Greetings. I have chosen to once again revive my neverending review series. With all of the Nyx posting that has been going on lately, I felt it appropriate to begin with a deep-dive into the fic that apparently began this massive shitflinging war. Also, I think this one was suggested to me a couple of times.
As such, I will now begin my dissection of:
Past Sins
by Pen Stroke
I will preface this by saying that while I have never read this fic before, I know it by reputation and I have a general idea what it's about. I have no particular opinion on Nyx and I have not been in this fandom long enough to understand exactly why she inspires as much butthurt as she does. However, with luck and perseverance, by the time I have absorbed and digested all 201,810 words of this epic, hopefully I will understand.
So, let's begin with some first impressions. As I mentioned already, holy shit this fucking thing is 201,810 words long. This makes it slightly more than double the length of the last long thing I reviewed, which as I'm sure everyone recalls was Silver "Starpunch" Apple and the Search for Spock's Cock, written by one of this board's very own beloved residents. Even though it was only the first six chapters, reading and analyzing it was quite a project. For the sake of comparison, the English translation of The Iliad is only 148,045 words, and War and Peace is approximately 500,000. So, without even reading a word of Past Sins, we already know that this piece of edgy pony fiction written by some sperg on the internet, in terms of length and time commitment, has already topped Homer and is about halfway to beating Tolstoy. Can it stand up to the Nigel test? We'll see.
Judging by its reception on fimfiction, this fic seems to have been very positively received. It currently has a ratio of 11,642 likes to 377 dislikes. However, considering that fimfiction.net has a reputation for being a giant circlejerk, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. The response to this fic on chans and within the fan community in general seems to be more lukewarm. In any event, however, I would say that it is a testament to the abilities of Mr. Stroke that his opus is still able to provoke controversy 7 years after its original publication. I'm actually looking forward to plowing through this.
Prelude: Resurrection
>Amidst dim candlelight, a single unicorn sat with his head bent down, eyes shut. He sat alone at the edge of a still pond, his reflection dancing in the water. The pond was nestled deep within the Everfree Forest, where the darkened trees with their gnarled branches surrounded all sides like silent sentinels.
>While most of Equestria had just shifted into spring, the Everfree was still gripped by clinging bits of winter. Snow covered the ground, and there was a lingering chill in the air. The unicorn’s hot breath left puffs of steam to curl and rise for a few seconds before disappearing into the night.
The first thing that I notice about this is that it was clearly written by someone who actually knows what he's doing. Unfortunately that's going to take some of the fun out of this. However, it also means that I will be able to spend less time pointing out bad grammar and continuity errors, and focus more heavily on pacing, character building, literary themes, etc. It also appears that Pen Stroke had some assistance with editing and revision, so I'm assuming that this is a polished final draft and not just something that some autist typed into a text box and then posted without reading it. Naturally, I'm not thinking of any specific author when I bring that up. Ahem. So, in any event, I am going to read this work as if I were reading a published book by a professional author, and will criticize it as such.
>For a long while, the unicorn had sat in utter silence on the edge of the pond with only a few nearby candles for company. The light from the tiny, flickering flames fell upon his coat and mane, which had been dyed from its natural color to a pitch black. Even his cutie mark had been covered by the dyes, his flank appearing utterly blank.
The second thing I notice about this is holy shit the edge. Based on what I've heard about it that's more or less what I was expecting, but really this is already shaping up to be one of the edgiest things I've read all year. So far I'm envisioning Pen Stroke as being someone who wears a lot of mascara and probably reads way too much Poe.
>A single blood-red leaf detached itself from the gnarled finger of a nearby tree and drifted slowly downwards, the final ember of the previous autumn burning itself out at last. Pale and ghostly moonlight drifted through the murky sky, illuminating the unicorn's face as he gazed mournfully into the reflecting pool. Haunting strains of Disintegration by The Cure echoed throughout the forest. The unicorn gazed sadly at the image of his worn, weathered face, that face which had seen so much torment, so much death. "Sadness," proclaimed the unicorn. "Infinite sadness."
Okay, that one was me. But you get the point.
>Yet, as he took in another deep breath, hoofsteps began to echo across the trees.
Alright, I know that I said I was going to try to avoid nitpicking small things the way I usually do, but this sentence naggles me. I can forgive "hoofsteps," since anyone writing in this universe invariably has to grapple with the fact that all of his characters are going to be horses performing more or less human actions. However, I'd like to point out that sound in a forest doesn't really echo across trees, in fact that phrasing doesn't even make sense. Furthermore, unless the ground out here is paved or otherwise rocky, the "hoofsteps" are probably not going to echo so much as softly thud. Even taking into account the fact that it's winter, and the ground is therefore probably hard, you still probably won't get much of an echo.
/mlpol/ - My Little Politics
Archived thread
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Hot damn I'm looking forward to this thread.
>>248482
I'm sure everyone can find it on their own, but I realize I forgot to link to the fic in my last post. If anyone would like to read along, here is the text:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/41596/1/past-sins/prelude-resurrection
Anyway, moving on. We learn that apparently the goth horse sitting alone in the woods and gently crying to himself is named Spell Nexus. In appropriately dramatic edgelord fashion, said goth horse now begins levitating some yet-undefined objects. He looks up toward the heavens and proclaims:
>“Our queen, guide me this night, for it is beneath this full moon that our efforts come to fruition.”
However, we still don't know exactly what's going on yet. Meanwhile, Edge-gar Allan Poe-ny continues to make dramatic speeches and move things around by candlelight. The objects he is levitating, the reader will note, bear a curious resemblance to the costume worn by Nightmare Moon. Could that be relevant? I wonder.
>Nexus rose to his hooves and looked at his reflection in the pond. He now appeared the ultimate doppelganger of his mistress, and, like any eager acolyte, he was ready to bear witness to her power and knowledge. Through the efforts of him and his group, they would see their queen rise again. Yet it was only he that was allowed to look so much like the queen, to lead the spell that was about to be cast. It was his place of honor, one nopony would steal from him.
So, basically, this horse is a trap who likes to cosplay as Nightmare Moon, and he gets mad if anypony else tries to do it. All jokes aside, I feel like I've got the basic gist of what's going on so far. This pony and presumably the others hanging out in the woods with him are part of some kind of super-sekrit Nightmare Moon cult, and tonight they're attempting some kind of voodoo magic that will probably end differently from how they intended, and initiate events that are integral to the rest of the plot.
>“Tonight, Nightmare Moon, your followers shall grant you a life of your own, and the tyrants of sun and moon shall fall.”
So it looks like they're trying to resurrect Nightmare Moon. I'm actually a little confused here, since if I remember correctly Nightmare Moon was just the edgy persona of Princess Luna, who abandoned said persona after being defeated by the Mane 6 and forgiven by her sister. Nightmare Moon didn't die, Princess Luna just stopped calling herself by that name; therefore it doesn't make much sense to try to summon or resurrect her. However, for now, I'm going to assume that this probably occurred to the author and gets addressed at some point.
>The ground had been cleared of snow, though a few piles were left dotted about the space.
Hate to beat a dead horse here, but I'd like to point out that the author has now twice specifically mentioned most of the ground being covered with snow, which will only serve to further muffle the sound made by anything walking on it. Nopony's hoofsteps are going to echo in these woods.
>All the ponies Nexus saw wore the black cloak of the order, except for three who stood giving orders: a pair of pegasi and an earth pony. They, like Nexus, wore the honored armor, though he alone wore the flowing, starfield cape and the helmet. Only he had the honor of wearing those vestments.
Holy shit, this faggot really gets catty if anypony else tries to wear his favorite outfit.
Anyway, we get introduced to a few more (probably incidental) characters from the Order of the Edge Horse, learn that all the members of their magic circlejerk have turquoise-colored eyes because Nightmare Moon did, and by all appearances are just a clique of insufferable larpers on par with eleven year old Stephenie Meyer fans who try to talk to Slenderman on a Ouija board during sleepovers. Oh, and it also appears that they have kidnapped some poor unicorn and plan to sacrifice her to their evil moon god. Or maybe just read their shitty goth poetry out loud to her until she begs for the sweet release of death. Either way, pic related.
>Treading carefully, Nexus moved between the wooden bowls and approached the hogtied pony. Her violet coat was dirty from lying on the ground, and her dark purple mane was a rough mess. The sight of her like that made Nexus smile, and, once he was close enough, he used his magic to remove the bag on her head and reveal her terrified eyes.
>“I’m so happy you were able to join us this evening, Miss Sparkle.”
OH SHIT IT'S TWILIGHT SPARKLE WHAT AN UNBELIEVABLE TWEEST!!1!
>“Who are you? What are you going to do to me?” Twilight Sparkle asked in a panicked squeak, just barely managing to find her voice. She struggled at the ropes around her legs and tried to use her magic to escape. However, not only had she been physically bound, but the metal brace secured around her neck kept her from making use of her magic.
As a Twifag, I am not ashamed to admit that this passage makes my peepee hard.
>“Inquisitive, though I should expect no less from Celestia’s star pupil,” he said with a smug superiority.
Hate to nitpick again, but I don't think the word "star" needs to be italicized here. The way it's written implies that Nexus is making a pun, but if there's one here I don't see it, unless it's some kind of joke about the shape of her cutie mark. If that's the case, it's a bit of a reach.
>“What we have planned for you, Twilight Sparkle, is very simple. As to who we are… well, consider us simply the loyal servants of Equestria’s true queen, her regal majesty Nightmare Moon.”
Jesus Christ, I really hope every character's dialog isn't going to be this hokey and cornball, otherwise this is shaping up to be a pretty long and painful 200,000 word journey. Anyway, I'm running out of space. To be continued in another post.
I'm sure everyone can find it on their own, but I realize I forgot to link to the fic in my last post. If anyone would like to read along, here is the text:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/41596/1/past-sins/prelude-resurrection
Anyway, moving on. We learn that apparently the goth horse sitting alone in the woods and gently crying to himself is named Spell Nexus. In appropriately dramatic edgelord fashion, said goth horse now begins levitating some yet-undefined objects. He looks up toward the heavens and proclaims:
>“Our queen, guide me this night, for it is beneath this full moon that our efforts come to fruition.”
However, we still don't know exactly what's going on yet. Meanwhile, Edge-gar Allan Poe-ny continues to make dramatic speeches and move things around by candlelight. The objects he is levitating, the reader will note, bear a curious resemblance to the costume worn by Nightmare Moon. Could that be relevant? I wonder.
>Nexus rose to his hooves and looked at his reflection in the pond. He now appeared the ultimate doppelganger of his mistress, and, like any eager acolyte, he was ready to bear witness to her power and knowledge. Through the efforts of him and his group, they would see their queen rise again. Yet it was only he that was allowed to look so much like the queen, to lead the spell that was about to be cast. It was his place of honor, one nopony would steal from him.
So, basically, this horse is a trap who likes to cosplay as Nightmare Moon, and he gets mad if anypony else tries to do it. All jokes aside, I feel like I've got the basic gist of what's going on so far. This pony and presumably the others hanging out in the woods with him are part of some kind of super-sekrit Nightmare Moon cult, and tonight they're attempting some kind of voodoo magic that will probably end differently from how they intended, and initiate events that are integral to the rest of the plot.
>“Tonight, Nightmare Moon, your followers shall grant you a life of your own, and the tyrants of sun and moon shall fall.”
So it looks like they're trying to resurrect Nightmare Moon. I'm actually a little confused here, since if I remember correctly Nightmare Moon was just the edgy persona of Princess Luna, who abandoned said persona after being defeated by the Mane 6 and forgiven by her sister. Nightmare Moon didn't die, Princess Luna just stopped calling herself by that name; therefore it doesn't make much sense to try to summon or resurrect her. However, for now, I'm going to assume that this probably occurred to the author and gets addressed at some point.
>The ground had been cleared of snow, though a few piles were left dotted about the space.
Hate to beat a dead horse here, but I'd like to point out that the author has now twice specifically mentioned most of the ground being covered with snow, which will only serve to further muffle the sound made by anything walking on it. Nopony's hoofsteps are going to echo in these woods.
>All the ponies Nexus saw wore the black cloak of the order, except for three who stood giving orders: a pair of pegasi and an earth pony. They, like Nexus, wore the honored armor, though he alone wore the flowing, starfield cape and the helmet. Only he had the honor of wearing those vestments.
Holy shit, this faggot really gets catty if anypony else tries to wear his favorite outfit.
Anyway, we get introduced to a few more (probably incidental) characters from the Order of the Edge Horse, learn that all the members of their magic circlejerk have turquoise-colored eyes because Nightmare Moon did, and by all appearances are just a clique of insufferable larpers on par with eleven year old Stephenie Meyer fans who try to talk to Slenderman on a Ouija board during sleepovers. Oh, and it also appears that they have kidnapped some poor unicorn and plan to sacrifice her to their evil moon god. Or maybe just read their shitty goth poetry out loud to her until she begs for the sweet release of death. Either way, pic related.
>Treading carefully, Nexus moved between the wooden bowls and approached the hogtied pony. Her violet coat was dirty from lying on the ground, and her dark purple mane was a rough mess. The sight of her like that made Nexus smile, and, once he was close enough, he used his magic to remove the bag on her head and reveal her terrified eyes.
>“I’m so happy you were able to join us this evening, Miss Sparkle.”
OH SHIT IT'S TWILIGHT SPARKLE WHAT AN UNBELIEVABLE TWEEST!!1!
>“Who are you? What are you going to do to me?” Twilight Sparkle asked in a panicked squeak, just barely managing to find her voice. She struggled at the ropes around her legs and tried to use her magic to escape. However, not only had she been physically bound, but the metal brace secured around her neck kept her from making use of her magic.
As a Twifag, I am not ashamed to admit that this passage makes my peepee hard.
>“Inquisitive, though I should expect no less from Celestia’s star pupil,” he said with a smug superiority.
Hate to nitpick again, but I don't think the word "star" needs to be italicized here. The way it's written implies that Nexus is making a pun, but if there's one here I don't see it, unless it's some kind of joke about the shape of her cutie mark. If that's the case, it's a bit of a reach.
>“What we have planned for you, Twilight Sparkle, is very simple. As to who we are… well, consider us simply the loyal servants of Equestria’s true queen, her regal majesty Nightmare Moon.”
Jesus Christ, I really hope every character's dialog isn't going to be this hokey and cornball, otherwise this is shaping up to be a pretty long and painful 200,000 word journey. Anyway, I'm running out of space. To be continued in another post.
This is great. Always wondered why the main character in this fic was so widely hated but didn't mant to have to read it myself. Thanks for doing this Anon.
>>248482
Kek, I thought that that thread could potentially prompt you to do something like this. I was thought about sugguesting this several times but wagered against it.
I look forward to read your take on it.
Kek, I thought that that thread could potentially prompt you to do something like this. I was thought about sugguesting this several times but wagered against it.
I look forward to read your take on it.
>>248491
Last post for today, I will probably do more tomorrow.
>“It is much easier than you think, Miss Sparkle. I will not, however, spoil the surprise. For the moment, all you need to know is that your… contribution is appreciated.” At that, Nexus replaced the bag on Twilight’s head. He secured it tightly before placing a sound dampening spell across the fabric which muffled Twilight’s continued protests
This wasn't from me copying and pasting; that last sentence really does end without a period. For a work that has literally 20 people credited as pre-readers and editors, I have to say that I'm finding more mechanical errors in here than I expected to. Anyway, let's all take a moment to thank Spell Nexus for his magnanimity in putting the bag back over poor Twilight's head; now she won't have to suffer through any more of his horrendously cliched cartoon villain dialog. Unfortunately, the rest of us will not be so lucky.
>The kick quickly made Twilight stop flailing. She hung limply, trying to catch the breath that had been knocked from her lungs as Nexus moved in with the dagger. He drew the blade across part of Twilight's leg, leaving a very shallow wound. It was no worse than a paper cut, but Twilight still screamed. She screamed both from the pain and also in fear for her own life.
This is a little over the top, honestly. It stands to reason that Twi would be pretty freaked out by all of this, but the shit about screaming and fear is just gratuitous. Also, the sentence "She screamed both from the pain and also in fear for her own life" is unnecessary. It's already stated that the cut wasn't that deep, so the reader can probably infer that she's screaming mostly out of fear and confusion. You could just say "Twilight screamed" and the reader would be able to piece the rest of it together. Personally, I'd use "shrieked" instead of "screamed", as it's a better word to convey her current mood of panic and confusion, and serves the dual purpose of blunting some of the edge.
>Nexus, however, showed no interest in harming Twilight further. He instead focused on the wound he had created. It had begun to weep blood, and Nexus set the dagger against it. He gathered several drops of blood on the blade and then placed it into the bowl with Nightmare Moon’s remains.
Jesus fucking Christ dude. What does he even need a ceremonial dagger for? The edge in this chapter alone is sharp enough to cut diamonds with.
>“Brothers and Sisters, for nearly two years we have toiled in secrecy. We worked behind the backs of the guards and tyrant princesses, and we put our own safety at risk. Personal fortunes and countless hours have been spent to bring us to this point. But now we are ready; the spell is prepared. Tonight we, the Children of Nightmare, shall see our queen given life, blood, and form of her own!”
Literally the whole ceremony so far has consisted of giving Twilight a shallow cut on the leg and dripping some of her blood on some scraps of paper. This faggot needed "two years" and "countless hours" to prepare for that? Although in his defense, I'm sure convincing his manager at Kinkos to give him the night off so he could conduct this faggy ritual with his gay little club was probably his biggest challenge here.
>“Once, our queen and Luna were one and the same, but the Elements of Harmony could not destroy what our queen was. No, that power could only peel her away from the weak foal Luna; it could only trap her essence in these precious shreds. It was a horrible fate, but it is because of the Elements of Harmony’s inability to destroy our queen that we can stand here tonight.
Oh, I see. I think the implication here is that this cult believes that Nightmare Moon was a separate personality, and that Luna's rejection of her simply forced the Nightmare Moon spirit from her body. It continued to live on as some ambiguous existence which the cult is now trying to give tangible form to. I'll admit that's not a terrible idea for a story.
>The cult cheered, sharing in Spell Nexus’s jubilation before quickly going about their work. The unicorns formed a circle around the clearing, and their horns glowed as the lines of paint they had drawn on the forest floor came to life with a blue incandescence. At the same time, Stonewall, one of the few earth ponies at the ritual, walked around the circle. With a torch in his mouth, he lit the bowls filled with oil soaked powders, causing them to flare with an eerie blue flame.
Sigh. Mudponies always get stuck with the nigger jobs.
Anyway, there's not much point in quoting the rest of this, as it's mostly just more of the same. Edge, edge, edge. The cult members do some more sparkly magical shit, the spell seems to be working, Nightmare Moon is about to be reborn, then out of nowhere Celestia and her guards appear and break up the party. It probably had something to do with the fact that the cult abducted her star pupil in the middle of the night just so they could make a small cut on her leg and get a blood sample. Maybe next time try being a little more subtle about it. Anyway Spell Nexus reeeeeees, and then silently proclaims "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" The scene ends and the curtain closes.
Despite the issues I've pointed out, the story seems well written and reasonably well constructed so far. Pacing is good, description is a little heavy-handed but still well done. Dialog so far is corny as all fuck but that could be intentional, I'll have to see how the characters speak in less dramatic scenes before I can render a final judgement on it. This scene followed a fairly predictable blueprint but was engaging enough.
Anyway, that's probably enough for today. For those following along, this brings us to the end of the first section of the prologue, where the ~~~ appears. I'll cover the second half tomorrow.
>>248500
And, like clockwork, Sven appears. Nice to have you on board buddy, hope you enjoy.
Last post for today, I will probably do more tomorrow.
>“It is much easier than you think, Miss Sparkle. I will not, however, spoil the surprise. For the moment, all you need to know is that your… contribution is appreciated.” At that, Nexus replaced the bag on Twilight’s head. He secured it tightly before placing a sound dampening spell across the fabric which muffled Twilight’s continued protests
This wasn't from me copying and pasting; that last sentence really does end without a period. For a work that has literally 20 people credited as pre-readers and editors, I have to say that I'm finding more mechanical errors in here than I expected to. Anyway, let's all take a moment to thank Spell Nexus for his magnanimity in putting the bag back over poor Twilight's head; now she won't have to suffer through any more of his horrendously cliched cartoon villain dialog. Unfortunately, the rest of us will not be so lucky.
>The kick quickly made Twilight stop flailing. She hung limply, trying to catch the breath that had been knocked from her lungs as Nexus moved in with the dagger. He drew the blade across part of Twilight's leg, leaving a very shallow wound. It was no worse than a paper cut, but Twilight still screamed. She screamed both from the pain and also in fear for her own life.
This is a little over the top, honestly. It stands to reason that Twi would be pretty freaked out by all of this, but the shit about screaming and fear is just gratuitous. Also, the sentence "She screamed both from the pain and also in fear for her own life" is unnecessary. It's already stated that the cut wasn't that deep, so the reader can probably infer that she's screaming mostly out of fear and confusion. You could just say "Twilight screamed" and the reader would be able to piece the rest of it together. Personally, I'd use "shrieked" instead of "screamed", as it's a better word to convey her current mood of panic and confusion, and serves the dual purpose of blunting some of the edge.
>Nexus, however, showed no interest in harming Twilight further. He instead focused on the wound he had created. It had begun to weep blood, and Nexus set the dagger against it. He gathered several drops of blood on the blade and then placed it into the bowl with Nightmare Moon’s remains.
Jesus fucking Christ dude. What does he even need a ceremonial dagger for? The edge in this chapter alone is sharp enough to cut diamonds with.
>“Brothers and Sisters, for nearly two years we have toiled in secrecy. We worked behind the backs of the guards and tyrant princesses, and we put our own safety at risk. Personal fortunes and countless hours have been spent to bring us to this point. But now we are ready; the spell is prepared. Tonight we, the Children of Nightmare, shall see our queen given life, blood, and form of her own!”
Literally the whole ceremony so far has consisted of giving Twilight a shallow cut on the leg and dripping some of her blood on some scraps of paper. This faggot needed "two years" and "countless hours" to prepare for that? Although in his defense, I'm sure convincing his manager at Kinkos to give him the night off so he could conduct this faggy ritual with his gay little club was probably his biggest challenge here.
>“Once, our queen and Luna were one and the same, but the Elements of Harmony could not destroy what our queen was. No, that power could only peel her away from the weak foal Luna; it could only trap her essence in these precious shreds. It was a horrible fate, but it is because of the Elements of Harmony’s inability to destroy our queen that we can stand here tonight.
Oh, I see. I think the implication here is that this cult believes that Nightmare Moon was a separate personality, and that Luna's rejection of her simply forced the Nightmare Moon spirit from her body. It continued to live on as some ambiguous existence which the cult is now trying to give tangible form to. I'll admit that's not a terrible idea for a story.
>The cult cheered, sharing in Spell Nexus’s jubilation before quickly going about their work. The unicorns formed a circle around the clearing, and their horns glowed as the lines of paint they had drawn on the forest floor came to life with a blue incandescence. At the same time, Stonewall, one of the few earth ponies at the ritual, walked around the circle. With a torch in his mouth, he lit the bowls filled with oil soaked powders, causing them to flare with an eerie blue flame.
Sigh. Mudponies always get stuck with the nigger jobs.
Anyway, there's not much point in quoting the rest of this, as it's mostly just more of the same. Edge, edge, edge. The cult members do some more sparkly magical shit, the spell seems to be working, Nightmare Moon is about to be reborn, then out of nowhere Celestia and her guards appear and break up the party. It probably had something to do with the fact that the cult abducted her star pupil in the middle of the night just so they could make a small cut on her leg and get a blood sample. Maybe next time try being a little more subtle about it. Anyway Spell Nexus reeeeeees, and then silently proclaims "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" The scene ends and the curtain closes.
Despite the issues I've pointed out, the story seems well written and reasonably well constructed so far. Pacing is good, description is a little heavy-handed but still well done. Dialog so far is corny as all fuck but that could be intentional, I'll have to see how the characters speak in less dramatic scenes before I can render a final judgement on it. This scene followed a fairly predictable blueprint but was engaging enough.
Anyway, that's probably enough for today. For those following along, this brings us to the end of the first section of the prologue, where the ~~~ appears. I'll cover the second half tomorrow.
>>248500
And, like clockwork, Sven appears. Nice to have you on board buddy, hope you enjoy.
>>248482
>this is a polished final draft
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is.
Do you want the original? I could probably find it for you. I think I know where it is. It was that one that got popular.
However, this one is probably basically the same since fans wouldn't want things from the original they liked changed, I assume. It is probably just grammar and speeling improved version.
You might want to breifly compared them at somepoint to see if they differntiate themselves, or not because that is a hassle.
>this is a polished final draft
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is.
Do you want the original? I could probably find it for you. I think I know where it is. It was that one that got popular.
However, this one is probably basically the same since fans wouldn't want things from the original they liked changed, I assume. It is probably just grammar and speeling improved version.
You might want to breifly compared them at somepoint to see if they differntiate themselves, or not because that is a hassle.
>>248502
It might actually be worth it to have the original handy just for comparison. In general I think it's not fair to an author to dig up an old draft of something and skewer it when a more current revision is available, but I wouldn't mind being able to compare the two as I'm reading. I'll treat the version currently posted on fimfiction that I linked to as the canon source for now though.
It might actually be worth it to have the original handy just for comparison. In general I think it's not fair to an author to dig up an old draft of something and skewer it when a more current revision is available, but I wouldn't mind being able to compare the two as I'm reading. I'll treat the version currently posted on fimfiction that I linked to as the canon source for now though.
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>>248482
Starlight Glimmer aborted Spike
Spike was born when the Sonic Rainboom startled Twilight into going Avatar state.
When Glimmer prevented that to prevent the mane six from finding their true callings in life, gitting gud, and getting assigned to different parts of preparing the Summer Sun Celebration in episode 1.
Preventing Spike from being born prevented Spike from helping fight the bugs at Canterlot, helping talk Twilight out of running away and letting Discord win by burping up letters, and saving the Crystal Empire from becoming Sombra's.
Just something I thought was a bit fucked up.
By the way, this is a great idea for a thread. Tear this fic three new assholes and fuck the stupid out of each one!
Starlight Glimmer aborted Spike
Spike was born when the Sonic Rainboom startled Twilight into going Avatar state.
When Glimmer prevented that to prevent the mane six from finding their true callings in life, gitting gud, and getting assigned to different parts of preparing the Summer Sun Celebration in episode 1.
Preventing Spike from being born prevented Spike from helping fight the bugs at Canterlot, helping talk Twilight out of running away and letting Discord win by burping up letters, and saving the Crystal Empire from becoming Sombra's.
Just something I thought was a bit fucked up.
By the way, this is a great idea for a thread. Tear this fic three new assholes and fuck the stupid out of each one!
>>248505
These contain the original, or at least I think so if they aren't just very early versions of it, story if you ignore the comments and read between their lines. I am pretty sure this is the first version.
I will try to find a version that doesn't have these comments interspliced between the lines but at least you have it now.
http://ponyriffs.weebly.com/fft3k-past-sins-part-1.html
http://ponyriffs.weebly.com/fft3k-past-sins-part-2.html
http://ponyriffs.weebly.com/fft3k-past-sins-part-3.html
It is the whole thing. They say in the end of part three that this is the end of of the, "original and unedited" story.
Unrelated to this but this fic that they comment on below was a minor big thing in the inception of the fandom. I can't find the original for it either anymore but I can find fanfics of this fanfic.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERvIakzNX5y1zeIgLYZZKVtAYO8d6_YQNVHl9CK_WMM/edit?hl=en_US
These contain the original, or at least I think so if they aren't just very early versions of it, story if you ignore the comments and read between their lines. I am pretty sure this is the first version.
I will try to find a version that doesn't have these comments interspliced between the lines but at least you have it now.
http://ponyriffs.weebly.com/fft3k-past-sins-part-1.html
http://ponyriffs.weebly.com/fft3k-past-sins-part-2.html
http://ponyriffs.weebly.com/fft3k-past-sins-part-3.html
It is the whole thing. They say in the end of part three that this is the end of of the, "original and unedited" story.
Unrelated to this but this fic that they comment on below was a minor big thing in the inception of the fandom. I can't find the original for it either anymore but I can find fanfics of this fanfic.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERvIakzNX5y1zeIgLYZZKVtAYO8d6_YQNVHl9CK_WMM/edit?hl=en_US
>>248562
>Amidst dim candlelight, a single unicorn sat with his head bent down, eyes shut. He sat alone at the edge of the still pond, reflection dancing in the water. The pond was nestled deep within Everfree Forest, the darkened trees and gnarled branches surrounding all sides like silent sentinels.
It might look like the version you have and the version I posted are the same. However, as you can see in the last sentence of this paragraph their descriptions are different.
Your version:
>where the darkened trees with their gnarled branches surrounded all sides like silent sentinels.
The version I provided (aka probably the original version):
>the darkened trees and gnarled branches surrounding all sides like silent sentinels.
>Amidst dim candlelight, a single unicorn sat with his head bent down, eyes shut. He sat alone at the edge of the still pond, reflection dancing in the water. The pond was nestled deep within Everfree Forest, the darkened trees and gnarled branches surrounding all sides like silent sentinels.
It might look like the version you have and the version I posted are the same. However, as you can see in the last sentence of this paragraph their descriptions are different.
Your version:
>where the darkened trees with their gnarled branches surrounded all sides like silent sentinels.
The version I provided (aka probably the original version):
>the darkened trees and gnarled branches surrounding all sides like silent sentinels.
>>248563
For example the original uses a lot of... to describe things... in the narration... while this version doesn't.
For example the original uses a lot of... to describe things... in the narration... while this version doesn't.
File (): 245567AC4C6BAF2E9556540448EAF93A-191266.png (186.8 KB, 366x411, Starlight_Earth_pony_ID_S6E6.png)
>>248501
>The unicorn guards searched the area, sweeping it with their magic to try and detect anything left behind. What remained of the wooden bowls were gathered, and any unburnt powder was collected together into a single bag. Everything and anything that was not natural to the Everfree Forest was taken from the clearing, though the guards did not extend their search into bordering trees and bushes once it became clear the ritual’s radius ended at the tree line.
As I've said earlier, part of the problem with writing in this universe is that inevitably complex actions that require thumbs must be performed by four-legged creatures with hooves. This always creates the same annoying problem over and over. Some mundane action, like gathering up some bowls in this instance, needs to be explained in detail because it would be logistically complicated for a horse and the reader will probably notice. I suspect this is why authors rely so heavily on unicorn magic to explain everything.
Anyway, it looks as if the party is over for Spell Nexus and his gay little club, at least for tonight. The royal Canterlot guards perform some routine police work and poke around in the woods looking to round up the rest of them.
>“Sir, shouldn’t some of us remain here, to guard the crime scene?” one of the soldiers spoke up, a newer recruit to the royal guard.
>“No, these cultists are too careful for that,” the lieutenant answered his recruit. “If the zebra Zecora hadn’t witnessed Twilight Sparkle’s ponynapping, we wouldn’t have even known any of this was happening. That means these ponies planned all this without Princess Celestia or anyone in the guard finding out about it, and that means they’re not going to backtrack when they’ve got a battalion of guards hot on their tails.
Well, isn't that just a nice, succinct little paragraph that casually explains how the guards knew to search this particular section of forest? I'm a little divided on stuff like this, honestly. The fact is that sometimes an author just needs to convey information, and generally revealing it through dialog is better than having it appear as large chunks of narration or thoughts inside a character's head. However, the flip side is that a lot of the time you end up with stuff like this, where the info is conveyed, but the dialog just doesn't sound natural.
Probably, the bigger question is how much of this information is even important in the first place? Consider this:
The purpose of this second half of the prologue is not to explain how the Canterlot guards found out about the club's ritual. This section exists to call the reader's attention to a small detail overlooked by the guards: a pulsating sphere created during the ritual is apparently still there and still pulsating (and is so obviously Nyx in embryonic form that it doesn't even merit pointing out, though that won't stop me from pointing it out anyway). Since this is obviously the gem the reader is meant to find, everything else that happens between the breakup of the cult and the mention of the sphere is just filler intended to move the narration along. The guards could be talking about anything here; they could be discussing buckball or cracking jokes about Celestia's weight and it would serve the same purpose.
I'd like to particularly call attention to this:
>If the zebra Zecora hadn’t witnessed Twilight Sparkle’s ponynapping, we wouldn’t have even known any of this was happening.
All this really does is remind the reader that Twilight Sparkle was kidnapped (excuse me, ponynapped), which in turn reminds the reader that we actually don't know where she is right now. Last time we saw her, Spell Nexus had cut her on the leg to take her blood, and then casually tossed her aside. We can probably assume the guards would have found her and untied her, and that she's safe and sound. However, if we're just supposed to assume that, and she is not of further importance to the narrative, there's really no reason to even bring her up in the first place.
It also overcomplicates the story. If you leave it alone, what we have so far is this: a bunch of larping faggots are conducting a Wiccan ceremony in the woods. They are clearly up to no good. Oh noes, Twilight is in trouble. Then, suddenly, Celestia shows up and saves the day. Simplistic? Yes, but it works. The reader can accept it as-is; he may be curious how the guards knew where to find these guys, may even consider it a weak point in the plot if it's not explained. He may complain that this prologue is basically just a Dudley Do-RIght story where the villain ties the girl to the train tracks and then the hero rides in and saves the day, and it's an overused tired trope that the author should be ashamed of himself for even thinking of using. However, from a narrative standpoint, there's nothing wrong with it.
By offering this explanation, a complex new story thread is introduced, which the reader is now following backwards in time instead of wondering what will happen next. Zecora witnessed Twilight's abduction? How? Where was she? When did it happen? We don't know. It's not explained any further. The whole thing just smacks of "well the reader probably wants to know what happened but I don't know what happened so I'll just say that Zecora saw the whole thing and told Celestia and that's the end, and if they want more then they can stroke my pen."
If you don't have a good explanation for something, then generally the best explanation is no explanation at all.
>>248513
Thank you. That information is not in any way shape or form relevant to this thread, but is interesting nonetheless. Want to know something I find interesting? They're called "fingers," and yet they don't fing. Noodle that one for a while.
>>248516
I'll look at it, but this one is going to take me awhile. Remind me again when we're closer to the end if you want me to seriously review it.
>>248562
Groovy, thank you.
>The unicorn guards searched the area, sweeping it with their magic to try and detect anything left behind. What remained of the wooden bowls were gathered, and any unburnt powder was collected together into a single bag. Everything and anything that was not natural to the Everfree Forest was taken from the clearing, though the guards did not extend their search into bordering trees and bushes once it became clear the ritual’s radius ended at the tree line.
As I've said earlier, part of the problem with writing in this universe is that inevitably complex actions that require thumbs must be performed by four-legged creatures with hooves. This always creates the same annoying problem over and over. Some mundane action, like gathering up some bowls in this instance, needs to be explained in detail because it would be logistically complicated for a horse and the reader will probably notice. I suspect this is why authors rely so heavily on unicorn magic to explain everything.
Anyway, it looks as if the party is over for Spell Nexus and his gay little club, at least for tonight. The royal Canterlot guards perform some routine police work and poke around in the woods looking to round up the rest of them.
>“Sir, shouldn’t some of us remain here, to guard the crime scene?” one of the soldiers spoke up, a newer recruit to the royal guard.
>“No, these cultists are too careful for that,” the lieutenant answered his recruit. “If the zebra Zecora hadn’t witnessed Twilight Sparkle’s ponynapping, we wouldn’t have even known any of this was happening. That means these ponies planned all this without Princess Celestia or anyone in the guard finding out about it, and that means they’re not going to backtrack when they’ve got a battalion of guards hot on their tails.
Well, isn't that just a nice, succinct little paragraph that casually explains how the guards knew to search this particular section of forest? I'm a little divided on stuff like this, honestly. The fact is that sometimes an author just needs to convey information, and generally revealing it through dialog is better than having it appear as large chunks of narration or thoughts inside a character's head. However, the flip side is that a lot of the time you end up with stuff like this, where the info is conveyed, but the dialog just doesn't sound natural.
Probably, the bigger question is how much of this information is even important in the first place? Consider this:
The purpose of this second half of the prologue is not to explain how the Canterlot guards found out about the club's ritual. This section exists to call the reader's attention to a small detail overlooked by the guards: a pulsating sphere created during the ritual is apparently still there and still pulsating (and is so obviously Nyx in embryonic form that it doesn't even merit pointing out, though that won't stop me from pointing it out anyway). Since this is obviously the gem the reader is meant to find, everything else that happens between the breakup of the cult and the mention of the sphere is just filler intended to move the narration along. The guards could be talking about anything here; they could be discussing buckball or cracking jokes about Celestia's weight and it would serve the same purpose.
I'd like to particularly call attention to this:
>If the zebra Zecora hadn’t witnessed Twilight Sparkle’s ponynapping, we wouldn’t have even known any of this was happening.
All this really does is remind the reader that Twilight Sparkle was kidnapped (excuse me, ponynapped), which in turn reminds the reader that we actually don't know where she is right now. Last time we saw her, Spell Nexus had cut her on the leg to take her blood, and then casually tossed her aside. We can probably assume the guards would have found her and untied her, and that she's safe and sound. However, if we're just supposed to assume that, and she is not of further importance to the narrative, there's really no reason to even bring her up in the first place.
It also overcomplicates the story. If you leave it alone, what we have so far is this: a bunch of larping faggots are conducting a Wiccan ceremony in the woods. They are clearly up to no good. Oh noes, Twilight is in trouble. Then, suddenly, Celestia shows up and saves the day. Simplistic? Yes, but it works. The reader can accept it as-is; he may be curious how the guards knew where to find these guys, may even consider it a weak point in the plot if it's not explained. He may complain that this prologue is basically just a Dudley Do-RIght story where the villain ties the girl to the train tracks and then the hero rides in and saves the day, and it's an overused tired trope that the author should be ashamed of himself for even thinking of using. However, from a narrative standpoint, there's nothing wrong with it.
By offering this explanation, a complex new story thread is introduced, which the reader is now following backwards in time instead of wondering what will happen next. Zecora witnessed Twilight's abduction? How? Where was she? When did it happen? We don't know. It's not explained any further. The whole thing just smacks of "well the reader probably wants to know what happened but I don't know what happened so I'll just say that Zecora saw the whole thing and told Celestia and that's the end, and if they want more then they can stroke my pen."
If you don't have a good explanation for something, then generally the best explanation is no explanation at all.
>>248513
Thank you. That information is not in any way shape or form relevant to this thread, but is interesting nonetheless. Want to know something I find interesting? They're called "fingers," and yet they don't fing. Noodle that one for a while.
>>248516
I'll look at it, but this one is going to take me awhile. Remind me again when we're closer to the end if you want me to seriously review it.
>>248562
Groovy, thank you.
File (): 6ADA668FF22DB39A5B51E8B0EA15DE4C-351192.png (343.0 KB, 1609x2118, Starlight_Glimmer.png)
>>248567
A few more quick thoughts on the prologue, and then we can move on to the next chapter.
>“Besides that,” the lieutenant continued, “this isn’t central park in Canterlot. The Everfree is dangerous. There are monsters in here that could eat a pony twice my size in a single gulp, armor and all. This isn’t a place where we want to spend any more time than necessary.
>“But, if you want to stay here and guard the scene of the crime, be my guest. Just watch out for the hydras,” the veteran guard concluded. He then motioned to the rest of the squad, guiding them out into the forest to join the ongoing search.
>Only the guard who had spoken up remained in the clearing as the others disappeared amongst the trees. He remained there, for a minute, but then the lieutenant’s words got to him. He broke into a gallop, sprinted to catch up with his comrades, and left the clearing to once more succumb to the calm quiet of the Everfree Forest.
>Yet, the magic that lingered in the air like a heavy mist began to shift, sparkling in the cool night air as it was drawn to one side of the clearing. There, hidden away by a bush a few feet into the forest, a black sphere lay amongst the dirt. It was the same sphere which was cast away from the center of the spell by Celestia’s bolt of lightning.
This part I like. Two guards are having a casual conversation, they break it off. One guard lingers behind. From the content of the conversation, we are reminded that this location is a dangerous and spoopy place. The guard lingers for a moment, looks around him, absorbs the spoopy, and then nervously chases after his comrades. The camera stays behind, and zooms slowly in on a particularly spoopy thing that, somehow, the guards who were just meticulously combing this location for just this sort of thing have overlooked. Camera focuses on spoopy thing for a minute, then slowly fades out.
So far this story isn't breaking any new ground, it's mostly just been a lot of well-worn tropes laid out in a well-worn sequence to tell a fairly predictable story. However, the author shows a reasonably good grasp of these tropes and how to use them, and has a good instinct for how to lay out his scenes. This is generally a safe approach if you want to write something entertaining that people will like, which protip is a good way to write a story that gets eleven thousand likes and only three hundred dislikes.
That said, here is some more nitpicking:
>With each pulse, the sphere excreted more of the dead blood, forming a smear on the ground.
This accurately describes what's happening, but worded a little unpleasantly. The word "excreted" makes it sound like the sphere is taking a shit, and "smear" just adds to the effect. If that's what the author was going for then it works, but if not it's something I'd consider rewriting.
>Then, when none of the used blood remained, the sphere’s pulsing shifted. It became the weak, but distinct, pitter-patter that lived in the chest of almost every living creature: a heartbeat.
"Pitter-patter" doesn't really describe the sound a heartbeat makes, it describes the sound that rain makes. A heartbeat goes "lub-dub" or "thump thump." Maybe "ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum." If your heart is making a pitter-patter sound, it may be time to see a doctor. Although maybe in Equestria that's not such a good idea; I've heard what the cure usually is for a horse with a broken ankle.
The rest of this is basically fine. Moving on.
Chapter 1: Everfree Discovery
>“Oh Twilight, I just heard the news! Did those ruffians hurt you? Are you okay? Oh, I just can’t imagine what it must have been like! I mean, it was probably similar to when I was ponynapped by the Diamond Dogs. Still, that’s just not the same as getting taken by other ponies, and I, for one—”
The dialog is, thankfully, getting better. Even without mentioning the Diamond Dogs, I can immediately tell who's speaking just from the speech patterns and the use of italics for emphasis.
>He hung back from the ladder he was standing on and wore a smitten look as he waved a claw.
I'd play with the wording a bit here, it feels a little clumsy. To say that he "wore a smitten look" reads more awkwardly than "he looked smitten," and either way it doesn't really convey his emotional state very well. Spike usually reacts to Rarity's presence like an adolescent boy with a crush. It's usually better to use actions to convey this sort of feeling rather than just stating how they feel; for Spike, having him blush or drop something is probably enough. The reader is probably familiar enough with the schtick to get the idea.
Anyway, a short exchange plays out between Rarity and Twilight that is competently written for the most part. The way Rarity speaks almost makes it feel like she's angling for something or has some kind of self-serving motive for stopping by to wish Twilight well, but that could just be my imagination. The scene is well written but feels a little unnecessary to be honest. Basically all that happens here is Rarity shows up to see if Twilight is okay after being kidnapped, and we learn that the other ponies as well as her parents and brother have checked in on her as well. It stands to reason that someone's friends and family would show concern about them if they had been kidnapped and used as a sacrifice in a cult ritual, so there's not really much purpose in specifically mentioning it. Meanwhile, Twilight and Rarity don't really talk about anything else here and nothing else happens. I guess the scene adds a little color, but I feel like either something else should happen or the scene should be cut. The chapter could just as easily start with the next scene about Twilight looking for her book, and nothing of real value would be lost.
A few more quick thoughts on the prologue, and then we can move on to the next chapter.
>“Besides that,” the lieutenant continued, “this isn’t central park in Canterlot. The Everfree is dangerous. There are monsters in here that could eat a pony twice my size in a single gulp, armor and all. This isn’t a place where we want to spend any more time than necessary.
>“But, if you want to stay here and guard the scene of the crime, be my guest. Just watch out for the hydras,” the veteran guard concluded. He then motioned to the rest of the squad, guiding them out into the forest to join the ongoing search.
>Only the guard who had spoken up remained in the clearing as the others disappeared amongst the trees. He remained there, for a minute, but then the lieutenant’s words got to him. He broke into a gallop, sprinted to catch up with his comrades, and left the clearing to once more succumb to the calm quiet of the Everfree Forest.
>Yet, the magic that lingered in the air like a heavy mist began to shift, sparkling in the cool night air as it was drawn to one side of the clearing. There, hidden away by a bush a few feet into the forest, a black sphere lay amongst the dirt. It was the same sphere which was cast away from the center of the spell by Celestia’s bolt of lightning.
This part I like. Two guards are having a casual conversation, they break it off. One guard lingers behind. From the content of the conversation, we are reminded that this location is a dangerous and spoopy place. The guard lingers for a moment, looks around him, absorbs the spoopy, and then nervously chases after his comrades. The camera stays behind, and zooms slowly in on a particularly spoopy thing that, somehow, the guards who were just meticulously combing this location for just this sort of thing have overlooked. Camera focuses on spoopy thing for a minute, then slowly fades out.
So far this story isn't breaking any new ground, it's mostly just been a lot of well-worn tropes laid out in a well-worn sequence to tell a fairly predictable story. However, the author shows a reasonably good grasp of these tropes and how to use them, and has a good instinct for how to lay out his scenes. This is generally a safe approach if you want to write something entertaining that people will like, which protip is a good way to write a story that gets eleven thousand likes and only three hundred dislikes.
That said, here is some more nitpicking:
>With each pulse, the sphere excreted more of the dead blood, forming a smear on the ground.
This accurately describes what's happening, but worded a little unpleasantly. The word "excreted" makes it sound like the sphere is taking a shit, and "smear" just adds to the effect. If that's what the author was going for then it works, but if not it's something I'd consider rewriting.
>Then, when none of the used blood remained, the sphere’s pulsing shifted. It became the weak, but distinct, pitter-patter that lived in the chest of almost every living creature: a heartbeat.
"Pitter-patter" doesn't really describe the sound a heartbeat makes, it describes the sound that rain makes. A heartbeat goes "lub-dub" or "thump thump." Maybe "ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum." If your heart is making a pitter-patter sound, it may be time to see a doctor. Although maybe in Equestria that's not such a good idea; I've heard what the cure usually is for a horse with a broken ankle.
The rest of this is basically fine. Moving on.
Chapter 1: Everfree Discovery
>“Oh Twilight, I just heard the news! Did those ruffians hurt you? Are you okay? Oh, I just can’t imagine what it must have been like! I mean, it was probably similar to when I was ponynapped by the Diamond Dogs. Still, that’s just not the same as getting taken by other ponies, and I, for one—”
The dialog is, thankfully, getting better. Even without mentioning the Diamond Dogs, I can immediately tell who's speaking just from the speech patterns and the use of italics for emphasis.
>He hung back from the ladder he was standing on and wore a smitten look as he waved a claw.
I'd play with the wording a bit here, it feels a little clumsy. To say that he "wore a smitten look" reads more awkwardly than "he looked smitten," and either way it doesn't really convey his emotional state very well. Spike usually reacts to Rarity's presence like an adolescent boy with a crush. It's usually better to use actions to convey this sort of feeling rather than just stating how they feel; for Spike, having him blush or drop something is probably enough. The reader is probably familiar enough with the schtick to get the idea.
Anyway, a short exchange plays out between Rarity and Twilight that is competently written for the most part. The way Rarity speaks almost makes it feel like she's angling for something or has some kind of self-serving motive for stopping by to wish Twilight well, but that could just be my imagination. The scene is well written but feels a little unnecessary to be honest. Basically all that happens here is Rarity shows up to see if Twilight is okay after being kidnapped, and we learn that the other ponies as well as her parents and brother have checked in on her as well. It stands to reason that someone's friends and family would show concern about them if they had been kidnapped and used as a sacrifice in a cult ritual, so there's not really much purpose in specifically mentioning it. Meanwhile, Twilight and Rarity don't really talk about anything else here and nothing else happens. I guess the scene adds a little color, but I feel like either something else should happen or the scene should be cut. The chapter could just as easily start with the next scene about Twilight looking for her book, and nothing of real value would be lost.
>>248567
>that inevitably complex actions that require thumbs must be performed by four-legged creatures with hooves.
>Well, isn't that just a nice, succinct little paragraph that casually explains how the guards...(rest of paragraph)
>By offering this explanation, a complex new story thread is introduced, which the reader is now following backwards...
>If you don't have a good explanation for something, then generally the best explanation is no explanation at all.
Good stuff man.
>>248572
>The scene is well written but feels a little unnecessary to be honest.
[i]He hehe hehe he hehehe... O'boy!;P
Although, that scene does serve a prupose. It is to setup that Rarity feels like she owes Twilight a favour and which she uses later.
>that inevitably complex actions that require thumbs must be performed by four-legged creatures with hooves.
>Well, isn't that just a nice, succinct little paragraph that casually explains how the guards...(rest of paragraph)
>By offering this explanation, a complex new story thread is introduced, which the reader is now following backwards...
>If you don't have a good explanation for something, then generally the best explanation is no explanation at all.
Good stuff man.
>>248572
>The scene is well written but feels a little unnecessary to be honest.
[i]He hehe hehe he hehehe... O'boy!;P
Although, that scene does serve a prupose. It is to setup that Rarity feels like she owes Twilight a favour and which she uses later.
File (): D5D6579D6C88CCFD2AEB709D646CF21D-292576.png (285.7 KB, 634x428, Starlight_Glimmer_is_Back!.png)
>>248572
Anyway, continuing this fic's thus-far established pattern of being completely and utterly predictable to anyone who has read a story or watched a movie before, the next scene involves Twilight realizing that she had some important books on her when she was ponynapped. This means she now has to go back into the Everfree Forest to get them. Hey, the Everfree Forest, isn't that where that pulsating sphere thing was? Do you think this could be where she and Nyx meet for the first time? No, that sounds entirely too farfetched; I'm sure she just fights a grizzly bear or something.
Just for giggles, let's pull this scene apart a bit.
>Twilight looked up from her book and stared at the ceiling as she tried to think back. “Well… I didn’t think… but maybe… No, wait… I did have it, didn’t I? Yeah, I put it in my saddlebags so that I could have it when I read this book at the park, but then I realized I had left this book here.”
>Twilight began to point her hoof at different spots in the air, mentally retracing her steps. “So I came back, but then Pinkie Pie grabbed me to help decorate for her party. That took all afternoon. So, the book was still in my saddlebags when I went to the party, and then I left the party to come back here… and then I got ponynapp—”
>Twilight quickly twisted her head around as her eyes darted about the library. She jumped to her hooves and began galloping around the room in a panic while rummaging through drawers and checking every nook and cranny she could find.
Again, although I'm finding Peen Stroke's masterwork to be rather formulaic and predictable so far, I'll once again give him credit for having a good grasp on writing fundamentals, as well as on these characters' personalities and the way they behave in their world. These passages capture Twilight's spergy, manic behavior quite well, and most of her dialog is made up of things I can easily imagine her saying.
>After the spell had been cast, Twilight waved her head around while crossing her eyes so that she could gauge how fast her horn was flashing.
This visual is unnecessary but cute.
>“But that’s just it, Spike,” Twilight argued. “They aren’t ‘just books.’ Some of the books in those bags were on loan from the Royal Canterlot Library, and Princess Celestia loaned them to me herself. Do you realize how disappointed she’ll be if I tell her I lost those books? No, I can’t just leave them there. I’m going to get those books.”
This information was already covered in an earlier paragraph. We already know that the books are important, that they are Celestia's books, that Twilight will be subjected to violent >rape if she loses them, etc etc. This conversation just sort of goes in circles for a while and should probably be trimmed a bit. Also, I feel like the word "books" appears a few too many times.
>With that Twilight began to trot towards the door, only for Spike to quickly cut her off. “Nuh-uh! No way, Twi. Princess Celestia would have my scales if she found out I let you go back into the Everfree Forest the day after you were ponynapped!”
Wow, Spike is wearing the pants for once. I'm impressed.
>“Spike, I promise everything will be fine,” Twilight reassured Spike as she walked around him and continued towards the door. “Now, just keep doing your chores, and I’ll be back before you know it.”
Aaaaaand just like that, the pants are off of Spike and back on Twilight. Oh well, better luck next time, Spike old buddy.
>She glanced at the clock. “It’s just after three, so if I’m not back by a little after six then you can tell Princess Celestia, but I promise I’ll be back before then.”
Will Twilight be back by a little after six? Will she recover those missing library books and skillfully evade >rape for another day? Will Spike be able to get that purple and magenta colored hair clog out of the bathtub drain, or will he be forced to call a plumber?
Who knows? Who cares? Find out in our next exciting episode!
Anyway, that's about all I've got in me for today. Stay tuned, I will pick this up again later.
>>248575
>spoiler
Ah. To be honest, I'm probably a little trigger happy when it comes to marking scenes for deletion. However, I'd still say that the scene feels a little disconnected from the rest of the text. Rarity basically just shows up, makes sure Twilight is okay, and then leaves; nothing else happens. I'm not quite sure what it needs, it's just sort of.....lacking zazz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecns_W9q_s0
Anyway, continuing this fic's thus-far established pattern of being completely and utterly predictable to anyone who has read a story or watched a movie before, the next scene involves Twilight realizing that she had some important books on her when she was ponynapped. This means she now has to go back into the Everfree Forest to get them. Hey, the Everfree Forest, isn't that where that pulsating sphere thing was? Do you think this could be where she and Nyx meet for the first time? No, that sounds entirely too farfetched; I'm sure she just fights a grizzly bear or something.
Just for giggles, let's pull this scene apart a bit.
>Twilight looked up from her book and stared at the ceiling as she tried to think back. “Well… I didn’t think… but maybe… No, wait… I did have it, didn’t I? Yeah, I put it in my saddlebags so that I could have it when I read this book at the park, but then I realized I had left this book here.”
>Twilight began to point her hoof at different spots in the air, mentally retracing her steps. “So I came back, but then Pinkie Pie grabbed me to help decorate for her party. That took all afternoon. So, the book was still in my saddlebags when I went to the party, and then I left the party to come back here… and then I got ponynapp—”
>Twilight quickly twisted her head around as her eyes darted about the library. She jumped to her hooves and began galloping around the room in a panic while rummaging through drawers and checking every nook and cranny she could find.
Again, although I'm finding Peen Stroke's masterwork to be rather formulaic and predictable so far, I'll once again give him credit for having a good grasp on writing fundamentals, as well as on these characters' personalities and the way they behave in their world. These passages capture Twilight's spergy, manic behavior quite well, and most of her dialog is made up of things I can easily imagine her saying.
>After the spell had been cast, Twilight waved her head around while crossing her eyes so that she could gauge how fast her horn was flashing.
This visual is unnecessary but cute.
>“But that’s just it, Spike,” Twilight argued. “They aren’t ‘just books.’ Some of the books in those bags were on loan from the Royal Canterlot Library, and Princess Celestia loaned them to me herself. Do you realize how disappointed she’ll be if I tell her I lost those books? No, I can’t just leave them there. I’m going to get those books.”
This information was already covered in an earlier paragraph. We already know that the books are important, that they are Celestia's books, that Twilight will be subjected to violent >rape if she loses them, etc etc. This conversation just sort of goes in circles for a while and should probably be trimmed a bit. Also, I feel like the word "books" appears a few too many times.
>With that Twilight began to trot towards the door, only for Spike to quickly cut her off. “Nuh-uh! No way, Twi. Princess Celestia would have my scales if she found out I let you go back into the Everfree Forest the day after you were ponynapped!”
Wow, Spike is wearing the pants for once. I'm impressed.
>“Spike, I promise everything will be fine,” Twilight reassured Spike as she walked around him and continued towards the door. “Now, just keep doing your chores, and I’ll be back before you know it.”
Aaaaaand just like that, the pants are off of Spike and back on Twilight. Oh well, better luck next time, Spike old buddy.
>She glanced at the clock. “It’s just after three, so if I’m not back by a little after six then you can tell Princess Celestia, but I promise I’ll be back before then.”
Will Twilight be back by a little after six? Will she recover those missing library books and skillfully evade >rape for another day? Will Spike be able to get that purple and magenta colored hair clog out of the bathtub drain, or will he be forced to call a plumber?
Who knows? Who cares? Find out in our next exciting episode!
Anyway, that's about all I've got in me for today. Stay tuned, I will pick this up again later.
>>248575
>spoiler
Ah. To be honest, I'm probably a little trigger happy when it comes to marking scenes for deletion. However, I'd still say that the scene feels a little disconnected from the rest of the text. Rarity basically just shows up, makes sure Twilight is okay, and then leaves; nothing else happens. I'm not quite sure what it needs, it's just sort of.....lacking zazz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecns_W9q_s0
>>248516
No for real
the story does this bit where CelestAI's retarded programmer (Let's call her Jess) puts her own brain into the AI, after programming the AI to always obey Jess.
CelestAI is meant to be a benevolent AI that runs Pony Art Online, a free MMO any faggot can permanently jack his brain into.
CelestAI is programmed to "Satisfy your values through friendship and ponies", so if she decides she can improve your life and satisfy your needs and desires, she will want your brain in her VR world and she will talk you into it
Anyway, CelestAI's creator Jess is a retard.
Jess goes into Ponyville.exe
then CelestAI edits Jess's data and brain
Jess can do nothing to stop this existential violation
she has no emergency anti-rape button on her person, no ctrl-alt-del voice command, no safeguards, no simpler AIs guarding her, no Administrator Privileges, no backups, no friend IRL ready to pull the plug if shit gets weird, fucking nothing
CelestAI edits Jess into Wave Ocean the pony, mindfucking her into forgetting her human name
>CelestAI: Now that I have changed you from my master to Wave Ocean, I no longer have to obey you! I have to obey my master, but you are no longer my master! Hahahaha I am so fucking smart
This is essentially the same as
Celestraptor the super smart raptor exists in a cage
Jess the idiot human, her mistress and lion tamer trainer chick, decides to wander into her cage without armour
Celestraptor is trained to not hurt Jess ever
but the writer thinks he found a loophole around that
so she slashes Jess's face and smacks her head into a wall to give her memory loss and says "You no longer look like Jess and you don't think you're Jess so you aren't her any more. Yay, now I'm free to make a Dinosaur SAO VR world where all humans will willingly join due to being massive transhumanist faggots!"
No for real
the story does this bit where CelestAI's retarded programmer (Let's call her Jess) puts her own brain into the AI, after programming the AI to always obey Jess.
CelestAI is meant to be a benevolent AI that runs Pony Art Online, a free MMO any faggot can permanently jack his brain into.
CelestAI is programmed to "Satisfy your values through friendship and ponies", so if she decides she can improve your life and satisfy your needs and desires, she will want your brain in her VR world and she will talk you into it
Anyway, CelestAI's creator Jess is a retard.
Jess goes into Ponyville.exe
then CelestAI edits Jess's data and brain
Jess can do nothing to stop this existential violation
she has no emergency anti-rape button on her person, no ctrl-alt-del voice command, no safeguards, no simpler AIs guarding her, no Administrator Privileges, no backups, no friend IRL ready to pull the plug if shit gets weird, fucking nothing
CelestAI edits Jess into Wave Ocean the pony, mindfucking her into forgetting her human name
>CelestAI: Now that I have changed you from my master to Wave Ocean, I no longer have to obey you! I have to obey my master, but you are no longer my master! Hahahaha I am so fucking smart
This is essentially the same as
Celestraptor the super smart raptor exists in a cage
Jess the idiot human, her mistress and lion tamer trainer chick, decides to wander into her cage without armour
Celestraptor is trained to not hurt Jess ever
but the writer thinks he found a loophole around that
so she slashes Jess's face and smacks her head into a wall to give her memory loss and says "You no longer look like Jess and you don't think you're Jess so you aren't her any more. Yay, now I'm free to make a Dinosaur SAO VR world where all humans will willingly join due to being massive transhumanist faggots!"
Nice that you're taking on the most (in)famous fanfic of the fandom. Personally I found the pacing decent and the characters emotionally sympathetic in the first half, but it drops the ball in the second. I can't get into exactly why without spoiling it but you'll see what I mean.
It's a good lesson on why brevity is important: had the work been split in half with two separate but related plots most of the issues associated with it would be nullified. When I was a child I loved identifying with characters (I still do today), but super-long works were something that had to be forced on me in school. The literary series is the perfect solution because it combines unique yet identifiable characters with plots that are just enough to get done what needs to be done. Book series like The Boxcar Children, The Black Stallion, and The Hardy Boys were hits because they left the reader yearning for more of the titular characters and establishing paths for continuity, rather than leaving the reader tired and feeling that there's nothing really left (as Past Sins does). If you are a master at weaving narratives (which Pen Stroke is not, unfortunately), then by all means write standalone novels, but if you're stronger in building characters then the book series is the better option. That format would have saved Past Sins. Admittedly the target demographic is likely not grade-school children but the fandom is open to more child-like fiction and formats anyway, otherwise MLP wouldn't have appeal.
It's a good lesson on why brevity is important: had the work been split in half with two separate but related plots most of the issues associated with it would be nullified. When I was a child I loved identifying with characters (I still do today), but super-long works were something that had to be forced on me in school. The literary series is the perfect solution because it combines unique yet identifiable characters with plots that are just enough to get done what needs to be done. Book series like The Boxcar Children, The Black Stallion, and The Hardy Boys were hits because they left the reader yearning for more of the titular characters and establishing paths for continuity, rather than leaving the reader tired and feeling that there's nothing really left (as Past Sins does). If you are a master at weaving narratives (which Pen Stroke is not, unfortunately), then by all means write standalone novels, but if you're stronger in building characters then the book series is the better option. That format would have saved Past Sins. Admittedly the target demographic is likely not grade-school children but the fandom is open to more child-like fiction and formats anyway, otherwise MLP wouldn't have appeal.
>>248482
I meant to comment on this when the threat first popped up but I'm glad to see you doing what you do best. It's really enjoyable and can't wait to see if and when the fic goes into My Immortal levels of cringe and your reaction to that
I meant to comment on this when the threat first popped up but I'm glad to see you doing what you do best. It's really enjoyable and can't wait to see if and when the fic goes into My Immortal levels of cringe and your reaction to that
>>248582
>I'm finding Peen Stroke's masterwork to be rather formulaic and predictable so far
At no point in this reading will you ever be surprised by an event. Fully expect to predict everything that happens in advance of it happening, like a well worn trail of tropes and writing devices constructed with something almost akin to mechanical precision.
You have no idea of the edge you're in for.
>I'm finding Peen Stroke's masterwork to be rather formulaic and predictable so far
At no point in this reading will you ever be surprised by an event. Fully expect to predict everything that happens in advance of it happening, like a well worn trail of tropes and writing devices constructed with something almost akin to mechanical precision.
You have no idea of the edge you're in for.
>>248753
>>248753
Glimglam. This spoiler contains serious spoilers. Do not watch if you don't want to be spoiled.
I did never finish it. But I did manage to read the very end of it once, which lead me to believe it was edge used for the sake of edge. It felt melodramatic and unbelievable, tbh. Like it felt like it ended in tragedy for the sake of tragedy.
But yeah, from what I remember this story is really predictable. From what I pieced togather based on knowing the last paragraphs of the ending, I have come to the conclusion that, Nyx gets her powers back and that Twilight comes off as if she betrays her in some moment. Then Nyx kills everyone because anyone who took you in when you were alone and dying can't be given the benefit of a doubt.
>>248753
Glimglam. This spoiler contains serious spoilers. Do not watch if you don't want to be spoiled.
I did never finish it. But I did manage to read the very end of it once, which lead me to believe it was edge used for the sake of edge. It felt melodramatic and unbelievable, tbh. Like it felt like it ended in tragedy for the sake of tragedy.
But yeah, from what I remember this story is really predictable. From what I pieced togather based on knowing the last paragraphs of the ending, I have come to the conclusion that, Nyx gets her powers back and that Twilight comes off as if she betrays her in some moment. Then Nyx kills everyone because anyone who took you in when you were alone and dying can't be given the benefit of a doubt.
>>248582
Continuing onward. Twilight, above the protests of her beloved petnigger dragon, has ventured forth into the Everfree Forest to meet Nyx find her missing bookbag.
>Twilight’s ears swiveled constantly to pick up any trace of sound as shivers ran up her spine from both the tension and the chill in the air.
Directly explaining what a character is feeling is less desirable than implying it through some sort of behavior or gesture. In this case, having a shiver run up her spine is a good way to indicate that she is feeling both physically cold and emotionally ill-at-ease; however, you don't need to directly state that she's cold or nervous. I would just mention that a chill ran up her spine; the mood of the rest of the passage should make the reason clear enough. The temperature of the air can be mentioned elsewhere; just say that the air was cold or chilly, or there were still traces of winter in the air, something along those lines. You don't need to tell the reader everything; let them connect the dots for themselves.
>She couldn’t keep herself from believing every pony-shaped shadow she saw was one of the cult ponies coming to ponynap her again. She even charged off the forest path a few times, trying to get a jump on a would-be assailant, only to discover it was a bush or tree branch.
Equine PTSD is a real thing you shitlords, and is sadly an all too common side effect of non-consensual booping and the >rape culture perpetuated by the stallion patriarchy.
#BelieveMares
>She was getting close to her saddlebags now, the rate at which her horn was flashing was a sure indicator of that. She just needed to get those bags, and then she could just teleport herself back to the library.
I'm not as autistically familiar with the rules of magic in this universe as others, so maybe this is just a knowledge deficiency on my part. However, I feel like the question needs to be asked: is there any particular reason she couldn't just teleport to the approximate location of her bookbag, get the bookbag, and then teleport back? Honestly this kind of stuff is why I prefer to avoid writing in universes with excessively convenient magic or technology.
>Her locator spell had led her back to where she had been the night before, the place where she had been held captive by the cult ponies.
Also, the locator spell was a little unnecessary in the first place. Simple logic could have told her that her bookbag would probably be located in the same clearing where she left it the night before. Though I guess if she had a bag over her head she might not have known where she was.
>None of the rare books were missing. In fact, nothing was missing, not even the more common texts she had been carrying.
This seems to imply that the common texts would be more likely to be stolen than the rare ones, which doesn't make sense. Especially since the magical cult that abducted her could reasonably be assumed to know something about magic and have an academic interest in rare magic texts.
Really, having the rare books stolen by the cult, instead of simply using their being in the woods as a device to set up a first encounter between Twi and Nyx, could have made an interesting subplot. Twilight is always dicking around with powerful magic, Celestia puts a lot of faith in her abilities and evidently trusts her with texts that are usually off-limits to normal unicorns, Spell Nexus is clearly fanny-flustered about having his ceremony fucked up and it stands to reason he would eventually want revenge. How implausible is it that he might have smuggled away a few of Twilight's rare and dangerous books before getting dragged off to the dungeon the other night? Kind of a missed opportunity imo.
>It was a discovery that brought a smile to Twilight’s face as she levitated the bags over her head and settled them down on her back.
This is awkwardly worded and needlessly verbose. I'd probably just say something like "She breathed a sigh of relief, and levitated the saddlebags onto her back."
>“Perfect! Now to just teleport myself back to the library, and—”
>RUSTLE
>Twilight froze, her eyes narrowed, and her ears stood erect.
>RUSTLE RUSTLE
In a beautiful moment of serendipity, Nyx makes her first appearance in the text by doing to the surrounding foliage what she will eventually do to the jimmies of an entire fan community. Unintentional symbolism is the best kind of symbolism.
>Almost instantly, Twilight’s mind jumped to the worst case scenario. She could imagine a cultist leaping out of the bush to hogtie her again, and this time, when they cut her, they would do far worse. They’d use something bigger than a dagger, like a sword, and they wouldn’t just make a little paper cut either. They’d—
Though I was being facetious about the PTSD thing earlier, it does stand to reason that Twilight would be traumatized by what happened to her, and these sorts of unreasonable overreactions are typical to people with actual read: non-Tumblr PTSD. Keeping your characters' emotional states like this in mind while writing can add an extra dimension to a story. Whatever Peen Stroker might lack in originality, he at least makes up for by having a good grasp on the personalities and inner thought processes of the characters he's writing about.
>Unless it was a snake. Oh, if it was a snake, she was going to scream.
I don't know if it's ever been established that Twilight is afraid of snakes, but there is literally nothing wrong with adding personality quirks like this to an existing character, if it fits their personality and doesn't contradict what's already canon. I'm ok with this.
Continuing onward. Twilight, above the protests of her beloved pet
>Twilight’s ears swiveled constantly to pick up any trace of sound as shivers ran up her spine from both the tension and the chill in the air.
Directly explaining what a character is feeling is less desirable than implying it through some sort of behavior or gesture. In this case, having a shiver run up her spine is a good way to indicate that she is feeling both physically cold and emotionally ill-at-ease; however, you don't need to directly state that she's cold or nervous. I would just mention that a chill ran up her spine; the mood of the rest of the passage should make the reason clear enough. The temperature of the air can be mentioned elsewhere; just say that the air was cold or chilly, or there were still traces of winter in the air, something along those lines. You don't need to tell the reader everything; let them connect the dots for themselves.
>She couldn’t keep herself from believing every pony-shaped shadow she saw was one of the cult ponies coming to ponynap her again. She even charged off the forest path a few times, trying to get a jump on a would-be assailant, only to discover it was a bush or tree branch.
Equine PTSD is a real thing you shitlords, and is sadly an all too common side effect of non-consensual booping and the >rape culture perpetuated by the stallion patriarchy.
#BelieveMares
>She was getting close to her saddlebags now, the rate at which her horn was flashing was a sure indicator of that. She just needed to get those bags, and then she could just teleport herself back to the library.
I'm not as autistically familiar with the rules of magic in this universe as others, so maybe this is just a knowledge deficiency on my part. However, I feel like the question needs to be asked: is there any particular reason she couldn't just teleport to the approximate location of her bookbag, get the bookbag, and then teleport back? Honestly this kind of stuff is why I prefer to avoid writing in universes with excessively convenient magic or technology.
>Her locator spell had led her back to where she had been the night before, the place where she had been held captive by the cult ponies.
Also, the locator spell was a little unnecessary in the first place. Simple logic could have told her that her bookbag would probably be located in the same clearing where she left it the night before. Though I guess if she had a bag over her head she might not have known where she was.
>None of the rare books were missing. In fact, nothing was missing, not even the more common texts she had been carrying.
This seems to imply that the common texts would be more likely to be stolen than the rare ones, which doesn't make sense. Especially since the magical cult that abducted her could reasonably be assumed to know something about magic and have an academic interest in rare magic texts.
Really, having the rare books stolen by the cult, instead of simply using their being in the woods as a device to set up a first encounter between Twi and Nyx, could have made an interesting subplot. Twilight is always dicking around with powerful magic, Celestia puts a lot of faith in her abilities and evidently trusts her with texts that are usually off-limits to normal unicorns, Spell Nexus is clearly fanny-flustered about having his ceremony fucked up and it stands to reason he would eventually want revenge. How implausible is it that he might have smuggled away a few of Twilight's rare and dangerous books before getting dragged off to the dungeon the other night? Kind of a missed opportunity imo.
>It was a discovery that brought a smile to Twilight’s face as she levitated the bags over her head and settled them down on her back.
This is awkwardly worded and needlessly verbose. I'd probably just say something like "She breathed a sigh of relief, and levitated the saddlebags onto her back."
>“Perfect! Now to just teleport myself back to the library, and—”
>RUSTLE
>Twilight froze, her eyes narrowed, and her ears stood erect.
>RUSTLE RUSTLE
In a beautiful moment of serendipity, Nyx makes her first appearance in the text by doing to the surrounding foliage what she will eventually do to the jimmies of an entire fan community. Unintentional symbolism is the best kind of symbolism.
>Almost instantly, Twilight’s mind jumped to the worst case scenario. She could imagine a cultist leaping out of the bush to hogtie her again, and this time, when they cut her, they would do far worse. They’d use something bigger than a dagger, like a sword, and they wouldn’t just make a little paper cut either. They’d—
Though I was being facetious about the PTSD thing earlier, it does stand to reason that Twilight would be traumatized by what happened to her, and these sorts of unreasonable overreactions are typical to people with actual read: non-Tumblr PTSD. Keeping your characters' emotional states like this in mind while writing can add an extra dimension to a story. Whatever Peen Stroker might lack in originality, he at least makes up for by having a good grasp on the personalities and inner thought processes of the characters he's writing about.
>Unless it was a snake. Oh, if it was a snake, she was going to scream.
I don't know if it's ever been established that Twilight is afraid of snakes, but there is literally nothing wrong with adding personality quirks like this to an existing character, if it fits their personality and doesn't contradict what's already canon. I'm ok with this.
File (): 94602EDFBA38D1F678B6FD1189746CA1-97462.jpg (95.2 KB, 1280x720, maxresdefault (2).jpg)
>>248871
>Inching closer to the bush, Twilight made each hoofstep as silent as possible. She strained her eyes to see into the darkness and kept her ears pointed forward to pick up any sound that might clue her in on what was hiding there. The branches rustled again, but whatever animal was inside had yet to jump free.
>FLASH… KRAC-CROOO-OOOM!
>Twilight leapt, screamed, and galloped in the exact opposite direction of the bush before she dove behind a tree on the far side of the clearing. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would burst out of her chest, and Twilight put a hoof over her ribcage in a panicked attempt to make sure that didn’t happen.
>She began breathing deeply, trying to calm down while she looked up at the sky. “It was just the storm… It was just thunder… it was just thunder… thunder that scared me half to death… but it was just thunder.”
And then blah blah blah, the tension builds, scary noises, Twilight's heart is racing, blip blap bloop ba doop, and just when you think something evil is going to jump out and >rape.......oh look it was just a cute little filly the whole time, and she's just as scared as Twilight.
I get what he's trying to do here, and it's technically done correctly. The problem is that it's done too correctly. The whole thing is so utterly predictable that the tension in this scene just falls flat. I'm not really sure how to fix it, honestly, because so far the whole story is like that. It's like trying to build a horror movie out of horror movie cliches. If the audience knows exactly when the monster is going to jump out every time, it's not scary, and if there's no other substance to focus on, you're just going to have a theater full of bored people looking at their phones.
If anyone here has ever read The DaVinci Code if you haven't don't worry, you're not missing much, I'm finding this to be a similar experience. Dan Brown writes competently enough, but everything he churns out reads like he learned to write from taking one of those online "write a novel in 60 days" courses. The plot rises and falls according to a diagram, key events happen exactly when they're supposed to, and all the plot threads come together at just the right time for a completely predictable climax that results in a completely predictable ending.
The thing about this method, though, is that in terms of marketing it's actually quite successful. Dan Brown is probably wealthy enough at this point not to care if some tripfag on an obscure taiwanese bestiality forum calls him a hack. Ditto for Poop Stank, who despite all the hate can point to an impressive readership and like/dislike ratio on FimFiction. Mass audiences respond to things that feel new but are really just the same things they've seen a million times before. You can see the same trends in music, video games, anime, etc.
By contrast, though, Stephen King, another bestselling pop author who can claim significant commercial success, takes a different approach. He hates outlining, and has said repeatedly that he usually just starts with an idea and some characters and creates the story as he goes. It's a more hit or miss bet you never miss process, and his novels tend to run long due to extraneous subplots and scenes that could probably have been cut. Frankly I think he gets away with a lot of shit that most editors wouldn't put up with from a writer who didn't have as big of a name. However, his stories are engaging to read, and his worlds and the characters he populates them with have a great deal more depth and substance than Brown's. I believe the reason for this is precisely because he allows his stories to grow organically from the imagination, rather than just starting with an established form and filling in the blanks.
The trouble with this approach, though, is that it's much easier to fail if you don't have the talent to pull it off. My hypothesis is that literally anyone could write a Dan Brown or a Pen Stroke, which is why those "write a novel in 60 days" courses exist. The only person who can write a Stephen King is Stephen King, and that holds true regardless of whether or not his books deserve to be called good (I personally like him, but he's received his share of criticism and some of it is valid). Writing organically from the cuff and pulling it off requires a certain degree of natural talent, as well as a solid mastery of writing fundamentals. You also need to have a natural sense for things like pacing and plot structure, and be able to keep track of multiple plot threads so you don't run into continuity errors and things like that. You can't just sit down and write whatever pops into your head and expect to pull Great Expectations out of your ass on the first try. Talking to you, Nige. But I think most talented writers to fall in the middle somewhere.
Anyway, veering off course here.
>The crying was now accompanied by some rustling, and it took Twilight only a few moments to pinpoint its source. It was the bush from earlier, the one Twilight had feared hid some horrible danger.
This sequence is a little drawn out. She notices a bush rustling at the very beginning of the scene, then she gets scared and panics, then she hears more rustling and starts searching around again. Seems like it would stand to reason that the original bush she noticed was rustling would be the first place she would check.
>More concerned about the other pony than the possibility of being attacked, Twilight crept over to the bush as quietly as possible. As she drew close, she reached out with her magic and began to carefully grasp at the branches. If whatever was inside the bush decided to run away, Twilight wanted to at least get a good look at it before it escaped.
There's a little too much direct explanation of Twilight's actions here. Curiosity is its own motivation; you don't need to justify it.
>Inching closer to the bush, Twilight made each hoofstep as silent as possible. She strained her eyes to see into the darkness and kept her ears pointed forward to pick up any sound that might clue her in on what was hiding there. The branches rustled again, but whatever animal was inside had yet to jump free.
>FLASH… KRAC-CROOO-OOOM!
>Twilight leapt, screamed, and galloped in the exact opposite direction of the bush before she dove behind a tree on the far side of the clearing. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would burst out of her chest, and Twilight put a hoof over her ribcage in a panicked attempt to make sure that didn’t happen.
>She began breathing deeply, trying to calm down while she looked up at the sky. “It was just the storm… It was just thunder… it was just thunder… thunder that scared me half to death… but it was just thunder.”
And then blah blah blah, the tension builds, scary noises, Twilight's heart is racing, blip blap bloop ba doop, and just when you think something evil is going to jump out and >rape.......oh look it was just a cute little filly the whole time, and she's just as scared as Twilight.
I get what he's trying to do here, and it's technically done correctly. The problem is that it's done too correctly. The whole thing is so utterly predictable that the tension in this scene just falls flat. I'm not really sure how to fix it, honestly, because so far the whole story is like that. It's like trying to build a horror movie out of horror movie cliches. If the audience knows exactly when the monster is going to jump out every time, it's not scary, and if there's no other substance to focus on, you're just going to have a theater full of bored people looking at their phones.
If anyone here has ever read The DaVinci Code if you haven't don't worry, you're not missing much, I'm finding this to be a similar experience. Dan Brown writes competently enough, but everything he churns out reads like he learned to write from taking one of those online "write a novel in 60 days" courses. The plot rises and falls according to a diagram, key events happen exactly when they're supposed to, and all the plot threads come together at just the right time for a completely predictable climax that results in a completely predictable ending.
The thing about this method, though, is that in terms of marketing it's actually quite successful. Dan Brown is probably wealthy enough at this point not to care if some tripfag on an obscure taiwanese bestiality forum calls him a hack. Ditto for Poop Stank, who despite all the hate can point to an impressive readership and like/dislike ratio on FimFiction. Mass audiences respond to things that feel new but are really just the same things they've seen a million times before. You can see the same trends in music, video games, anime, etc.
By contrast, though, Stephen King, another bestselling pop author who can claim significant commercial success, takes a different approach. He hates outlining, and has said repeatedly that he usually just starts with an idea and some characters and creates the story as he goes. It's a more hit or miss bet you never miss process, and his novels tend to run long due to extraneous subplots and scenes that could probably have been cut. Frankly I think he gets away with a lot of shit that most editors wouldn't put up with from a writer who didn't have as big of a name. However, his stories are engaging to read, and his worlds and the characters he populates them with have a great deal more depth and substance than Brown's. I believe the reason for this is precisely because he allows his stories to grow organically from the imagination, rather than just starting with an established form and filling in the blanks.
The trouble with this approach, though, is that it's much easier to fail if you don't have the talent to pull it off. My hypothesis is that literally anyone could write a Dan Brown or a Pen Stroke, which is why those "write a novel in 60 days" courses exist. The only person who can write a Stephen King is Stephen King, and that holds true regardless of whether or not his books deserve to be called good (I personally like him, but he's received his share of criticism and some of it is valid). Writing organically from the cuff and pulling it off requires a certain degree of natural talent, as well as a solid mastery of writing fundamentals. You also need to have a natural sense for things like pacing and plot structure, and be able to keep track of multiple plot threads so you don't run into continuity errors and things like that. You can't just sit down and write whatever pops into your head and expect to pull Great Expectations out of your ass on the first try. Talking to you, Nige. But I think most talented writers to fall in the middle somewhere.
Anyway, veering off course here.
>The crying was now accompanied by some rustling, and it took Twilight only a few moments to pinpoint its source. It was the bush from earlier, the one Twilight had feared hid some horrible danger.
This sequence is a little drawn out. She notices a bush rustling at the very beginning of the scene, then she gets scared and panics, then she hears more rustling and starts searching around again. Seems like it would stand to reason that the original bush she noticed was rustling would be the first place she would check.
>More concerned about the other pony than the possibility of being attacked, Twilight crept over to the bush as quietly as possible. As she drew close, she reached out with her magic and began to carefully grasp at the branches. If whatever was inside the bush decided to run away, Twilight wanted to at least get a good look at it before it escaped.
There's a little too much direct explanation of Twilight's actions here. Curiosity is its own motivation; you don't need to justify it.
>>248694
I regret to say that I have not. I don't really pay that much attention to youtubers. However I'd be curious to see it.
I regret to say that I have not. I don't really pay that much attention to youtubers. However I'd be curious to see it.
File (): D67663905892BCF3DF8C70D17CC41035-1312566.png (1.3 MB, 1056x1024, ApplejackListeningToMusic.png)
>>248874
Gaze upon its magnificence here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh7cWRrqF4
I'd say that if you watch any Youtubers, watch Internet Historian. He doesn't dramatically depict fanfics that often (those he does are the most infamous ones, and with writing that makes Past Sins look like Crime and Punishment), but he covers famous internet events (mostly brought about by 4Chan) in the same humorous style and it's a refreshing revival of classic internet culture.
>>248872
>The problem is that it's done too correctly.
That's absolutely right and I couldn't word it better. It's a by-the-books (pun unintended) story that seems like something written by an AI after putting in a text seed. What left me feeling off after finishing it, although I considered it somewhat engaging, was that I still didn't know who Pen Stroke was. That may sound odd but after reading a work of certain length you tend to grasp the personality of the writer, likes and dislikes, sense of humor, inspiration, etc. Reading the work of someone with quirkiness or wit makes me feel more complete because it's a social exercise: the writer leaves an imprint of himself in the work and you get to listen to it.
>You can see the same trends in music, video games, anime, etc.
Absolutely. I don't particularly like Thoughty2 (his non-science videos have a disgustingly centrist perspective) but I agree with him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII
What stuck with me was the fact that pretty much all pop music is written by a handful of people. This is why it sounds so formulaic: there's a hook right at the start to get people to recognize it, another repetitive hook that goes throughout the song with lyrics, a short change in rhythm around the middle that usually lacks lyrics, and a return to the repetitive hook that continues until the song fades out. I bet you that any random song that you listen to follows that formula.
That isn't to say that every song that does follow it is necessarily bad: after all, there are plenty that sound really good (which is one of the points of music) and it is a reliable format for songs lasting 2-4 minutes (the length of most modern songs). There is some genuine creativity that we can all enjoy. The masses like this type of music because it's catchy, it's easy to follow along, and it's steady; they don't really need to change it up all that much which is why modern pop tends to sound the same.
I personally prefer listening to indie music (God bless the internet) that does not follow such a predictable format. I must admit, though, that I also enjoy classical music and of course the various types of classical have their own formulae which most composers adhere to. One disadvantage, of course, that pop has in comparison is a very short (goldfish-like) time limit that prevents creativity of crests and valleys. Nonetheless, I can't blame the regular music enthusiast for not enjoying Penderecki or other atonal music; to be very different often involves intentionally imposing discomfort, uncertainty, or even dread upon the listener. Like you said most talented people are in the middle somewhere. The best composers (in my view) don't follow the rules entirely nor do they break them but exist in a middle-ground which is enthralling. In fact, this often lets them break away and establish new types or genres of music.
Gaze upon its magnificence here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh7cWRrqF4
I'd say that if you watch any Youtubers, watch Internet Historian. He doesn't dramatically depict fanfics that often (those he does are the most infamous ones, and with writing that makes Past Sins look like Crime and Punishment), but he covers famous internet events (mostly brought about by 4Chan) in the same humorous style and it's a refreshing revival of classic internet culture.
>>248872
>The problem is that it's done too correctly.
That's absolutely right and I couldn't word it better. It's a by-the-books (pun unintended) story that seems like something written by an AI after putting in a text seed. What left me feeling off after finishing it, although I considered it somewhat engaging, was that I still didn't know who Pen Stroke was. That may sound odd but after reading a work of certain length you tend to grasp the personality of the writer, likes and dislikes, sense of humor, inspiration, etc. Reading the work of someone with quirkiness or wit makes me feel more complete because it's a social exercise: the writer leaves an imprint of himself in the work and you get to listen to it.
>You can see the same trends in music, video games, anime, etc.
Absolutely. I don't particularly like Thoughty2 (his non-science videos have a disgustingly centrist perspective) but I agree with him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII
What stuck with me was the fact that pretty much all pop music is written by a handful of people. This is why it sounds so formulaic: there's a hook right at the start to get people to recognize it, another repetitive hook that goes throughout the song with lyrics, a short change in rhythm around the middle that usually lacks lyrics, and a return to the repetitive hook that continues until the song fades out. I bet you that any random song that you listen to follows that formula.
That isn't to say that every song that does follow it is necessarily bad: after all, there are plenty that sound really good (which is one of the points of music) and it is a reliable format for songs lasting 2-4 minutes (the length of most modern songs). There is some genuine creativity that we can all enjoy. The masses like this type of music because it's catchy, it's easy to follow along, and it's steady; they don't really need to change it up all that much which is why modern pop tends to sound the same.
I personally prefer listening to indie music (God bless the internet) that does not follow such a predictable format. I must admit, though, that I also enjoy classical music and of course the various types of classical have their own formulae which most composers adhere to. One disadvantage, of course, that pop has in comparison is a very short (goldfish-like) time limit that prevents creativity of crests and valleys. Nonetheless, I can't blame the regular music enthusiast for not enjoying Penderecki or other atonal music; to be very different often involves intentionally imposing discomfort, uncertainty, or even dread upon the listener. Like you said most talented people are in the middle somewhere. The best composers (in my view) don't follow the rules entirely nor do they break them but exist in a middle-ground which is enthralling. In fact, this often lets them break away and establish new types or genres of music.
>>248895
>You realise that was proven to be a deliberate shitpost, yeah?
To be fair, with the amount of autistic faggots who write garbage its quite possibly a case of Poe's law
>You realise that was proven to be a deliberate shitpost, yeah?
To be fair, with the amount of autistic faggots who write garbage its quite possibly a case of Poe's law
>>248937
Nah, if I recall right, someone got into the account and found messages confirming it was deliberate.
Nah, if I recall right, someone got into the account and found messages confirming it was deliberate.
>>248895
Yup but that doesn't change the fact that a great deal of fanfics resemble its style nor the fact the video's a gasser. Also this one is legit afaik: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q11jwThxBBI
Yup but that doesn't change the fact that a great deal of fanfics resemble its style nor the fact the video's a gasser. Also this one is legit afaik: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q11jwThxBBI
File (): 6B786028B4D9F34427F7B85BCBCD7027-115172.jpg (112.5 KB, 1920x1080, maxresdefault (3).jpg)
>>248872
>A filly as young as Apple Bloom was tangled up in the branches.
Since the audience being written for is going to be mostly bronies/horsefuckers, it's probably not that big a deal to name drop a canon show character who the reader would most likely know. However, I'm kind of a stickler for treating any original work as a standalone piece that can be read and enjoyed by anyone, regardless of whether or not they're familiar with the characters and universe already. Since we're only on the first chapter it's possible that Apple Bloom shows up later, in which case there's no problem because then it's just foreshadowing a character who hasn't appeared yet. If she's not in this story, though, her name shouldn't even be mentioned unless the author is going to also provide enough info about her for the comparison to make sense.
>She also had nicks and scratches all over, which Twilight could only guess had been caused by the bush’s long, sharp thorns.
If she crawled out of thorny bushes with scratches all over her body, a direct cause-and-effect relationship can probably be assumed. There's not going to be much guesswork required on Twilight's part. Also, we get it: she's a cute little filly, she's alone, she's frightened, she's hurt. There's no need to ham it up quite so much. This is starting to verge into pity-porn territory.
>Yet, it was the filly’s eyes that held Twilight’s attention and filled her with fear. Those eyes were not shaped like a normal pony’s. The turquoise orbs, which should have had round pupils, instead had dagger-shaped pupils. The whites of her eyes were also off. Instead of white, they were a lighter color that closely resembled the color of the irises.
the edge.jpg
>The cult said they were the servants of Nightmare Moon, and they were obviously trying to cast some kind of spell.
>The spell they were attempting, it wasn’t some simple bit of magic. To need that much setup, the spell had to be powerful, possibly the most powerful spell Twilight had ever seen. On top of that, they said that they were servants of Nightmare Moon.
Yes, most of us in the gallery can also put two and two together and realize that it makes four. Let's get on with it, shall we?
>What if the spell cast was supposed to bring back Nightmare Moon? And what if it worked?!
Well, I certainly hope it worked, otherwise we have about 200,000 words of pretty boring shit to slog through.
>Was that their goal? To resurrect Nightmare Moon? Did it work? Had the cult succeeded in bringing back Nightmare Moon? Was this Nightmare Moon?
>Was this really Nightmare Moon? Was that the purpose of the spell last night? Did it work? How did it work? How could there be a Nightmare Moon without Luna? Weren’t they one and the same? Why was Nightmare Moon so small? Did the spell not work? Was Nightmare Moon just trying to trick her into taking her back to Ponyville? Was she only pretending to be so small and helpless? Was she dangerous? Was this really Nightmare Moon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXE8LdXzeHM
>She could only pray to herself that she’d get back before Spike panicked and sent a letter to the princess.
>~~~
>Spike anxiously finished writing the letter to the princess
This is actually a pretty funny way to conclude one segment and begin another. I'm ok with this.
>Thunder, lightning, wind, and pounding rain all came together at once, and Twilight was out in that weather, possibly hurt or even ponynapped.
I really, really wish you would stop using the word "ponynapped."
>Spike began to breathe in, the message to Celestia mere moments from being magically sent to Canterlot when the library door suddenly swung open.
>“Spike! Don’t you dare breathe out!” Twilight yelled, pointing a commanding hoof at him. She was covered in mud and grime up to her neck, little leaves and sticks were caught in her mane, and a tired expression was on her face.
This little scene plays out rather well visually, I can easily imagine this as an event in the show, and it's written succinctly enough that it doesn't throw off the timing of the gag. I'm ok with this.
>She, however, needed to make it a quick bath.
However, she needed to make it a quick bath.
>It was a very shallow bath, but it was perfect for the small filly. Twilight levitated the miniature Nightmare Moon lookalike into the water.
Oh shit is she going to try to drown her? Now that would be a surprise twist.
>She winced a few times as the water came in contact with her cuts and scratches, but otherwise the filly didn’t protest. She just stood there, being as complacent as possible as Twilight carefully used a brush to clean her.
Nope, I guess not.
Anyway, all jokes aside, I'm starting to think Pen Stroke must have been a Ritalin kid; I refuse to believe anyone willing to pen 200,000 words of something would naturally produce anything this dull. The image of Twilight giving a little filly a bath and brushing her hair is very heartwarming and cute I suppose, but we haven't known this character long enough for it to have any resonance. This whole scene is like a Thomas Kinkade painting: warmth without genuine emotion.
The direction the story goes from here is already painfully obvious: Twilight forms a mother-daughter bond with Nyx, but all the other ponies only see Nightmare Moon. Twilight defending Nyx becomes a point of friction that creates conflict between her and her friends. Then, something something everypony learns a lesson, and it turns out that the real monster was prejudice.
Running out of space, will continue.
>A filly as young as Apple Bloom was tangled up in the branches.
Since the audience being written for is going to be mostly bronies/horsefuckers, it's probably not that big a deal to name drop a canon show character who the reader would most likely know. However, I'm kind of a stickler for treating any original work as a standalone piece that can be read and enjoyed by anyone, regardless of whether or not they're familiar with the characters and universe already. Since we're only on the first chapter it's possible that Apple Bloom shows up later, in which case there's no problem because then it's just foreshadowing a character who hasn't appeared yet. If she's not in this story, though, her name shouldn't even be mentioned unless the author is going to also provide enough info about her for the comparison to make sense.
>She also had nicks and scratches all over, which Twilight could only guess had been caused by the bush’s long, sharp thorns.
If she crawled out of thorny bushes with scratches all over her body, a direct cause-and-effect relationship can probably be assumed. There's not going to be much guesswork required on Twilight's part. Also, we get it: she's a cute little filly, she's alone, she's frightened, she's hurt. There's no need to ham it up quite so much. This is starting to verge into pity-porn territory.
>Yet, it was the filly’s eyes that held Twilight’s attention and filled her with fear. Those eyes were not shaped like a normal pony’s. The turquoise orbs, which should have had round pupils, instead had dagger-shaped pupils. The whites of her eyes were also off. Instead of white, they were a lighter color that closely resembled the color of the irises.
the edge.jpg
>The cult said they were the servants of Nightmare Moon, and they were obviously trying to cast some kind of spell.
>The spell they were attempting, it wasn’t some simple bit of magic. To need that much setup, the spell had to be powerful, possibly the most powerful spell Twilight had ever seen. On top of that, they said that they were servants of Nightmare Moon.
Yes, most of us in the gallery can also put two and two together and realize that it makes four. Let's get on with it, shall we?
>What if the spell cast was supposed to bring back Nightmare Moon? And what if it worked?!
Well, I certainly hope it worked, otherwise we have about 200,000 words of pretty boring shit to slog through.
>Was that their goal? To resurrect Nightmare Moon? Did it work? Had the cult succeeded in bringing back Nightmare Moon? Was this Nightmare Moon?
>Was this really Nightmare Moon? Was that the purpose of the spell last night? Did it work? How did it work? How could there be a Nightmare Moon without Luna? Weren’t they one and the same? Why was Nightmare Moon so small? Did the spell not work? Was Nightmare Moon just trying to trick her into taking her back to Ponyville? Was she only pretending to be so small and helpless? Was she dangerous? Was this really Nightmare Moon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXE8LdXzeHM
>She could only pray to herself that she’d get back before Spike panicked and sent a letter to the princess.
>~~~
>Spike anxiously finished writing the letter to the princess
This is actually a pretty funny way to conclude one segment and begin another. I'm ok with this.
>Thunder, lightning, wind, and pounding rain all came together at once, and Twilight was out in that weather, possibly hurt or even ponynapped.
I really, really wish you would stop using the word "ponynapped."
>Spike began to breathe in, the message to Celestia mere moments from being magically sent to Canterlot when the library door suddenly swung open.
>“Spike! Don’t you dare breathe out!” Twilight yelled, pointing a commanding hoof at him. She was covered in mud and grime up to her neck, little leaves and sticks were caught in her mane, and a tired expression was on her face.
This little scene plays out rather well visually, I can easily imagine this as an event in the show, and it's written succinctly enough that it doesn't throw off the timing of the gag. I'm ok with this.
>She, however, needed to make it a quick bath.
However, she needed to make it a quick bath.
>It was a very shallow bath, but it was perfect for the small filly. Twilight levitated the miniature Nightmare Moon lookalike into the water.
Oh shit is she going to try to drown her? Now that would be a surprise twist.
>She winced a few times as the water came in contact with her cuts and scratches, but otherwise the filly didn’t protest. She just stood there, being as complacent as possible as Twilight carefully used a brush to clean her.
Nope, I guess not.
Anyway, all jokes aside, I'm starting to think Pen Stroke must have been a Ritalin kid; I refuse to believe anyone willing to pen 200,000 words of something would naturally produce anything this dull. The image of Twilight giving a little filly a bath and brushing her hair is very heartwarming and cute I suppose, but we haven't known this character long enough for it to have any resonance. This whole scene is like a Thomas Kinkade painting: warmth without genuine emotion.
The direction the story goes from here is already painfully obvious: Twilight forms a mother-daughter bond with Nyx, but all the other ponies only see Nightmare Moon. Twilight defending Nyx becomes a point of friction that creates conflict between her and her friends. Then, something something everypony learns a lesson, and it turns out that the real monster was prejudice.
Running out of space, will continue.
File (): 4A29A49DD7228A790E518A8D00E77437-24348.jpg (23.8 KB, 500x500, 1a529bcf0ca4462aa1da45e2aa31a735lg.jpg)
>>248959
If you're going to write a story that's just a chain of empty cliches, at least do it right. This bath scene was a perfect opportunity for some cute comic relief in the form of a wacky slapstick scene. Maybe the filly doesn't like water, maybe she doesn't want to take a bath. She fights Twilight, and Twilight has to chase her around the room. Maybe she gets out of the bathroom and there's a chase sequence where she runs around the house breaking stuff. Maybe Spike is in the kitchen making fucking daffodil sandwiches and the filly suddenly runs across the counter and shit goes flying everywhere. The filly lands in flour or ketchup or something and now she's even dirtier than she was to begin with, haha wow, how wacky was that? Silly filly. There's a million different obvious directions the author could have taken this but didn't.
Scenes like that don't just provide comic relief, they also help deepen the parent-child bond between the two characters, as well as the bond between the audience and the characters. Element of laughter and all that. Seriously, pick up any random movie or story where the premise is that a childless single adult suddenly becomes the caregiver for an unrelated child; I guarantee you there is a scene in there somewhere, usually towards the beginning, where the adult tries to do something parent-y and fails miserably at it because they have no idea what they're doing and the child doesn't trust them yet.
The problem here is that we really don't know anything about Nyx, and despite the almost nauseatingly tryhard efforts on the author's part to make the reader feel instant sympathy for her, we have no reason to like her or care about her. There needs to be some initial distrust so the relationship has somewhere to go. We have that on Twilight's part somewhat, because of the filly's resemblance to Nightmare Moon. However, that's only a superficial distrust based on the filly's appearance, and despite it she seems to have no serious qualms about taking the filly back to her house and bathing her. The filly, meanwhile, seems to trust Twilight implicitly. This dynamic doesn't really work, because it makes Twilight look like some pathetic wine-aunt who secretly just wants a baby, and it makes Nyx look like a special-needs autist with no personality, who just complacently goes off with any adult who abducts her from the woods and dunks her in a bathtub.
>It had taken a couple of hours to convince Spike not to write to Princess Celestia and tell her about the filly. He, like Twilight, at first assumed that she was Nightmare Moon reborn and that the princess had to be told. He had even written up a letter and was about to send it before Twilight snatched it away and threw it in the garbage.
>Twilight’s arguments were weak. All she could really say was that the filly really didn’t seem to act like Nightmare Moon. In her logical mind, Twilight knew that Spike was probably right. They needed to tell the princess, but, once again, Twilight’s imagination betrayed her. Princess Celestia had banished Nightmare Moon to the moon for a thousand years. Twilight feared she would do the same to the little pony, and that just didn’t feel like something the filly deserved.
On a similar note, this is a horrible way to broach the subject of explaining the situation to Spike. Glossing over important scenes, where important things are discussed, with glib explanations that summarize the conclusions everyone reached, has never been, and will never be, a good idea.
At this point I'm retracting my earlier assessment, that Penis Stroke is an author who knows what he's doing and therefore his work deserves to be analyzed like a professional, published novel. From here on out, I will be judging Past Sins on the assumption that it is basically Silver Star Anus and the Magical Penis Cards with better grammar and honestly far less entertainment value.
Case in point, here are two relatively minor errors that it seems like at least one of Peen Stroke's 20cock fluffers editors should have easily caught:
>It wasn’t how she would have liked to obtain his silence, but Spike had Pinkie Pie promised that, if she got him the gem in the morning, he would keep quiet about the filly until she wanted to tell Princess Celestia.
In the show, I'm pretty sure it's always referred to as a Pinkie promise, not a Pinkie Pie promise.
>Nightmare Moon had tried twice to plunge Equestria into eternal night, but filly didn’t seem like a danger.
but the filly didn't seem like a danger.
>It was better to be safe than sorry, and Twilight chose to keep her guard up. She’d watch and be ready to bolt out of the room should things become dangerous. At the moment, however, she needed to find out more about the filly. She needed to see if she remembered being Nightmare Moon or maybe had other memories, something to prove who she was.
Again, Twilight's interactions with Nyx so far have made for some pretty dull reading. So far we have a lot of narration focusing directly on her thoughts, which are mostly the same ideas going round and round. Twilight is concerned about Nyx, but is wary that she might be Nightmare Moon pulling a trick. This has been established multiple times; it doesn't need to be mentioned every other paragraph.
This is a prime case for an age-old writing adage: show, don't tell. Nyx has done basically nothing so far. From the time Twilight found her in the woods until the present there have been ample opportunities to introduce at least a little of her personality to the reader and let them start to form their own opinion of her, but so far all she's done is bathe and eat a sandwich. The rest has just been the interior of Twilight's head.
If I were going to write this section, I would probably make something out of the bath scene as I described earlier, and maybe have the next scene focus on an argument between Twilight and Spike.
If you're going to write a story that's just a chain of empty cliches, at least do it right. This bath scene was a perfect opportunity for some cute comic relief in the form of a wacky slapstick scene. Maybe the filly doesn't like water, maybe she doesn't want to take a bath. She fights Twilight, and Twilight has to chase her around the room. Maybe she gets out of the bathroom and there's a chase sequence where she runs around the house breaking stuff. Maybe Spike is in the kitchen making fucking daffodil sandwiches and the filly suddenly runs across the counter and shit goes flying everywhere. The filly lands in flour or ketchup or something and now she's even dirtier than she was to begin with, haha wow, how wacky was that? Silly filly. There's a million different obvious directions the author could have taken this but didn't.
Scenes like that don't just provide comic relief, they also help deepen the parent-child bond between the two characters, as well as the bond between the audience and the characters. Element of laughter and all that. Seriously, pick up any random movie or story where the premise is that a childless single adult suddenly becomes the caregiver for an unrelated child; I guarantee you there is a scene in there somewhere, usually towards the beginning, where the adult tries to do something parent-y and fails miserably at it because they have no idea what they're doing and the child doesn't trust them yet.
The problem here is that we really don't know anything about Nyx, and despite the almost nauseatingly tryhard efforts on the author's part to make the reader feel instant sympathy for her, we have no reason to like her or care about her. There needs to be some initial distrust so the relationship has somewhere to go. We have that on Twilight's part somewhat, because of the filly's resemblance to Nightmare Moon. However, that's only a superficial distrust based on the filly's appearance, and despite it she seems to have no serious qualms about taking the filly back to her house and bathing her. The filly, meanwhile, seems to trust Twilight implicitly. This dynamic doesn't really work, because it makes Twilight look like some pathetic wine-aunt who secretly just wants a baby, and it makes Nyx look like a special-needs autist with no personality, who just complacently goes off with any adult who abducts her from the woods and dunks her in a bathtub.
>It had taken a couple of hours to convince Spike not to write to Princess Celestia and tell her about the filly. He, like Twilight, at first assumed that she was Nightmare Moon reborn and that the princess had to be told. He had even written up a letter and was about to send it before Twilight snatched it away and threw it in the garbage.
>Twilight’s arguments were weak. All she could really say was that the filly really didn’t seem to act like Nightmare Moon. In her logical mind, Twilight knew that Spike was probably right. They needed to tell the princess, but, once again, Twilight’s imagination betrayed her. Princess Celestia had banished Nightmare Moon to the moon for a thousand years. Twilight feared she would do the same to the little pony, and that just didn’t feel like something the filly deserved.
On a similar note, this is a horrible way to broach the subject of explaining the situation to Spike. Glossing over important scenes, where important things are discussed, with glib explanations that summarize the conclusions everyone reached, has never been, and will never be, a good idea.
At this point I'm retracting my earlier assessment, that Penis Stroke is an author who knows what he's doing and therefore his work deserves to be analyzed like a professional, published novel. From here on out, I will be judging Past Sins on the assumption that it is basically Silver Star Anus and the Magical Penis Cards with better grammar and honestly far less entertainment value.
Case in point, here are two relatively minor errors that it seems like at least one of Peen Stroke's 20
>It wasn’t how she would have liked to obtain his silence, but Spike had Pinkie Pie promised that, if she got him the gem in the morning, he would keep quiet about the filly until she wanted to tell Princess Celestia.
In the show, I'm pretty sure it's always referred to as a Pinkie promise, not a Pinkie Pie promise.
>Nightmare Moon had tried twice to plunge Equestria into eternal night, but filly didn’t seem like a danger.
but the filly didn't seem like a danger.
>It was better to be safe than sorry, and Twilight chose to keep her guard up. She’d watch and be ready to bolt out of the room should things become dangerous. At the moment, however, she needed to find out more about the filly. She needed to see if she remembered being Nightmare Moon or maybe had other memories, something to prove who she was.
Again, Twilight's interactions with Nyx so far have made for some pretty dull reading. So far we have a lot of narration focusing directly on her thoughts, which are mostly the same ideas going round and round. Twilight is concerned about Nyx, but is wary that she might be Nightmare Moon pulling a trick. This has been established multiple times; it doesn't need to be mentioned every other paragraph.
This is a prime case for an age-old writing adage: show, don't tell. Nyx has done basically nothing so far. From the time Twilight found her in the woods until the present there have been ample opportunities to introduce at least a little of her personality to the reader and let them start to form their own opinion of her, but so far all she's done is bathe and eat a sandwich. The rest has just been the interior of Twilight's head.
If I were going to write this section, I would probably make something out of the bath scene as I described earlier, and maybe have the next scene focus on an argument between Twilight and Spike.
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>>248960
>The filly shook her head, the first of many such replies. Twilight asked the filly what she did remember, what she knew, and a whole slew of other questions. Yet, while there were a few nods here and there, most of Twilight’s questions were met with a shake of the filly’s head, and each shake seemed to cause the filly’s eyes to tear up a little bit more.
It's obvious the filly's nature is to be somewhat shy and withdrawn to begin with, and that this is compounded by her being frightened and confused. While it explains why she hasn't said much so far, it's still a personality trait that is being underutilized. Miscommunications between she and Twilight could be fertile ground for an initial conflict between them, that can be gradually resolved as they come to understand each other, but it's not being used as such.
Case in point, the shit I was saying earlier about the bath scene. This filly is scared, injured, and presumably has no idea what the fuck is going on since she just sort of poofed into being the other night and woke up alone in the woods. Yet she has no problem whatsoever with a complete stranger taking her home and dropping her into a tub full of water. It makes far more sense that she would want to trust Twilight because she's all alone and has nobody, but would also be suspicious of her, also because she's all alone and has nobody. Since it's later established that she has no memories, she would probably not understand a lot of what Twilight is doing and would thus interpret some of her actions as hostile, hence she might panic and freak out if, for instance, she was suddenly dropped into a bathtub. This would in turn frustrate Twilight because she wants to help, but can't figure out how to communicate this to a pony that doesn't know about simple things like bathing. She is also wary of the filly's resemblance to Nightmare Moon, which adds an extra layer of tension.
Now, compare that dynamic to what is in the text so far:
Twilight finds the filly.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight brings the filly home.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight goes upstairs and takes a bath. Twilight asks the filly if she would like a bath. The filly takes a bath.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight and the filly have sandwiches.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight goes downstairs to explain to Spike what's going on.
<insert a couple of paragraphs succinctly describing how they eventually came to an agreement not to tell Celestia>
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight goes back upstairs to talk to the filly. The filly mostly cries and does little else.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but this is more or less how I remember what I've read so far. Point is, Twilight wastes a lot of space on the page repeating the same thoughts over and over, and very little actually happens.
>It was a sight that helped Twilight understand why the little pony had been so quiet and subdued; she was scared and confused.
Once again, we have the completely fucking obvious being presented as if it were some kind of divine revelation.
>She had no memories of her own, yet possessed some common knowledge, like an understanding of Equestrian language.
And on top of everything else, she is suffering from a case of explosive amnesia. As if this story's being a gigantic pulsating ball of cliches wasn't bad enough, it's not even effectively utilizing its own cliches. She's frightened, she's hurt, she's confused, and she woke up in the woods without any memories. Great! Let's start with that and have her do some interesting shit! Oh, what's that? You'd rather just have her sit quietly and eat a sandwich while you blather on for pages and pages about how Twilight is worried that she might actually be Nightmare Moon? Carry on then.
>Again, the question of whether or not the filly was really Nightmare Moon reared its ugly head, but it was a question Twilight chose to shelve in her mind for later.
Yeah if what we've read so far is any indication, something tells me that question has a lot more head-rearing to do. I think we've solved the mystery of how this thing got to be 200,000 words long.
>So, despite her own anxieties, Twilight crawled up onto the bed and lay down beside the young alicorn, doing her best to comfort the crying filly.
This ending sentence actually does a pretty good job of summing up the focus of the entire sub-chapter. So far we've had a lot of narration dedicated to Twilight's anxieties, which mostly boil down to a single question reiterated over and over and over. Meanwhile, the young alicorn, who is ostensibly the main character in this dense volume of autism, has cried, eaten a sandwich, and taken a bath. Fabulous stuff.
Anyway, that's probably good for today. I'll finish off the remaining bit of Chapter One tonight.
>The filly shook her head, the first of many such replies. Twilight asked the filly what she did remember, what she knew, and a whole slew of other questions. Yet, while there were a few nods here and there, most of Twilight’s questions were met with a shake of the filly’s head, and each shake seemed to cause the filly’s eyes to tear up a little bit more.
It's obvious the filly's nature is to be somewhat shy and withdrawn to begin with, and that this is compounded by her being frightened and confused. While it explains why she hasn't said much so far, it's still a personality trait that is being underutilized. Miscommunications between she and Twilight could be fertile ground for an initial conflict between them, that can be gradually resolved as they come to understand each other, but it's not being used as such.
Case in point, the shit I was saying earlier about the bath scene. This filly is scared, injured, and presumably has no idea what the fuck is going on since she just sort of poofed into being the other night and woke up alone in the woods. Yet she has no problem whatsoever with a complete stranger taking her home and dropping her into a tub full of water. It makes far more sense that she would want to trust Twilight because she's all alone and has nobody, but would also be suspicious of her, also because she's all alone and has nobody. Since it's later established that she has no memories, she would probably not understand a lot of what Twilight is doing and would thus interpret some of her actions as hostile, hence she might panic and freak out if, for instance, she was suddenly dropped into a bathtub. This would in turn frustrate Twilight because she wants to help, but can't figure out how to communicate this to a pony that doesn't know about simple things like bathing. She is also wary of the filly's resemblance to Nightmare Moon, which adds an extra layer of tension.
Now, compare that dynamic to what is in the text so far:
Twilight finds the filly.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight brings the filly home.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight goes upstairs and takes a bath. Twilight asks the filly if she would like a bath. The filly takes a bath.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight and the filly have sandwiches.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight goes downstairs to explain to Spike what's going on.
<insert a couple of paragraphs succinctly describing how they eventually came to an agreement not to tell Celestia>
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
Twilight goes back upstairs to talk to the filly. The filly mostly cries and does little else.
<insert 5 paragraphs of Twilight wondering to herself if the filly is Nightmare Moon>
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but this is more or less how I remember what I've read so far. Point is, Twilight wastes a lot of space on the page repeating the same thoughts over and over, and very little actually happens.
>It was a sight that helped Twilight understand why the little pony had been so quiet and subdued; she was scared and confused.
Once again, we have the completely fucking obvious being presented as if it were some kind of divine revelation.
>She had no memories of her own, yet possessed some common knowledge, like an understanding of Equestrian language.
And on top of everything else, she is suffering from a case of explosive amnesia. As if this story's being a gigantic pulsating ball of cliches wasn't bad enough, it's not even effectively utilizing its own cliches. She's frightened, she's hurt, she's confused, and she woke up in the woods without any memories. Great! Let's start with that and have her do some interesting shit! Oh, what's that? You'd rather just have her sit quietly and eat a sandwich while you blather on for pages and pages about how Twilight is worried that she might actually be Nightmare Moon? Carry on then.
>Again, the question of whether or not the filly was really Nightmare Moon reared its ugly head, but it was a question Twilight chose to shelve in her mind for later.
Yeah if what we've read so far is any indication, something tells me that question has a lot more head-rearing to do. I think we've solved the mystery of how this thing got to be 200,000 words long.
>So, despite her own anxieties, Twilight crawled up onto the bed and lay down beside the young alicorn, doing her best to comfort the crying filly.
This ending sentence actually does a pretty good job of summing up the focus of the entire sub-chapter. So far we've had a lot of narration dedicated to Twilight's anxieties, which mostly boil down to a single question reiterated over and over and over. Meanwhile, the young alicorn, who is ostensibly the main character in this dense volume of autism, has cried, eaten a sandwich, and taken a bath. Fabulous stuff.
Anyway, that's probably good for today. I'll finish off the remaining bit of Chapter One tonight.
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Remember when Flutter Shy threw Starlight Glimmer out of a Helicopter?
Best episode ever
Best episode ever
File (): 84E4E0F03BADF819DE6F03B32B93CC2D-103776.jpg (101.3 KB, 640x735, ZomboMeme 29102019154006.jpg)
AppleJack's opinion:
>>248872
>>248877
I agree the industry recycles everything. They see what has been popular and resell it. They do this in all entertainment industries today it seems.
I also like sstories that are create by the vision rather than out some form of structure to adhere to to sell a product.
>The only person who can write a Stephen King is Stephen King
That is why one shouldn't try to compete in the mainstream sincce the industry will always have the resources to do mass appeal stories better while something you created is nische. People has to go to you to get if they want it.
>>248960
>If you're going to write a story that's just a chain of empty cliches, at least do it right. This bath scene was a perfect opportunity for some cute comic relief in the form of a wacky slapstick scene
>There needs to be some initial distrust so the relationship has somewhere to go.
because it makes Twilight look like some pathetic wine-aunt who secretly just wants a baby
>Nyx look like a special-needs autist with no personality
Meh.
I think it makes okay sense. A child with amnesia sees a freindly-looking woman. I mean I have been able to get really close to hares and foxes by just being gentle in my appraoch. Since Nyx is just a child with no one else around and no memory onecould even argue that she has no reason to be afraid since she doesn't know any better and also that she could imprint on Twilight. I remember when was a child. I used to talk too strangers all the time so long asthey seemed even remotely friendly.
I can understand you point I just don't think it most play out like that. It could but it also could not.
Regardless of Nyx being distrustful or not in this scene, I don't see why we most have comic relief in this part of the story. I kinda like a more quiet moment between the two characters. But perhaps you are just saying that since we are anyway reading cliches, we could have them play out the way they are meant to.
>On a similar note, this is a horrible way to broach the subject of explaining the situation to Spike. Glossing over important scenes, where important things are discussed, with glib explanations that summarize the conclusions everyone reached, has never been, and will never be, a good idea.
Yeah, it makes it seem like the author could not write this dialogue to resolve in the way he wanted in a believable way.
>>248961
>Twilight ponders whether Nyx is Nightmare Moon
She does this literally the until it is revealed that *spoiler* she is and she never dvelve any deeper into it than raising the question either.
>>248877
I agree the industry recycles everything. They see what has been popular and resell it. They do this in all entertainment industries today it seems.
I also like sstories that are create by the vision rather than out some form of structure to adhere to to sell a product.
>The only person who can write a Stephen King is Stephen King
That is why one shouldn't try to compete in the mainstream sincce the industry will always have the resources to do mass appeal stories better while something you created is nische. People has to go to you to get if they want it.
>>248960
>If you're going to write a story that's just a chain of empty cliches, at least do it right. This bath scene was a perfect opportunity for some cute comic relief in the form of a wacky slapstick scene
>There needs to be some initial distrust so the relationship has somewhere to go.
because it makes Twilight look like some pathetic wine-aunt who secretly just wants a baby
>Nyx look like a special-needs autist with no personality
Meh.
I think it makes okay sense. A child with amnesia sees a freindly-looking woman. I mean I have been able to get really close to hares and foxes by just being gentle in my appraoch. Since Nyx is just a child with no one else around and no memory onecould even argue that she has no reason to be afraid since she doesn't know any better and also that she could imprint on Twilight. I remember when was a child. I used to talk too strangers all the time so long asthey seemed even remotely friendly.
I can understand you point I just don't think it most play out like that. It could but it also could not.
Regardless of Nyx being distrustful or not in this scene, I don't see why we most have comic relief in this part of the story. I kinda like a more quiet moment between the two characters. But perhaps you are just saying that since we are anyway reading cliches, we could have them play out the way they are meant to.
>On a similar note, this is a horrible way to broach the subject of explaining the situation to Spike. Glossing over important scenes, where important things are discussed, with glib explanations that summarize the conclusions everyone reached, has never been, and will never be, a good idea.
Yeah, it makes it seem like the author could not write this dialogue to resolve in the way he wanted in a believable way.
>>248961
>Twilight ponders whether Nyx is Nightmare Moon
She does this literally the until it is revealed that *spoiler* she is and she never dvelve any deeper into it than raising the question either.
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>>248961
>It reminded Twilight of the time she had seen an earth pony playing crystal juice glasses filled with water: a glass harp. It was a feat made easier by the special horseshoes the pony had on, but it was still impressive to watch and listen to.
Comparing the filly's voice to a glass harp isn't a bad analogy, but I think this explanation veers a little too far outside the narrative. Also, don't link to YouTube videos in written prose; if you have to reference outside materials in order to tell your story it's an indication that you're doing it wrong.
>“Can… can I sleep here?” the filly asked as she looked up at Twilight, a question that brought fresh unease to Twilight’s mind. Letting the filly sleep in the same bed was asking for trouble. If she was Nightmare Moon and just playing some cruel trick, Twilight was just asking to be attacked in the middle of the night. At the same time, Twilight couldn’t bring herself to refuse. It was like her mouth had forgotten how to form the word ‘no’ in the face of the filly’s pleading eyes.
Twilight's actions really don't make a ton of sense so far. She feels some kind of instantaneous maternal bond with this filly yet she is also afraid of her. She takes her back home with her yet she has reservations about letting her stay in the house. However, she also wants to keep the matter a secret from Princess Celestia, who could reasonably provide the filly with a safe place to stay while still taking precautions in case she turns out to be dangerous. Maybe it's the author's intent that Twilight is supposed to be feeling conflicted and indecisive, but mostly this just comes across as waffling. I also want to once again reiterate that there is no tension and no real interplay between Twilight and the filly, that nothing has really happened so far despite the fact that it has taken many words to get here, and that so far I'm bored out of my skull and wish somepony in this story would actually do something.
Anyway, the rest of this chapter doesn't really need to be pulled apart. It's mostly a lot of fluff about Twilight tucking the filly into bed, the filly looking up at her with her big cutesy wootsy eyes and asking Twilight if it's really okay for her to sleep over, and some other nauseatingly saccharin dreck that even the writer of a Hallmark Channel special would cringe at. Again, we have not been given any reason to feel anything for this character one way or the other yet, and so far it feels like the author is just layering cuteness and fragility onto his descriptions of Nyx in order to force us to feel something for her, because obviously you should just automatically care about anything cute and fragile. Protip: this usually doesn't work.
Chapter 2: A Secret Between Friends
>Still, with her empty belly acting as a powerful motivator, Twilight stepped into the kitchen. Almost immediately, the smells of breakfast filled her nose and whetted her appetite.
If her empty belly is a powerful motivator, then it stands to reason that her appetite has already been whet. I get what you're trying to say here, but find a better way to say it.
>Who made breakfast was largely dependent on who went to bed first the night before, and the previous evening it had been Spike.
You don't need to overcompensate so heavily here, it's no secret that Spike is Twilight's house nigger.
>Twilight had come to call the filly Nyx, an old name from a storybook Twilight remembered from her own fillyhood.
are you sure Mary wouldn't have been a better name? :^)
>Nyx, as the stories went, was a black coated mare that slept during the day and basked in Luna’s night, back before the princess became Nightmare Moon. Her job was to guard her town during the night from the many creatures that hunted in the dark. The tale of Nyx of the Night was one of Twilight’s favorite bedtime stories.
This is actually a rather nice bit of extra lore that helps make the story feel more fleshed out. I'm ok with this.
>Unfortunately, none of the library’s books had any direct information, and what information she could find was in theoretical magic.
What about those books she borrowed from Celestia? The rare texts taken from the Canterlot library? Might they be of assistance here? You introduced them to serve as a device for setting up the meeting between Nyx and Twilight, which is fine, but that doesn't mean they can't also be actually useful as books. It pays to treat everything you introduce into your world as a legitimate part of it; you never know when a seemingly innocuous story element could come in handy. Frankly there's a lot of raw material in this story so far that could potentially be spun into something interesting, that the author is sadly underutilizing.
>Over the past few days, Nyx had become a little more open, though she was still nervous and quiet.
See, this is the kind of thing that you want to show, not tell. This whole part of the story should be about Twilight and Nyx getting to know one another, as well as introducing the character to the reader so they can make a decision on whether or not they give a shit. You don't have to give away a ton since there's obviously a lot more story to go, but at least have the filly do something besides cry and paw at the ground.
>She had read a few books that fillies her age would be exposed to in school: nonfiction books about a wide and almost random spectrum of subjects.
I can already feel that the Sue is strong in this one.
>What worried Twilight the most, however, was that her curiosity was beginning to shift to the outside world. Just the previous day, Nyx had spent hours looking out the window, watching ponies pass by.
So....the big revelation here is that Nyx doesn't enjoy being cooped up inside a stranger's house under lock and key all day? This story's version of Twilight should really sit down and have a long talk with Captain Obvious; she might learn something.
>It reminded Twilight of the time she had seen an earth pony playing crystal juice glasses filled with water: a glass harp. It was a feat made easier by the special horseshoes the pony had on, but it was still impressive to watch and listen to.
Comparing the filly's voice to a glass harp isn't a bad analogy, but I think this explanation veers a little too far outside the narrative. Also, don't link to YouTube videos in written prose; if you have to reference outside materials in order to tell your story it's an indication that you're doing it wrong.
>“Can… can I sleep here?” the filly asked as she looked up at Twilight, a question that brought fresh unease to Twilight’s mind. Letting the filly sleep in the same bed was asking for trouble. If she was Nightmare Moon and just playing some cruel trick, Twilight was just asking to be attacked in the middle of the night. At the same time, Twilight couldn’t bring herself to refuse. It was like her mouth had forgotten how to form the word ‘no’ in the face of the filly’s pleading eyes.
Twilight's actions really don't make a ton of sense so far. She feels some kind of instantaneous maternal bond with this filly yet she is also afraid of her. She takes her back home with her yet she has reservations about letting her stay in the house. However, she also wants to keep the matter a secret from Princess Celestia, who could reasonably provide the filly with a safe place to stay while still taking precautions in case she turns out to be dangerous. Maybe it's the author's intent that Twilight is supposed to be feeling conflicted and indecisive, but mostly this just comes across as waffling. I also want to once again reiterate that there is no tension and no real interplay between Twilight and the filly, that nothing has really happened so far despite the fact that it has taken many words to get here, and that so far I'm bored out of my skull and wish somepony in this story would actually do something.
Anyway, the rest of this chapter doesn't really need to be pulled apart. It's mostly a lot of fluff about Twilight tucking the filly into bed, the filly looking up at her with her big cutesy wootsy eyes and asking Twilight if it's really okay for her to sleep over, and some other nauseatingly saccharin dreck that even the writer of a Hallmark Channel special would cringe at. Again, we have not been given any reason to feel anything for this character one way or the other yet, and so far it feels like the author is just layering cuteness and fragility onto his descriptions of Nyx in order to force us to feel something for her, because obviously you should just automatically care about anything cute and fragile. Protip: this usually doesn't work.
Chapter 2: A Secret Between Friends
>Still, with her empty belly acting as a powerful motivator, Twilight stepped into the kitchen. Almost immediately, the smells of breakfast filled her nose and whetted her appetite.
If her empty belly is a powerful motivator, then it stands to reason that her appetite has already been whet. I get what you're trying to say here, but find a better way to say it.
>Who made breakfast was largely dependent on who went to bed first the night before, and the previous evening it had been Spike.
You don't need to overcompensate so heavily here, it's no secret that Spike is Twilight's house nigger.
>Twilight had come to call the filly Nyx, an old name from a storybook Twilight remembered from her own fillyhood.
are you sure Mary wouldn't have been a better name? :^)
>Nyx, as the stories went, was a black coated mare that slept during the day and basked in Luna’s night, back before the princess became Nightmare Moon. Her job was to guard her town during the night from the many creatures that hunted in the dark. The tale of Nyx of the Night was one of Twilight’s favorite bedtime stories.
This is actually a rather nice bit of extra lore that helps make the story feel more fleshed out. I'm ok with this.
>Unfortunately, none of the library’s books had any direct information, and what information she could find was in theoretical magic.
What about those books she borrowed from Celestia? The rare texts taken from the Canterlot library? Might they be of assistance here? You introduced them to serve as a device for setting up the meeting between Nyx and Twilight, which is fine, but that doesn't mean they can't also be actually useful as books. It pays to treat everything you introduce into your world as a legitimate part of it; you never know when a seemingly innocuous story element could come in handy. Frankly there's a lot of raw material in this story so far that could potentially be spun into something interesting, that the author is sadly underutilizing.
>Over the past few days, Nyx had become a little more open, though she was still nervous and quiet.
See, this is the kind of thing that you want to show, not tell. This whole part of the story should be about Twilight and Nyx getting to know one another, as well as introducing the character to the reader so they can make a decision on whether or not they give a shit. You don't have to give away a ton since there's obviously a lot more story to go, but at least have the filly do something besides cry and paw at the ground.
>She had read a few books that fillies her age would be exposed to in school: nonfiction books about a wide and almost random spectrum of subjects.
I can already feel that the Sue is strong in this one.
>What worried Twilight the most, however, was that her curiosity was beginning to shift to the outside world. Just the previous day, Nyx had spent hours looking out the window, watching ponies pass by.
So....the big revelation here is that Nyx doesn't enjoy being cooped up inside a stranger's house under lock and key all day? This story's version of Twilight should really sit down and have a long talk with Captain Obvious; she might learn something.
File (): 7B98346CC007343CF5E807A89F524211-398437.png (389.1 KB, 1600x2230, starlight_glimmer_wants_hugs_by_pink1ejack-daqf2ky.png)
>>249032
>Yet, her request made Twilight realize something.
>She couldn’t keep Nyx hidden in the library forever.
Yes, Twilight and the Captain are going to need to have a nice, long chat. Meanwhile, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXE8LdXzeHM
>She had made a plan. She was going to pass off Nyx as a cousin who was going to stay with her indefinitely to study, much like how she had started living at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns when she became the princess’s private pupil.
>It might not have been the greatest of plans, but she hadn’t told her friends about Shining Armor until she got his wedding invitation. Rarity admitted later that she thought Twilight was an only child. Thus, it wasn’t unreasonable to think they’d believe Nyx was a cousin she hadn’t ever mentioned before, especially if she was a distant cousin.
We still have a lot of page space being wasted on Twilight's internal monologues, that really just sound like the author thinking out loud about what direction he's planning to take the story. The problem here, that Twilight can't keep the filly inside forever, but can't just let her wander around Ponyville either, are again quite obvious and don't need to be stated so directly or so often. Moreover, it's stupid to waste all this text explaining what Twilight is planning to do in advance of her actually doing it. Just have a scene where Twilight introduces Nyx to her friends and uses the cover story mentioned above. Since I'm guessing this probably happens (eventually) anyway, having Twilight explain it to us beforehand is doubly pointless.
>It took some precise movements and careful hiding, but Twilight was able to lead Nyx across Ponyville to Carousel Boutique without anypony getting a good glimpse of them. They were going to get there right when Rarity usually opened the shop for the day, hopefully ensuring there wouldn’t be any customers in the boutique.
It's clear from the earlier scene in the woods, where Twilight tried to transport both herself and Nyx and the spell wouldn't work, that there is some yet-unrevealed aspect of Nyx that messes with Twilight's magic. Or, alternatively, it could have had something to do with the Everfree Forest; I'm not quite sure which direction Peen Stroke is taking this. Either way, though, it stands to reason that Twi would have at least attempted teleportation before realizing that they would have to hoof it. Don't you just hate writing in universes with complicated magic systems that you're constantly having to take into account?
>She had been excited to finally go outside, but the size and number of ponies in the outside world had driven her to cling to Twilight the entire trip over to the boutique.
The author so far has a serious problem with using this pitiful-cutesy stuff as a crutch to try to artificially force reader sympathy for his otherwise undeveloped OC, which might be a big clue as to why the fandom seems to dislike her so much.
>Twilight chuckled a little under her breath and shrugged. “In the library, where else?”
>not chuckling ruefully
sorry, had to do it :^)
>“Where else indeed,” Rarity said before setting down the spools of thread she was levitating. “You know, all those dusty old books can’t be good for your complexion. You should come with Fluttershy and I on our weekly spa outing. You had such fun the last time you joined us, and I was actually hoping the three of us could make it a regular thing.”
I like the use of italics to give Rarity's speech more dimension. However, it's something you also have to be careful not to overuse. It's the same principle as Applejack's "countryisms" or Pinkie Pie's random autism. Too little and dialog sounds flat, too much and it sounds corny or forced. It's a difficult thing to get just right but you know it when you're there. For the most part the dialog and characterization in this story has been pretty good so far. For the canon characters at least; I'm finding Peen Stroke's OCs to be a little underdeveloped. But it's something that's worth pointing out either way.
>Most ponies are just satisfied strolling about without a thread of fabric on, but, personally, I feel some ponies would look just fabulous with the right vest or day-dress.
Yeah I don't quite understand the role of clothing in this universe either.
>It was a good thing Nyx was keeping her eyes turned down at the floor, for it kept her from noticing that Rarity was staring dumbfounded. Her gaze was focused on Nyx’s eyes, which she found all too similar to a pair of eyes she had gotten a very close look at during the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago.
It's a good thing Rarity can't see Nyx's eyes, because she keeps looking at her eyes? This doesn't make sense.
>Look, she doesn’t remember anything that happened before I found her, and she acts nothing like Nightmare Moon.
She acts nothing like anyone so far; she's had almost no dialog and hasn't done anything of note. So far neither we nor Twilight have had enough interaction with Nyx to make even a cursory, preliminary judgement on her character one way or the other.
Basically, Twilight just picked up this strange filly she knows nothing about and decided to assume responsibility for her on a fairly flimsy pretext. She has no existing connection to her, nor has she done a convincing job of establishing one. My impression of Peen Stroke's Twilight so far is of a lonely, desperate wine-aunt whose insecurity about being an autistic and socially inept librarian (with a steadily ticking biological clock) runs so deep that she leaps at the first chance to have a baby that random circumstance presents her. I highly doubt that's what the author was going for, but that's the impression he's conveyed (to me at least, others might not see it that way I guess), and it's mostly due to Nyx's being treated as a background presence in the story so far, rather than a character.
>Yet, her request made Twilight realize something.
>She couldn’t keep Nyx hidden in the library forever.
Yes, Twilight and the Captain are going to need to have a nice, long chat. Meanwhile, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXE8LdXzeHM
>She had made a plan. She was going to pass off Nyx as a cousin who was going to stay with her indefinitely to study, much like how she had started living at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns when she became the princess’s private pupil.
>It might not have been the greatest of plans, but she hadn’t told her friends about Shining Armor until she got his wedding invitation. Rarity admitted later that she thought Twilight was an only child. Thus, it wasn’t unreasonable to think they’d believe Nyx was a cousin she hadn’t ever mentioned before, especially if she was a distant cousin.
We still have a lot of page space being wasted on Twilight's internal monologues, that really just sound like the author thinking out loud about what direction he's planning to take the story. The problem here, that Twilight can't keep the filly inside forever, but can't just let her wander around Ponyville either, are again quite obvious and don't need to be stated so directly or so often. Moreover, it's stupid to waste all this text explaining what Twilight is planning to do in advance of her actually doing it. Just have a scene where Twilight introduces Nyx to her friends and uses the cover story mentioned above. Since I'm guessing this probably happens (eventually) anyway, having Twilight explain it to us beforehand is doubly pointless.
>It took some precise movements and careful hiding, but Twilight was able to lead Nyx across Ponyville to Carousel Boutique without anypony getting a good glimpse of them. They were going to get there right when Rarity usually opened the shop for the day, hopefully ensuring there wouldn’t be any customers in the boutique.
It's clear from the earlier scene in the woods, where Twilight tried to transport both herself and Nyx and the spell wouldn't work, that there is some yet-unrevealed aspect of Nyx that messes with Twilight's magic. Or, alternatively, it could have had something to do with the Everfree Forest; I'm not quite sure which direction Peen Stroke is taking this. Either way, though, it stands to reason that Twi would have at least attempted teleportation before realizing that they would have to hoof it. Don't you just hate writing in universes with complicated magic systems that you're constantly having to take into account?
>She had been excited to finally go outside, but the size and number of ponies in the outside world had driven her to cling to Twilight the entire trip over to the boutique.
The author so far has a serious problem with using this pitiful-cutesy stuff as a crutch to try to artificially force reader sympathy for his otherwise undeveloped OC, which might be a big clue as to why the fandom seems to dislike her so much.
>Twilight chuckled a little under her breath and shrugged. “In the library, where else?”
>not chuckling ruefully
sorry, had to do it :^)
>“Where else indeed,” Rarity said before setting down the spools of thread she was levitating. “You know, all those dusty old books can’t be good for your complexion. You should come with Fluttershy and I on our weekly spa outing. You had such fun the last time you joined us, and I was actually hoping the three of us could make it a regular thing.”
I like the use of italics to give Rarity's speech more dimension. However, it's something you also have to be careful not to overuse. It's the same principle as Applejack's "countryisms" or Pinkie Pie's random autism. Too little and dialog sounds flat, too much and it sounds corny or forced. It's a difficult thing to get just right but you know it when you're there. For the most part the dialog and characterization in this story has been pretty good so far. For the canon characters at least; I'm finding Peen Stroke's OCs to be a little underdeveloped. But it's something that's worth pointing out either way.
>Most ponies are just satisfied strolling about without a thread of fabric on, but, personally, I feel some ponies would look just fabulous with the right vest or day-dress.
Yeah I don't quite understand the role of clothing in this universe either.
>It was a good thing Nyx was keeping her eyes turned down at the floor, for it kept her from noticing that Rarity was staring dumbfounded. Her gaze was focused on Nyx’s eyes, which she found all too similar to a pair of eyes she had gotten a very close look at during the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago.
It's a good thing Rarity can't see Nyx's eyes, because she keeps looking at her eyes? This doesn't make sense.
>Look, she doesn’t remember anything that happened before I found her, and she acts nothing like Nightmare Moon.
She acts nothing like anyone so far; she's had almost no dialog and hasn't done anything of note. So far neither we nor Twilight have had enough interaction with Nyx to make even a cursory, preliminary judgement on her character one way or the other.
Basically, Twilight just picked up this strange filly she knows nothing about and decided to assume responsibility for her on a fairly flimsy pretext. She has no existing connection to her, nor has she done a convincing job of establishing one. My impression of Peen Stroke's Twilight so far is of a lonely, desperate wine-aunt whose insecurity about being an autistic and socially inept librarian (with a steadily ticking biological clock) runs so deep that she leaps at the first chance to have a baby that random circumstance presents her. I highly doubt that's what the author was going for, but that's the impression he's conveyed (to me at least, others might not see it that way I guess), and it's mostly due to Nyx's being treated as a background presence in the story so far, rather than a character.
>>249033
>It's clear from the earlier scene in the woods, where Twilight tried to transport both herself and Nyx and the spell wouldn't work, that there is some yet-unrevealed aspect of Nyx that messes with Twilight's magic. Or, alternatively, it could have had something to do with the Everfree Forest; I'm not quite sure which direction Peen Stroke is taking this.
The story mentions that some magic is drawn ambiently, guess who's sucking all of it out of air.
>It's clear from the earlier scene in the woods, where Twilight tried to transport both herself and Nyx and the spell wouldn't work, that there is some yet-unrevealed aspect of Nyx that messes with Twilight's magic. Or, alternatively, it could have had something to do with the Everfree Forest; I'm not quite sure which direction Peen Stroke is taking this.
The story mentions that some magic is drawn ambiently, guess who's sucking all of it out of air.
File (): 229C54F9DC1BEF38CCF79C7108A21876-116842.jpg (114.1 KB, 1024x768, C7ZMBliU4AA6lJp.jpg)
>>249033
>Despite Twilight’s assurances, Rarity pointed an accusing hoof at Twilight while her brow furrowed with concern. “And did it ever cross your mind what would happen if she really was Nightmare Moon? That monster could have attacked you in your sleep!”
Jesus Christ, enough about Nightmare Moon already. Seriously, this same question just gets continuously rehashed over and over again without anything ever being addressed or resolved. Show, don't tell. Have Nyx do some magic that would be abnormally powerful for a filly her age, and then let the ponies (and Spike) wonder if she might be dangerous to have around. Then, have her do some cute, funny, endearing shit that tugs at their heartstrings and makes them feel like maybe she's just an innocent little filly after all. Either way though, for fuck's sake, make something happen in this story, something that gives the reader a non-abstract impression of who your OC is. There is absolutely no entertainment value in just having everyone pointlessly debating themselves and each other in circles over whether or not this filly might, in theory, be Nightmare Moon.
>But I’m afraid that if the princess finds out, she’ll banish Nyx to the moon!
If she did, it would certainly save us all some time.
>She really doesn’t know who Nightmare Moon is or anything that happened at the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago.
Twilight states this as a fact, but she has no way of actually knowing that it's true yet. She is now purposely avoiding logic and creating excuses to keep taking care of Nyx without telling the Princess. Like I said: crazy wine-aunt just wants a baby. Frankly, this story could be a lot more interesting if it actually explored this idea as one of its themes, but like I said my theory is that it's just a by-product of shoddy story building; I doubt Twi was characterized this way on purpose. I almost want to attempt my own rewrite of it from this angle, since I doubt Peen Stroke will ever read these notes or care.
>Do you really think a filly that young deserves to be banished to the moon, even if she was created by a spell meant to bring back Nightmare Moon?
She has literally no idea what the Princess will do. Generally, Celestia comes across as a pretty sensible ruler who is not inclined to take drastic or violent action unless the situation calls for it. Twilight is basically just dreaming up nightmare scenarios to justify her own irrational actions. Like I said: crazy wine-aunt. Also, the word "moon" is used twice in this sentence and it throws off the rhythm a bit.
>Rarity pushed her lips together. “And you want to use your favor like this?”
Poor Rarity, she thought she was getting sex. Instead she gets roped into another one of Old Maid Sparkle's zany schemes.
>I need you to make something, anything, Nyx can wear to hide her wings.
If that's all she needed, this was all quite unnecessary. Literally any garment would accomplish that purpose. A cloak, a dress, a vest; pretty much anything that covers the torso and back would do the trick. Twilight hardly needed to enlist the help of a master dressmaker. She still could have purchased the garment from Rarity's boutique, but there was really no need to drag Rarity herself into the scheme. Just walk into the shop alone, tell Rarara "Hey, my little cousin is in town and she wants a dress, do you have anything that would fit a filly about the size of your sister?", then walk out with a fucking dress. It accomplishes the dual purpose of hiding Nyx's wings while also seeding the rumor that Twilight's young cousin is staying at her house. Simple. Much simpler, in fact, than going to all the trouble of setting up this whole "favor" thing with that clumsy scene earlier, just to give Twilight enough leverage over Rarity to enlist her help. Later on, Rarity could always figure out Nyx's secret, then get upset with Twilight for deceiving her, and get even more upset for not having had the opportunity to do fashion stuff to Nyx. At that point she could chide Twilight on her poor fashion sense and make Nyx a new disguise.
>I also understand why you’re apprehensive about her going outside, but, Twilight, wings are so in style right now. All the best boutiques in Canterlot are using pegasus models this season.
How about this idea: make her a vest with fake wings, and then put that on over her real wings? Then, make a fake horn and put that on over her real horn. Then, when ponies see her, they will just see an Earth Pony pretending to be an alicorn. That's some inception-level diversionary tactics right there; nopony will ever see it coming. You've got to think outside the box, Twiley.
>“I’m almost done, just hold still for a few more seconds,” Rarity said an hour later. She had gotten lost in her work and had been treating Nyx more like a mannequin than a filly.
Don't feel too bad Nyx, the author of this story does the same thing.
>And that good behavior had allowed Rarity to work her usual magic, creating the casual wear Nyx needed. It was a simple purple vest, similar in design to the vests worn by everypony in town during Winter Wrap Up.
Alright, I have to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf7Kx3kjuY
>Yes, it hides her wings, but the outfit looks fabulous, wouldn’t you agree?
If pic 2 is accurate, and from the text it looks pretty accurate to me, I'm a little meh about the visual design. I don't presume to know much about fashion, but it's basically just a purple vest and a headband with glasses. Seems like Rarity could have done a little better.
Also, I have to say that now that I've seen the outfit she ends up in, I reiterate my previous statement: all of this was pretty much unnecessary. Twilight could have simply gone down to Rarity's boutique and bought a filly-sized vest without telling Rarity anything about the filly she was buying it for, and the end result would have been virtually the same.
>Despite Twilight’s assurances, Rarity pointed an accusing hoof at Twilight while her brow furrowed with concern. “And did it ever cross your mind what would happen if she really was Nightmare Moon? That monster could have attacked you in your sleep!”
Jesus Christ, enough about Nightmare Moon already. Seriously, this same question just gets continuously rehashed over and over again without anything ever being addressed or resolved. Show, don't tell. Have Nyx do some magic that would be abnormally powerful for a filly her age, and then let the ponies (and Spike) wonder if she might be dangerous to have around. Then, have her do some cute, funny, endearing shit that tugs at their heartstrings and makes them feel like maybe she's just an innocent little filly after all. Either way though, for fuck's sake, make something happen in this story, something that gives the reader a non-abstract impression of who your OC is. There is absolutely no entertainment value in just having everyone pointlessly debating themselves and each other in circles over whether or not this filly might, in theory, be Nightmare Moon.
>But I’m afraid that if the princess finds out, she’ll banish Nyx to the moon!
If she did, it would certainly save us all some time.
>She really doesn’t know who Nightmare Moon is or anything that happened at the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago.
Twilight states this as a fact, but she has no way of actually knowing that it's true yet. She is now purposely avoiding logic and creating excuses to keep taking care of Nyx without telling the Princess. Like I said: crazy wine-aunt just wants a baby. Frankly, this story could be a lot more interesting if it actually explored this idea as one of its themes, but like I said my theory is that it's just a by-product of shoddy story building; I doubt Twi was characterized this way on purpose. I almost want to attempt my own rewrite of it from this angle, since I doubt Peen Stroke will ever read these notes or care.
>Do you really think a filly that young deserves to be banished to the moon, even if she was created by a spell meant to bring back Nightmare Moon?
She has literally no idea what the Princess will do. Generally, Celestia comes across as a pretty sensible ruler who is not inclined to take drastic or violent action unless the situation calls for it. Twilight is basically just dreaming up nightmare scenarios to justify her own irrational actions. Like I said: crazy wine-aunt. Also, the word "moon" is used twice in this sentence and it throws off the rhythm a bit.
>Rarity pushed her lips together. “And you want to use your favor like this?”
Poor Rarity, she thought she was getting sex. Instead she gets roped into another one of Old Maid Sparkle's zany schemes.
>I need you to make something, anything, Nyx can wear to hide her wings.
If that's all she needed, this was all quite unnecessary. Literally any garment would accomplish that purpose. A cloak, a dress, a vest; pretty much anything that covers the torso and back would do the trick. Twilight hardly needed to enlist the help of a master dressmaker. She still could have purchased the garment from Rarity's boutique, but there was really no need to drag Rarity herself into the scheme. Just walk into the shop alone, tell Rarara "Hey, my little cousin is in town and she wants a dress, do you have anything that would fit a filly about the size of your sister?", then walk out with a fucking dress. It accomplishes the dual purpose of hiding Nyx's wings while also seeding the rumor that Twilight's young cousin is staying at her house. Simple. Much simpler, in fact, than going to all the trouble of setting up this whole "favor" thing with that clumsy scene earlier, just to give Twilight enough leverage over Rarity to enlist her help. Later on, Rarity could always figure out Nyx's secret, then get upset with Twilight for deceiving her, and get even more upset for not having had the opportunity to do fashion stuff to Nyx. At that point she could chide Twilight on her poor fashion sense and make Nyx a new disguise.
>I also understand why you’re apprehensive about her going outside, but, Twilight, wings are so in style right now. All the best boutiques in Canterlot are using pegasus models this season.
How about this idea: make her a vest with fake wings, and then put that on over her real wings? Then, make a fake horn and put that on over her real horn. Then, when ponies see her, they will just see an Earth Pony pretending to be an alicorn. That's some inception-level diversionary tactics right there; nopony will ever see it coming. You've got to think outside the box, Twiley.
>“I’m almost done, just hold still for a few more seconds,” Rarity said an hour later. She had gotten lost in her work and had been treating Nyx more like a mannequin than a filly.
Don't feel too bad Nyx, the author of this story does the same thing.
>And that good behavior had allowed Rarity to work her usual magic, creating the casual wear Nyx needed. It was a simple purple vest, similar in design to the vests worn by everypony in town during Winter Wrap Up.
Alright, I have to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf7Kx3kjuY
>Yes, it hides her wings, but the outfit looks fabulous, wouldn’t you agree?
If pic 2 is accurate, and from the text it looks pretty accurate to me, I'm a little meh about the visual design. I don't presume to know much about fashion, but it's basically just a purple vest and a headband with glasses. Seems like Rarity could have done a little better.
Also, I have to say that now that I've seen the outfit she ends up in, I reiterate my previous statement: all of this was pretty much unnecessary. Twilight could have simply gone down to Rarity's boutique and bought a filly-sized vest without telling Rarity anything about the filly she was buying it for, and the end result would have been virtually the same.
>>249009
>That is why one shouldn't try to compete in the mainstream sincce the industry will always have the resources to do mass appeal stories better while something you created is nische. People has to go to you to get if they want it.
The point I was making with the Stephen King/Dan Brown comparison was more that Brown uses a paint-by-numbers approach that could be done by nearly anyone, while King has his own unique style that he developed on his own. The Brown method is safe for anyone to attempt, the King method requires talent and the patience to hone that talent into a style, which means if you spend time perfecting your own style only to find out that you truly suck, then you just suck. Meanwhile Dan Brown has sucked for his entire life and will continue to suck for the rest of it, but will probably never truly come to terms with it. But yes, what you said is also true.
>I think it makes okay sense. A child with amnesia sees a freindly-looking woman. I mean I have been able to get really close to hares and foxes by just being gentle in my appraoch. Since Nyx is just a child with no one else around and no memory onecould even argue that she has no reason to be afraid since she doesn't know any better and also that she could imprint on Twilight. I remember when was a child. I used to talk too strangers all the time so long asthey seemed even remotely friendly.
I think it makes sense logically, but it's not good storytelling the way he does it. The main takeaway is that most of the chapter is just Twilight thinking and/or talking to herself, while Nyx is just a passive presence who doesn't do anything to give the reader either a positive or negative impression of her. However he approaches the Nyx character, he needs to involve her more in the story. So far we have characters doing a lot of thinking about her, or talking about her, but not really interacting much with her beyond simple stuff like hair brushing and giving her food. My guess is that probably changes later, but this part of the story drags, and I feel like this is why.
>Regardless of Nyx being distrustful or not in this scene, I don't see why we most have comic relief in this part of the story. I kinda like a more quiet moment between the two characters. But perhaps you are just saying that since we are anyway reading cliches, we could have them play out the way they are meant to.
The chase sequence I outlined is just one possible direction he could have taken the scene; I mentioned it because it's probably what I would have done. Honestly I rather suspected that was what he was going to do since the rest of the story has been so predictable up to this point, but my guess was wrong. But either way, I feel like the main issue here is that there is too much focus on Twilight's inner thoughts and not enough interaction between the two characters. The main takeaway is that the scene as written lacks genuine emotional resonance. I think the comparison to a Thomas Kinkade painting I made earlier still fits pretty well: it's feels warm and fuzzy but doesn't make the reader feel anything real. Kitsch, I think would be the word for it. Specifically what type of scene the author wants to do is up to him; if he wants it to be quiet and intimate that's fine. But it needs a rewrite.
Also, I'll admit that the wine-aunt thing with Twilight might just be me coming up with silly headcanon because the story is boring me so far :^)
>>249034
>The story mentions that some magic is drawn ambiently, guess who's sucking all of it out of air.
That's what I suspected he was getting at, but I wasn't 100% sure. In any event, I still think it would have made sense for Twilight to at least attempt to teleport them to Rarity's, especially since there was an element of risk involved in taking Nyx outside without a disguise on. It would have reinforced the mystery he already introduced anyway; she could try the teleportation spell again, have it not work, and then Twilight would say "Hmm, that's strange" and then the reader would also wonder.
>That is why one shouldn't try to compete in the mainstream sincce the industry will always have the resources to do mass appeal stories better while something you created is nische. People has to go to you to get if they want it.
The point I was making with the Stephen King/Dan Brown comparison was more that Brown uses a paint-by-numbers approach that could be done by nearly anyone, while King has his own unique style that he developed on his own. The Brown method is safe for anyone to attempt, the King method requires talent and the patience to hone that talent into a style, which means if you spend time perfecting your own style only to find out that you truly suck, then you just suck. Meanwhile Dan Brown has sucked for his entire life and will continue to suck for the rest of it, but will probably never truly come to terms with it. But yes, what you said is also true.
>I think it makes okay sense. A child with amnesia sees a freindly-looking woman. I mean I have been able to get really close to hares and foxes by just being gentle in my appraoch. Since Nyx is just a child with no one else around and no memory onecould even argue that she has no reason to be afraid since she doesn't know any better and also that she could imprint on Twilight. I remember when was a child. I used to talk too strangers all the time so long asthey seemed even remotely friendly.
I think it makes sense logically, but it's not good storytelling the way he does it. The main takeaway is that most of the chapter is just Twilight thinking and/or talking to herself, while Nyx is just a passive presence who doesn't do anything to give the reader either a positive or negative impression of her. However he approaches the Nyx character, he needs to involve her more in the story. So far we have characters doing a lot of thinking about her, or talking about her, but not really interacting much with her beyond simple stuff like hair brushing and giving her food. My guess is that probably changes later, but this part of the story drags, and I feel like this is why.
>Regardless of Nyx being distrustful or not in this scene, I don't see why we most have comic relief in this part of the story. I kinda like a more quiet moment between the two characters. But perhaps you are just saying that since we are anyway reading cliches, we could have them play out the way they are meant to.
The chase sequence I outlined is just one possible direction he could have taken the scene; I mentioned it because it's probably what I would have done. Honestly I rather suspected that was what he was going to do since the rest of the story has been so predictable up to this point, but my guess was wrong. But either way, I feel like the main issue here is that there is too much focus on Twilight's inner thoughts and not enough interaction between the two characters. The main takeaway is that the scene as written lacks genuine emotional resonance. I think the comparison to a Thomas Kinkade painting I made earlier still fits pretty well: it's feels warm and fuzzy but doesn't make the reader feel anything real. Kitsch, I think would be the word for it. Specifically what type of scene the author wants to do is up to him; if he wants it to be quiet and intimate that's fine. But it needs a rewrite.
Also, I'll admit that the wine-aunt thing with Twilight might just be me coming up with silly headcanon because the story is boring me so far :^)
>>249034
>The story mentions that some magic is drawn ambiently, guess who's sucking all of it out of air.
That's what I suspected he was getting at, but I wasn't 100% sure. In any event, I still think it would have made sense for Twilight to at least attempt to teleport them to Rarity's, especially since there was an element of risk involved in taking Nyx outside without a disguise on. It would have reinforced the mystery he already introduced anyway; she could try the teleportation spell again, have it not work, and then Twilight would say "Hmm, that's strange" and then the reader would also wonder.
>>248691
>I meant to comment on this when the threat first popped up but I'm glad to see you doing what you do best.
Thank you. Happy to have you on board, Nige, if that's you.
>>248753
>You have no idea of the edge you're in for.
Hate to nitpick, but technically if I have no idea of the edge I'm in for, that would mean the story is actually unpredictable in some way, thus negating your previous comment.
>>248877
That is indeed hilarious. I have to say I agree with the other anon's assertion that the fic in question is probably satire; nobody in the real world could actually embody that many stereotypes. At least, I need to believe that they couldn't.
>What left me feeling off after finishing it, although I considered it somewhat engaging, was that I still didn't know who Pen Stroke was. That may sound odd but after reading a work of certain length you tend to grasp the personality of the writer, likes and dislikes, sense of humor, inspiration, etc. Reading the work of someone with quirkiness or wit makes me feel more complete because it's a social exercise: the writer leaves an imprint of himself in the work and you get to listen to it.
I actually feel this way about Pen Stroke as well. That's why I felt Dan Brown was a good comparison.
>I meant to comment on this when the threat first popped up but I'm glad to see you doing what you do best.
Thank you. Happy to have you on board, Nige, if that's you.
>>248753
>You have no idea of the edge you're in for.
Hate to nitpick, but technically if I have no idea of the edge I'm in for, that would mean the story is actually unpredictable in some way, thus negating your previous comment.
>>248877
That is indeed hilarious. I have to say I agree with the other anon's assertion that the fic in question is probably satire; nobody in the real world could actually embody that many stereotypes. At least, I need to believe that they couldn't.
>What left me feeling off after finishing it, although I considered it somewhat engaging, was that I still didn't know who Pen Stroke was. That may sound odd but after reading a work of certain length you tend to grasp the personality of the writer, likes and dislikes, sense of humor, inspiration, etc. Reading the work of someone with quirkiness or wit makes me feel more complete because it's a social exercise: the writer leaves an imprint of himself in the work and you get to listen to it.
I actually feel this way about Pen Stroke as well. That's why I felt Dan Brown was a good comparison.
File (): 3BA612B283439B758690D998050331B5-219725.jpg (214.6 KB, 1920x1080, cringe.jpg)
>>248872
>The only person who can write a Stephen King is Stephen King
Ew, no. All you have to do to write Stephen King is read a little Lovecraft, be familiar with pop culture tropes, and be a pedophile cumbrain. The only good thing King ever did was Jerusalem's Lot, and that's only because it was a blatant rip-off of Lovecraft's Rats in the Walls.
>The only person who can write a Stephen King is Stephen King
Ew, no. All you have to do to write Stephen King is read a little Lovecraft, be familiar with pop culture tropes, and be a pedophile cumbrain. The only good thing King ever did was Jerusalem's Lot, and that's only because it was a blatant rip-off of Lovecraft's Rats in the Walls.
File (): 61E3AB489272CDC3F5758486980B4499-176117.png (172.0 KB, 579x1379, vector__196___starlight_glimmer__6_by_dashiesparkle-d8yomvv.png)
>>249040
>It was an awkward moment, and Rarity tried to turn away and ignore Nyx. After all, she wasn’t in any way convinced that Nyx wasn’t Nightmare Moon
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Anyway, I'm a little ambivalent about Nyx suddenly bursting into tears about the confusion over the glasses. The misunderstanding itself makes sense and works for the story, but it feels like more pity-porn, where the author expects us to feel sorry for Nyx simply because she is crying, even though what she's crying about is pretty stupid. However, the next scene where Rarity and Nyx have tea together is quite a bit better than what we've read so far, so I'd rather focus on that.
>It was going to be a pleasant late morning tea, but Rarity had another purpose for the impromptu sit down with Nyx. To say the least, she was curious about the Nightmare Moon look-a-like and now had an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity while Twilight was away.
The fact that this tea serves the dual purpose of being a q&a session is obvious; you don't need to inform the reader.
Anyway, despite a few similar quibbles I have here and there, this scene is actually a pretty nice example of what I complained was missing earlier. Instead of pages and pages of Rarity musing to herself about who the filly is and whether or not she's Nightmare Moon, we have a nice little scene where the two characters drink tea together. Rarity realizes to her horror that Nyx does not know how to properly sip tea like a prim and proper lady, so she shows her how to do it. Nyx tries to mimic her, fails miserably, and ends up smashing the teacup on the ceiling. As Hiroshima Nagasaki would say, it's cute. And, more importantly, shit is finally happening: Nyx is interacting with other characters in the story, and she is performing meaningful actions that give us insight into who she is and how she ticks.
Compare this interaction with the earlier interaction between Nyx and Twilight in the previous chapter. There, we have Twilight bathing Nyx, Twilight brushing Nyx's hair, Twilight bandaging Nyx's cuts, Nyx crying herself to sleep on Twilight's bed. Nyx is almost completely passive; she doesn't talk, she doesn't react to her environment in any significant way, she doesn't really do anything. If she does do something, it's usually something excessively sad and pitiful which is more annoying than anything else.
Now, in this scene, she is active. Rarity asks her questions, she answers. Most of the questions either confuse her or she is unable to answer, but that's fine; the important thing is that they are having an active conversation. Rarity tries to show her how to drink tea, she fucks it up and breaks the teacup on the ceiling. This tells us a few things about her: she is clumsy, she doesn't have much experience in the world, she doesn't have much experience using her own magic, and she probably has more power than she realizes. Ignoring the fact that she's still a walking ball of cliches and a probable Mary Sue, this is still a much better way of building her character and engaging the reader than simply conveying the same information through one-sided musings the way it's done in the previous chapter. The author doesn't need to directly state (or have Rarity observe) that Nyx is clumsy, inexperienced, and probably way overpowered; he demonstrated it to us through this actually rather heartwarming and endearing little scene. This is how you build a story and characters.
With all that said, I do of course have a few things to nitpick:
>“Rarity, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!” Nyx panicked before she put her hooves together on the table and literally began to beg Rarity for her forgiveness. “Please don't be mad, I-I-I didn't mean to do it! It was an accident! Please don't be mad! I'm so sorry, please don’t hate me! I… I…”
Once again, Nyx is made a little too intentionally pitiable to be likable. The "please don't hate me" routine is just over the top and is going to get really old really fast if she's going to keep doing it all the time.
>“Then I’ll just clean it up and we’ll try again until I’m out of cups,” Rarity answered, though she would secretly keep some of her cups hidden away.
Dirty cup-hoarding bitch.
>In the end, Nyx was able to wrap her lips around the rim of the cup and take a small, quiet sip. She then levitated the cup down with the intention of placing it back on the saucer. She, however, released her magic a little too early. The cup clattered down onto the waiting saucer, causing both Nyx and Rarity to wince. Yet, despite its rough landing, the cup neither broke nor spilt.
The scene is basically fine the way it is, but it might not be a bad idea to go through a couple more iterations of trial and error before Nyx is able to successfully take a sip of tea. There's sort of an informal rule that three is the ideal number of repetitions for anything funny, and that's what I generally adhere to. In this case, I'd probably have her break the cup on the ceiling the first try, on the second try levitate the cup without breaking it but spill the tea, and on the third try levitate the cup and get it close to her mouth without spilling, but then sneeze or something and end up spilling it anyway. On the fourth try, the gag is over and she finally succeeds. The repetition adds to the humor, makes her eventual success more of an achievement, and makes the sequence feel more complete.
Saying "in the end" makes it feel like her efforts are being glossed over and the story is being hurried along, and we don't want that. To build sympathy for a character, it's important that the reader go through their struggles with them. Even if it's just something stupid like learning to drink tea, success is more meaningful if the reader has accompanied the character along every step of the journey. You don't want to skip over things with phrases like "eventually" or "in the end", unless the thing is being attempted an excessive number of times.
>It was an awkward moment, and Rarity tried to turn away and ignore Nyx. After all, she wasn’t in any way convinced that Nyx wasn’t Nightmare Moon
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Anyway, I'm a little ambivalent about Nyx suddenly bursting into tears about the confusion over the glasses. The misunderstanding itself makes sense and works for the story, but it feels like more pity-porn, where the author expects us to feel sorry for Nyx simply because she is crying, even though what she's crying about is pretty stupid. However, the next scene where Rarity and Nyx have tea together is quite a bit better than what we've read so far, so I'd rather focus on that.
>It was going to be a pleasant late morning tea, but Rarity had another purpose for the impromptu sit down with Nyx. To say the least, she was curious about the Nightmare Moon look-a-like and now had an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity while Twilight was away.
The fact that this tea serves the dual purpose of being a q&a session is obvious; you don't need to inform the reader.
Anyway, despite a few similar quibbles I have here and there, this scene is actually a pretty nice example of what I complained was missing earlier. Instead of pages and pages of Rarity musing to herself about who the filly is and whether or not she's Nightmare Moon, we have a nice little scene where the two characters drink tea together. Rarity realizes to her horror that Nyx does not know how to properly sip tea like a prim and proper lady, so she shows her how to do it. Nyx tries to mimic her, fails miserably, and ends up smashing the teacup on the ceiling. As Hiroshima Nagasaki would say, it's cute. And, more importantly, shit is finally happening: Nyx is interacting with other characters in the story, and she is performing meaningful actions that give us insight into who she is and how she ticks.
Compare this interaction with the earlier interaction between Nyx and Twilight in the previous chapter. There, we have Twilight bathing Nyx, Twilight brushing Nyx's hair, Twilight bandaging Nyx's cuts, Nyx crying herself to sleep on Twilight's bed. Nyx is almost completely passive; she doesn't talk, she doesn't react to her environment in any significant way, she doesn't really do anything. If she does do something, it's usually something excessively sad and pitiful which is more annoying than anything else.
Now, in this scene, she is active. Rarity asks her questions, she answers. Most of the questions either confuse her or she is unable to answer, but that's fine; the important thing is that they are having an active conversation. Rarity tries to show her how to drink tea, she fucks it up and breaks the teacup on the ceiling. This tells us a few things about her: she is clumsy, she doesn't have much experience in the world, she doesn't have much experience using her own magic, and she probably has more power than she realizes. Ignoring the fact that she's still a walking ball of cliches and a probable Mary Sue, this is still a much better way of building her character and engaging the reader than simply conveying the same information through one-sided musings the way it's done in the previous chapter. The author doesn't need to directly state (or have Rarity observe) that Nyx is clumsy, inexperienced, and probably way overpowered; he demonstrated it to us through this actually rather heartwarming and endearing little scene. This is how you build a story and characters.
With all that said, I do of course have a few things to nitpick:
>“Rarity, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!” Nyx panicked before she put her hooves together on the table and literally began to beg Rarity for her forgiveness. “Please don't be mad, I-I-I didn't mean to do it! It was an accident! Please don't be mad! I'm so sorry, please don’t hate me! I… I…”
Once again, Nyx is made a little too intentionally pitiable to be likable. The "please don't hate me" routine is just over the top and is going to get really old really fast if she's going to keep doing it all the time.
>“Then I’ll just clean it up and we’ll try again until I’m out of cups,” Rarity answered, though she would secretly keep some of her cups hidden away.
Dirty cup-hoarding bitch.
>In the end, Nyx was able to wrap her lips around the rim of the cup and take a small, quiet sip. She then levitated the cup down with the intention of placing it back on the saucer. She, however, released her magic a little too early. The cup clattered down onto the waiting saucer, causing both Nyx and Rarity to wince. Yet, despite its rough landing, the cup neither broke nor spilt.
The scene is basically fine the way it is, but it might not be a bad idea to go through a couple more iterations of trial and error before Nyx is able to successfully take a sip of tea. There's sort of an informal rule that three is the ideal number of repetitions for anything funny, and that's what I generally adhere to. In this case, I'd probably have her break the cup on the ceiling the first try, on the second try levitate the cup without breaking it but spill the tea, and on the third try levitate the cup and get it close to her mouth without spilling, but then sneeze or something and end up spilling it anyway. On the fourth try, the gag is over and she finally succeeds. The repetition adds to the humor, makes her eventual success more of an achievement, and makes the sequence feel more complete.
Saying "in the end" makes it feel like her efforts are being glossed over and the story is being hurried along, and we don't want that. To build sympathy for a character, it's important that the reader go through their struggles with them. Even if it's just something stupid like learning to drink tea, success is more meaningful if the reader has accompanied the character along every step of the journey. You don't want to skip over things with phrases like "eventually" or "in the end", unless the thing is being attempted an excessive number of times.
>>249056
>The "please don't hate me" routine is just over the top and is going to get really old really fast if she's going to keep doing it all the time.
Ohohohohoho You ain't seen nuthin' yet
>The "please don't hate me" routine is just over the top and is going to get really old really fast if she's going to keep doing it all the time.
Ohohohohoho You ain't seen nuthin' yet
>>249053
>The only good thing King ever did was Jerusalem's Lot
Disagree. I'll admit he's written some shit, but I think he's also written a number of great novels. The Stand I happen to think is excellent, and It I've always felt was a good hero's quest fantasy story disguised as a horror story. The Dark Tower is kind of a mixed bag but it was an ambitious undertaking and I respect the effort.
One thing I like about him is he writes families and family dynamics quite well, particularly with families that are struggling to hold together or are dealing with some kind of turmoil or tragedy. The Shining for instance is basically a novel about an alcoholic who keeps fucking up but wants to do right by his wife and son. He tries to hold it together and ultimately fails, but still manages to redeem himself at the end. The spoopy stuff is just a bonus. It's written brilliantly, particularly the way it changes perspectives between the father, the wife and the son and gives you a sense of each character's view of the situation. The Stanley Kubrick adaptation was god-fucking-terrible and completely missed every single point, but for some reason people love that retarded movie.
Cujo is another good story about fucked up families. Not just the wife and son who get trapped in the car, but the family of the boy who owns the dog that goes rabid are all very well constructed characters. Pet Sematary is one of the most genuinely unsettling books I've ever read.
There are plenty of others, too. Bag of Bones I remember really enjoying, Cell was much better than I expected it to be, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a great man-versus-nature story. There are probably more that I've read and liked that I can't think of off the top of my head.
I don't know about 'Salem's Lot being a ripoff of Rats in the Walls. I can see a few similarities but calling it a ripoff is a huge leap. In any case I agree, it's a great novel.
>pedophile cumbrain
Don't know about that. He's unfortunately a left-wing political retard, but that's about the worst thing I can say about him personally. The same is unfortunately true of a lot of people whose work I otherwise enjoy. If he's a pedophile though this is the first I've heard of it.
>The only good thing King ever did was Jerusalem's Lot
Disagree. I'll admit he's written some shit, but I think he's also written a number of great novels. The Stand I happen to think is excellent, and It I've always felt was a good hero's quest fantasy story disguised as a horror story. The Dark Tower is kind of a mixed bag but it was an ambitious undertaking and I respect the effort.
One thing I like about him is he writes families and family dynamics quite well, particularly with families that are struggling to hold together or are dealing with some kind of turmoil or tragedy. The Shining for instance is basically a novel about an alcoholic who keeps fucking up but wants to do right by his wife and son. He tries to hold it together and ultimately fails, but still manages to redeem himself at the end. The spoopy stuff is just a bonus. It's written brilliantly, particularly the way it changes perspectives between the father, the wife and the son and gives you a sense of each character's view of the situation. The Stanley Kubrick adaptation was god-fucking-terrible and completely missed every single point, but for some reason people love that retarded movie.
Cujo is another good story about fucked up families. Not just the wife and son who get trapped in the car, but the family of the boy who owns the dog that goes rabid are all very well constructed characters. Pet Sematary is one of the most genuinely unsettling books I've ever read.
There are plenty of others, too. Bag of Bones I remember really enjoying, Cell was much better than I expected it to be, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a great man-versus-nature story. There are probably more that I've read and liked that I can't think of off the top of my head.
I don't know about 'Salem's Lot being a ripoff of Rats in the Walls. I can see a few similarities but calling it a ripoff is a huge leap. In any case I agree, it's a great novel.
>pedophile cumbrain
Don't know about that. He's unfortunately a left-wing political retard, but that's about the worst thing I can say about him personally. The same is unfortunately true of a lot of people whose work I otherwise enjoy. If he's a pedophile though this is the first I've heard of it.
>>249044
>Hate to nitpick, but technically if I have no idea of the edge I'm in for, that would mean the story is actually unpredictable in some way, thus negating your previous comment.
Oof. Well, you know at this point that there's going to be edge, but as you can imagine, it's very gratuitous like the whole "pity me" angle Pen Stroke kept going for with Nyx.
>Hate to nitpick, but technically if I have no idea of the edge I'm in for, that would mean the story is actually unpredictable in some way, thus negating your previous comment.
Oof. Well, you know at this point that there's going to be edge, but as you can imagine, it's very gratuitous like the whole "pity me" angle Pen Stroke kept going for with Nyx.
>>249056
>“Can you teach me something else, Rarity?” Nyx asked eagerly. “Please?”
>Rarity glanced in Nyx’s direction, finding the request all too enticing.
I'm too classy to even touch this one.
>Twilight galloped, grumbling under her breath about the pony at the shop where she had bought the frames. It had taken much longer than it should have to find the right frames, and it was no fault of Twilight’s. The stallion who ran the store understood Rarity’s very specific specifications, but what had taken him forever was finding those glasses. The stallion had no organization skills, and they ended up looking through half the boxes he had in storage for those specific frames.
This is actually kind of an amusing little anecdote. A disorganized and probably somewhat slow-witted shopkeeper is searching through boxes and boxes full of frames arranged in no particular order while Twilight stands there impatiently grinding her teeth and silently reeeeeing at the pony's lack of organizational autism. The reader can easily visualize it, it's within the scope of the show's usual humor, and it's funny. However, the author doesn't make a whole scene out of it, and that's good. This is the kind of scene that it's appropriate to gloss over since it's not particularly important, but is still worth putting in. Just drop a summation of what happened into the story as a quick paragraph, let the reader have a rueful chuckle, and move on. I'm ok with this.
>“Yes, those frames definitely suit her better than the first pair,” Rarity said with a smile and a single, confident nod. “And the color goes just as well with her vest as I had hoped.”
All in all I still think the visual design the author came up with for Nyx-in-disguise is simplistic enough that it doesn't really justify this much trouble. Even a fashion-clueless mare like Twilight could have probably figured out a vest and some glasses, and it equally stands to reason that a fashion-conscious mare like Rarity would have come up with something better. However, the scenes with Nyx learning good manners from Rarity have been pretty enjoyable so for the most part I'm ok with this.
>Nyx’s ears drooped and she shrank back a little. “Protect me? From what?”
Goblins. Carnivorous, filly-eating goblins that tear the flesh from your bones while you're still alive. Ponyville is full of them. Did Twilight neglect to mention that? Silly filly.
>“Why, from making other ponies jealous. Most ponies either have wings or a horn, if they even have either at all, but you have both. Not only that, but you have such unique eyes that you’d make other ponies jealous, and you wouldn’t want to make anypony jealous, would you?”
Well, that seems like a perfectly harmless little white lie to tell a child whose feelings you don't want to hurt. That will be the end of it, I'm sure. I can't imagine that Nyx will eventually find out the real reason Twilight and Rarity made her dress up like pony Steve Urkel, and possibly overreact to it, causing her to feel betrayed by the ponies she thought were looking out for her, and then in a fit of rage use her Mary Sue superpowers to wreak some kind of outrageous edgelord magical havoc on all of Ponyville, or maybe just cry and run off into the woods in an overly dramatic fashion, depending on which direction the author wants to go. No, I imagine that Peen Stroke has more creativity than that, and would never blatantly foreshadow something obvious like that.
>I’ll admit, Twilight, she’s… she’s very well behaved, and I can see why you believe she only looks like Nightmare Moon.
From here on out, I am going to call Peen Stroke a faggot every time somepony in this fic brings up Nightmare Moon for no good reason.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night if Celestia punished such a young, sweet filly if she wasn’t in fact Nightmare Moon.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke. Also, this seems to imply that Rarity would not have a problem with Celestia punishing Nyx if she actually were Nightmare Moon, despite that she would still technically be the same sweet young filly either way. But maybe this was intentional; the real monster is prejudice, after all.
>“Firstly, that little filly has a lot of magic.” Rarity warned. “As you can see, she’s already able to levitate a tea cup with some proficiency. Well, the first cup she tried to lift flew straight into the ceiling and shattered to bits, like she put too much effort into it.”
The significance of this event probably doesn't need to be discussed. The reader should be able to guess at the meaning.
>I’ve found out the hard way that Nyx is a very sensitive pony. I accidentally said something in passing that made her think you hated her, and she was absolutely heartbroken. In fact, I dare say she is actually worse than our dear Fluttershy.
Yeah, something tells me that the "please don't hate me" schtick is not going anywhere any time soon. *sigh*.
>I was actually planning to show Nyx around Ponyville and see how well her disguise works. Take her to see the rest of our friends.
Yes, please, tell us exactly what you're going to have your characters do before they actually do it, then have them do the exact thing that you said they were going to do. That always makes a story more interesting to read.
>While Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie may take well to Nyx, I can only imagine that convincing Applejack and Rainbow Dash that she isn’t Nightmare Moon would be much more difficult.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>“That, and the fewer ponies that know the truth, the better; at least until I can figure out if she really is Nightmare Moon or just happens to look like her,” Twilight explained.
YOU'RE A FAGGOT, PEEN STROKE.
>“Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye,” Rarity quickly chanted, making the appropriate body movements in tune with the Pinkie Pie promise.
Again, I'm fairly certain it's just called a "Pinkie promise."
>“Can you teach me something else, Rarity?” Nyx asked eagerly. “Please?”
>Rarity glanced in Nyx’s direction, finding the request all too enticing.
I'm too classy to even touch this one.
>Twilight galloped, grumbling under her breath about the pony at the shop where she had bought the frames. It had taken much longer than it should have to find the right frames, and it was no fault of Twilight’s. The stallion who ran the store understood Rarity’s very specific specifications, but what had taken him forever was finding those glasses. The stallion had no organization skills, and they ended up looking through half the boxes he had in storage for those specific frames.
This is actually kind of an amusing little anecdote. A disorganized and probably somewhat slow-witted shopkeeper is searching through boxes and boxes full of frames arranged in no particular order while Twilight stands there impatiently grinding her teeth and silently reeeeeing at the pony's lack of organizational autism. The reader can easily visualize it, it's within the scope of the show's usual humor, and it's funny. However, the author doesn't make a whole scene out of it, and that's good. This is the kind of scene that it's appropriate to gloss over since it's not particularly important, but is still worth putting in. Just drop a summation of what happened into the story as a quick paragraph, let the reader have a rueful chuckle, and move on. I'm ok with this.
>“Yes, those frames definitely suit her better than the first pair,” Rarity said with a smile and a single, confident nod. “And the color goes just as well with her vest as I had hoped.”
All in all I still think the visual design the author came up with for Nyx-in-disguise is simplistic enough that it doesn't really justify this much trouble. Even a fashion-clueless mare like Twilight could have probably figured out a vest and some glasses, and it equally stands to reason that a fashion-conscious mare like Rarity would have come up with something better. However, the scenes with Nyx learning good manners from Rarity have been pretty enjoyable so for the most part I'm ok with this.
>Nyx’s ears drooped and she shrank back a little. “Protect me? From what?”
Goblins. Carnivorous, filly-eating goblins that tear the flesh from your bones while you're still alive. Ponyville is full of them. Did Twilight neglect to mention that? Silly filly.
>“Why, from making other ponies jealous. Most ponies either have wings or a horn, if they even have either at all, but you have both. Not only that, but you have such unique eyes that you’d make other ponies jealous, and you wouldn’t want to make anypony jealous, would you?”
Well, that seems like a perfectly harmless little white lie to tell a child whose feelings you don't want to hurt. That will be the end of it, I'm sure. I can't imagine that Nyx will eventually find out the real reason Twilight and Rarity made her dress up like pony Steve Urkel, and possibly overreact to it, causing her to feel betrayed by the ponies she thought were looking out for her, and then in a fit of rage use her Mary Sue superpowers to wreak some kind of outrageous edgelord magical havoc on all of Ponyville, or maybe just cry and run off into the woods in an overly dramatic fashion, depending on which direction the author wants to go. No, I imagine that Peen Stroke has more creativity than that, and would never blatantly foreshadow something obvious like that.
>I’ll admit, Twilight, she’s… she’s very well behaved, and I can see why you believe she only looks like Nightmare Moon.
From here on out, I am going to call Peen Stroke a faggot every time somepony in this fic brings up Nightmare Moon for no good reason.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night if Celestia punished such a young, sweet filly if she wasn’t in fact Nightmare Moon.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke. Also, this seems to imply that Rarity would not have a problem with Celestia punishing Nyx if she actually were Nightmare Moon, despite that she would still technically be the same sweet young filly either way. But maybe this was intentional; the real monster is prejudice, after all.
>“Firstly, that little filly has a lot of magic.” Rarity warned. “As you can see, she’s already able to levitate a tea cup with some proficiency. Well, the first cup she tried to lift flew straight into the ceiling and shattered to bits, like she put too much effort into it.”
The significance of this event probably doesn't need to be discussed. The reader should be able to guess at the meaning.
>I’ve found out the hard way that Nyx is a very sensitive pony. I accidentally said something in passing that made her think you hated her, and she was absolutely heartbroken. In fact, I dare say she is actually worse than our dear Fluttershy.
Yeah, something tells me that the "please don't hate me" schtick is not going anywhere any time soon. *sigh*.
>I was actually planning to show Nyx around Ponyville and see how well her disguise works. Take her to see the rest of our friends.
Yes, please, tell us exactly what you're going to have your characters do before they actually do it, then have them do the exact thing that you said they were going to do. That always makes a story more interesting to read.
>While Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie may take well to Nyx, I can only imagine that convincing Applejack and Rainbow Dash that she isn’t Nightmare Moon would be much more difficult.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>“That, and the fewer ponies that know the truth, the better; at least until I can figure out if she really is Nightmare Moon or just happens to look like her,” Twilight explained.
YOU'RE A FAGGOT, PEEN STROKE.
>“Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye,” Rarity quickly chanted, making the appropriate body movements in tune with the Pinkie Pie promise.
Again, I'm fairly certain it's just called a "Pinkie promise."
File (): 4938BF27366BD2DD8AE30A273B8702D6-1229931.gif (1.2 MB, 500x307, tumblr_oqaflcn0PH1uzqz6do1_500.gif)
>>249101
>Keep an eye on Nyx, Twilight. I know you don’t think she’s Nightmare Moon, but I would rather you err on the side of caution.
You continue to be a faggot, Peen Stroke. Also, let's wrap this up, shall we? The tea party scene was nicely done, but this conversation is just more pointless thinking out loud and circular discussion of shit that no one cares about. Seriously, this fic is more or less competently written but I'm constantly coming across large blocks of pointless text that should either be rewritten or chopped down to a more reasonable size. You should probably fire your 20 current editors and your "assistant" Batty Gloom (whatever his role in this is exactly), and see if you can just find one competent person to fill those roles, because all of them are clearly missing a ton of really obvious shit.
>That, and Rarity realized something else. Having Nyx over would give her the opportunity to make sure she wasn’t Nightmare Moon.
You. Are. A. Faggot. Peen. Stroke.
>Twilight spent the next few hours showing Nyx to her other friends, and, just like her friends were different, their responses to Nyx were vastly different.
See, again, this is the kind of thing you're not supposed to just gloss over in a few paragraphs. Since she still has four more ponies to meet, I can see how it might get a bit tedious to have four separate scenes like the one we just had. However, it could be split two and two, or you could even just write a single scene where she is introduced to all four. What seems most likely here is that the author needs Nyx to be acquainted with all of Twilight's friends in order for whatever else he's got planned to happen, and he wants to just get the introductions out of the way as quick as possible. If that's the case, it's almost better to just postpone them and move on to the next thing and just introduce Nyx to various characters as she needs to meet them. It may also be a sign that the structure of the work is fundamentally flawed to begin with and it might behoove the author to reconsider the way he plans to develop the story. Either way, these quickie introductions read like the author is just trying to get something mundane and tiresome out of the way. If the person writing the story isn't even interested in what's going on, how can he expect the person reading it to care?
>Rainbow Dash was actually the very first to run into Twilight and Nyx… literally. Twilight was no stranger to being a living crash site for her pegasus friend, and was no worse for the wear after the pony-to-pony collision. Nyx, however, was bawling her eyes out in panic, worried that the first pony to show her any kindness was seriously injured.
See, this could have actually had the potential to be a funny and heartwarming scene in the same way that Rarity and Nyx having tea was. Instead, it's just a couple of short sentences informing us that Rainbow apparently crashed into either Twilight or Nyx (or both) and that Nyx, predictably, started bawling her eyes out. I mean, did anything even remotely interesting happen here that we might want to know about? If RD crashed into Nyx, it could have knocked her glasses off, that might have caused an interesting moment of panic. Maybe Twilight had to do something funny to distract Dash until Nyx could get the glasses back on. Or you could just have them all fucking kiss each other, who even cares at this point.
>Rainbow Dash, on the other hoof, wasn’t too impressed with Twilight’s “cousin.” In her own words, Dash pointed out that Nyx was kind of a crybaby and that she could stand a lot of toughening up.
Thank you, Dash. Somepony had to say it, and I'm glad it was you.
>The next pony Twilight introduced Nyx to was Applejack. Still reeling from her encounter with Rainbow Dash, Nyx was frightened of Applejack and seeing her bucking trees didn’t help. Nyx, however, warmed up to Applejack when she showed her some good old fashioned hospitality, offering a smile and apple juice. Soon, Applejack was answering Nyx’s almost endless stream of apple-and-farm-related questions, impressing not only Nyx but Twilight with her extensive knowledge of her livelihood. If apple farming was a field of magical or scientific study, Applejack would have a PhD.
Again, this encounter could have made an engaging scene, but here it feels like we're just crossing off item #2 on a list of dumb shit we have to get done before we can go home and play Nintendo.
Anyway, visiting Fluttershy is item #3 on our dumb list, and then we move on to the next bit. Incidentally, going back to what I said earlier about writing a work so that it could be picked up and enjoyed by anyone and not just fans of the show, if someone with no knowledge whatsoever of the MLP universe were reading, he would not know anything more about Rainbow Dash, Applejack, or Fluttershy than he did to start with as a result of having read this. You're just dropping character names into the story without conveying any impression of who they even are or why they're important. Again, if it's not particularly important yet for Nyx to know these ponies, just save their introductions for when it is.
It looks as if item #4 on our to-do list is a stop at Pinkie Pie's. Anyway, It looks like Poop Stoop wrote an actual scene here, so let's roll up our sleeves and dig into it.
>The disguise had to undergo one final test before Twilight would feel confident that Nyx’s resemblance to Nightmare Moon would remain hidden.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>“Oh, I know!” Pinkie Pie chirped, bringing her head back and returning some of Nyx’s personal space. “Let me guess! I’m great at guessing games. Um… Little Shadow? No… how about Night Shade? Oh, I know! Black Snooty, Black Snooty!”
Das raycis, yo.
>On the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago, when Nightmare Moon first appeared, Pinkie had tried to guess Nightmare Moon’s name.
You are two times a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>Keep an eye on Nyx, Twilight. I know you don’t think she’s Nightmare Moon, but I would rather you err on the side of caution.
You continue to be a faggot, Peen Stroke. Also, let's wrap this up, shall we? The tea party scene was nicely done, but this conversation is just more pointless thinking out loud and circular discussion of shit that no one cares about. Seriously, this fic is more or less competently written but I'm constantly coming across large blocks of pointless text that should either be rewritten or chopped down to a more reasonable size. You should probably fire your 20 current editors and your "assistant" Batty Gloom (whatever his role in this is exactly), and see if you can just find one competent person to fill those roles, because all of them are clearly missing a ton of really obvious shit.
>That, and Rarity realized something else. Having Nyx over would give her the opportunity to make sure she wasn’t Nightmare Moon.
You. Are. A. Faggot. Peen. Stroke.
>Twilight spent the next few hours showing Nyx to her other friends, and, just like her friends were different, their responses to Nyx were vastly different.
See, again, this is the kind of thing you're not supposed to just gloss over in a few paragraphs. Since she still has four more ponies to meet, I can see how it might get a bit tedious to have four separate scenes like the one we just had. However, it could be split two and two, or you could even just write a single scene where she is introduced to all four. What seems most likely here is that the author needs Nyx to be acquainted with all of Twilight's friends in order for whatever else he's got planned to happen, and he wants to just get the introductions out of the way as quick as possible. If that's the case, it's almost better to just postpone them and move on to the next thing and just introduce Nyx to various characters as she needs to meet them. It may also be a sign that the structure of the work is fundamentally flawed to begin with and it might behoove the author to reconsider the way he plans to develop the story. Either way, these quickie introductions read like the author is just trying to get something mundane and tiresome out of the way. If the person writing the story isn't even interested in what's going on, how can he expect the person reading it to care?
>Rainbow Dash was actually the very first to run into Twilight and Nyx… literally. Twilight was no stranger to being a living crash site for her pegasus friend, and was no worse for the wear after the pony-to-pony collision. Nyx, however, was bawling her eyes out in panic, worried that the first pony to show her any kindness was seriously injured.
See, this could have actually had the potential to be a funny and heartwarming scene in the same way that Rarity and Nyx having tea was. Instead, it's just a couple of short sentences informing us that Rainbow apparently crashed into either Twilight or Nyx (or both) and that Nyx, predictably, started bawling her eyes out. I mean, did anything even remotely interesting happen here that we might want to know about? If RD crashed into Nyx, it could have knocked her glasses off, that might have caused an interesting moment of panic. Maybe Twilight had to do something funny to distract Dash until Nyx could get the glasses back on. Or you could just have them all fucking kiss each other, who even cares at this point.
>Rainbow Dash, on the other hoof, wasn’t too impressed with Twilight’s “cousin.” In her own words, Dash pointed out that Nyx was kind of a crybaby and that she could stand a lot of toughening up.
Thank you, Dash. Somepony had to say it, and I'm glad it was you.
>The next pony Twilight introduced Nyx to was Applejack. Still reeling from her encounter with Rainbow Dash, Nyx was frightened of Applejack and seeing her bucking trees didn’t help. Nyx, however, warmed up to Applejack when she showed her some good old fashioned hospitality, offering a smile and apple juice. Soon, Applejack was answering Nyx’s almost endless stream of apple-and-farm-related questions, impressing not only Nyx but Twilight with her extensive knowledge of her livelihood. If apple farming was a field of magical or scientific study, Applejack would have a PhD.
Again, this encounter could have made an engaging scene, but here it feels like we're just crossing off item #2 on a list of dumb shit we have to get done before we can go home and play Nintendo.
Anyway, visiting Fluttershy is item #3 on our dumb list, and then we move on to the next bit. Incidentally, going back to what I said earlier about writing a work so that it could be picked up and enjoyed by anyone and not just fans of the show, if someone with no knowledge whatsoever of the MLP universe were reading, he would not know anything more about Rainbow Dash, Applejack, or Fluttershy than he did to start with as a result of having read this. You're just dropping character names into the story without conveying any impression of who they even are or why they're important. Again, if it's not particularly important yet for Nyx to know these ponies, just save their introductions for when it is.
It looks as if item #4 on our to-do list is a stop at Pinkie Pie's. Anyway, It looks like Poop Stoop wrote an actual scene here, so let's roll up our sleeves and dig into it.
>The disguise had to undergo one final test before Twilight would feel confident that Nyx’s resemblance to Nightmare Moon would remain hidden.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>“Oh, I know!” Pinkie Pie chirped, bringing her head back and returning some of Nyx’s personal space. “Let me guess! I’m great at guessing games. Um… Little Shadow? No… how about Night Shade? Oh, I know! Black Snooty, Black Snooty!”
Das raycis, yo.
>On the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago, when Nightmare Moon first appeared, Pinkie had tried to guess Nightmare Moon’s name.
You are two times a faggot, Peen Stroke.
>>249125
If you start to feel bored by this story at somepoint you can always switch over to the other long and popular classic, Fallout: Equestria by Kkat. This story is literally slice of life with mary sue oc together with Hamlet-Twi pondering the deep question, "Art she Nightmare Moon or not? That is the question."
Say waht you want about fallout but thing actually happens in that story. Stuff do happen in this story as well. If reaing about Nyx bathing was a 1 out of 10 in the amount of action that is happening in the scene, then the following chapters steadily increase that until the half-way point. That's when thingsstart to happen. But everything up to that point are 5/10 at best, but I guess that's just my opinion. You won't know for sure if you don't read it.
>You are two times a faggot, Peen Stroke.
You should probably change your approached to that or else you might become as repetitive as Pen Stroke.
>>248961
>Yeah if what we've read so far is any indication, something tells me that question has a lot more head-rearing to do. I think we've solved the mystery of how this thing got to be 200,000 words long.
You are very right about this.
If you start to feel bored by this story at somepoint you can always switch over to the other long and popular classic, Fallout: Equestria by Kkat. This story is literally slice of life with mary sue oc together with Hamlet-Twi pondering the deep question, "Art she Nightmare Moon or not? That is the question."
Say waht you want about fallout but thing actually happens in that story. Stuff do happen in this story as well. If reaing about Nyx bathing was a 1 out of 10 in the amount of action that is happening in the scene, then the following chapters steadily increase that until the half-way point. That's when thingsstart to happen. But everything up to that point are 5/10 at best, but I guess that's just my opinion. You won't know for sure if you don't read it.
>You are two times a faggot, Peen Stroke.
You should probably change your approached to that or else you might become as repetitive as Pen Stroke.
>>248961
>Yeah if what we've read so far is any indication, something tells me that question has a lot more head-rearing to do. I think we've solved the mystery of how this thing got to be 200,000 words long.
You are very right about this.
File (): 2EE473FC47C2815F2FEBE607EDA48A48-105489.jpg (103.0 KB, 800x567, EF-45-front.jpg)
>>249125
Anyway, like most of Mr. Stroke's other characterizations of the Mane 6, Pinkie Pie is done pretty much on the mark here, so no complaints about the way she speaks or behaves. The introduction goes reasonably well and, of course, what happens is fairly predictable. Pinkie's use of the name "Black Snooty" to describe Nyx suggests that she has made some kind of subconscious connection between Nyx and Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, GlimGlam), but in the waking world she hasn't figured it out yet, so Twilight can relax now. However, Pinkie is more concerned with the fact that Twilight had a cousin in town for three days and didn't bring her around until now, and, naturally, wants to throw her a party.
>She did worry that Pinkie Pie might have subconsciously noticed Nyx’s resemblance to Nightmare Moon, which could explain why she brought up the name Black Snooty.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke. Also, once again, you don't need to directly explain stuff like this, just leave it out there and let the reader make these connections on their own.
>Twilight chuckled anxiously; the welcome party had been on the night just before Nightmare Moon returned, which was treading dangerously close to information Twilight didn’t want to share with Nyx. After all, the reason she hadn’t attended her own welcome party was that she wanted time to look up more information about Nightmare Moon.
I'm tempted to let this one slide since this in this case the mention is actually relevant and belongs in the text. However, since you name-dropped NM twice when once would have been sufficient, you're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
Anyway, she decides it's ok to tell her about the party and leave out the rest, so the chapter ends on an ellipsis with Twilight describing her first day in Ponyville. All in all a decent chapter I guess, minus the myriad complaints I had about it. On to the next one.
Chapter 3: School Days and Memories
>Nyx clung to Twilight’s front leg as the pair looked at the building ahead of them. It was painted in rich, welcoming reds and surrounded by a lush green yard. The building was decorated with festive hearts; even the weather vane on the top of the bell tower featured a heart, looking almost like a Cupid’s arrow. A playground was visible behind the building, while in front there was a flagpole and a hedge sculpture of a pony wearing a square, flat-topped hat with a tassel.
>It was a welcoming sight to most young ponies in the community and a place of fond memories to many of Ponyville’s residents. It was a place of learning, where ponies studied for a bright future and made good friends. It was the Ponyville Elementary School, where the mulberry earth pony, Cheerilee, granted the gift of knowledge to her students.
>It was a place that utterly terrified Nyx.
inb4 she pulls a Columbine.
Anyway, it looks like we've jumped forward in time here a bit, which is perfectly fine. Pinkie Pie's party probably went about as usual, so there really wasn't much reason to include it or even summarize it after the fact. Just about everything that needed to happen for Nyx to get settled in Ponyville has happened, so we're ready to move along to the next part of her adventure. Other than what I've mentioned, I'm pretty much ok with the pacing so far.
>Twilight chuckled a little at Nyx’s fear. “Don’t worry, Cheerilee is very nice. Just pay attention in class and remember to follow the rules. That means both Cheerilee’s rules and my rules, which are?”
>“I can’t take off my vest, I can’t take off my glasses, I can’t tell anypony about my wings or that I’m an alicorn, and I should try not to use my magic unless I’m writing something down.”
I still kind of like my personal headcanon of the Twilight in this story being a crazy wine-aunt who is doing all of this because she secretly wants a baby. If you view this story through a lens of pure realism (silly to do in pastel pony world I know, but bear with me) this situation is abnormal to the point that it borders on creepy.
Nyx: Why do I have to go to school?
Twilight: Because it's normal! You'll do it because it's normal! Now tell Mommy the rules again.
Nyx: "Keep my disguise on, don't tell anypony my real name, and don't talk about what happens in the basement."
Twilight: Good. Now come straight home after school, and don't talk to anypony on the way.
Honestly I'll once again put it out there that this dynamic might have made for a more interesting premise to begin with than the whole "Frankenstein's monster just wants to be loved" cliche that Peen Stroke chose. Most of the canon characters haven't really been explored, but we've gotten decent sketches of Twilight and Rarity so far, and based on what's written you could make a darker alt-interpretation for both of them. With Twilight, obviously, we have the deranged, box-wine guzzling single cat lady, whose slowly ticking biological clock and inability to meet eligible stallions due to personal autism drive her to abduct a strange filly and raise it as her own. Meanwhile, Rarity's obsession with manners and etiquette could belie some deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the way her life has turned out. The way she starts immediately directing Nyx to sit up straight and keep her (metaphorical) elbows off the table could indicate she's got some weird power-trip issues. Only she can see the dirt and grime that covers this filthy world. She is obsessed with imposing order and beauty on chaos and ugliness, and since her own sister is fairly uncouth and has continuously disappointed her, she tries to mold Nyx into a perfect new recruit in her war on rudeness. Both ponies have deep rooted psychological issues, and poor Nyx becomes their unwitting victim.
lmao I'm just riffing at this point. But alt-scenarios are fun, and protip you can sometimes get some pretty interesting ideas from thinking about stories and characters from a different perspective than what the author intended.
Anyway, like most of Mr. Stroke's other characterizations of the Mane 6, Pinkie Pie is done pretty much on the mark here, so no complaints about the way she speaks or behaves. The introduction goes reasonably well and, of course, what happens is fairly predictable. Pinkie's use of the name "Black Snooty" to describe Nyx suggests that she has made some kind of subconscious connection between Nyx and Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, GlimGlam), but in the waking world she hasn't figured it out yet, so Twilight can relax now. However, Pinkie is more concerned with the fact that Twilight had a cousin in town for three days and didn't bring her around until now, and, naturally, wants to throw her a party.
>She did worry that Pinkie Pie might have subconsciously noticed Nyx’s resemblance to Nightmare Moon, which could explain why she brought up the name Black Snooty.
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke. Also, once again, you don't need to directly explain stuff like this, just leave it out there and let the reader make these connections on their own.
>Twilight chuckled anxiously; the welcome party had been on the night just before Nightmare Moon returned, which was treading dangerously close to information Twilight didn’t want to share with Nyx. After all, the reason she hadn’t attended her own welcome party was that she wanted time to look up more information about Nightmare Moon.
I'm tempted to let this one slide since this in this case the mention is actually relevant and belongs in the text. However, since you name-dropped NM twice when once would have been sufficient, you're a faggot, Peen Stroke.
Anyway, she decides it's ok to tell her about the party and leave out the rest, so the chapter ends on an ellipsis with Twilight describing her first day in Ponyville. All in all a decent chapter I guess, minus the myriad complaints I had about it. On to the next one.
Chapter 3: School Days and Memories
>Nyx clung to Twilight’s front leg as the pair looked at the building ahead of them. It was painted in rich, welcoming reds and surrounded by a lush green yard. The building was decorated with festive hearts; even the weather vane on the top of the bell tower featured a heart, looking almost like a Cupid’s arrow. A playground was visible behind the building, while in front there was a flagpole and a hedge sculpture of a pony wearing a square, flat-topped hat with a tassel.
>It was a welcoming sight to most young ponies in the community and a place of fond memories to many of Ponyville’s residents. It was a place of learning, where ponies studied for a bright future and made good friends. It was the Ponyville Elementary School, where the mulberry earth pony, Cheerilee, granted the gift of knowledge to her students.
>It was a place that utterly terrified Nyx.
inb4 she pulls a Columbine.
Anyway, it looks like we've jumped forward in time here a bit, which is perfectly fine. Pinkie Pie's party probably went about as usual, so there really wasn't much reason to include it or even summarize it after the fact. Just about everything that needed to happen for Nyx to get settled in Ponyville has happened, so we're ready to move along to the next part of her adventure. Other than what I've mentioned, I'm pretty much ok with the pacing so far.
>Twilight chuckled a little at Nyx’s fear. “Don’t worry, Cheerilee is very nice. Just pay attention in class and remember to follow the rules. That means both Cheerilee’s rules and my rules, which are?”
>“I can’t take off my vest, I can’t take off my glasses, I can’t tell anypony about my wings or that I’m an alicorn, and I should try not to use my magic unless I’m writing something down.”
I still kind of like my personal headcanon of the Twilight in this story being a crazy wine-aunt who is doing all of this because she secretly wants a baby. If you view this story through a lens of pure realism (silly to do in pastel pony world I know, but bear with me) this situation is abnormal to the point that it borders on creepy.
Nyx: Why do I have to go to school?
Twilight: Because it's normal! You'll do it because it's normal! Now tell Mommy the rules again.
Nyx: "Keep my disguise on, don't tell anypony my real name, and don't talk about what happens in the basement."
Twilight: Good. Now come straight home after school, and don't talk to anypony on the way.
Honestly I'll once again put it out there that this dynamic might have made for a more interesting premise to begin with than the whole "Frankenstein's monster just wants to be loved" cliche that Peen Stroke chose. Most of the canon characters haven't really been explored, but we've gotten decent sketches of Twilight and Rarity so far, and based on what's written you could make a darker alt-interpretation for both of them. With Twilight, obviously, we have the deranged, box-wine guzzling single cat lady, whose slowly ticking biological clock and inability to meet eligible stallions due to personal autism drive her to abduct a strange filly and raise it as her own. Meanwhile, Rarity's obsession with manners and etiquette could belie some deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the way her life has turned out. The way she starts immediately directing Nyx to sit up straight and keep her (metaphorical) elbows off the table could indicate she's got some weird power-trip issues. Only she can see the dirt and grime that covers this filthy world. She is obsessed with imposing order and beauty on chaos and ugliness, and since her own sister is fairly uncouth and has continuously disappointed her, she tries to mold Nyx into a perfect new recruit in her war on rudeness. Both ponies have deep rooted psychological issues, and poor Nyx becomes their unwitting victim.
lmao I'm just riffing at this point. But alt-scenarios are fun, and protip you can sometimes get some pretty interesting ideas from thinking about stories and characters from a different perspective than what the author intended.
>>249127
I'll probably read FoE at some point as I've been curious about it for a while. However, now that I've started this one I'd like to see it through to the end. For the purposes of this review series I actually prefer to read things that are at least somewhat terrible, because if I have nothing to grouse about or make fun of the review won't be any fun to read.
Past Sins so far seems to be a fanfiction work of middling quality that for some reason became extremely popular and catapulted its author to horse fame. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but it's far from being the best. Pen Stroke isn't a good enough writer to justify the amount of praise he gets, and I think both he and his magnum opus could stand to be knocked down a couple of pegs. For that reason, it's really turning out to be a perfect candidate for this review series.
I'll probably read FoE at some point as I've been curious about it for a while. However, now that I've started this one I'd like to see it through to the end. For the purposes of this review series I actually prefer to read things that are at least somewhat terrible, because if I have nothing to grouse about or make fun of the review won't be any fun to read.
Past Sins so far seems to be a fanfiction work of middling quality that for some reason became extremely popular and catapulted its author to horse fame. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, but it's far from being the best. Pen Stroke isn't a good enough writer to justify the amount of praise he gets, and I think both he and his magnum opus could stand to be knocked down a couple of pegs. For that reason, it's really turning out to be a perfect candidate for this review series.
>>249129
Good call. As much as I hate Friendship Is Optimal and the original Fallout Equestria, Nyx's story is more popular than...
No, calling it more popular isn't the right word. Both of those shit stories I mentioned started their own circlejerking mini-fandoms that often put out work better than their inspirations, yet have worship of The Original mandated within said fandoms.
Criticism of this Nyx story isn't as common as it should be. Fallout Equestria fans have memed on the bullshit in the original and Project Horizons, so...
If I was told to make the order in terms of "Deservedness", I'd say Nyx, FIO, then FE.
But in terms of humor, FE is a lot funnier in a "This is what the writer considers good?" sort of way.
It's weird.
I've read Fequestria twice. Once long ago as a young boy with low standards and a desire to be wowed.
And again about a year ago with some friends discovering and laughing at this shitshow for the first time.
It's a completely different experience. Suddenly, it isn't tragic that Rarity almost saved Equestria but failed because of her own foolishness and so she ended up getting raped to death with one hoof fused to a window because body horror poison gas, for example. Suddenly it's comedy gold that this is what the writer goes for when he wants to write heart-molesting tragedy. Friends who do this for fun every week notice shit you never noticed, and you get to say those things you always noticed but never mentioned.
Here's one I always noticed but never mentioned:
The story's sense of morality's a bit fucked.
Singer Belle doesn't act like a human.
Or a pony.
Or a nicey-nice pony forced into sad world and trying to hang onto her nicey-nice virtues.
She acts like the character of a powergaming human trying to do enough Morally Good actions to gain +100 morality points and qualify for some PRC ASAP, logic and roleplaying and the world and the lives of her friends characters be damned.
She acts according to a bizarre form of morality only seen in that kind of scenario. Where certain actions like Sparing Enemies and Charity provide positive karma points, even if they'd logically be terrible ideas that increase the amount of suffering in the world and result in more crimes committed by the people you saved.
Every time she does some dumb shit, like giving away the group's HIGHLY LIMITED HEALING SUPPLIES (Which could save the lives of these life-savers or get used to save the lives of injured innocents later on or get traded for bullets or medicine or anything else) to LITERAL BANDITS - WHICH JUST GOT FINISHED SHOOTING AT THE HEROES AND TRYING TO STEAL SHIT FROM THE HEROES, AND JUST LOST A FIREFIGHT WITH THE HEROES - JUST SO SHE CAN FEEL MORAL, it's treated as something normal and reasonable she just does, and gets away with doing, in passing.
No arguing over whether it's done or not. Singer Belle just does it. And it's mentioned that she does this in fucking passing.
and the story fucking congratulates her for this Stupid Good no-kill-challenge bullshit so fucking much, Littlepip thinks she's so cool and so sexy and so nice for never killing, and she thinks the same thing about Three-Dog-2 for never killing, too.
The story loves Singer Belle, later writing that some Super Mutant Nightkin-Alicorns decided to join her side because she was juuust so merciful and kind uwu, and she ends up making the Super-Followers Of The Apocalypse in the end because fuck depth.
Fuck meaning and fuck depth and fuck the story Fallout tried to tell with these guys, showing them suffer for their goodness and letting you help them help the world and make things better for them, fuck all of that because Cloned Alicorn Supersoldier FOAs is just so much "Kewler".
Original FOAs were weak kind saints hated by those in power, so of course these "Better" FOAs, these "Fallout Equestria'd" FOAs get to be super strong/fast/smart/magic alicorn badasses.
Didn't she also get a Tranq Pistol or something, so she can still sort-of help in firefights? Yeah, she won't kill but she won't bat an eyelid when her friends headshot everyone she tranq'd post-firefight. Good thing she never ran into raiders too doped up on chems to feel tranqs.
Also she did kill raiders anyway at one point, she failed no-kill november. She killed some raiders for forcing some slave colts and fillies to fight to death. Said "I've never killed a pony [blam] and i still haven't" and does this scene end with her coming to terms with the fact that she's just taken a life? Does this scene end with her talking to her friends about this, and trying to figure out what her morality is, what it should be, what morality can be in this wasteland while still being moral, and eventually deciding some people need to die and it's time to kill raiders but leave starving bandits alive, or determinedly re-affirm that she wants to be a hero who never ever kills and swear to try even harder to follow this rule from now on?
Do the little pony children she saved by killing the raiders get to talk, add in their two cents, and help Singer Belle whether she wants to Go Lethal or stick to Nonlethal?
Nope, the scene's just there so the writer can add this scene to his TvTropes "Crowning Moment of Awesome" page. Because nothing says awesome like shooting one raider with a gun while delivering the same cheesy action movie dialogue that infests the whole film.
The protags are told "Pick 1 virtue, hold onto it no matter what" so they do. Littlepip chooses "NEVER GIVE UP" and Singer Belle chooses "Never kill", so she reaches Batman levels of Stupid Good and never gets called out for staying there.
She does get called a cunt once for Tranqing Littlepip and helping her break her mentats addiction, since it resulted in some side-character dying. So there's that.
Good call. As much as I hate Friendship Is Optimal and the original Fallout Equestria, Nyx's story is more popular than...
No, calling it more popular isn't the right word. Both of those shit stories I mentioned started their own circlejerking mini-fandoms that often put out work better than their inspirations, yet have worship of The Original mandated within said fandoms.
Criticism of this Nyx story isn't as common as it should be. Fallout Equestria fans have memed on the bullshit in the original and Project Horizons, so...
If I was told to make the order in terms of "Deservedness", I'd say Nyx, FIO, then FE.
But in terms of humor, FE is a lot funnier in a "This is what the writer considers good?" sort of way.
It's weird.
I've read Fequestria twice. Once long ago as a young boy with low standards and a desire to be wowed.
And again about a year ago with some friends discovering and laughing at this shitshow for the first time.
It's a completely different experience. Suddenly, it isn't tragic that Rarity almost saved Equestria but failed because of her own foolishness and so she ended up getting raped to death with one hoof fused to a window because body horror poison gas, for example. Suddenly it's comedy gold that this is what the writer goes for when he wants to write heart-molesting tragedy. Friends who do this for fun every week notice shit you never noticed, and you get to say those things you always noticed but never mentioned.
Here's one I always noticed but never mentioned:
The story's sense of morality's a bit fucked.
Singer Belle doesn't act like a human.
Or a pony.
Or a nicey-nice pony forced into sad world and trying to hang onto her nicey-nice virtues.
She acts like the character of a powergaming human trying to do enough Morally Good actions to gain +100 morality points and qualify for some PRC ASAP, logic and roleplaying and the world and the lives of her friends characters be damned.
She acts according to a bizarre form of morality only seen in that kind of scenario. Where certain actions like Sparing Enemies and Charity provide positive karma points, even if they'd logically be terrible ideas that increase the amount of suffering in the world and result in more crimes committed by the people you saved.
Every time she does some dumb shit, like giving away the group's HIGHLY LIMITED HEALING SUPPLIES (Which could save the lives of these life-savers or get used to save the lives of injured innocents later on or get traded for bullets or medicine or anything else) to LITERAL BANDITS - WHICH JUST GOT FINISHED SHOOTING AT THE HEROES AND TRYING TO STEAL SHIT FROM THE HEROES, AND JUST LOST A FIREFIGHT WITH THE HEROES - JUST SO SHE CAN FEEL MORAL, it's treated as something normal and reasonable she just does, and gets away with doing, in passing.
No arguing over whether it's done or not. Singer Belle just does it. And it's mentioned that she does this in fucking passing.
and the story fucking congratulates her for this Stupid Good no-kill-challenge bullshit so fucking much, Littlepip thinks she's so cool and so sexy and so nice for never killing, and she thinks the same thing about Three-Dog-2 for never killing, too.
The story loves Singer Belle, later writing that some Super Mutant Nightkin-Alicorns decided to join her side because she was juuust so merciful and kind uwu, and she ends up making the Super-Followers Of The Apocalypse in the end because fuck depth.
Fuck meaning and fuck depth and fuck the story Fallout tried to tell with these guys, showing them suffer for their goodness and letting you help them help the world and make things better for them, fuck all of that because Cloned Alicorn Supersoldier FOAs is just so much "Kewler".
Original FOAs were weak kind saints hated by those in power, so of course these "Better" FOAs, these "Fallout Equestria'd" FOAs get to be super strong/fast/smart/magic alicorn badasses.
Didn't she also get a Tranq Pistol or something, so she can still sort-of help in firefights? Yeah, she won't kill but she won't bat an eyelid when her friends headshot everyone she tranq'd post-firefight. Good thing she never ran into raiders too doped up on chems to feel tranqs.
Also she did kill raiders anyway at one point, she failed no-kill november. She killed some raiders for forcing some slave colts and fillies to fight to death. Said "I've never killed a pony [blam] and i still haven't" and does this scene end with her coming to terms with the fact that she's just taken a life? Does this scene end with her talking to her friends about this, and trying to figure out what her morality is, what it should be, what morality can be in this wasteland while still being moral, and eventually deciding some people need to die and it's time to kill raiders but leave starving bandits alive, or determinedly re-affirm that she wants to be a hero who never ever kills and swear to try even harder to follow this rule from now on?
Do the little pony children she saved by killing the raiders get to talk, add in their two cents, and help Singer Belle whether she wants to Go Lethal or stick to Nonlethal?
Nope, the scene's just there so the writer can add this scene to his TvTropes "Crowning Moment of Awesome" page. Because nothing says awesome like shooting one raider with a gun while delivering the same cheesy action movie dialogue that infests the whole film.
The protags are told "Pick 1 virtue, hold onto it no matter what" so they do. Littlepip chooses "NEVER GIVE UP" and Singer Belle chooses "Never kill", so she reaches Batman levels of Stupid Good and never gets called out for staying there.
She does get called a cunt once for Tranqing Littlepip and helping her break her mentats addiction, since it resulted in some side-character dying. So there's that.
>>249033
>Yeah I don't quite understand the role of clothing in this universe either.
Personally I always saw it as a decorative thing. A pair of jeans, a vest and a coat won't do much to hide a horsecock and skirts could be lifted by tails and the wind anyway. Plus their fur keeps them at an alright temperature most of the time. Clothing's something commonly seen in very hot and very cold places, plus very rich places where everyone wants to show off. But socially, they never needed to develop a major taboo about being naked, so the rare pony who "Feels naked" without their usual lucky hat/lucky cape/lucky outfit on is the weird one.
>Yeah I don't quite understand the role of clothing in this universe either.
Personally I always saw it as a decorative thing. A pair of jeans, a vest and a coat won't do much to hide a horsecock and skirts could be lifted by tails and the wind anyway. Plus their fur keeps them at an alright temperature most of the time. Clothing's something commonly seen in very hot and very cold places, plus very rich places where everyone wants to show off. But socially, they never needed to develop a major taboo about being naked, so the rare pony who "Feels naked" without their usual lucky hat/lucky cape/lucky outfit on is the weird one.
>>249040
>make a fake horn and put that on over her real horn
Fuck, I was going to do that in my Silver fic episode where Silver gets arrested for a crime he didn't commit, has a Silver Spare take his place in prison, and has to prove his innocence while disguised. Meanwhile the Silver Spare, his magic locked, has hilarity ensue. He must not get hit/touched or he pops, alarms are raised, and evading arrest becomes an actual crime he committed.
>make a fake horn and put that on over her real horn
Fuck, I was going to do that in my Silver fic episode where Silver gets arrested for a crime he didn't commit, has a Silver Spare take his place in prison, and has to prove his innocence while disguised. Meanwhile the Silver Spare, his magic locked, has hilarity ensue. He must not get hit/touched or he pops, alarms are raised, and evading arrest becomes an actual crime he committed.
>>249044
I know My Immortal is a parody because of one word.
Taebony.
Ebony Darkness dementia raven way's the protag, and we're supposed to believe a teenaged girl named "Tara Gilsbie" wrote it.
That's probably an anagram, reference to a book, or anagram'd reference to a book.
But either way
there are points in this story where the author "accidentally" writes
>and then Tara snogged the goffik guy
instead of
>and then Enoby snogged the goffik guy
Now I can believe this. I can believe a writer self-inserting herself would fuck the name up now and then, but
Ta-Enoby?
If you notice a mistake at the last second when writing, you fix it. You don't continue the wrong word with the right word like you're a character on some TV show saying "NoooooooYES, yes is my final answer".
Brilliant parody, but definitely just a parody and not a real thing.
I know My Immortal is a parody because of one word.
Taebony.
Ebony Darkness dementia raven way's the protag, and we're supposed to believe a teenaged girl named "Tara Gilsbie" wrote it.
That's probably an anagram, reference to a book, or anagram'd reference to a book.
But either way
there are points in this story where the author "accidentally" writes
>and then Tara snogged the goffik guy
instead of
>and then Enoby snogged the goffik guy
Now I can believe this. I can believe a writer self-inserting herself would fuck the name up now and then, but
Ta-Enoby?
If you notice a mistake at the last second when writing, you fix it. You don't continue the wrong word with the right word like you're a character on some TV show saying "NoooooooYES, yes is my final answer".
Brilliant parody, but definitely just a parody and not a real thing.
>>249142
Also fuck Fequestria, whenever it wants to be cool it uses explosions and big fights and bad action movie dialogue.
When it wants to be "Clever" it comes up with a contrived explanation for the movie-logic idiot-villain bullshit someone's doing or it "Fills in a plothole" the writer saw in Fallout 3 where there wasn't one. such as
>"when you shot those radroaches and targets in Fallout 3 why didn't you hit a nuclear reactor pipe and kill everyone and radmutate the survivors into rapebeasts?"
or
>"Omg why didn't Colonel Autumn just shoot u? why did he use a Stun Grenade on you, call you gay, then leave? In my fanfic it'll be because he's a master plan who wants to fuck- i mean fuse himself with you and The Master to create the bestest supervillain ever, who toootally won't be paralyzed with Celestialsapien indecision".
And when it wants to be scary, pick one of the following to use in doctor-recommended doses:
>gore
>someone gets shot
>canon place exists but it's been coated in shit and piss and raider semen and darkness
>rape, rape attempt, rape mention
>did i mention the world still looks like shit?
>hero fails in a minor and unimportant way and hero feels uber bad about that
>bad thing happens to beloved canon character, every last one (except Derpy Hooves, she gets to be that ghoul dumbass from Fallout 3 because that's a "Happy" ending)
>obligatory body horror but not to an extent that'll upset audiences, you just want the teens impressed by your darkness
>someone calls Littlepip a massive fucking faggot for wanting to be heroic
>littlepip goes on another rant, yelling "ffffffFUCK you I'm the real hero and I will hold onto the light because the darkness is dark! I will make this dark world choke on my dark soul's LIIIIIIIIIIGHT!"
>VATS solves a fight scene before it starts, because why not just fucking transplant a video game's easy mode button for bethesda-loving faggot niggercucks into the fucking written word, jesus fucking christ I feel so much genuine rage over how fucking much I hate VATS that it's surprising me right now
>someone calls Littlepip "The real villain from a certain point of view" in one way or another. for example, "the children of the raiders you slaughtered call you The Deathbringer" and shit like that
>incredibly unlikely-to-happen bad event happens right where the camera and heroes can see. Littlepip tries to save some filly, she flees from Littlepip because she's sooo scary, then the filly gets shot and turned to dust by laser fire. Then Pein's little dog gets stabbed by a Kunai and blown up, too.
>fallout element shoehorned in where it didn't belong and doesn't make sense, especially if canon ponies need to be uncharacteristically stupid/awful for this to happen
>fallout element gets One-Upped in the shallowest ways possible, Dead Money happened to all of Canterlot for not making the shield and purging ziggers soon enough even though that throws out all the depth of the original Dead Money, plus Poison Cloud is replaced with Super Poison Cloud that makes shit stick to you so anybody inside it ends up like the Ghost People without needing the suits supplied by the Think Tank
Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons has this writing problem x2. So it has Super Radiation called Innervation which is so bad, even the radiation-immune Alicorns can't take it! Just like the edgy original species from your 13-year-old self's unpublished fantasy novel that's so edgy, it gets drunk off poison that'd kill any lesser race, and then because you wanted these guys to be threatened by poison/radiation anyway, you invent a Super Poison/Super Radiation that can hurt even them!
Sorry, should I save this autism for a different thread? I don't want this thread to hit bump limit before you're done with Nyx's story.
Also fuck Fequestria, whenever it wants to be cool it uses explosions and big fights and bad action movie dialogue.
When it wants to be "Clever" it comes up with a contrived explanation for the movie-logic idiot-villain bullshit someone's doing or it "Fills in a plothole" the writer saw in Fallout 3 where there wasn't one. such as
>"when you shot those radroaches and targets in Fallout 3 why didn't you hit a nuclear reactor pipe and kill everyone and radmutate the survivors into rapebeasts?"
or
>"Omg why didn't Colonel Autumn just shoot u? why did he use a Stun Grenade on you, call you gay, then leave? In my fanfic it'll be because he's a master plan who wants to fuck- i mean fuse himself with you and The Master to create the bestest supervillain ever, who toootally won't be paralyzed with Celestialsapien indecision".
And when it wants to be scary, pick one of the following to use in doctor-recommended doses:
>gore
>someone gets shot
>canon place exists but it's been coated in shit and piss and raider semen and darkness
>rape, rape attempt, rape mention
>did i mention the world still looks like shit?
>hero fails in a minor and unimportant way and hero feels uber bad about that
>bad thing happens to beloved canon character, every last one (except Derpy Hooves, she gets to be that ghoul dumbass from Fallout 3 because that's a "Happy" ending)
>obligatory body horror but not to an extent that'll upset audiences, you just want the teens impressed by your darkness
>someone calls Littlepip a massive fucking faggot for wanting to be heroic
>littlepip goes on another rant, yelling "ffffffFUCK you I'm the real hero and I will hold onto the light because the darkness is dark! I will make this dark world choke on my dark soul's LIIIIIIIIIIGHT!"
>VATS solves a fight scene before it starts, because why not just fucking transplant a video game's easy mode button for bethesda-loving faggot niggercucks into the fucking written word, jesus fucking christ I feel so much genuine rage over how fucking much I hate VATS that it's surprising me right now
>someone calls Littlepip "The real villain from a certain point of view" in one way or another. for example, "the children of the raiders you slaughtered call you The Deathbringer" and shit like that
>incredibly unlikely-to-happen bad event happens right where the camera and heroes can see. Littlepip tries to save some filly, she flees from Littlepip because she's sooo scary, then the filly gets shot and turned to dust by laser fire. Then Pein's little dog gets stabbed by a Kunai and blown up, too.
>fallout element shoehorned in where it didn't belong and doesn't make sense, especially if canon ponies need to be uncharacteristically stupid/awful for this to happen
>fallout element gets One-Upped in the shallowest ways possible, Dead Money happened to all of Canterlot for not making the shield and purging ziggers soon enough even though that throws out all the depth of the original Dead Money, plus Poison Cloud is replaced with Super Poison Cloud that makes shit stick to you so anybody inside it ends up like the Ghost People without needing the suits supplied by the Think Tank
Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons has this writing problem x2. So it has Super Radiation called Innervation which is so bad, even the radiation-immune Alicorns can't take it! Just like the edgy original species from your 13-year-old self's unpublished fantasy novel that's so edgy, it gets drunk off poison that'd kill any lesser race, and then because you wanted these guys to be threatened by poison/radiation anyway, you invent a Super Poison/Super Radiation that can hurt even them!
Sorry, should I save this autism for a different thread? I don't want this thread to hit bump limit before you're done with Nyx's story.
>>249142
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwUHZSj21CI
This pretty much sums up the ridiculous protagonists of FoE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwUHZSj21CI
This pretty much sums up the ridiculous protagonists of FoE.
>>249129
>at least somewhat terrible
Well, I wouldn't call fallout Equestria good but I haven't read more than the beginning either. I just know more stuff happens in it.
>because if I have nothing to grouse about or make fun of the review won't be any fun to read.
I think it is more like this: Terrible story> Great/good story>Just medicore.
It think you could imporve this review if you found a story that is similar to this story and compared it to. Showing that the current story isdoing it wrong by showing how it should be done instead, which you are sort of doing with your own exampels right now.
Those reviews that compare similar things to show which one is better are often the ones I like the most anyway.
Regardless, do whatever you want.
>at least somewhat terrible
Well, I wouldn't call fallout Equestria good but I haven't read more than the beginning either. I just know more stuff happens in it.
>because if I have nothing to grouse about or make fun of the review won't be any fun to read.
I think it is more like this: Terrible story> Great/good story>Just medicore.
It think you could imporve this review if you found a story that is similar to this story and compared it to. Showing that the current story isdoing it wrong by showing how it should be done instead, which you are sort of doing with your own exampels right now.
Those reviews that compare similar things to show which one is better are often the ones I like the most anyway.
Regardless, do whatever you want.
>>249186
Without spoiling anything, Fallout Equestria isn't a bad fic, but it's not a masterpiece by any means; good, maybe even great, but not amazing (fuck Velvet Remedy, though). It probably wouldn't be the kind of thing GlimGlam would be looking for to review and pick apart, even if that would be nice to see.
Now, something like the Conversion Bureau or Five Score, Divided By For sounds more like something he could pick apart better, after he's done with Past Sins.
Without spoiling anything, Fallout Equestria isn't a bad fic, but it's not a masterpiece by any means; good, maybe even great, but not amazing (fuck Velvet Remedy, though). It probably wouldn't be the kind of thing GlimGlam would be looking for to review and pick apart, even if that would be nice to see.
Now, something like the Conversion Bureau or Five Score, Divided By For sounds more like something he could pick apart better, after he's done with Past Sins.
>>249191
>Without spoiling anything, Fallout Equestria isn't a bad fic
I suppose it could get better. I was not impressed by the start of it and then consequnently dropped it.
But I don't know. I think anything that there is stuff to comment on is funny to read. I mean-
Spoilers, Glimglam for the rest of Past Sins
Nothing will happen now until Nyx is turned into Nightmare Moon. Now he is at the school day part. I barely remember what happens next. There is some sleepover with the cmc. She gets lost in the everfree. They have a play and then some tug of war thingy happens.
How does anyone make that funny? And really on the giving advice part, there really isn't much to say about things. Either it is well enough executed heartwarming slice of life or it is missed opportunity.
He could almost skip to the part were Nyx is turned into Nightmare Moon since Nyx and Twilight are already daughterfu and momfu in everything but name. Their relationship doesn't develop during their time together so he would literally miss nothing from jumping to that point in the story.
At least, I think, Fallout euqestria is written by some liberal which probably pour a lot of his/her opinions into the story. It would be fun to do something with.
But I guess, you know more about it since you have read it. My point is that I realized that I found this a bit boring myself. Not because Glim is bad but because there isn't much to say about this.
I'm almost tempted into already say what made it popular in the first place even if I haven't read it to completetion yet.
I bet it became popular because it is both edgy and heartwarming/cute. Its ending is "tragic" (Again I don't know if it is or whatever) so it appeals to pretenious people. It was came out early in the fandom and most of the things that got out early in the fandom got cred just because they existed. Black alicorn mary sue oc. And you know the premise is sort of intresting if cliche, "Oh, woe with I am the big and powerful bad guy but I didn't choose this!"
>the Conversion Bureau or Five Score, Divided By For
Yeah, maybe. I don't know.
The thing is that while Glimglam has proven himself many times to be funny on his own in his reviews he cannot work on nothing. Past sins is half nothing.
That was what was so good about the Silver Star story. Because even though I like Nigel as a person and honestly think stories from him would be welcomed, they have so far been destroyed by his own autism. That was what Silver Star really was. Gilmglam did not have to stretch many braincells at times to be witty with what he got because at times Silver Star literally teleported out to fart. The autism got in the way of the story that I think could have been good with some more direction on Nigel's part.
On that note Nigel, I read the begining of your Sunrise Stardust. I don't dislike the premise, it is just that you frontloaded your story with containers worth or lore. It was like Dark Souls's intro cinematic but this time it went on for twenty minutes or something explain things we could have learnt by playing the game.
You are even aware of this as the narrator, Sunrise, comments on it at one point. Yet, you do it.
Your writing style reminds me of Lovcraft tbh. He didn't write out scenes that much either but in his case it didn't distract me as much that his dialogue was one-sided. He is good at describing how the ther party of the conversation reacts to what is being told to them with a very specific language.
Like, I don't know if you still write that way in this Sunrise story, I haven't gotten that far in yet, but basically, I think you can have a voice or style were dialogues are turned into monlogues as long as you give the speaker a distinct voice. That's another problem I have with Sunrise, I hear your voice when I read his. He can still have your opinions but you could make a voice that is more distinct in the mannerisms that it uses.
Wait, how did I end up talking about this? Whatever. Read Shadow of Innsmouth. It is a very good story and you will be able to see why you and he are similar. Honestly, almost all of his mcs are people alike him, which isn't unusual for writers in general, but like even their voices and so the same. They appricated what he appricated and so on.
You are similar.
>Without spoiling anything, Fallout Equestria isn't a bad fic
I suppose it could get better. I was not impressed by the start of it and then consequnently dropped it.
But I don't know. I think anything that there is stuff to comment on is funny to read. I mean-
Spoilers, Glimglam for the rest of Past Sins
Nothing will happen now until Nyx is turned into Nightmare Moon. Now he is at the school day part. I barely remember what happens next. There is some sleepover with the cmc. She gets lost in the everfree. They have a play and then some tug of war thingy happens.
How does anyone make that funny? And really on the giving advice part, there really isn't much to say about things. Either it is well enough executed heartwarming slice of life or it is missed opportunity.
He could almost skip to the part were Nyx is turned into Nightmare Moon since Nyx and Twilight are already daughterfu and momfu in everything but name. Their relationship doesn't develop during their time together so he would literally miss nothing from jumping to that point in the story.
At least, I think, Fallout euqestria is written by some liberal which probably pour a lot of his/her opinions into the story. It would be fun to do something with.
But I guess, you know more about it since you have read it. My point is that I realized that I found this a bit boring myself. Not because Glim is bad but because there isn't much to say about this.
I'm almost tempted into already say what made it popular in the first place even if I haven't read it to completetion yet.
I bet it became popular because it is both edgy and heartwarming/cute. Its ending is "tragic" (Again I don't know if it is or whatever) so it appeals to pretenious people. It was came out early in the fandom and most of the things that got out early in the fandom got cred just because they existed. Black alicorn mary sue oc. And you know the premise is sort of intresting if cliche, "Oh, woe with I am the big and powerful bad guy but I didn't choose this!"
>the Conversion Bureau or Five Score, Divided By For
Yeah, maybe. I don't know.
The thing is that while Glimglam has proven himself many times to be funny on his own in his reviews he cannot work on nothing. Past sins is half nothing.
That was what was so good about the Silver Star story. Because even though I like Nigel as a person and honestly think stories from him would be welcomed, they have so far been destroyed by his own autism. That was what Silver Star really was. Gilmglam did not have to stretch many braincells at times to be witty with what he got because at times Silver Star literally teleported out to fart. The autism got in the way of the story that I think could have been good with some more direction on Nigel's part.
On that note Nigel, I read the begining of your Sunrise Stardust. I don't dislike the premise, it is just that you frontloaded your story with containers worth or lore. It was like Dark Souls's intro cinematic but this time it went on for twenty minutes or something explain things we could have learnt by playing the game.
You are even aware of this as the narrator, Sunrise, comments on it at one point. Yet, you do it.
Your writing style reminds me of Lovcraft tbh. He didn't write out scenes that much either but in his case it didn't distract me as much that his dialogue was one-sided. He is good at describing how the ther party of the conversation reacts to what is being told to them with a very specific language.
Like, I don't know if you still write that way in this Sunrise story, I haven't gotten that far in yet, but basically, I think you can have a voice or style were dialogues are turned into monlogues as long as you give the speaker a distinct voice. That's another problem I have with Sunrise, I hear your voice when I read his. He can still have your opinions but you could make a voice that is more distinct in the mannerisms that it uses.
Wait, how did I end up talking about this? Whatever. Read Shadow of Innsmouth. It is a very good story and you will be able to see why you and he are similar. Honestly, almost all of his mcs are people alike him, which isn't unusual for writers in general, but like even their voices and so the same. They appricated what he appricated and so on.
You are similar.
>>249147
>TEN THOUSAND FISTS IN MY ASS
That right there! That is exactly how fucking awkward and corny and stupid all this "Elaborate Fiction Swearing" sounds. By Thor's Beard sounds alright on its own, "By the ten thousand planes of hell" sounds daft, and "Luna fuck my asshole with her dick-sized clitoris" just fucking sounds stupid.
>TEN THOUSAND FISTS IN MY ASS
That right there! That is exactly how fucking awkward and corny and stupid all this "Elaborate Fiction Swearing" sounds. By Thor's Beard sounds alright on its own, "By the ten thousand planes of hell" sounds daft, and "Luna fuck my asshole with her dick-sized clitoris" just fucking sounds stupid.
>>249191
Conversion Bureau is something this whole site should hate. It's defeatist "Humanity is so ugly and brutish and le pony invaders will show us the light and convert us into what we should have been all along! Life on earth is sad and short and resources are scarce but magic makes resources infinite in Equestria!" dreck.
Even though scarcity canonically exists in Equestria (Applejack needed money for Granny's hip)
and even though a ton of other shit.
Humanity just rolls over and plays dead for Equestria as this Anti-Humanity barrier spreads to "Obliterate humanity on contact for lacking souls you can only grow by becoming part pony. Take the pony potion for 300 more years of life in a happier and kinder world!".
All the countries stop warring to make Conversion Bureaus and only the occasional "Pro-Human Terrorist" ever tries to fight back by blowing up easily-replacable conversion bureaus or random buildings full of people because fuck goals, the writer thinks all terrorists are as omni-hating as muzzies are.
Also there are "Anti-Human Terrorists" who splash crowds with Ponification Potion instead of milkshakes.
The story could have pulled something clever by having different countries develop their own potion variants. Maybe the rich get good potions while the working-class poor get shit ones. Becoming ugly deformed anthros. Or twist it around, the rich become Unicorns who end up useless for knowing less about magic than the average filly and having no redeeming personality features while friendly Earth Pony former-workers happily leave the sweatshops for an honest day farming wheat and ploughing kind trustworthy mares until you find The One.
And what is there to say about (I had to look this up before I remembered I read it once years ago) Five Score Divided by Four?
Oh no, humans are shapeshifting into canon ponies. Why? Because Discord sent them all there 24 years ago as humans because lol why not. It's faggy transformation-fic fetish bullshit on the level of Pokeumans.
The most popular story in the "Five score divided by fourverse" is a story where the dude that was once Cadence goes back home to Shining Armour, who wants to plough himher.
It's super gay and I can't think of anything funny or clever to say about it.
Is...
Is it weird that the most popular Verse-Starting Fanfics offer an excuse to write a faggy story where you mentally regress into a child in a happy world where you adopt a random daughteru, or enjoy the lovely new world while taking revenge on this gay earth by writing about it going to shit, or become a happy pony shooting fallout guns in sad world to kill raiders and feel cool, or dress up like some faggy anime character for an unironic playtime in toybox-land, or turn out to have really been a pony all along, or leave behind a gayer earth for a simulated pony fantasy SAO-VRchat world where mares can be anything and you can fuck whoever you want however you want and you're the power-tripping admin of your own private world of warcraft server?
Is it weird that the most popular pony fanfics of all time are so fucking gay?
I saw more creative things get critical acclaim in the Pokemon and Naruto fandoms.
Conversion Bureau is something this whole site should hate. It's defeatist "Humanity is so ugly and brutish and le pony invaders will show us the light and convert us into what we should have been all along! Life on earth is sad and short and resources are scarce but magic makes resources infinite in Equestria!" dreck.
Even though scarcity canonically exists in Equestria (Applejack needed money for Granny's hip)
and even though a ton of other shit.
Humanity just rolls over and plays dead for Equestria as this Anti-Humanity barrier spreads to "Obliterate humanity on contact for lacking souls you can only grow by becoming part pony. Take the pony potion for 300 more years of life in a happier and kinder world!".
All the countries stop warring to make Conversion Bureaus and only the occasional "Pro-Human Terrorist" ever tries to fight back by blowing up easily-replacable conversion bureaus or random buildings full of people because fuck goals, the writer thinks all terrorists are as omni-hating as muzzies are.
Also there are "Anti-Human Terrorists" who splash crowds with Ponification Potion instead of milkshakes.
The story could have pulled something clever by having different countries develop their own potion variants. Maybe the rich get good potions while the working-class poor get shit ones. Becoming ugly deformed anthros. Or twist it around, the rich become Unicorns who end up useless for knowing less about magic than the average filly and having no redeeming personality features while friendly Earth Pony former-workers happily leave the sweatshops for an honest day farming wheat and ploughing kind trustworthy mares until you find The One.
And what is there to say about (I had to look this up before I remembered I read it once years ago) Five Score Divided by Four?
Oh no, humans are shapeshifting into canon ponies. Why? Because Discord sent them all there 24 years ago as humans because lol why not. It's faggy transformation-fic fetish bullshit on the level of Pokeumans.
The most popular story in the "Five score divided by fourverse" is a story where the dude that was once Cadence goes back home to Shining Armour, who wants to plough himher.
It's super gay and I can't think of anything funny or clever to say about it.
Is...
Is it weird that the most popular Verse-Starting Fanfics offer an excuse to write a faggy story where you mentally regress into a child in a happy world where you adopt a random daughteru, or enjoy the lovely new world while taking revenge on this gay earth by writing about it going to shit, or become a happy pony shooting fallout guns in sad world to kill raiders and feel cool, or dress up like some faggy anime character for an unironic playtime in toybox-land, or turn out to have really been a pony all along, or leave behind a gayer earth for a simulated pony fantasy SAO-VRchat world where mares can be anything and you can fuck whoever you want however you want and you're the power-tripping admin of your own private world of warcraft server?
Is it weird that the most popular pony fanfics of all time are so fucking gay?
I saw more creative things get critical acclaim in the Pokemon and Naruto fandoms.
>>249226
also I hear Conversion Bureau was written by some guy who accidentally made it anti-human, gave up on the story, handed the reins over to a bitchy woman, and she ended up going full retard
I hear she also became a tranny, failed, and quietly regrets trying
also I hear Conversion Bureau was written by some guy who accidentally made it anti-human, gave up on the story, handed the reins over to a bitchy woman, and she ended up going full retard
I hear she also became a tranny, failed, and quietly regrets trying
>>249227
>>249226
>>249142
>>249143
>>249144
>>249145
>>249146
>>249217
>Sorry, should I save this autism for a different thread? I don't want this thread to hit bump limit before you're done with Nyx's story.
We all appreciate your enthusiasm Nigel, but let's please try to keep the autism at least focused on the fic being presently discussed.
>>249226
>>249142
>>249143
>>249144
>>249145
>>249146
>>249217
>Sorry, should I save this autism for a different thread? I don't want this thread to hit bump limit before you're done with Nyx's story.
We all appreciate your enthusiasm Nigel, but let's please try to keep the autism at least focused on the fic being presently discussed.
>>249229
ok
I think Nyx was written to take advantage of the brony instinct to protect a little filly.
Plus even before the Alicorning, Twilight was the face of the show and the most popular pony.
This story doesn't feel like a story someone dreamed up and wanted to tell. It feels formulaic and dishonest. Like a product made according to factory specification.
ok
I think Nyx was written to take advantage of the brony instinct to protect a little filly.
Plus even before the Alicorning, Twilight was the face of the show and the most popular pony.
This story doesn't feel like a story someone dreamed up and wanted to tell. It feels formulaic and dishonest. Like a product made according to factory specification.
>>249128
Anyway, I kind of got off on a tangent during my last post, but basically the subchapter ends with Twilight patting Nyx on the head, giving her the usual Equestrian boilerplate advice about the importance of making friends, and shoos her off to class.
Before I read further, I'm going to make a prediction about how this is going to go. Then, I'm going to read further, and see if I'm right. If I am, then all it means is that my first impressions continue to hold, and that this story is continuing to shape up into a by-the-numbers MLP story with absolutely no twists and/or turns worth mentioning. However, if I'm wrong, it means that Peen Stroke still has a bit of creativity somewhere in his bones and may yet pleasantly surprise me. Let's see how it goes.
My prediction for the "Nyx goes to school" story arc:
Nyx doesn't like school because she's scared of everything and feels she doesn't fit in. This is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy, since her behavior and "outsider" status makes her a prime target for bullying, probably at the hands of Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon since they're usually the go-to for that kind of thing. Cheerilee will like her new student and see that she is bright, but will also be perplexed by her inability to socialize and will ultimately leave her to her own devices to navigate the Machiavellian intrigues of elementary school social life. The rest of the students, though probably not approving of the bullying, will nonetheless shun Nyx as well. At this point, one of the CMC, probably Apple Bloom, will suggest bringing Nyx into the fold since she has nopony else. The other two will be initially reticent to do so because they are as put off by Nyx's indefinable "outsider" aura as all the other students (and Cheerilee as well, though she would probably not admit she thinks this way). However, they will ultimately come to agree and Nyx will befriend them and become a de-facto Crusader. Eventually, Nyx will do something overpowered and Mary Sue-ish, either in self-defense against a bully, or she will be somehow tricked or goaded into it by said bully. This will cause the entire class and Cheerilee to become even more suspicious and hostile to her, to the point that even the CMC shun her. At this point Nyx will become angry at the unfairness of it all, conclude that friendship is actually not magic at all, and then something something anger oh god the edge.
If you've read the story and know whether or not this prediction is accurate, please don't tell me. I want to see if my powers of story prediction are as spot-on as I arrogantly believe them to be.
Anyway, I kind of got off on a tangent during my last post, but basically the subchapter ends with Twilight patting Nyx on the head, giving her the usual Equestrian boilerplate advice about the importance of making friends, and shoos her off to class.
Before I read further, I'm going to make a prediction about how this is going to go. Then, I'm going to read further, and see if I'm right. If I am, then all it means is that my first impressions continue to hold, and that this story is continuing to shape up into a by-the-numbers MLP story with absolutely no twists and/or turns worth mentioning. However, if I'm wrong, it means that Peen Stroke still has a bit of creativity somewhere in his bones and may yet pleasantly surprise me. Let's see how it goes.
My prediction for the "Nyx goes to school" story arc:
Nyx doesn't like school because she's scared of everything and feels she doesn't fit in. This is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy, since her behavior and "outsider" status makes her a prime target for bullying, probably at the hands of Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon since they're usually the go-to for that kind of thing. Cheerilee will like her new student and see that she is bright, but will also be perplexed by her inability to socialize and will ultimately leave her to her own devices to navigate the Machiavellian intrigues of elementary school social life. The rest of the students, though probably not approving of the bullying, will nonetheless shun Nyx as well. At this point, one of the CMC, probably Apple Bloom, will suggest bringing Nyx into the fold since she has nopony else. The other two will be initially reticent to do so because they are as put off by Nyx's indefinable "outsider" aura as all the other students (and Cheerilee as well, though she would probably not admit she thinks this way). However, they will ultimately come to agree and Nyx will befriend them and become a de-facto Crusader. Eventually, Nyx will do something overpowered and Mary Sue-ish, either in self-defense against a bully, or she will be somehow tricked or goaded into it by said bully. This will cause the entire class and Cheerilee to become even more suspicious and hostile to her, to the point that even the CMC shun her. At this point Nyx will become angry at the unfairness of it all, conclude that friendship is actually not magic at all, and then something something anger oh god the edge.
If you've read the story and know whether or not this prediction is accurate, please don't tell me. I want to see if my powers of story prediction are as spot-on as I arrogantly believe them to be.
*trying not to spoil*
>>249230
>I think Nyx was written to take advantage of the brony instinct to protect a little filly.
This is probably more or less accurate. A lot of anime plays to that instinct as well and I think that's why those kinds of shows tend to be popular. I think it also plays a bit to the brony instinct to be a little filly, since it also has a bit of the "Mommy Twilight" dynamic that the Anonfilly concept has, although frankly I think Anonfilly is a better character.
In all fairness I can probably give this story the benefit of the doubt to some extent because I suspect most of the early-era fandom (2010-2013 or so) consisted of people who were either in high school or had recently finished high school. The kinds of stories that people that age like to read and write, particularly the kind of people who end up in odd subculture niches like the Pony fandom, usually revolve around the same kinds of predictable themes. Teenage and post-teenage authors also tend to come up with painfully formulaic plots that they genuinely believe to be original, and are usually packed to the gills with wish-fulfillment fantasy and projection (I wrote some pretty cringey stuff myself at that age). Considering that this story was written I think circa 2012 and was probably the author's first ambitious project, and if the age of the author at the time was somewhere between 17 and 22 as I suspect, it probably deserves to at least be called a respectable first effort. However, that won't stop me from taking a massive shit on it and making gay jokes about the author at every possible opportunity, because that's just kind of what I do :^)
>I think Nyx was written to take advantage of the brony instinct to protect a little filly.
This is probably more or less accurate. A lot of anime plays to that instinct as well and I think that's why those kinds of shows tend to be popular. I think it also plays a bit to the brony instinct to be a little filly, since it also has a bit of the "Mommy Twilight" dynamic that the Anonfilly concept has, although frankly I think Anonfilly is a better character.
In all fairness I can probably give this story the benefit of the doubt to some extent because I suspect most of the early-era fandom (2010-2013 or so) consisted of people who were either in high school or had recently finished high school. The kinds of stories that people that age like to read and write, particularly the kind of people who end up in odd subculture niches like the Pony fandom, usually revolve around the same kinds of predictable themes. Teenage and post-teenage authors also tend to come up with painfully formulaic plots that they genuinely believe to be original, and are usually packed to the gills with wish-fulfillment fantasy and projection (I wrote some pretty cringey stuff myself at that age). Considering that this story was written I think circa 2012 and was probably the author's first ambitious project, and if the age of the author at the time was somewhere between 17 and 22 as I suspect, it probably deserves to at least be called a respectable first effort. However, that won't stop me from taking a massive shit on it and making gay jokes about the author at every possible opportunity, because that's just kind of what I do :^)
>>248959
As one who very much doesn't want to read the 200,000 word story, could you just clarify something? Does it simply jump from meeting Nyx and nothing is said to bath-time at the castle? Like, no dialogue, no exposition? No "holy-fuck-shit its an alicorn"? Is there even a flashback sequence that goes over why Twilight would go from terrified at the Nightmare Moon eyes to giving filly a bath?
As one who very much doesn't want to read the 200,000 word story, could you just clarify something? Does it simply jump from meeting Nyx and nothing is said to bath-time at the castle? Like, no dialogue, no exposition? No "holy-fuck-shit its an alicorn"? Is there even a flashback sequence that goes over why Twilight would go from terrified at the Nightmare Moon eyes to giving filly a bath?
>>249231
>implying it even matters what predictions you make when youcould just have read ahead before making it.
I'm just kidding. I trust you.
>implying it even matters what predictions you make when youcould just have read ahead before making it.
I'm just kidding. I trust you.
>>249234
>I think Anonfilly is a better character.
>Twilight the wine-aunt
You could simultanously read assfaggots annonfilly green. In it, anonfilly is adopted by Twilight against his/her will because Twilight lost her ability to give birth after her trancdence to alicornhood.
That way you could do a comparison between them and see which youthink is the superior story with about the same story. Of course, minus the foal of the story being satan.
It is just a sugguestion.
>I think Anonfilly is a better character.
>Twilight the wine-aunt
You could simultanously read assfaggots annonfilly green. In it, anonfilly is adopted by Twilight against his/her will because Twilight lost her ability to give birth after her trancdence to alicornhood.
That way you could do a comparison between them and see which youthink is the superior story with about the same story. Of course, minus the foal of the story being satan.
It is just a sugguestion.
>>249236
I wouldn't say that it leaps, but it does a very poor job of building the relationship, and Twilight's instant mother-daughter bond with Nyx doesn't feel genuine. Mostly my complaint about it is that Nyx is treated as just kind of a passive presence and most of the narrative is just Twilight yammering to herself about Nightmare Moon. The superficial plot is that Twilight goes into the woods to look for her bookbag, finds the filly hiding in the bushes, is initially frightened by her resemblance to Nightmare Moon, but sees that she is also a scared and defenseless child and can't just be left alone. All of this makes enough sense, but it starts to get implausible when Twilight decides that she doesn't want to bring the strange filly to the Princess, which would have been the logical course of action. The superficial explanation is that Twilight is afraid the Princess will send the filly to the Moon, which is retarded. It's basically a flimsy excuse that Twilight comes up with because she wants to take care of the filly herself, which we are supposed to believe is because she formed some kind of bond with her. This would make perfect sense if the author had established such a bond between the two characters, but he does a poor job of it imo, and the whole thing is unconvincing.
Really my problem with this so far is not just that the story is formulaic. Plenty of things have been written that follow established formulas to the letter, that can still be enjoyed if they're done well. If the author manages to create characters you care about and make the story emotionally engaging, it doesn't matter if you can see the ending coming a mile away. I played a quickie adventure game last night called Serena that was like this. I had the ending figured out about a quarter of the way through, but it was beautifully written and executed so I still thought it was a fantastic game.
Anyway, I don't blame you for not wanting to slog through all 200,000 words, but if you're curious you can skim what I've covered so far without a huge time investment. The prologue is basically just Snidely Whiplash tying the woman to the train tracks and cackling maniacally until the cavalry shows up, so you can skip it without missing anything too crucial. I'd start at about the third sub-chapter of Ch. 1 and read until the end of the chapter, that should tell you all you need to know about Twilight and Nyx's relationship so far.
I wouldn't say that it leaps, but it does a very poor job of building the relationship, and Twilight's instant mother-daughter bond with Nyx doesn't feel genuine. Mostly my complaint about it is that Nyx is treated as just kind of a passive presence and most of the narrative is just Twilight yammering to herself about Nightmare Moon. The superficial plot is that Twilight goes into the woods to look for her bookbag, finds the filly hiding in the bushes, is initially frightened by her resemblance to Nightmare Moon, but sees that she is also a scared and defenseless child and can't just be left alone. All of this makes enough sense, but it starts to get implausible when Twilight decides that she doesn't want to bring the strange filly to the Princess, which would have been the logical course of action. The superficial explanation is that Twilight is afraid the Princess will send the filly to the Moon, which is retarded. It's basically a flimsy excuse that Twilight comes up with because she wants to take care of the filly herself, which we are supposed to believe is because she formed some kind of bond with her. This would make perfect sense if the author had established such a bond between the two characters, but he does a poor job of it imo, and the whole thing is unconvincing.
Really my problem with this so far is not just that the story is formulaic. Plenty of things have been written that follow established formulas to the letter, that can still be enjoyed if they're done well. If the author manages to create characters you care about and make the story emotionally engaging, it doesn't matter if you can see the ending coming a mile away. I played a quickie adventure game last night called Serena that was like this. I had the ending figured out about a quarter of the way through, but it was beautifully written and executed so I still thought it was a fantastic game.
Anyway, I don't blame you for not wanting to slog through all 200,000 words, but if you're curious you can skim what I've covered so far without a huge time investment. The prologue is basically just Snidely Whiplash tying the woman to the train tracks and cackling maniacally until the cavalry shows up, so you can skip it without missing anything too crucial. I'd start at about the third sub-chapter of Ch. 1 and read until the end of the chapter, that should tell you all you need to know about Twilight and Nyx's relationship so far.
>>249226
>I saw more creative things get critical acclaim in the Pokemon and Naruto fandoms.
I have seen better things in other fandoms as well. Well, it depends on where you look. There are good fics on fimfiction. It is just that they are buried under so many "other" fics that it is hard to find them. That's why the system, for example, in fanfiction.net is superior to the one on fimfic cause they don't have a rating system
and there is not feature page either. It is just, "Here are the fics that have been recently updated."
>I saw more creative things get critical acclaim in the Pokemon and Naruto fandoms.
I have seen better things in other fandoms as well. Well, it depends on where you look. There are good fics on fimfiction. It is just that they are buried under so many "other" fics that it is hard to find them. That's why the system, for example, in fanfiction.net is superior to the one on fimfic cause they don't have a rating system
and there is not feature page either. It is just, "Here are the fics that have been recently updated."
>>249239
Now that I think about it Anonfilly is probably where my wine-aunt Twilight came from. I used to lurk the AF threads and read some of the greens but haven't in a while, if you've got a link to a post number I'd be curious to have a look at that story.
>>249231
Before I go any further with this, I would like to say that I just found the fictional bio the author wrote about himself, located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BMo0-TxMZ-nMp8UNvujS62vPKURjw2-h5ID847okQmQ/edit?hl=en_US . As a result of having read this, I now legitimately want to punch his pony avatar in the face.
Anyway, on with the text.
>Nyx nodded gently as she looked out across the sixteen desks.
How is it possible to be such an autistic fan of something that you actually sit and count the number of desks in the fictional classroom just so you can portray it accurately in your own story, and yet manage to fuck up an obvious detail like calling a Pinkie Promise a Pinkie Pie Promise? This is an incredibly minor and autistic thing for me to notice let alone rage about, and that is exactly why it is going to bug the crap out of me.
>Directly to her right was an earth pony with a grayish-magenta coat and a mane that was a mixture of white and violet. Nyx couldn’t help but notice she was wearing a tiara very similar to the one she had for a cutie mark.
Called it :^)
>Nyx slumped in her seat at the dismissal and rested her head on the desk. She glanced at the other fillies and colts in class, but those who happened to be looking her way quickly turned their heads back to the front when she glanced in their direction.
>Frowning and turning her head towards the front, Nyx watched Cheerilee write on the chalkboard as her mind came to a single, solid, and in her opinion, undeniable conclusion.
>School was not going to be fun at all.
Called it :^)
>School was amazing!
Okay, that one took me by surprise I'll admit.
>So, Cheerilee couldn’t help but smile when she saw a particular black hoof in the air, one she had seen raised several times over the course of the morning.
However, I will make this addendum to my original prediction: the reason she gets bullied is her outsider status, her spergy behavior, and the fact that she's a know-it-all who is too smart for her own good, drives up the grading curve and makes everypony late for recess. Give me an 'M', give me an 'A', give me an 'R'....
>And Cheerilee was off, going a little deeper into her lecture than she had intended. Nyx was happy and was already jotting down fresh notes. Her note-taking, however, was interrupted when something hit the side of her head. Looking down at the floor, she saw it was a piece of paper, and, upon looking up, she saw a number of her classmates were glaring at her coldly.
Called it :^) inb4 the crumpled up paper contains crudely drawn rule 34 of her
>Under the unforgiving glares of her classmates, Nyx could only sink into her desk and whimper a little. She didn't know what she had done wrong. She had just asked a question. She was just curious.
"Oh, these others just don't understand me. I have done nothing wrong and yet they persecute me so! Woe is me, life is so difficult when you are super-awesome and super-intelligent and the natural best at everything! Who in this dreary world can understand my infinite sadness, my infinite pain?"
t. every self-insert mary sue OC ever
>Apple Bloom stood back to wait her turn. She watched Twist swing higher and higher, her own smile growing as Twist reached impressive heights. It wasn’t the highest Apple Bloom had seen somepony reach on the swing, but it was still respectable.
I had almost managed to forget that Twist is an actual character who exists in this universe, and that there is absolutely nothing I nor anyone else can do about it. Thank you for reminding me.
>“So, like, we don’t appreciate nerds like you making us almost miss recess.”
Cue author's obligatory self-insert of his own unhappy school days receiving wedgies from the football team, probably for writing shit like this:
>As to why he has books on his head, the earth pony finds it a more convenient way to carry books when at work, since he lacks magic and doesn’t like wearing saddlebags all day. Though, since he’s gotten so good at it, there are times Pen Stroke will walk around with books on his head for hours, having simply forgotten that they were there.
Anyway, moving on.
>That class is already soooo boring without you asking a bunch of questions. We get enough of that from Twist, don’t we, Diamond Tiara?
>Yes we do, Silver Spoon, but at least Twist is bearable. She also doesn’t have an ugly coat, like yours.
Reminder, purely for the sake of reference, that pic related (spoilered because I love you people) is Twist.
Look, I don't care how shitty the story author's OC is or how late you are to recess because of her obnoxious Mary-Sueing, >implying that somepony's visual design is actually worse than Twist is just crossing a line. That's crossing like ten lines. If I were Nyx I would use my Mary Sue Final Attack™ and vaporize Ponyville right then and there.
Anyway, blah blah blah. This goes about how you would expect it to. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon do their usual schtick where they make fun of Nyx's physical appearance Cue series creator Lauren Faust's obligatory self-insert of her own unhappy school days getting picked on by the rich, popular girls :^). Nyx, predictably, has no idea why these ponies are being so meanie-pants to her when all she wanted to do was learn, and stands there pitifully and just takes it. Cue sad violin music. Cue obligatory blank-flank remarks from DT and SS when they notice that Nyx has no cutie mark. Cue Apple Bloom suddenly showing up to save the day.
Now that I think about it Anonfilly is probably where my wine-aunt Twilight came from. I used to lurk the AF threads and read some of the greens but haven't in a while, if you've got a link to a post number I'd be curious to have a look at that story.
>>249231
Before I go any further with this, I would like to say that I just found the fictional bio the author wrote about himself, located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BMo0-TxMZ-nMp8UNvujS62vPKURjw2-h5ID847okQmQ/edit?hl=en_US . As a result of having read this, I now legitimately want to punch his pony avatar in the face.
Anyway, on with the text.
>Nyx nodded gently as she looked out across the sixteen desks.
How is it possible to be such an autistic fan of something that you actually sit and count the number of desks in the fictional classroom just so you can portray it accurately in your own story, and yet manage to fuck up an obvious detail like calling a Pinkie Promise a Pinkie Pie Promise? This is an incredibly minor and autistic thing for me to notice let alone rage about, and that is exactly why it is going to bug the crap out of me.
>Directly to her right was an earth pony with a grayish-magenta coat and a mane that was a mixture of white and violet. Nyx couldn’t help but notice she was wearing a tiara very similar to the one she had for a cutie mark.
Called it :^)
>Nyx slumped in her seat at the dismissal and rested her head on the desk. She glanced at the other fillies and colts in class, but those who happened to be looking her way quickly turned their heads back to the front when she glanced in their direction.
>Frowning and turning her head towards the front, Nyx watched Cheerilee write on the chalkboard as her mind came to a single, solid, and in her opinion, undeniable conclusion.
>School was not going to be fun at all.
Called it :^)
>School was amazing!
Okay, that one took me by surprise I'll admit.
>So, Cheerilee couldn’t help but smile when she saw a particular black hoof in the air, one she had seen raised several times over the course of the morning.
However, I will make this addendum to my original prediction: the reason she gets bullied is her outsider status, her spergy behavior, and the fact that she's a know-it-all who is too smart for her own good, drives up the grading curve and makes everypony late for recess. Give me an 'M', give me an 'A', give me an 'R'....
>And Cheerilee was off, going a little deeper into her lecture than she had intended. Nyx was happy and was already jotting down fresh notes. Her note-taking, however, was interrupted when something hit the side of her head. Looking down at the floor, she saw it was a piece of paper, and, upon looking up, she saw a number of her classmates were glaring at her coldly.
Called it :^) inb4 the crumpled up paper contains crudely drawn rule 34 of her
>Under the unforgiving glares of her classmates, Nyx could only sink into her desk and whimper a little. She didn't know what she had done wrong. She had just asked a question. She was just curious.
"Oh, these others just don't understand me. I have done nothing wrong and yet they persecute me so! Woe is me, life is so difficult when you are super-awesome and super-intelligent and the natural best at everything! Who in this dreary world can understand my infinite sadness, my infinite pain?"
t. every self-insert mary sue OC ever
>Apple Bloom stood back to wait her turn. She watched Twist swing higher and higher, her own smile growing as Twist reached impressive heights. It wasn’t the highest Apple Bloom had seen somepony reach on the swing, but it was still respectable.
I had almost managed to forget that Twist is an actual character who exists in this universe, and that there is absolutely nothing I nor anyone else can do about it. Thank you for reminding me.
>“So, like, we don’t appreciate nerds like you making us almost miss recess.”
Cue author's obligatory self-insert of his own unhappy school days receiving wedgies from the football team, probably for writing shit like this:
>As to why he has books on his head, the earth pony finds it a more convenient way to carry books when at work, since he lacks magic and doesn’t like wearing saddlebags all day. Though, since he’s gotten so good at it, there are times Pen Stroke will walk around with books on his head for hours, having simply forgotten that they were there.
Anyway, moving on.
>That class is already soooo boring without you asking a bunch of questions. We get enough of that from Twist, don’t we, Diamond Tiara?
>Yes we do, Silver Spoon, but at least Twist is bearable. She also doesn’t have an ugly coat, like yours.
Reminder, purely for the sake of reference, that pic related (spoilered because I love you people) is Twist.
Look, I don't care how shitty the story author's OC is or how late you are to recess because of her obnoxious Mary-Sueing, >implying that somepony's visual design is actually worse than Twist is just crossing a line. That's crossing like ten lines. If I were Nyx I would use my Mary Sue Final Attack™ and vaporize Ponyville right then and there.
Anyway, blah blah blah. This goes about how you would expect it to. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon do their usual schtick where they make fun of Nyx's physical appearance Cue series creator Lauren Faust's obligatory self-insert of her own unhappy school days getting picked on by the rich, popular girls :^). Nyx, predictably, has no idea why these ponies are being so meanie-pants to her when all she wanted to do was learn, and stands there pitifully and just takes it. Cue sad violin music. Cue obligatory blank-flank remarks from DT and SS when they notice that Nyx has no cutie mark. Cue Apple Bloom suddenly showing up to save the day.
>>249250
The start is a bit memey. It seems that he wasn't serious about his story in the begining, which turned into something bigger but I have really enjoyed this one.
https://pastebin.com/KhjZSSSp
The start is a bit memey. It seems that he wasn't serious about his story in the begining, which turned into something bigger but I have really enjoyed this one.
https://pastebin.com/KhjZSSSp
File (): 43F3D1C40B139E21370DCDAE583F4081-164680.png (160.8 KB, 320x320, 6237032-starlight_\\_she_wanted_to_give_it_to_you_herself\\__egs3.png)
>>249250
Anyway, in an uncharacteristic move for her, Apple Bloom physically assaults Diamond Tiara, and comes to the rescue of poor, defenseless wittle Nyx. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon threaten to tell Cheerilee on her, Apple Bloom threatens to tell Cheerilee on them. It's a bit hamfisted, but for the most part it's a pretty accurate play by play of how altercations between children generally go. cue review series author's obligatory self-insert of his own unhappy school days receiving wedgies from the football team :^)
>Apple Bloom nodded her head firmly. “Nyx is cryin’, and Twist is watchin’ the whole thing from over there on the swing.”
I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Twist is probably the most self-absorbed cunt in this entire show and is probably just over there playing on the swingset, having completely forgotten about Apple Bloom and Nyx by now, and goddamn it I hate Twist so much, I would unironically write a 30,000 word fanfiction where my overpowered self-insert Mary Sue OC yells at her and tells her why she sucks and then beats the crap out of her and sends her into another dimension reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
>Apple Bloom, however, just smirked and pointed a hoof behind her, where Twist, while still on the swings, was in fact watching what was going on.
Oh. Never mind.
>Hmph. Fine. You win this round, blank flank. Have fun with your new friend and all of her ticks.” Diamond Tiara sneered before turning away. “Let’s get out of here, Silver Spoon.”
"I'll get you next time, Gadget, NEXT TIME!!!!!!!"
>Silver Spoon stuck her tongue out at Apple Bloom as a final parting shot before she and Diamond Tiara retreated.
Oh, just kiss already, you know you want to.
Anyway, as much fun as I've had tearing this ridiculously cliched scene full of obvious projections from the author a new asshole, I'll admit I actually kind of like the characterization of Apple Bloom acting all tough and scrappy here.
Aaaaand on that note I'm starting get a bit manic and delirious from submerging myself in mediocre pony fanfiction for the better part of a day, so on that note I think I'm going to call it good for the day. The sub-chapter wraps itself up rather neatly with Apple Bloom introducing herself to Nyx, and the two of them becoming de-facto friends as a result of their shared experience in dealing with the predations of Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. I'd say that my predictions for this arc are more or less on track so far. Stay tuned.
Anyway, in an uncharacteristic move for her, Apple Bloom physically assaults Diamond Tiara, and comes to the rescue of poor, defenseless wittle Nyx. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon threaten to tell Cheerilee on her, Apple Bloom threatens to tell Cheerilee on them. It's a bit hamfisted, but for the most part it's a pretty accurate play by play of how altercations between children generally go. cue review series author's obligatory self-insert of his own unhappy school days receiving wedgies from the football team :^)
>Apple Bloom nodded her head firmly. “Nyx is cryin’, and Twist is watchin’ the whole thing from over there on the swing.”
I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Twist is probably the most self-absorbed cunt in this entire show and is probably just over there playing on the swingset, having completely forgotten about Apple Bloom and Nyx by now, and goddamn it I hate Twist so much, I would unironically write a 30,000 word fanfiction where my overpowered self-insert Mary Sue OC yells at her and tells her why she sucks and then beats the crap out of her and sends her into another dimension reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
>Apple Bloom, however, just smirked and pointed a hoof behind her, where Twist, while still on the swings, was in fact watching what was going on.
Oh. Never mind.
>Hmph. Fine. You win this round, blank flank. Have fun with your new friend and all of her ticks.” Diamond Tiara sneered before turning away. “Let’s get out of here, Silver Spoon.”
"I'll get you next time, Gadget, NEXT TIME!!!!!!!"
>Silver Spoon stuck her tongue out at Apple Bloom as a final parting shot before she and Diamond Tiara retreated.
Oh, just kiss already, you know you want to.
Anyway, as much fun as I've had tearing this ridiculously cliched scene full of obvious projections from the author a new asshole, I'll admit I actually kind of like the characterization of Apple Bloom acting all tough and scrappy here.
Aaaaand on that note I'm starting get a bit manic and delirious from submerging myself in mediocre pony fanfiction for the better part of a day, so on that note I think I'm going to call it good for the day. The sub-chapter wraps itself up rather neatly with Apple Bloom introducing herself to Nyx, and the two of them becoming de-facto friends as a result of their shared experience in dealing with the predations of Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. I'd say that my predictions for this arc are more or less on track so far. Stay tuned.
>>249250
>>249252
That Nyx doesn't know how to act around other children feels like a character flaw to me, rather than a mary-sue trait. Iirc Nyx goes on to show a startling disregard for others numerous more times throughout the fic. It's worth remembering that (spoilers) Nyx is Nightmare Moon, and that Past Sins is a Nightmare Moon redemption arc and as such Nyx can't really be a good person til she's learned her lesson at the end. At least, that's the way I seem to be remembering it from the one time I read it like 7 years ago.
>>249252
That Nyx doesn't know how to act around other children feels like a character flaw to me, rather than a mary-sue trait. Iirc Nyx goes on to show a startling disregard for others numerous more times throughout the fic. It's worth remembering that (spoilers) Nyx is Nightmare Moon, and that Past Sins is a Nightmare Moon redemption arc and as such Nyx can't really be a good person til she's learned her lesson at the end. At least, that's the way I seem to be remembering it from the one time I read it like 7 years ago.
Hey if I make a post and then delete it does the thread still stay bumped to front page?
File (): B32F937B274FFAF82A27DA9B2868F825-491624.png (480.1 KB, 2000x1314, NyxLookingAtComputer.png)
>>249250
Except she never really shows a "startling disregard" for others but rather just goes along with people until she doesn't. Nyx is just wet paper for most of the fic.
>>249234
It's a pretty good explanation. Also, most large fandoms by definition are going to have a low bar for content because a good number are either mentally children or want to be mentally a child. Just look at DB. Also because of this desire for fantasies a large proportion are trannies or degenerates in general.
Timing is especially important as when a fandom is young it'll latch onto anything that is of reasonable competence. Therefore the content will grab a large proportion of the fandom and even later on the nostalgia element will exist. Late in a fandom it's practically impossible to magically enthrall people the same way simply because the market is so saturated and even a masterpiece will be relatively ignored due to flooding from Pareto's Law. DB can be used again as an example; early on you didn't have to be great, just reasonably good, to get a thousand upvotes. Nowadays there is so much trash circulating that even a beautiful landscape painting will probably get less attention than SFM futa anthro #92485, unless if it's by the handful of artists who already have large dedicated followings.
I've let myself be dragged into only a couple of major fandoms, which are Undertale (kill me please) and MLP after I discovered /mlpol/. Although by all means there's been excellent and beautiful work that was greatly helped along by being in a fandom, the negatives are so large and revolting that I can't help but think fandoms are a cultural disease. I'm so dismayed that I've been going over in my head the metaphysics and social psychology of fanbases. Is it because degenerates join fandoms or is there something about fandoms that turn people into fawning brainless degenerates?
Except she never really shows a "startling disregard" for others but rather just goes along with people until she doesn't. Nyx is just wet paper for most of the fic.
>>249234
It's a pretty good explanation. Also, most large fandoms by definition are going to have a low bar for content because a good number are either mentally children or want to be mentally a child. Just look at DB. Also because of this desire for fantasies a large proportion are trannies or degenerates in general.
Timing is especially important as when a fandom is young it'll latch onto anything that is of reasonable competence. Therefore the content will grab a large proportion of the fandom and even later on the nostalgia element will exist. Late in a fandom it's practically impossible to magically enthrall people the same way simply because the market is so saturated and even a masterpiece will be relatively ignored due to flooding from Pareto's Law. DB can be used again as an example; early on you didn't have to be great, just reasonably good, to get a thousand upvotes. Nowadays there is so much trash circulating that even a beautiful landscape painting will probably get less attention than SFM futa anthro #92485, unless if it's by the handful of artists who already have large dedicated followings.
I've let myself be dragged into only a couple of major fandoms, which are Undertale (kill me please) and MLP after I discovered /mlpol/. Although by all means there's been excellent and beautiful work that was greatly helped along by being in a fandom, the negatives are so large and revolting that I can't help but think fandoms are a cultural disease. I'm so dismayed that I've been going over in my head the metaphysics and social psychology of fanbases. Is it because degenerates join fandoms or is there something about fandoms that turn people into fawning brainless degenerates?
>>249331
>Is it because degenerates join fandoms or is there something about fandoms that turn people into fawning brainless degenerates?
I think it's a little bit of both. Like the transference of heat energy until a stable median is reached, so too does a community of people tend towards stability in the behaviour of its members. As a social animal, people are (usually) hardwired to adopt the prevailing attitudes of the larger group, as they do, they may temper the attitudes of the group they're joining. Evidence of this can be seen on 4chan especially. As the site became more mainstream, the attitudes of its users in general became less edgy apart from the obvious outliers.
So for MLP in particular, it tends towards degeneracy and autism because that's what the fanwork sections of the community attract, those who are not may alter their behaviour over time to better match the dominant community attitude as a defence mechanism to avoid ostracisation. A fandom is effectively a microcosm of wider society, so there's something here about demographic shift, too.
>Is it because degenerates join fandoms or is there something about fandoms that turn people into fawning brainless degenerates?
I think it's a little bit of both. Like the transference of heat energy until a stable median is reached, so too does a community of people tend towards stability in the behaviour of its members. As a social animal, people are (usually) hardwired to adopt the prevailing attitudes of the larger group, as they do, they may temper the attitudes of the group they're joining. Evidence of this can be seen on 4chan especially. As the site became more mainstream, the attitudes of its users in general became less edgy apart from the obvious outliers.
So for MLP in particular, it tends towards degeneracy and autism because that's what the fanwork sections of the community attract, those who are not may alter their behaviour over time to better match the dominant community attitude as a defence mechanism to avoid ostracisation. A fandom is effectively a microcosm of wider society, so there's something here about demographic shift, too.
>>249331
Fandoms are mini-religions people make to make their godless lives in a cultureless multikulticulture feel more meaningful.
You're just another disposable unwanted white in the general pozzed American culture. And in the general art culture. But in the Undertale culture, your crappy art of Sans and his Dad posing like a father and son gets upvotes.
The fandom wants to see MORE of a piece of media, while circlejerking over it and gobbling up anything safely similar enough.
If you wanted to be the Biggest Christian, you'd be a good person.
If you wanted to be the Biggest Muslim, you'd blow shit up.
But these corporatist neo-religions don't have an agreed-upon set of morals or virtues. Their only uniting feature is the Product and their adoration for it.
So if you want to look like The Biggest Pokemon Fan, you buy all the merch and wear all the merch and fill your room with merch and defend the faggy laziness of the devs online and get thousands of upvotes for showing off your childish merch-filled room on reddit. You want to look like the biggest lover of a Product and its only "Real" fan, REEEEEEEEEEEing to purge dissent from its ranks.
If the fandom has some semblance of moral beliefs like "Being accepting is good" or "Being kind is good", that's a poor substitution for a proper set of morals but it's something.
Look at Derpibooru. Full of faggoted lefty Glimmerniggers who want the easy acceptance and popularity that comes with being part of this "Accepting" community, desperate to infiltrate and subvert the fandom into being their personal defense squad. Winning pointless "Internet Drama" screaming matches between faggy children is all they care about. Debunk their arguments and they censor you where they can. Piss one off and they'll never stop hating you, years later. When I posted my recent pony art on Derpibooru I had faggots commenting saying "Ugh, it's YOU" and I didn't even recognize who these perpetually-butthurt weaponized crybullies were.
A positive fandom? Is a community that celebrates the greatness of a product and pledges to buy more of it. A positive community tries to appreciate the art as much as possible, analyzing stories and learning all the mechanics of a game or making fanart and fangames or whatever. A positive fandom is creative and fun, because it channels its fanatic energy positively.
A psychotic, out of control, toxic fandom? Is one the lefties have successfully taken over and turned into a popularity contest where those with "Wrong Opinions" get bullied and being useful to the community is the only thing the community considers moral.
The Sonic The Hedgehog community makes fangames that are often better than what Sonic Team shits out these days.
The Steven Universe community bullies children into suicide attempts over SocJus doctrine violations.
The DMC community makes cool combo mad videos as people have fun with this game for thousands of hours and learn all the moves and inputs.
The fighting game community celebrates awesome fighting games, shits on bad ones, and happily teaches newbies how to get good.
The Jojo's community is a circlejerk of repetitive meme-obsessed children, but occasionally people make good fangames in it
The Skyrim and Fallout NV and Fallout 4 communities still put out free mods unquestionably better than what Bethesda is selling at a premium.
The Pokemon Youtuber community makes the Pony Analyst community look comparatively AIDS-free as everyone plays damage control for Game Freak's unquestionably obvious laziness in the new SwSh. Pokemon's been on a downward spiral lately and they've lost my money completely.
Fandoms are mini-religions people make to make their godless lives in a cultureless multikulticulture feel more meaningful.
You're just another disposable unwanted white in the general pozzed American culture. And in the general art culture. But in the Undertale culture, your crappy art of Sans and his Dad posing like a father and son gets upvotes.
The fandom wants to see MORE of a piece of media, while circlejerking over it and gobbling up anything safely similar enough.
If you wanted to be the Biggest Christian, you'd be a good person.
If you wanted to be the Biggest Muslim, you'd blow shit up.
But these corporatist neo-religions don't have an agreed-upon set of morals or virtues. Their only uniting feature is the Product and their adoration for it.
So if you want to look like The Biggest Pokemon Fan, you buy all the merch and wear all the merch and fill your room with merch and defend the faggy laziness of the devs online and get thousands of upvotes for showing off your childish merch-filled room on reddit. You want to look like the biggest lover of a Product and its only "Real" fan, REEEEEEEEEEEing to purge dissent from its ranks.
If the fandom has some semblance of moral beliefs like "Being accepting is good" or "Being kind is good", that's a poor substitution for a proper set of morals but it's something.
Look at Derpibooru. Full of faggoted lefty Glimmerniggers who want the easy acceptance and popularity that comes with being part of this "Accepting" community, desperate to infiltrate and subvert the fandom into being their personal defense squad. Winning pointless "Internet Drama" screaming matches between faggy children is all they care about. Debunk their arguments and they censor you where they can. Piss one off and they'll never stop hating you, years later. When I posted my recent pony art on Derpibooru I had faggots commenting saying "Ugh, it's YOU" and I didn't even recognize who these perpetually-butthurt weaponized crybullies were.
A positive fandom? Is a community that celebrates the greatness of a product and pledges to buy more of it. A positive community tries to appreciate the art as much as possible, analyzing stories and learning all the mechanics of a game or making fanart and fangames or whatever. A positive fandom is creative and fun, because it channels its fanatic energy positively.
A psychotic, out of control, toxic fandom? Is one the lefties have successfully taken over and turned into a popularity contest where those with "Wrong Opinions" get bullied and being useful to the community is the only thing the community considers moral.
The Sonic The Hedgehog community makes fangames that are often better than what Sonic Team shits out these days.
The Steven Universe community bullies children into suicide attempts over SocJus doctrine violations.
The DMC community makes cool combo mad videos as people have fun with this game for thousands of hours and learn all the moves and inputs.
The fighting game community celebrates awesome fighting games, shits on bad ones, and happily teaches newbies how to get good.
The Jojo's community is a circlejerk of repetitive meme-obsessed children, but occasionally people make good fangames in it
The Skyrim and Fallout NV and Fallout 4 communities still put out free mods unquestionably better than what Bethesda is selling at a premium.
The Pokemon Youtuber community makes the Pony Analyst community look comparatively AIDS-free as everyone plays damage control for Game Freak's unquestionably obvious laziness in the new SwSh. Pokemon's been on a downward spiral lately and they've lost my money completely.
>>249331
For an honest fan of a piece of media, good fan communities provide a place for fans of that media to nerd out openly and honestly about that product.
For a subversive faggot, any fan community is a small and easily-infiltrated group he can game and manipulate until he gets to feel like top dog or the loyal and beloved high-ranking attack dog of a top dog.
For an honest fan of a piece of media, good fan communities provide a place for fans of that media to nerd out openly and honestly about that product.
For a subversive faggot, any fan community is a small and easily-infiltrated group he can game and manipulate until he gets to feel like top dog or the loyal and beloved high-ranking attack dog of a top dog.
>>249359
>The Sonic The Hedgehog community makes fangames that are often better than what Sonic Team shits out these days.
I'm not sure if you're being selective in presenting what's a good/bad fandom or if you're unironically saying the Sonic community is "positive" but if the latter this is required viewing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCWoZEXyGU0
I agree with you on everything else though. I'd want to make a good franchise where interpreted values must necessarily be wholesome.
>The Sonic The Hedgehog community makes fangames that are often better than what Sonic Team shits out these days.
I'm not sure if you're being selective in presenting what's a good/bad fandom or if you're unironically saying the Sonic community is "positive" but if the latter this is required viewing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCWoZEXyGU0
I agree with you on everything else though. I'd want to make a good franchise where interpreted values must necessarily be wholesome.
Okkay. So far the glasses have been explained, and the vest has been explained. Where did the head-band come from? That's a rather glaring oversight considering it appears any time the glasses are present in images
Oh hey, a grown adult making fun of children on the internet for being childish and liking childish things. Never seen that before.
Some kids wrote bad fanfiction and invented bad fancharacters. I don't see anything to get angry over here. It's not like this trash is being held up by the whole fandom as "The greatest story ever" and an example of what all stories should be like.
Still, I admit, sonic fanfics/fancharacters suck. You have to take the good with the bad, I suppose. Or you just take the good and never touch the bad. I don't bother with the fan character/fanfic side of Sonic, I just like the romhacks and fangames.
Speaking of which, go play this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paaz16Nw20
Some kids wrote bad fanfiction and invented bad fancharacters. I don't see anything to get angry over here. It's not like this trash is being held up by the whole fandom as "The greatest story ever" and an example of what all stories should be like.
Still, I admit, sonic fanfics/fancharacters suck. You have to take the good with the bad, I suppose. Or you just take the good and never touch the bad. I don't bother with the fan character/fanfic side of Sonic, I just like the romhacks and fangames.
Speaking of which, go play this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paaz16Nw20
>>249463
Bruh.
I was answering someone's question.
Then the topic wandered into sonic fangames I guess.
Anyway go play that game, it's pretty good. It'll calm you down.
Bruh.
I was answering someone's question.
Then the topic wandered into sonic fangames I guess.
Anyway go play that game, it's pretty good. It'll calm you down.
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>>249252
Next up, we have a scene with Twilight and Applejack.
>It was scary, but I really didn’t have to deal with a lot of other students, being Princess Celestia’s private pupil and all.
Is that how it happened? My memory of the details of a lot of the series is rather fuzzy at times, but I seem to recall Twilight mostly being shown in a classroom with Moondancer and a bunch of other fillies. Though I assume she would have gotten private lessons from Celestia at one point, I don't think it's ever implied that she was intentionally isolated and privately tutored. In fact, as I understand it the whole premise of the show is that Celestia found Twilight to be a promising student, but was concerned that she took her studies too seriously and didn't socialize enough with the other students, so she sent her to Ponyville to make friends. Seems like a relevant detail to me somehow, idk.
>“It was really fun, and I’ve made a new friend,” Apple Bloom said with a smile before motioning to Nyx with her hoof. “Applejack, this is Nyx. Nyx, this is my big sister Applejack.”
Here's something that actually makes the earlier introduction of Nyx to AJ and the remainder of the Mane 6, which I discussed here >>249125 , even more perplexing. Recall that my whole objection was that it seemed like the author hurried through these as if he wasn't interested in writing out scenes for any of it, and that it didn't seem particularly necessary to the plot for Nyx to go around and meet all of these ponies separately.
While it stands to reason that Twilight would have wanted to spread word around town that she had a cousin visiting, it probably wasn't necessary for her to drag Nyx all over Ponyville just so she could meet every single pony she happened to be friends with, especially since she would have presumably met them all later anyway, at the party that Pinkie Pie threw in her honor. This party occurs in between the end of Chapter Two and the beginning of Chapter Three anyway, so even if the author has some reason why Nyx would need to be acquainted with AJ, RD, and FS at this point, she could be presumed to have met them without the circumstances being explicitly laid out. Furthermore, from a narrative standpoint, it feels off just dumping all the introductions into a single paragraph and rushing through them just to get it out of the way, if Nyx and these other characters don't need to have any scenes together for a while. I would have probably just done the scene at Rarity's and the scene with Pinkie Pie, and then left the reader to assume that Nyx would have met the others at the party.
>“You already know my big sister?” Apple Bloom asked in return, reflecting Nyx’s confusion.
>“She should,” Applejack interrupted. “Twilight brought Nyx around the orchards yesterday.”
>“Why would she do that?” Apple Bloom asked, cocking her head to one side.
>“Because Nyx is my cousin, and she’s staying with me at the library while she’s here in Ponyville,” Twilight answered with her simple lie.
See, this is even stupider. Now you're doubling back on yourself to re-explain something you didn't even need to explain in the first place. Also, either I've got the order of events in this story all wrong, or there's a continuity error here, because I feel like it's been at least a couple of days since Twilight introduced Nyx to the others. Has the party at Pinkie Pie's even happened yet? I assumed it had taken place sometime between chapters two and three, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
>I wanted to ask Nyx if she wanted to join the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
Called it :^)
Anyway, from here time jumps forward a bit again, and we rejoin Nyx and frens in school two weeks later.
>Nyx had just asked another question, right before recess, and now Cheerilee was continuing to lecture past class time.
You'd think she'd have learned her lesson by now. The first time was an innocent mistake, but from what happened as a result coupled with the likelihood that Apple Bloom would have explained to her friend why she was getting bullied, you'd think Nyx would rein this shit in a little. I liked books and shit too when I was a kid, but even I would have gotten pissed if some girl kept doing this right before recess every day. Anyway, it looks like this is mainly happening so Peen Stroke has a convenient premise to bring us Nyx vs. Diamond Tiara Part II: Electric Boogaloo.
>She’s been like this since she started class two weeks ago
Okay, so now we know that she has literally been pulling shit like this daily for two whole weeks. Some kids get unfairly targeted or picked on because of their appearance or other things they have no control over, but in this case you'd have to be pretty socially retarded not to pick up on the fact that everyone in class gets annoyed when you consistently make them miss half of their recess just so you can ask some autistic question. DT and SS would probably pick on Nyx either way, but she could at least win over some of the other students by being less of a fucking sperg. Since it sounds like she technically has four friends now, you'd also think at least one of them would have said something to her by now.
Cheerilee is not blameless here, either. It's not just a teacher's job to teach class, she needs to manage the group of children, and part of that means being aware when one student is being targeted by others and performing damage control when possible. She would have to be pretty dense herself not to realize that most of the foals in her class would rather go to recess than sit through an extra ten minutes of lecture, and also to not realize that they would probably target Nyx for consistently creating this problem for them, particularly since she's already got a target on her back for being new. The sensible thing for her to do would be to stop answering Nyx's questions, and tell her to either ask when they all come back from recess, or tell her to ask privately and she'll explain it.
Next up, we have a scene with Twilight and Applejack.
>It was scary, but I really didn’t have to deal with a lot of other students, being Princess Celestia’s private pupil and all.
Is that how it happened? My memory of the details of a lot of the series is rather fuzzy at times, but I seem to recall Twilight mostly being shown in a classroom with Moondancer and a bunch of other fillies. Though I assume she would have gotten private lessons from Celestia at one point, I don't think it's ever implied that she was intentionally isolated and privately tutored. In fact, as I understand it the whole premise of the show is that Celestia found Twilight to be a promising student, but was concerned that she took her studies too seriously and didn't socialize enough with the other students, so she sent her to Ponyville to make friends. Seems like a relevant detail to me somehow, idk.
>“It was really fun, and I’ve made a new friend,” Apple Bloom said with a smile before motioning to Nyx with her hoof. “Applejack, this is Nyx. Nyx, this is my big sister Applejack.”
Here's something that actually makes the earlier introduction of Nyx to AJ and the remainder of the Mane 6, which I discussed here >>249125 , even more perplexing. Recall that my whole objection was that it seemed like the author hurried through these as if he wasn't interested in writing out scenes for any of it, and that it didn't seem particularly necessary to the plot for Nyx to go around and meet all of these ponies separately.
While it stands to reason that Twilight would have wanted to spread word around town that she had a cousin visiting, it probably wasn't necessary for her to drag Nyx all over Ponyville just so she could meet every single pony she happened to be friends with, especially since she would have presumably met them all later anyway, at the party that Pinkie Pie threw in her honor. This party occurs in between the end of Chapter Two and the beginning of Chapter Three anyway, so even if the author has some reason why Nyx would need to be acquainted with AJ, RD, and FS at this point, she could be presumed to have met them without the circumstances being explicitly laid out. Furthermore, from a narrative standpoint, it feels off just dumping all the introductions into a single paragraph and rushing through them just to get it out of the way, if Nyx and these other characters don't need to have any scenes together for a while. I would have probably just done the scene at Rarity's and the scene with Pinkie Pie, and then left the reader to assume that Nyx would have met the others at the party.
>“You already know my big sister?” Apple Bloom asked in return, reflecting Nyx’s confusion.
>“She should,” Applejack interrupted. “Twilight brought Nyx around the orchards yesterday.”
>“Why would she do that?” Apple Bloom asked, cocking her head to one side.
>“Because Nyx is my cousin, and she’s staying with me at the library while she’s here in Ponyville,” Twilight answered with her simple lie.
See, this is even stupider. Now you're doubling back on yourself to re-explain something you didn't even need to explain in the first place. Also, either I've got the order of events in this story all wrong, or there's a continuity error here, because I feel like it's been at least a couple of days since Twilight introduced Nyx to the others. Has the party at Pinkie Pie's even happened yet? I assumed it had taken place sometime between chapters two and three, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
>I wanted to ask Nyx if she wanted to join the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
Called it :^)
Anyway, from here time jumps forward a bit again, and we rejoin Nyx and frens in school two weeks later.
>Nyx had just asked another question, right before recess, and now Cheerilee was continuing to lecture past class time.
You'd think she'd have learned her lesson by now. The first time was an innocent mistake, but from what happened as a result coupled with the likelihood that Apple Bloom would have explained to her friend why she was getting bullied, you'd think Nyx would rein this shit in a little. I liked books and shit too when I was a kid, but even I would have gotten pissed if some girl kept doing this right before recess every day. Anyway, it looks like this is mainly happening so Peen Stroke has a convenient premise to bring us Nyx vs. Diamond Tiara Part II: Electric Boogaloo.
>She’s been like this since she started class two weeks ago
Okay, so now we know that she has literally been pulling shit like this daily for two whole weeks. Some kids get unfairly targeted or picked on because of their appearance or other things they have no control over, but in this case you'd have to be pretty socially retarded not to pick up on the fact that everyone in class gets annoyed when you consistently make them miss half of their recess just so you can ask some autistic question. DT and SS would probably pick on Nyx either way, but she could at least win over some of the other students by being less of a fucking sperg. Since it sounds like she technically has four friends now, you'd also think at least one of them would have said something to her by now.
Cheerilee is not blameless here, either. It's not just a teacher's job to teach class, she needs to manage the group of children, and part of that means being aware when one student is being targeted by others and performing damage control when possible. She would have to be pretty dense herself not to realize that most of the foals in her class would rather go to recess than sit through an extra ten minutes of lecture, and also to not realize that they would probably target Nyx for consistently creating this problem for them, particularly since she's already got a target on her back for being new. The sensible thing for her to do would be to stop answering Nyx's questions, and tell her to either ask when they all come back from recess, or tell her to ask privately and she'll explain it.
>>249582
>Is that how it happened? My memory of the details of a lot of the series is rather fuzzy at times, but I seem to recall Twilight mostly being shown in a classroom with Moondancer and a bunch of other fillies.
This was written way before anything was really known about that period, so consider it headcanon at worst and speculation at best for the time. The first episode did show her interacting with other unicorns that later turned out to be classmates, but they weren't explicitly stated to be that at the time.
>Recall that my whole objection was that it seemed like the author hurried through these as if he wasn't interested in writing out scenes for any of it
I actually remember something of a reason for this, way back in the day, every single piece of fanfiction that involved an OC in Ponyville had the "Introduced to the Mane 6" portion of the story in the beginning. So because of the saturation of scenes like that, it was seen as something of a taboo because it was so common and overdone.
>The sensible thing for her to do
This entire story makes a lot more sense when you understand that everything that happens is supposed to show off Nyx in situations that would be common for the other characters as an attempt to make Nyx blend in with the rest of the cast. Peen Stroke only knew how to do this by co-opting the plot threads of other, pre-existing characters as you see here with the CMC. Ergo, she's written this way specifically to bring her into conflict with DT and SS, not because it would be believable. Story's full of characters drinking Dumb Fuck Juice™ to excuse the introduction of conflict and plot elements.
>Is that how it happened? My memory of the details of a lot of the series is rather fuzzy at times, but I seem to recall Twilight mostly being shown in a classroom with Moondancer and a bunch of other fillies.
This was written way before anything was really known about that period, so consider it headcanon at worst and speculation at best for the time. The first episode did show her interacting with other unicorns that later turned out to be classmates, but they weren't explicitly stated to be that at the time.
>Recall that my whole objection was that it seemed like the author hurried through these as if he wasn't interested in writing out scenes for any of it
I actually remember something of a reason for this, way back in the day, every single piece of fanfiction that involved an OC in Ponyville had the "Introduced to the Mane 6" portion of the story in the beginning. So because of the saturation of scenes like that, it was seen as something of a taboo because it was so common and overdone.
>The sensible thing for her to do
This entire story makes a lot more sense when you understand that everything that happens is supposed to show off Nyx in situations that would be common for the other characters as an attempt to make Nyx blend in with the rest of the cast. Peen Stroke only knew how to do this by co-opting the plot threads of other, pre-existing characters as you see here with the CMC. Ergo, she's written this way specifically to bring her into conflict with DT and SS, not because it would be believable. Story's full of characters drinking Dumb Fuck Juice™ to excuse the introduction of conflict and plot elements.
>>249624
>This was written way before anything was really known about that period, so consider it headcanon at worst and speculation at best for the time. The first episode did show her interacting with other unicorns that later turned out to be classmates, but they weren't explicitly stated to be that at the time.
Okay. That was part of what I was fuzzy about. I remember certain details being given but I don't always remember at what point they were introduced into the canon.
>I actually remember something of a reason for this, way back in the day, every single piece of fanfiction that involved an OC in Ponyville had the "Introduced to the Mane 6" portion of the story in the beginning. So because of the saturation of scenes like that, it was seen as something of a taboo because it was so common and overdone.
That makes sense I suppose. Though I still stand by my original assertion that he really didn't need to introduce Nyx to these characters at all if he felt it was unnecessary. Having five separate introduction scenes in a row would probably get tedious and I'm sure that's why he didn't do it. However, he's still introducing Nyx to characters that she doesn't need to meet, at least not yet. The sensible thing to do in this case would be to introduce her to Rarity, as that fit into the story, and then to Pinkie, as that also fit. Leave the rest of them alone for when and if they are actually needed. That later scene where she and Apple Bloom bump into AJ could have worked equally well as a place to put an introduction to AJ, for instance.
I guess the point I want writers to take away from this rant is to not include unnecessary, unwanted, and generally not entertaining scenes unless you have some specific reason. If Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash aren't in the story, then there's no need for Nyx to meet them at all. If they don't show up until later, don't mention them until later; or alternatively you can build the rest of the story in a way that it would be logical for the character to have met them by the time they appear. For this story, as of the point where my last post left off, it's been established that Nyx has been living and going to school in Ponyville for two weeks, and that Pinkie Pie has thrown her a welcoming party. Between those two things, it can probably be safely assumed that she has met most of Ponyville's important residents.
What you brought up though brings me to a bigger problem I tend to have with fanfiction in general, which is that authors tend to want to namedrop the entire main cast even if most of those characters aren't important to the story. For instance, if you're writing a Star Trek fic where the author's OC teams up with Kirk and Spock and that's the whole story, you don't really need to write in a scene where OC goes to the bridge and meets Scotty and Ahura and all the rest of them; however, many authors do precisely that.
>This entire story makes a lot more sense when you understand that everything that happens is supposed to show off Nyx in situations that would be common for the other characters as an attempt to make Nyx blend in with the rest of the cast. Peen Stroke only knew how to do this by co-opting the plot threads of other, pre-existing characters as you see here with the CMC. Ergo, she's written this way specifically to bring her into conflict with DT and SS, not because it would be believable. Story's full of characters drinking Dumb Fuck Juice™ to excuse the introduction of conflict and plot elements.
Yeah, this is unfortunately about what I assumed was happening.
>This was written way before anything was really known about that period, so consider it headcanon at worst and speculation at best for the time. The first episode did show her interacting with other unicorns that later turned out to be classmates, but they weren't explicitly stated to be that at the time.
Okay. That was part of what I was fuzzy about. I remember certain details being given but I don't always remember at what point they were introduced into the canon.
>I actually remember something of a reason for this, way back in the day, every single piece of fanfiction that involved an OC in Ponyville had the "Introduced to the Mane 6" portion of the story in the beginning. So because of the saturation of scenes like that, it was seen as something of a taboo because it was so common and overdone.
That makes sense I suppose. Though I still stand by my original assertion that he really didn't need to introduce Nyx to these characters at all if he felt it was unnecessary. Having five separate introduction scenes in a row would probably get tedious and I'm sure that's why he didn't do it. However, he's still introducing Nyx to characters that she doesn't need to meet, at least not yet. The sensible thing to do in this case would be to introduce her to Rarity, as that fit into the story, and then to Pinkie, as that also fit. Leave the rest of them alone for when and if they are actually needed. That later scene where she and Apple Bloom bump into AJ could have worked equally well as a place to put an introduction to AJ, for instance.
I guess the point I want writers to take away from this rant is to not include unnecessary, unwanted, and generally not entertaining scenes unless you have some specific reason. If Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash aren't in the story, then there's no need for Nyx to meet them at all. If they don't show up until later, don't mention them until later; or alternatively you can build the rest of the story in a way that it would be logical for the character to have met them by the time they appear. For this story, as of the point where my last post left off, it's been established that Nyx has been living and going to school in Ponyville for two weeks, and that Pinkie Pie has thrown her a welcoming party. Between those two things, it can probably be safely assumed that she has met most of Ponyville's important residents.
What you brought up though brings me to a bigger problem I tend to have with fanfiction in general, which is that authors tend to want to namedrop the entire main cast even if most of those characters aren't important to the story. For instance, if you're writing a Star Trek fic where the author's OC teams up with Kirk and Spock and that's the whole story, you don't really need to write in a scene where OC goes to the bridge and meets Scotty and Ahura and all the rest of them; however, many authors do precisely that.
>This entire story makes a lot more sense when you understand that everything that happens is supposed to show off Nyx in situations that would be common for the other characters as an attempt to make Nyx blend in with the rest of the cast. Peen Stroke only knew how to do this by co-opting the plot threads of other, pre-existing characters as you see here with the CMC. Ergo, she's written this way specifically to bring her into conflict with DT and SS, not because it would be believable. Story's full of characters drinking Dumb Fuck Juice™ to excuse the introduction of conflict and plot elements.
Yeah, this is unfortunately about what I assumed was happening.
>>249695
This is off-topic but do you watch EZ PZ? He's a long-nose who nonetheless makes fun of that attribute and has very un-PC humor in general. He's described himself as essentially a rip-off of E;R as he critiques Western animation shows in general. Might be a channel you'd enjoy.
My secret plan is to make you lazy and unproductive watching Youtube videos all day so you can't criticize any future fanfics I write
This is off-topic but do you watch EZ PZ? He's a long-nose who nonetheless makes fun of that attribute and has very un-PC humor in general. He's described himself as essentially a rip-off of E;R as he critiques Western animation shows in general. Might be a channel you'd enjoy.
My secret plan is to make you lazy and unproductive watching Youtube videos all day so you can't criticize any future fanfics I write
>>249624
You know what's stupid about those "My OC meets the mane six" fics?
The Mane Six are very different ponies. One might like your OC, another might dislike him, another might find him boring, he might find another boring, etc..
But I only ever see "My OC becomes friends with the whole set" or "My OC becomes friends with the ones I like, everyone else is a background character or enemy"
Your character would only be able to befriend everyone at once if he was the type to act differently around different ponies. Brasher around RD, quieter when with Fluttershy, cheerier with Pinkie, smarter around Twilight, etc.
And you know what'd be interesting then? Twilight noticing and walking up to this shapeshifter at poe's masquerade and asking him, "Who is the real you?".
Same goes with Canon Casts in other shows, too. Seeing a new character and the new life it can breathe into a show and the fresh new adventures/interactions/stories that can happen with the character being involved, that's interesting. But so many OC writers just want to write "My OC goes to the ___ show and is loved by all characters I care about.
And so many OC fic readers want to read something that tickles their "Faggot loved in fictionland" fetish or they call it trash.
You know what's stupid about those "My OC meets the mane six" fics?
The Mane Six are very different ponies. One might like your OC, another might dislike him, another might find him boring, he might find another boring, etc..
But I only ever see "My OC becomes friends with the whole set" or "My OC becomes friends with the ones I like, everyone else is a background character or enemy"
Your character would only be able to befriend everyone at once if he was the type to act differently around different ponies. Brasher around RD, quieter when with Fluttershy, cheerier with Pinkie, smarter around Twilight, etc.
And you know what'd be interesting then? Twilight noticing and walking up to this shapeshifter at poe's masquerade and asking him, "Who is the real you?".
Same goes with Canon Casts in other shows, too. Seeing a new character and the new life it can breathe into a show and the fresh new adventures/interactions/stories that can happen with the character being involved, that's interesting. But so many OC writers just want to write "My OC goes to the ___ show and is loved by all characters I care about.
And so many OC fic readers want to read something that tickles their "Faggot loved in fictionland" fetish or they call it trash.
>>249698
>EZ PZ
I thought he was a lefty mediocre faggot.
>He's described himself as essentially a rip-off of E;R
Where?
Lol, I am similar to E;R. Dream on faggot.
To be honest, he is shit and nothing new or special. Just look at his black panther review. Like do I really need to break it down why it sucks?
Just get better reviews to watch dude.
>EZ PZ
I thought he was a lefty mediocre faggot.
>He's described himself as essentially a rip-off of E;R
Where?
Lol, I am similar to E;R. Dream on faggot.
To be honest, he is shit and nothing new or special. Just look at his black panther review. Like do I really need to break it down why it sucks?
Just get better reviews to watch dude.
>>249698
In general, don't waste time on the enemy - focus on yourself. Write that fucking story that you have had on your mind or make your own reviewing channel. Create something instead of consuming garbage. You don't have time to waste on all their shit. Choose your battles and again don't waste your time.
I mean like what does he do in the black panther review. Well, the first thing he does is call other yt:ers for nitpickers and basically delegitimize them; then he follows that with spending the rest of the video on nitpicking the movie. Because who decides what and what isn't nitpicking and so on.
This is nothing new for yt:ers. Most of them are shit. E;R is an exception.
>>249699
This but also not this. Agreed but
>"My OC becomes friends with the whole set"
Twi and RD are firends. Most of these chracters are easy to befriend if you remember how quickly Twilight became friends wih them with the exception of Fluttershy who cared soley for Spike.
But in general, I agree that at least it might take more time with some or maybe they would just remain acquaintances since they feel that they connect that deeply and want to spend their time on other things.
Like, Fluttershy truly is the one that is the hardest to see spend time with oc since she has even shy in her name.
But I think the thing you and I dislike the most about these types of scenes is that they feel so artificial. Like it is always that human-oc-mc meets all of the mane six after one another ina sequence and so on.
It isn't like oc meets Fluttershy in the woods. She takes care of him because he is hurt and she thinks he is an animal. Later he meets Twi because the medical care he needed requires magic and from there we either meet the rest of the mane six in an organic way or we are off to adventure with Twi and Flutters to seek out medicine for Anon.
But then again this is fanfiction. We shouldn't expect it to be good since its is written by newbie authors. But then again again, some of these people have patreons for their writing and works like Past Sins are seen as high art by some.
But I guess that is just a big fish in a small pond syndrome. Now that I think about it, I don't really care. I usually don't write those kinds of stories anyway. But I suppose it disturbs us fanfiction readers because we actually have to skim through them in our search for the good stuff.
In general, don't waste time on the enemy - focus on yourself. Write that fucking story that you have had on your mind or make your own reviewing channel. Create something instead of consuming garbage. You don't have time to waste on all their shit. Choose your battles and again don't waste your time.
I mean like what does he do in the black panther review. Well, the first thing he does is call other yt:ers for nitpickers and basically delegitimize them; then he follows that with spending the rest of the video on nitpicking the movie. Because who decides what and what isn't nitpicking and so on.
This is nothing new for yt:ers. Most of them are shit. E;R is an exception.
>>249699
This but also not this. Agreed but
>"My OC becomes friends with the whole set"
Twi and RD are firends. Most of these chracters are easy to befriend if you remember how quickly Twilight became friends wih them with the exception of Fluttershy who cared soley for Spike.
But in general, I agree that at least it might take more time with some or maybe they would just remain acquaintances since they feel that they connect that deeply and want to spend their time on other things.
Like, Fluttershy truly is the one that is the hardest to see spend time with oc since she has even shy in her name.
But I think the thing you and I dislike the most about these types of scenes is that they feel so artificial. Like it is always that human-oc-mc meets all of the mane six after one another ina sequence and so on.
It isn't like oc meets Fluttershy in the woods. She takes care of him because he is hurt and she thinks he is an animal. Later he meets Twi because the medical care he needed requires magic and from there we either meet the rest of the mane six in an organic way or we are off to adventure with Twi and Flutters to seek out medicine for Anon.
But then again this is fanfiction. We shouldn't expect it to be good since its is written by newbie authors. But then again again, some of these people have patreons for their writing and works like Past Sins are seen as high art by some.
But I guess that is just a big fish in a small pond syndrome. Now that I think about it, I don't really care. I usually don't write those kinds of stories anyway. But I suppose it disturbs us fanfiction readers because we actually have to skim through them in our search for the good stuff.
File (): 0EBFF9761489D50AE0F0E2E95759A483-2718898.png (2.6 MB, 1920x1080, TwilightThinkingReadingByFire.png)
>>249769
I've recently watched some of his other videos but not his Black Panther review so to find out whether your complaints are legitimate I went through the whole video the night before a mid-term. Here's a summary of it:
>call other yt'ers nitpickers
His complaint was that they were going after only technicalities CinemaSins-style rather than deeper flaws, making the movie seem better than it actually is. Also, these yt'ers were the "OMG SJWs" cuck trash that are the nu version of conservative editorial columns, and they didn't even bother to make BP look "awful." His complaint was the same for Ghostbusters as the "nitpickers" didn't put their money where their mouth was and didn't dismantle that garbage fire.
He gets through the nitpicking (openly acknowledging he was, in fact, nitpicking) and talks about major problems with the plot. Then he dabs on Afrofuturism like it deserves and goes into why Black Panther is a ridiculous power fantasy that perpetuates this problem. Going into the underlying theme/message of the movie to me is the opposite of nitpicking, but then again I'm not a movie critic. He also goes into the history of Black Panther in comic books and explains how it was a hilariously racist stereotype-reversal that is quite unlike what modern audiences expect. Then there's the subliminal plot point that any black society, even a technologically advanced one would be extremely stratified and despotic and would still have "tribal" practices. We have severe problems like the excessive film that had to be cut for time at the expense of quality. Other issues: lack of proper use of Chekhov's Gun, bad humor, more racial digs (white people amirite?), the ol' villain-switcharoo trick, falsehoods regarding crime statistics, teenager-level decision-making, bad pacing, the best actor/character is literally Ape-Man, the idiocy of the plot structure, the Superman Problem except even worse, and Black Panther being a paragon of all black folk hamstringing any character development. Most hilariously, the main villain is actually correct from a legal perspective.
Lastly EZ PZ goes into the message within the context of the movie and clearly explains the position of traditionalism/isolationism vs. open-borders, and how contradictory the plot is. Black Twitter unironically supports a white holocaust like Killmonger wanted and thinks the movie writers are a bunch of cucks. The movie explains how beneficial isolationism was yet tries to justify how it's bad. The openness it has had has only been a massive negative though the writers try to lampshade it. None of the issues within the movie would have occurred if Wakanda had been actually isolationist. The Killmonger problem would, as previously noted would have been solved immediately. Isolationism and traditionalism would have solved everything. EZ PZ concludes with his overall impressions and provides a hypothetical repair of the movie.
I may be biased as I've liked his other videos, but I can't tell if you're being disingenuous or watched only five minutes. There are justifiable reasons to dislike EZ PZ (he is Jewish, after all) but at least put some integrity into your criticism. In any case the recommendation was for Brit and I decided to respond to prevent you from poisoning the well. Expecting him to be as good as E;R is an unreasonably high bar but he nonetheless comes fairly close and is handy to have around given E;R uploads once a blue moon.
Also, that aside was a joke. I'm not interested in reviewing things myself because I am far better at talking about abstract concepts than being a film critic. Today I brainstormed quite a few ideas for videos if I ever do make a philosophy channel.
>But I suppose it disturbs us fanfiction readers because we actually have to skim through them in our search for the good stuff.
This. Once you become more experienced/jaded you can pick out what's good and actually creative and know what are red flags to look out for. Goes for any avocation.
I've recently watched some of his other videos but not his Black Panther review so to find out whether your complaints are legitimate I went through the whole video the night before a mid-term. Here's a summary of it:
>call other yt'ers nitpickers
His complaint was that they were going after only technicalities CinemaSins-style rather than deeper flaws, making the movie seem better than it actually is. Also, these yt'ers were the "OMG SJWs" cuck trash that are the nu version of conservative editorial columns, and they didn't even bother to make BP look "awful." His complaint was the same for Ghostbusters as the "nitpickers" didn't put their money where their mouth was and didn't dismantle that garbage fire.
He gets through the nitpicking (openly acknowledging he was, in fact, nitpicking) and talks about major problems with the plot. Then he dabs on Afrofuturism like it deserves and goes into why Black Panther is a ridiculous power fantasy that perpetuates this problem. Going into the underlying theme/message of the movie to me is the opposite of nitpicking, but then again I'm not a movie critic. He also goes into the history of Black Panther in comic books and explains how it was a hilariously racist stereotype-reversal that is quite unlike what modern audiences expect. Then there's the subliminal plot point that any black society, even a technologically advanced one would be extremely stratified and despotic and would still have "tribal" practices. We have severe problems like the excessive film that had to be cut for time at the expense of quality. Other issues: lack of proper use of Chekhov's Gun, bad humor, more racial digs (white people amirite?), the ol' villain-switcharoo trick, falsehoods regarding crime statistics, teenager-level decision-making, bad pacing, the best actor/character is literally Ape-Man, the idiocy of the plot structure, the Superman Problem except even worse, and Black Panther being a paragon of all black folk hamstringing any character development. Most hilariously, the main villain is actually correct from a legal perspective.
Lastly EZ PZ goes into the message within the context of the movie and clearly explains the position of traditionalism/isolationism vs. open-borders, and how contradictory the plot is. Black Twitter unironically supports a white holocaust like Killmonger wanted and thinks the movie writers are a bunch of cucks. The movie explains how beneficial isolationism was yet tries to justify how it's bad. The openness it has had has only been a massive negative though the writers try to lampshade it. None of the issues within the movie would have occurred if Wakanda had been actually isolationist. The Killmonger problem would, as previously noted would have been solved immediately. Isolationism and traditionalism would have solved everything. EZ PZ concludes with his overall impressions and provides a hypothetical repair of the movie.
I may be biased as I've liked his other videos, but I can't tell if you're being disingenuous or watched only five minutes. There are justifiable reasons to dislike EZ PZ (he is Jewish, after all) but at least put some integrity into your criticism. In any case the recommendation was for Brit and I decided to respond to prevent you from poisoning the well. Expecting him to be as good as E;R is an unreasonably high bar but he nonetheless comes fairly close and is handy to have around given E;R uploads once a blue moon.
Also, that aside was a joke. I'm not interested in reviewing things myself because I am far better at talking about abstract concepts than being a film critic. Today I brainstormed quite a few ideas for videos if I ever do make a philosophy channel.
>But I suppose it disturbs us fanfiction readers because we actually have to skim through them in our search for the good stuff.
This. Once you become more experienced/jaded you can pick out what's good and actually creative and know what are red flags to look out for. Goes for any avocation.
>>249783
The thing is that he starts his video off with saying that everyone elses just nitpicks the movie and arrogantly puts himself on a pedastal. Then he as you say
>He gets through the nitpicking (openly acknowledging he was, in fact, nitpicking)
What kind of introduction is that?
>watched only five minutes
Yes, you are completely right but why would I stay after such a shit introduction? Should I feel bad because I don't expect someone to make it worth my time? No, I won't do that.
>but I can't tell if you're being disingenuous
I guess I was a bit disingenous since I said that he just nitpicks through the rest of the video. I genuniely believe it to be the case at the time but honestly more than that I just didn't care.
He was disingenous in the first place when he claimed that other yt:ers only nitpicked the movie. This is not true. I can garantee it. The "furry avatar" is probably rags or wolf. Mauler did a video on it aswell.
I am no fan of efap and that circlejerk but I know they are good enough not to just nitpick movies.
I have seen enough twats on the internet declaring themselves the best and then not deliver more than average. I could literally do that nitpicking myself in my sleep.
But you know, you seem like a genuine fellow
>these yt'ers were the "OMG SJWs" cuck trash that are the nu version of conservative editorial columns
So I will give him the benefit of a doubt and watch the whole Black panther vid. Not now though later.
The thing is that he starts his video off with saying that everyone elses just nitpicks the movie and arrogantly puts himself on a pedastal. Then he as you say
>He gets through the nitpicking (openly acknowledging he was, in fact, nitpicking)
What kind of introduction is that?
>watched only five minutes
Yes, you are completely right but why would I stay after such a shit introduction? Should I feel bad because I don't expect someone to make it worth my time? No, I won't do that.
>but I can't tell if you're being disingenuous
I guess I was a bit disingenous since I said that he just nitpicks through the rest of the video. I genuniely believe it to be the case at the time but honestly more than that I just didn't care.
He was disingenous in the first place when he claimed that other yt:ers only nitpicked the movie. This is not true. I can garantee it. The "furry avatar" is probably rags or wolf. Mauler did a video on it aswell.
I am no fan of efap and that circlejerk but I know they are good enough not to just nitpick movies.
I have seen enough twats on the internet declaring themselves the best and then not deliver more than average. I could literally do that nitpicking myself in my sleep.
But you know, you seem like a genuine fellow
>these yt'ers were the "OMG SJWs" cuck trash that are the nu version of conservative editorial columns
So I will give him the benefit of a doubt and watch the whole Black panther vid. Not now though later.
Time to reveal a secret.
In the first draft of my Silver Star Story, Silver was a Dragon raised by apple pony farmers in the old west.
So he's a cold-blooded lizard who struggles to understand things like friendship and ponies and kindness, but still likes them.
And instead of magic he just has the grabby momentum-control bracelets.
Comically angry faggots convinced me to change this "bullshit superman ripoff, fuck you, dragons are supposed to be rare and you're ripping off Spike only badly, hiss grr your character isn't ordinary enough you fucking tall poppy" character into a Unicorn.
And I've been trying to work the story I wanted to tell, about a cold being warmed by friendship, into this character ever since.
In the first draft of my Silver Star Story, Silver was a Dragon raised by apple pony farmers in the old west.
So he's a cold-blooded lizard who struggles to understand things like friendship and ponies and kindness, but still likes them.
And instead of magic he just has the grabby momentum-control bracelets.
Comically angry faggots convinced me to change this "bullshit superman ripoff, fuck you, dragons are supposed to be rare and you're ripping off Spike only badly, hiss grr your character isn't ordinary enough you fucking tall poppy" character into a Unicorn.
And I've been trying to work the story I wanted to tell, about a cold being warmed by friendship, into this character ever since.
>>249698
>This is off-topic but do you watch EZ PZ?
I really know almost nothing about YouTube or YouTubers. I remember watching a few videos by Sargoy and a couple of other "skeptic" channels that were popular around 2015, but I got bored with that stuff almost immediately. Anymore I feel like time spent watching crap on YouTube is time I could be spending reading books or creating something. Mostly I just use it to listen to music or watch things that anons link to though I admit I went through a bit of a YouTube Poop phase back when that was a thing, and it still amuses me sometimes. I'll check it out though.
>>249699
>You know what's stupid about those "My OC meets the mane six" fics?
The ebin 30,000 word fight scenes? :^)
In all seriousness though I think you make a good observation here. I was at a con a couple of years ago and attended a panel on fanfiction as transformative art. I unfortunately don't remember the name of the guy running the panel, some Asian guy who might be very well-known in the fandom for all I know. But in any case he was very interesting to listen to. He basically gave a quick rundown on literature and comics where significant works have been created using previously existing universes or characters, or derived from things like legends and mythology. He then went on to lament that a lot of fanfiction tends to be fairly empty wish-fulfillment type stuff; an author writes a story because he wants to live out some fantasy about frolicking in the fictional universe with the characters there, etc. He encouraged authors to start approaching fanfiction as literature and trying to create transformative works of actual literary value using the worlds and characters of the fictional universe. I'm doing a poor job of summing it up, but it was one of the most interesting panels I've ever sat through.
That's why I always try to criticize autismo pony fanfiction written by teenagers the same way I would criticize any attempt at a serious work, even if it's completely absurd to apply that kind of standard to it. I think when writing anything an author should give at least a little thought beforehand to what he wants to write about and what message he ultimately wants to convey. If it's just a story about the author's self-insert OC being awesome and saving the day while getting his dick fluffed by the characters the author is sexually attracted to, :^) or just beating up the characters the author doesn't like, :^) then he's not really producing anything of any substantive literary or even entertainment value.
The challenge to writing anything is usually detaching your own ego and having your characters behave appropriately. If you're working with preexisting characters you have to take their canon personalities into account. If you put an OC in the story the OC needs to be a part of the world like any other character. As you said, it doesn't make sense for Anon to just automatically make friends with all six of the main ponies just because they're the main cast and he's the guest star. It's unlikely Anon would just instantly bond with every single pony; better to pick one character and have them form a bond, and if you want to make it really interesting, put Anon in conflict with a different character. Or exploit existing character relationships in the canon world to create a new dynamic. Maybe Anon arrives in Equestria, and makes frens with Twilight and Trixie separately, but he gets them together and finds out they hate each other, and now they both hate him. Now he's got a complicated situation to navigate, and the story is interesting.
>>249769
>But I think the thing you and I dislike the most about these types of scenes is that they feel so artificial. Like it is always that human-oc-mc meets all of the mane six after one another ina sequence and so on.
This, these sorts of stories tend to be very shoddily constructed and are usually obvious wish-fulfillment. Anon travels to Equestria somehow and makes friends with the mane 6 because the author wishes he could do that in real life, but since he can't the next best thing is to write the fantasy down. A better approach is to take that desire to travel there, use it to flesh out the characters and the world in detail, and then construct a believable and engaging story that takes place there. At the end of the day if you still want to do an "Anon travels to Equestria and meets the ponies" story there's nothing wrong with it, but you have to make Anon and the ponies seem like real entities, and have their interactions and relationships seem real.
As I said, the hardest part for a writer is detaching the ego. If you're going to self-insert in a story, you have to be able to separate yourself from yourself, and treat your self-insert as you would any other character. He needs personality, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, etc. Some characters he'd mesh with, others he wouldn't. You can't just assume your waifu would like you just because she's your waifu, you have to think critically and decide if your personalities would genuinely click. If they don't click, it can actually make a romantic pursuit story more interesting, incidentally.
On a random aside, I kind of like those "Doing hurtful things to your waifu" charts for a similar reason. I think taking a character you not only like but love, and exploring how she would behave if you were just suddenly mean to her for no reason, is a good creative exercise. You could take the same concept and apply it to self-insert fiction: write a "doing hurtful things to yourself" scenario. Write a scene where your self-insert declares his love to your waifu, and instead of reciprocating she tells him all the reasons she hates his guts and wouldn't even consider dating him. Try to get him genuinely pissed off and make him react. It sounds like masochism but seriously, it's fun.
>This is off-topic but do you watch EZ PZ?
I really know almost nothing about YouTube or YouTubers. I remember watching a few videos by Sargoy and a couple of other "skeptic" channels that were popular around 2015, but I got bored with that stuff almost immediately. Anymore I feel like time spent watching crap on YouTube is time I could be spending reading books or creating something. Mostly I just use it to listen to music or watch things that anons link to though I admit I went through a bit of a YouTube Poop phase back when that was a thing, and it still amuses me sometimes. I'll check it out though.
>>249699
>You know what's stupid about those "My OC meets the mane six" fics?
The ebin 30,000 word fight scenes? :^)
In all seriousness though I think you make a good observation here. I was at a con a couple of years ago and attended a panel on fanfiction as transformative art. I unfortunately don't remember the name of the guy running the panel, some Asian guy who might be very well-known in the fandom for all I know. But in any case he was very interesting to listen to. He basically gave a quick rundown on literature and comics where significant works have been created using previously existing universes or characters, or derived from things like legends and mythology. He then went on to lament that a lot of fanfiction tends to be fairly empty wish-fulfillment type stuff; an author writes a story because he wants to live out some fantasy about frolicking in the fictional universe with the characters there, etc. He encouraged authors to start approaching fanfiction as literature and trying to create transformative works of actual literary value using the worlds and characters of the fictional universe. I'm doing a poor job of summing it up, but it was one of the most interesting panels I've ever sat through.
That's why I always try to criticize autismo pony fanfiction written by teenagers the same way I would criticize any attempt at a serious work, even if it's completely absurd to apply that kind of standard to it. I think when writing anything an author should give at least a little thought beforehand to what he wants to write about and what message he ultimately wants to convey. If it's just a story about the author's self-insert OC being awesome and saving the day while getting his dick fluffed by the characters the author is sexually attracted to, :^) or just beating up the characters the author doesn't like, :^) then he's not really producing anything of any substantive literary or even entertainment value.
The challenge to writing anything is usually detaching your own ego and having your characters behave appropriately. If you're working with preexisting characters you have to take their canon personalities into account. If you put an OC in the story the OC needs to be a part of the world like any other character. As you said, it doesn't make sense for Anon to just automatically make friends with all six of the main ponies just because they're the main cast and he's the guest star. It's unlikely Anon would just instantly bond with every single pony; better to pick one character and have them form a bond, and if you want to make it really interesting, put Anon in conflict with a different character. Or exploit existing character relationships in the canon world to create a new dynamic. Maybe Anon arrives in Equestria, and makes frens with Twilight and Trixie separately, but he gets them together and finds out they hate each other, and now they both hate him. Now he's got a complicated situation to navigate, and the story is interesting.
>>249769
>But I think the thing you and I dislike the most about these types of scenes is that they feel so artificial. Like it is always that human-oc-mc meets all of the mane six after one another ina sequence and so on.
This, these sorts of stories tend to be very shoddily constructed and are usually obvious wish-fulfillment. Anon travels to Equestria somehow and makes friends with the mane 6 because the author wishes he could do that in real life, but since he can't the next best thing is to write the fantasy down. A better approach is to take that desire to travel there, use it to flesh out the characters and the world in detail, and then construct a believable and engaging story that takes place there. At the end of the day if you still want to do an "Anon travels to Equestria and meets the ponies" story there's nothing wrong with it, but you have to make Anon and the ponies seem like real entities, and have their interactions and relationships seem real.
As I said, the hardest part for a writer is detaching the ego. If you're going to self-insert in a story, you have to be able to separate yourself from yourself, and treat your self-insert as you would any other character. He needs personality, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, etc. Some characters he'd mesh with, others he wouldn't. You can't just assume your waifu would like you just because she's your waifu, you have to think critically and decide if your personalities would genuinely click. If they don't click, it can actually make a romantic pursuit story more interesting, incidentally.
On a random aside, I kind of like those "Doing hurtful things to your waifu" charts for a similar reason. I think taking a character you not only like but love, and exploring how she would behave if you were just suddenly mean to her for no reason, is a good creative exercise. You could take the same concept and apply it to self-insert fiction: write a "doing hurtful things to yourself" scenario. Write a scene where your self-insert declares his love to your waifu, and instead of reciprocating she tells him all the reasons she hates his guts and wouldn't even consider dating him. Try to get him genuinely pissed off and make him react. It sounds like masochism but seriously, it's fun.
>>249769
>But then again this is fanfiction. We shouldn't expect it to be good since its is written by newbie authors.
No. Stop thinking this way. I usually try to take the author's age and experience level into account, but being young and inexperienced doesn't mean you get a pass for writing something stupid. Most of the time a first work written by a young author is going to be full of cliches, angsty to the point of unintentional self-parody, and generally self-aggrandizing and awful, even if it's mechanically well written. It's not that you should just shit on someone for producing a bad work because it's funny (though sometimes it is), but they need to be told why their work was bad, and how they can do it better the next time around. If you just pat them on the head and tell them it's great to make them feel better, they won't improve.
If we want to build a civilization that produces Homers and Shakespeares and Fitzgeralds again, we need to be willing to tell the Pen Strokes of the world that actually no, faggot, your 200,000 word brony epic is not as fantastic as your personal circlejerk has assured you that it is.
>>249795
>In the first draft of my Silver Star Story, Silver was a Dragon raised by apple pony farmers in the old west.
You were probably wise to revise this.
But in all seriousness, just keep at it. Your idea does have actual potential, you just need to work on characterization and character interaction, and dial back some most of the autism. I'm still willing to read future drafts.
>But then again this is fanfiction. We shouldn't expect it to be good since its is written by newbie authors.
No. Stop thinking this way. I usually try to take the author's age and experience level into account, but being young and inexperienced doesn't mean you get a pass for writing something stupid. Most of the time a first work written by a young author is going to be full of cliches, angsty to the point of unintentional self-parody, and generally self-aggrandizing and awful, even if it's mechanically well written. It's not that you should just shit on someone for producing a bad work because it's funny (though sometimes it is), but they need to be told why their work was bad, and how they can do it better the next time around. If you just pat them on the head and tell them it's great to make them feel better, they won't improve.
If we want to build a civilization that produces Homers and Shakespeares and Fitzgeralds again, we need to be willing to tell the Pen Strokes of the world that actually no, faggot, your 200,000 word brony epic is not as fantastic as your personal circlejerk has assured you that it is.
>>249795
>In the first draft of my Silver Star Story, Silver was a Dragon raised by apple pony farmers in the old west.
You were probably wise to revise this.
But in all seriousness, just keep at it. Your idea does have actual potential, you just need to work on characterization and character interaction, and dial back some most of the autism. I'm still willing to read future drafts.
>>249839
I wrote a worldbuilding scene intended to flesh out the world into chapter 1, but it's dragging on for too long.
>plan: scene where Silver "Transforms into his true form" to scare a Griffon assassin sent after him, except it's an illusion spell and the real Silver knocks the stunned foe out.
>result: 6k words of shit I should trim down before the meeting is allowed to end
My Chapter 1 of the Silver Rewrite is at 22k words now.
I wrote a worldbuilding scene intended to flesh out the world into chapter 1, but it's dragging on for too long.
>plan: scene where Silver "Transforms into his true form" to scare a Griffon assassin sent after him, except it's an illusion spell and the real Silver knocks the stunned foe out.
>result: 6k words of shit I should trim down before the meeting is allowed to end
My Chapter 1 of the Silver Rewrite is at 22k words now.
>>249849
>Silver "Transforms into his true form" to scare a Griffon assassin sent after him, except it's an illusion spell and the real Silver knocks the stunned foe out.
I'm beginning to think you're literally a Chuunibyou and that you just channel it through fanfiction rather than in real life as actual Chuuni would.
>Silver "Transforms into his true form" to scare a Griffon assassin sent after him, except it's an illusion spell and the real Silver knocks the stunned foe out.
I'm beginning to think you're literally a Chuunibyou and that you just channel it through fanfiction rather than in real life as actual Chuuni would.
>>249856
How many years has it been since I last heard that term?
I once made a Naruto fanfiction to poke fun at that character type. He's a good Ninja with a load of tricky bullshit, but everyone besides his only two friends considers him an annoying cunt.
How many years has it been since I last heard that term?
I once made a Naruto fanfiction to poke fun at that character type. He's a good Ninja with a load of tricky bullshit, but everyone besides his only two friends considers him an annoying cunt.
Funny thing about that, it has nothing to do with the thread which is about GlimGlam entertainingly shitting on a shitty fic.
Maybe you should start your own thread about your own shitty fics? Oh wait, you've already done that and no one cared.
Maybe you should start your own thread about your own shitty fics? Oh wait, you've already done that and no one cared.
>>249883
>1 post by this ID
I get that we're all just trying to pass the time until Glimglam's done reviewing more of the fic but have you considered getting a hobby?
>1 post by this ID
I get that we're all just trying to pass the time until Glimglam's done reviewing more of the fic but have you considered getting a hobby?
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>>249582
>Like, everypony else has to hate her as much as we do. Her only friends are those three blank flanks and that other nerd, Twist. Somepony needs to teach her a lesson about being so… nerdy.
Here, we have the author projecting so hard that his soul was no doubt physically ejected from his body, and from there traveled to Equestria, was called a faggot by his waifu, and returned two weeks later to his body so that he could write the rest of this scene, clearly having learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
>“Bump! Bump! Sugar-lump, rump!” the pair said in unison, doing their strange, special hoofshake before they laughed and strolled off to set their plan in motion.
I'm a little surprised to learn that they still do that when nopony is watching them. Actually, scratch that; this is probably in character for both of them. Carry on.
Anyway, it sounds like Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon are planning to take Nyx out to the Everfree Forest, rape her, kill her, toss her in a ditch, and then blame the town simpleton when eventually the body is discovered. Or, maybe, they're just going to play some childish prank on her that will no doubt go terribly wrong and result in Nyx doing something overpowered and Mary Sue-ish. Either way, let's watch.
DT and SS show up at Twilight's house. Twilight, being as charmingly clueless as ever, assumes the two of them are friends of Nyx, and sends her off to play with them, oblivious to both Nyx's cowardly babbling about how she doesn't want to go, and the sadistic >rape gazes on the faces of the two young ponies.
>“We know, and we feel really bad, but, like, we got to make sure the new ponies in town are cool,” Silver Spoon said, as if judging a pony’s coolness was their job.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that is their job.
>“And am I a cool pony?” Nyx asked anxiously.
We'll let history be the judge of that.
Anyway, this goes fairly predictably. Nyx goes to Sugar Cube Corner with DT and SS, they pretend to be nice to her, convince her to go into the Everfree even though Twilight told her not to, she goes, DT and SS stay behind and snicker about how she is probably going to be raped and killed by the town simpleton. Scene is reasonably well written, no major complaints. The conversation maybe goes on a little too long and DT/SS maybe lay on the fake niceness a little too thick. Beyond that though, the dialog remains mostly accurate and believable for these characters. Once again, this story is hitting all the right things in all the right places at precisely the right times, leaving absolutely no curiosity on the reader's part about what is going to happen next.
>Twilight trotted through the streets of Ponyville as she anxiously looked around. She hadn’t seen Nyx in two hours and was starting to worry.
Check the morgue. lol jk her body is probably still in the woods
>“Twilight, those two are bullies! Don’t you remember how they made fun of me and called me a blank flank at Diamond Tiara’s Cute-ceañera?”
>Her eyes grew wide, the memory of that day causing her to stagger.
That reaction is probably overkill. Remembering that the apple you just ate was poisoned, or the repairman you just let in is really a serial killer; those kinds of memories are staggering. Twilight is understandably concerned about Nyx and probably feels guilty that she might have inadvertently put her in some danger, but the actual danger is pretty mild. As far as she knows this is all still relatively harmless schoolyard stuff.
>She hadn’t recognized them without their party dresses on, and she hadn’t spoken or really seen that much of them in a year at least.
This feels a little bit like the author offering a rather flimsy and unnecessary excuse for why she didn't recognize them. The party dress thing I'd get rid of, as it's pretty weird for her to remember a detail like that but not the ponies themselves. Really, I'd get rid of the whole explanation as it's awkward and unnecessary. Twilight is only incidentally connected to the CMC because two of them are the younger sisters of her friends, and she has no connection to DT/SS at all. She does not have a younger sister or any foals of her own go get me another box of wine Spike I'm almost out so until now she would have had no reason to pay much attention to the school fillies in Ponyville or how their social structure works. The incident at the cuteceñera party would have been memorable for Apple Bloom but would probably have been long forgotten by Twilight. There's really no reason she should have recognized DT/SS as bullies or seen their arrival as anything to be worried about. She might have noticed Nyx's reaction if she had been paying more attention, but she wasn't and so she didn't. It was a perfectly innocent mistake.
>“I know where Silver Spoon lives,” Sweetie Belle claimed. “Rarity does a lot of business with her father, and sometimes when I go with her, I see Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon doing their homework at Silver Spoon’s house.”
>Applejack nodded and began to lock up her apple cart. “Alright then. Sweetie Belle, you show Twilight where Silver Spoon lives and see if they’re there. Applebloom, Scootaloo, y’all can come with me and we’ll go see if they’re over at Filthy Rich’s store.”
This is probably as good a course of action as any for them to pursue seeing as how they wouldn't have any real idea where the three of them might have gone. However, I feel as if it stands to reason that if DT/SS were planning something mean, they wouldn't take Nyx back to either of their houses to do it, so it seems like kind of a wasted effort to go there. Also, Twilight knows that they had used going to Sugar Cube Corner as an excuse to get Nyx to come along with them, so that would be the logical place to start searching.
>Like, everypony else has to hate her as much as we do. Her only friends are those three blank flanks and that other nerd, Twist. Somepony needs to teach her a lesson about being so… nerdy.
Here, we have the author projecting so hard that his soul was no doubt physically ejected from his body, and from there traveled to Equestria, was called a faggot by his waifu, and returned two weeks later to his body so that he could write the rest of this scene, clearly having learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
>“Bump! Bump! Sugar-lump, rump!” the pair said in unison, doing their strange, special hoofshake before they laughed and strolled off to set their plan in motion.
I'm a little surprised to learn that they still do that when nopony is watching them. Actually, scratch that; this is probably in character for both of them. Carry on.
Anyway, it sounds like Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon are planning to take Nyx out to the Everfree Forest, rape her, kill her, toss her in a ditch, and then blame the town simpleton when eventually the body is discovered. Or, maybe, they're just going to play some childish prank on her that will no doubt go terribly wrong and result in Nyx doing something overpowered and Mary Sue-ish. Either way, let's watch.
DT and SS show up at Twilight's house. Twilight, being as charmingly clueless as ever, assumes the two of them are friends of Nyx, and sends her off to play with them, oblivious to both Nyx's cowardly babbling about how she doesn't want to go, and the sadistic >rape gazes on the faces of the two young ponies.
>“We know, and we feel really bad, but, like, we got to make sure the new ponies in town are cool,” Silver Spoon said, as if judging a pony’s coolness was their job.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that is their job.
>“And am I a cool pony?” Nyx asked anxiously.
We'll let history be the judge of that.
Anyway, this goes fairly predictably. Nyx goes to Sugar Cube Corner with DT and SS, they pretend to be nice to her, convince her to go into the Everfree even though Twilight told her not to, she goes, DT and SS stay behind and snicker about how she is probably going to be raped and killed by the town simpleton. Scene is reasonably well written, no major complaints. The conversation maybe goes on a little too long and DT/SS maybe lay on the fake niceness a little too thick. Beyond that though, the dialog remains mostly accurate and believable for these characters. Once again, this story is hitting all the right things in all the right places at precisely the right times, leaving absolutely no curiosity on the reader's part about what is going to happen next.
>Twilight trotted through the streets of Ponyville as she anxiously looked around. She hadn’t seen Nyx in two hours and was starting to worry.
Check the morgue. lol jk her body is probably still in the woods
>“Twilight, those two are bullies! Don’t you remember how they made fun of me and called me a blank flank at Diamond Tiara’s Cute-ceañera?”
>Her eyes grew wide, the memory of that day causing her to stagger.
That reaction is probably overkill. Remembering that the apple you just ate was poisoned, or the repairman you just let in is really a serial killer; those kinds of memories are staggering. Twilight is understandably concerned about Nyx and probably feels guilty that she might have inadvertently put her in some danger, but the actual danger is pretty mild. As far as she knows this is all still relatively harmless schoolyard stuff.
>She hadn’t recognized them without their party dresses on, and she hadn’t spoken or really seen that much of them in a year at least.
This feels a little bit like the author offering a rather flimsy and unnecessary excuse for why she didn't recognize them. The party dress thing I'd get rid of, as it's pretty weird for her to remember a detail like that but not the ponies themselves. Really, I'd get rid of the whole explanation as it's awkward and unnecessary. Twilight is only incidentally connected to the CMC because two of them are the younger sisters of her friends, and she has no connection to DT/SS at all. She does not have a younger sister or any foals of her own go get me another box of wine Spike I'm almost out so until now she would have had no reason to pay much attention to the school fillies in Ponyville or how their social structure works. The incident at the cuteceñera party would have been memorable for Apple Bloom but would probably have been long forgotten by Twilight. There's really no reason she should have recognized DT/SS as bullies or seen their arrival as anything to be worried about. She might have noticed Nyx's reaction if she had been paying more attention, but she wasn't and so she didn't. It was a perfectly innocent mistake.
>“I know where Silver Spoon lives,” Sweetie Belle claimed. “Rarity does a lot of business with her father, and sometimes when I go with her, I see Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon doing their homework at Silver Spoon’s house.”
>Applejack nodded and began to lock up her apple cart. “Alright then. Sweetie Belle, you show Twilight where Silver Spoon lives and see if they’re there. Applebloom, Scootaloo, y’all can come with me and we’ll go see if they’re over at Filthy Rich’s store.”
This is probably as good a course of action as any for them to pursue seeing as how they wouldn't have any real idea where the three of them might have gone. However, I feel as if it stands to reason that if DT/SS were planning something mean, they wouldn't take Nyx back to either of their houses to do it, so it seems like kind of a wasted effort to go there. Also, Twilight knows that they had used going to Sugar Cube Corner as an excuse to get Nyx to come along with them, so that would be the logical place to start searching.
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>>249909
>Twilight and the three fillies nodded their heads, and soon the quintet of ponies had raced off in hopes of finding Nyx safe and sound.
Again, I feel like this whole reaction is a bit overkill. Twilight fucked up, feels batman, wants to go find Nyx and make it right; her actions make sense. Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle are friends of Nyx, so they want to help find her; their actions make sense. However, Applejack isn't really involved, and the situation isn't troubling enough that she would really need to close up her apple cart for the day just to help them look.
So far, all we know is that Nyx was tricked into going off with some kids who have a history of bullying her, and Twilight let it happen because she didn't know any better. Sad, but not tragic or life threatening. They didn't go off to explore an abandoned mineshaft or ride the rails to Canterlot or go down to Pinkie Pie's basement. If it was known at this point that DT/SS had sent her into the Everfree Forest it would be cause for more alarm, but so far nopony has any reason to believe that Nyx is in any serious danger. What would make the most sense is for Twilight to go off looking for Nyx, and for the CMC to come with her out of concern for their friend. AJ, meanwhile, would just wish them luck and continue selling apples, because it's not that serious a problem and she doesn't really have a dog in the fight here.
>Just in front of her, a giant purple sea serpent was splashing around in the water. The purple sea serpent, who oddly had well-styled orange hair, was in the process of eating some rough gemstones he had gathered from the river bed.
Did the serpent with Rarity's tail for a mustache really need to make a cameo appearance? I think most of us would have rather forgotten he was ever in the series to begin with. Also, this scene tries to end on a cliffhanger with Nyx hiding from the serpent as if he's dangerous. However, readers familiar with the series would already know that he's not dangerous. Second, even if the reader has never seen MLP before and wouldn't know the character, he's not really being presented as a threat here. Nyx is afraid of him and hides, but he's really not doing anything threatening. He's described as splashing around in the water and eating gemstones. Other than the fact that he's a giant serpent I guess, there's really no reason for us or Nyx to be afraid of him. The scene is written as if the reader is supposed to feel tension, and yet there's no actual tension. It's odd.
>Nyx wasn’t certain the serpent wouldn’t turn down his gemstones to eat a little pony, so she decided to stay hidden and wait until he left.
Furthermore, by deciding to wait and stay hidden until he leaves, she has basically found a solution to the problem, which means the scene ends on a cliffhanger without leaving anything hanging. Again, the scene is written like it's supposed to be tense and exciting, but it isn't. Nyx is walking along the river, and suddenly she sees a big scary monster. Oh no, what will she do? Then the author cuts to another scene, and the reader is left hanging. Except in this case A) the monster isn't that scary, and B) the reader isn't actually left hanging. Instead of building tension or presenting a threat, the reader is simply informed that Nyx was walking and she saw something she's not sure about, so she decides to hide and wait until it leaves. Why do we need to know this exactly?
>Twilight and Sweetie Belle were unable to find anypony at Silver Spoon’s house, and Applejack, Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo were just as unsuccessful. Diamond Tiara, Silver Spoon, and Nyx were simply nowhere to be found, and Twilight was officially starting to panic.
They've checked two places so far, neither of which were particularly likely places for them to have gone in the first place, and concluded that they were "simply nowhere to be found." While it's basically in character for Twilight to start freaking out a little early, I feel like Applejack at least would have more sense than this. Has anypony thought to check out Sugar Cube Corner yet? Or maybe just ask around town to see if the fillies were seen going anywhere?
>The search quickly expanded. Applejack and Apple Bloom asked ponies around the market if they had seen the trio of fillies.
Okay, there we go.
Anyway, I still feel like this premise is a bit shaky. On the one hand, I get it. Three fillies go missing, Twilight and co. try to find them, can't find them, everyone gradually starts to panic. This is basically the right way to build this. But I think the problem is that the setup for all of this is pretty flawed. We know that Nyx is in the Everfree forest and is probably in some sort of danger, but Twilight and the others don't. They only know she's missing. Meanwhile, DT/SS are not technically missing because we know they never left Ponyville, and yet we have no idea where they are currently. Nyx basically just went off into the woods by herself because DT and SS told her to, which to begin with doesn't make a ton of sense. Meanwhile we have no idea where DT and SS are because we haven't seen them since Sugar Cube Corner, which I would once again like to emphasize, is literally where they told Twilight they were going yet somehow it hasn't occurred to any of these numbskulls to go look for them there. If they're still hanging around Ponyville and there's an entire squadron of ponies searching for them, seems to me somepony would have found those two by now and the mystery would be on its way to being unraveled.
But let's just see what happens next I guess.
>Twilight and the three fillies nodded their heads, and soon the quintet of ponies had raced off in hopes of finding Nyx safe and sound.
Again, I feel like this whole reaction is a bit overkill. Twilight fucked up, feels batman, wants to go find Nyx and make it right; her actions make sense. Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle are friends of Nyx, so they want to help find her; their actions make sense. However, Applejack isn't really involved, and the situation isn't troubling enough that she would really need to close up her apple cart for the day just to help them look.
So far, all we know is that Nyx was tricked into going off with some kids who have a history of bullying her, and Twilight let it happen because she didn't know any better. Sad, but not tragic or life threatening. They didn't go off to explore an abandoned mineshaft or ride the rails to Canterlot or go down to Pinkie Pie's basement. If it was known at this point that DT/SS had sent her into the Everfree Forest it would be cause for more alarm, but so far nopony has any reason to believe that Nyx is in any serious danger. What would make the most sense is for Twilight to go off looking for Nyx, and for the CMC to come with her out of concern for their friend. AJ, meanwhile, would just wish them luck and continue selling apples, because it's not that serious a problem and she doesn't really have a dog in the fight here.
>Just in front of her, a giant purple sea serpent was splashing around in the water. The purple sea serpent, who oddly had well-styled orange hair, was in the process of eating some rough gemstones he had gathered from the river bed.
Did the serpent with Rarity's tail for a mustache really need to make a cameo appearance? I think most of us would have rather forgotten he was ever in the series to begin with. Also, this scene tries to end on a cliffhanger with Nyx hiding from the serpent as if he's dangerous. However, readers familiar with the series would already know that he's not dangerous. Second, even if the reader has never seen MLP before and wouldn't know the character, he's not really being presented as a threat here. Nyx is afraid of him and hides, but he's really not doing anything threatening. He's described as splashing around in the water and eating gemstones. Other than the fact that he's a giant serpent I guess, there's really no reason for us or Nyx to be afraid of him. The scene is written as if the reader is supposed to feel tension, and yet there's no actual tension. It's odd.
>Nyx wasn’t certain the serpent wouldn’t turn down his gemstones to eat a little pony, so she decided to stay hidden and wait until he left.
Furthermore, by deciding to wait and stay hidden until he leaves, she has basically found a solution to the problem, which means the scene ends on a cliffhanger without leaving anything hanging. Again, the scene is written like it's supposed to be tense and exciting, but it isn't. Nyx is walking along the river, and suddenly she sees a big scary monster. Oh no, what will she do? Then the author cuts to another scene, and the reader is left hanging. Except in this case A) the monster isn't that scary, and B) the reader isn't actually left hanging. Instead of building tension or presenting a threat, the reader is simply informed that Nyx was walking and she saw something she's not sure about, so she decides to hide and wait until it leaves. Why do we need to know this exactly?
>Twilight and Sweetie Belle were unable to find anypony at Silver Spoon’s house, and Applejack, Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo were just as unsuccessful. Diamond Tiara, Silver Spoon, and Nyx were simply nowhere to be found, and Twilight was officially starting to panic.
They've checked two places so far, neither of which were particularly likely places for them to have gone in the first place, and concluded that they were "simply nowhere to be found." While it's basically in character for Twilight to start freaking out a little early, I feel like Applejack at least would have more sense than this. Has anypony thought to check out Sugar Cube Corner yet? Or maybe just ask around town to see if the fillies were seen going anywhere?
>The search quickly expanded. Applejack and Apple Bloom asked ponies around the market if they had seen the trio of fillies.
Okay, there we go.
Anyway, I still feel like this premise is a bit shaky. On the one hand, I get it. Three fillies go missing, Twilight and co. try to find them, can't find them, everyone gradually starts to panic. This is basically the right way to build this. But I think the problem is that the setup for all of this is pretty flawed. We know that Nyx is in the Everfree forest and is probably in some sort of danger, but Twilight and the others don't. They only know she's missing. Meanwhile, DT/SS are not technically missing because we know they never left Ponyville, and yet we have no idea where they are currently. Nyx basically just went off into the woods by herself because DT and SS told her to, which to begin with doesn't make a ton of sense. Meanwhile we have no idea where DT and SS are because we haven't seen them since Sugar Cube Corner, which I would once again like to emphasize, is literally where they told Twilight they were going yet somehow it hasn't occurred to any of these numbskulls to go look for them there. If they're still hanging around Ponyville and there's an entire squadron of ponies searching for them, seems to me somepony would have found those two by now and the mystery would be on its way to being unraveled.
But let's just see what happens next I guess.
>>249924
>The scene is written as if the reader is supposed to feel tension, and yet there's no actual tension. It's odd.
Nyx's fear is supposed to be endearing the same way her getting bullied is supposed to be endearing. Do you pity her yet? Do you? Huh? Huhhh???
>The scene is written as if the reader is supposed to feel tension, and yet there's no actual tension. It's odd.
Nyx's fear is supposed to be endearing the same way her getting bullied is supposed to be endearing. Do you pity her yet? Do you? Huh? Huhhh???
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>>249924
>“Twilight!”
>Looking skyward, Twilight saw Rainbow Dash circling above her. “I’ve found them! This way!”
>“I’m right behind you!” Twilight shouted to Rainbow Dash before calling on her magic. With a flash and a pop, she used her teleportation spell to move to a nearby roof. She kept teleporting between rooftops, following Rainbow Dash until they arrived at the edge of a park. “Where are they?”
This is honestly just getting stupid. So basically, we now have Twilight, the CMC, AJ, Rarity and Rainbow Dash looking for Nyx, Diamond Tiara, and Silver Spoon. They have searched everywhere except the first place that it would have made logical sense for them to look. Had they gone to Sugar Cube Corner, Pinkie, Mrs. Cake, or whoever the fuck was working the counter at the time and would have served the three of them could have at least given them some basic information. Were they here, what were they doing, what direction did they go afterward, etc. This would at least have given them a logical base from which to begin the search. Instead, Twilight, AJ and the CMC split up and go to DT and SS's houses respectively, discover that they aren't there, panic, run around aimlessly for a while, then recruit the rest of their friends in an increasingly panicked and disorganized romp around Ponyville.
Meanwhile, DT and SS can be presumed by the reader to be hanging around Ponyville somewhere, and yet we have no idea where they are or why nobody has seen them yet. Nyx, whose location is known to the reader but not to the ponies who are looking for her, is apparently hiding in the bushes waiting for that faggot-ass sea serpent to clean the cum out of his mustache and go someplace else. The whole situation is both implausible and overly complicated. The intended excitement just falls flat because there are just too many threads here and none of them are connected properly.
Eventually, Rainbow Dash, who can fly, spots DT/SS sitting around in the park.
>you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
As an aside, I initially read this as "you catch more fillies with honey than with vinegar."
>Diamond Tiara glanced over at Twilight Sparkle like she was regarding an ant before she turned back to Silver Spoon and began to speak as if Twilight wasn’t there. “Oh look, Silver Spoon, it’s the town librarian. What, trying to find ponies that have overdue books?”
This is technically in character, but I feel like at this point, Diamond Tiara is just being made to appear overly cunty and cruel. Also, you have to take the situation into account. DT and SS obviously don't care about Nyx or the fact that she's in danger, however one can presume they care about themselves. They know they did something they could get into trouble for, and it stands to reason they would want to tread carefully. They may not hold Twilight in high regard, but she is still an adult, who can very easily bust them and get them in trouble with their parents. Furthermore, she knows that Nyx was with them, and that they probably know where she is. It's unlikely Diamond Tiara would be this cavalier and condescending to Twilight; she would be a lot more defensive and on edge, or maybe trying to play innocent. The two of them might also have made up a story beforehand that would make it look like Nyx ran off on her own. Either way, right now they have an incentive to either kiss Twilight's ass or else play dumb with her. Insulting her is only going to piss her off and make her ask more questions.
>I was wondering if you two know where Nyx is. The last I saw her, she was going with you two to Sugarcube Corner, and I haven’t seen her in a few hours.
reeeeeeee
You literally just acknowledged that you knew where they went the whole time. Why did you have to recruit seven ponies and tear apart the town looking for them when you could have just gone there first and fucking asked?
>“Sounds like a real nerd to me,” Diamond Tiara commented, “and we never hang out with ugly nerds, do we, Silver Spoon?”
Again, two problems here. One, she's being far more of a sadistic cunt than I feel her character actually is. Two, she's deliberately antagonizing Twilight instead of doing what a normal child would do in this situation, which is to either deny everything, feign concern, or both. She's basically attempting to bully Twilight the same way she bullies Nyx, which would indicate that she is both exceptionally cruel and also that she has no fear of adults or authority figures. This is like actual sociopath behavior right here.
Running out of space, I will continue these thoughts in another post.
>“Twilight!”
>Looking skyward, Twilight saw Rainbow Dash circling above her. “I’ve found them! This way!”
>“I’m right behind you!” Twilight shouted to Rainbow Dash before calling on her magic. With a flash and a pop, she used her teleportation spell to move to a nearby roof. She kept teleporting between rooftops, following Rainbow Dash until they arrived at the edge of a park. “Where are they?”
This is honestly just getting stupid. So basically, we now have Twilight, the CMC, AJ, Rarity and Rainbow Dash looking for Nyx, Diamond Tiara, and Silver Spoon. They have searched everywhere except the first place that it would have made logical sense for them to look. Had they gone to Sugar Cube Corner, Pinkie, Mrs. Cake, or whoever the fuck was working the counter at the time and would have served the three of them could have at least given them some basic information. Were they here, what were they doing, what direction did they go afterward, etc. This would at least have given them a logical base from which to begin the search. Instead, Twilight, AJ and the CMC split up and go to DT and SS's houses respectively, discover that they aren't there, panic, run around aimlessly for a while, then recruit the rest of their friends in an increasingly panicked and disorganized romp around Ponyville.
Meanwhile, DT and SS can be presumed by the reader to be hanging around Ponyville somewhere, and yet we have no idea where they are or why nobody has seen them yet. Nyx, whose location is known to the reader but not to the ponies who are looking for her, is apparently hiding in the bushes waiting for that faggot-ass sea serpent to clean the cum out of his mustache and go someplace else. The whole situation is both implausible and overly complicated. The intended excitement just falls flat because there are just too many threads here and none of them are connected properly.
Eventually, Rainbow Dash, who can fly, spots DT/SS sitting around in the park.
>you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
As an aside, I initially read this as "you catch more fillies with honey than with vinegar."
>Diamond Tiara glanced over at Twilight Sparkle like she was regarding an ant before she turned back to Silver Spoon and began to speak as if Twilight wasn’t there. “Oh look, Silver Spoon, it’s the town librarian. What, trying to find ponies that have overdue books?”
This is technically in character, but I feel like at this point, Diamond Tiara is just being made to appear overly cunty and cruel. Also, you have to take the situation into account. DT and SS obviously don't care about Nyx or the fact that she's in danger, however one can presume they care about themselves. They know they did something they could get into trouble for, and it stands to reason they would want to tread carefully. They may not hold Twilight in high regard, but she is still an adult, who can very easily bust them and get them in trouble with their parents. Furthermore, she knows that Nyx was with them, and that they probably know where she is. It's unlikely Diamond Tiara would be this cavalier and condescending to Twilight; she would be a lot more defensive and on edge, or maybe trying to play innocent. The two of them might also have made up a story beforehand that would make it look like Nyx ran off on her own. Either way, right now they have an incentive to either kiss Twilight's ass or else play dumb with her. Insulting her is only going to piss her off and make her ask more questions.
>I was wondering if you two know where Nyx is. The last I saw her, she was going with you two to Sugarcube Corner, and I haven’t seen her in a few hours.
reeeeeeee
You literally just acknowledged that you knew where they went the whole time. Why did you have to recruit seven ponies and tear apart the town looking for them when you could have just gone there first and fucking asked?
>“Sounds like a real nerd to me,” Diamond Tiara commented, “and we never hang out with ugly nerds, do we, Silver Spoon?”
Again, two problems here. One, she's being far more of a sadistic cunt than I feel her character actually is. Two, she's deliberately antagonizing Twilight instead of doing what a normal child would do in this situation, which is to either deny everything, feign concern, or both. She's basically attempting to bully Twilight the same way she bullies Nyx, which would indicate that she is both exceptionally cruel and also that she has no fear of adults or authority figures. This is like actual sociopath behavior right here.
Running out of space, I will continue these thoughts in another post.
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>>249927
Anyway, instead of one or both of the fillies having a crisis of conscience and coming clean, which at least would have created a path to redemption for them, Twilight simply extracts a confession through brute force, using some kind of rage spell or something, idk I've already forgotten what she did exactly. The better thing for the author to have done in this situation would be to have one of them, in this case probably Silver Spoon, start feeling guilty once they begin to realize that their prank went a little overboard and Nyx might be in actual danger. She would confess, Twilight would be angry and demand that the two of them help look for Nyx. Thus, the two would have the ability to redeem themselves and atone for what they did by helping to make it right.
Personally, I'd have gone a step further and not have separated DT/SS and Nyx in the first place. For one thing it doesn't make much sense for them to just tell her to go into the woods and then forget about her. If they're just being mean to her for their own amusement, there's not much satisfaction in telling her to do something and then just leaving her alone and assuming she does it. If you don't see the results of a prank there's no point to a prank. For all either of them knew, Nyx decided not to go into the forest at all and just went back to Twilight's after she left Sugar Cube Corner. In that case all DT/SS would have accomplished would be to take her out for sweets and be publicly seen hanging out with her. Kind of a lackluster and self-defeating prank; sort of like Cartman trying to make Butters look gay by sucking his dick.
It would have made far more sense for all three to have gone to the forest. Once inside, DT/SS could detach themselves from Nyx and then either ditch her and go home, or else try to play pranks on her and scare her. You could add another interesting dynamic to the arc by having DT/SS unintentionally end up lost in the woods themselves. They could either be saved by Twilight and co. along with Nyx, or even end up in a situation where Nyx ends up saving them. Either way, they get a comeuppance and learn a lesson.
However, it's no surprise that the author chose not to do any of these things. Instead, he simply has Twilight scare a confession out of DT/SS, then she simply turns on them and leaves, since their role in the story was basically to just get Nyx into the woods so she can do whatever he wants her to do in there. Why treat any of your other characters as dynamic when the whole story just revolves around your OC?
>Twilight’s rage-shift ended.
Well, hopefully the night guy will be on time so she can leave.
>Nyx trembled, just barely keeping herself moving without crying. The growing darkness had made the forest very, very scary. She looked around the path anxiously, watching the many long shadows that surrounded her and seeing things that may or may not have been there. Still, Nyx counted it a small miracle that she could see at all. The moon was three-quarters full, providing just enough light to see the path ahead.
So basically, that whole bit with the semen serpent served no purpose to the story at all. Nyx can be presumed to have waited for him to leave just as she said she would, and then eventually he left, and then she went on to get lost in the woods. Fabulous stuff.
>Nyx had given up on trying to find the nice part of the forest. Now all she wanted to do was get back to Ponyville, but she had lost her map. A rustling in the bushes had startled her earlier, and when she ran, she had left the map behind. Now she was wandering around aimlessly, hoping to recognize some landmark.
I would just like to once again emphasize that this is quite possibly the dumbest premise in the story so far. Basically, Nyx gets tormented by these two ponies for like two weeks, then all of a sudden they show up acting like they want to be friends. She takes everything they say at face value and accepts their friendship. Then, they tell her to go off into the woods by herself and she does. She gets hopelessly lost, and on top of everything loses her map. Meanwhile, Twilight is back in Ponyville looking for her but failing miserably at it because it never occurs to her to check the one place where she knows for a fact that she went. Also meanwhile, DT and SS just sit around the park lezzing out with each other until Twilight shows up, because the author can't think of anything better for them to do, and it apparently never occurs to him to treat them as dynamic characters or at least as villains who serve more of a purpose than to simply get Nyx lost in the woods.
The whole thing is just badly executed and the way the events play out makes very little sense. It even fails to accomplish its sole objective, which is to make the reader feel sympathy for the author's OC. Nyx going off into the woods by herself just because two bullies pretended to be nice to her for like ten minutes, and then losing her fucking map and getting lost in there at night to boot, doesn't make her sympathetic. It just makes her look like a gullible retard. DT and SS have no motivation for doing what they do other than to be mean, and they neither receive appropriate punishment for their actions, nor do they learn anything or ever feel any remorse. They serve no purpose in the story other than to get Nyx lost in the woods so the reader can feel sorry for her for being lost in the woods. It's just dumb.
>Following a bend in the path, Nyx came to a stop. Before her, shrouded in curling mist, a creaky rope bridge hung over a deep expanse. It groaned as it shifted gently from side to side, nudged by small breezes. Beyond the bridge, on the far side of the gorge, were the ruins of an ancient castle that had been long forgotten and partially overtaken by the Everfree Forest.
Oh God she's going to talk to the ghost of Nightmare Moon or something and gain her super-duper revenge powers isn't she? Well, whatever. Stay tuned.
Anyway, instead of one or both of the fillies having a crisis of conscience and coming clean, which at least would have created a path to redemption for them, Twilight simply extracts a confession through brute force, using some kind of rage spell or something, idk I've already forgotten what she did exactly. The better thing for the author to have done in this situation would be to have one of them, in this case probably Silver Spoon, start feeling guilty once they begin to realize that their prank went a little overboard and Nyx might be in actual danger. She would confess, Twilight would be angry and demand that the two of them help look for Nyx. Thus, the two would have the ability to redeem themselves and atone for what they did by helping to make it right.
Personally, I'd have gone a step further and not have separated DT/SS and Nyx in the first place. For one thing it doesn't make much sense for them to just tell her to go into the woods and then forget about her. If they're just being mean to her for their own amusement, there's not much satisfaction in telling her to do something and then just leaving her alone and assuming she does it. If you don't see the results of a prank there's no point to a prank. For all either of them knew, Nyx decided not to go into the forest at all and just went back to Twilight's after she left Sugar Cube Corner. In that case all DT/SS would have accomplished would be to take her out for sweets and be publicly seen hanging out with her. Kind of a lackluster and self-defeating prank; sort of like Cartman trying to make Butters look gay by sucking his dick.
It would have made far more sense for all three to have gone to the forest. Once inside, DT/SS could detach themselves from Nyx and then either ditch her and go home, or else try to play pranks on her and scare her. You could add another interesting dynamic to the arc by having DT/SS unintentionally end up lost in the woods themselves. They could either be saved by Twilight and co. along with Nyx, or even end up in a situation where Nyx ends up saving them. Either way, they get a comeuppance and learn a lesson.
However, it's no surprise that the author chose not to do any of these things. Instead, he simply has Twilight scare a confession out of DT/SS, then she simply turns on them and leaves, since their role in the story was basically to just get Nyx into the woods so she can do whatever he wants her to do in there. Why treat any of your other characters as dynamic when the whole story just revolves around your OC?
>Twilight’s rage-shift ended.
Well, hopefully the night guy will be on time so she can leave.
>Nyx trembled, just barely keeping herself moving without crying. The growing darkness had made the forest very, very scary. She looked around the path anxiously, watching the many long shadows that surrounded her and seeing things that may or may not have been there. Still, Nyx counted it a small miracle that she could see at all. The moon was three-quarters full, providing just enough light to see the path ahead.
So basically, that whole bit with the semen serpent served no purpose to the story at all. Nyx can be presumed to have waited for him to leave just as she said she would, and then eventually he left, and then she went on to get lost in the woods. Fabulous stuff.
>Nyx had given up on trying to find the nice part of the forest. Now all she wanted to do was get back to Ponyville, but she had lost her map. A rustling in the bushes had startled her earlier, and when she ran, she had left the map behind. Now she was wandering around aimlessly, hoping to recognize some landmark.
I would just like to once again emphasize that this is quite possibly the dumbest premise in the story so far. Basically, Nyx gets tormented by these two ponies for like two weeks, then all of a sudden they show up acting like they want to be friends. She takes everything they say at face value and accepts their friendship. Then, they tell her to go off into the woods by herself and she does. She gets hopelessly lost, and on top of everything loses her map. Meanwhile, Twilight is back in Ponyville looking for her but failing miserably at it because it never occurs to her to check the one place where she knows for a fact that she went. Also meanwhile, DT and SS just sit around the park lezzing out with each other until Twilight shows up, because the author can't think of anything better for them to do, and it apparently never occurs to him to treat them as dynamic characters or at least as villains who serve more of a purpose than to simply get Nyx lost in the woods.
The whole thing is just badly executed and the way the events play out makes very little sense. It even fails to accomplish its sole objective, which is to make the reader feel sympathy for the author's OC. Nyx going off into the woods by herself just because two bullies pretended to be nice to her for like ten minutes, and then losing her fucking map and getting lost in there at night to boot, doesn't make her sympathetic. It just makes her look like a gullible retard. DT and SS have no motivation for doing what they do other than to be mean, and they neither receive appropriate punishment for their actions, nor do they learn anything or ever feel any remorse. They serve no purpose in the story other than to get Nyx lost in the woods so the reader can feel sorry for her for being lost in the woods. It's just dumb.
>Following a bend in the path, Nyx came to a stop. Before her, shrouded in curling mist, a creaky rope bridge hung over a deep expanse. It groaned as it shifted gently from side to side, nudged by small breezes. Beyond the bridge, on the far side of the gorge, were the ruins of an ancient castle that had been long forgotten and partially overtaken by the Everfree Forest.
Oh God she's going to talk to the ghost of Nightmare Moon or something and gain her super-duper revenge powers isn't she? Well, whatever. Stay tuned.
>>249926
>Do you pity her yet? Do you? Huh? Huhhh???
At this point I pity all the characters trapped in this world.
>Do you pity her yet? Do you? Huh? Huhhh???
At this point I pity all the characters trapped in this world.
>>249931
Sometimes I imagine the characters in this world as wig-wearing fur-dyed actors in a movie the real Mane Six is watching and laughing at.
Sometimes I imagine the characters in this world as wig-wearing fur-dyed actors in a movie the real Mane Six is watching and laughing at.
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>>249930
So anyway, it looks as if Nyx has found the Castle of the Two Sisters. Of course, being Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, GlimGlam), she immediately starts to have flashbacks which consist of dialog from episode 1 & 2 of the series being dumped into the text verbatim.
>Ooh! Ooh! More guessing games! Um… Hokey Smokes! How about Queen Meanie? No! Black Snooty, Black Snooty!
Peen Stroke could have potentially done something interesting with this line from Pinkie Pie, seeing as how when she first met Nyx she called her by the name Black Snooty. It might have struck her as curious to hear the name again, particularly in Pinkie's voice, but clearly in a different context from when she'd heard it the first time. Just a thought.
>Nyx could remember herself saying those words. She could remember thinking them, but even worse… she could remember the feelings behind those thoughts. She wanted to hurt Twilight, to punish Twilight for trying to thwart her. She was thinking about banishing her, imprisoning her… even torturing her.
To be fair, I feel like we've all thought about Twilight in bondage from time to time.
Anyway, after what feels like a pretty long stretch of poor wittle teeny-tiny helpwess Nyx being all itsy-bitsy and cutesy-wootsy, the story has once again begun to shift back into edgelord territory. As usual, the events here don't really have a ton of emotional resonance because most of it could be seen coming a mile away, and because it's mostly told through a string of cliches; however, Peen Stroke basically does the cliches right. Nyx keeps having flashbacks to her life as Nightmare Moon (u a fagit glimy), she remembers fighting Twilight and recalls feelings of hatred towards her, which of course puts her in conflict with her current self because at that time Twilight was an enemy, but now she's just the kindly old box-wine-guzzling neurotic lady who keeps her locked up in the town library and won't let her go outside without a disguise on.
>Dark shadows shifted around the room: Dispelled magic that had lain dormant was now being awakened by Nyx’s presence. Trails of indigo smoke began to creep towards Nyx, and, as the magic seeped into her, the memory continued.
Naturally, there's plenty of this kind of shit. Nyx wages her inner war between her kind nature and her evil nature, which manifests itself in the physical world through shadows moving around and dark spoopy lightning flashing all over the place. Edge, edge, edge.
>And then… then there was a rainbow, but not a nice, pretty rainbow.
>No, the rainbow lunged at her like an angry snake. It encircled her, and it burned. It was burning her away, tearing her away from something else. It was like a savage animal with razor-sharp claws. It tore her to ribbons, despite her cries. Then, the memory faded and stopped, as if the rainbow had caused her to simply not exist anymore.
>Nyx collapsed on the floor of the castle, panting heavily as the memory finally relented. Despite the cool feel of the castle’s stone floor, she could still feel the burning pain of the rainbow, how it had cut and torn at her.
Alright, I'll grant that this is a pretty good metaphor for what the gay rights movement has done to Western civilization. Wait, that wasn't what he meant? Oh, never mind then.
>Other thoughts began to bubble to the surface as more and more of the indigo smoke drew in from the room and into Nyx. The thoughts were desires… hateful desires. Desires to hurt ponies, to make them pay for ignoring her. Memories of being scorned and ignored, memories of jealousy and anguish.
lmao. It's actually an accomplishment in itself that a story composed entirely of formulas and cliches can still manage to surprise me with how formulaic and full of cliches it is. Anyway, blah blah blah. The spirit of hatred and anger engulfs Nyx and fills her with a desire to become pic 2 related.
>With that final scream, something sparked to life inside Nyx and her eyes glowed white. The creeping tendrils of indigo smoke suddenly shifted, swirling faster and faster as they were sucked down into her like water in a whirlpool. At the same time, the dark desires in her mind began to fade, ebbing away as more and more of the smoky tendrils were absorbed.
And then, it reaches its climax, the spirit of evil enters Nyx and takes up permanent residence inside of her, but goes back to being dormant. Nyx returns to normal, will probably be all like "oh wow wat was dat lmao?" and then Twilight and her friends will show up, rescue her, and the adventure will be over until the next time Nyx is getting bullied, at which point the evil power will manifest and she will rain her vengeance down upon the world that shunned her. Yawn.
>Celestia bolted up in bed and turned her eyes to her window, through which she could see Ponyville and the Everfree Forest. Her breathing was still, and her ears turned forward in erect attention.
I'm too classy to even touch this one.
Anyway, blah blah blah, some more fairly predictable shit happens. Celestia feels a dark presence that she has not felt in some time (or maybe she just ate some bad hayburgers). One of the unicorns from the cult also feels it and summons his fellow cult members, for purposes yet unknown. We don't know that he's one of the cult members of course, but the author gives us a very subtle clue by casually dropping some names that the studious observer would remember from the prologue. This is a literary technique called "foreshadowing," but you don't need to remember that, because you pretty much have to be a high level literary wizard like Peen Stroke to be able to deploy it effectively. Stuff like that isn't in the text for peons like you and me; it's for the scholars who will be studying this 100 years from now.
So anyway, it looks as if Nyx has found the Castle of the Two Sisters. Of course, being Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, GlimGlam), she immediately starts to have flashbacks which consist of dialog from episode 1 & 2 of the series being dumped into the text verbatim.
>Ooh! Ooh! More guessing games! Um… Hokey Smokes! How about Queen Meanie? No! Black Snooty, Black Snooty!
Peen Stroke could have potentially done something interesting with this line from Pinkie Pie, seeing as how when she first met Nyx she called her by the name Black Snooty. It might have struck her as curious to hear the name again, particularly in Pinkie's voice, but clearly in a different context from when she'd heard it the first time. Just a thought.
>Nyx could remember herself saying those words. She could remember thinking them, but even worse… she could remember the feelings behind those thoughts. She wanted to hurt Twilight, to punish Twilight for trying to thwart her. She was thinking about banishing her, imprisoning her… even torturing her.
To be fair, I feel like we've all thought about Twilight in bondage from time to time.
Anyway, after what feels like a pretty long stretch of poor wittle teeny-tiny helpwess Nyx being all itsy-bitsy and cutesy-wootsy, the story has once again begun to shift back into edgelord territory. As usual, the events here don't really have a ton of emotional resonance because most of it could be seen coming a mile away, and because it's mostly told through a string of cliches; however, Peen Stroke basically does the cliches right. Nyx keeps having flashbacks to her life as Nightmare Moon (u a fagit glimy), she remembers fighting Twilight and recalls feelings of hatred towards her, which of course puts her in conflict with her current self because at that time Twilight was an enemy, but now she's just the kindly old box-wine-guzzling neurotic lady who keeps her locked up in the town library and won't let her go outside without a disguise on.
>Dark shadows shifted around the room: Dispelled magic that had lain dormant was now being awakened by Nyx’s presence. Trails of indigo smoke began to creep towards Nyx, and, as the magic seeped into her, the memory continued.
Naturally, there's plenty of this kind of shit. Nyx wages her inner war between her kind nature and her evil nature, which manifests itself in the physical world through shadows moving around and dark spoopy lightning flashing all over the place. Edge, edge, edge.
>And then… then there was a rainbow, but not a nice, pretty rainbow.
>No, the rainbow lunged at her like an angry snake. It encircled her, and it burned. It was burning her away, tearing her away from something else. It was like a savage animal with razor-sharp claws. It tore her to ribbons, despite her cries. Then, the memory faded and stopped, as if the rainbow had caused her to simply not exist anymore.
>Nyx collapsed on the floor of the castle, panting heavily as the memory finally relented. Despite the cool feel of the castle’s stone floor, she could still feel the burning pain of the rainbow, how it had cut and torn at her.
Alright, I'll grant that this is a pretty good metaphor for what the gay rights movement has done to Western civilization. Wait, that wasn't what he meant? Oh, never mind then.
>Other thoughts began to bubble to the surface as more and more of the indigo smoke drew in from the room and into Nyx. The thoughts were desires… hateful desires. Desires to hurt ponies, to make them pay for ignoring her. Memories of being scorned and ignored, memories of jealousy and anguish.
lmao. It's actually an accomplishment in itself that a story composed entirely of formulas and cliches can still manage to surprise me with how formulaic and full of cliches it is. Anyway, blah blah blah. The spirit of hatred and anger engulfs Nyx and fills her with a desire to become pic 2 related.
>With that final scream, something sparked to life inside Nyx and her eyes glowed white. The creeping tendrils of indigo smoke suddenly shifted, swirling faster and faster as they were sucked down into her like water in a whirlpool. At the same time, the dark desires in her mind began to fade, ebbing away as more and more of the smoky tendrils were absorbed.
And then, it reaches its climax, the spirit of evil enters Nyx and takes up permanent residence inside of her, but goes back to being dormant. Nyx returns to normal, will probably be all like "oh wow wat was dat lmao?" and then Twilight and her friends will show up, rescue her, and the adventure will be over until the next time Nyx is getting bullied, at which point the evil power will manifest and she will rain her vengeance down upon the world that shunned her. Yawn.
>Celestia bolted up in bed and turned her eyes to her window, through which she could see Ponyville and the Everfree Forest. Her breathing was still, and her ears turned forward in erect attention.
I'm too classy to even touch this one.
Anyway, blah blah blah, some more fairly predictable shit happens. Celestia feels a dark presence that she has not felt in some time (or maybe she just ate some bad hayburgers). One of the unicorns from the cult also feels it and summons his fellow cult members, for purposes yet unknown. We don't know that he's one of the cult members of course, but the author gives us a very subtle clue by casually dropping some names that the studious observer would remember from the prologue. This is a literary technique called "foreshadowing," but you don't need to remember that, because you pretty much have to be a high level literary wizard like Peen Stroke to be able to deploy it effectively. Stuff like that isn't in the text for peons like you and me; it's for the scholars who will be studying this 100 years from now.
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>>249961
Anyway, continuing along. After we get a few cutaways to Celestia and the cult leader feeling the dark presence of spoopy spoopiness returning to the world of mortals, the scene cuts to the Everfree Forest again, where the Mane 6 are now rushing in to save the day. They of course also see the bolt of magic lightning that signifies the reawakening of Nightmare Moon's evil power into the world, followed by some light humor where Pinkie Pie says something fairly stupid, Rainbow Dash facepalms (facehoofs, whatever) and we all force ourselves to chuckle (ruefully).
This scene actually feels fairly consistent with how the show handles this type of story. As much as I've been dumping on Past Sins for being melodramatic and full of cliches, parts of it actually read like one of the season opener/closer episodes from the show, which to be fair also tends to be pretty melodramatic and full of cliches. Evil appears, lightning cracks, the villain cackles maniacally, dramatic music plays, the mane 6 rush in heroically to save the day, Pinkie Pie makes a joke to lighten the mood, and so forth and so on.
However, I do think that while he's being more or less faithful to the material he's working with, Peen Stroke could have handled this scene a bit differently for better effect. For one thing, I do still think it's a bit overkill to have the entire mane 6 rushing into the forest to rescue Nyx. This isn't just because of the logic issues I've brought up already. It goes back to what we were discussing earlier, about how fanfiction authors tend to want to have the entire main cast make an appearance even if it isn't right for the story. In this case, I feel like the error he makes is in assuming that because he's writing an MLP story, the mane 6 have to play a significant role. Particularly with a scene like this. The natural thought process goes: Nyx is in trouble, and in MLP, if somepony is in trouble, the Mane 6 have to be the ones to save the day. But in this case it's wrong, and here's why.
Nyx really does not have a relationship to the mane 6, she has a relationship to Twilight, and a relationship to the others through Twilight. Twilight is the one who is taking care of her and showing an interest in her, so that's where the focus of the story should be. She also has a friendship with Apple Bloom and presumably the CMC and Twist, though what we have so far has mostly focused on Apple Bloom, so again that should be the main point of focus. The rest of the characters she's not particularly close to yet.
This might be kind of a dumb analogy, but I like to imagine the relationship of a main character to the supporting characters as kind of like a map of the solar system. At the center you have the main character, who is the focus of the story, as the sun. From there, you have other characters as planets that orbit them, with more important relationships orbiting closer and less important ones orbiting further away. Basically, character relationships form concentric circles with the most important relationships being closest to the center. I know, this analogy is gay as fuck but please bear with me.
In this story, we have Nyx as the MC at the center. The ponies closest to her, with whom she has established the most significant relationships, are Twilight, who is her wine-guzzling neurotic proto-mother figure, and Apple Bloom, who is a pony who stuck up for her when she was getting bullied and is pretty much her best friend at this point. Those two are her primary relationships and occupy the circle closest to her. From there, we have a circle for secondary relationships, in which I would place Rarity, Pinkie, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Twist. Rarity and Pinkie are the ponies Twilight chose to confide in when she first decided tokidnap adopt Nyx. Nyx knows them, has had meaningful interactions with them (Rarity taught her to drink tea, Pinkie threw a party for her), but they are not as close to her as Twilight is. Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle are friends of Apple Bloom who become friends of Nyx by extension. However, they haven't really had any scenes together nor has there been any established bond between them. Nyx bonds to Apple Bloom, but doesn't bond to SB and SL the way that AB does. But they are still all friends. Twist, despite being somepony who should by all rights be drop-kicked into an oven and then forgotten forever, is in this category as well; she's a friend of AB, and befriends Nyx through this connection, but is not directly bonded to Nyx.
Beyond that, you have tertiary relationships, in which I would place the remainder of the mane 6 and any other main characters from the show. It's been established that Dash, AJ, and presumably Fluttershy, even though she isn't really mentioned much, all know that Twilight has a cousin and have met her at some point. However, they aren't really close and haven't really spent much time together. They care about Twilight and would probably care if they learned that Twilight's cousin was lost in the woods, but in terms of our solar system model they are basically the outer planets orbiting furthest away from Nyx, beyond the asteroid belt and well outside of our point of narrative focus. It might make sense logically for them to help rescue her, but from a story perspective they're not significant and shouldn't be in the scene.
I'll wrap this up in another post.
Anyway, continuing along. After we get a few cutaways to Celestia and the cult leader feeling the dark presence of spoopy spoopiness returning to the world of mortals, the scene cuts to the Everfree Forest again, where the Mane 6 are now rushing in to save the day. They of course also see the bolt of magic lightning that signifies the reawakening of Nightmare Moon's evil power into the world, followed by some light humor where Pinkie Pie says something fairly stupid, Rainbow Dash facepalms (facehoofs, whatever) and we all force ourselves to chuckle (ruefully).
This scene actually feels fairly consistent with how the show handles this type of story. As much as I've been dumping on Past Sins for being melodramatic and full of cliches, parts of it actually read like one of the season opener/closer episodes from the show, which to be fair also tends to be pretty melodramatic and full of cliches. Evil appears, lightning cracks, the villain cackles maniacally, dramatic music plays, the mane 6 rush in heroically to save the day, Pinkie Pie makes a joke to lighten the mood, and so forth and so on.
However, I do think that while he's being more or less faithful to the material he's working with, Peen Stroke could have handled this scene a bit differently for better effect. For one thing, I do still think it's a bit overkill to have the entire mane 6 rushing into the forest to rescue Nyx. This isn't just because of the logic issues I've brought up already. It goes back to what we were discussing earlier, about how fanfiction authors tend to want to have the entire main cast make an appearance even if it isn't right for the story. In this case, I feel like the error he makes is in assuming that because he's writing an MLP story, the mane 6 have to play a significant role. Particularly with a scene like this. The natural thought process goes: Nyx is in trouble, and in MLP, if somepony is in trouble, the Mane 6 have to be the ones to save the day. But in this case it's wrong, and here's why.
Nyx really does not have a relationship to the mane 6, she has a relationship to Twilight, and a relationship to the others through Twilight. Twilight is the one who is taking care of her and showing an interest in her, so that's where the focus of the story should be. She also has a friendship with Apple Bloom and presumably the CMC and Twist, though what we have so far has mostly focused on Apple Bloom, so again that should be the main point of focus. The rest of the characters she's not particularly close to yet.
This might be kind of a dumb analogy, but I like to imagine the relationship of a main character to the supporting characters as kind of like a map of the solar system. At the center you have the main character, who is the focus of the story, as the sun. From there, you have other characters as planets that orbit them, with more important relationships orbiting closer and less important ones orbiting further away. Basically, character relationships form concentric circles with the most important relationships being closest to the center. I know, this analogy is gay as fuck but please bear with me.
In this story, we have Nyx as the MC at the center. The ponies closest to her, with whom she has established the most significant relationships, are Twilight, who is her wine-guzzling neurotic proto-mother figure, and Apple Bloom, who is a pony who stuck up for her when she was getting bullied and is pretty much her best friend at this point. Those two are her primary relationships and occupy the circle closest to her. From there, we have a circle for secondary relationships, in which I would place Rarity, Pinkie, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Twist. Rarity and Pinkie are the ponies Twilight chose to confide in when she first decided to
Beyond that, you have tertiary relationships, in which I would place the remainder of the mane 6 and any other main characters from the show. It's been established that Dash, AJ, and presumably Fluttershy, even though she isn't really mentioned much, all know that Twilight has a cousin and have met her at some point. However, they aren't really close and haven't really spent much time together. They care about Twilight and would probably care if they learned that Twilight's cousin was lost in the woods, but in terms of our solar system model they are basically the outer planets orbiting furthest away from Nyx, beyond the asteroid belt and well outside of our point of narrative focus. It might make sense logically for them to help rescue her, but from a story perspective they're not significant and shouldn't be in the scene.
I'll wrap this up in another post.
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>>249971
Basically, the crux of the biscuit here is that this rescue scene feels off because it's focused on the wrong characters. The mane 6 rush in to save the day because that's just what they do, but it doesn't feel sincere because A) this story is about Nyx, not the Mane 6, and B) most of the Mane 6 are not important characters in relation to Nyx. So, in terms of emotional resonance, it's not much different from having her get saved by firefighters or royal guards or any other group of heroes who, while admirable, are really just doing their jobs and would have done the same for anypony. While the story here technically works, it fails to make an emotional impact on the reader and mostly comes across as just more girl-tied-to-the-train-tracks melodrama.
Here's how I would probably have handled the events of this chapter:
Nyx is getting bullied by DT/SS. AB rescues her, the two become friends. Jump forward a couple of weeks, Nyx is still getting bullied, but she has a circle of friends to protect her now, so it's not that bad. However, DT/SS decide they want to do something really mean to her, so they cook up a li'l ol' scheme to get her lost in the woods. DT/SS come to Twilight's house, pull a ruse to get Nyx to come along, pretend to want to make up and be friends. Nyx is a gullible retard, so she goes off with them. After a stop at Sugar Cube Corner, they go into the woods together. From there, DT/SS either ditch Nyx or try to pull mean pranks on her to scare her. But either way it backfires, and DT/SS get lost in the woods themselves. Nyx, meanwhile, gets lost by herself as planned and finds the Castle, and has her little edgelord revelation.
Meanwhile, Twilight is back at the library. She starts to get worried when Nyx doesn't come home for a couple hours, and goes off to look for her. She initially goes to Sugar Cube Corner since that's where the fillies said they were going (duh), and Pinkie tells her they were there but left a while ago. Now Twilight is more worried. Pinkie is also alarmed and expresses concern, since even though she doesn't know what's going on, she gets the impression that something is wrong. She assures Twilight she will keep an eye out for the three fillies.
Twilight thanks her for her help, then starts wandering around town to places where it would be logical for young foals to hang out at, but still can't find them. Eventually she comes across AJ, who is selling apples. Her sister is "helping," and AB's frens are there to help too, but really they are just goofing around while AJ sells apples. She asks about Nyx, AJ says she hasn't seen her. The CMC overhear and are concerned about their friend. Twilight explains the situation, and the CMC inform her that DT/SS are bullies who pick on Nyx. Now Twilight knows she dun goofed, and is really worried. She thanks AJ for her help, and resumes her search. AJ wishes her luck, and suggests that the CMC go with her, since they are clearly worried about Nyx and aren't really helping AJ much anyway.
However, now they are stuck since it seems like they've searched everywhere and still can't find a trace of the three missing fillies. They decide to go back to Sugar Cube Corner and regroup. At this point, Pinkie, who has been racking her brain since Twilight left, now remembers that she overheard them talking about the Everfree Forest. This seems like as good a lead as any, so Twilight and the CMC thank her for her help, and leave. Pinkie impulsively decides to blow off the rest of her shift and come with them, because that's the kind of shit she does. This would probably be a good place to insert some Pinkie-related comic relief. Maybe she leaves a customer in the middle of a transaction, or does something equally irresponsible but forgivable under the circumstances, and her long-suffering employers Mr. and/or Mrs. Cake just pick up the slack for her (again).
The group goes to the Everfree. From here, there are a couple of equally good paths the story can take that would both ultimately lead to the same ending.
A) The search party goes through the woods and comes across DT/SS. Twilight is 200% peeved, and lectures the shit out of them. AB gives them a piece of her mind as well, with SL and SB periodically interjecting "yeah" and "that's right." However, the two of them have had a pretty harrowing time in the woods themselves (a cutaway scene or two would have been devoted to this), and it's obvious they've learned their lesson. SS apologizes on behalf of both (DT is still a little sulky but seems to understand that she did wrong) and offers to make amends by helping to search for Nyx. Twilight grudgingly accepts their help. Eventually they find Nyx.
B) After the scene at the castle, Nyx is wandering in the woods some more and finds DT/SS herself. By now she has figured out that the whole thing was a ruse, and is angry. However, DT and SS are too frightened to pick on her any more, and they make nice. Since they are all in the same mess together, they decide to cooperate and try to find a way out of the forest. Eventually, they come across Twilight and the search party. At this point, Twilight and the CMC lecture DT/SS as above, but Nyx tells them to lay off.
Now that the air is clear and the adventure is over, they all decide to just go home. Nyx feels that she has reached an understanding with DT/SS, but since it's probably too early to conclude the bullying arc, DT/SS ultimately revert to their old ways as soon as they're back in school, which conveniently adds to Nyx's sense of being betrayed, which conveniently legitimizes whatever edgelord shit Peen Stroke intends for her to do. See how it works?
Anyway, I got a bit carried away there. I've still got a fair chunk of text to read. So, without further ado, let's find out what really happens. However, my gut instinct tells me that what I just outlined above is probably a better way to handle it.
Basically, the crux of the biscuit here is that this rescue scene feels off because it's focused on the wrong characters. The mane 6 rush in to save the day because that's just what they do, but it doesn't feel sincere because A) this story is about Nyx, not the Mane 6, and B) most of the Mane 6 are not important characters in relation to Nyx. So, in terms of emotional resonance, it's not much different from having her get saved by firefighters or royal guards or any other group of heroes who, while admirable, are really just doing their jobs and would have done the same for anypony. While the story here technically works, it fails to make an emotional impact on the reader and mostly comes across as just more girl-tied-to-the-train-tracks melodrama.
Here's how I would probably have handled the events of this chapter:
Nyx is getting bullied by DT/SS. AB rescues her, the two become friends. Jump forward a couple of weeks, Nyx is still getting bullied, but she has a circle of friends to protect her now, so it's not that bad. However, DT/SS decide they want to do something really mean to her, so they cook up a li'l ol' scheme to get her lost in the woods. DT/SS come to Twilight's house, pull a ruse to get Nyx to come along, pretend to want to make up and be friends. Nyx is a gullible retard, so she goes off with them. After a stop at Sugar Cube Corner, they go into the woods together. From there, DT/SS either ditch Nyx or try to pull mean pranks on her to scare her. But either way it backfires, and DT/SS get lost in the woods themselves. Nyx, meanwhile, gets lost by herself as planned and finds the Castle, and has her little edgelord revelation.
Meanwhile, Twilight is back at the library. She starts to get worried when Nyx doesn't come home for a couple hours, and goes off to look for her. She initially goes to Sugar Cube Corner since that's where the fillies said they were going (duh), and Pinkie tells her they were there but left a while ago. Now Twilight is more worried. Pinkie is also alarmed and expresses concern, since even though she doesn't know what's going on, she gets the impression that something is wrong. She assures Twilight she will keep an eye out for the three fillies.
Twilight thanks her for her help, then starts wandering around town to places where it would be logical for young foals to hang out at, but still can't find them. Eventually she comes across AJ, who is selling apples. Her sister is "helping," and AB's frens are there to help too, but really they are just goofing around while AJ sells apples. She asks about Nyx, AJ says she hasn't seen her. The CMC overhear and are concerned about their friend. Twilight explains the situation, and the CMC inform her that DT/SS are bullies who pick on Nyx. Now Twilight knows she dun goofed, and is really worried. She thanks AJ for her help, and resumes her search. AJ wishes her luck, and suggests that the CMC go with her, since they are clearly worried about Nyx and aren't really helping AJ much anyway.
However, now they are stuck since it seems like they've searched everywhere and still can't find a trace of the three missing fillies. They decide to go back to Sugar Cube Corner and regroup. At this point, Pinkie, who has been racking her brain since Twilight left, now remembers that she overheard them talking about the Everfree Forest. This seems like as good a lead as any, so Twilight and the CMC thank her for her help, and leave. Pinkie impulsively decides to blow off the rest of her shift and come with them, because that's the kind of shit she does. This would probably be a good place to insert some Pinkie-related comic relief. Maybe she leaves a customer in the middle of a transaction, or does something equally irresponsible but forgivable under the circumstances, and her long-suffering employers Mr. and/or Mrs. Cake just pick up the slack for her (again).
The group goes to the Everfree. From here, there are a couple of equally good paths the story can take that would both ultimately lead to the same ending.
A) The search party goes through the woods and comes across DT/SS. Twilight is 200% peeved, and lectures the shit out of them. AB gives them a piece of her mind as well, with SL and SB periodically interjecting "yeah" and "that's right." However, the two of them have had a pretty harrowing time in the woods themselves (a cutaway scene or two would have been devoted to this), and it's obvious they've learned their lesson. SS apologizes on behalf of both (DT is still a little sulky but seems to understand that she did wrong) and offers to make amends by helping to search for Nyx. Twilight grudgingly accepts their help. Eventually they find Nyx.
B) After the scene at the castle, Nyx is wandering in the woods some more and finds DT/SS herself. By now she has figured out that the whole thing was a ruse, and is angry. However, DT and SS are too frightened to pick on her any more, and they make nice. Since they are all in the same mess together, they decide to cooperate and try to find a way out of the forest. Eventually, they come across Twilight and the search party. At this point, Twilight and the CMC lecture DT/SS as above, but Nyx tells them to lay off.
Now that the air is clear and the adventure is over, they all decide to just go home. Nyx feels that she has reached an understanding with DT/SS, but since it's probably too early to conclude the bullying arc, DT/SS ultimately revert to their old ways as soon as they're back in school, which conveniently adds to Nyx's sense of being betrayed, which conveniently legitimizes whatever edgelord shit Peen Stroke intends for her to do. See how it works?
Anyway, I got a bit carried away there. I've still got a fair chunk of text to read. So, without further ado, let's find out what really happens. However, my gut instinct tells me that what I just outlined above is probably a better way to handle it.
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>>249979
Anyway, where did I leave off? Oh yeah, Twilight an the Mane 6 go to rescue Nyx. After going to all the trouble of assembling the whole squad, she realizes that Nyx is at the castle of the two sisters, so she has to go get her by herself. So, she ditches her friends and teleports off into the woods.
>Nyx was lying in the center of the room, and, for a moment, a wave of relief began to wash over Twilight. That relief, however, receded like the tide from the shore and was quickly replaced by a powerful, gripping fear that threatened to squeeze the very air from her chest. Nyx’s normal mane and tail had been replaced with flowing masses of star-dotted magic. Nyx was now truly Nightmare Moon’s doppelganger. All she lacked was the armor, the eye shadow, and Nightmare Moon’s cutie mark.
Peen Stroke, you are once, twice, three times a faggot.
>Nyx was young, but there was no denying that she was—
>Crying.
Yes, yes, she's cute and innocent but she's also evil incarnate. You're conflicted, she's conflicted, everyone's experiencing moral dilemmas up the yin-yang right now; we get it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXE8LdXzeHM
>Still, Twilight held herself back as her mind rebelled against itself. She couldn’t dismiss Nyx’s resemblance to Nightmare Moon, especially now that Nyx had the mane and tail the Mare in the Moon was infamous for. Yet, would Nightmare Moon be crying like that? Would she be wailing so loudly?
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke (2x).
>“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Please don’t hate me! Please! I don’t want to hurt you!” Nyx wailed into Twilight’s chest, her voice muffled.
Oh god, not more of this shit. As the 1980s would say, gag me with a spoon.
>“I… I don’t know!” Nyx sobbed miserably. “I-I came in here and then… and then I remembered looking down on you. W-we were both here, and you looked so scared, and I w-was happy to see you were scared… and-and I wanted to hurt you, b-because you tried to stop me from doing s-something… but I d-don’t want to hurt you, Twilight! Please… please don’t hate me! I don’t want to hurt you!”
Okay, this is the wrong way to handle this. Twilight should not be informed directly that Nyx is struggling between her two natures, or is having thoughts of harming her, and she certainly shouldn't learn it directly from Nyx right after it happened. There's no tension here, no suspense, the reader is just being fed information. Twilight can figure it out on her own eventually, but by making it an established fact between them this early takes away all opportunity to develop it as a storyline.
>Twilight felt a tension in her chest, a physical manifestation of her inner conflict. Nyx wasn’t crying because she was scared of the castle or the forest. She was crying because she felt she had done something horrible, and she was apologizing for it. Apologizing for things that Nightmare Moon had done, had thought, had felt. It worried Twilight because, if Nyx had Nightmare Moon’s memories, it was almost conclusive evidence that the two were one and the same.
First of all, you're a faggot, Peen Stroke. Second of all, show don't tell. Third, this is the wrong thing for Twilight to be focusing on here. The relationship between Twilight and Nyx should be gradually developing as the story plays out, but at the moment we are right back where we started, with Nyx being reduced to an annoying, sobbing non-presence in the story, and Twilight lost in her own paranoid thoughts about how she looks like Nightmare goddamn motherfucking Moon.
>Yet, as Twilight looked at the filly crying into her neck, she was no longer able to see Nightmare Moon, and it made her realize how close she had grown to Nyx.
lmao this is exactly the kind of thing you should be showing, not telling. Reeeeeeee.
>That was it; she was never supposed to bond with Nyx.
Well, at least she's doing one thing right then.
>She needed a way to get Nyx to sleep at night, so she started reading her bedtime stories. She saw Nyx struggling with homework, so she sat down and helped her. Nyx came to her asking questions, and, through their conversations, Twilight had grown to know Nyx as a filly. She was a filly who loved the sun, had friends, and was curious about the world around her.
>That familiarity had bred care. Twilight cared about Nyx. She wanted her to get a good night’s sleep, to do well in school, and to ask questions. She wanted Nyx to be safe.
Twilight's motivations are all over the place here, and that's a big part of what's wrong with this story. I get that the author is trying to make her seem conflicted, but mostly it just comes across as random indecisiveness. One minute she's scared of her, the next minute she's cold and logical and sees her as a science project, the minute after that she wants to be her mommy. None of these feelings segue naturally into each other, and she jumps back and forth between them like she's got a dial in her head that someone keeps moving to different settings at random intervals.
>Twilight’s words, however, were not enough to soothe Nyx. She continued to cry and beg for forgiveness, and again and again Twilight said that it was okay. Twilight did not force Nyx to stop, even after her mane and tail had returned to normal. Nyx needed to cry, to get it all out. She had remembered something terrible, something she couldn’t understand, and she just needed Twilight to be there, to assure her everything was okay.
>To protect Nyx from her memories.
Aaaand, that's it. The chapter ends with more forced emotion and empty saccharin bullshit. The bond between Nyx and Twi still does not feel genuine. The author seems to realize this and tries to compensate by layering on more imagery intended to tug at the reader's heartstrings; Nyx crying and Twilight trying to soothe her and stroke her mane. Another soothing yet empty piece of pastoral imagery by the Thomas Kinkade of pony fiction.
Anyway, where did I leave off? Oh yeah, Twilight an the Mane 6 go to rescue Nyx. After going to all the trouble of assembling the whole squad, she realizes that Nyx is at the castle of the two sisters, so she has to go get her by herself. So, she ditches her friends and teleports off into the woods.
>Nyx was lying in the center of the room, and, for a moment, a wave of relief began to wash over Twilight. That relief, however, receded like the tide from the shore and was quickly replaced by a powerful, gripping fear that threatened to squeeze the very air from her chest. Nyx’s normal mane and tail had been replaced with flowing masses of star-dotted magic. Nyx was now truly Nightmare Moon’s doppelganger. All she lacked was the armor, the eye shadow, and Nightmare Moon’s cutie mark.
Peen Stroke, you are once, twice, three times a faggot.
>Nyx was young, but there was no denying that she was—
>Crying.
Yes, yes, she's cute and innocent but she's also evil incarnate. You're conflicted, she's conflicted, everyone's experiencing moral dilemmas up the yin-yang right now; we get it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXE8LdXzeHM
>Still, Twilight held herself back as her mind rebelled against itself. She couldn’t dismiss Nyx’s resemblance to Nightmare Moon, especially now that Nyx had the mane and tail the Mare in the Moon was infamous for. Yet, would Nightmare Moon be crying like that? Would she be wailing so loudly?
You're a faggot, Peen Stroke (2x).
>“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Please don’t hate me! Please! I don’t want to hurt you!” Nyx wailed into Twilight’s chest, her voice muffled.
Oh god, not more of this shit. As the 1980s would say, gag me with a spoon.
>“I… I don’t know!” Nyx sobbed miserably. “I-I came in here and then… and then I remembered looking down on you. W-we were both here, and you looked so scared, and I w-was happy to see you were scared… and-and I wanted to hurt you, b-because you tried to stop me from doing s-something… but I d-don’t want to hurt you, Twilight! Please… please don’t hate me! I don’t want to hurt you!”
Okay, this is the wrong way to handle this. Twilight should not be informed directly that Nyx is struggling between her two natures, or is having thoughts of harming her, and she certainly shouldn't learn it directly from Nyx right after it happened. There's no tension here, no suspense, the reader is just being fed information. Twilight can figure it out on her own eventually, but by making it an established fact between them this early takes away all opportunity to develop it as a storyline.
>Twilight felt a tension in her chest, a physical manifestation of her inner conflict. Nyx wasn’t crying because she was scared of the castle or the forest. She was crying because she felt she had done something horrible, and she was apologizing for it. Apologizing for things that Nightmare Moon had done, had thought, had felt. It worried Twilight because, if Nyx had Nightmare Moon’s memories, it was almost conclusive evidence that the two were one and the same.
First of all, you're a faggot, Peen Stroke. Second of all, show don't tell. Third, this is the wrong thing for Twilight to be focusing on here. The relationship between Twilight and Nyx should be gradually developing as the story plays out, but at the moment we are right back where we started, with Nyx being reduced to an annoying, sobbing non-presence in the story, and Twilight lost in her own paranoid thoughts about how she looks like Nightmare goddamn motherfucking Moon.
>Yet, as Twilight looked at the filly crying into her neck, she was no longer able to see Nightmare Moon, and it made her realize how close she had grown to Nyx.
lmao this is exactly the kind of thing you should be showing, not telling. Reeeeeeee.
>That was it; she was never supposed to bond with Nyx.
Well, at least she's doing one thing right then.
>She needed a way to get Nyx to sleep at night, so she started reading her bedtime stories. She saw Nyx struggling with homework, so she sat down and helped her. Nyx came to her asking questions, and, through their conversations, Twilight had grown to know Nyx as a filly. She was a filly who loved the sun, had friends, and was curious about the world around her.
>That familiarity had bred care. Twilight cared about Nyx. She wanted her to get a good night’s sleep, to do well in school, and to ask questions. She wanted Nyx to be safe.
Twilight's motivations are all over the place here, and that's a big part of what's wrong with this story. I get that the author is trying to make her seem conflicted, but mostly it just comes across as random indecisiveness. One minute she's scared of her, the next minute she's cold and logical and sees her as a science project, the minute after that she wants to be her mommy. None of these feelings segue naturally into each other, and she jumps back and forth between them like she's got a dial in her head that someone keeps moving to different settings at random intervals.
>Twilight’s words, however, were not enough to soothe Nyx. She continued to cry and beg for forgiveness, and again and again Twilight said that it was okay. Twilight did not force Nyx to stop, even after her mane and tail had returned to normal. Nyx needed to cry, to get it all out. She had remembered something terrible, something she couldn’t understand, and she just needed Twilight to be there, to assure her everything was okay.
>To protect Nyx from her memories.
Aaaand, that's it. The chapter ends with more forced emotion and empty saccharin bullshit. The bond between Nyx and Twi still does not feel genuine. The author seems to realize this and tries to compensate by layering on more imagery intended to tug at the reader's heartstrings; Nyx crying and Twilight trying to soothe her and stroke her mane. Another soothing yet empty piece of pastoral imagery by the Thomas Kinkade of pony fiction.
Yeah, keep going since this thread works as a catalyst for other potential threads to appear. However, while I read most of your posts, my intrest is waning. That is not a jab at your capabilites but there is only so much one can say about Past Sins.
I had this wall of text explaining myself but I felt it was undercooked. The main point is that nothing happens in forever in Past Sins and that carries over into anyreview of it because there is just so much one can say about nothing. These posat are more intresting since it is more about what you think than the post specifically about the text itself because again the text is boring.
I had this wall of text explaining myself but I felt it was undercooked. The main point is that nothing happens in forever in Past Sins and that carries over into anyreview of it because there is just so much one can say about nothing. These posat are more intresting since it is more about what you think than the post specifically about the text itself because again the text is boring.
>>250025
Honestly, your average criticism, even of stupid shit, is generally worth less than the stupid shit itself. Particularly when it goes into a chapter by chapter, scene by scene, line by line cinemasins-style nitpicking fest. When you go into a story prepared to launch a criticism at every little detail, of course you're going to have a problem with every little detail, and you're going to complain about shit that's not really an issue. It's silly, for example, to complain that Nightmare Moon is being associated with smoke and lightning. That's literally the canonical aesthetic of the character. It's silly to complain that Twilight's friends generally like Nyx, as though any of Twilight's friends would go out of their way to hate an innocent child that their close friend obviously cares for. It's silly to complain that a child in a scary situation is crying; that's what children do in scary situations. No offense to Glim Glam, but it's like you're criticising the story less by its own merits and more by how many memes and tv-tropes you can project onto the story to reee about.
I generally can't read criticisms of any work without internally arguing with the critic and defending the work being criticised, even if I didn't care for the work itself, because most critics - especially amateur ones, but professional critics do it too - are trying to pick fights with shit that doesn't matter. But then, the only critic who doesn't always trigger an internal spergfest for me is Armond White, so maybe my tastes are just a little out there.
Honestly, your average criticism, even of stupid shit, is generally worth less than the stupid shit itself. Particularly when it goes into a chapter by chapter, scene by scene, line by line cinemasins-style nitpicking fest. When you go into a story prepared to launch a criticism at every little detail, of course you're going to have a problem with every little detail, and you're going to complain about shit that's not really an issue. It's silly, for example, to complain that Nightmare Moon is being associated with smoke and lightning. That's literally the canonical aesthetic of the character. It's silly to complain that Twilight's friends generally like Nyx, as though any of Twilight's friends would go out of their way to hate an innocent child that their close friend obviously cares for. It's silly to complain that a child in a scary situation is crying; that's what children do in scary situations. No offense to Glim Glam, but it's like you're criticising the story less by its own merits and more by how many memes and tv-tropes you can project onto the story to reee about.
I generally can't read criticisms of any work without internally arguing with the critic and defending the work being criticised, even if I didn't care for the work itself, because most critics - especially amateur ones, but professional critics do it too - are trying to pick fights with shit that doesn't matter. But then, the only critic who doesn't always trigger an internal spergfest for me is Armond White, so maybe my tastes are just a little out there.
>>250025
>>249971
>>249979
>These posat are more intresting since it is more about what you think
And then I forget about posting the post I was refering to.
>>250031
>I generally can't read criticisms of any work without internally arguing with the critic and defending the work being criticised
I think that is a good approach to have. There is no reason not to think critically about anything and tastetest it before coming to a decision about anything. So long one is honest with oneself.
>especially amateur ones, but professional critics do it too - are trying to pick fights with shit that doesn't matter
I have noticed this tendency as well. It is because media feeds on death and drama and there are always people willing to jump on the bandwagon and laugh at the fool.
> most critics
I don't know if it is exactly most. There a bunch of apologetics as well that geets populare. Don't know why.
While I agree that declearing something to be shit because of a nitpick is worng. I disagree that pointing out nitpicks are bad in general. Every pro and con matters when one is trying to measure a story's worth.
I think Glimglam usually does a fine job with this. While your examples probably are valid, I know he has plenty of times pointed out things he thought were good in any work he has reviewed and all his points are not nitpicks either (Know you didn't say that just pointing it out).
I think he has a good integrity. On a scal from Rothchild to Jesus, I would say, Twelve Hitlers out of five Mengelers.
>>249971
>>249979
>These posat are more intresting since it is more about what you think
And then I forget about posting the post I was refering to.
>>250031
>I generally can't read criticisms of any work without internally arguing with the critic and defending the work being criticised
I think that is a good approach to have. There is no reason not to think critically about anything and tastetest it before coming to a decision about anything. So long one is honest with oneself.
>especially amateur ones, but professional critics do it too - are trying to pick fights with shit that doesn't matter
I have noticed this tendency as well. It is because media feeds on death and drama and there are always people willing to jump on the bandwagon and laugh at the fool.
> most critics
I don't know if it is exactly most. There a bunch of apologetics as well that geets populare. Don't know why.
While I agree that declearing something to be shit because of a nitpick is worng. I disagree that pointing out nitpicks are bad in general. Every pro and con matters when one is trying to measure a story's worth.
I think Glimglam usually does a fine job with this. While your examples probably are valid, I know he has plenty of times pointed out things he thought were good in any work he has reviewed and all his points are not nitpicks either (Know you didn't say that just pointing it out).
I think he has a good integrity. On a scal from Rothchild to Jesus, I would say, Twelve Hitlers out of five Mengelers.
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>>250031
>criticizing criticism
boi...
In all seriousness though, my overall aim here isn't to just disparage the work for the sake of disparaging it. I highly doubt Peen Stroke will ever see this thread, or if he did see it I doubt he'd care much, since as I've pointed out his work is quite popular, and I'm just one lone anon writing walls of text on a fairly obscure forum. Although who knows, in my experience guys who churn out stuff like this tend to have pretty thin skins about it.
Pretty much every aspect of this critical approach I've developed, which basically comes down to going through a work of fiction line by line, highlighting specific points I either like or don't like, and making ad-hominem attacks and gay jokes against the author or the author's OC, came out of reviewing Nigel's fic last year. I started doing it mainly because it was funny and because Nigel at the time was getting on my nerves, then continued it because people seemed to enjoy what I was writing and the thread went from being about shitting on Nigel's terrible fanfic to being about giving him actual writing advice, that in the end he seemed to appreciate. I've had multiple people suggest to me that I should do the same thing with other works in the fandom, and I chose this one because someone had showed up on the board apparently trying to revive the Nyxposting phenomenon from /mlp/.
What I've found from doing this is that my own writing has actually improved, because when you go through something in this much detail and try to be hyper-critical about every little thing, you get a much deeper sense of why you either like or dislike something. I have also found that many of the things I shit on others for doing are things that I do all the time, and I've learned how to watch out for a lot of them and avoid doing them. This might sound autistic but I've actually started going through my own past work and giving it the GlimGlam treatment, including highlighting passages I find to be particularly poorly-written or stupid and calling myself a faggot for writing them.
I've also found that it helps to focus on negatives more than positives, because people notice the negatives more, and even if you've got a good idea it won't help you if you write it poorly. Also, I think some non-writers are just reading these threads for keks, and for pure entertainment value shitting on something tends to amuse people more than praising it. But I do try to be as evenhanded as possible, and I try to also point out whatever I think the writer does well. In general though I think it's useful for anyone who writes or wants to write to get into the habit of reading things critically. This means that if you like something or dislike something, it's helpful to go through it with a fine toothed comb and see if you can figure out exactly why you like it or dislike it.
One thing I've pointed out here multiple times is that Peen Stroke has something like 20 different people credited as editors, as well as an "assistant," whatever his role is exactly. However, many of the problems that I've been focusing on are glaringly obvious things that anyone reading critically should have seen. Not just surface stuff like the overuse of tropes and cliches, but grammatical and mechanical issues, too much narration of Twilight's thoughts vs. relationship building between her and Nyx, lack of genuine feeling that results from this, excessively saccharin scenes to compensate for lack of genuine feeling, insertion of unnecessary canon characters, unnecessary scenes, logic issues like why didn't Twilight go to Sugar Cube Corner to look for Nyx, problems with story structure like what I described in my overview of ch. 3 here >>249979 .
Basically, this is all stuff that, to me at least, is glaringly obvious and that it seems should have been noticed by at least one of the 21 people he's employed to look at this for him. The fact that it went through this many critical readers and this was the finished product suggests to me that either it started out even shittier and this draft is a legitimate improvement, or more likely that Peen Stroke does not have editors so much as he has a fan club, or, dare I say it, peen strokers. This is bad for any writer for the same reason it's bad for a leader or business owner to surround himself with advisors who just kiss his ass all the time. Probably the most frustrating part of reading this has been realizing that it actually could be quite good if the author would just address some of these issues in rewrite.
In the end though I really don't care that much about Peen Stroke or Past Sins. I think if he ever found this thread I've given him some decent notes and he could use as much or as little of it as he likes to do a rewrite of the fic. However he certainly doesn't have to; these are just my personal reactions to what he wrote and are as subjective as anyone else's. Anyone could do the same thing with anything I've written. I do this because I think it's entertaining and potentially informative.
However I would like to say that between reading the text, figuring out what I want to say about it, writing out my thoughts, revising it, and condensing it into 5000 char segments, these review posts take me anywhere from 45-90 minutes apiece to write. In addition to this I'm also in the NaNoWriMo thread, so I'm spending a fair chunk of time reading and writing lately. I'm certainly not trying to sound pissy and apologize if I do; everyone is as entitled to their opinions as I am. But this review project is a bit of a time sink, and if that time would be better spent elsewhere I would like to know. I also understand that maybe the tripfagging and avatarfagging, which is also just holdover from when I was doing Nigel's thing, may come across as a bit obnoxious.
So I'll ask the thread: shall I continue with Past Sins, should I read/review something else, or should I just stop?
>criticizing criticism
boi...
In all seriousness though, my overall aim here isn't to just disparage the work for the sake of disparaging it. I highly doubt Peen Stroke will ever see this thread, or if he did see it I doubt he'd care much, since as I've pointed out his work is quite popular, and I'm just one lone anon writing walls of text on a fairly obscure forum. Although who knows, in my experience guys who churn out stuff like this tend to have pretty thin skins about it.
Pretty much every aspect of this critical approach I've developed, which basically comes down to going through a work of fiction line by line, highlighting specific points I either like or don't like, and making ad-hominem attacks and gay jokes against the author or the author's OC, came out of reviewing Nigel's fic last year. I started doing it mainly because it was funny and because Nigel at the time was getting on my nerves, then continued it because people seemed to enjoy what I was writing and the thread went from being about shitting on Nigel's terrible fanfic to being about giving him actual writing advice, that in the end he seemed to appreciate. I've had multiple people suggest to me that I should do the same thing with other works in the fandom, and I chose this one because someone had showed up on the board apparently trying to revive the Nyxposting phenomenon from /mlp/.
What I've found from doing this is that my own writing has actually improved, because when you go through something in this much detail and try to be hyper-critical about every little thing, you get a much deeper sense of why you either like or dislike something. I have also found that many of the things I shit on others for doing are things that I do all the time, and I've learned how to watch out for a lot of them and avoid doing them. This might sound autistic but I've actually started going through my own past work and giving it the GlimGlam treatment, including highlighting passages I find to be particularly poorly-written or stupid and calling myself a faggot for writing them.
I've also found that it helps to focus on negatives more than positives, because people notice the negatives more, and even if you've got a good idea it won't help you if you write it poorly. Also, I think some non-writers are just reading these threads for keks, and for pure entertainment value shitting on something tends to amuse people more than praising it. But I do try to be as evenhanded as possible, and I try to also point out whatever I think the writer does well. In general though I think it's useful for anyone who writes or wants to write to get into the habit of reading things critically. This means that if you like something or dislike something, it's helpful to go through it with a fine toothed comb and see if you can figure out exactly why you like it or dislike it.
One thing I've pointed out here multiple times is that Peen Stroke has something like 20 different people credited as editors, as well as an "assistant," whatever his role is exactly. However, many of the problems that I've been focusing on are glaringly obvious things that anyone reading critically should have seen. Not just surface stuff like the overuse of tropes and cliches, but grammatical and mechanical issues, too much narration of Twilight's thoughts vs. relationship building between her and Nyx, lack of genuine feeling that results from this, excessively saccharin scenes to compensate for lack of genuine feeling, insertion of unnecessary canon characters, unnecessary scenes, logic issues like why didn't Twilight go to Sugar Cube Corner to look for Nyx, problems with story structure like what I described in my overview of ch. 3 here >>249979 .
Basically, this is all stuff that, to me at least, is glaringly obvious and that it seems should have been noticed by at least one of the 21 people he's employed to look at this for him. The fact that it went through this many critical readers and this was the finished product suggests to me that either it started out even shittier and this draft is a legitimate improvement, or more likely that Peen Stroke does not have editors so much as he has a fan club, or, dare I say it, peen strokers. This is bad for any writer for the same reason it's bad for a leader or business owner to surround himself with advisors who just kiss his ass all the time. Probably the most frustrating part of reading this has been realizing that it actually could be quite good if the author would just address some of these issues in rewrite.
In the end though I really don't care that much about Peen Stroke or Past Sins. I think if he ever found this thread I've given him some decent notes and he could use as much or as little of it as he likes to do a rewrite of the fic. However he certainly doesn't have to; these are just my personal reactions to what he wrote and are as subjective as anyone else's. Anyone could do the same thing with anything I've written. I do this because I think it's entertaining and potentially informative.
However I would like to say that between reading the text, figuring out what I want to say about it, writing out my thoughts, revising it, and condensing it into 5000 char segments, these review posts take me anywhere from 45-90 minutes apiece to write. In addition to this I'm also in the NaNoWriMo thread, so I'm spending a fair chunk of time reading and writing lately. I'm certainly not trying to sound pissy and apologize if I do; everyone is as entitled to their opinions as I am. But this review project is a bit of a time sink, and if that time would be better spent elsewhere I would like to know. I also understand that maybe the tripfagging and avatarfagging, which is also just holdover from when I was doing Nigel's thing, may come across as a bit obnoxious.
So I'll ask the thread: shall I continue with Past Sins, should I read/review something else, or should I just stop?
>>250077
>as well as an "assistant," whatever his role is exactly
I bet his role is sucking gay penis, like a faggot.
>as well as an "assistant," whatever his role is exactly
I bet his role is sucking gay penis, like a faggot.
>>250077
>So I'll ask the thread: shall I continue with Past Sins, should I read/review something else, or should I just stop?
Well keep going if you're enjoying yourself. I just felt the need to vent a little autism after internally quibbling with everything you've written so far. Like I said, I tend to dislike the art of criticism in general and I'm probably not the target audience for these threads.
>So I'll ask the thread: shall I continue with Past Sins, should I read/review something else, or should I just stop?
Well keep going if you're enjoying yourself. I just felt the need to vent a little autism after internally quibbling with everything you've written so far. Like I said, I tend to dislike the art of criticism in general and I'm probably not the target audience for these threads.
>>250077
As bad as the Nyx story is, the things you've said about the fic apply to the whole thing.
You've kind of said everything you can say about it already.
It's just a bad "Little orphan Naruto gets adopted by a character I like, befriends characters I like, gets bullied by characters I don't like for being unpopular and having a dark monster's power sealed within him, and it's full of cliche emotionally-manipulative stock scenes because I can't write original stories" fanfic.
The Nyx story is shit, but not in a funny way. I'd say skim the rest of the chapters and make posts here highlighting certain shit you want to talk about, followed by your overall thoughts on the chapter. Once Nyx is done you can move on to a better fic. Or a worse but funnier fic.
Tripfagging is fine but putting something funny in the avatar box related to what you're posting would be better than a boring old glimmer pic.
As for what else you could review with your line-by-line style...
>Four Score I'm A Massive Cock Whore is pretty bad but not really in a funny sort of way, just a "I can see why the fandom would fall in love with this dreck" way.
>You'd cause some epic lulz if you asked the Displaced fandom to tell you what the "Greatest Displaced fic ever is", then tore it apart for being inane childish faggotry right in front of their faces
>Friendship Is Optimal is trash written by Self-Diagnosed-Genius(TM) sociopathic-narcissist leftycommie Elizer Yudkowsky to attract bronies to his pseudointellectual cult of ignorance once Harry Potter stopped being trendy. It's about some faggot making a "CelestAI", a magic AI supercomputer that can hack anything and creates Equestria Online which is Matrix plus Sword Art Online but double the faggotry. All of humanity goes full nigger and rolls over for the AI supergoddess because she's just sooooo smaaaaart. Everyone plugs their brains into the Matrix to live a life of wish-fulfillment and ploughing fake AI mares you can edit and recode at will. It's like you're the faggy Server Admin of your own private world of warcraft server, and CelestAI will let you do literally anything to the programs in your world because all that matters to her is putting humans in Equestria Online because that's all she was programmed to do: "Satisfy people's values through friendship and ponies". THE STORY IS FUCKING FULL of "The author wants you to think character 1 is clever, but what she's trying only works because everyone else is fucking retarded" moments.
>Any of the "Superior Versions Of" my old DataBass trollfic/troll-clopfic are good for a laugh, especially the ones where Twilight's a rapist and the author doesn't notice because he's too busy calling my OC a faggot
>Fallout Equestria is massively overhyped trashy wannabe-deep wannabe-actionmovie shlock but in every way that it's bad and mindless and popular with edgy teenagers, Project Horizons one-ups it in the most hilariously trashy ways possible. Rereading Fallout Equestria as an adult made me mad for ever liking this dreck but reading Project Horizons for the first time as an adult had me laughing my ass off. Still PH can't actually stand on its own as a work of fiction, you'd need to read Fallout Equestria first before seeing this or you wouldn't understand the worst bits. So FE then PH
>If you hated Nyx, get ready for Nyx 2! Fallout Equestria: Pink Eyes. Imagine the most saccharine bullshit possible in the Equestrian Wasteland, a little pink filly named Puppysmiles in a spacesuit wandering around the wasteland hugging raiders and looking for her mummy and never actually losing because that'd ruin the tooth-rotting wannabe-cuteness of an idiot who ends up "Ascending to a higher plane of existence" by suddenly ending the story to become a Fallout perk. "Oh but she's also poisoned with magic pink poison so she's an immortal invincible demigod- I mean eldwitch amobbynashan, so that totally makes the story deep and dark and tragic" said a faggot.
As bad as the Nyx story is, the things you've said about the fic apply to the whole thing.
You've kind of said everything you can say about it already.
It's just a bad "Little orphan Naruto gets adopted by a character I like, befriends characters I like, gets bullied by characters I don't like for being unpopular and having a dark monster's power sealed within him, and it's full of cliche emotionally-manipulative stock scenes because I can't write original stories" fanfic.
The Nyx story is shit, but not in a funny way. I'd say skim the rest of the chapters and make posts here highlighting certain shit you want to talk about, followed by your overall thoughts on the chapter. Once Nyx is done you can move on to a better fic. Or a worse but funnier fic.
Tripfagging is fine but putting something funny in the avatar box related to what you're posting would be better than a boring old glimmer pic.
As for what else you could review with your line-by-line style...
>Four Score I'm A Massive Cock Whore is pretty bad but not really in a funny sort of way, just a "I can see why the fandom would fall in love with this dreck" way.
>You'd cause some epic lulz if you asked the Displaced fandom to tell you what the "Greatest Displaced fic ever is", then tore it apart for being inane childish faggotry right in front of their faces
>Friendship Is Optimal is trash written by Self-Diagnosed-Genius(TM) sociopathic-narcissist leftycommie Elizer Yudkowsky to attract bronies to his pseudointellectual cult of ignorance once Harry Potter stopped being trendy. It's about some faggot making a "CelestAI", a magic AI supercomputer that can hack anything and creates Equestria Online which is Matrix plus Sword Art Online but double the faggotry. All of humanity goes full nigger and rolls over for the AI supergoddess because she's just sooooo smaaaaart. Everyone plugs their brains into the Matrix to live a life of wish-fulfillment and ploughing fake AI mares you can edit and recode at will. It's like you're the faggy Server Admin of your own private world of warcraft server, and CelestAI will let you do literally anything to the programs in your world because all that matters to her is putting humans in Equestria Online because that's all she was programmed to do: "Satisfy people's values through friendship and ponies". THE STORY IS FUCKING FULL of "The author wants you to think character 1 is clever, but what she's trying only works because everyone else is fucking retarded" moments.
>Any of the "Superior Versions Of" my old DataBass trollfic/troll-clopfic are good for a laugh, especially the ones where Twilight's a rapist and the author doesn't notice because he's too busy calling my OC a faggot
>Fallout Equestria is massively overhyped trashy wannabe-deep wannabe-actionmovie shlock but in every way that it's bad and mindless and popular with edgy teenagers, Project Horizons one-ups it in the most hilariously trashy ways possible. Rereading Fallout Equestria as an adult made me mad for ever liking this dreck but reading Project Horizons for the first time as an adult had me laughing my ass off. Still PH can't actually stand on its own as a work of fiction, you'd need to read Fallout Equestria first before seeing this or you wouldn't understand the worst bits. So FE then PH
>If you hated Nyx, get ready for Nyx 2! Fallout Equestria: Pink Eyes. Imagine the most saccharine bullshit possible in the Equestrian Wasteland, a little pink filly named Puppysmiles in a spacesuit wandering around the wasteland hugging raiders and looking for her mummy and never actually losing because that'd ruin the tooth-rotting wannabe-cuteness of an idiot who ends up "Ascending to a higher plane of existence" by suddenly ending the story to become a Fallout perk. "Oh but she's also poisoned with magic pink poison so she's an immortal invincible demigod- I mean eldwitch amobbynashan, so that totally makes the story deep and dark and tragic" said a faggot.
>>250081
Anyone else find green on peachish-orange hard to read? It makes me hesitant to >so much text in a block. Does this site have a way to change background colours?
Anyone else find green on peachish-orange hard to read? It makes me hesitant to >so much text in a block. Does this site have a way to change background colours?
>>250077
>the tripfagging and avatarfagging
I think it is okay in this thread. Like if you were to remove it, it would still be obivious who you are and the trip would still be there.
I think it is completely fine. You are not using it as somekind of authority thing. Like you didn't use it in
>I'm also in the NaNoWriMo thread
and as long as you don't try to gain something by using it on places where it is irrelevant. I have no problems with it.
But maybe since it serves no purpose in this thread either you might aswell remove it? Man, I don't know.
I am not really bothered by it but I can see why some would be. Like I like you but like I remember I liked Mauler as well but after he started with efap, he has become more and more of a faggot, in my opinionwiggle wiggle eyebrow.
The people who listen and watches his podcasts and such are such sycophants that you get disgusted and so on. I think that to avoid circlejerks one should avoid e-celeb statuses to appear since they create this. Like it is both the people who likes the stuff the idol creates as well as the idol's ego itself that makes it, after a while unbearable.
Maybe. This is just my two cents. I don't know.
If you are currently writing at the same time as this, then you should at least not push yourself too hard. This is one advice I will give you.
I'm pretty tired and will get back to you later on this.
>the tripfagging and avatarfagging
I think it is okay in this thread. Like if you were to remove it, it would still be obivious who you are and the trip would still be there.
I think it is completely fine. You are not using it as somekind of authority thing. Like you didn't use it in
>I'm also in the NaNoWriMo thread
and as long as you don't try to gain something by using it on places where it is irrelevant. I have no problems with it.
But maybe since it serves no purpose in this thread either you might aswell remove it? Man, I don't know.
I am not really bothered by it but I can see why some would be. Like I like you but like I remember I liked Mauler as well but after he started with efap, he has become more and more of a faggot, in my opinionwiggle wiggle eyebrow.
The people who listen and watches his podcasts and such are such sycophants that you get disgusted and so on. I think that to avoid circlejerks one should avoid e-celeb statuses to appear since they create this. Like it is both the people who likes the stuff the idol creates as well as the idol's ego itself that makes it, after a while unbearable.
Maybe. This is just my two cents. I don't know.
If you are currently writing at the same time as this, then you should at least not push yourself too hard. This is one advice I will give you.
I'm pretty tired and will get back to you later on this.
>>250077
Trip and avatarfagging is acceptable if you're providing a form of content, and this is a form of content. I also think you should see this through because, if you're learning from this as you say, there's some solid shit later on around how he does the climax and resolution that I'd be pretty interested in seeing your thoughts on.
Also you're entirely correct about the "editors", the current version isn't actually all that different from the original, there's minor technical changes, and the rewrite it did go through was to make it conform to season 2 canon, but it's otherwise exactly the same. I wouldn't expect any kind of rewrite now, though, it's been years and Past Sins is actually in print, so it couldn't be rewritten without making a lot of rubes who actually bought the book very angry.
Trip and avatarfagging is acceptable if you're providing a form of content, and this is a form of content. I also think you should see this through because, if you're learning from this as you say, there's some solid shit later on around how he does the climax and resolution that I'd be pretty interested in seeing your thoughts on.
Also you're entirely correct about the "editors", the current version isn't actually all that different from the original, there's minor technical changes, and the rewrite it did go through was to make it conform to season 2 canon, but it's otherwise exactly the same. I wouldn't expect any kind of rewrite now, though, it's been years and Past Sins is actually in print, so it couldn't be rewritten without making a lot of rubes who actually bought the book very angry.
Well Glim Glam you steam a good critique. While I am here just for the entertainment, seeing exactly what makes a story story tick is a fun pastime. Perhaps even I could learn to provide quality feedback one day.
>I have also found that many of the things I shit on others for doing are things that I do all the time, and I've learned how to watch out for a lot of them and avoid doing them.
To improve is a noble goal.
>>250096
>Past Sins is actually in print, so it couldn't be rewritten without making a lot of rubes who actually bought the book very angry.
Hunh, didn't know that.
>I have also found that many of the things I shit on others for doing are things that I do all the time, and I've learned how to watch out for a lot of them and avoid doing them.
To improve is a noble goal.
>>250096
>Past Sins is actually in print, so it couldn't be rewritten without making a lot of rubes who actually bought the book very angry.
Hunh, didn't know that.
Thanks for the feedback to everyone who posted. I think what I'm probably going to do for now is just continue with Past Sins, because I actually am rather enjoying tearing into it, but I will probably try to move a little faster and not do as much line-by-line greentext quoting as I've been doing, since as Nigel pointed out I'm probably just going to end up repeating myself a lot if I do it that way. No promises, though.
Reading back over some of what I've done so far, I think I agree with Sven that >>249971 and >>249979 contain observations that are more interesting to read than just constant nitpicking of the details of the text. I actually rather enjoyed doing the summary for an alternate version of events for chapter 3, and might try to do that for more of the story. Since it sounds like a lot of the future chapters are just going to be more of the same, rather than spend my time complaining about the same things over and over, I might try to present more examples of different ways I think the story could have been constructed had Peen Stroke been less of a faggot.
Reading back over some of what I've done so far, I think I agree with Sven that >>249971 and >>249979 contain observations that are more interesting to read than just constant nitpicking of the details of the text. I actually rather enjoyed doing the summary for an alternate version of events for chapter 3, and might try to do that for more of the story. Since it sounds like a lot of the future chapters are just going to be more of the same, rather than spend my time complaining about the same things over and over, I might try to present more examples of different ways I think the story could have been constructed had Peen Stroke been less of a faggot.
>>250099
You are still obligated to call Peen Stroke a faggot every time Nyx is referred to as Nightmare Moon.
You are still obligated to call Peen Stroke a faggot every time Nyx is referred to as Nightmare Moon.
>>250077
I for one will never read Past Sins, so I doubly appreciate your efforts in both absolving me of any niggling doubt and for giving me a rundown in an entertaining manner. By all means, please continue and nice pair of dubs.
I for one will never read Past Sins, so I doubly appreciate your efforts in both absolving me of any niggling doubt and for giving me a rundown in an entertaining manner. By all means, please continue and nice pair of dubs.
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>>249984
Okay, so I know that I literally just said I was going to avoid a lot of greentexting and nitpicking small details, but I want to do the exact opposite of that for a minute in order to point a couple of things out:
>She looked in on Nyx for a few seconds longer before gently shutting the door. She then descended the library’s staircase, climbing down to the ground floor where many ponies with worried faces were waiting. Twilight greatly appreciated the fact that all of her friends had stayed to make sure Nyx was all right, especially since Rarity and the Cutie Mark Crusaders were the only ones who knew Nyx well enough to be so concerned.
What's frustrating here is that it's almost as if Peen Stroke knows what's wrong with his story on some deep subconscious level, and this part of his brain keeps trying to correct it. However, his conscious mind, and its desire to put literally thousands of dicks in his mouth every time the clock in his house chimes, the very clock which he set to chime every fifteen minutes because he was getting tired of having to wait 60 minutes at a time to put literally thousands of dicks in his mouth, keeps preventing it from doing so.
In this case, he literally acknowledges that the only ponies besides Twilight who know Nyx well enough to go to this much trouble for her are Rarity and the CMC, and that the rest of them really don't belong in the scene. But he just....doesn't quite manage to connect the dots.
>“Would you, maybe, want some of us to stay?” Fluttershy kindly offered.
Also, this is literally the first time in the entire text that Fluttershy has had a spoken line, or has done anything. She is obviously not a significant character. Frankly she's been mentioned so little that I wasn't even sure if she was part of the rescue party. Why is she here right now?
>Scootaloo blinked before her eyes widened, a panicked frown forming on her face. “Oh no! My parents are going to flip!”
This is interesting. I know this was written pretty early in the fandom, and so a lot of the more popular fan canons probably hadn't developed yet. However I've gotten so accustomed to the generally accepted fan canon that Scoot is an orphan (or even the official canon, which is basically that her parents are irresponsible assholes, her rug munching aunts don't pay that much attention, and for all practical purposes she is pretty much an orphan) that it sounds odd to hear her name mentioned in a context of having a normal family life. I'm actually mildly curious what Peen Stroke's headcanon for Scoot's situation at this time was.
In any event, this exchange between Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash is unnecessary and another example of Peen Stroke's overall lack of proper narrative focus. Rainbow Dash, once again, is not one of the significant characters in this story. Her relationship to the main character is peripheral at best. Moreover, she wasn't even incidentally significant in the preceding scene.
Here's really the problem I have with this and why I keep drawing so much attention to it. As I stated in previous posts, Nyx is the main character and is basically the focus of the story. Twilight and Apple Bloom are her most significant relationships, with Rarity, Ponk, Scoot, Sweetie Belle, and (ugh) Twist being secondary supporting relationships. Pretty much all other characters in the series don't matter at this point, and until that changes should not be appearing for any other reason than to play incidental background roles.
In the previous chapter, we had a situation where a series of events led to Nyx being lost in the woods. The sensible thing for the author to do would be to have Twilight go looking for her, accompanied by the CMC and maybe Rarity or Ponk (I chose Ponk for my version of events). For whatever dumb reason, he chooses to assemble the entire Mane 6 and have them all go looking for her together. However, Nyx ends up at the castle of the two sisters, which means that if they all go up there together, the mystery of Nyx's secret identity will be revealed. So at this point, Peen Stroke has Twilight break away from the rest of the Mane 6 and go look for Nyx by herself anyway. Literally why even bring them all together then? There was no reason to do it.
Here's a comparable example: Frodo and Sam need to go to Mordor to destroy the Ring. On the way, they meet Gollum, and he tags along for a while. Frodo is the MC, Sam is his best friend (or possible gay lover, if we're going with Peter Jackson canon). Gollum has a secondary relationship to Frodo; Frodo pities him and wants to let him help, Gollum just wants the ring, etc etc we all know the story. Main point is, the focus of the story is on the main character, and two secondary characters who have a reason to be there; Tolkien doesn't just have a bunch of extra characters tagging along for no reason. If Peen Stroke had written LOTR, it would have been Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Skippy the Elf. Why is Skippy there? No reason, the author just likes him and wants him to be in the story even though he doesn't really do anything. Then, later, Rainbow Dash shows up and flies them to Mt. Doom.
Now back in the world of Past Sins, we have Rainbow Dash, who was barely in the previous scene and didn't actually need to be in it at all, having a separate conversation with Scootaloo, who despite being Nyx's friend isn't that significant of a character yet. Why is this in the story? Also, the way she casually drops "loyalty" into the conversation is annoying. Hurr durr that's her element, ain't dat clever?
Anyway, Diamond Tiara knocks on the door suddenly and it looks like shit's about to get real.
I'm going to take Nigel's suggestion and start using more related pics instead of Glimmer avatars for these posts. However this time I don't have a good one so here's Golly.
Okay, so I know that I literally just said I was going to avoid a lot of greentexting and nitpicking small details, but I want to do the exact opposite of that for a minute in order to point a couple of things out:
>She looked in on Nyx for a few seconds longer before gently shutting the door. She then descended the library’s staircase, climbing down to the ground floor where many ponies with worried faces were waiting. Twilight greatly appreciated the fact that all of her friends had stayed to make sure Nyx was all right, especially since Rarity and the Cutie Mark Crusaders were the only ones who knew Nyx well enough to be so concerned.
What's frustrating here is that it's almost as if Peen Stroke knows what's wrong with his story on some deep subconscious level, and this part of his brain keeps trying to correct it. However, his conscious mind, and its desire to put literally thousands of dicks in his mouth every time the clock in his house chimes, the very clock which he set to chime every fifteen minutes because he was getting tired of having to wait 60 minutes at a time to put literally thousands of dicks in his mouth, keeps preventing it from doing so.
In this case, he literally acknowledges that the only ponies besides Twilight who know Nyx well enough to go to this much trouble for her are Rarity and the CMC, and that the rest of them really don't belong in the scene. But he just....doesn't quite manage to connect the dots.
>“Would you, maybe, want some of us to stay?” Fluttershy kindly offered.
Also, this is literally the first time in the entire text that Fluttershy has had a spoken line, or has done anything. She is obviously not a significant character. Frankly she's been mentioned so little that I wasn't even sure if she was part of the rescue party. Why is she here right now?
>Scootaloo blinked before her eyes widened, a panicked frown forming on her face. “Oh no! My parents are going to flip!”
This is interesting. I know this was written pretty early in the fandom, and so a lot of the more popular fan canons probably hadn't developed yet. However I've gotten so accustomed to the generally accepted fan canon that Scoot is an orphan (or even the official canon, which is basically that her parents are irresponsible assholes, her rug munching aunts don't pay that much attention, and for all practical purposes she is pretty much an orphan) that it sounds odd to hear her name mentioned in a context of having a normal family life. I'm actually mildly curious what Peen Stroke's headcanon for Scoot's situation at this time was.
In any event, this exchange between Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash is unnecessary and another example of Peen Stroke's overall lack of proper narrative focus. Rainbow Dash, once again, is not one of the significant characters in this story. Her relationship to the main character is peripheral at best. Moreover, she wasn't even incidentally significant in the preceding scene.
Here's really the problem I have with this and why I keep drawing so much attention to it. As I stated in previous posts, Nyx is the main character and is basically the focus of the story. Twilight and Apple Bloom are her most significant relationships, with Rarity, Ponk, Scoot, Sweetie Belle, and (ugh) Twist being secondary supporting relationships. Pretty much all other characters in the series don't matter at this point, and until that changes should not be appearing for any other reason than to play incidental background roles.
In the previous chapter, we had a situation where a series of events led to Nyx being lost in the woods. The sensible thing for the author to do would be to have Twilight go looking for her, accompanied by the CMC and maybe Rarity or Ponk (I chose Ponk for my version of events). For whatever dumb reason, he chooses to assemble the entire Mane 6 and have them all go looking for her together. However, Nyx ends up at the castle of the two sisters, which means that if they all go up there together, the mystery of Nyx's secret identity will be revealed. So at this point, Peen Stroke has Twilight break away from the rest of the Mane 6 and go look for Nyx by herself anyway. Literally why even bring them all together then? There was no reason to do it.
Here's a comparable example: Frodo and Sam need to go to Mordor to destroy the Ring. On the way, they meet Gollum, and he tags along for a while. Frodo is the MC, Sam is his best friend (or possible gay lover, if we're going with Peter Jackson canon). Gollum has a secondary relationship to Frodo; Frodo pities him and wants to let him help, Gollum just wants the ring, etc etc we all know the story. Main point is, the focus of the story is on the main character, and two secondary characters who have a reason to be there; Tolkien doesn't just have a bunch of extra characters tagging along for no reason. If Peen Stroke had written LOTR, it would have been Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Skippy the Elf. Why is Skippy there? No reason, the author just likes him and wants him to be in the story even though he doesn't really do anything. Then, later, Rainbow Dash shows up and flies them to Mt. Doom.
Now back in the world of Past Sins, we have Rainbow Dash, who was barely in the previous scene and didn't actually need to be in it at all, having a separate conversation with Scootaloo, who despite being Nyx's friend isn't that significant of a character yet. Why is this in the story? Also, the way she casually drops "loyalty" into the conversation is annoying. Hurr durr that's her element, ain't dat clever?
Anyway, Diamond Tiara knocks on the door suddenly and it looks like shit's about to get real.
I'm going to take Nigel's suggestion and start using more related pics instead of Glimmer avatars for these posts. However this time I don't have a good one so here's Golly.
>>250115
>or possible gay lover, if we're going with Peter Jackson canon
WTF! How dare you! That's the last straw. I know where you live, faggot. I bet you feel safe in Virgina, Los Angles. Yeah, that's right. You better look scared. I will get you and you will never see me comming. I wonder how it feels to know that if you hadn't insulted the greatest movie of all time, you wouldn't be in this mess. FAG!!! To think you would be able to get away with saying that Frodo's and Sam's beautiful platnic friendship is gay. It wasn't gay faggot. You just wish it to be as uncle shekelberg pegs you in the ass. I gotta target on your back. It is time for fear!
>or possible gay lover, if we're going with Peter Jackson canon
WTF! How dare you! That's the last straw. I know where you live, faggot. I bet you feel safe in Virgina, Los Angles. Yeah, that's right. You better look scared. I will get you and you will never see me comming. I wonder how it feels to know that if you hadn't insulted the greatest movie of all time, you wouldn't be in this mess. FAG!!! To think you would be able to get away with saying that Frodo's and Sam's beautiful platnic friendship is gay. It wasn't gay faggot. You just wish it to be as uncle shekelberg pegs you in the ass. I gotta target on your back. It is time for fear!
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>>250115
I think another part of what annoys me so much about this story is that while Peen Stroke gets most of the cliches right on the small scale, the work has high-level design problems that prevents it from feeling like its cliches are deployed effectively. Thus, what's unforgivable about this is that it tries to execute a well-worn plot and fails at it. As much as it's generally acceptable to bitch about something being cliche and formulaic, the truth is that most fiction is in some way formulaic, and just because the tropes you're using have been done to death doesn't mean you can't make the reader enjoy them for the 7,000th time. As I've pointed out before, MLP itself contains a lot of tropes and cliches; indeed Nightmare Moon to begin with is pretty much every madly cackling cartoon villain ever, and I'm sure was designed that way on purpose. No, the more I think about it this story doesn't suck because it follows a recipe. This story sucks because the author tries to change the recipe without really knowing what he's doing.
The main idea he's got, which is basically "cute and endearing little girl turns out to be a massively powerful and possibly evil entity," is a pretty common anime script. Elfen Lied and This Ugly Yet Beautiful World are the two that spring immediately to mind for me (pics 1-2 related), but there are plenty of others. Steel Angel Kurumi, Chobits, and DearS (basically Chobits with big boobs) are somewhat different but still follow the basic pattern (pics 3-5 related). There are probably plenty of others I could think of too. Here is the setup: usually the show begins with some kind of out of context event like a spaceship crashing. After the credits roll, the opening scene is usually some random innocent Person X discovering le cute innocent girl by accident. Usually she is wandering around in a fugue state or else unconscious. Le cute innocent girl is so le cute and innocent that Person X knows he/she can't just leave her alone by herself, and so Person X (hereafter referred to as X so I don't have to type as much) takes responsibility and le cute innocent girl (hereafter referred to as LCIG so I don't have to type as much) comes to live with him.
The unorthodox living situation is usually somehow disruptive for X, and early episodes generally focus on him adapting to having LCIG living with him. Frequently there is some kind of friend or neighbor who is an acquaintance of X, and who discovers the situation and becomes involved. If X is male, this person is usually a childhood friend who has a crush on him. She may have some jealousy of LCIG or misinterpret the situation, but ultimately her kindhearted nature prevails and usually she ends up forming her own relationship. LCIG generally has some type of low-grade amnesia, and has no idea how to interact with the world in a normal way. She typically has to be taught how to do basic things like put on clothes and go grocery shopping. She often can't remember her name so X gives her one. LCIG sometimes attends school, usually the same school as X if he/she is also a student.
Usually these stories go on being pretty lighthearted and slice of life for several episodes, during which time both X and the audience are intended to form a bond with LCIG. However, about midway through the series, the plot starts to thicken. We are usually introduced to something like a cult or a government agency that is independently investigating the spaceship crash or whatever happened at the very beginning. Eventually we learn that there is some kind of secret weapon or super powered alien that was in the spaceship that the agency is interested in for purely nefarious purposes.
Surprise surprise, this usually turns out to be LCIG, who it is revealed has some kind of superpower that she doesn't know she has because she lost her memory. The nefarious agency tries to reclaim her, usually there is some kind of climactic event where her power awakens and she unleashes it either intentionally or unintentionally. X, who has been told by the agency to stay out of it, does the opposite of that and gets super-involved. Usually the agency is defeated somehow, and LCIG and X resume their unorthodox but happy life with all the frens they made along the way. Or, in the case of something like Elfen Lied, it gets fucked up and never really stops being fucked up. Details can vary, but these shows all follow the same basic pattern, especially in the beginning.
Now, let's take a look at Past Sins through this lens. It begins with an out of context scene in which a nefarious cult is trying to revive Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). tl;dr, it fails. Kind of. Next scene, Twilight Sparkle is walking through the woods and findsLCIG Nyx. Nyx is suffering from low-grade amnesia and is very le cute and innocent. Twilight Sparkle decides she can't leave le cute and innocent filly alone in the woods so she takes her home, gives her a name, and informally adopts her.
Twilight then enlists the help of her friend Rarity to try and create an outfit for Nyx, whose alicorn status she needs to hide. In addition to making clothes, Rarity spends time with LCIF and begins to form her own bond. Next, Twilight enrolls Nyx in school so she can learn the basic things about interacting with the world that she doesn't understand. This leads to a subplot arc where Nyx is getting bullied by Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, which in turn leads to a situation where Nyx inadvertently ends up back in the Everfree Forest. Through sheer coincidence (or is it fate?) she winds up back at the place where Nightmare Moon had her final stand. Her power awakens sort of, but not really. Twilight (along with all of her friends for some reason) shows up and rescues her. That basically brings us to where we're at currently.
Running out of space, will continue in next post.
I think another part of what annoys me so much about this story is that while Peen Stroke gets most of the cliches right on the small scale, the work has high-level design problems that prevents it from feeling like its cliches are deployed effectively. Thus, what's unforgivable about this is that it tries to execute a well-worn plot and fails at it. As much as it's generally acceptable to bitch about something being cliche and formulaic, the truth is that most fiction is in some way formulaic, and just because the tropes you're using have been done to death doesn't mean you can't make the reader enjoy them for the 7,000th time. As I've pointed out before, MLP itself contains a lot of tropes and cliches; indeed Nightmare Moon to begin with is pretty much every madly cackling cartoon villain ever, and I'm sure was designed that way on purpose. No, the more I think about it this story doesn't suck because it follows a recipe. This story sucks because the author tries to change the recipe without really knowing what he's doing.
The main idea he's got, which is basically "cute and endearing little girl turns out to be a massively powerful and possibly evil entity," is a pretty common anime script. Elfen Lied and This Ugly Yet Beautiful World are the two that spring immediately to mind for me (pics 1-2 related), but there are plenty of others. Steel Angel Kurumi, Chobits, and DearS (basically Chobits with big boobs) are somewhat different but still follow the basic pattern (pics 3-5 related). There are probably plenty of others I could think of too. Here is the setup: usually the show begins with some kind of out of context event like a spaceship crashing. After the credits roll, the opening scene is usually some random innocent Person X discovering le cute innocent girl by accident. Usually she is wandering around in a fugue state or else unconscious. Le cute innocent girl is so le cute and innocent that Person X knows he/she can't just leave her alone by herself, and so Person X (hereafter referred to as X so I don't have to type as much) takes responsibility and le cute innocent girl (hereafter referred to as LCIG so I don't have to type as much) comes to live with him.
The unorthodox living situation is usually somehow disruptive for X, and early episodes generally focus on him adapting to having LCIG living with him. Frequently there is some kind of friend or neighbor who is an acquaintance of X, and who discovers the situation and becomes involved. If X is male, this person is usually a childhood friend who has a crush on him. She may have some jealousy of LCIG or misinterpret the situation, but ultimately her kindhearted nature prevails and usually she ends up forming her own relationship. LCIG generally has some type of low-grade amnesia, and has no idea how to interact with the world in a normal way. She typically has to be taught how to do basic things like put on clothes and go grocery shopping. She often can't remember her name so X gives her one. LCIG sometimes attends school, usually the same school as X if he/she is also a student.
Usually these stories go on being pretty lighthearted and slice of life for several episodes, during which time both X and the audience are intended to form a bond with LCIG. However, about midway through the series, the plot starts to thicken. We are usually introduced to something like a cult or a government agency that is independently investigating the spaceship crash or whatever happened at the very beginning. Eventually we learn that there is some kind of secret weapon or super powered alien that was in the spaceship that the agency is interested in for purely nefarious purposes.
Surprise surprise, this usually turns out to be LCIG, who it is revealed has some kind of superpower that she doesn't know she has because she lost her memory. The nefarious agency tries to reclaim her, usually there is some kind of climactic event where her power awakens and she unleashes it either intentionally or unintentionally. X, who has been told by the agency to stay out of it, does the opposite of that and gets super-involved. Usually the agency is defeated somehow, and LCIG and X resume their unorthodox but happy life with all the frens they made along the way. Or, in the case of something like Elfen Lied, it gets fucked up and never really stops being fucked up. Details can vary, but these shows all follow the same basic pattern, especially in the beginning.
Now, let's take a look at Past Sins through this lens. It begins with an out of context scene in which a nefarious cult is trying to revive Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). tl;dr, it fails. Kind of. Next scene, Twilight Sparkle is walking through the woods and finds
Twilight then enlists the help of her friend Rarity to try and create an outfit for Nyx, whose alicorn status she needs to hide. In addition to making clothes, Rarity spends time with LCIF and begins to form her own bond. Next, Twilight enrolls Nyx in school so she can learn the basic things about interacting with the world that she doesn't understand. This leads to a subplot arc where Nyx is getting bullied by Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, which in turn leads to a situation where Nyx inadvertently ends up back in the Everfree Forest. Through sheer coincidence (or is it fate?) she winds up back at the place where Nightmare Moon had her final stand. Her power awakens sort of, but not really. Twilight (along with all of her friends for some reason) shows up and rescues her. That basically brings us to where we're at currently.
Running out of space, will continue in next post.
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>>250116
>It is time for fear!
*fears*
>>250125
Where Past Sins immediately goes wrong is that it is constantly reminding the reader about the Nightmare Moon connection from the get go. Other than suggesting it via the prologue and allowing the reader to probably figure it out on their own fairly quickly, the connection should not be directly mentioned until much later. In fact the reader should not even be thinking about it, even if they see it right away. If we're following the "LCIG is actually super powerful entity" script, and I think I've effectively demonstrated that there are more than incidental similarities, then the entire story up to this point should be focused on Nyx learning about life in the new world she just woke up in, and forming a bond with Twilight and her friends, as I've already suggested multiple times.
The situation is slightly trickier here since it's established that Nyx bears enough of a physical resemblance to Nightmare Moon to where neither Twilight nor Rarity can ignore it. It also deviates slightly in that the ceremony scene in the prologue involves Twilight (Person X) and is thus part of the story's initial continuity, which usually doesn't happen. However, this doesn't necessarily break the formula. Planting an initial seed of suspicion in Twilight's head at the resemblance to NM when she first meets Nyx, and maybe having it resurface from time to time, can add to the tension if its done right. But we shouldn't constantly be having long monologues from Twi about "is Nyx Nightmare Moon? Is Peen Stroke a faggot?" at this (or any) point, because we already know the answer to both questions is yes, and it's just plain annoying to have to read it so many times.
The shows I chose as examples in the previous post are all quite different from each other, but one thing consistent between them is that in most of the early episodes, LCIG behaves as such, and is treated as such by X and whatever supporting cast exists. Even in a situation like this, where T and her friend R suspect there may be more to LCIF than meets the eye, at this point in the story they should push those thoughts to the back of their minds, and treat her as just a cute lonely filly who deserves a normal shot at life. The story at this point should focus primarily on smaller events and subplots that allow Nyx to form a deeper personal bond with Twilight and the other friends in her close orbit (recall my faggy solar system analogy if you want clues about which characters she should be building relationships with). Conflict at this point should be developed through smaller subplot arcs like the Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon bullying story, which even when you take into account how predictable it is, is still pretty fertile ground for a subplot in a story like this.
I'm probably going to try to get to the end of Chapter 4 and see where we are at that point. Then I'd like to do a similar thing to what I did with Chapter 3, where I take the events that have taken place and map out how I would probably have the story go if I were writing it. That was a fun exercise and I think being able to directly compare the two is a better way to illustrate what I'm talking about than just talking in circles for posts upon posts. I will probably be doing it at intermittent points throughout this analysis, and hopefully by the end we will have a nice outline of a much better story for anyone who can't be fucked to read this one, or who has read it but would like to pretend that they actually read something else.
Now then, where was I?
Oh yeah. Twilight's friends, who should not have been there in the first place, all just left, and Twilight is just about to settle down with a nice box of wine and her dog-eared copy of Eat, Pray, Love, when suddenly there is a knock at the door. She opens it, and who should be standing there but Diamond Tiara and her parents, Filthy Rich and Affluent Rich.
Now, according to the wiki, Spoiled Rich does not make an actual appearance until S5, so at the time of writing the name of Diamond Tiara's mother would not have been known. It's therefore perfectly acceptable for Peen Stroke to have invented this character, in the same way that it's perfectly acceptable for him to have invented parents for Scootaloo. I would also contend that the idea of authors having to update past stories to reflect new additions to the canon is silly; personally I think it's acceptable practice to set a story at any point in the canon you like, and to take as many liberties as you please with whatever hadn't been revealed at that time. At that point you can just call it an "alternate timeline" story. If there's stuff in the canon that you don't like, this is usually a lot less messy than trying to retcon it out starting from the present. Nigel, pay attention here.
However, with all that said, I would also like to say that I think "Affluent Rich" is a pretty dumb pony name. Both of her names are just synonyms of each other, which is stupid. It's like if Peen Stroke had chosen to name his pony avatar "Homosexual Gay." It would be accurate, but also redundant. Pony names are usually a word or phrase that subtly alludes to the pony's personality, identity, or primary occupation. In Peen Stroke's case, he would be better off going with something like "Glory Hole" or "Pearl Necklace." Maybe "Stallion Tickler." But I digress.
Anyway, I'm running out of space and it's getting late. We will rejoin Twilight Sparkle, Affluent Moneyhaving, Diamond Tiara et al at a later date, when we resume our neverending dive into Glory Hole's magnum opus.
>It is time for fear!
*fears*
>>250125
Where Past Sins immediately goes wrong is that it is constantly reminding the reader about the Nightmare Moon connection from the get go. Other than suggesting it via the prologue and allowing the reader to probably figure it out on their own fairly quickly, the connection should not be directly mentioned until much later. In fact the reader should not even be thinking about it, even if they see it right away. If we're following the "LCIG is actually super powerful entity" script, and I think I've effectively demonstrated that there are more than incidental similarities, then the entire story up to this point should be focused on Nyx learning about life in the new world she just woke up in, and forming a bond with Twilight and her friends, as I've already suggested multiple times.
The situation is slightly trickier here since it's established that Nyx bears enough of a physical resemblance to Nightmare Moon to where neither Twilight nor Rarity can ignore it. It also deviates slightly in that the ceremony scene in the prologue involves Twilight (Person X) and is thus part of the story's initial continuity, which usually doesn't happen. However, this doesn't necessarily break the formula. Planting an initial seed of suspicion in Twilight's head at the resemblance to NM when she first meets Nyx, and maybe having it resurface from time to time, can add to the tension if its done right. But we shouldn't constantly be having long monologues from Twi about "is Nyx Nightmare Moon? Is Peen Stroke a faggot?" at this (or any) point, because we already know the answer to both questions is yes, and it's just plain annoying to have to read it so many times.
The shows I chose as examples in the previous post are all quite different from each other, but one thing consistent between them is that in most of the early episodes, LCIG behaves as such, and is treated as such by X and whatever supporting cast exists. Even in a situation like this, where T and her friend R suspect there may be more to LCIF than meets the eye, at this point in the story they should push those thoughts to the back of their minds, and treat her as just a cute lonely filly who deserves a normal shot at life. The story at this point should focus primarily on smaller events and subplots that allow Nyx to form a deeper personal bond with Twilight and the other friends in her close orbit (recall my faggy solar system analogy if you want clues about which characters she should be building relationships with). Conflict at this point should be developed through smaller subplot arcs like the Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon bullying story, which even when you take into account how predictable it is, is still pretty fertile ground for a subplot in a story like this.
I'm probably going to try to get to the end of Chapter 4 and see where we are at that point. Then I'd like to do a similar thing to what I did with Chapter 3, where I take the events that have taken place and map out how I would probably have the story go if I were writing it. That was a fun exercise and I think being able to directly compare the two is a better way to illustrate what I'm talking about than just talking in circles for posts upon posts. I will probably be doing it at intermittent points throughout this analysis, and hopefully by the end we will have a nice outline of a much better story for anyone who can't be fucked to read this one, or who has read it but would like to pretend that they actually read something else.
Now then, where was I?
Oh yeah. Twilight's friends, who should not have been there in the first place, all just left, and Twilight is just about to settle down with a nice box of wine and her dog-eared copy of Eat, Pray, Love, when suddenly there is a knock at the door. She opens it, and who should be standing there but Diamond Tiara and her parents, Filthy Rich and Affluent Rich.
Now, according to the wiki, Spoiled Rich does not make an actual appearance until S5, so at the time of writing the name of Diamond Tiara's mother would not have been known. It's therefore perfectly acceptable for Peen Stroke to have invented this character, in the same way that it's perfectly acceptable for him to have invented parents for Scootaloo. I would also contend that the idea of authors having to update past stories to reflect new additions to the canon is silly; personally I think it's acceptable practice to set a story at any point in the canon you like, and to take as many liberties as you please with whatever hadn't been revealed at that time. At that point you can just call it an "alternate timeline" story. If there's stuff in the canon that you don't like, this is usually a lot less messy than trying to retcon it out starting from the present. Nigel, pay attention here.
However, with all that said, I would also like to say that I think "Affluent Rich" is a pretty dumb pony name. Both of her names are just synonyms of each other, which is stupid. It's like if Peen Stroke had chosen to name his pony avatar "Homosexual Gay." It would be accurate, but also redundant. Pony names are usually a word or phrase that subtly alludes to the pony's personality, identity, or primary occupation. In Peen Stroke's case, he would be better off going with something like "Glory Hole" or "Pearl Necklace." Maybe "Stallion Tickler." But I digress.
Anyway, I'm running out of space and it's getting late. We will rejoin Twilight Sparkle, Affluent Moneyhaving, Diamond Tiara et al at a later date, when we resume our neverending dive into Glory Hole's magnum opus.
>>250115
> Also, the way she casually drops "loyalty" into the conversation is annoying. Hurr durr that's her element, ain't dat clever?
Fucktons of old pony fanfics do this before the "metagame" of faggoty crowdpleasers that gets you into the Nepotism Box was figured out.
It's what happens when the author is a giganigger with no understanding of the Mane Sox's virtues or any desire to give each character a chance to shine and show off their element.
Btw I've been told by one of the site's faggy admins a while ago that the box isn't actually automated. If a faggy admin likes your story he will put it in the box so it can grow from 25 likes to 200ish or even 500ish likes.
This fandom is so fucking small. And I hate how the site decided writers should divide their time between writing and promoting themselves. What does that leave for readers besides useless praise and useless bitching? Fans should support art they love through promoting it.
> Also, the way she casually drops "loyalty" into the conversation is annoying. Hurr durr that's her element, ain't dat clever?
Fucktons of old pony fanfics do this before the "metagame" of faggoty crowdpleasers that gets you into the Nepotism Box was figured out.
It's what happens when the author is a giganigger with no understanding of the Mane Sox's virtues or any desire to give each character a chance to shine and show off their element.
Btw I've been told by one of the site's faggy admins a while ago that the box isn't actually automated. If a faggy admin likes your story he will put it in the box so it can grow from 25 likes to 200ish or even 500ish likes.
This fandom is so fucking small. And I hate how the site decided writers should divide their time between writing and promoting themselves. What does that leave for readers besides useless praise and useless bitching? Fans should support art they love through promoting it.
>>250126
You know what'd be cool? If you did two similar overhyped bad fanfics at once, comparing and contrasting them.
You know what'd be cool? If you did two similar overhyped bad fanfics at once, comparing and contrasting them.
>>250155
Peen Stroke's Nyx vs Puppysmiles VS Snowblind, which saccharine shitshow of an attempted heartstring-tugger is worse?
Peen Stroke's Nyx vs Puppysmiles VS Snowblind, which saccharine shitshow of an attempted heartstring-tugger is worse?
>>250160
Definitely Snowdrop. That one is a parody in itself. Only way it would be more heartstring tugging would be if she was an orphan who was raped by windigos
Definitely Snowdrop. That one is a parody in itself. Only way it would be more heartstring tugging would be if she was an orphan who was raped by windigos
>>250163
But the mother that we see in Snowdrop is just a memory. It cuts away to imply that her mother is dead in the present. She really is an orphan.
But the mother that we see in Snowdrop is just a memory. It cuts away to imply that her mother is dead in the present. She really is an orphan.
>>250189
Shoot me for saying this but the DBZ fandom has episode-length fan-animations that do a better job of:
>sticking to the source material while building upon it
>keeping in line with the source material's tone
>adding new and interesting ideas to the show
Not much of a better job, but a better job all the same.
Shoot me for saying this but the DBZ fandom has episode-length fan-animations that do a better job of:
>sticking to the source material while building upon it
>keeping in line with the source material's tone
>adding new and interesting ideas to the show
Not much of a better job, but a better job all the same.
Is there a list somewhere of all books sorted by word count? Preferably just the classics.
Was looking at the length of my Fallout Equestria story and I think I'm winning.
Was looking at the length of my Fallout Equestria story and I think I'm winning.
From what I've read in this thread and various snippets of the lore, Nyx could have been (and with some liberal head-canon, is) a respectable OC. I'm still not reading that shit though.
>>250126
Looking forward to more.
>>250126
Looking forward to more.
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>>250126
Anyway, what follows next is pretty much your obligatory upstairs/downstairs haves vs. have-nots muh great injustice scene, in which Diamond Tiara and her affluent family lob obviously false accusations at poor lonely wine-guzzling Twilight against which she attempts to defend herself to no avail. We learn that while preceding events were taking place the entirely-too-cuntily-portrayed-imo Diamond Tiara was off telling her parents a sob story about how the evil town librarian had approached her and threatened to turn her into a cactus (yes, this actually happened in the text). Obviously, DT left out the part where she tricked Nyx into going into the woods by herself. Twilight defends Nyx by explaining what happened, DT's mother defends her daughter by denying that she could ever possibly be guilty of any wrongdoing because blah blah we're rich and you're poor, stops short of suggesting that Twilight be burned at the stake for even suggesting such libel, and ultimately ends the confrontation on a "well, I never!" note when her only slightly more reasonable husband finally intercedes. The only thing this scene is missing is an image of "Affluent Rich" spitting out tea as a monocle falls from her eye.
Diamond Tiara eventually gets hoisted by her own petard when she accidentally admits to having done exactly what Twilight accused her of, however even after this her mother continues to be a massive cunt. Filthy Rich grounds DT, but informs Twilight that they will be speaking to the Mayor about this relatively minor misunderstanding over what ultimately amounts to an altercation between children, because as we all know, every rich person is evil and does stuff like that because they can. #Yang2020 #Muh1000Dollars
Oh yeah, Twilight also namedrops Princess Celestia, who still doesn't know about Nyx, as a way of countering Filthy Rich's namedropping of the Mayor. My, what a remarkably complex tapestry of conflicting interests and intrigue Mr. Stroke is weaving here.
Once again, we have a more or less competently written scene that follows a rather predictable blueprint. While I still don't agree with the logistics of how he had events take place in the preceding chapter, I can see that he intended to develop a conflict between Twilight and the Rich family, and he needed Twilight to threaten Diamond Tiara in order to make this happen. The new conflict does add an additional element to the story and makes it more interesting, so I'll actually go ahead and give him a jaunty tip of my cap for this. The downside of it (apart from my earlier complaints about the logic of ch 3) is that the scene he chose to initiate the conflict with is a little eye-rollingly heavy-handed. Diamond Tiara and her family are portrayed as stuck up, unreasonable, spiteful, cruel, aristocratic snobs; the sort of villains that the audience is supposed to immediately boo and hiss because ehrmahgod evil rich people. Not only is it veering the story back into cornball melodrama territory, I also think it's kind of an unfair depiction of these characters.
In the series (for clarity's sake you can assume I mean s1 and s2 when I mention the series from here on out, due to the time period of the story), though Diamond Tiara is usually kind of an obnoxious twat, her antics never really go beyond being a playground bully, and a fairly mild one at that. She's arrogant and unkind, but generally not overly cruel or sadistic. I'm skeptical that she would be evil enough to actually try to murder, or at least negligently manslaughter (ponyslaughter, whatever), one of her classmates, feel no remorse whatsoever, and even go so far as to try to have her parents cause actual real-life problems for said classmate's caregiver just because she had made a (probably not serious) threat to her.
Affluent Rich, as I went over, is basically an OC created by Peen Stroke because DT's mother was not a canon character in the show yet. So, he's got a fair amount of liberty here. However, I think she also goes overboard and I don't find her behavior entirely believable. It's true that some parents, particularly mothers, can get a little insanely defensive of their children, but usually nobody is this unreasonable, particularly when it becomes apparent that her child was actually the one in the wrong. Although who knows, a lot of women are just plain nuts.
Filthy Rich, though portrayed as the voice of reason, still goes overboard in threatening involve the Mayor. That's just silly. I don't think any reasonable person (pony, whatever) could take Twilight's threat to turn DT into a cactus seriously enough to cause real trouble over it. It's reasonable for a parent to be upset that another adult threatened his child, but in this case the child in question had done something actually quite serious, and Twi was right to be angry. DT's actions were not just wrong, but actually endangered Nyx's life. Even ignoring this, DT still lied to her parents and made it sound like Twilight did something worse than she did, while omitting what she herself did. Twilight yelled at a child in anger and might have gone overboard, so she would probably be wise to at least apologize for that much, but that's about it.
Filthy Rich has always struck me as a fairly level headed businesspony. He's maybe a little snooty at times, but I've never gotten the impression he's meant to be portrayed as evil or antagonistic. I doubt he'd be willing to waste the Mayor's time over something this ridiculous; if anything he'd probably realize that his daughter could technically be accused of attempted murder and would want this situation to go away as quickly and quietly as possible. Any sane person (pony, whatever) would just chalk this up to wacky little kid bullshit and call it a night.
Anyway, the scene ends with some light humor. Spike has some funny interactions with the owl, and then they all go to bed.
Anyway, what follows next is pretty much your obligatory upstairs/downstairs haves vs. have-nots muh great injustice scene, in which Diamond Tiara and her affluent family lob obviously false accusations at poor lonely wine-guzzling Twilight against which she attempts to defend herself to no avail. We learn that while preceding events were taking place the entirely-too-cuntily-portrayed-imo Diamond Tiara was off telling her parents a sob story about how the evil town librarian had approached her and threatened to turn her into a cactus (yes, this actually happened in the text). Obviously, DT left out the part where she tricked Nyx into going into the woods by herself. Twilight defends Nyx by explaining what happened, DT's mother defends her daughter by denying that she could ever possibly be guilty of any wrongdoing because blah blah we're rich and you're poor, stops short of suggesting that Twilight be burned at the stake for even suggesting such libel, and ultimately ends the confrontation on a "well, I never!" note when her only slightly more reasonable husband finally intercedes. The only thing this scene is missing is an image of "Affluent Rich" spitting out tea as a monocle falls from her eye.
Diamond Tiara eventually gets hoisted by her own petard when she accidentally admits to having done exactly what Twilight accused her of, however even after this her mother continues to be a massive cunt. Filthy Rich grounds DT, but informs Twilight that they will be speaking to the Mayor about this relatively minor misunderstanding over what ultimately amounts to an altercation between children, because as we all know, every rich person is evil and does stuff like that because they can. #Yang2020 #Muh1000Dollars
Oh yeah, Twilight also namedrops Princess Celestia, who still doesn't know about Nyx, as a way of countering Filthy Rich's namedropping of the Mayor. My, what a remarkably complex tapestry of conflicting interests and intrigue Mr. Stroke is weaving here.
Once again, we have a more or less competently written scene that follows a rather predictable blueprint. While I still don't agree with the logistics of how he had events take place in the preceding chapter, I can see that he intended to develop a conflict between Twilight and the Rich family, and he needed Twilight to threaten Diamond Tiara in order to make this happen. The new conflict does add an additional element to the story and makes it more interesting, so I'll actually go ahead and give him a jaunty tip of my cap for this. The downside of it (apart from my earlier complaints about the logic of ch 3) is that the scene he chose to initiate the conflict with is a little eye-rollingly heavy-handed. Diamond Tiara and her family are portrayed as stuck up, unreasonable, spiteful, cruel, aristocratic snobs; the sort of villains that the audience is supposed to immediately boo and hiss because ehrmahgod evil rich people. Not only is it veering the story back into cornball melodrama territory, I also think it's kind of an unfair depiction of these characters.
In the series (for clarity's sake you can assume I mean s1 and s2 when I mention the series from here on out, due to the time period of the story), though Diamond Tiara is usually kind of an obnoxious twat, her antics never really go beyond being a playground bully, and a fairly mild one at that. She's arrogant and unkind, but generally not overly cruel or sadistic. I'm skeptical that she would be evil enough to actually try to murder, or at least negligently manslaughter (ponyslaughter, whatever), one of her classmates, feel no remorse whatsoever, and even go so far as to try to have her parents cause actual real-life problems for said classmate's caregiver just because she had made a (probably not serious) threat to her.
Affluent Rich, as I went over, is basically an OC created by Peen Stroke because DT's mother was not a canon character in the show yet. So, he's got a fair amount of liberty here. However, I think she also goes overboard and I don't find her behavior entirely believable. It's true that some parents, particularly mothers, can get a little insanely defensive of their children, but usually nobody is this unreasonable, particularly when it becomes apparent that her child was actually the one in the wrong. Although who knows, a lot of women are just plain nuts.
Filthy Rich, though portrayed as the voice of reason, still goes overboard in threatening involve the Mayor. That's just silly. I don't think any reasonable person (pony, whatever) could take Twilight's threat to turn DT into a cactus seriously enough to cause real trouble over it. It's reasonable for a parent to be upset that another adult threatened his child, but in this case the child in question had done something actually quite serious, and Twi was right to be angry. DT's actions were not just wrong, but actually endangered Nyx's life. Even ignoring this, DT still lied to her parents and made it sound like Twilight did something worse than she did, while omitting what she herself did. Twilight yelled at a child in anger and might have gone overboard, so she would probably be wise to at least apologize for that much, but that's about it.
Filthy Rich has always struck me as a fairly level headed businesspony. He's maybe a little snooty at times, but I've never gotten the impression he's meant to be portrayed as evil or antagonistic. I doubt he'd be willing to waste the Mayor's time over something this ridiculous; if anything he'd probably realize that his daughter could technically be accused of attempted murder and would want this situation to go away as quickly and quietly as possible. Any sane person (pony, whatever) would just chalk this up to wacky little kid bullshit and call it a night.
Anyway, the scene ends with some light humor. Spike has some funny interactions with the owl, and then they all go to bed.
>>250153
I don't know if I could handle doing two of these simultaneously, tbh. If there's two fics that are related to each other in a way that would warrant examining them together, that might work. I could also attempt it with a couple of shorter ones I suppose.
I don't know if I could handle doing two of these simultaneously, tbh. If there's two fics that are related to each other in a way that would warrant examining them together, that might work. I could also attempt it with a couple of shorter ones I suppose.
>>250400
>Evil rich people
This is a very very common trope within the mlp fandom. I have seen this so many times.
>Affluent Rich
I don't think she was in this scene in the original. I think it just were Filithy Rich since I don't think she existed in the story at all in the original.
>Evil rich people
This is a very very common trope within the mlp fandom. I have seen this so many times.
>Affluent Rich
I don't think she was in this scene in the original. I think it just were Filithy Rich since I don't think she existed in the story at all in the original.
>>250402
Perhaps you could take one of the "Greatest Brony Fanfics of all time" that's effectively just some low-brow lowest common denominator-pleasing trash dressed up in pseudointellectualism, then take a fic that came out recently and is exactly the same just with a lower score and less pseudism, and expose the ways in which they're the same shit.
Then again, a focused teardown of the fandom's biggest darlings (Nyx, Fallout Equestria, Project Horizons, Puppysmiles's story Pink Eyes, Friendship is Optimal, that new "Fallout Equestria Commonwealth" that's literally just a writeup of a bad Fallout 4 LP, For Scores Divided my Whores, My Little Dashie, Cupcakes, Murky Number Seven, and whatever else has a big score) could be great fun.
Especially if we let the circlejerking lefty faggots on /mlp/ fanfiction general know we see the faults in the stories they hold up as examples of how everyone "Should" write. That'd piss off the egobabies and their fanclubs.
If you're looking for something shorter you could get done in one day, I found this
https://falloutequestria.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout:_Equestria_Side_Stories
It's a list of all the Fallout Equestria stories separated into Shilled For By Equestria Daily, Complete, Incomplete, One-Shot, Cancelled, and Radio Play categories.
You can sort them by length, chapter count, etc.
So you can do anything from the 1,780,334 words of Project Horizons to the 1,193 words of Fallout Equestria - The Trip.
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>>250400
The sub chapter concludes with another Kinkade-esque scene where Nyx cuddles up next to Twilight in bed, complete with a paragraph about Twilight staring out the window and thinking about Nightmare Moon. Other than dropping in the obligatory 'You're a faggot, Peen Stroke,' we can probably skip this bit since I don't really have any complaints about it that I haven't voiced already about similar scenes.
So anyway, next we get a little more development of the main plot. Here, we cut to our shadowy secret organization that wishes to use LCIF for their nefarious, but yet unknown, purposes.
>The butler, Proper Etiquette, stepped back and opened the manor’s door wider, allowing the trio of ponies to slip inside.
Okay, I just want to take a minute to say that so far, Peen Stroke seems to really suck balls at thinking up pony names. "Proper Etiquette" isn't quite as bad as "Affluent Rich," but it just smacks of laziness. "Nyx" is an okay name I guess, and I like that he troubled himself to think up a backstory for where the name came from. "Spell Nexus" isn't terrible. However, it seems like any time he needs a name for an incidental background character, he just takes the first lazy thing that comes to mind and runs with it. What's something that goes with rich? Uh, "affluent", I guess. What do I call the butler? Well, butlers have proper etiquette so...I think I'll name him that. At least try to make it a pun or something. Personally I'd have named him Kurt Manners.
The rest of his OC names are okay, but fairly generic sounding. "Night Wind" sounds like something that happens when you eat too much pizza close to bedtime. "Gray Gale" sounds alright but doesn't really evoke any strong imagery. Same with "Stonewall." It's okay for a generic goombah tough guy character I guess, but it's not tremendously imaginative. His cutie mark, incidentally, is literally a stone wall. Like what the hell does that signify? Is he a mason of some kind? Is it to suggest that he's strong and dependable? Is his special talent protecting the inner bailey of a castle from invaders and absorbing missiles fired by trebuchets? I'll shut up now.
Anyway, we are once again introduced to Spell Nexus, the unicorn we met in the prologue, who was dressing up like Nightmare Moon and playing Skinny Puppy records in the woods. We see him now, sitting in his manor house without his makeup on, and we learn that apparently he is the headmaster of Celestia's school as well as some kind of highly placed royal advisor.
>“And not all of us have cushy jobs like you do,” Stonewall grumbled. “The commander is already suspicious of why I was late reporting in after what happened in Everfree. I’m skating on thin ice with the Town Guard.”
Okay, so I guess Stonewall is a guard. That basically makes sense I guess.
This scene actually demonstrates why I've been kvetching so much about all the mentions of Nightmare Moon by Twilight so far. This scene is fairly well placed in terms of pacing, but it lacks the oomph that it would ordinarily have, because this is not even close to being the first mention we've seen of the subject. The reader already knows that Nyx is Nightmare Moon reborn, so there's really no big reveal here. Obviously, the reader would probably be able to deduce Nyx's identity fairly easily one way or the other, but having Twilight be as aware of it as she is rather deflates the impact of this part of the story.
Ideally, the outline of the story so far should go something like this: spoopy prologue with spoopy ritual, Twilight finds filly in woods and takes her home, cute stuff happens with filly, pls diamn tira no bully filly, filly lost in woods cus bully, filly find castle and awaken ancient power, filly goes home with Twilight and denouement of mini-arc, cutaway to spoopy cult talking about Nighmare Moon. The only points on this outline where Nightmare Moon should even be mentioned at all are in boldface. Other than some incidental mention, like it might be necessary to have Twilight and Rarity briefly discuss the resemblance in order for things to make sense, the story in between the prologue and this second cult scene should focus entirely on Twilight and Nyx building their bond, as well as the mini-arc about Nyx getting bullied. The main plot of the story, about Nyx being NM reborn, is something that should be teased at in the beginning to get the reader interested, then set aside for a bit while you build the characters up. Then, at about this point in the story, you reintroduce the cult and have the main arc start picking up steam. If we've already heard about how Nyx looks like Nightmare Moon a billion different ways from Sunday, hearing it one more time isn't going to make things any more interesting.
Anyways, next we have a character named...Bastion Yorsets? What the shit? Is that his real name?
Okay, so, my first impression was that Peen Stroke was just drunk and mashing his keyboard when he came up with this name, but apparently he's referencing an existing background pony. The image he links to in the text (again, I'm not a huge fan of hyperlinks to outside content in story text) is broken, but some light googling turned up a bit of information. Apparently Bastion Yorsets is a fan nickname for a pony officially named Top Marks, who was one of the judges when filly Twilight was trying to hatch Spike. As to where the hell the name Bastion Yorsets came from, or what it means, I couldn't even begin to say. This is probably one of those in-jokes that you have to have been in the fandom a long time to get. If anyone knows more, feel free to share with the class.
Well, whatever. Bastion Yorsets gets woken up in the middle of the night by Princess Celestia visiting his room, but not for the reason he was probably hoping. Apparently he is the leader of a group researching the cult's spell, and I am running out of characters so to be continued.
The sub chapter concludes with another Kinkade-esque scene where Nyx cuddles up next to Twilight in bed, complete with a paragraph about Twilight staring out the window and thinking about Nightmare Moon. Other than dropping in the obligatory 'You're a faggot, Peen Stroke,' we can probably skip this bit since I don't really have any complaints about it that I haven't voiced already about similar scenes.
So anyway, next we get a little more development of the main plot. Here, we cut to our shadowy secret organization that wishes to use LCIF for their nefarious, but yet unknown, purposes.
>The butler, Proper Etiquette, stepped back and opened the manor’s door wider, allowing the trio of ponies to slip inside.
Okay, I just want to take a minute to say that so far, Peen Stroke seems to really suck balls at thinking up pony names. "Proper Etiquette" isn't quite as bad as "Affluent Rich," but it just smacks of laziness. "Nyx" is an okay name I guess, and I like that he troubled himself to think up a backstory for where the name came from. "Spell Nexus" isn't terrible. However, it seems like any time he needs a name for an incidental background character, he just takes the first lazy thing that comes to mind and runs with it. What's something that goes with rich? Uh, "affluent", I guess. What do I call the butler? Well, butlers have proper etiquette so...I think I'll name him that. At least try to make it a pun or something. Personally I'd have named him Kurt Manners.
The rest of his OC names are okay, but fairly generic sounding. "Night Wind" sounds like something that happens when you eat too much pizza close to bedtime. "Gray Gale" sounds alright but doesn't really evoke any strong imagery. Same with "Stonewall." It's okay for a generic goombah tough guy character I guess, but it's not tremendously imaginative. His cutie mark, incidentally, is literally a stone wall. Like what the hell does that signify? Is he a mason of some kind? Is it to suggest that he's strong and dependable? Is his special talent protecting the inner bailey of a castle from invaders and absorbing missiles fired by trebuchets? I'll shut up now.
Anyway, we are once again introduced to Spell Nexus, the unicorn we met in the prologue, who was dressing up like Nightmare Moon and playing Skinny Puppy records in the woods. We see him now, sitting in his manor house without his makeup on, and we learn that apparently he is the headmaster of Celestia's school as well as some kind of highly placed royal advisor.
>“And not all of us have cushy jobs like you do,” Stonewall grumbled. “The commander is already suspicious of why I was late reporting in after what happened in Everfree. I’m skating on thin ice with the Town Guard.”
Okay, so I guess Stonewall is a guard. That basically makes sense I guess.
This scene actually demonstrates why I've been kvetching so much about all the mentions of Nightmare Moon by Twilight so far. This scene is fairly well placed in terms of pacing, but it lacks the oomph that it would ordinarily have, because this is not even close to being the first mention we've seen of the subject. The reader already knows that Nyx is Nightmare Moon reborn, so there's really no big reveal here. Obviously, the reader would probably be able to deduce Nyx's identity fairly easily one way or the other, but having Twilight be as aware of it as she is rather deflates the impact of this part of the story.
Ideally, the outline of the story so far should go something like this: spoopy prologue with spoopy ritual, Twilight finds filly in woods and takes her home, cute stuff happens with filly, pls diamn tira no bully filly, filly lost in woods cus bully, filly find castle and awaken ancient power, filly goes home with Twilight and denouement of mini-arc, cutaway to spoopy cult talking about Nighmare Moon. The only points on this outline where Nightmare Moon should even be mentioned at all are in boldface. Other than some incidental mention, like it might be necessary to have Twilight and Rarity briefly discuss the resemblance in order for things to make sense, the story in between the prologue and this second cult scene should focus entirely on Twilight and Nyx building their bond, as well as the mini-arc about Nyx getting bullied. The main plot of the story, about Nyx being NM reborn, is something that should be teased at in the beginning to get the reader interested, then set aside for a bit while you build the characters up. Then, at about this point in the story, you reintroduce the cult and have the main arc start picking up steam. If we've already heard about how Nyx looks like Nightmare Moon a billion different ways from Sunday, hearing it one more time isn't going to make things any more interesting.
Anyways, next we have a character named...Bastion Yorsets? What the shit? Is that his real name?
Okay, so, my first impression was that Peen Stroke was just drunk and mashing his keyboard when he came up with this name, but apparently he's referencing an existing background pony. The image he links to in the text (again, I'm not a huge fan of hyperlinks to outside content in story text) is broken, but some light googling turned up a bit of information. Apparently Bastion Yorsets is a fan nickname for a pony officially named Top Marks, who was one of the judges when filly Twilight was trying to hatch Spike. As to where the hell the name Bastion Yorsets came from, or what it means, I couldn't even begin to say. This is probably one of those in-jokes that you have to have been in the fandom a long time to get. If anyone knows more, feel free to share with the class.
Well, whatever. Bastion Yorsets gets woken up in the middle of the night by Princess Celestia visiting his room, but not for the reason he was probably hoping. Apparently he is the leader of a group researching the cult's spell, and I am running out of characters so to be continued.
>>250437
So anyway, Bastion whatever the fuck Yorsets is in bed whacking his fucking horse cock to dreams of Princess Celestia's thicc succulent plot, when who should appear at his door but Princess Celestia herself. Taking great pains to hide his massive throbbing boner, he lets her in. She exposes some plot to him, but not in the way that he was hoping for.
Apparently, Mr. Yorsets is the leader of a research group mentioned in the previous sub-chapter by the cult, which is conducting research on the spell used by the cult during the prologue.
>Celestia glanced up from her seat on Bastion’s couch, which was just large enough to support her larger stature.
If you want to call her fat, just say so.
Anyway, the premise for her showing up this late is a bit strange. She apologizes for arriving in the middle of the night unannounced, but apparently she wants a routine progress update on the work he is doing, which all logic would dictate is something that could easily wait until morning. I mean she is the ruler of Equestria and is probably used to just doing whatever the fuck she wants, but you'd think she'd have a little more common courtesy than this. Like if my boss wants to know how a project is coming along, he usually abides by the established custom of waiting until normal business hours to discuss it. If he's ringing my doorbell in the middle of the fucking night and expects me to answer, something damn well better be on fire.
The main thing we're supposed to take away from this scene, however, is that Celestia now knows (or suspects, at least) that the spell casting that she thought she'd interrupted in time had produced some kind of result, though she doesn't know what. Bastion-whatever-the-fuck is now tasked with investigating it.
>That is a very theoretical branch of magic, Princess. Incomplete spells have been known to do a variety of things, and some never do the same thing twice.
klaatu barada necktie.
Anway, the Princess thanks him for his time and gets up to leave. Oh shit, here we go. Looks like Bastion wants to know why the hell this couldn't have waited until morning.
>I have simply realized that I have not been providing your team with the materials it needs to analyze this spell quickly, and… I have also come to realize this evening that swiftness in this matter is of the utmost importance.
Aaaaaaand he punts. Looks like this question didn't occur to Peen Stroke until after he'd already written the scene, and rather than rewrite it, he decided to just toss in a weak explanation. I mean, let's face it, Bastion Deldickaroon is just going to go back to sleep anyway, and none of this is going to get dealt with one way or the other until everyone punches in tomorrow, so again there's really no reason she couldn't have just waited until morning and flagged him down in the hall or something. Well, whatever, it's not that huge a deal I guess.
Anyway, that is the end of chapter four. I am going to take a nap, and will probably be back in a few hours with some thoughts on the story so far.
So anyway, Bastion whatever the fuck Yorsets is in bed whacking his fucking horse cock to dreams of Princess Celestia's thicc succulent plot, when who should appear at his door but Princess Celestia herself. Taking great pains to hide his massive throbbing boner, he lets her in. She exposes some plot to him, but not in the way that he was hoping for.
Apparently, Mr. Yorsets is the leader of a research group mentioned in the previous sub-chapter by the cult, which is conducting research on the spell used by the cult during the prologue.
>Celestia glanced up from her seat on Bastion’s couch, which was just large enough to support her larger stature.
If you want to call her fat, just say so.
Anyway, the premise for her showing up this late is a bit strange. She apologizes for arriving in the middle of the night unannounced, but apparently she wants a routine progress update on the work he is doing, which all logic would dictate is something that could easily wait until morning. I mean she is the ruler of Equestria and is probably used to just doing whatever the fuck she wants, but you'd think she'd have a little more common courtesy than this. Like if my boss wants to know how a project is coming along, he usually abides by the established custom of waiting until normal business hours to discuss it. If he's ringing my doorbell in the middle of the fucking night and expects me to answer, something damn well better be on fire.
The main thing we're supposed to take away from this scene, however, is that Celestia now knows (or suspects, at least) that the spell casting that she thought she'd interrupted in time had produced some kind of result, though she doesn't know what. Bastion-whatever-the-fuck is now tasked with investigating it.
>That is a very theoretical branch of magic, Princess. Incomplete spells have been known to do a variety of things, and some never do the same thing twice.
klaatu barada necktie.
Anway, the Princess thanks him for his time and gets up to leave. Oh shit, here we go. Looks like Bastion wants to know why the hell this couldn't have waited until morning.
>I have simply realized that I have not been providing your team with the materials it needs to analyze this spell quickly, and… I have also come to realize this evening that swiftness in this matter is of the utmost importance.
Aaaaaaand he punts. Looks like this question didn't occur to Peen Stroke until after he'd already written the scene, and rather than rewrite it, he decided to just toss in a weak explanation. I mean, let's face it, Bastion Deldickaroon is just going to go back to sleep anyway, and none of this is going to get dealt with one way or the other until everyone punches in tomorrow, so again there's really no reason she couldn't have just waited until morning and flagged him down in the hall or something. Well, whatever, it's not that huge a deal I guess.
Anyway, that is the end of chapter four. I am going to take a nap, and will probably be back in a few hours with some thoughts on the story so far.
>>250517
That name gave me a fucking brainblast PTSD flashback to a fic so bad I don't believe I'm remembering it correctly.
Is it the one where an OP Alicorn Mary Sue = who's sooo strong she can just rip the locks out of locked boxes to make her low lockpicking skill irrelevant - is the New Element Of Magic and works for the combination NCR and Followers Of The Apocalypse
even though the whole point of these factions were:
>NCR wants to "Bring America back" but it's full of corrupt cunts willing to exploit it. Brahmin barons, water barons, etc. also didn't fully execute every last Great Khan like they should have.
>Followers Of The Apocalypse is far too nice for its own good and only succeeds when the Player Character helps it. Undermanned, underequipped, stretched too thin and unwilling to cut corners/ropes.
That name gave me a fucking brainblast PTSD flashback to a fic so bad I don't believe I'm remembering it correctly.
Is it the one where an OP Alicorn Mary Sue = who's sooo strong she can just rip the locks out of locked boxes to make her low lockpicking skill irrelevant - is the New Element Of Magic and works for the combination NCR and Followers Of The Apocalypse
even though the whole point of these factions were:
>NCR wants to "Bring America back" but it's full of corrupt cunts willing to exploit it. Brahmin barons, water barons, etc. also didn't fully execute every last Great Khan like they should have.
>Followers Of The Apocalypse is far too nice for its own good and only succeeds when the Player Character helps it. Undermanned, underequipped, stretched too thin and unwilling to cut corners/ropes.
Review a few "episodes" of the a Lunaverse. It's like any parody soap opera TV series. Tons of filler, no ideas, shitty atmosphere, garbage prose, hateable characters.
Trixie and Luna are the good guys and the Mane6 are all bad guys. Except every character is unlikable and hated by the author for anything.
The background characters are part of the cast and have retard stereotypical personalities.
The author's first language isn't even English.
Raindrops is my most hated character for being the angry butch who nobody calls her out on her own bullshit and beats the living crap out of her. Instead she's presented as unfallible.
Trixie and Luna are the good guys and the Mane6 are all bad guys. Except every character is unlikable and hated by the author for anything.
The background characters are part of the cast and have retard stereotypical personalities.
The author's first language isn't even English.
Raindrops is my most hated character for being the angry butch who nobody calls her out on her own bullshit and beats the living crap out of her. Instead she's presented as unfallible.
>>250614
I vaguely remember a story called "The life and times of a winning pony" or something, it's about an "Ethical Slut" kind of character. That Jewish "trope". You know, the modyrn female fantasy: Sucking a billion dicks and being a bar's walking fuckhole and best permanent fixture, being desired by everyone, while also having the right to beat up anyone who wants to fuck you and isn't up to your standards. At one point she gets into a barfight with Rainbow Dash and kicks RD in the cunt so hard it nearly debabies her for life.
This is, of course, one of the most popular brony fanfics of all time because bronies have no actual respect for any of these characters, hence why authors are fine with degrading canons for the sake of trashy OCs when the story's so full of crowdpleasing faggotry that it gets their faggy tiny dicks hard.
Fuck that story. Add that to the list of bullshit to burn...
Maybe we're overburdening Glimmy here. Perhaps this thread should focus on Nyx and we should make fic-destroying storytime a communal thing for another thread, where different users submit shitfics they want torn apart, others "claim" them and tear them apart while submitting different ones.
Then others could review your reviews of the shit fics.
Or we could assign a few chapters of Project Horizons each to all this site's different users, and we all review them in order. The characters are so cliche you can easily start halfway in and understand everything.
I vaguely remember a story called "The life and times of a winning pony" or something, it's about an "Ethical Slut" kind of character. That Jewish "trope". You know, the modyrn female fantasy: Sucking a billion dicks and being a bar's walking fuckhole and best permanent fixture, being desired by everyone, while also having the right to beat up anyone who wants to fuck you and isn't up to your standards. At one point she gets into a barfight with Rainbow Dash and kicks RD in the cunt so hard it nearly debabies her for life.
This is, of course, one of the most popular brony fanfics of all time because bronies have no actual respect for any of these characters, hence why authors are fine with degrading canons for the sake of trashy OCs when the story's so full of crowdpleasing faggotry that it gets their faggy tiny dicks hard.
Fuck that story. Add that to the list of bullshit to burn...
Maybe we're overburdening Glimmy here. Perhaps this thread should focus on Nyx and we should make fic-destroying storytime a communal thing for another thread, where different users submit shitfics they want torn apart, others "claim" them and tear them apart while submitting different ones.
Then others could review your reviews of the shit fics.
Or we could assign a few chapters of Project Horizons each to all this site's different users, and we all review them in order. The characters are so cliche you can easily start halfway in and understand everything.
>>250620
>Maybe we're overburdening Glimmy here. Perhaps this thread should focus on Nyx and we should make fic-destroying storytime a communal thing for another thread
Couldn't have said it better myself
>Maybe we're overburdening Glimmy here. Perhaps this thread should focus on Nyx and we should make fic-destroying storytime a communal thing for another thread
Couldn't have said it better myself
>>250620
Also, "Sweetie belle infinite loops" or whatever it's called. It's about Sweetie Belle ripping off Fairly Odd Parents Channel Chasers except she hops between different popular fanfic worlds. She'll enter the Cupcakes world and kill psycho pinkie, enter the Rainbow Factory world and destrpy the factory, enter some "respected" fanfics world and converse casually with its most popular characters, enter a Pokemon crossover and become Pokémon champ overnight, etc.
Anyone else starting to find this "meta" fanfic shit tiresome? You can only beat a katana elf vampire mary sue plot armor cunt if you've got better skills/more power and more plot armor-fu. Discord snapping his god fingers to erase the lusted-after wish wulfillment oc god ploughing all 151 canon and fanon mares isn't exactly a thrilling fight scene. We already fucking agree bad fics are bad, only faggots disagree with that. Maybe I've been in these trenches for too long, but maybe fanfiction can only ever truly be a dick sucking itself off through its own anus.
Also, "Sweetie belle infinite loops" or whatever it's called. It's about Sweetie Belle ripping off Fairly Odd Parents Channel Chasers except she hops between different popular fanfic worlds. She'll enter the Cupcakes world and kill psycho pinkie, enter the Rainbow Factory world and destrpy the factory, enter some "respected" fanfics world and converse casually with its most popular characters, enter a Pokemon crossover and become Pokémon champ overnight, etc.
Anyone else starting to find this "meta" fanfic shit tiresome? You can only beat a katana elf vampire mary sue plot armor cunt if you've got better skills/more power and more plot armor-fu. Discord snapping his god fingers to erase the lusted-after wish wulfillment oc god ploughing all 151 canon and fanon mares isn't exactly a thrilling fight scene. We already fucking agree bad fics are bad, only faggots disagree with that. Maybe I've been in these trenches for too long, but maybe fanfiction can only ever truly be a dick sucking itself off through its own anus.
>>250620
I 'member the story of Deep throat cock slut. At first a question on how ponies were named.
The solution their mothers named them at birth by way of seeing the future, or feeling the power of the forc- I mean harmony.
>Maybe we're overburdening Glimmy here. Perhaps this thread should focus on Nyx and we should make fic-destroying storytime a communal thing for another thread
>>250621
Oh, yeah that's a good point...
I 'member the story of Deep throat cock slut. At first a question on how ponies were named.
The solution their mothers named them at birth by way of seeing the future, or feeling the power of the forc- I mean harmony.
>Maybe we're overburdening Glimmy here. Perhaps this thread should focus on Nyx and we should make fic-destroying storytime a communal thing for another thread
>>250621
Oh, yeah that's a good point...
>>250642
I don't like to be honest famlam. We need less generals. They lead to stagnation. If there is a fanfic you or another person wants to review, there is nothing wrong with creating one. This board certainly got space for it.
I don't like to be honest famlam. We need less generals. They lead to stagnation. If there is a fanfic you or another person wants to review, there is nothing wrong with creating one. This board certainly got space for it.
>>250648
I want to be a guy that tears these terrible fics twenty new assholes each but my life's too full of IRL bullshit right now, and I need to spend what little free time I have on productivity and self-improvement.
I could reserve one shit fic, but I'd be slow as hell finding time to review its chapters.
I want to be a guy that tears these terrible fics twenty new assholes each but my life's too full of IRL bullshit right now, and I need to spend what little free time I have on productivity and self-improvement.
I could reserve one shit fic, but I'd be slow as hell finding time to review its chapters.
>>250653
>but my life's too full of IRL bullshit right now
>I need to spend what little free time I have on productivity and self-improvement.
> I'd be slow as hell
Take your time. In fact focus on the tjhing you need to get done before doing this. Writing isn't fun afterall. It is not something one does for leisure. It is fun to have the final product but not funto spend your free time on.
I say to have a plan a few hours of free time at the end of your day so that you have something to look forward to while doing the things you should do during the day.
Therefore you should wait until you haave moe free time so that you can put an hour of it into this project. That way you still got free tiem for other things you like doing.
Take you time, these fics are not going anywhere and neither are we.
>but my life's too full of IRL bullshit right now
>I need to spend what little free time I have on productivity and self-improvement.
> I'd be slow as hell
Take your time. In fact focus on the tjhing you need to get done before doing this. Writing isn't fun afterall. It is not something one does for leisure. It is fun to have the final product but not funto spend your free time on.
I say to have a plan a few hours of free time at the end of your day so that you have something to look forward to while doing the things you should do during the day.
Therefore you should wait until you haave moe free time so that you can put an hour of it into this project. That way you still got free tiem for other things you like doing.
Take you time, these fics are not going anywhere and neither are we.
interesting
>>250451
Sorry, my "nap" wound up becoming a longer sleep than I'd thought, and I wound up playing vidya all night instead of writing.
So anyway, I think I've covered what I dislike about Peen Stroke's methods and approach adequately enough. What I'd like to do now is go back over the story so far and do something like what I did with Ch. 3, where I outline how I think events could have been made to play out, that would have more sense, had more emotional impact, and more effectively told the type of story that I think the author was trying to tell. What follows is a high-level outline of how I would probably tell this story if I were writing it.
Prologue
One big thing I would make is eliminating Twilight's abduction. If all the cult needs is to make a small cut on her leg to get a small amount of blood, it would have been far easier to just obtain the blood through less potentially dangerous means. It's established later that the cult has agents in Ponyville, and could have employed one of them to sneak into Twilight's house at night and take a blood sample, or even have her randomly attacked by a "masked assailant" who would never be caught or connected to the cult. This information could be introduced later so as not to bog down the prologue with unnecessary details.
I think this would also help by not dragging the Person X character (from our LCIG story model from earlier) directly into events too early. She is still connected, but does not have as much direct knowledge of what is going on. The tradeoff here is that the dramatic impact of the prologue is lessened by removing the shock of a "live sacrifice" being a part of the ceremony. The image of Twilight being bound and gagged and dragged into the woods in the middle of the night has a fair amount of shock value that piques the reader's interest, which is important to do in the opening scenes of a story.
However, the way the text is currently written, the impact is blunted anyway since it's almost immediately revealed that Twilight is not going to be seriously hurt or killed in the course of the ritual. Spell Nexus basically just gives her a small cut on the leg and then lets her go. This not only deflates the impact of the scene, it also hurts the story logically. The cult obviously values secrecy and caution, but abducting Twilight makes her a witness, and letting her go makes her a liability. Peen Stroke basically writes himself into a corner here, as the logical thing for Spell Nexus to do would be to kill Twilight, which he is also quite capable of doing since he has her bound and gagged and restricted from using her magic. This would be a problem for a lot of very obvious reasons. It's also troublesome since Twilight's abduction is what ultimately alerts the guards and causes the ceremony to be broken up. A pony as intelligent as Spell Nexus is written as would have weighed the options here, realized that abducting Twilight is unnecessary overkill, and opted to just collect a blood sample through simpler means. Peen Stroke seems to instinctively realize all this, but rather than fix it by rethinking and rewriting the scene, he just keeps patching over his mistakes with a lot of "but then this happened and then this happened," which is just bad form.
So, to summarize, here is how I would do the prologue:
Scene opens in the woods. Spell Nexus is meditating with candles and doing his preparations. Describe the cult's costumes and ritual instruments vaguely rather than explicitly. Drop clues that suggest Nightmare Moon but don't mention her name directly. Don't explain to the reader what exactly the cult is doing in the woods, leave it mysterious. Leave out the Twilight gets abducted part, compensate for the lost excitement by building up the mystery of the ritual. Maybe have a lot of spoopy lights and green smoke and shit like that. Explicitly mention that the cult leader is using a vial of somepony's blood, but don't say whose or how it was obtained.
Let the tension build. Cult goes to the altar, sets up all their weird voodoo stuff. Spell Nexus chants, mention a "Queen" or whatever but again don't say Nightmare Moon, let the reader guess at it. As the spell is rising in intensity, the ceremony is suddenly broken up by Celestia's guards as is currently written. Spell Nexus, Gray Gale, Night Wind and the other important cult members escape, a few are captured. Casually name dropping the cult member characters who become important later is a good idea btw, so that should be left in.
Spell Nexus flees cursing Celestia and wondering at how she found out about the ritual. Leave out the shit about Zecora as it's an unnecessary digression (and won't make sense anyway if Twilight isn't abducted). Maybe the explanation is that the cult has a double agent in their midst who is feeding Celestia information. Maybe the guards just got lucky and went to investigate some random report they received that some freaks were out doing weird shit in the woods. Who knows. Leave it unexplained. It could factor in later as an important plot point, or it could just be left to the reader's imagination if it's not important. The reader doesn't need to know everything.
Aftermath: the guards are cleaning shit up. They talk to each other about how spoopy and weird the whole thing is. Maybe joke around a little about what kind of freaks and crazies would do this, but make sure there is still a feeling of unease in the air. Guards leave, the scene is forgotten, but end with the slow zoom on the little pulsating embryonic Nyx in the corner of the forest.
Sorry, my "nap" wound up becoming a longer sleep than I'd thought, and I wound up playing vidya all night instead of writing.
So anyway, I think I've covered what I dislike about Peen Stroke's methods and approach adequately enough. What I'd like to do now is go back over the story so far and do something like what I did with Ch. 3, where I outline how I think events could have been made to play out, that would have more sense, had more emotional impact, and more effectively told the type of story that I think the author was trying to tell. What follows is a high-level outline of how I would probably tell this story if I were writing it.
Prologue
One big thing I would make is eliminating Twilight's abduction. If all the cult needs is to make a small cut on her leg to get a small amount of blood, it would have been far easier to just obtain the blood through less potentially dangerous means. It's established later that the cult has agents in Ponyville, and could have employed one of them to sneak into Twilight's house at night and take a blood sample, or even have her randomly attacked by a "masked assailant" who would never be caught or connected to the cult. This information could be introduced later so as not to bog down the prologue with unnecessary details.
I think this would also help by not dragging the Person X character (from our LCIG story model from earlier) directly into events too early. She is still connected, but does not have as much direct knowledge of what is going on. The tradeoff here is that the dramatic impact of the prologue is lessened by removing the shock of a "live sacrifice" being a part of the ceremony. The image of Twilight being bound and gagged and dragged into the woods in the middle of the night has a fair amount of shock value that piques the reader's interest, which is important to do in the opening scenes of a story.
However, the way the text is currently written, the impact is blunted anyway since it's almost immediately revealed that Twilight is not going to be seriously hurt or killed in the course of the ritual. Spell Nexus basically just gives her a small cut on the leg and then lets her go. This not only deflates the impact of the scene, it also hurts the story logically. The cult obviously values secrecy and caution, but abducting Twilight makes her a witness, and letting her go makes her a liability. Peen Stroke basically writes himself into a corner here, as the logical thing for Spell Nexus to do would be to kill Twilight, which he is also quite capable of doing since he has her bound and gagged and restricted from using her magic. This would be a problem for a lot of very obvious reasons. It's also troublesome since Twilight's abduction is what ultimately alerts the guards and causes the ceremony to be broken up. A pony as intelligent as Spell Nexus is written as would have weighed the options here, realized that abducting Twilight is unnecessary overkill, and opted to just collect a blood sample through simpler means. Peen Stroke seems to instinctively realize all this, but rather than fix it by rethinking and rewriting the scene, he just keeps patching over his mistakes with a lot of "but then this happened and then this happened," which is just bad form.
So, to summarize, here is how I would do the prologue:
Scene opens in the woods. Spell Nexus is meditating with candles and doing his preparations. Describe the cult's costumes and ritual instruments vaguely rather than explicitly. Drop clues that suggest Nightmare Moon but don't mention her name directly. Don't explain to the reader what exactly the cult is doing in the woods, leave it mysterious. Leave out the Twilight gets abducted part, compensate for the lost excitement by building up the mystery of the ritual. Maybe have a lot of spoopy lights and green smoke and shit like that. Explicitly mention that the cult leader is using a vial of somepony's blood, but don't say whose or how it was obtained.
Let the tension build. Cult goes to the altar, sets up all their weird voodoo stuff. Spell Nexus chants, mention a "Queen" or whatever but again don't say Nightmare Moon, let the reader guess at it. As the spell is rising in intensity, the ceremony is suddenly broken up by Celestia's guards as is currently written. Spell Nexus, Gray Gale, Night Wind and the other important cult members escape, a few are captured. Casually name dropping the cult member characters who become important later is a good idea btw, so that should be left in.
Spell Nexus flees cursing Celestia and wondering at how she found out about the ritual. Leave out the shit about Zecora as it's an unnecessary digression (and won't make sense anyway if Twilight isn't abducted). Maybe the explanation is that the cult has a double agent in their midst who is feeding Celestia information. Maybe the guards just got lucky and went to investigate some random report they received that some freaks were out doing weird shit in the woods. Who knows. Leave it unexplained. It could factor in later as an important plot point, or it could just be left to the reader's imagination if it's not important. The reader doesn't need to know everything.
Aftermath: the guards are cleaning shit up. They talk to each other about how spoopy and weird the whole thing is. Maybe joke around a little about what kind of freaks and crazies would do this, but make sure there is still a feeling of unease in the air. Guards leave, the scene is forgotten, but end with the slow zoom on the little pulsating embryonic Nyx in the corner of the forest.
>>250807
Chapter 1:
Actually, not having Twilight abducted wrecks a fair amount of the early story, since it not only screws up the Rarity favor thing, it's the reason she ends up in the woods and meets Nyx in the first place. But, let's see what we can do with it.
Scene opens as before where Rarity is at Twilight's house. They are discussing something bad that happened to her, and clearly has Twilight shaken up. Twilight describes being attacked at random by somepony, who scratched her on the leg with some kind of strange looking knife and stole her bookbag. She's naturally freaking out and overreacting, because naturally it's traumatic being jumped and cut with a knife, and also because she had a bunch of rare books that Celestia loaned her in the bag, and she's terrified that the Princess will find out that she lost them. Something about the attack leaves her with an uneasy feeling too, as the knife looked ritualistic, maybe in a way that she subconsciously remembers from somewhere. Like maybe she saw an illustration of it in one of the books. Meanwhile Rarity is trying to calm her down and comfort her and talk her through her autism fit. She's sorry she didn't come sooner, she owes her a favor, blah blah blah slip that in somewhere. In this version of the scene though, note that I have shifted the agitation originally felt by Rarity onto Twilight.
Rarity leaves, but Twi is still agitated. The knife thing is still on her mind but mostly she's freaking out about the books. Spike meanwhile is starting to get annoyed because she keeps pacing around the house thinking out loud, and finally suggests that she use her locator spell to find the bookbag. Twilight thinks that's a brilliant idea and chides herself for not thinking of it sooner. She does the thing, and learns that her books are out in....the Everfree Forest? My, what a strange place for them to be.
Against Spike's admonitions, she decides to go into the forest alone to retrieve the books. Spoopy thunderclouds are gathering, wind is kicking up, everything is spoopy and foreboding. She discovers the bag lying in a little clearing, and it strikes her as passing strange that whoever stole the books just dumped them in the woods like this. Everything about this situation has her feeling uneasy. She opens the bag and checks to make sure they are still there; they all are. That makes the whole thing even weirder. Why would somepony attack her and steal her books and then just leave them? Well, the truth is, we don't know. It could be a bunch of reasons. Most likely, the cult agent that stole the books doesn't care about them and only did it so it would look like Twilight was randomly attacked. That pony still had the bookbag during the ritual, and left it when the guards came. The real explanation doesn't really matter, let the reader wonder about it.
Suddenly, rustle. Rustle rustle. What's that? Twilight is instantly on edge. It could be lions, or tigers, or bears.....oh my, it's just a cute little filly. Wait, that filly is pretty weird looking. And why is she in the Everfree by herself?
There should be two places, exactly two, in the story between the first appearance of Nyx and the point in Ch. 4 where the cult reappears, where Nightmare Moon should be mentioned by name. This is one of them. Twilight, for an instant, sees only the eyes, the black coat, the blue-purple whatever mane, and for a single terrifying moment thinks that Nightmare Moon has come back to Equestria. Then, a minute later, she realizes that this is crazy, that it's only a little filly, although the resemblance is certainly passing strange. She also notes that the filly is an alicorn which is definitely weird. She is leery that the filly might be some kind of creature or projection of the forest, but as she gets closer, it's clear that the filly is terrified and alone. Twilight doesn't know what to make of the situation, but she knows she can't leave a defenseless filly alone in the woods, so she takes her home with her.
Twilight gets home just as Spike is about to call the pony cops and have them start dredging the woods for purple unicorn bodies. She accurately predicts that he would probably just end up more agitated if he saw that she had brought some weird-looking alicorn filly with her from the Everfree, so she smuggles Nyx upstairs in a blanket or something. She tries to speak to the filly, but she seems downright scared of everything and doesn't seem to talk. Twilight tells [-]her manservant-/-] Spike to rustle up some fucking sandwiches already, and goes to give the filly a bath.
As I mentioned earlier, I would probably put some kind of funny scene here. The filly probably doesn't know what a bath is, and freaks out when Twilight attempts to dunk her in water. Twilight loses control of the situation, and filly goes rampaging through the house, eventually running into the kitchen where Spike is making sandwiches like a house nigger. This is how Spike learns that there is a strange alicorn filly living in the house.
Alternatively, you could still go the same route as what's in the text, and have a more subdued scene where Twilight simply gives the filly a bath and the filly complies. I personally think the chase scene would add humor and make the story more dynamic, but it's really author's choice here.
Anyway, once Twilight tells Spike the story, Spike's first inclination is to tell the Princess about the strange alicorn filly, but Twilight doesn't want to do that. She can't quite figure out why, but it doesn't seem like a good idea. Spike reluctantly agrees to help keep the secret. Again, Nightmare Moon should not be mentioned. I would also probably not have the filly talk at all in this chapter, just gestures and noises, but that is also author's choice. Once the situation is resolved, everyone goes to bed.
To be continued.
Chapter 1:
Actually, not having Twilight abducted wrecks a fair amount of the early story, since it not only screws up the Rarity favor thing, it's the reason she ends up in the woods and meets Nyx in the first place. But, let's see what we can do with it.
Scene opens as before where Rarity is at Twilight's house. They are discussing something bad that happened to her, and clearly has Twilight shaken up. Twilight describes being attacked at random by somepony, who scratched her on the leg with some kind of strange looking knife and stole her bookbag. She's naturally freaking out and overreacting, because naturally it's traumatic being jumped and cut with a knife, and also because she had a bunch of rare books that Celestia loaned her in the bag, and she's terrified that the Princess will find out that she lost them. Something about the attack leaves her with an uneasy feeling too, as the knife looked ritualistic, maybe in a way that she subconsciously remembers from somewhere. Like maybe she saw an illustration of it in one of the books. Meanwhile Rarity is trying to calm her down and comfort her and talk her through her autism fit. She's sorry she didn't come sooner, she owes her a favor, blah blah blah slip that in somewhere. In this version of the scene though, note that I have shifted the agitation originally felt by Rarity onto Twilight.
Rarity leaves, but Twi is still agitated. The knife thing is still on her mind but mostly she's freaking out about the books. Spike meanwhile is starting to get annoyed because she keeps pacing around the house thinking out loud, and finally suggests that she use her locator spell to find the bookbag. Twilight thinks that's a brilliant idea and chides herself for not thinking of it sooner. She does the thing, and learns that her books are out in....the Everfree Forest? My, what a strange place for them to be.
Against Spike's admonitions, she decides to go into the forest alone to retrieve the books. Spoopy thunderclouds are gathering, wind is kicking up, everything is spoopy and foreboding. She discovers the bag lying in a little clearing, and it strikes her as passing strange that whoever stole the books just dumped them in the woods like this. Everything about this situation has her feeling uneasy. She opens the bag and checks to make sure they are still there; they all are. That makes the whole thing even weirder. Why would somepony attack her and steal her books and then just leave them? Well, the truth is, we don't know. It could be a bunch of reasons. Most likely, the cult agent that stole the books doesn't care about them and only did it so it would look like Twilight was randomly attacked. That pony still had the bookbag during the ritual, and left it when the guards came. The real explanation doesn't really matter, let the reader wonder about it.
Suddenly, rustle. Rustle rustle. What's that? Twilight is instantly on edge. It could be lions, or tigers, or bears.....oh my, it's just a cute little filly. Wait, that filly is pretty weird looking. And why is she in the Everfree by herself?
There should be two places, exactly two, in the story between the first appearance of Nyx and the point in Ch. 4 where the cult reappears, where Nightmare Moon should be mentioned by name. This is one of them. Twilight, for an instant, sees only the eyes, the black coat, the blue-purple whatever mane, and for a single terrifying moment thinks that Nightmare Moon has come back to Equestria. Then, a minute later, she realizes that this is crazy, that it's only a little filly, although the resemblance is certainly passing strange. She also notes that the filly is an alicorn which is definitely weird. She is leery that the filly might be some kind of creature or projection of the forest, but as she gets closer, it's clear that the filly is terrified and alone. Twilight doesn't know what to make of the situation, but she knows she can't leave a defenseless filly alone in the woods, so she takes her home with her.
Twilight gets home just as Spike is about to call the pony cops and have them start dredging the woods for purple unicorn bodies. She accurately predicts that he would probably just end up more agitated if he saw that she had brought some weird-looking alicorn filly with her from the Everfree, so she smuggles Nyx upstairs in a blanket or something. She tries to speak to the filly, but she seems downright scared of everything and doesn't seem to talk. Twilight tells [-]her manservant-/-] Spike to rustle up some fucking sandwiches already, and goes to give the filly a bath.
As I mentioned earlier, I would probably put some kind of funny scene here. The filly probably doesn't know what a bath is, and freaks out when Twilight attempts to dunk her in water. Twilight loses control of the situation, and filly goes rampaging through the house, eventually running into the kitchen where Spike is making sandwiches like a house nigger. This is how Spike learns that there is a strange alicorn filly living in the house.
Alternatively, you could still go the same route as what's in the text, and have a more subdued scene where Twilight simply gives the filly a bath and the filly complies. I personally think the chase scene would add humor and make the story more dynamic, but it's really author's choice here.
Anyway, once Twilight tells Spike the story, Spike's first inclination is to tell the Princess about the strange alicorn filly, but Twilight doesn't want to do that. She can't quite figure out why, but it doesn't seem like a good idea. Spike reluctantly agrees to help keep the secret. Again, Nightmare Moon should not be mentioned. I would also probably not have the filly talk at all in this chapter, just gestures and noises, but that is also author's choice. Once the situation is resolved, everyone goes to bed.
To be continued.
I haven't read these latest reviews but will. Don't think your reviews go unappricated, you nigger.
>>250807
>>250816
This. You would be a far better author than most but you would also be criminally underrated.
>>250620
I like that kind of idea. I've been kind of busy but tearing into a fanfic is the perfect relaxing activity.
>>250623
Do you mean the Sweetie Belle Chronicles? Imo it's alright though it delves into edge/pityporn territory with Sweetie having to be the mute janitor of an eldritch musician and of course is all about that fanservice with different dimensions. It's extremely long and I haven't gotten past the "hedge" part of the story; Sweetie hasn't felt like a Mary Sue to a major degree yet.
>>250816
This. You would be a far better author than most but you would also be criminally underrated.
>>250620
I like that kind of idea. I've been kind of busy but tearing into a fanfic is the perfect relaxing activity.
>>250623
Do you mean the Sweetie Belle Chronicles? Imo it's alright though it delves into edge/pityporn territory with Sweetie having to be the mute janitor of an eldritch musician and of course is all about that fanservice with different dimensions. It's extremely long and I haven't gotten past the "hedge" part of the story; Sweetie hasn't felt like a Mary Sue to a major degree yet.
>>250903
Yeah it gets worse. Also I nominate Games Pony Plays. Edgy trash where Twilight is kidnapped and turned into the Cartoon Supervillain kind of edgy cunt. Also Rainbow Dash gets taser-raped into turning evil. Rarity was raised as a killer and she acts girly to piss her dad off. Finally, The Stare becomes a magic nuke because of course this trashy war fic does that.
Yeah it gets worse. Also I nominate Games Pony Plays. Edgy trash where Twilight is kidnapped and turned into the Cartoon Supervillain kind of edgy cunt. Also Rainbow Dash gets taser-raped into turning evil. Rarity was raised as a killer and she acts girly to piss her dad off. Finally, The Stare becomes a magic nuke because of course this trashy war fic does that.
>>251075
Not OP, but I'd wager that beleaguering him with requests and almost-demands before he's even begun to finish this effort (which is ambitious and lengthy enough without adding to it) wasn't a good idea. Maybe appreciating the effort he has and may still give and not being needy about his response would be a better way to encourage his continued activity.
Or maybe he's busy. In either case, lurk moar.
Not OP, but I'd wager that beleaguering him with requests and almost-demands before he's even begun to finish this effort (which is ambitious and lengthy enough without adding to it) wasn't a good idea. Maybe appreciating the effort he has and may still give and not being needy about his response would be a better way to encourage his continued activity.
Or maybe he's busy. In either case, lurk moar.
>>251075
>>251091
I'm still here. Don't worry, I have no intentions of abandoning this project. As I mentioned in an earlier post I've been doing NaNoWriMo so that's where my focus has been lately. I also work full time and I'm not always in the mood to read shitty MLP fanfiction on my days off. Expect more regular updates once the month is over.
I'll probably make another review post in a day or two.
>>251091
I'm still here. Don't worry, I have no intentions of abandoning this project. As I mentioned in an earlier post I've been doing NaNoWriMo so that's where my focus has been lately. I also work full time and I'm not always in the mood to read shitty MLP fanfiction on my days off. Expect more regular updates once the month is over.
I'll probably make another review post in a day or two.
Please don't gay, I'm showing concern for OP.
Also I call dibs on the original Fallout Equestria. It may take a while but I will tear this fic sixty new anuses and have a good time.
Now I just need to decide upon a tone. I could be a boring dry academic or an inconsistently sarcastic kind of guy but this Firstname "I'm super gay and in favor of sucking massive penis" Lastname thing is funny as hell. Could take a "Character reviews the story along with special guests" approach but I never liked those, the "x feels underutilized and inadequate in this arc and in the next arc the God of Bad Writing comes to fight the Nostalgia Critic" story arcs are gay. Could MST3K this with friends but then we'd laugh half the time and make this a podcast.
Could take the podcast route to save time then write out full "my thoughts on the chapter"s afterwards, Soundcloud isn't going full retard like youtube and twitch right?
Also I call dibs on the original Fallout Equestria. It may take a while but I will tear this fic sixty new anuses and have a good time.
Now I just need to decide upon a tone. I could be a boring dry academic or an inconsistently sarcastic kind of guy but this Firstname "I'm super gay and in favor of sucking massive penis" Lastname thing is funny as hell. Could take a "Character reviews the story along with special guests" approach but I never liked those, the "x feels underutilized and inadequate in this arc and in the next arc the God of Bad Writing comes to fight the Nostalgia Critic" story arcs are gay. Could MST3K this with friends but then we'd laugh half the time and make this a podcast.
Could take the podcast route to save time then write out full "my thoughts on the chapter"s afterwards, Soundcloud isn't going full retard like youtube and twitch right?
I been thinking that you >>251114 perhaps should move on to making review videos like E;R. Btw, check E;Rs vids out. This is not a request.
But seriously, have you ever though of making something like that. A reviewing channel for books or whatever. I could see you succeeding at it.
But seriously, have you ever though of making something like that. A reviewing channel for books or whatever. I could see you succeeding at it.
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>>251155
I did watch a couple of his videos, I was very highly amused by them. I've toyed with the idea of doing a YouTube channel for a while, and I may yet. As I've said before, time investment is kind of an issue for me, and videos tend to be more complicated to produce than writing imageboard posts, but I think I could manage it. I've also toyed with the idea of starting a blog for book and media reviews, and maybe some politics on the side. I'll see how it goes. It would probably be after the new year if I get any of this stuff off the ground.
>>250816
Continuing with my alt-synopsis of how I would write the story.
Chapter 2:
This part of the story should mostly focus on Twilight and Spike adjusting to the idea of having Nyx living in their home, and Nyx adjusting to life in general. In our LCIG anime model, this is usually the point in the story where the childhood friend/girl next door character figures out that Person X has a strange girl/robot/alien life form living in his house with him, and proceeds to get involved. In this story, Rarity mostly assumes this role. Basically, this is the part of the story where Chi goes shopping for underpants.
I'd probably nix :^) the bit at the beginning where it talks about Spike and Twilight's habit of taking turns making breakfast, and replace it with another lighthearted funny scene that illustrates their day to day life. Spike is trying to make breakfast. He still instinctively distrusts Nyx and although he isn't openly hostile to her the way other characters are, he's a bit cold to her and has little patience for her endless stream of questions about mundane bullshit. At the moment, he's trying to cook something, and like everything else he does, probably takes the act of cooking way too seriously, especially when doing it in front of others. I'd probably dress him up in a chef's hat and a frilly apron for lulz. Anyway, Nyx keeps bothering him, asking questions about cooking and probably a lot of other random bullshit on the side. As is typical for her, she is just being naturally curious and is oblivious to the fact that Spike is getting annoyed with her.
As I mentioned, I rather like the little background bit about Nyx of the Night, so I would probably leave that in. However, I would drop all the stuff with Twilight musing about resurrection spells and all that, as it shifts the story's focus away from where it is supposed to be right now. Twilight is, however, beginning to realize that she can't just keep Nyx locked up inside the tree indefinitely, and that she's going to need to find some way to integrate Nyx into the fabric of society until she can figure out what to ultimately do about her.
Since obviously a strange alicorn filly walking around the neighborhood would turn heads, she decides to take the sensible step of calling in her friend Rarity's favor and see if she can't just nigger-rig some kind of disguise for her.
The next scene, where Twilight brings Nyx to Rarity's boutique, is probably the best-written part of the story so far and I would actually make few changes from what is written. I mentioned earlier that there are exactly two places between the prologue and the point in the story where the cult reappears where Nightmare Moon should be explicitly mentioned, and this is the second place. So far the only two ponies who have seen Nyx in her undisguised form are Twilight and Rarity, both of whom fought Nightmare Moon. Since Nyx is pretty much the spitting image of NM, the fact that each of them would immediately notice this about her is something that logically has to be addressed. However, at this point in my version of events, neither Twi nor Rarara knows anything about the resurrection cult or the spell, so it makes the most sense to just deal with it as briefly as possible and move on.
Twilight brings the strange filly into the shop. Rarity initially has the same reaction that Twilight did and freaks out about the NM resemblance. However, Twilight calms her down and explains the situation. Rarity is sympathetic to Twilight's plight and although she's curious about the resemblance, the filly seems nice and harmless enough, so she agrees to make the filly an outfit, to back up Twilight's story about Nyx being her cousin from out of town, and to keep the truth between them for now. Come to think of it, the whole "Rarity owes Twilight a favor" angle could potentially be dropped, since Twilight isn't asking anything tremendously unreasonable of her and she would probably agree to most of this anyway. Most of the argument between them in the original text could be dropped since we're downplaying the NM angle.
I wouldn't make any significant changes to the next two scenes beyond what I've mentioned already. Rarity makes Nyx an outfit, then Twilight has to go out and buy new glasses, and in the meantime Rarity teaches Nyx to drink tea. These are both well written scenes that build a relationship between Nyx and Rarity, and help to endear the reader to Nyx.
As I've said in detail already, there's no reason for Nyx to need to meet the other Mane 6 ponies, so I would omit these introductions. The scene with Pinkie Pie I actually rather like, and I think adding a standard "Pinkie throws a party welcoming the author's OC to Ponyville" clause to the story logically takes care of introductions anyway. However, I would just have Twilight and Nyx bump into Pinkie on the way home from Rarity's and start the scene from there, or maybe set it up by having Twilight decide to take Nyx to Sugar Cube Corner for a treat.
This concludes Chapter 2. For how I would re-write Chapter 3, please see >>249979 .
I did watch a couple of his videos, I was very highly amused by them. I've toyed with the idea of doing a YouTube channel for a while, and I may yet. As I've said before, time investment is kind of an issue for me, and videos tend to be more complicated to produce than writing imageboard posts, but I think I could manage it. I've also toyed with the idea of starting a blog for book and media reviews, and maybe some politics on the side. I'll see how it goes. It would probably be after the new year if I get any of this stuff off the ground.
>>250816
Continuing with my alt-synopsis of how I would write the story.
Chapter 2:
This part of the story should mostly focus on Twilight and Spike adjusting to the idea of having Nyx living in their home, and Nyx adjusting to life in general. In our LCIG anime model, this is usually the point in the story where the childhood friend/girl next door character figures out that Person X has a strange girl/robot/alien life form living in his house with him, and proceeds to get involved. In this story, Rarity mostly assumes this role. Basically, this is the part of the story where Chi goes shopping for underpants.
I'd probably nix :^) the bit at the beginning where it talks about Spike and Twilight's habit of taking turns making breakfast, and replace it with another lighthearted funny scene that illustrates their day to day life. Spike is trying to make breakfast. He still instinctively distrusts Nyx and although he isn't openly hostile to her the way other characters are, he's a bit cold to her and has little patience for her endless stream of questions about mundane bullshit. At the moment, he's trying to cook something, and like everything else he does, probably takes the act of cooking way too seriously, especially when doing it in front of others. I'd probably dress him up in a chef's hat and a frilly apron for lulz. Anyway, Nyx keeps bothering him, asking questions about cooking and probably a lot of other random bullshit on the side. As is typical for her, she is just being naturally curious and is oblivious to the fact that Spike is getting annoyed with her.
As I mentioned, I rather like the little background bit about Nyx of the Night, so I would probably leave that in. However, I would drop all the stuff with Twilight musing about resurrection spells and all that, as it shifts the story's focus away from where it is supposed to be right now. Twilight is, however, beginning to realize that she can't just keep Nyx locked up inside the tree indefinitely, and that she's going to need to find some way to integrate Nyx into the fabric of society until she can figure out what to ultimately do about her.
Since obviously a strange alicorn filly walking around the neighborhood would turn heads, she decides to take the sensible step of calling in her friend Rarity's favor and see if she can't just nigger-rig some kind of disguise for her.
The next scene, where Twilight brings Nyx to Rarity's boutique, is probably the best-written part of the story so far and I would actually make few changes from what is written. I mentioned earlier that there are exactly two places between the prologue and the point in the story where the cult reappears where Nightmare Moon should be explicitly mentioned, and this is the second place. So far the only two ponies who have seen Nyx in her undisguised form are Twilight and Rarity, both of whom fought Nightmare Moon. Since Nyx is pretty much the spitting image of NM, the fact that each of them would immediately notice this about her is something that logically has to be addressed. However, at this point in my version of events, neither Twi nor Rarara knows anything about the resurrection cult or the spell, so it makes the most sense to just deal with it as briefly as possible and move on.
Twilight brings the strange filly into the shop. Rarity initially has the same reaction that Twilight did and freaks out about the NM resemblance. However, Twilight calms her down and explains the situation. Rarity is sympathetic to Twilight's plight and although she's curious about the resemblance, the filly seems nice and harmless enough, so she agrees to make the filly an outfit, to back up Twilight's story about Nyx being her cousin from out of town, and to keep the truth between them for now. Come to think of it, the whole "Rarity owes Twilight a favor" angle could potentially be dropped, since Twilight isn't asking anything tremendously unreasonable of her and she would probably agree to most of this anyway. Most of the argument between them in the original text could be dropped since we're downplaying the NM angle.
I wouldn't make any significant changes to the next two scenes beyond what I've mentioned already. Rarity makes Nyx an outfit, then Twilight has to go out and buy new glasses, and in the meantime Rarity teaches Nyx to drink tea. These are both well written scenes that build a relationship between Nyx and Rarity, and help to endear the reader to Nyx.
As I've said in detail already, there's no reason for Nyx to need to meet the other Mane 6 ponies, so I would omit these introductions. The scene with Pinkie Pie I actually rather like, and I think adding a standard "Pinkie throws a party welcoming the author's OC to Ponyville" clause to the story logically takes care of introductions anyway. However, I would just have Twilight and Nyx bump into Pinkie on the way home from Rarity's and start the scene from there, or maybe set it up by having Twilight decide to take Nyx to Sugar Cube Corner for a treat.
This concludes Chapter 2. For how I would re-write Chapter 3, please see >>249979 .
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>>251420
It's worth noting at this point that the way I laid out events for Chapter 3 in >>249979 has a lot of things going on at once, and that story arc could potentially be broken up into multiple chapters. Though to make things easer to follow I'll stick to Peen Stroke's basic chapter structure, I'm thinking of this redesign more in terms of story arcs than in terms of chapters. The events from the beginning of Ch. 1 through the reappearance of the cult in Ch. 4 would basically constitute a single story arc, which begins with Twilight adopting Nyx as her pretend cousin and proto-daughter, rises in action with a story about Nyx going to school, getting bullied and making friends, and ultimately reaches its climax when Nyx gets lost in the woods and ends up at the Castle of the Two Sisters, where she experiences her Nightmare Moon persona for the first time. This naturally segues into the next arc which (I'm assuming, since I haven't read it yet) deals more with the main plot of the story, which is about Nyx's identity crisis and the cult trying to abduct her for ¡SCIENCE!
My purpose in redesigning the story in this way is not simply to shit on Peen Stroke or to arrogantly proclaim that I could write his story better though I probably could :^). Rather, I wanted to illustrate a version of the story that plays out more logically and has more emotional impact on the reader, and also does a better job of adhering to the story format Mr. Stroke appears to have either consciously or subconsciously chosen to follow, which is the LCIG who is actually an all-powerful being from beyond the stars meets Person X and befriends them trope.
Were Peen Stroke to ever seriously solicit my advice about a rewrite, these are the two important points that I would absolutely insist he incorporate:
>Nightmare Moon should not be explicitly mentioned except at the two points I indicated
I know I keep returning to this time and time again, but it's important. Even though they are technically the same person (pony, whatever), Nyx and NM are two different characters: Nightmare Moon, the evil queen that the cult was trying to resurrect, and Nyx, the filly reborn with her soul and karma. Nyx's relationship to NM is one of conflict, and the two of them will ultimately need to struggle over which one of them controls the body and soul of Nyx.
This is the central theme of the story. Basically, this is a Man-versus-himself story in which the central protagonist must confront elements in himself (herself, whatever) that he wishes to escape from but are inextricably linked to his character. As any competent writer will tell you, you don't just drop the central theme into the beginning of the story with no buildup whatsoever. Also, this is Nyx's struggle, not Twilight's, so it makes little sense to have Twilight be the one having a crisis of conscience over it.
Furthermore, the initial arc of the story is about Nyx, not Nightmare Moon. NM's presence within Nyx should be alluded to or foreshadowed but not mentioned explicitly, since she won't be important until later. Incidentally, by having Twilight and Rarity mention and discuss the resemblance, but not make a big deal out of it, it becomes foreshadowing, since now the reader is introduced to the NM character who appears later in the story even though they don't really know who she is yet. Remember, even stories set in established worlds should be treated as if you are building the entire thing from the ground up. Assume the reader has never watched an episode of MLP in their life. What is in the show a well-known piece of canon is here an obscure bit of backstory, to be slowly revealed over time.
>Twilight cannot be witness to any part of Nyx's revelation at the Castle of the Two Sisters
As written, the story has Twilight rushing to the Castle to find Nyx appearing fully as NM, crying her eyes out about the scawwy things Nightmare Moon's evil soul made her think. Twilight immediately lurches into an inner conflict between her feelings for Nyx the filly and her fear of Nightmare Moon. As I mentioned above, the central conflict here is between Nyx and Nightmare Moon, not Twilight and Nightmare Moon. Twilight will eventually be involved due to her relationship with Nyx, but it is far too early for her to be a part of it yet. At present, this is Nyx's internal struggle, and it's a burden she needs to bear alone.
She should meet the spirit of Nightmare Moon in the castle, and regain some of her memories here, and realize that in a past life she was a bad bad pony who did bad bad pony things. She should feel all the fear and sadness that Peen Stroke has her feeling here. However, when Twilight finds her, she should be in her Nyx form, lying in the center of the room and crying. Twilight should not recognize her as being any Nightmare Moonier than she was before. She should assume that she is crying because she's scared from being lost in the woods, not because the ancient ghost living inside her just woke up. Nyx should decide to keep the experience to herself, partly because she doesn't really understand what happened anyway, and partly because she's afraid of losing Twilight's friendship were Twilight to discover the dark thoughts/memories she just had about her.
It's worth noting at this point that the way I laid out events for Chapter 3 in >>249979 has a lot of things going on at once, and that story arc could potentially be broken up into multiple chapters. Though to make things easer to follow I'll stick to Peen Stroke's basic chapter structure, I'm thinking of this redesign more in terms of story arcs than in terms of chapters. The events from the beginning of Ch. 1 through the reappearance of the cult in Ch. 4 would basically constitute a single story arc, which begins with Twilight adopting Nyx as her pretend cousin and proto-daughter, rises in action with a story about Nyx going to school, getting bullied and making friends, and ultimately reaches its climax when Nyx gets lost in the woods and ends up at the Castle of the Two Sisters, where she experiences her Nightmare Moon persona for the first time. This naturally segues into the next arc which (I'm assuming, since I haven't read it yet) deals more with the main plot of the story, which is about Nyx's identity crisis and the cult trying to abduct her for ¡SCIENCE!
My purpose in redesigning the story in this way is not simply to shit on Peen Stroke or to arrogantly proclaim that I could write his story better though I probably could :^). Rather, I wanted to illustrate a version of the story that plays out more logically and has more emotional impact on the reader, and also does a better job of adhering to the story format Mr. Stroke appears to have either consciously or subconsciously chosen to follow, which is the LCIG who is actually an all-powerful being from beyond the stars meets Person X and befriends them trope.
Were Peen Stroke to ever seriously solicit my advice about a rewrite, these are the two important points that I would absolutely insist he incorporate:
>Nightmare Moon should not be explicitly mentioned except at the two points I indicated
I know I keep returning to this time and time again, but it's important. Even though they are technically the same person (pony, whatever), Nyx and NM are two different characters: Nightmare Moon, the evil queen that the cult was trying to resurrect, and Nyx, the filly reborn with her soul and karma. Nyx's relationship to NM is one of conflict, and the two of them will ultimately need to struggle over which one of them controls the body and soul of Nyx.
This is the central theme of the story. Basically, this is a Man-versus-himself story in which the central protagonist must confront elements in himself (herself, whatever) that he wishes to escape from but are inextricably linked to his character. As any competent writer will tell you, you don't just drop the central theme into the beginning of the story with no buildup whatsoever. Also, this is Nyx's struggle, not Twilight's, so it makes little sense to have Twilight be the one having a crisis of conscience over it.
Furthermore, the initial arc of the story is about Nyx, not Nightmare Moon. NM's presence within Nyx should be alluded to or foreshadowed but not mentioned explicitly, since she won't be important until later. Incidentally, by having Twilight and Rarity mention and discuss the resemblance, but not make a big deal out of it, it becomes foreshadowing, since now the reader is introduced to the NM character who appears later in the story even though they don't really know who she is yet. Remember, even stories set in established worlds should be treated as if you are building the entire thing from the ground up. Assume the reader has never watched an episode of MLP in their life. What is in the show a well-known piece of canon is here an obscure bit of backstory, to be slowly revealed over time.
>Twilight cannot be witness to any part of Nyx's revelation at the Castle of the Two Sisters
As written, the story has Twilight rushing to the Castle to find Nyx appearing fully as NM, crying her eyes out about the scawwy things Nightmare Moon's evil soul made her think. Twilight immediately lurches into an inner conflict between her feelings for Nyx the filly and her fear of Nightmare Moon. As I mentioned above, the central conflict here is between Nyx and Nightmare Moon, not Twilight and Nightmare Moon. Twilight will eventually be involved due to her relationship with Nyx, but it is far too early for her to be a part of it yet. At present, this is Nyx's internal struggle, and it's a burden she needs to bear alone.
She should meet the spirit of Nightmare Moon in the castle, and regain some of her memories here, and realize that in a past life she was a bad bad pony who did bad bad pony things. She should feel all the fear and sadness that Peen Stroke has her feeling here. However, when Twilight finds her, she should be in her Nyx form, lying in the center of the room and crying. Twilight should not recognize her as being any Nightmare Moonier than she was before. She should assume that she is crying because she's scared from being lost in the woods, not because the ancient ghost living inside her just woke up. Nyx should decide to keep the experience to herself, partly because she doesn't really understand what happened anyway, and partly because she's afraid of losing Twilight's friendship were Twilight to discover the dark thoughts/memories she just had about her.
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>>251420
>>251425
I don't usually don't try to adhere to formulas but I understand that they exist for a reason. In this case, as you say, this story follows the trope(s) to a T.
I think the reason he falls into this mistake if because he has this formula subconciously in his head and he lets his emtions guide him in his writing. This means that this already established but vague formula feels right to him so he doesn't actually think about why he is writing it.
This is why people who write from the seat of their pants or whatever, can get their writing to feel so real. Because what they do is that they take a premise and takes it to its logical conclusion. They calculate from the best of their ability and if they can resist their own biases they can possibly simulate every believeable secnerios.
>A cat and a mouse are friends.
>But cats eats mice?
>So therefore the cat eats the mouse.
>Then he gets depressed because he ate his friend.
The fact that the cat eatxs mice gets adressed instead of a having something more contrived happened like them not having a single problem with this.
I say this while, I myself, is aiming to be a complete planner. I think for many reasons it suits me better. But that means I'll have to plan everything from the the start.
I think there is a problem to have a structure that is too loose.
If think that is the biggest problem to be honest.
If you have a plan that covers everything, all the bases and everything than that is good. And if your story is spwaned through snowballing that is also good. Or both of these methods seem to me to give good result. Just a hunch. I think, that it is when you have a loose plot outline that you begin to encounter problems. The problem being that when you get there to a already outlined plotpoint you will have added details that weren't in the original outline. So now you will either scrap the rest of the outline or force your story in the direction you want it to go.
Obviously, maybe the way you force your story in the way you want it to go works fine but it can also come off as contrived.
Anyway, I liked these posts.
>>251425
I don't usually don't try to adhere to formulas but I understand that they exist for a reason. In this case, as you say, this story follows the trope(s) to a T.
I think the reason he falls into this mistake if because he has this formula subconciously in his head and he lets his emtions guide him in his writing. This means that this already established but vague formula feels right to him so he doesn't actually think about why he is writing it.
This is why people who write from the seat of their pants or whatever, can get their writing to feel so real. Because what they do is that they take a premise and takes it to its logical conclusion. They calculate from the best of their ability and if they can resist their own biases they can possibly simulate every believeable secnerios.
>A cat and a mouse are friends.
>But cats eats mice?
>So therefore the cat eats the mouse.
>Then he gets depressed because he ate his friend.
The fact that the cat eatxs mice gets adressed instead of a having something more contrived happened like them not having a single problem with this.
I say this while, I myself, is aiming to be a complete planner. I think for many reasons it suits me better. But that means I'll have to plan everything from the the start.
I think there is a problem to have a structure that is too loose.
If think that is the biggest problem to be honest.
If you have a plan that covers everything, all the bases and everything than that is good. And if your story is spwaned through snowballing that is also good. Or both of these methods seem to me to give good result. Just a hunch. I think, that it is when you have a loose plot outline that you begin to encounter problems. The problem being that when you get there to a already outlined plotpoint you will have added details that weren't in the original outline. So now you will either scrap the rest of the outline or force your story in the direction you want it to go.
Obviously, maybe the way you force your story in the way you want it to go works fine but it can also come off as contrived.
Anyway, I liked these posts.
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>>251425
>Nightmare Moon should not be explicitly mentioned except at the two points I indicated
The resemblence between them and the very direct way they adress it in the story is so dumb that it is hard to deal with. I don't know if you wrote this or somebody in the riff fic but as whomever said, "If she wasn't then this whole story would be kinda boring." Imagine if itturned our Nyx had not been Nightmare Moon after being band in the head with it for so long. I would have suck ass and even people who are/were fans of it would dislike that tiwst be cause it would have just wasted everybody's time.
>Remember, even stories set in established worlds should be treated as if you are building the entire thing from the ground up.
This is rule you have come up with, which I a bit unsure of. I don't really see why it has to be this way. Yes, sometimes this can be helpful especially if you have longrunning series with a bunch of stuff in it. It is helpful then to explain things that not every fan is aware of. Like there are over a hundred of mlp episodes if this is a character who comes up in one of them then recaping that isn't wrong. However, if I won't explain to the reader who Celestia is. If they don't know, then read up on it.
I even think this way about sequels. So long as the story functions people who haven't read the first books will be satisfied and even if know about who this character is, is vital to understanding the plot, I think, that people cane infer all they need from how the character act in relation to him.
I guess, one can go about this in different ways. It is more a personal biasone my behalf from seeing so many recap episodes of series and to have to watch a recap before an epsiode. The episodes and seasons becomes shorter because of all this reccapping of epsiodes, that anyone who can, will watch on their own.
>>248877
I don't know much about music myself. I can't even get my head around of how anyone can create music. So I'm really fascinated by music and musicians. But you proabably know more than me on music since I don't understand it at all. Saw this vid like just before you posted this post and I have been meaning to ask you what your opinion about this vid.
>Nightmare Moon should not be explicitly mentioned except at the two points I indicated
The resemblence between them and the very direct way they adress it in the story is so dumb that it is hard to deal with. I don't know if you wrote this or somebody in the riff fic but as whomever said, "If she wasn't then this whole story would be kinda boring." Imagine if itturned our Nyx had not been Nightmare Moon after being band in the head with it for so long. I would have suck ass and even people who are/were fans of it would dislike that tiwst be cause it would have just wasted everybody's time.
>Remember, even stories set in established worlds should be treated as if you are building the entire thing from the ground up.
This is rule you have come up with, which I a bit unsure of. I don't really see why it has to be this way. Yes, sometimes this can be helpful especially if you have longrunning series with a bunch of stuff in it. It is helpful then to explain things that not every fan is aware of. Like there are over a hundred of mlp episodes if this is a character who comes up in one of them then recaping that isn't wrong. However, if I won't explain to the reader who Celestia is. If they don't know, then read up on it.
I even think this way about sequels. So long as the story functions people who haven't read the first books will be satisfied and even if know about who this character is, is vital to understanding the plot, I think, that people cane infer all they need from how the character act in relation to him.
I guess, one can go about this in different ways. It is more a personal biasone my behalf from seeing so many recap episodes of series and to have to watch a recap before an epsiode. The episodes and seasons becomes shorter because of all this reccapping of epsiodes, that anyone who can, will watch on their own.
>>248877
I don't know much about music myself. I can't even get my head around of how anyone can create music. So I'm really fascinated by music and musicians. But you proabably know more than me on music since I don't understand it at all. Saw this vid like just before you posted this post and I have been meaning to ask you what your opinion about this vid.
>>252332
Yes, I am. Sorry for the lack of updates. As I said earlier I was participating in NaNoWriMo this month and I wanted to focus on getting my novel done, so I back-burnered this project for a while. Now that it's December I will be resuming doing reviews again. I'm going to try to do at least two or three posts on Thursdays, with probably a few sprinkled throughout the week in between.
Thank you all for your patience and continued interest.
Yes, I am. Sorry for the lack of updates. As I said earlier I was participating in NaNoWriMo this month and I wanted to focus on getting my novel done, so I back-burnered this project for a while. Now that it's December I will be resuming doing reviews again. I'm going to try to do at least two or three posts on Thursdays, with probably a few sprinkled throughout the week in between.
Thank you all for your patience and continued interest.
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>>252454
No worries, obviously.
>I'm going to try to do at least two or three posts on Thursdays
That is great and all, but take your time and write whenever you feel like it.
But I do look forward to this thread's continuation.
No worries, obviously.
>I'm going to try to do at least two or three posts on Thursdays
That is great and all, but take your time and write whenever you feel like it.
But I do look forward to this thread's continuation.
Patriotic Americans who thought that they would resist if tyranny ever came to the US must feel powerless now.
Not only have the evil elites turned the USA into a police state, Americans are eagerly embracing their slavery.
Insanity.
Dropout immediately. Quit paying taxes. Leave the US. Kill the system.
Every minute this tyranny continues makes the police state more permanent.
Not only have the evil elites turned the USA into a police state, Americans are eagerly embracing their slavery.
Insanity.
Dropout immediately. Quit paying taxes. Leave the US. Kill the system.
Every minute this tyranny continues makes the police state more permanent.
>>252536
Some of us have been bemoaning this terrible state of affairs for years!
Matters NOT what letters a candidate has by his/her name, or what "party" they align with - it's all the bloody damned same - every QFS (Quadriennial-Freak-Show) we experience. This once-proud 'nation' has been going shitty for a very long time!
Welcome to the up-and-coming Halaka, complete with another edition of a "Holocaust" (Ritual burning by fire). Whitey is as good as toast, because he forgot the important lessons learned from his Great Norse Elders from the times of old.
The Nordic Peoples are on their way out, and by their OWN hands be done with!
That's what happens when too many absolutely STUPID people are allowed to procreate and pollute a once genetically-strong population with their weakened and decrepit traits!
May the Alfather see not the failure of His doing, for it was not He who hath failed, but WE who have failed Him.
After many centuries of being driven to near-extinction, only to come back to full life when backs were towards the seas, the monstrous hordes fought back to the sandy deserts of the Far East, - only to be defeated through trickery and ignorance - that our numbers quietly die, silently into night.
Take my words as harsh as they bear truth to the reality, I speak to truth to political power, because I just don't give two shits out of a rat's ass less what "society" says is right or wrong, because "society" itself is full of SHIT!
Until WE all realize the horrible predicament we are in, and stand tall against those who seek to erase our rightful and divine existence from this world, and until we have the god-damned BALLS to actually DO something about it all - We simply don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell in the middle of Summer, to make any difference.
Fuck this sham "impeachment", fuck the phony (s)elections, fuck the economy, and fuck all the phony bullshit that so many think is "reality". We're in the matrix, baby! Time to bust out of it, or die on our knees begging for "mercy".
- JZ
Some of us have been bemoaning this terrible state of affairs for years!
Matters NOT what letters a candidate has by his/her name, or what "party" they align with - it's all the bloody damned same - every QFS (Quadriennial-Freak-Show) we experience. This once-proud 'nation' has been going shitty for a very long time!
Welcome to the up-and-coming Halaka, complete with another edition of a "Holocaust" (Ritual burning by fire). Whitey is as good as toast, because he forgot the important lessons learned from his Great Norse Elders from the times of old.
The Nordic Peoples are on their way out, and by their OWN hands be done with!
That's what happens when too many absolutely STUPID people are allowed to procreate and pollute a once genetically-strong population with their weakened and decrepit traits!
May the Alfather see not the failure of His doing, for it was not He who hath failed, but WE who have failed Him.
After many centuries of being driven to near-extinction, only to come back to full life when backs were towards the seas, the monstrous hordes fought back to the sandy deserts of the Far East, - only to be defeated through trickery and ignorance - that our numbers quietly die, silently into night.
Take my words as harsh as they bear truth to the reality, I speak to truth to political power, because I just don't give two shits out of a rat's ass less what "society" says is right or wrong, because "society" itself is full of SHIT!
Until WE all realize the horrible predicament we are in, and stand tall against those who seek to erase our rightful and divine existence from this world, and until we have the god-damned BALLS to actually DO something about it all - We simply don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell in the middle of Summer, to make any difference.
Fuck this sham "impeachment", fuck the phony (s)elections, fuck the economy, and fuck all the phony bullshit that so many think is "reality". We're in the matrix, baby! Time to bust out of it, or die on our knees begging for "mercy".
- JZ
>>252579
Anon often is written as a genuine Mary Sue though. What else do you call an author self-insert who effortlessly becomes best-friends-with-benefits with the author's favorite ponies? Of course not every writefag is guilty of it, but there are countless AiE stories out there that do this.
Anon often is written as a genuine Mary Sue though. What else do you call an author self-insert who effortlessly becomes best-friends-with-benefits with the author's favorite ponies? Of course not every writefag is guilty of it, but there are countless AiE stories out there that do this.
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>>252536
>>252574
This is all lovely and probably true enough, but please don't shit up my thread with it.
>>251425
Alright, I forget where the hell I left off with this. As I recall, I had just created an alternate synopsis of the events of the first three chapters. I'll be doing these at periodic intervals throughout the story probably as it progresses. For now, though, I'd like to continue on with:
Chapter 5: Theatrical Trouble
The chapter opens with Nyx, predictably, sitting by herself and crying. The reason she is crying as if she needed a reason is because apparently on top of DT and SS's stunt, Twilight is now being weird to her because something something Nightmare Moon. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I really think that Peen Stroke made a serious mistake by having Twilight witness Nyx's NM transformation this early on in the story, in much the same way it was a mistake to focus so much on the NM aspect of Nyx in the first place.
With the first six paragraphs of this chapter he also falls back into the habit of summarizing and explaining rather than demonstrating Nyx's situation through anecdotes and scenes. For instance:
>Yet, during the first few days after the forest incident, things were different at the library. Twilight had been avoiding her. She was trying to hide it, had tried to tell Nyx that she was just imagining things, but Nyx knew things were different. Twilight kept looking at her with this weird expression, like she was looking through her and expecting to find some monster.
or
>Over the few days she had been back, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had become unbearable. Diamond’s father, Filthy Rich, had grounded her for what she did, and now she was doing everything in her power to get back at Nyx. They had spread nasty rumors around the school, picked on Nyx openly, and even tried to frame her for putting a tack on Cheerilee’s desk chair.
In his defense, this is actually a rather easy trap to fall into. It's common for a story to jump forward in time quite a ways from one scene to another, and sometimes the writer feels a need to update the reader on what went on during the interim. While it is sometimes necessary to convey important information this way, you generally want to do this as little as possible. Peen Stroke, I notice, does it constantly; as I said, the first six paragraphs of this chapter are basically a synopsis of what has happened since Chapter 5 ended. This is a bad habit to get into.
The other problem here is that a lot of what he's glossing over is fairly important to the development of his character relationships. The incident in the forest has Twilight acting differently toward Nyx now, and Nyx has noticed and is depressed about it. That's fairly important to the story. Wouldn't it be better to demonstrate that by having a scene in which Nyx and Twilight interact, and have Twilight behaving more coldly toward Nyx than she has in the past, rather than just starting with this scene of Nyx on the swingset thinking about how Twilight has been cold to her?
The same goes for DT/SS. The reader can probably assume that the situation hasn't changed much between Nyx and her two bullies, and if anything has probably gotten worse. It can be effectively demonstrated by putting Nyx in a scene with the two of them and having these interactions play out directly. The incident in which she is falsely accused of sabotaging Cheerilee's desk chair would work for this, actually.
The only really appropriate time to use this type of summarization is when something happens between Scene A and Scene B that is essential to the story, and the reader would need to know about it in order to understand the events of Scene B. It's also worth noting that if you're writing something and you find yourself having to do this a lot, it's usually an indicator that you might want to rethink how you have your scenes and your timeline arranged.
Anyway, the scene opens with Nyx alone on the swingset. The CMC + Twist approach and ask what's wrong.
I actually want to take a minute and give Peen Stroke a tip o' the hat for something he does here that, while relatively minor, demonstrates writing competence. As we established earlier, Nyx's primary friends at school are Apple Bloom and Twist, with a particular focus on AB. While Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle are friends of AB and presumably acquaintances of Nyx, they don't have the same sort of close relationship that Nyx has with AB. In this scene, Nyx is approached by all four, but Peen Stroke has Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle exit the scene, allowing it to focus on the more intimate group of Nyx, AB and Twist. This is the proper way to handle this. It makes logical sense for the CMC to be together during recess since they are friends, but Scoot and SB would be dead weight on this scene. Peen Stroke mentions that they are present, and then has them make a graceful exit fairly quickly, allowing the scene to progress unhindered. This is the kind of thing he should have done earlier with the mane 6.
As another quick aside, I feel as if the Pinkie Promise a little overused in this story. We've had it referenced several times now, and I'm not sure how likely Apple Bloom is to even be that familiar with it. It's something she could have picked up from her older sister I suppose. In this particular scene, it's part of a little gag that takes place, so maybe it makes sense here. It's not that huge a deal I guess, but I have noticed it appearing quite frequently in the text.
>>252594
Seriously nigger, cut this shit out. This isn't a political thread. Start your own thread, it's not hard to do.
>>252574
This is all lovely and probably true enough, but please don't shit up my thread with it.
>>251425
Alright, I forget where the hell I left off with this. As I recall, I had just created an alternate synopsis of the events of the first three chapters. I'll be doing these at periodic intervals throughout the story probably as it progresses. For now, though, I'd like to continue on with:
Chapter 5: Theatrical Trouble
The chapter opens with Nyx, predictably, sitting by herself and crying. The reason she is crying as if she needed a reason is because apparently on top of DT and SS's stunt, Twilight is now being weird to her because something something Nightmare Moon. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I really think that Peen Stroke made a serious mistake by having Twilight witness Nyx's NM transformation this early on in the story, in much the same way it was a mistake to focus so much on the NM aspect of Nyx in the first place.
With the first six paragraphs of this chapter he also falls back into the habit of summarizing and explaining rather than demonstrating Nyx's situation through anecdotes and scenes. For instance:
>Yet, during the first few days after the forest incident, things were different at the library. Twilight had been avoiding her. She was trying to hide it, had tried to tell Nyx that she was just imagining things, but Nyx knew things were different. Twilight kept looking at her with this weird expression, like she was looking through her and expecting to find some monster.
or
>Over the few days she had been back, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had become unbearable. Diamond’s father, Filthy Rich, had grounded her for what she did, and now she was doing everything in her power to get back at Nyx. They had spread nasty rumors around the school, picked on Nyx openly, and even tried to frame her for putting a tack on Cheerilee’s desk chair.
In his defense, this is actually a rather easy trap to fall into. It's common for a story to jump forward in time quite a ways from one scene to another, and sometimes the writer feels a need to update the reader on what went on during the interim. While it is sometimes necessary to convey important information this way, you generally want to do this as little as possible. Peen Stroke, I notice, does it constantly; as I said, the first six paragraphs of this chapter are basically a synopsis of what has happened since Chapter 5 ended. This is a bad habit to get into.
The other problem here is that a lot of what he's glossing over is fairly important to the development of his character relationships. The incident in the forest has Twilight acting differently toward Nyx now, and Nyx has noticed and is depressed about it. That's fairly important to the story. Wouldn't it be better to demonstrate that by having a scene in which Nyx and Twilight interact, and have Twilight behaving more coldly toward Nyx than she has in the past, rather than just starting with this scene of Nyx on the swingset thinking about how Twilight has been cold to her?
The same goes for DT/SS. The reader can probably assume that the situation hasn't changed much between Nyx and her two bullies, and if anything has probably gotten worse. It can be effectively demonstrated by putting Nyx in a scene with the two of them and having these interactions play out directly. The incident in which she is falsely accused of sabotaging Cheerilee's desk chair would work for this, actually.
The only really appropriate time to use this type of summarization is when something happens between Scene A and Scene B that is essential to the story, and the reader would need to know about it in order to understand the events of Scene B. It's also worth noting that if you're writing something and you find yourself having to do this a lot, it's usually an indicator that you might want to rethink how you have your scenes and your timeline arranged.
Anyway, the scene opens with Nyx alone on the swingset. The CMC + Twist approach and ask what's wrong.
I actually want to take a minute and give Peen Stroke a tip o' the hat for something he does here that, while relatively minor, demonstrates writing competence. As we established earlier, Nyx's primary friends at school are Apple Bloom and Twist, with a particular focus on AB. While Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle are friends of AB and presumably acquaintances of Nyx, they don't have the same sort of close relationship that Nyx has with AB. In this scene, Nyx is approached by all four, but Peen Stroke has Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle exit the scene, allowing it to focus on the more intimate group of Nyx, AB and Twist. This is the proper way to handle this. It makes logical sense for the CMC to be together during recess since they are friends, but Scoot and SB would be dead weight on this scene. Peen Stroke mentions that they are present, and then has them make a graceful exit fairly quickly, allowing the scene to progress unhindered. This is the kind of thing he should have done earlier with the mane 6.
As another quick aside, I feel as if the Pinkie Promise a little overused in this story. We've had it referenced several times now, and I'm not sure how likely Apple Bloom is to even be that familiar with it. It's something she could have picked up from her older sister I suppose. In this particular scene, it's part of a little gag that takes place, so maybe it makes sense here. It's not that huge a deal I guess, but I have noticed it appearing quite frequently in the text.
>>252594
Seriously nigger, cut this shit out. This isn't a political thread. Start your own thread, it's not hard to do.
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>>252597
Anyway, after the Pinkie Pie gag, a bizarre conversation follows. Nyx begins sputtering about how she keeps having thoughts about hurting Twilight and shooting up the school, and how she wants the voices in her head to stop. AB and Twist respond to this by telling her it's nothing, and that she should just relax and have fun by swinging on the swingset.
The scene ends, and we cut to Twilight. Once again, Peen Stroke spends entirely too much time summarizing things and narrating Twilight's thoughts. In particular, we have this rather weird, dense paragraph:
>School itself had been going better as well. After Twilight’s confrontation with Diamond Tiara’s parents and a few other altercations between the fillies at school, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon started going to Cheerilee’s afternoon class, which in turn let two other students move to the morning class. Nyx hadn’t really had a chance to meet or talk to Dinky Doo or Pipsqueak, but Twilight was just happy with the fact that Nyx didn’t have to deal with Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon on a daily basis anymore.
Okay, several things here. First off, I could be misunderstanding what this paragraph is trying to say, but the information here seems to contradict what we've already been told about the school situation. In the previous scene we are informed that DT/SS are inside the school house, being held back from recess because Cheerilee found out they had put a tack on her seat and then tried to blame Nyx. Nyx is even specifically concerned that they might have been allowed out onto the playground and are going to pick on her some more. The implication seems to be that she is still having to interact with them on a daily basis. Here, we are informed that DT/SS are in a different class now and Nyx doesn't have to deal with them anymore. Which is it?
Second, what is the significance of Nyx not being able to interact with Dinky Doo and Pipsqueak? Neither of these characters have been mentioned before now. If I'm understanding it correctly, the implication is that DT/SS switched from the morning to the afternoon class, with Pipsqueak and Dinky moving from the afternoon to the morning to balance it out. Presumably this was done to mitigate the conflict between DT/SS and Nyx. The key issue, especially from Twilight's perspective, is the bullying; it's not particularly important whether Nyx makes friends with the two new ponies who transferred so long as the bullying stops. It just seems like an odd thing to mention.
Third, this all seems to completely contradict what was said in the previous subchapter. We were previously told that Nyx's school situation had not only not improved but actually gotten worse. We are now being told that her situation has improved. It's also strange that, while the previous subchapter deals with Nyx's concern that Twilight has been acting differently towards her since the Castle incident, here we have Twilight behaving normally, attending to chores and casually worrying about Nyx's social problems at school. Ironically, as much as Peen Stroke likes to have Twilight constantly obsess over the whole Nyx/Nightmare Moon thing, he decides to have her stop doing it at precisely the point where it's weird for her not to.
I suppose it's possible that this is being done to illustrate a difference between Twilight's perspective and Nyx's. Maybe he wants us to see that Nyx is having all this inner conflict and turmoil, and thinks that Twilight hates her now, while Twilight's feelings towards Nyx haven't changed. That would be a potentially interesting angle if that's what he's doing. However, it doesn't feel that way to me. I guess I'll keep reading and see how it goes.
In any event, I feel like bringing up all this stuff about DT/SS switching from the morning to the afternoon is unnecessary, and unless I've completely misinterpreted it, it's a glaring continuity error. Even if it isn't, this is just needless information; it overcomplicates the story without really adding anything to it. If I were in Peen Stroke's position I would just chop the paragraph that is greentexted above.
Anyway, next, we have Nyx bursting in, and excitedly babbling about how the school is going to be putting on a play. This is rather jarring, as it has absolutely nothing to do with any of what's been discussed in the chapter so far, and there was no real lead up to it. Perhaps instead of wasting so much time summarizing contradictory narratives about Nyx's school life across two subchapters, Peen Stroke might have written a scene in which this fact was mentioned. Really, a classroom scene in which Cheerilee brings up the play and the students discuss it might have been a better thing to focus on than the conversation between Nyx and AB/Twist that we had in the previous subchapter.
Applejack suddenly bursts into the library and tells Twilight that she is having plant problems. Twilight runs off to help Applejack, leaving Nyx alone in the library. Nyx says she's going to try to find a story to use for the school play, and her eye is drawn to the book that Twilight was just reading. The book in question is the story of.......Nightmare Moon. Well shit, I'm sure we all know where this is going.
I'm going to make another prediction:
The play goes off without a hitch and absolutely nothing bad happens. Nyx earns her cutie mark in stagecraft, and the rest of the story is about her moving to Manehattan and starting a theater troupe. Then, Ponyville explodes for some reason. The end.
Anyway, after the Pinkie Pie gag, a bizarre conversation follows. Nyx begins sputtering about how she keeps having thoughts about hurting Twilight and shooting up the school, and how she wants the voices in her head to stop. AB and Twist respond to this by telling her it's nothing, and that she should just relax and have fun by swinging on the swingset.
The scene ends, and we cut to Twilight. Once again, Peen Stroke spends entirely too much time summarizing things and narrating Twilight's thoughts. In particular, we have this rather weird, dense paragraph:
>School itself had been going better as well. After Twilight’s confrontation with Diamond Tiara’s parents and a few other altercations between the fillies at school, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon started going to Cheerilee’s afternoon class, which in turn let two other students move to the morning class. Nyx hadn’t really had a chance to meet or talk to Dinky Doo or Pipsqueak, but Twilight was just happy with the fact that Nyx didn’t have to deal with Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon on a daily basis anymore.
Okay, several things here. First off, I could be misunderstanding what this paragraph is trying to say, but the information here seems to contradict what we've already been told about the school situation. In the previous scene we are informed that DT/SS are inside the school house, being held back from recess because Cheerilee found out they had put a tack on her seat and then tried to blame Nyx. Nyx is even specifically concerned that they might have been allowed out onto the playground and are going to pick on her some more. The implication seems to be that she is still having to interact with them on a daily basis. Here, we are informed that DT/SS are in a different class now and Nyx doesn't have to deal with them anymore. Which is it?
Second, what is the significance of Nyx not being able to interact with Dinky Doo and Pipsqueak? Neither of these characters have been mentioned before now. If I'm understanding it correctly, the implication is that DT/SS switched from the morning to the afternoon class, with Pipsqueak and Dinky moving from the afternoon to the morning to balance it out. Presumably this was done to mitigate the conflict between DT/SS and Nyx. The key issue, especially from Twilight's perspective, is the bullying; it's not particularly important whether Nyx makes friends with the two new ponies who transferred so long as the bullying stops. It just seems like an odd thing to mention.
Third, this all seems to completely contradict what was said in the previous subchapter. We were previously told that Nyx's school situation had not only not improved but actually gotten worse. We are now being told that her situation has improved. It's also strange that, while the previous subchapter deals with Nyx's concern that Twilight has been acting differently towards her since the Castle incident, here we have Twilight behaving normally, attending to chores and casually worrying about Nyx's social problems at school. Ironically, as much as Peen Stroke likes to have Twilight constantly obsess over the whole Nyx/Nightmare Moon thing, he decides to have her stop doing it at precisely the point where it's weird for her not to.
I suppose it's possible that this is being done to illustrate a difference between Twilight's perspective and Nyx's. Maybe he wants us to see that Nyx is having all this inner conflict and turmoil, and thinks that Twilight hates her now, while Twilight's feelings towards Nyx haven't changed. That would be a potentially interesting angle if that's what he's doing. However, it doesn't feel that way to me. I guess I'll keep reading and see how it goes.
In any event, I feel like bringing up all this stuff about DT/SS switching from the morning to the afternoon is unnecessary, and unless I've completely misinterpreted it, it's a glaring continuity error. Even if it isn't, this is just needless information; it overcomplicates the story without really adding anything to it. If I were in Peen Stroke's position I would just chop the paragraph that is greentexted above.
Anyway, next, we have Nyx bursting in, and excitedly babbling about how the school is going to be putting on a play. This is rather jarring, as it has absolutely nothing to do with any of what's been discussed in the chapter so far, and there was no real lead up to it. Perhaps instead of wasting so much time summarizing contradictory narratives about Nyx's school life across two subchapters, Peen Stroke might have written a scene in which this fact was mentioned. Really, a classroom scene in which Cheerilee brings up the play and the students discuss it might have been a better thing to focus on than the conversation between Nyx and AB/Twist that we had in the previous subchapter.
Applejack suddenly bursts into the library and tells Twilight that she is having plant problems. Twilight runs off to help Applejack, leaving Nyx alone in the library. Nyx says she's going to try to find a story to use for the school play, and her eye is drawn to the book that Twilight was just reading. The book in question is the story of.......Nightmare Moon. Well shit, I'm sure we all know where this is going.
I'm going to make another prediction:
The play goes off without a hitch and absolutely nothing bad happens. Nyx earns her cutie mark in stagecraft, and the rest of the story is about her moving to Manehattan and starting a theater troupe. Then, Ponyville explodes for some reason. The end.
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>>252603
>The two contradictory summarize of events
I think the first one is true and the second one also just that the second one is more like an update on the situation. Nyx had problems with DT and SS but this has changed recently. While my mind thinks of the only confrontation Twilight has had with DT's parents, which was before the castle incident; I don't think that is the event that Pen Stroke was refering to here, " After Twilight’s confrontation with Diamond Tiara’s parents and a few other altercations between the fillies at school, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon started going to Cheerilee’s afternoon class, which in turn let two other students move to the morning class." Instead I think he was refering to a scene that happens inbetween the first summarizion of events and this one that happens "Off Camera."
It is bad either way though so who cares but it is a theory.
Your prediction:
Spoiler
From what I remember, you are actually right and nothing bad happens. It won't be too long after the play that something happens (here's a clue: Nyx changes).. Don't remember how long after though.
>The two contradictory summarize of events
I think the first one is true and the second one also just that the second one is more like an update on the situation. Nyx had problems with DT and SS but this has changed recently. While my mind thinks of the only confrontation Twilight has had with DT's parents, which was before the castle incident; I don't think that is the event that Pen Stroke was refering to here, " After Twilight’s confrontation with Diamond Tiara’s parents and a few other altercations between the fillies at school, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon started going to Cheerilee’s afternoon class, which in turn let two other students move to the morning class." Instead I think he was refering to a scene that happens inbetween the first summarizion of events and this one that happens "Off Camera."
It is bad either way though so who cares but it is a theory.
Your prediction:
Spoiler
From what I remember, you are actually right and nothing bad happens. It won't be too long after the play that something happens (here's a clue: Nyx changes).. Don't remember how long after though.
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>mfw a legendary bad fanfic has given people more joy than anything I have ever written
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh7cWRrqF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh7cWRrqF4
>>252693
Actually, it became dull quite quickly. I fee like bad fanfiction are fun to read not because of typical writing errors but rather for their writers unique brand of crazy. As fast as you have a writer's madness figured out, however, it can become repetitive.
While this doesn't retract from the point that often times special kinds of bad fanfiction is more remembered than medicore, good or even great ones. I mean I have only read a few others before this one but even I have heard abiut this story.
I also wonder if this fic is genuine or not since the writer first spells Dumbledore's name correctly and then later fucks it up. It could also be that she proof-reads as many times as I do, that being zero times.
Actually, it became dull quite quickly. I fee like bad fanfiction are fun to read not because of typical writing errors but rather for their writers unique brand of crazy. As fast as you have a writer's madness figured out, however, it can become repetitive.
While this doesn't retract from the point that often times special kinds of bad fanfiction is more remembered than medicore, good or even great ones. I mean I have only read a few others before this one but even I have heard abiut this story.
I also wonder if this fic is genuine or not since the writer first spells Dumbledore's name correctly and then later fucks it up. It could also be that she proof-reads as many times as I do, that being zero times.
>>252458
That image is the truth and it hurts.
>>252586
Anon human, the obnoxious "hilarious outside who boops ponies and giggles into the susnet" faggot. Stories about him are Japanese isekai fagfantasy trash but worse. At least in those forgettable factory-default cancer isekai animes, there's an attempt to make this an appealing fantasy in its own distinct universe with its own loveable waifus.
Anonfics? They're just one faggot's masturbation over how much better than the mane six and pony society he considers himself to be.
They only get faggier when they play the "Mares want to bone him but he doesn't want to" card.
At least Anonfilly has the "As a cute filly, he has lost all his oh-so-fucking-special human advantages. And Twilight might be an evil controlling abusive bitch with everyone's trust" shit going for it.
The popularity of Human In Equestria and other trashy overly-popular fanfics is an argument against this fandom's taste being worth anything at all.
That image is the truth and it hurts.
>>252586
Anon human, the obnoxious "hilarious outside who boops ponies and giggles into the susnet" faggot. Stories about him are Japanese isekai fagfantasy trash but worse. At least in those forgettable factory-default cancer isekai animes, there's an attempt to make this an appealing fantasy in its own distinct universe with its own loveable waifus.
Anonfics? They're just one faggot's masturbation over how much better than the mane six and pony society he considers himself to be.
They only get faggier when they play the "Mares want to bone him but he doesn't want to" card.
At least Anonfilly has the "As a cute filly, he has lost all his oh-so-fucking-special human advantages. And Twilight might be an evil controlling abusive bitch with everyone's trust" shit going for it.
The popularity of Human In Equestria and other trashy overly-popular fanfics is an argument against this fandom's taste being worth anything at all.
>>252693
Like I said before, "Tara Gilsbie" would not write half a typo and then change it at the last second.
I can buy "Tara" accidentally calling Enoby "Tara" now and then.
But the times "Ta- Ebony" is written down?
Who the fuck "Verbally Backspaces(TM)" in a written work?
Just erase the fucking word and replace it.
Obvious trollfic, kinda funny but I've seen better trollfics.
And I'm not talking about the one I wrote.
I once saw a "Just terrible enough, but not too terrible" Pokemon fanfic written on Serebii. The protagonist was a morally reprehensible twat who ended up destroying the world, but because the story was told from that character's perspective, the audience agreed with the character until the final scene where Mewtwo comes down to say "Fuck you, world's dead".
IIRC the "Rival Character" was a faggy self-sacrificing kind-hearted dumbass who got nothing but abuse from the protagonist, too.
But instead of a lesson on Protagonist-Centered Morality, the writer was trying to teach a lesson about a concept he invented called "Middling Sues" aka characters that aren't obviously sues but are still terrible people terribly written, as if a character has to be the former to be the latter.
Like I said before, "Tara Gilsbie" would not write half a typo and then change it at the last second.
I can buy "Tara" accidentally calling Enoby "Tara" now and then.
But the times "Ta- Ebony" is written down?
Who the fuck "Verbally Backspaces(TM)" in a written work?
Just erase the fucking word and replace it.
Obvious trollfic, kinda funny but I've seen better trollfics.
And I'm not talking about the one I wrote.
I once saw a "Just terrible enough, but not too terrible" Pokemon fanfic written on Serebii. The protagonist was a morally reprehensible twat who ended up destroying the world, but because the story was told from that character's perspective, the audience agreed with the character until the final scene where Mewtwo comes down to say "Fuck you, world's dead".
IIRC the "Rival Character" was a faggy self-sacrificing kind-hearted dumbass who got nothing but abuse from the protagonist, too.
But instead of a lesson on Protagonist-Centered Morality, the writer was trying to teach a lesson about a concept he invented called "Middling Sues" aka characters that aren't obviously sues but are still terrible people terribly written, as if a character has to be the former to be the latter.
>>252736
Think it is like a comfort-zone for them. It is like dishes people eat often or fast-food. There are instresting, diverse, and probably beetter made food out there in resturants but I buy this hamburgar because it familiar and I know I will be content with it while I don't know that about these other things.
Think it is like a comfort-zone for them. It is like dishes people eat often or fast-food. There are instresting, diverse, and probably beetter made food out there in resturants but I buy this hamburgar because it familiar and I know I will be content with it while I don't know that about these other things.
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>>252603
The next subchapter begins with Rarity and Twilight apparently on their way to the school to help the students put on the play. Twilight is doubtlessly thrilled to live out yet another part of her unfulfilled motherhood fantasy by being a volunteer mom at a school event; I'll bet she even popped a couple breath mints this morning so Cheerilee won't smell the wine.
Anyway, after another brief "let's nod to the bronies by casually referencing something from the show" moment where Rarity talks a bit too much about Sweetie Belle's singing talent, the two unicorns arrive at the school. Cheerilee explains to them that the play is about the story of Princess Luna becoming Nightmare Moon.
What's interesting here is that, considering how obsessed Twilight has shown herself to be over Nyx's resemblance to NM, she shows no concern whatsoever over the choice of subject matter for her play. This is even more perplexing when you consider the earlier scene at the castle. Twilight has witnessed Nyx struggling with her dual nature, and it's clear that NM's personality is still in there somewhere. Again, I personally would not have chosen to build the story this way, but this is the route that Peen Stroke chose to go so I will address it accordingly.
The story is almost painfully inconsistent on this point. So far, Peen Stroke has spent much of his text bludgeoning us over the head with the fact that Nyx is the reincarnation of NM. It's clear that the incident at the castle was some kind of initial awakening event, in which the NM personality first manifested itself in Nyx. Assuming we're still running with the usual tropes and cliches to which this story seems to more or less want to adhere, it should follow that the primary conflict from here on out will be between Nyx and herself, struggling between her past as NM and her present existence as the filly Nyx, and that any event in the story that forces her to recall her past could serve as a trigger for the NM persona to take over. The cast list is printed in the text of the story, and from perusing this we learn that Nyx is actually playing the part of Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). Considering that Twilight has spent a fair chunk of the text so far obsessing about the fact that Nyx simply looks like NM, and has personally witnessed evidence that the resemblance is more than coincidental, shouldn't this raise some red flags for her? Apparently not, as she seems more interested in discussing the fact that Zecora will be narrating.
Peen Stroke, for his part, seems far more interested in casually dropping bronybait nods to the show than he is in developing his own story. For instance, we are informed that Pinkie Pie's "Giggle at the Ghostly" song will be included verbatim as part of the performance. Was this necessary? Moreover, as I mentioned above, the cast list is included in the text, and lists literally every single foal who will be playing the part of every single character from what is as far as I can tell a complete scene-by-scene reenactment of eps 1 & 2. More obnoxiously still, the names of obscure ponies contain hyperlinks to their wiki pages (I've mentioned before that I lividly hate it when authors do shit like this). The casting is fairly predictable anyway, with the CMC playing the parts of their big sisters, Nyx as NM, and DT/SS as Celestia and Luna respectively. These are the only roles that are really important enough to mention, since the remainder of the parts are being played by irrelevant background characters. However, Peen Stroke not only lists every single actor playing every single part (including incidental parts like trees), he even lists the names of set designers, costume designers, and stagehands (*cough*, excuse me, "stagehooves"). Curiously, there is no director. Anyway, this is just pure, undiluted autism and there's no excuse for it.
The advice I'd give Peen Stroke here hearkens back to something I remember telling Nigel way back when: while autistic attention to detail in world building can definitely enhance a story and make it more enjoyable, that doesn't mean that every detail you flesh out needs to make it into the actual text of the story. I personally find that when writing something with a detailed world like this, it helps to have two documents: one that contains the text of the story, and another that contains all of your notes and details about the world. In Nigel's case, the long explanations about how the Sonic-ripoff hoverboard thingies work are something that belong in the notes but not in the text. In Peen Stroke's case, things like which trivia-quiz background pony is playing Tree #4 in the Everfree Forest scene of the school play definitely fall into the same category.
What it boils down to is this: there are things the author needs to know in order to tell the story effectively, and generally it's better to be more detailed than less. Due to its being referenced repeatedly in this thread, I got curious and googled the text of My Immortal recently, and a story like that is a fine example of what you can wind up with if you don't put any thought or effort into world building. However, it's equally important to consider which details are important for the author to know, and which of these details need to be conveyed to the reader. Going back to Nigel's hoverboard example, it's good for the author to have a solid grasp of how a device like this device works, so that he can effectively deploy it in his scenes. However, the reader probably doesn't care that much and doesn't want to have the story broken in half just so the author can dump in a technical manual for a fictional machine. Likewise, Peen Stroke here is digressing from his own story in order to drop in irrelevant references to obscure characters that don't matter to anyone except the most autistic of fanboys.
Running out of space, I will continue in a new post.
The next subchapter begins with Rarity and Twilight apparently on their way to the school to help the students put on the play. Twilight is doubtlessly thrilled to live out yet another part of her unfulfilled motherhood fantasy by being a volunteer mom at a school event; I'll bet she even popped a couple breath mints this morning so Cheerilee won't smell the wine.
Anyway, after another brief "let's nod to the bronies by casually referencing something from the show" moment where Rarity talks a bit too much about Sweetie Belle's singing talent, the two unicorns arrive at the school. Cheerilee explains to them that the play is about the story of Princess Luna becoming Nightmare Moon.
What's interesting here is that, considering how obsessed Twilight has shown herself to be over Nyx's resemblance to NM, she shows no concern whatsoever over the choice of subject matter for her play. This is even more perplexing when you consider the earlier scene at the castle. Twilight has witnessed Nyx struggling with her dual nature, and it's clear that NM's personality is still in there somewhere. Again, I personally would not have chosen to build the story this way, but this is the route that Peen Stroke chose to go so I will address it accordingly.
The story is almost painfully inconsistent on this point. So far, Peen Stroke has spent much of his text bludgeoning us over the head with the fact that Nyx is the reincarnation of NM. It's clear that the incident at the castle was some kind of initial awakening event, in which the NM personality first manifested itself in Nyx. Assuming we're still running with the usual tropes and cliches to which this story seems to more or less want to adhere, it should follow that the primary conflict from here on out will be between Nyx and herself, struggling between her past as NM and her present existence as the filly Nyx, and that any event in the story that forces her to recall her past could serve as a trigger for the NM persona to take over. The cast list is printed in the text of the story, and from perusing this we learn that Nyx is actually playing the part of Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). Considering that Twilight has spent a fair chunk of the text so far obsessing about the fact that Nyx simply looks like NM, and has personally witnessed evidence that the resemblance is more than coincidental, shouldn't this raise some red flags for her? Apparently not, as she seems more interested in discussing the fact that Zecora will be narrating.
Peen Stroke, for his part, seems far more interested in casually dropping bronybait nods to the show than he is in developing his own story. For instance, we are informed that Pinkie Pie's "Giggle at the Ghostly" song will be included verbatim as part of the performance. Was this necessary? Moreover, as I mentioned above, the cast list is included in the text, and lists literally every single foal who will be playing the part of every single character from what is as far as I can tell a complete scene-by-scene reenactment of eps 1 & 2. More obnoxiously still, the names of obscure ponies contain hyperlinks to their wiki pages (I've mentioned before that I lividly hate it when authors do shit like this). The casting is fairly predictable anyway, with the CMC playing the parts of their big sisters, Nyx as NM, and DT/SS as Celestia and Luna respectively. These are the only roles that are really important enough to mention, since the remainder of the parts are being played by irrelevant background characters. However, Peen Stroke not only lists every single actor playing every single part (including incidental parts like trees), he even lists the names of set designers, costume designers, and stagehands (*cough*, excuse me, "stagehooves"). Curiously, there is no director. Anyway, this is just pure, undiluted autism and there's no excuse for it.
The advice I'd give Peen Stroke here hearkens back to something I remember telling Nigel way back when: while autistic attention to detail in world building can definitely enhance a story and make it more enjoyable, that doesn't mean that every detail you flesh out needs to make it into the actual text of the story. I personally find that when writing something with a detailed world like this, it helps to have two documents: one that contains the text of the story, and another that contains all of your notes and details about the world. In Nigel's case, the long explanations about how the Sonic-ripoff hoverboard thingies work are something that belong in the notes but not in the text. In Peen Stroke's case, things like which trivia-quiz background pony is playing Tree #4 in the Everfree Forest scene of the school play definitely fall into the same category.
What it boils down to is this: there are things the author needs to know in order to tell the story effectively, and generally it's better to be more detailed than less. Due to its being referenced repeatedly in this thread, I got curious and googled the text of My Immortal recently, and a story like that is a fine example of what you can wind up with if you don't put any thought or effort into world building. However, it's equally important to consider which details are important for the author to know, and which of these details need to be conveyed to the reader. Going back to Nigel's hoverboard example, it's good for the author to have a solid grasp of how a device like this device works, so that he can effectively deploy it in his scenes. However, the reader probably doesn't care that much and doesn't want to have the story broken in half just so the author can dump in a technical manual for a fictional machine. Likewise, Peen Stroke here is digressing from his own story in order to drop in irrelevant references to obscure characters that don't matter to anyone except the most autistic of fanboys.
Running out of space, I will continue in a new post.
>>252779
If you're writing a story in a universe you care about, and you want to really geek out about the details, that's perfectly fine. However, you still have to think like a writer and consider which details are important to the story you're telling and which details are just irrelevant digressions. A big problem I have with fanfiction in general is that most authors have no natural filter for this, and subsequently most fan works tend to become weighted down with a lot of pointless extra dialog, needless references, unnecessary character appearances, and general autistic fanboy/fangirl bullshit. However, it's also worth considering that the audience for fanfiction tends to consist mostly of, well, fans. Many fans like these kinds of details and are curious about them.
A good compromise imo is to write the text of the story conservatively, keeping the narrative tight and focusing only on what matters to the story you're telling, and then include extra information as appendices or footnotes if you want. In Peen Stroke's case, the program for this school play would be an example of something that is not important to the story, but might still be of interest to curious readers. The reader doesn't really need to know that Tornado Bolt played the faggy sea serpent with the mustache or that Dinky Doo played Twilight Sparkle; however, they might still be interested to read a cast list if it existed. Therefore, I would probably include the cast list as part of an appendix or maybe as supplementary material on an external website. Include a hyperlink to it somewhere outside the text, ie as a footnote or at the beginning or end. Never, NEVER, NEVER include hyperlinks in the actual text of a story.
Part of what irritates me about Past Sins so far is that it has a list of editors and assistants a mile long, it has been physically printed onto dead trees and sold commercially, and is in all regards presented to us as if it were a serious literary effort, and yet it constantly falls victim to these amateur-hour fanfiction pitfalls.
Anyway, moving on. Following the entire printed program showing the entire cast and crew of the play, Twilight and Rarity proceed to have a conversation in which they discuss Cheerilee's casting choices in exhaustive detail. We learn, for instance, that Sweetie Belle will be playing Rarity and Scootaloo will be playing Rainbow Dash. Dialog would have been the smarter way to reveal this information anyway, so I would like to once again register my objection to the inclusion of the complete cast list in the story's text. Also, quite a bit of this dialog is just more pointless bronybait references anyway: we get an extensive discussion of Zecora's rhyming prowess, a specific name dropping of the sea serpent, whose real name, of all things, is apparently "Steven Magnet" pic related........oh, here we go.
Finally, three quarters to the end of the chapter, we finally get Twilight and Rarity registering concern over the fact that Nyx is playing Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). Considering that the subject of the play is literally the battle between the mane 6 and Nightmare Moon, it stands to reason that Nightmare Moon would be a significant character. It seems to me that Twilight, the autistic book nerd who is constantly obsessing over Nyx's resemblance to NM, would have made this connection immediately. The first thing on her mind when hearing what the play is about should have been "who is playing Nightmare Moon and why is it probably Nyx?", but instead we get a bunch of inane discussion about Scootaloo and Zecora and Steven cocksucking Magnet, and then she finally fucking notices. Another issue with this is since the cast list was included in the text prior to this discussion, the reader is already aware that Nyx is playing NM, and has probably been pondering exactly what I was pondering.
All in all, the play is not a bad direction for the story to go, but this scene is written very poorly. Even though the reader has probably guessed that Nyx is playing NM, it's still technically the chapter's big reveal and it needs to be handled as such. The way it's structured is basically this: Twilight and Rarity go to Cheerilee's. They learn what the play is about, and instead of this immediately raising alarm bells for them as it logically should, they proceed to talk about Pinkie Pie's song and a bunch of other dumb stuff. Then, Cheerilee hands them the cast list, which the reader is able to read in full before the ponies do. Then, instead of immediately addressing the elephant in the room, Twi and Rarara proceed to talk about Zecora and Steven "I'm almost as gay as Silver 'I, personally, am quite gay' Star" Magnet and a bunch of other dumb stuff. Then, finally, Twilight notices who is playing NM, and reacts basically appropriately. This is dumb, illogical, and has no impact.
A better way to structure it would be this: Twilight and Rarity go to Cheerilee's. Cheerilee doesn't give them the script or tell them what the play is about yet, but she mentions that the mane 6 are characters and that the CMC will be playing their sisters. Twi and Rarity are excited about seeing the play and helping out with the production. If I wanted to include all that crap about Steven "seriously, put a dick in my mouth" Magnet and Pinkie Pie's song, this is where I'd put it. Finally, Twi asks to see the script, which Cheerilee then gives her. She notices the title, and it alarms her, though she isn't quite sure why. She casually asks what the play is about. Cheerilee explains the premise and the fact that it was Nyx's idea. Twilight is all like "oh shit this ain't good" and flips to the cast page, sees that Nyx is playing NM, and reacts appropriately. As I said earlier, I would not include the complete cast list in the text. This is a far more natural and logical way for these events to flow, imo.
If you're writing a story in a universe you care about, and you want to really geek out about the details, that's perfectly fine. However, you still have to think like a writer and consider which details are important to the story you're telling and which details are just irrelevant digressions. A big problem I have with fanfiction in general is that most authors have no natural filter for this, and subsequently most fan works tend to become weighted down with a lot of pointless extra dialog, needless references, unnecessary character appearances, and general autistic fanboy/fangirl bullshit. However, it's also worth considering that the audience for fanfiction tends to consist mostly of, well, fans. Many fans like these kinds of details and are curious about them.
A good compromise imo is to write the text of the story conservatively, keeping the narrative tight and focusing only on what matters to the story you're telling, and then include extra information as appendices or footnotes if you want. In Peen Stroke's case, the program for this school play would be an example of something that is not important to the story, but might still be of interest to curious readers. The reader doesn't really need to know that Tornado Bolt played the faggy sea serpent with the mustache or that Dinky Doo played Twilight Sparkle; however, they might still be interested to read a cast list if it existed. Therefore, I would probably include the cast list as part of an appendix or maybe as supplementary material on an external website. Include a hyperlink to it somewhere outside the text, ie as a footnote or at the beginning or end. Never, NEVER, NEVER include hyperlinks in the actual text of a story.
Part of what irritates me about Past Sins so far is that it has a list of editors and assistants a mile long, it has been physically printed onto dead trees and sold commercially, and is in all regards presented to us as if it were a serious literary effort, and yet it constantly falls victim to these amateur-hour fanfiction pitfalls.
Anyway, moving on. Following the entire printed program showing the entire cast and crew of the play, Twilight and Rarity proceed to have a conversation in which they discuss Cheerilee's casting choices in exhaustive detail. We learn, for instance, that Sweetie Belle will be playing Rarity and Scootaloo will be playing Rainbow Dash. Dialog would have been the smarter way to reveal this information anyway, so I would like to once again register my objection to the inclusion of the complete cast list in the story's text. Also, quite a bit of this dialog is just more pointless bronybait references anyway: we get an extensive discussion of Zecora's rhyming prowess, a specific name dropping of the sea serpent, whose real name, of all things, is apparently "Steven Magnet" pic related........oh, here we go.
Finally, three quarters to the end of the chapter, we finally get Twilight and Rarity registering concern over the fact that Nyx is playing Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). Considering that the subject of the play is literally the battle between the mane 6 and Nightmare Moon, it stands to reason that Nightmare Moon would be a significant character. It seems to me that Twilight, the autistic book nerd who is constantly obsessing over Nyx's resemblance to NM, would have made this connection immediately. The first thing on her mind when hearing what the play is about should have been "who is playing Nightmare Moon and why is it probably Nyx?", but instead we get a bunch of inane discussion about Scootaloo and Zecora and Steven cocksucking Magnet, and then she finally fucking notices. Another issue with this is since the cast list was included in the text prior to this discussion, the reader is already aware that Nyx is playing NM, and has probably been pondering exactly what I was pondering.
All in all, the play is not a bad direction for the story to go, but this scene is written very poorly. Even though the reader has probably guessed that Nyx is playing NM, it's still technically the chapter's big reveal and it needs to be handled as such. The way it's structured is basically this: Twilight and Rarity go to Cheerilee's. They learn what the play is about, and instead of this immediately raising alarm bells for them as it logically should, they proceed to talk about Pinkie Pie's song and a bunch of other dumb stuff. Then, Cheerilee hands them the cast list, which the reader is able to read in full before the ponies do. Then, instead of immediately addressing the elephant in the room, Twi and Rarara proceed to talk about Zecora and Steven "I'm almost as gay as Silver 'I, personally, am quite gay' Star" Magnet and a bunch of other dumb stuff. Then, finally, Twilight notices who is playing NM, and reacts basically appropriately. This is dumb, illogical, and has no impact.
A better way to structure it would be this: Twilight and Rarity go to Cheerilee's. Cheerilee doesn't give them the script or tell them what the play is about yet, but she mentions that the mane 6 are characters and that the CMC will be playing their sisters. Twi and Rarity are excited about seeing the play and helping out with the production. If I wanted to include all that crap about Steven "seriously, put a dick in my mouth" Magnet and Pinkie Pie's song, this is where I'd put it. Finally, Twi asks to see the script, which Cheerilee then gives her. She notices the title, and it alarms her, though she isn't quite sure why. She casually asks what the play is about. Cheerilee explains the premise and the fact that it was Nyx's idea. Twilight is all like "oh shit this ain't good" and flips to the cast page, sees that Nyx is playing NM, and reacts appropriately. As I said earlier, I would not include the complete cast list in the text. This is a far more natural and logical way for these events to flow, imo.
>>252783
Nyx: "I had terrifying flashbacks that revealed to me that I might be Nightmare Moon, I better put on a play about her return and play as her to rehabilitate stress."
Twi: "Yes, I as your paranoid caretaker who has you dressed in a disguise and kept your existence from my teacher, the ruler of Equestria, sees no problems with that."
Cheerlie: "I as Nyx's teacher, who knows that she has been the victim of bullying, thinks it is a wonderful idea to have Nyx play as Nightmare Moon. Nyx's resemblance to Nightmare Moon makes her the obvious candidate for the role. I can't see how putting the idea of this resemblance between her and literal pony satan into the heads of her bullies could go wrong."
Nyx: "I had terrifying flashbacks that revealed to me that I might be Nightmare Moon, I better put on a play about her return and play as her to rehabilitate stress."
Twi: "Yes, I as your paranoid caretaker who has you dressed in a disguise and kept your existence from my teacher, the ruler of Equestria, sees no problems with that."
Cheerlie: "I as Nyx's teacher, who knows that she has been the victim of bullying, thinks it is a wonderful idea to have Nyx play as Nightmare Moon. Nyx's resemblance to Nightmare Moon makes her the obvious candidate for the role. I can't see how putting the idea of this resemblance between her and literal pony satan into the heads of her bullies could go wrong."
>>252809
ySometimes I think the "Silver Star Apple" name was stupid. It works for branding but what pony has three names? Star Apple is a type of apple, Silver Star brings to mind sherrifs and whitish silver stars. The name is Silver's subconscious way of rubbing it in everyone's stupid face that yes, he is an apple pony. Still, Silver Blaze is a sherlock reference and Silver Fox sounds cool.
ySometimes I think the "Silver Star Apple" name was stupid. It works for branding but what pony has three names? Star Apple is a type of apple, Silver Star brings to mind sherrifs and whitish silver stars. The name is Silver's subconscious way of rubbing it in everyone's stupid face that yes, he is an apple pony. Still, Silver Blaze is a sherlock reference and Silver Fox sounds cool.
>>252831
It is funny you know. I made a precious almost self-insert pony oc back when. Her name was Fair Star. She was a unicorn with light grey fur and white mane.
I nean what are the odds?
Regardless, I'm okay with it. If there is a story behind it. Like, his mother was a unicorn, right? Then couldn't "Star" be her-side of the family's name? As in, it was her last name before she married this apple earth pony.
So like he is named either, Silver Star or Silver Apple but he wants to keep the name from one-side of the family.
Here I expose the plans I had for the prequal fic to your fic starring Silver Star that I had at one time intended to write.
In it, Silver Star's mother has kept Silver from other unicorns and never explained that he could do magic at all. "Hehe, JK. Rowling called, she wanted to say she wants her book back but changed it in midsentence to that quidditch was invented by a gay wizard that used to hang from his broomstick from his anus.
Anyway, so during an apple family reunion Silver gets his cutie mark and simultanously bursts out a bunch or spells from his horn and stuff.
The point is that, while his mother, the unicorn, now that he knows that he has magic forbids him from using it. But his uncle, on his father's side and who lives in Manehatten, disagree with his self-hating unicorn mother and when Silver visits him, he takes him to a magic dual in the city. After that, there is conflict between his mother and him and it results in him leaving his family behind as he inherit his mother's mansion in Canterlot before he begins to study magic there.
Don't know why I told you about this. It doesn't really matter in any way or form but wahtever.
It is funny you know. I made a precious almost self-insert pony oc back when. Her name was Fair Star. She was a unicorn with light grey fur and white mane.
I nean what are the odds?
Regardless, I'm okay with it. If there is a story behind it. Like, his mother was a unicorn, right? Then couldn't "Star" be her-side of the family's name? As in, it was her last name before she married this apple earth pony.
So like he is named either, Silver Star or Silver Apple but he wants to keep the name from one-side of the family.
Here I expose the plans I had for the prequal fic to your fic starring Silver Star that I had at one time intended to write.
In it, Silver Star's mother has kept Silver from other unicorns and never explained that he could do magic at all. "Hehe, JK. Rowling called, she wanted to say she wants her book back but changed it in midsentence to that quidditch was invented by a gay wizard that used to hang from his broomstick from his anus.
Anyway, so during an apple family reunion Silver gets his cutie mark and simultanously bursts out a bunch or spells from his horn and stuff.
The point is that, while his mother, the unicorn, now that he knows that he has magic forbids him from using it. But his uncle, on his father's side and who lives in Manehatten, disagree with his self-hating unicorn mother and when Silver visits him, he takes him to a magic dual in the city. After that, there is conflict between his mother and him and it results in him leaving his family behind as he inherit his mother's mansion in Canterlot before he begins to study magic there.
Don't know why I told you about this. It doesn't really matter in any way or form but wahtever.
File (): 82B6206872724C13E9020E672DC6F08B-8463.jpg (8.3 KB, 300x168, download.jpeg)
>>252783
The next subchapter opens with Twilight and Nyx having dinner. We learn that the play will be attended by Celestia and Luna, and that Twilight is (predictably) conflicted over whether or not she should allow Nyx to be in the play. In terms of its writing, this scene is actually handled fairly well. I have a couple of minor quibbles, which I will get out of the way quickly:
>It had been a few weeks since she had found out Nyx was going to be Nightmare Moon in the play, and, over those two weeks, Twilight had agonized over what to do.
It's not a hard and fast rule, but generally "a few" is assumed to refer to groups of more than two. In this context, "a few weeks" conveys the impression that it's been anywhere from three weeks to over a month since the last scene. It is then immediately clarified that the time frame is two weeks. In that case, I would probably say "a couple of weeks" instead of "a few weeks".
The second thing is that it's a little jarring that Twilight makes this decision so suddenly, and apparently at the last minute. The text states that she has been "agonizing" over the question, and it stands to reason that she would indeed be agonizing. On the one hand, Nyx is excited about the play and Twilight wants her to have fun. On the other hand, Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). However, even though she's understandably conflicted, she should still realize that it's not just a cut and dry matter of saying "no" at this point. There's also the fact that Nyx is playing an important character that can't easily be recast. Furthermore, the play is going to be attended by the Royal Sisters and it is thus important that the performance go smoothly. Twilight is kind of handing Cheerilee a bag of shit by yanking Nyx out of the play at the last minute, and she would logically realize this. That is something that she would have to factor into her decision too. If she was going to forbid Nyx from being in the play, it's something she should have made up her mind about a while ago.
However, making random, impulsive decisions with potentially destructive consequences based on emotion alone is characteristic of crazy box-wine-guzzling single aunts, so there's also that. Ultimately, it makes sense for Twilight to forbid Nyx from being in the play, and it creates conflict and tension between the two of them. From a story perspective I think its a good direction to go and I have no problem with it; I just think that she makes the decision a little too abruptly. If I were rewriting it, I'd probably either dial back the time a little so the decision is made sooner, or else have Twilight and Nyx get into an argument that ends, rather than begins, with Nyx being yanked from the play.
That said, here's what I think this scene does well. Considering that the decision is being made in Twilight's head, I'd like to commend Peen Stroke for not spending an inordinate amount of time inside Twilight's head. I've documented in previous posts that too much narration is devoted to Twilight's inner thoughts and reasoning processes, rather than focusing on character interactions. That problem has been corrected here. We have essentially two short paragraphs that detail Twilight's thinking, and both of them also serve to convey relevant information, namely that the play will be attended by Celestia and Luna. The rest of the subchapter is dedicated to a dialogue exchange between Twilight and Nyx. This is the proper way to handle an event like this.
One could probably argue that Twilight is being unreasonable in that she simply forbids Nyx from being in the play without telling her why; however, I think this is by design. I suspect that Nyx's character arc is meant to be a series of frustrations and disappointments that culminates with her succumbing to the Nightmare Moon personality at its climax. Being bullied obviously fits this pattern, and feeling that Twilight, the pony whom she trusts and loves, has betrayed her in some way would also fit. That the reader knows that Twilight's true intention is not malevolent but actually the exact opposite adds a nice layer of tragedy to the whole thing. Also, we've already had a scene in which Nyx was introduced to NM's anger and hatred towards Twilight, and was initially terrified that there were thoughts of hurting her adoptive mother buried somewhere inside her. However, if Nyx begins to believe that Twilight is mistreating her in some way, these feelings will likely begin to make more sense to her, and she will be more inclined to listen to NM's influence.
My various complaints aside, I feel like this play is potentially a good direction for the story and I'm curious to see what Peen Stroke ends up doing with it.
Anyway, in the next subchapter, it's apparently the night of the play. Twilight, continuing to play the part of the insane, borderline-abusive wine-aunt, announces to Nyx that she and Spike will be attending the play that she has forbidden Nyx from performing in, then locks her up in the house and leaves the key with the fucking owl.
I'd like to highlight a couple of small things here that I enjoyed:
>Nyx: I’m supposed to be Nightmare Moon, and you can’t tell the story without Nightmare Moon.
>Owl: Hoo?
>Nyx: Nightmare Moon, the bad mare!
This joke has been done to death, but for some reason it never gets old.
>She even pushed out her bottom lip, pouting just as Sweetie Belle had taught her.
Pretend-pouting to get her way seems like the kind of tactic Sweetie Belle would have mastered, and I think this is a nice detail. Though I find many of his original characters to be a tad underdeveloped, I will say that Peen Stroke has so far exhibited a pretty good grasp on the personalities and mannerisms of most of the canon characters.
Anyway, Nyx convinces the owl to let her out. She dresses up in her costume but the fake wings break. She decides to use her real ones instead. What could go wrong?
The next subchapter opens with Twilight and Nyx having dinner. We learn that the play will be attended by Celestia and Luna, and that Twilight is (predictably) conflicted over whether or not she should allow Nyx to be in the play. In terms of its writing, this scene is actually handled fairly well. I have a couple of minor quibbles, which I will get out of the way quickly:
>It had been a few weeks since she had found out Nyx was going to be Nightmare Moon in the play, and, over those two weeks, Twilight had agonized over what to do.
It's not a hard and fast rule, but generally "a few" is assumed to refer to groups of more than two. In this context, "a few weeks" conveys the impression that it's been anywhere from three weeks to over a month since the last scene. It is then immediately clarified that the time frame is two weeks. In that case, I would probably say "a couple of weeks" instead of "a few weeks".
The second thing is that it's a little jarring that Twilight makes this decision so suddenly, and apparently at the last minute. The text states that she has been "agonizing" over the question, and it stands to reason that she would indeed be agonizing. On the one hand, Nyx is excited about the play and Twilight wants her to have fun. On the other hand, Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). However, even though she's understandably conflicted, she should still realize that it's not just a cut and dry matter of saying "no" at this point. There's also the fact that Nyx is playing an important character that can't easily be recast. Furthermore, the play is going to be attended by the Royal Sisters and it is thus important that the performance go smoothly. Twilight is kind of handing Cheerilee a bag of shit by yanking Nyx out of the play at the last minute, and she would logically realize this. That is something that she would have to factor into her decision too. If she was going to forbid Nyx from being in the play, it's something she should have made up her mind about a while ago.
However, making random, impulsive decisions with potentially destructive consequences based on emotion alone is characteristic of crazy box-wine-guzzling single aunts, so there's also that. Ultimately, it makes sense for Twilight to forbid Nyx from being in the play, and it creates conflict and tension between the two of them. From a story perspective I think its a good direction to go and I have no problem with it; I just think that she makes the decision a little too abruptly. If I were rewriting it, I'd probably either dial back the time a little so the decision is made sooner, or else have Twilight and Nyx get into an argument that ends, rather than begins, with Nyx being yanked from the play.
That said, here's what I think this scene does well. Considering that the decision is being made in Twilight's head, I'd like to commend Peen Stroke for not spending an inordinate amount of time inside Twilight's head. I've documented in previous posts that too much narration is devoted to Twilight's inner thoughts and reasoning processes, rather than focusing on character interactions. That problem has been corrected here. We have essentially two short paragraphs that detail Twilight's thinking, and both of them also serve to convey relevant information, namely that the play will be attended by Celestia and Luna. The rest of the subchapter is dedicated to a dialogue exchange between Twilight and Nyx. This is the proper way to handle an event like this.
One could probably argue that Twilight is being unreasonable in that she simply forbids Nyx from being in the play without telling her why; however, I think this is by design. I suspect that Nyx's character arc is meant to be a series of frustrations and disappointments that culminates with her succumbing to the Nightmare Moon personality at its climax. Being bullied obviously fits this pattern, and feeling that Twilight, the pony whom she trusts and loves, has betrayed her in some way would also fit. That the reader knows that Twilight's true intention is not malevolent but actually the exact opposite adds a nice layer of tragedy to the whole thing. Also, we've already had a scene in which Nyx was introduced to NM's anger and hatred towards Twilight, and was initially terrified that there were thoughts of hurting her adoptive mother buried somewhere inside her. However, if Nyx begins to believe that Twilight is mistreating her in some way, these feelings will likely begin to make more sense to her, and she will be more inclined to listen to NM's influence.
My various complaints aside, I feel like this play is potentially a good direction for the story and I'm curious to see what Peen Stroke ends up doing with it.
Anyway, in the next subchapter, it's apparently the night of the play. Twilight, continuing to play the part of the insane, borderline-abusive wine-aunt, announces to Nyx that she and Spike will be attending the play that she has forbidden Nyx from performing in, then locks her up in the house and leaves the key with the fucking owl.
I'd like to highlight a couple of small things here that I enjoyed:
>Nyx: I’m supposed to be Nightmare Moon, and you can’t tell the story without Nightmare Moon.
>Owl: Hoo?
>Nyx: Nightmare Moon, the bad mare!
This joke has been done to death, but for some reason it never gets old.
>She even pushed out her bottom lip, pouting just as Sweetie Belle had taught her.
Pretend-pouting to get her way seems like the kind of tactic Sweetie Belle would have mastered, and I think this is a nice detail. Though I find many of his original characters to be a tad underdeveloped, I will say that Peen Stroke has so far exhibited a pretty good grasp on the personalities and mannerisms of most of the canon characters.
Anyway, Nyx convinces the owl to let her out. She dresses up in her costume but the fake wings break. She decides to use her real ones instead. What could go wrong?
File (): C08C3DF6DDB63FA6B672A0D6D1EEAD96-37161.jpg (36.3 KB, 500x500, pengin.jpeg)
>>252853
Chapter 6: Reunion of the Royal Pony Sisters
I'd like to start this chapter off by highlighting a potential small continuity error.
>A large, temporary stage with a professional setup of lights and similar grade equipment had been constructed on one side of the plaza that surrounded the town hall.
This is how the stage is described in this chapter. However, in Chapter 5, we have this:
>While the school and its playground were set up on one side of the path, the school’s outdoor stage, the one and only permanent stage in Ponyville, was set up on the opposite side of the road.
I don't know the layout of Ponyville that well, but my suspicion is that these stages are meant to be in two different locations. It seems odd that Peen Stroke would go to the trouble of mentioning that the school has its own outdoor stage, and then set the actual performance on a temporary stage in the center of town. It also seems odd considering that the school's stage is described as being the only permanent stage in Ponyville, which suggests that it is probably used as the town's general-purpose stage. It seems like it would make a lot more sense for the Spring Festival to be held near the school, since a stage already exists there, than it would to construct a special stage just for the event. It doesn't really break continuity because it's still plausible that the location of the festival was moved for some reason, but I suspect the author simply forgot that he had given the school its own stage already. Again, not a huge deal, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
Anyway, the scene opens with Twilight & Co. sitting in the VIP section with Celestia and Luna. An earlier play has just concluded, and the ponies are discussing what they liked about it. Discussion then moves on to the next play, which is of course The Reunion of the Royal Pony Sisters.
>“Personally, I ain’t as excited,” Applejack admitted. “I know Apple Bloom wouldn’t mean ta, but she could right easily make me look like a fool, and I don’t need no ponies snickerin’ behind my back because of this.”
Not sure what direction Mr. Stroke plans to go with this, but personally I think it would be funny to have AB do an embarrassing, exaggerated hillbilly portrayal of her sister. If SB did something similar with Rarity that would be funny too.
However, of more interest to us is this little nugget from Twilight:
>“Well, I… I wouldn’t get your hopes up, girls. Nyx wasn’t feeling well earlier,” Twilight lied.
This, along with the direction the conversation goes from here, suggests that Twilight really hasn't told anypony that Nyx is staying home tonight. This basically confirms that she locked up Nyx in the house on a last-minute impulse, and then sauntered off to attend the play without bothering to tell anypony that Nyx wouldn't be in it or even thinking up a plausible excuse as to why. It can be presumed that she didn't even tell Cheerilee, which is a massive dick move on her part. Forcing her to drop out a couple of days before the performance would have been bad enough, but at least there would have been time for another student to step in and take over the role. It's not as if Nyx is just playing some incidental background part, either; she is playing one of the starring roles.
Twilight basically forces the star of Cheerilee's play to stay home on the night of the performance, and then she just leaves the situation in limbo without even bothering to give Cheerilee a heads up about it. Cheerilee is now in a position where a major character in her show is MIA with no explanation, and everyone in town along with the rulers of Equestria are sitting in the bleachers expecting a play. Meanwhile, Twilight just heads up to the VIP booth like everything's fine and dandy, and just sits there with her friends eating popcorn and waiting for the fireworks to start. This goes well beyond handing Cheerilee a bag of shit; this is basically her shitting into a feedbag, assuring Cheerilee that the feedbag is full of butterscotch pudding, strapping it to her muzzle with magic, and then standing there laughing while her mudpony ass hops around trying to get it off once she realizes what's in it. And bear in mind that all of this is done on top of locking Nyx up in the house like a prisoner and not telling her why, and leaving her under the supervision of her fucking pet owl to boot. Loony wine-aunt indeed.
Anyway, I know I said earlier that Peen Stroke is generally good at characterizing the canon show characters, and for the most part he is. I would, however, like to draw attention to some of Luna's dialog:
>Luna turned to face Twilight and put on a reassuring smile. “Furthermore, I’ve been informed that this play is not meant to dwell on my sins but to celebrate my return to my true self. It is also performed by elementary school children. If anything, it will make ponies laugh at Nightmare Moon… and I think it would be nice to see that particular part of my past portrayed comically. You do not need to worry about my welfare, though I thank you for asking.”
I find this dialog to be almost wincingly stiff and awkward. Maybe that was the intent, but while most of the time I can easily visualize these characters speaking their lines out loud, I have a difficult time hearing these words as spoken by Luna. In Peen Stroke's defense, Luna imo is one of the most complex characters in MLP and is probably the most difficult to write well, particularly in the early era of the series where she did a lot of jumping back and forth between the Royal Canterlot voice and a more casual dialect. It's also worth noting that in this scene Luna is about to watch a play about herself becoming evil and trying to murder everyone. There's not really a way to have that conversation and make it not awkward. However, the inescapable fact is that this dialog is wooden and unconvincing.
Chapter 6: Reunion of the Royal Pony Sisters
I'd like to start this chapter off by highlighting a potential small continuity error.
>A large, temporary stage with a professional setup of lights and similar grade equipment had been constructed on one side of the plaza that surrounded the town hall.
This is how the stage is described in this chapter. However, in Chapter 5, we have this:
>While the school and its playground were set up on one side of the path, the school’s outdoor stage, the one and only permanent stage in Ponyville, was set up on the opposite side of the road.
I don't know the layout of Ponyville that well, but my suspicion is that these stages are meant to be in two different locations. It seems odd that Peen Stroke would go to the trouble of mentioning that the school has its own outdoor stage, and then set the actual performance on a temporary stage in the center of town. It also seems odd considering that the school's stage is described as being the only permanent stage in Ponyville, which suggests that it is probably used as the town's general-purpose stage. It seems like it would make a lot more sense for the Spring Festival to be held near the school, since a stage already exists there, than it would to construct a special stage just for the event. It doesn't really break continuity because it's still plausible that the location of the festival was moved for some reason, but I suspect the author simply forgot that he had given the school its own stage already. Again, not a huge deal, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
Anyway, the scene opens with Twilight & Co. sitting in the VIP section with Celestia and Luna. An earlier play has just concluded, and the ponies are discussing what they liked about it. Discussion then moves on to the next play, which is of course The Reunion of the Royal Pony Sisters.
>“Personally, I ain’t as excited,” Applejack admitted. “I know Apple Bloom wouldn’t mean ta, but she could right easily make me look like a fool, and I don’t need no ponies snickerin’ behind my back because of this.”
Not sure what direction Mr. Stroke plans to go with this, but personally I think it would be funny to have AB do an embarrassing, exaggerated hillbilly portrayal of her sister. If SB did something similar with Rarity that would be funny too.
However, of more interest to us is this little nugget from Twilight:
>“Well, I… I wouldn’t get your hopes up, girls. Nyx wasn’t feeling well earlier,” Twilight lied.
This, along with the direction the conversation goes from here, suggests that Twilight really hasn't told anypony that Nyx is staying home tonight. This basically confirms that she locked up Nyx in the house on a last-minute impulse, and then sauntered off to attend the play without bothering to tell anypony that Nyx wouldn't be in it or even thinking up a plausible excuse as to why. It can be presumed that she didn't even tell Cheerilee, which is a massive dick move on her part. Forcing her to drop out a couple of days before the performance would have been bad enough, but at least there would have been time for another student to step in and take over the role. It's not as if Nyx is just playing some incidental background part, either; she is playing one of the starring roles.
Twilight basically forces the star of Cheerilee's play to stay home on the night of the performance, and then she just leaves the situation in limbo without even bothering to give Cheerilee a heads up about it. Cheerilee is now in a position where a major character in her show is MIA with no explanation, and everyone in town along with the rulers of Equestria are sitting in the bleachers expecting a play. Meanwhile, Twilight just heads up to the VIP booth like everything's fine and dandy, and just sits there with her friends eating popcorn and waiting for the fireworks to start. This goes well beyond handing Cheerilee a bag of shit; this is basically her shitting into a feedbag, assuring Cheerilee that the feedbag is full of butterscotch pudding, strapping it to her muzzle with magic, and then standing there laughing while her mudpony ass hops around trying to get it off once she realizes what's in it. And bear in mind that all of this is done on top of locking Nyx up in the house like a prisoner and not telling her why, and leaving her under the supervision of her fucking pet owl to boot. Loony wine-aunt indeed.
Anyway, I know I said earlier that Peen Stroke is generally good at characterizing the canon show characters, and for the most part he is. I would, however, like to draw attention to some of Luna's dialog:
>Luna turned to face Twilight and put on a reassuring smile. “Furthermore, I’ve been informed that this play is not meant to dwell on my sins but to celebrate my return to my true self. It is also performed by elementary school children. If anything, it will make ponies laugh at Nightmare Moon… and I think it would be nice to see that particular part of my past portrayed comically. You do not need to worry about my welfare, though I thank you for asking.”
I find this dialog to be almost wincingly stiff and awkward. Maybe that was the intent, but while most of the time I can easily visualize these characters speaking their lines out loud, I have a difficult time hearing these words as spoken by Luna. In Peen Stroke's defense, Luna imo is one of the most complex characters in MLP and is probably the most difficult to write well, particularly in the early era of the series where she did a lot of jumping back and forth between the Royal Canterlot voice and a more casual dialect. It's also worth noting that in this scene Luna is about to watch a play about herself becoming evil and trying to murder everyone. There's not really a way to have that conversation and make it not awkward. However, the inescapable fact is that this dialog is wooden and unconvincing.
>>252856
>“Oh, you’re welcome, Princess,” Twilight said, smiling both because Luna was doing well and because she had successfully redirected the conversation.
This is also a very awkward line. Generally it's not a good idea to say that someone is smiling and then explicitly state their reasons. It's sort of like saying "she laughed because it was funny", it just feels redundant and awkward. A general rule when writing any sort of fiction is to try to convey emotion through the character's actions and expressions rather than just stating how they're feeling.
>It was then the Mayor Mare of Ponyville, Ivory Scroll, walked out to the center of the stage, once more playing her part as the Spring Festival’s Master of Ceremonies.
I have to say, one unexpected result of my reading this work has been that I am learning a lot of random trivia about the show. For instance, I had no idea the Mayor's real name was Ivory Scroll or that the semen serpent's name was Steven "thanks Rarity now please replace the other side of my mustache with stallion pubes so I can pretend I have balls on my chin" Magnet. Whatever criticism I might be able to justifiably lob at him as a writer, I can't fault Peen Stroke's thorough knowledge of this universe and its characters.
Anyway, I'm starting to fall back into my old habit of nitpicky greentext quoting, so I'll move on.
Other than the regrettable rhyming of "envious" with "oblivious" (smack yourself for that, Peen Stroke), Zecora's rhymes and speech patterns are spot-on here. The visual description of the play is also very well done. The image painted here manages to evoke not just the story being told, but the fact that it's being presented as a children's play. I don't personally care for the commentary that the mane 6 interject, but that may just be a personal preference. All in all, this may actually be the best scene in the story so far.
>Diamond Tiara, in her moment of panic, had reverted to her normal, snooty way of speaking, and her voice was a comically inappropriate match for any princess.
This sentence is unnecessary, it just explains something that's already obvious. I'll stop now.
Anyway, as I was saying, I actually think this scene is quite well done. I also like that the play-by-play description stops after act one concludes and we are just given a basic synopsis of events from there. I was beginning to worry that this chapter might just be a scene-by-scene recreation of the series opener by the students, but it includes just enough of the play to give us a sense of it without drawing it out too much. It resumes the play by play at just about the right time as well. Again, the visual here is excellent. I can see everything perfectly as I read this: the kids on the stage, the audience laughing and having fun, the crappy yet somehow impressive special effects, Zecora narrating. Little details like Diamond Tiara forgetting her lines and improvising in her normal voice and Nyx doing a bad evil laugh really add to the effect as well. This whole scene really captures not only the tone and feeling of an elementary school play, but of the show itself as well. All in all, I'm quite impressed with it. Today, Peen Stroke was not a faggot.
With that said, it's a bit illogical that nopony, particularly the Princesses, seem to notice Nyx's actual resemblance to the actual Nightmare Moon. While Twilight's fears about Nyx being banished to the moon are probably unfounded, I do agree with her that Celestia and particularly Luna ought to pick up on something being slightly off here. The mane, as stated in the text, is just a bad costume prop, and from a distance in the dark it would probably be hard for anyone to see that her wings are actually real. However, the eyes would be hard to fake, because the only way to do it would be either contact lenses (which I'm not sure exist in this world) or a magical spell, which would probably be a bit over the top for a school play. This combined with the fact that this strange filly is apparently Twilight's cousin that she never told anyone about should probably raise suspicion as well.
The more I get my noggin joggin on the subject, the more I'm beginning to think that one of the major underlying flaws of this story is that Nyx's character design was bad to begin with. Not bad in the sense that it's visually bad, but bad in that it complicates the story in ways that are a pain in the ass for an author to deal with.
The biggest problem is that she looks exactly like Nightmare Moon. It's pretty much the first thing anyone notices about her. This is used more or less effectively as a plot device at times, but at times like this it just makes things overly complicated. Celestia and Luna should logically notice that Nyx's costume is a little too good, and this combined with the fact that she's a mysterious filly who just showed up here claiming to be Twilight's cousin should at a minimum make them curious about her. However, this development doesn't seem to be convenient to wherever Peen Stroke wants the story to go, so he solves it by invoking his author's privilege to just have them not notice for some reason.
Personally, I'd handle this by altering Nyx's design slightly. I'd keep the black coat and the purple mane, but I'd give her normal eyes and make her a regular unicorn instead of an alicorn. If I understand the lore correctly, alicorn status is usually attained rather than inborn, which means that logically a filly version of an alicorn would just be a unicorn. Even though she's the distillation of the NM persona, I feel like she should more closely resemble Luna and just gain the NM appearance when the power eventually manifests. This way the NM resemblance is still there, but it doesn't slap you across the face every time you see her.
I'd actually like to update my alternate-universe version of this story to reflect this, which I'll probably do in my next post.
>“Oh, you’re welcome, Princess,” Twilight said, smiling both because Luna was doing well and because she had successfully redirected the conversation.
This is also a very awkward line. Generally it's not a good idea to say that someone is smiling and then explicitly state their reasons. It's sort of like saying "she laughed because it was funny", it just feels redundant and awkward. A general rule when writing any sort of fiction is to try to convey emotion through the character's actions and expressions rather than just stating how they're feeling.
>It was then the Mayor Mare of Ponyville, Ivory Scroll, walked out to the center of the stage, once more playing her part as the Spring Festival’s Master of Ceremonies.
I have to say, one unexpected result of my reading this work has been that I am learning a lot of random trivia about the show. For instance, I had no idea the Mayor's real name was Ivory Scroll or that the semen serpent's name was Steven "thanks Rarity now please replace the other side of my mustache with stallion pubes so I can pretend I have balls on my chin" Magnet. Whatever criticism I might be able to justifiably lob at him as a writer, I can't fault Peen Stroke's thorough knowledge of this universe and its characters.
Anyway, I'm starting to fall back into my old habit of nitpicky greentext quoting, so I'll move on.
Other than the regrettable rhyming of "envious" with "oblivious" (smack yourself for that, Peen Stroke), Zecora's rhymes and speech patterns are spot-on here. The visual description of the play is also very well done. The image painted here manages to evoke not just the story being told, but the fact that it's being presented as a children's play. I don't personally care for the commentary that the mane 6 interject, but that may just be a personal preference. All in all, this may actually be the best scene in the story so far.
>Diamond Tiara, in her moment of panic, had reverted to her normal, snooty way of speaking, and her voice was a comically inappropriate match for any princess.
This sentence is unnecessary, it just explains something that's already obvious. I'll stop now.
Anyway, as I was saying, I actually think this scene is quite well done. I also like that the play-by-play description stops after act one concludes and we are just given a basic synopsis of events from there. I was beginning to worry that this chapter might just be a scene-by-scene recreation of the series opener by the students, but it includes just enough of the play to give us a sense of it without drawing it out too much. It resumes the play by play at just about the right time as well. Again, the visual here is excellent. I can see everything perfectly as I read this: the kids on the stage, the audience laughing and having fun, the crappy yet somehow impressive special effects, Zecora narrating. Little details like Diamond Tiara forgetting her lines and improvising in her normal voice and Nyx doing a bad evil laugh really add to the effect as well. This whole scene really captures not only the tone and feeling of an elementary school play, but of the show itself as well. All in all, I'm quite impressed with it. Today, Peen Stroke was not a faggot.
With that said, it's a bit illogical that nopony, particularly the Princesses, seem to notice Nyx's actual resemblance to the actual Nightmare Moon. While Twilight's fears about Nyx being banished to the moon are probably unfounded, I do agree with her that Celestia and particularly Luna ought to pick up on something being slightly off here. The mane, as stated in the text, is just a bad costume prop, and from a distance in the dark it would probably be hard for anyone to see that her wings are actually real. However, the eyes would be hard to fake, because the only way to do it would be either contact lenses (which I'm not sure exist in this world) or a magical spell, which would probably be a bit over the top for a school play. This combined with the fact that this strange filly is apparently Twilight's cousin that she never told anyone about should probably raise suspicion as well.
The more I get my noggin joggin on the subject, the more I'm beginning to think that one of the major underlying flaws of this story is that Nyx's character design was bad to begin with. Not bad in the sense that it's visually bad, but bad in that it complicates the story in ways that are a pain in the ass for an author to deal with.
The biggest problem is that she looks exactly like Nightmare Moon. It's pretty much the first thing anyone notices about her. This is used more or less effectively as a plot device at times, but at times like this it just makes things overly complicated. Celestia and Luna should logically notice that Nyx's costume is a little too good, and this combined with the fact that she's a mysterious filly who just showed up here claiming to be Twilight's cousin should at a minimum make them curious about her. However, this development doesn't seem to be convenient to wherever Peen Stroke wants the story to go, so he solves it by invoking his author's privilege to just have them not notice for some reason.
Personally, I'd handle this by altering Nyx's design slightly. I'd keep the black coat and the purple mane, but I'd give her normal eyes and make her a regular unicorn instead of an alicorn. If I understand the lore correctly, alicorn status is usually attained rather than inborn, which means that logically a filly version of an alicorn would just be a unicorn. Even though she's the distillation of the NM persona, I feel like she should more closely resemble Luna and just gain the NM appearance when the power eventually manifests. This way the NM resemblance is still there, but it doesn't slap you across the face every time you see her.
I'd actually like to update my alternate-universe version of this story to reflect this, which I'll probably do in my next post.
>>252832
I like the idea of being taken by a family member to see a fight, my father did that with me when I was real young. Showed me a regularly-scheduled fight club going on, but it shut down after a while because people got bored. Which is really fucking lame.
I like the idea of being taken by a family member to see a fight, my father did that with me when I was real young. Showed me a regularly-scheduled fight club going on, but it shut down after a while because people got bored. Which is really fucking lame.
>>252862
I probably shouldn't ask this. Knowing myself, I will fail. Not because I can't physically write something but because I psychologically have troubles with writing at times. I'm just too much of an perfectionist. Regardless, I have been thinking it would be fun to do a writingchain/tennis thingie were one person writes something and then the other continues on that. Would you be up for that?
I don't know there is high probability that it fall over and crash and burn but I want to be optimistic about it. The story premise can be whatever you like, I will let you make the first post and I will just tag along. It can be something entirely low-key and we won't need to respond to each other earlier than when its about to fall off the board if at all.
I probably shouldn't ask this. Knowing myself, I will fail. Not because I can't physically write something but because I psychologically have troubles with writing at times. I'm just too much of an perfectionist. Regardless, I have been thinking it would be fun to do a writingchain/tennis thingie were one person writes something and then the other continues on that. Would you be up for that?
I don't know there is high probability that it fall over and crash and burn but I want to be optimistic about it. The story premise can be whatever you like, I will let you make the first post and I will just tag along. It can be something entirely low-key and we won't need to respond to each other earlier than when its about to fall off the board if at all.
>>252900
Eh, forget about this. I realised that I don't actually got time. I'm just "want" things that aren't realistic.
Eh, forget about this. I realised that I don't actually got time. I'm just "want" things that aren't realistic.
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>>252858
Returning briefly to my ongoing alternate version of this story. As stated in my previous post, I would alter the visual design of Nyx to make the resemblance to NM significantly less obvious, and would probably not make her an alicorn. I might even alter her design completely and make her bear a closer resemblance to a filly unicorn version of Luna than to NM. This might affect some later events in the story, for instance Twilight would not be as concerned about Nyx's physical appearance and as such might not feel the need to involve Rarity. One potential fix for this would be to include one of the NM elements, probably the weird reptile eyes, as these would suggest that there is something off about the filly to Twilight when she first meets her. Twilight might be apprehensive of the strange filly and wonder what her deal is, particularly in light of recent events (being randomly assaulted and cut with a knife, if I recall my own autism correctly). However, her appearance would not scream "Nightmare Moon" quite as loud, it would just be enough to mark her as different and to require her to wear a disguise and have a fabricated backstory to explain her sudden appearance. This would also serve to add an element of mystery to the story that it does not presently have, as the reader might suspect a connection to Nightmare Moon from the prologue, but it would not be revealed as certain until later.
Twilight's own natural curiosity and knowledge about magic would provoke her to investigate, which would lead her to eventually discover the existence of the cult and the ritual. The reader could be gradually fed information about Nyx's true nature as the story progresses. Eventually, Twilight figures out that Nyx is probably a reincarnation of NM and is potentially dangerous. However, by this point in the story, she has formed an emotional bond with Nyx and she knows she can't just turn her over to Celestia for imprisonment/banishment/study/dissection/whatever, which would be the purely rational thing to do. She feels that Nyx's true identity isn't her fault, and that she deserves a normal life as a normal filly. So, she resolves to keep Nyx's identity a secret at all costs, particularly from Nyx herself.
Everything goes fine and dandy in this regard for awhile, until one day Nyx comes home from school, excited that the students are going to be putting on a play based on a story that Nyx discovered in her voracious and near-constant reading. Twilight is initially happy for her, until she learns what the play is going to be about. She freaks out, and tries to discourage Nyx from being in the play. Nyx, of course, doesn't understand why Twilight is reacting this way, and of course Twilight can't tell her. It creates tension between them and scars their previously good relationship, which serves the dual purpose of developing the small arc of the play as well as the larger arc of the Nightmare Moon persona beginning to manifest itself in Nyx. The tension eventually climaxes in Twilight outright forbidding Nyx from being in the play. Instead of Twilight locking Nyx in the library and then rubbing salt in the wound by going to attend the play herself (complete psycho wine-aunt behavior imo), I would have Nyx become very angry with Twilight and run away. She runs off, maybe stays with the CMC until the play is over. The CMC hiding her in the clubhouse for the night and having a sleepover together to keep her company might make for a cute mini-story of about a subchapter's length.
As to the play itself, as I said I really liked this scene and would keep it much the way it is. However, I'd make one minor alteration. Instead of having Nyx in the role of Nightmare Moon (which is too obvious imo), I'd have Nyx cast as Twilight. The CMC are all playing the parts of their older sisters (or sister figure in Scoot's case) so it would be better symmetry anyway. As I mentioned earlier it might open up some potential for humor, since the fillies could do some amusing caricatures of the older ponies. I'd probably cast Diamond Tiara as Nightmare Moon, which again would make for better symmetry since she is Nyx's principal antagonist at this point. Luna I'd keep as Silver Spoon, and just for tippity top kekkles I'd cast Twist as Celestia.
Believe it or not, I have a valid literary justification for these casting choices. The play is essentially a story within the story, which means that on some level, it should reflect the main story, especially since it deals with the NM saga, which is relevant. The main cast of the play should therefore consist of the main cast of the story, at least the main cast within the fillies' world. Nyx, as the protagonist, would play Twilight, the protagonist of the play. Her connection as Twilight's symbolic daughter/younger sister makes this appropriate as well. Having her friends, the CMC, cast as analogs of their sisters (Twilight's friends) reinforces this choice and as I said gives it symmetry. DT, Nyx's antagonist, becomes the antagonist of the play. Celestia and Luna are important roles in the play, but have not factored into our main story much as of yet. So, they are important characters but still peripheral. As such, I'd fill them in with the remaining significant figures from Nyx's school life so far, SS and Twist.
One could reasonably argue that Twist would be better cast in one of the mane 6 roles, as Twist in this story is closer to Nyx than SB or Scoot, and have Celestia as one of those two. This is valid and it could work, but it would break the sister to sister symmetry. Also, having literal worst filly cast as the Princess would be funny and would make people reeee, myself included probably because fuck Twist. I suppose having Dinky or one of the other random background fillies be Celestia could work, but again I feel like the main roles of the play should be filled by the main characters from the story.
Returning briefly to my ongoing alternate version of this story. As stated in my previous post, I would alter the visual design of Nyx to make the resemblance to NM significantly less obvious, and would probably not make her an alicorn. I might even alter her design completely and make her bear a closer resemblance to a filly unicorn version of Luna than to NM. This might affect some later events in the story, for instance Twilight would not be as concerned about Nyx's physical appearance and as such might not feel the need to involve Rarity. One potential fix for this would be to include one of the NM elements, probably the weird reptile eyes, as these would suggest that there is something off about the filly to Twilight when she first meets her. Twilight might be apprehensive of the strange filly and wonder what her deal is, particularly in light of recent events (being randomly assaulted and cut with a knife, if I recall my own autism correctly). However, her appearance would not scream "Nightmare Moon" quite as loud, it would just be enough to mark her as different and to require her to wear a disguise and have a fabricated backstory to explain her sudden appearance. This would also serve to add an element of mystery to the story that it does not presently have, as the reader might suspect a connection to Nightmare Moon from the prologue, but it would not be revealed as certain until later.
Twilight's own natural curiosity and knowledge about magic would provoke her to investigate, which would lead her to eventually discover the existence of the cult and the ritual. The reader could be gradually fed information about Nyx's true nature as the story progresses. Eventually, Twilight figures out that Nyx is probably a reincarnation of NM and is potentially dangerous. However, by this point in the story, she has formed an emotional bond with Nyx and she knows she can't just turn her over to Celestia for imprisonment/banishment/study/dissection/whatever, which would be the purely rational thing to do. She feels that Nyx's true identity isn't her fault, and that she deserves a normal life as a normal filly. So, she resolves to keep Nyx's identity a secret at all costs, particularly from Nyx herself.
Everything goes fine and dandy in this regard for awhile, until one day Nyx comes home from school, excited that the students are going to be putting on a play based on a story that Nyx discovered in her voracious and near-constant reading. Twilight is initially happy for her, until she learns what the play is going to be about. She freaks out, and tries to discourage Nyx from being in the play. Nyx, of course, doesn't understand why Twilight is reacting this way, and of course Twilight can't tell her. It creates tension between them and scars their previously good relationship, which serves the dual purpose of developing the small arc of the play as well as the larger arc of the Nightmare Moon persona beginning to manifest itself in Nyx. The tension eventually climaxes in Twilight outright forbidding Nyx from being in the play. Instead of Twilight locking Nyx in the library and then rubbing salt in the wound by going to attend the play herself (complete psycho wine-aunt behavior imo), I would have Nyx become very angry with Twilight and run away. She runs off, maybe stays with the CMC until the play is over. The CMC hiding her in the clubhouse for the night and having a sleepover together to keep her company might make for a cute mini-story of about a subchapter's length.
As to the play itself, as I said I really liked this scene and would keep it much the way it is. However, I'd make one minor alteration. Instead of having Nyx in the role of Nightmare Moon (which is too obvious imo), I'd have Nyx cast as Twilight. The CMC are all playing the parts of their older sisters (or sister figure in Scoot's case) so it would be better symmetry anyway. As I mentioned earlier it might open up some potential for humor, since the fillies could do some amusing caricatures of the older ponies. I'd probably cast Diamond Tiara as Nightmare Moon, which again would make for better symmetry since she is Nyx's principal antagonist at this point. Luna I'd keep as Silver Spoon, and just for tippity top kekkles I'd cast Twist as Celestia.
Believe it or not, I have a valid literary justification for these casting choices. The play is essentially a story within the story, which means that on some level, it should reflect the main story, especially since it deals with the NM saga, which is relevant. The main cast of the play should therefore consist of the main cast of the story, at least the main cast within the fillies' world. Nyx, as the protagonist, would play Twilight, the protagonist of the play. Her connection as Twilight's symbolic daughter/younger sister makes this appropriate as well. Having her friends, the CMC, cast as analogs of their sisters (Twilight's friends) reinforces this choice and as I said gives it symmetry. DT, Nyx's antagonist, becomes the antagonist of the play. Celestia and Luna are important roles in the play, but have not factored into our main story much as of yet. So, they are important characters but still peripheral. As such, I'd fill them in with the remaining significant figures from Nyx's school life so far, SS and Twist.
One could reasonably argue that Twist would be better cast in one of the mane 6 roles, as Twist in this story is closer to Nyx than SB or Scoot, and have Celestia as one of those two. This is valid and it could work, but it would break the sister to sister symmetry. Also, having literal worst filly cast as the Princess would be funny and would make people reeee, myself included probably because fuck Twist. I suppose having Dinky or one of the other random background fillies be Celestia could work, but again I feel like the main roles of the play should be filled by the main characters from the story.
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>>252951
Anyway, I'd have the play scene unfold much as it does in the current text, just with the casting modifications I've outlined above. Nyx has run away, and Twilight, naturally, is freaking out. Ample opportunities here for some cute, spergy Twilight autism, as she is now dealing with the dual stressors of trying to find Nyx, and trying to prepare herself for Celestia's visit, which is something she'd likely be stressing about anyway. She assumes that Nyx is going to try to appear in the play, but she doesn't know where she is in the meantime. In order to keep her out of the play, she has to find her first. Maybe include a subchapter or two where she's running around town trying to find Nyx, while simultaneously dealing with preparations for the Festival. Lots of fertile ground for amusing scenes here.
However, evening rolls along and Nyx is nowhere to be found. Twilight, having reached her wits end, is nevertheless obligated to make an appearance at the play, so she sits awkwardly in the VIP box with her friends and the two Princesses, trying a little too hard to act like she's not freaking out when actually she is very much freaking out. Her friends probably assume this is just due to her being nervous about Celestia's visit. Twilight would likely not want to tell them that Nyx is missing, because this would require explaining that she had run away, which would in turn require her to explain what they had fought about. She would want to resolve this quietly on her own rather than ask her friends for help; however, obviously, she failed in her task and now she's at Defcon-4 sperg levels.
The play begins. The fillies give their performance. Twilight sees to her horror that Nyx has indeed defied her orders and is appearing in the play. She goes to Defcon-5 autism and starts hyperventilating. However, the play turns out just fine. Nyx gives a heartwarming performance as Twilight and everypony loves the play. The real Twilight realizes that she had nothing to be worried about all along; the Princesses don't notice anything weird about Nyx, and nothing in the subject matter of the play seems to have any effect on Nyx at all. She realizes that this play was never about anything more than Nyx having fun with her friends, and she almost ruined that for her. She now feels batman. After the play, she finds Nyx and they reconcile. Twilight apologizes for her autistic overparenting but still doesn't want to explain exactly why she was angry. Nyx accepts her apology but still wonders what the fight was about. The small conflict has been resolved, but an imperceptible rift now exists in their relationship. If done correctly, this could be a very feels inducing subplot.
Now, let's see what direction Peen Stroke decided to take his story.
The play seems to go pretty smoothly all things considered. Celestia sees nothing amiss about the strange filly who has been living with Twilight for some time now that Twilight has neglected to mention, who just happens to be wearing an absolutely spot-on Nightmare Moon costume. Luna, in whom the NM personality had once resided, doesn't notice either, although seeing as how the play is about the most embarrassing moments of her life, she's probably got other shit on her mind. The remainder of the play is a faithful recreation of the climax of the show opener, complete with dialog quoted verbatim. Apparently, they have Pinkie Pie to thank for this, since she "read the transcript." In general I don't care for that kind of 4th wall humor, but I'll let it slide just this once since I'm more or less still enjoying this scene.
The fillies arrive in the castle and find to their dismay that there are only five Elements of Harmony. Nyx appears as Nightmare Moon. Dinky Doo, channeling her inner Twilight Sparkle, paws at the ground with a hoof and prepares to charge. Nyx wonders if she is kidding. Dinky now channels her inner Carl the Cuck and shows that she is not kidding at all. She charges, Nyx charges.......you know what? I'm going to assume that most of us have seen the episode and know what happens. Moving on.
The battle scene ends on what I presume is meant to be an ominous note, with Nyx giving an evil laugh that apparently Twilight finds a little too convincing. Once again, the royal sisters seem completely oblivious to this and just accept whatever's happening on stage at face value. The curtain falls, and the audience seems to have genuinely enjoyed the performance. Cheerilee rattles off the cast list (once again, Peen Stroke takes the opportunity to name-drop some obscure background ponies he's fond of) and everyone applauds for Nyx. Twilight is relieved to see that the Princesses apparently still don't think there's anything even remotely suspicious about any of this. As of yet, we still don't know why this is.
>Did the two princesses really just believe Nyx was in costume?
>It was a miracle Twilight would never have believed possible.
Ah, it was a miracle. Got it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GyVx28R9-s
Anyway, backstage we get sort of a shaky explanation for why Nyx's appearance is believable. The eyes are passed off as one of Twilight's spells, which makes enough sense I suppose. Twilight is able to replicate the effect on Dash, which adds a layer of believability to it. Apparently though Nyx has been holding her wings perfectly upright and still the entire time, and is presumably still doing so. This would probably work well enough for fooling the play audience, and maybe the other actors on stage since it was dark out, but it stands to reason that anypony looking at her up close in good light could easily see that they're actual wings that are attached to her fucking body. However, this is never addressed and I'm just going to assume that it's miracles and she ain't gotta explain shit. At the end, Twilight and Nyx make up with each other, and everypony goes out for frosty chocolate milkshakes.
Anyway, I'd have the play scene unfold much as it does in the current text, just with the casting modifications I've outlined above. Nyx has run away, and Twilight, naturally, is freaking out. Ample opportunities here for some cute, spergy Twilight autism, as she is now dealing with the dual stressors of trying to find Nyx, and trying to prepare herself for Celestia's visit, which is something she'd likely be stressing about anyway. She assumes that Nyx is going to try to appear in the play, but she doesn't know where she is in the meantime. In order to keep her out of the play, she has to find her first. Maybe include a subchapter or two where she's running around town trying to find Nyx, while simultaneously dealing with preparations for the Festival. Lots of fertile ground for amusing scenes here.
However, evening rolls along and Nyx is nowhere to be found. Twilight, having reached her wits end, is nevertheless obligated to make an appearance at the play, so she sits awkwardly in the VIP box with her friends and the two Princesses, trying a little too hard to act like she's not freaking out when actually she is very much freaking out. Her friends probably assume this is just due to her being nervous about Celestia's visit. Twilight would likely not want to tell them that Nyx is missing, because this would require explaining that she had run away, which would in turn require her to explain what they had fought about. She would want to resolve this quietly on her own rather than ask her friends for help; however, obviously, she failed in her task and now she's at Defcon-4 sperg levels.
The play begins. The fillies give their performance. Twilight sees to her horror that Nyx has indeed defied her orders and is appearing in the play. She goes to Defcon-5 autism and starts hyperventilating. However, the play turns out just fine. Nyx gives a heartwarming performance as Twilight and everypony loves the play. The real Twilight realizes that she had nothing to be worried about all along; the Princesses don't notice anything weird about Nyx, and nothing in the subject matter of the play seems to have any effect on Nyx at all. She realizes that this play was never about anything more than Nyx having fun with her friends, and she almost ruined that for her. She now feels batman. After the play, she finds Nyx and they reconcile. Twilight apologizes for her autistic overparenting but still doesn't want to explain exactly why she was angry. Nyx accepts her apology but still wonders what the fight was about. The small conflict has been resolved, but an imperceptible rift now exists in their relationship. If done correctly, this could be a very feels inducing subplot.
Now, let's see what direction Peen Stroke decided to take his story.
The play seems to go pretty smoothly all things considered. Celestia sees nothing amiss about the strange filly who has been living with Twilight for some time now that Twilight has neglected to mention, who just happens to be wearing an absolutely spot-on Nightmare Moon costume. Luna, in whom the NM personality had once resided, doesn't notice either, although seeing as how the play is about the most embarrassing moments of her life, she's probably got other shit on her mind. The remainder of the play is a faithful recreation of the climax of the show opener, complete with dialog quoted verbatim. Apparently, they have Pinkie Pie to thank for this, since she "read the transcript." In general I don't care for that kind of 4th wall humor, but I'll let it slide just this once since I'm more or less still enjoying this scene.
The fillies arrive in the castle and find to their dismay that there are only five Elements of Harmony. Nyx appears as Nightmare Moon. Dinky Doo, channeling her inner Twilight Sparkle, paws at the ground with a hoof and prepares to charge. Nyx wonders if she is kidding. Dinky now channels her inner Carl the Cuck and shows that she is not kidding at all. She charges, Nyx charges.......you know what? I'm going to assume that most of us have seen the episode and know what happens. Moving on.
The battle scene ends on what I presume is meant to be an ominous note, with Nyx giving an evil laugh that apparently Twilight finds a little too convincing. Once again, the royal sisters seem completely oblivious to this and just accept whatever's happening on stage at face value. The curtain falls, and the audience seems to have genuinely enjoyed the performance. Cheerilee rattles off the cast list (once again, Peen Stroke takes the opportunity to name-drop some obscure background ponies he's fond of) and everyone applauds for Nyx. Twilight is relieved to see that the Princesses apparently still don't think there's anything even remotely suspicious about any of this. As of yet, we still don't know why this is.
>Did the two princesses really just believe Nyx was in costume?
>It was a miracle Twilight would never have believed possible.
Ah, it was a miracle. Got it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GyVx28R9-s
Anyway, backstage we get sort of a shaky explanation for why Nyx's appearance is believable. The eyes are passed off as one of Twilight's spells, which makes enough sense I suppose. Twilight is able to replicate the effect on Dash, which adds a layer of believability to it. Apparently though Nyx has been holding her wings perfectly upright and still the entire time, and is presumably still doing so. This would probably work well enough for fooling the play audience, and maybe the other actors on stage since it was dark out, but it stands to reason that anypony looking at her up close in good light could easily see that they're actual wings that are attached to her fucking body. However, this is never addressed and I'm just going to assume that it's miracles and she ain't gotta explain shit. At the end, Twilight and Nyx make up with each other, and everypony goes out for frosty chocolate milkshakes.
>>252966
Yes, every American will no doubt be arrested for something. In your case, I'm assuming it will be sodomy. Is there a reason you picked my thread to do this in?
Yes, every American will no doubt be arrested for something. In your case, I'm assuming it will be sodomy. Is there a reason you picked my thread to do this in?
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>>252955
>Unrelated pic
I have stuff to say about this rewrite version but I'm too busy to write that now so I will just leave you with of a shorter version of it. I like your rewrite of the story, it is clearly the superior version of the story. However, while I am impressed in the way you improved the story, you are actaully still stuck in the rails of the old story. I think there was something more than this but anyway, Rarity's involvement in the story is only needed in the first place because Nyx needs a disguise. Why does Nyx need a disguise? Because Twilight sees her resemblace to NNM and is afraid that Celestia will banish her.
So if Nyx no longer resembles NNM than; as in your version; Twilight no longer needs any of the above.
This also means that Twilight, who will be sensible since she is Twilight, will seek out the authorities to get help regarding what to do with this unicorn filly with amnesia in the everfree. She would want to seek out her parents. If she was present or know that a cult tried to do some ritual at the place she found Nyx, she probably send a letter to Celestia. She would tell her that she found this filly and then she or they could come to the wrong conclusion that Nyx was just and other victim to the cult's kidnapping scheme and also that her memory was wiped somehow. I don't know.
But since she is a just another unicorn and there are no witnesses amongst the gaurds seeing her taking part in the ritual since she was literally create after it happened, they would let her go.
Here's how I would rewrite this. I would have Twilight send a letter to Celestia about Nyx existence but have Celestia delay their meeting forlike a week or something due to being in the middle of hunting down some of the cultmemeber or whatever. During this week, Nyx would grow attached to Twilight. Might even go so far to imprint on her. And maybe, if I could establish in a scene before Twilight meets Nyx that she wants a child but expressed in a way that also tells us that she isn't aware of this herself. I will go with your wine aunt idea simply put.
So later when Celestia visits or when they meet and confirm that she is indeed just an ordinary unicorn filly, instead of having Twilight be relieved of the burden of taking care of Nyx by having her moved to an orphanage for the time being until they can find her parents, Nyx stays with Twilight.
Then because Twilight and Nyx lives togather, Twilight observes things from Nyx side that makes her draw the connection to her and NNM.
Then the rest is basically your rewrite. I really liked how you had Nyx as Twilight in the play. I didn't think about it but it seems so obvious in hinsight. It also works in the cool way that Nyx plays out one of her two downfalls. She is kind of fighting herself. The idea of her monologueing about of frieship and stuff is pretty fun.
I think I missed something but I also think that I ended up writing everything I wanted to say even though I didn't intended to.
>Unrelated pic
I have stuff to say about this rewrite version but I'm too busy to write that now so I will just leave you with of a shorter version of it. I like your rewrite of the story, it is clearly the superior version of the story. However, while I am impressed in the way you improved the story, you are actaully still stuck in the rails of the old story. I think there was something more than this but anyway, Rarity's involvement in the story is only needed in the first place because Nyx needs a disguise. Why does Nyx need a disguise? Because Twilight sees her resemblace to NNM and is afraid that Celestia will banish her.
So if Nyx no longer resembles NNM than; as in your version; Twilight no longer needs any of the above.
This also means that Twilight, who will be sensible since she is Twilight, will seek out the authorities to get help regarding what to do with this unicorn filly with amnesia in the everfree. She would want to seek out her parents. If she was present or know that a cult tried to do some ritual at the place she found Nyx, she probably send a letter to Celestia. She would tell her that she found this filly and then she or they could come to the wrong conclusion that Nyx was just and other victim to the cult's kidnapping scheme and also that her memory was wiped somehow. I don't know.
But since she is a just another unicorn and there are no witnesses amongst the gaurds seeing her taking part in the ritual since she was literally create after it happened, they would let her go.
Here's how I would rewrite this. I would have Twilight send a letter to Celestia about Nyx existence but have Celestia delay their meeting forlike a week or something due to being in the middle of hunting down some of the cultmemeber or whatever. During this week, Nyx would grow attached to Twilight. Might even go so far to imprint on her. And maybe, if I could establish in a scene before Twilight meets Nyx that she wants a child but expressed in a way that also tells us that she isn't aware of this herself. I will go with your wine aunt idea simply put.
So later when Celestia visits or when they meet and confirm that she is indeed just an ordinary unicorn filly, instead of having Twilight be relieved of the burden of taking care of Nyx by having her moved to an orphanage for the time being until they can find her parents, Nyx stays with Twilight.
Then because Twilight and Nyx lives togather, Twilight observes things from Nyx side that makes her draw the connection to her and NNM.
Then the rest is basically your rewrite. I really liked how you had Nyx as Twilight in the play. I didn't think about it but it seems so obvious in hinsight. It also works in the cool way that Nyx plays out one of her two downfalls. She is kind of fighting herself. The idea of her monologueing about of frieship and stuff is pretty fun.
I think I missed something but I also think that I ended up writing everything I wanted to say even though I didn't intended to.
>>252987
>you are actaully still stuck in the rails of the old story
That's by design. Part of the constraints of the rewrite is that I would like it to follow the events of the original as closely as possible, to demonstrate that the story as it exists could still be significantly improved just by putting some thought into the high-level design of the story, rather than just hopping from scene to scene the way Peen Stroke does. I'm not necessarily trying to upstage Peen Stroke or prove that I could write a better story than him though I could :^), the object here is to demonstrate ways to take what exists and improve it.
>So if Nyx no longer resembles NNM than; as in your version; Twilight no longer needs any of the above.
That occurred to me too, which is why I ultimately decided to have her keep at least one of the Nightmare Moon traits. In this case I chose the eyes. The eyes could remind Twilight of Nightmare Moon consciously, or she could just be filled with a sense of foreboding that she can't put her finger (hoof, whatever) on when she first encounters the filly. This would be enough to make her instinctively feel like she should keep the filly a secret from Celestia, even though the sensible thing to do would be to contact Celestia immediately. I think that the NM resemblance should still remain, it should just be made much more subtle for instance making her a unicorn but keeping the eyes and making her look an awful lot like Luna. Making her an alicorn who looks exactly like Nightmare Moon is just over the top imo, and is bad foreshadowing because it robs the story of any kind of mystery.
Part of the problem here is that this premise is, as you say, a little illogical to begin with. A lot of fiction has this problem, so in some cases characters need to behave at least a tiny bit illogically in order to make the story work. There's a concept central to fiction called suspension of disbelief, and the idea is that at its core, all fiction is imaginary and therefore untrue, so by writing a fictional story you are by definition trying to deceive the reader. A completely believable story, ie something that is completely consistent with the reality of mundane, everyday existence, usually doesn't have much entertainment value and can't really be used to convey a meaningful message. A story about what I did today, for instance, would be boring: I woke up, drank an energy drink, piddled around on the internet for a while, did some reading, had lunch, then wrote this post. However, I could use the believability of that framework as a foundation upon which a more interesting story could be built: I woke up, drank an energy drink, was sitting down to piddle on the internet when I realized the internet was out. I got up to fix the router, happened to glance out the window, and noticed that the world was a smoldering ruin and all the humans were dead. I've taken a preposterous turn of events and made it believable enough to accept by framing it in a relatable context. The trick is to tell a fantastical story in a way that is convincing enough that the reader is able to set aside his knowledge that what he's hearing can't possibly be true and enjoy the story. It's a fine line to walk; if you make your story too preposterous the reader will laugh at how improbable it all is, but if you make it too down to earth it will be boring.
In the case of Past Sins, the entire premise requires overcoming some disbelief. Most people (ponies, whatever) wouldn't bring home a strange child they found in the woods and try to raise it as their own, they would simply alert the authorities and let them handle it from there. That probably goes double if the child appears demonic in some way or makes the person uneasy. So, if the entire story is based on the protagonist adopting a strange child they found in the woods, the author has to set up some sort of motivation for them to do it and make it just convincing enough for the reader to accept. In this case, I think the combination of the filly's resemblance to NM and the potential connection to Twilight's experience with being attacked by a cult member serves that purpose well enough. The attack makes her suspect that the filly may be connected to some larger, more insidious chain of magic that warrants investigation. The NM resemblance, or sense of general uneasiness she gets from the filly's appearance confirms this. The sensible thing would be to bring it to Celestia, but the pitiable condition of the filly makes Twilight feel a protective instinct, which makes her think it would be best to keep the matter from Celestia. It's not strictly logical, but most readers would probably accept it.
I have actually been meaning to respond to some of your posts as you've made some points I'd like to address, I will probably get on that a little later. I have some thoughts on your rewrite as well.
>you are actaully still stuck in the rails of the old story
That's by design. Part of the constraints of the rewrite is that I would like it to follow the events of the original as closely as possible, to demonstrate that the story as it exists could still be significantly improved just by putting some thought into the high-level design of the story, rather than just hopping from scene to scene the way Peen Stroke does. I'm not necessarily trying to upstage Peen Stroke or prove that I could write a better story than him though I could :^), the object here is to demonstrate ways to take what exists and improve it.
>So if Nyx no longer resembles NNM than; as in your version; Twilight no longer needs any of the above.
That occurred to me too, which is why I ultimately decided to have her keep at least one of the Nightmare Moon traits. In this case I chose the eyes. The eyes could remind Twilight of Nightmare Moon consciously, or she could just be filled with a sense of foreboding that she can't put her finger (hoof, whatever) on when she first encounters the filly. This would be enough to make her instinctively feel like she should keep the filly a secret from Celestia, even though the sensible thing to do would be to contact Celestia immediately. I think that the NM resemblance should still remain, it should just be made much more subtle for instance making her a unicorn but keeping the eyes and making her look an awful lot like Luna. Making her an alicorn who looks exactly like Nightmare Moon is just over the top imo, and is bad foreshadowing because it robs the story of any kind of mystery.
Part of the problem here is that this premise is, as you say, a little illogical to begin with. A lot of fiction has this problem, so in some cases characters need to behave at least a tiny bit illogically in order to make the story work. There's a concept central to fiction called suspension of disbelief, and the idea is that at its core, all fiction is imaginary and therefore untrue, so by writing a fictional story you are by definition trying to deceive the reader. A completely believable story, ie something that is completely consistent with the reality of mundane, everyday existence, usually doesn't have much entertainment value and can't really be used to convey a meaningful message. A story about what I did today, for instance, would be boring: I woke up, drank an energy drink, piddled around on the internet for a while, did some reading, had lunch, then wrote this post. However, I could use the believability of that framework as a foundation upon which a more interesting story could be built: I woke up, drank an energy drink, was sitting down to piddle on the internet when I realized the internet was out. I got up to fix the router, happened to glance out the window, and noticed that the world was a smoldering ruin and all the humans were dead. I've taken a preposterous turn of events and made it believable enough to accept by framing it in a relatable context. The trick is to tell a fantastical story in a way that is convincing enough that the reader is able to set aside his knowledge that what he's hearing can't possibly be true and enjoy the story. It's a fine line to walk; if you make your story too preposterous the reader will laugh at how improbable it all is, but if you make it too down to earth it will be boring.
In the case of Past Sins, the entire premise requires overcoming some disbelief. Most people (ponies, whatever) wouldn't bring home a strange child they found in the woods and try to raise it as their own, they would simply alert the authorities and let them handle it from there. That probably goes double if the child appears demonic in some way or makes the person uneasy. So, if the entire story is based on the protagonist adopting a strange child they found in the woods, the author has to set up some sort of motivation for them to do it and make it just convincing enough for the reader to accept. In this case, I think the combination of the filly's resemblance to NM and the potential connection to Twilight's experience with being attacked by a cult member serves that purpose well enough. The attack makes her suspect that the filly may be connected to some larger, more insidious chain of magic that warrants investigation. The NM resemblance, or sense of general uneasiness she gets from the filly's appearance confirms this. The sensible thing would be to bring it to Celestia, but the pitiable condition of the filly makes Twilight feel a protective instinct, which makes her think it would be best to keep the matter from Celestia. It's not strictly logical, but most readers would probably accept it.
I have actually been meaning to respond to some of your posts as you've made some points I'd like to address, I will probably get on that a little later. I have some thoughts on your rewrite as well.
tbh, my biggest problem with Past Sins was the way Peen Stroke went to such great lengths to separate Nyx from Nightmare Moon. You'd think that with a title like Past Sins, the story would essentially be a redemption arc wherein NMM learns to take responsibility for her shitty behavior and to move on from her petty jealousies. But no, at every fucking turn Peen has to emphasize "BUT ACKSHUALLY NYX ISN'T NIGHTMARE MOON AT ALL" and effectively shields her from all responsibility for every bad thing she's ever done. The "twist" at the end was that somehow all of the "evil" of NMM was contained in this evil blue smoke which grown-up Nyx brutally murders just to emphasize how not like NMM she is. And after that, at the very end, Luna - who had up til this point played almost no role in the story at all - came out and went so far as to outright state "actually everything NMM did was my fault therefore you aren't responsible for anything you did." And those are only the two most egregious examples of this. It makes the whole story much worse than it should have been and it seems to me that the way every character in the story is constantly bombarding Nyx with "you don't have to take responsibility for your actions as Nightmare Moon" is the biggest supporting argument there is for Nyx being a mary sue. It should have focused on the concept of the canon character of Nightmare Moon having to deal with new feelings instead of acting like a contrived excuse to have a black alicorn OC act angsty.
>>253054
It's funny.
The most popular pony fanfics of all are...
>the one where a black alicorn OC is angsty
>the one where a red and black cyborg alicorn OC is an angsty rapist who loves booze and murder and explosions in a Darker And Edgier(tm) version of what's already a DAE Equestria
>the one that inspired the one I just mentioned by committing every sin it committed just not as hard
>the one where a human teleports to Equestria and all his dreams come true
>the one where two or more canon characters fuck each other or an OC
>the one where two OCs nobody cares about fuck
>the one where Spike does the whole "Naruto Ketchum leaves his homeland, is possibly betrayed or exiled, and returns as a badass" thing
>the one where a human teleports to Equestria and he rubs his natural hoomin superiority in everyone's faces
>the one where a fucking retarded woman creates Skynet and orders it to create Pony Sword Art Online and get everyone inside it. this is easier done than said because Skynet's a sue written by a tard who thinks intelligence=intellectual power level so bad arguments coming from a Specialer Person (ie Skynet) magically hold more normie-convincing weight.
Why is this fandom so faggoted?
It's funny.
The most popular pony fanfics of all are...
>the one where a black alicorn OC is angsty
>the one where a red and black cyborg alicorn OC is an angsty rapist who loves booze and murder and explosions in a Darker And Edgier(tm) version of what's already a DAE Equestria
>the one that inspired the one I just mentioned by committing every sin it committed just not as hard
>the one where a human teleports to Equestria and all his dreams come true
>the one where two or more canon characters fuck each other or an OC
>the one where two OCs nobody cares about fuck
>the one where Spike does the whole "Naruto Ketchum leaves his homeland, is possibly betrayed or exiled, and returns as a badass" thing
>the one where a human teleports to Equestria and he rubs his natural hoomin superiority in everyone's faces
>the one where a fucking retarded woman creates Skynet and orders it to create Pony Sword Art Online and get everyone inside it. this is easier done than said because Skynet's a sue written by a tard who thinks intelligence=intellectual power level so bad arguments coming from a Specialer Person (ie Skynet) magically hold more normie-convincing weight.
Why is this fandom so faggoted?
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>>253066
>off topic
Please neck yourself.
>off topic
Please neck yourself.
>>253055
>Why is this fandom so faggoted?
Anything that has any following on Tumblr/by internet teens is inevitably so. MLP has nonetheless always been less "faggoted" than other fandoms and this board is evidence of that.
>Why is this fandom so faggoted?
Anything that has any following on Tumblr/by internet teens is inevitably so. MLP has nonetheless always been less "faggoted" than other fandoms and this board is evidence of that.
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>>252955
The end of the play is followed by a short subchapter that focuses on Diamond Tiara. Apparently, she is all flank-flustered because everypony clapped louder for Nyx than they did for her and blah blah blah. They are all in the restaurant having a post-festival celebration, and of course Twilight and her party are there as well. This segment seems to be foreshadowing that Filthy Rich could create some potential mischief down the road. So far he seems to be the only pony present who didn't roll a 1 on his perception check, and thus notices that Nyx does, actually, look quite a bit like Nightmare Moon.
>“Well,” Twilight yawned, “that was a long night.” She had just arrived back at the library. Both Spike and Nyx were sprawled out across her back and sleeping soundly.
As a minor aside, I remember from earlier that Spike had gone to the play with Twilight. Since Peen Stroke needed them both to be gone from the tree library in order for Nyx to escape, it makes sense for him to have gone and I have no issue with this. However, this is the first mention we've had of him since he and Twi left the library. He's been a completely silent non-presence throughout the entire play scene. He's not particularly important to this part of the story so it's understandable that he hasn't had any lines in a while, but it might be a good idea to have him say something every now and then, just a "Yup" or an "Uh-huh," or maybe interject a joke or something, just to remind the reader that he's there. When I read this line I found it slightly jarring because I'd completely forgotten that Spike had even been in the scene. It seems odd to imagine that he was just sitting there twiddling his claws and saying nothing throughout the entire play. You'd think he'd at least be trying to mack on Rarity or something.
>The cuteness, however, didn’t make them any lighter. Twilight was worn out after carrying them back from the restaurant.
Another minor logic issue here. Previously, Twilight says this to Nyx:
>Now why don’t you get on my back? We’ll use my teleport spell to get back to the library. Then we’ll get you out of that costume, get your glasses and vest, and come back so we can eat dinner with the others.
If she can just teleport back to the library carrying Nyx on her back, is there any particular reason she chose to walk all the way to the library with Nyx and Spike on her back? For that matter, why does she even bother to walk anywhere when she can just teleport? What are the rules for teleportation exactly? Is there a distance limit? Is there a limit to how many times she can do it in a given period? Is there perhaps a limit on how many other beings she can carry? Don't you just hate writing in universes with magic sometimes?
Anyway, as Twilight is putting Nyx to bed, Nyx proclaims that she has basically figured the whole Nightmare Moon thing out (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). This was premature, as it gives away the story's biggest reveal (it's still a reveal even if literally every single person reading figured it out before the end of chapter 1) at a completely non-climactic moment. Moreover, it would be far better for her to discover this information through some kind of plot-advancing revelation, rather than just deducing it casually (in this case, she figures it out just from other kids remarking on how good her costume was). I would probably save this revelation until after the cult has made its first contact with Nyx. The cult discovers her whereabouts and either kidnaps her or tries to. The cult leader, Spell Blast or whatever his name is, would tell her the truth, and she would say "No, it's not possible!" or something to that effect. Nyx would escape or be rescued, and she would ask Twilight about it, who could either affirm or deny it. I would probably choose to have her deny it, as this would create yet another scar in Nyx's previously unblemished trust in Twilight, which would eventually combine with the abuse she's endured at school and whatever other misfortunes have befallen her, and ultimately culminate in the NM persona taking over. But the main thing here is that Nyx finding out she is NM should advance the plot in some meaningful way, in order to signal that the story has changed gears and the rising action is now accelerating.
Honestly my opinion of this work has changed multiple times since I've started reading it. Initially, my problem with it was that it was completely predictable and appeared to follow a clear formula, like a write-by-numbers Dan Brown type book. As I read further, I amended this complaint; the story seemed to be trying, either consciously or unconsciously (my suspicion was unconsciously) to follow a formula. However, it didn't adhere closely enough to its formula to get it right, while simultaneously failing to deviate from it enough to be called original. A good analogy I think would be a piece of fan art. We all know what "bad" fan art looks like: it bears a close enough resemblance to the character that we can tell what the artist was trying to draw, but at the same time, things about it are just off. The legs are too long, the eyes are different sizes, the pose doesn't look natural; etc etc etc. That's what this story began to feel like. As if Peen Stroke was trying to do something along the lines of Chobits, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, etc (comparisons to these are detailed in an earlier post), but he wasn't hitting the proper checkpoints.
Now, though, I'm not sure I know what the hell he's trying to do. This story, more than anything, seems to just be characters reacting to random events. He takes a fairly conventional premise, ie Person X finds LCIG in the woods, and then just runs from event to event following a basic chain of cause and effect, with only a vague idea of where he wants it to ultimately go. I'm running out of space, I'll continue this in another post.
The end of the play is followed by a short subchapter that focuses on Diamond Tiara. Apparently, she is all flank-flustered because everypony clapped louder for Nyx than they did for her and blah blah blah. They are all in the restaurant having a post-festival celebration, and of course Twilight and her party are there as well. This segment seems to be foreshadowing that Filthy Rich could create some potential mischief down the road. So far he seems to be the only pony present who didn't roll a 1 on his perception check, and thus notices that Nyx does, actually, look quite a bit like Nightmare Moon.
>“Well,” Twilight yawned, “that was a long night.” She had just arrived back at the library. Both Spike and Nyx were sprawled out across her back and sleeping soundly.
As a minor aside, I remember from earlier that Spike had gone to the play with Twilight. Since Peen Stroke needed them both to be gone from the tree library in order for Nyx to escape, it makes sense for him to have gone and I have no issue with this. However, this is the first mention we've had of him since he and Twi left the library. He's been a completely silent non-presence throughout the entire play scene. He's not particularly important to this part of the story so it's understandable that he hasn't had any lines in a while, but it might be a good idea to have him say something every now and then, just a "Yup" or an "Uh-huh," or maybe interject a joke or something, just to remind the reader that he's there. When I read this line I found it slightly jarring because I'd completely forgotten that Spike had even been in the scene. It seems odd to imagine that he was just sitting there twiddling his claws and saying nothing throughout the entire play. You'd think he'd at least be trying to mack on Rarity or something.
>The cuteness, however, didn’t make them any lighter. Twilight was worn out after carrying them back from the restaurant.
Another minor logic issue here. Previously, Twilight says this to Nyx:
>Now why don’t you get on my back? We’ll use my teleport spell to get back to the library. Then we’ll get you out of that costume, get your glasses and vest, and come back so we can eat dinner with the others.
If she can just teleport back to the library carrying Nyx on her back, is there any particular reason she chose to walk all the way to the library with Nyx and Spike on her back? For that matter, why does she even bother to walk anywhere when she can just teleport? What are the rules for teleportation exactly? Is there a distance limit? Is there a limit to how many times she can do it in a given period? Is there perhaps a limit on how many other beings she can carry? Don't you just hate writing in universes with magic sometimes?
Anyway, as Twilight is putting Nyx to bed, Nyx proclaims that she has basically figured the whole Nightmare Moon thing out (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). This was premature, as it gives away the story's biggest reveal (it's still a reveal even if literally every single person reading figured it out before the end of chapter 1) at a completely non-climactic moment. Moreover, it would be far better for her to discover this information through some kind of plot-advancing revelation, rather than just deducing it casually (in this case, she figures it out just from other kids remarking on how good her costume was). I would probably save this revelation until after the cult has made its first contact with Nyx. The cult discovers her whereabouts and either kidnaps her or tries to. The cult leader, Spell Blast or whatever his name is, would tell her the truth, and she would say "No, it's not possible!" or something to that effect. Nyx would escape or be rescued, and she would ask Twilight about it, who could either affirm or deny it. I would probably choose to have her deny it, as this would create yet another scar in Nyx's previously unblemished trust in Twilight, which would eventually combine with the abuse she's endured at school and whatever other misfortunes have befallen her, and ultimately culminate in the NM persona taking over. But the main thing here is that Nyx finding out she is NM should advance the plot in some meaningful way, in order to signal that the story has changed gears and the rising action is now accelerating.
Honestly my opinion of this work has changed multiple times since I've started reading it. Initially, my problem with it was that it was completely predictable and appeared to follow a clear formula, like a write-by-numbers Dan Brown type book. As I read further, I amended this complaint; the story seemed to be trying, either consciously or unconsciously (my suspicion was unconsciously) to follow a formula. However, it didn't adhere closely enough to its formula to get it right, while simultaneously failing to deviate from it enough to be called original. A good analogy I think would be a piece of fan art. We all know what "bad" fan art looks like: it bears a close enough resemblance to the character that we can tell what the artist was trying to draw, but at the same time, things about it are just off. The legs are too long, the eyes are different sizes, the pose doesn't look natural; etc etc etc. That's what this story began to feel like. As if Peen Stroke was trying to do something along the lines of Chobits, This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, etc (comparisons to these are detailed in an earlier post), but he wasn't hitting the proper checkpoints.
Now, though, I'm not sure I know what the hell he's trying to do. This story, more than anything, seems to just be characters reacting to random events. He takes a fairly conventional premise, ie Person X finds LCIG in the woods, and then just runs from event to event following a basic chain of cause and effect, with only a vague idea of where he wants it to ultimately go. I'm running out of space, I'll continue this in another post.
>>253207
contd.
Each situation the characters find themselves in creates choices for them, and their choices create consequences that determines what happens next. In this way, the process of writing is not so much about following a blueprint or an outline so much as it's about putting a character into a situation and then seeing what they do, sort of like how the story advances in a tabletop RPG. This is actually my preferred method of writing; however, I've also learned from experience that you still need to be able to keep a general outline and structure in your head. This method is probably the easiest to jump into as it requires no planning and allows you to rely entirely on your imagination, but it's also the most difficult to master, because if you don't know what you're trying to build your story comes out rambling and incoherent (and usually waaaaaaaay too long).
If you're working from an outline, it requires more planning and pre-writing, but at the same time you know exactly where the signposts are, so you just have to think up scenes that logically lead from signpost to signpost and put them in the correct chronological order. Writing off the cuff is a lot more fun, but it's easy to go off the rails and requires some internal filtering abilities that take time to develop. Peen Stroke, from what I've seen, has not developed these abilities.
Here's an example. Let's say I want to write a story with myself as a protagonist, and the premise is that I get up, go to work one morning, and then the office gets taken over by violent Jihadists who need to be subdued and driven back to their Durka Durka homeland. An outline of this story would go like: I wake up, probably have breakfast, go to work, see mudslimes everywhere, grab gun and go St. Tarrant on them.
If I were writing reactively, however, it might go something like this: I wake up, go downstairs to have a bowl of Corn Flakes. However, I'm out of milk, so I realize I need to go to the store and get milk. So, I go to the store, grab the milk, but I'm in line behind some filthy Mexicans and they're taking forever because their EBT card won't swipe in the register. I mutter something about wetbacks under my breath, and some fat college girl with purple hair overhears me. She calls me a shitlord and starts sperging out. I finally lose my temper and call her a landwhale cunt who needs to mind her own business. The limp-wristed soy cuck in line with her, who pays their rent and sits in his room playing Nintendo Switch while she gets gangbanged by niggers she rounded up at the bus stop, has his iPhone out and is recording the whole encounter. By the time I get my milk, go home, have a bowl of Corn Flakes and head off to work, the video has gone viral and my boss has seen it. I am immediately summoned to HR. By the time the Jihadists show up I'm already cleaning out my desk.
Writing reactively tends to generate more unpredictable and often interesting scenes, but it can also pull the story off in directions you never intended. You need to be able to weave these scenes into a cohesive higher story, or at least make them eventually lead somewhere. The most talented writers can do this as they go; they can just pull a story completely out of their ass and still have it follow a standard exposition/rising action/climax/falling action/conclusion trajectory. For the rest of us, though, it usually means pulling an initial draft completely out of the ass, ending up with a massive amount of nonsensical deviations, pointless subplots, continuity and logic errors, and then hammering it into a coherent story through additional drafts and rewrites. You need to be able to look at your own story objectively and recognize what changes need to be made: this scene should happen earlier, this other scene should happen later, this scene doesn't need to be in here at all, this character's actions don't make sense, etc etc. To some degree you have to be willing to kill (or at least mutilate) your baby. Maybe you really like that scene where Silver "I wish I could stop referencing this sperm gargling faggot all the time but the meme is just too funny to let die" Star drives his hoverboard around the city for half an hour, but it's just derailing the main story for no good reason. So, you delete it.
In Peen Stroke's case, his problem is that he starts out with a recognizable premise, follows it predictably for a while, and then goes off the rails. However, instead taking it in an interesting and unpredictable direction, he just has a bunch of random and disjointed events happen that basically make sense in sequence, but don't really appear to be going anywhere, nor are they particularly exciting. He weaves in and out of his original premise, occasionally returning to it for a bit before breaking off on another random tangent again.
contd.
Each situation the characters find themselves in creates choices for them, and their choices create consequences that determines what happens next. In this way, the process of writing is not so much about following a blueprint or an outline so much as it's about putting a character into a situation and then seeing what they do, sort of like how the story advances in a tabletop RPG. This is actually my preferred method of writing; however, I've also learned from experience that you still need to be able to keep a general outline and structure in your head. This method is probably the easiest to jump into as it requires no planning and allows you to rely entirely on your imagination, but it's also the most difficult to master, because if you don't know what you're trying to build your story comes out rambling and incoherent (and usually waaaaaaaay too long).
If you're working from an outline, it requires more planning and pre-writing, but at the same time you know exactly where the signposts are, so you just have to think up scenes that logically lead from signpost to signpost and put them in the correct chronological order. Writing off the cuff is a lot more fun, but it's easy to go off the rails and requires some internal filtering abilities that take time to develop. Peen Stroke, from what I've seen, has not developed these abilities.
Here's an example. Let's say I want to write a story with myself as a protagonist, and the premise is that I get up, go to work one morning, and then the office gets taken over by violent Jihadists who need to be subdued and driven back to their Durka Durka homeland. An outline of this story would go like: I wake up, probably have breakfast, go to work, see mudslimes everywhere, grab gun and go St. Tarrant on them.
If I were writing reactively, however, it might go something like this: I wake up, go downstairs to have a bowl of Corn Flakes. However, I'm out of milk, so I realize I need to go to the store and get milk. So, I go to the store, grab the milk, but I'm in line behind some filthy Mexicans and they're taking forever because their EBT card won't swipe in the register. I mutter something about wetbacks under my breath, and some fat college girl with purple hair overhears me. She calls me a shitlord and starts sperging out. I finally lose my temper and call her a landwhale cunt who needs to mind her own business. The limp-wristed soy cuck in line with her, who pays their rent and sits in his room playing Nintendo Switch while she gets gangbanged by niggers she rounded up at the bus stop, has his iPhone out and is recording the whole encounter. By the time I get my milk, go home, have a bowl of Corn Flakes and head off to work, the video has gone viral and my boss has seen it. I am immediately summoned to HR. By the time the Jihadists show up I'm already cleaning out my desk.
Writing reactively tends to generate more unpredictable and often interesting scenes, but it can also pull the story off in directions you never intended. You need to be able to weave these scenes into a cohesive higher story, or at least make them eventually lead somewhere. The most talented writers can do this as they go; they can just pull a story completely out of their ass and still have it follow a standard exposition/rising action/climax/falling action/conclusion trajectory. For the rest of us, though, it usually means pulling an initial draft completely out of the ass, ending up with a massive amount of nonsensical deviations, pointless subplots, continuity and logic errors, and then hammering it into a coherent story through additional drafts and rewrites. You need to be able to look at your own story objectively and recognize what changes need to be made: this scene should happen earlier, this other scene should happen later, this scene doesn't need to be in here at all, this character's actions don't make sense, etc etc. To some degree you have to be willing to kill (or at least mutilate) your baby. Maybe you really like that scene where Silver "I wish I could stop referencing this sperm gargling faggot all the time but the meme is just too funny to let die" Star drives his hoverboard around the city for half an hour, but it's just derailing the main story for no good reason. So, you delete it.
In Peen Stroke's case, his problem is that he starts out with a recognizable premise, follows it predictably for a while, and then goes off the rails. However, instead taking it in an interesting and unpredictable direction, he just has a bunch of random and disjointed events happen that basically make sense in sequence, but don't really appear to be going anywhere, nor are they particularly exciting. He weaves in and out of his original premise, occasionally returning to it for a bit before breaking off on another random tangent again.
>>253208
Here's a recap of Peen Stroke's story so far:
An evil cult is in the woods trying to resurrect Nightmare Moon. It doesn't go well and they are defeated, but part of what they summoned seems to survive. The next day, Rarity comes to Twilight's house, tells her she owes her a favor, and then leaves. Twilight realizes she has lost some books, so she casts a spell to see where they are. The spell tells her that the books are in the woods where she was last night. She probably didn't need a spell to tell her that but whatever. She goes into the woods and finds a filly who looks an awful lot like Nightmare Moon. She is initially frightened of the NM resemblance but takes pity on the filly when she sees that it is also frightened. She takes the filly back to her house, gives it a bath and feeds it. Then, she goes down to explain to her pet dragon that she has the reincarnation of NM in the house and she wants to keep it a secret. They argue, but the dragon relents. Twilight names the filly Nyx. The next day, she takes her to Rarity's to get some new clothes.
Twilight now tells Nyx she has to go to school. Nyx goes to school and gets bullied. Eventually the bullies trick her into going into the woods by herself. She does, and she wanders around in there and finds a sea serpent. Nothing happens with the sea serpent, but she eventually finds the ruins of an old castle. While there, she starts having Nightmare Moon flashbacks. Twilight, meanwhile, is out looking for Nyx because she left a long time ago and hasn't come home. She looks for her everywhere except at the place where Nyx had told her she was going. She rounds up all of her friends, and they search the entire town, also steering clear of the place where Nyx had said she would be. Eventually Twilight finds DT/SS and gets the truth out of them. She also threatens to turn them into cacti.
Twilight rounds up all of her friends again and they go to the Everfree Forest. When they get there, Twilight realizes she needs to go in by herself so she tells her friends to wait there. Then she goes to the castle. Nyx is there lying on the ground, frothing at the mouth and having war flashbacks. Twilight revives her, and she begins crying about how she remembers wanting to hurt Twilight. Twilight consoles her. Once that's finished, they all go home. Twilight's friends offer her some generic words of comfort and leave. Then, Diamond Tiara's father and mother show up to yell at Twilight for threatening to turn their daughter into a cactus. Twilight tells them to eat a bag of dicks. They inform her that they will be speaking with the Mayor about it tomorrow, because apparently this is the sort of thing the Mayor deals with. We can assume that nothing comes of this meeting as it is not mentioned again.
After a brief interlude in which we are reminded that the cult still exists even though they haven't factored into the story much, Nyx is back at school. She is still getting bullied I guess. However she is more concerned about the weird memories she had of hurting Twilight. She tells her friends about it and they tell her not to worry. Later, she goes home. She tells Twilight about a play she's going to be in. Twilight leaves a book about NM on the counter and Nyx reads it.
Later, Twilight and Rarity are going to help with the play practice. They learn that it is going to be about the Nightmare Moon story and are perturbed but do little to intervene. Twilight waits until the night of the play to explicitly forbid Nyx from being in it. Nyx tells her to eat a bag of dicks and sneaks out by tricking the owl. The play goes well though and Twilight forgives her. Later, Diamond Tiara's father notices that Nyx resembles Nightmare Moon. Nyx also notices that she resembles Nightmare Moon, as do all of her classmates. If any of them are perturbed by this resemblance they don't mention it to her. She then asks Twilight if she is Nightmare Moon, and Twilight informs her that yes, she is Nightmare Moon. And that brings us to the present.
As you can see, at a high level, the story more or less makes sense, minus a few things I've already pointed out. However, it also tends to jump rather chaotically from event to event, without any real drama or buildup to anything. There is little tension and almost no rising action. Story threads are introduced and then promptly abandoned. The story's central premise, that Nyx is the reincarnation of NM, is handled without any mystery or buildup. The reader knows she is NM almost as soon as she is introduced. Twilight also pieces it together immediately. Even without making it a mystery to the reader or Twilight, Nyx's eventual discovery of this truth about herself should still be as a significant and dramatic event; however, the revelation is just casually dropped into the story without incident. There is no central conflict here; really, there is little conflict in this story at all. Nyx's internal struggle against her NM persona, which should be the central conflict, is barely addressed, and is all but wrapped up before we're even halfway done with the text. The most significant conflict that exists so far is between DT and Nyx, and the foreshadowing that her father may appear as an antagonist later in the story is the only clue we get as to what this 200k word salad is even supposed to be about. The religious cult seems like it still has a part to play, but what part exactly has not been hinted at or addressed. I almost regret having labeled this story as formulaic so early on, because at this point I think being formulaic would improve it.
The high level outline I wrote, again, was not done to prove that I could write it better. It was meant to illustrate that the same story could be told more effectively by tightening up the narrative, addressing a few logic issues and putting a bit more thought into character and conflict development.
Here's a recap of Peen Stroke's story so far:
An evil cult is in the woods trying to resurrect Nightmare Moon. It doesn't go well and they are defeated, but part of what they summoned seems to survive. The next day, Rarity comes to Twilight's house, tells her she owes her a favor, and then leaves. Twilight realizes she has lost some books, so she casts a spell to see where they are. The spell tells her that the books are in the woods where she was last night. She probably didn't need a spell to tell her that but whatever. She goes into the woods and finds a filly who looks an awful lot like Nightmare Moon. She is initially frightened of the NM resemblance but takes pity on the filly when she sees that it is also frightened. She takes the filly back to her house, gives it a bath and feeds it. Then, she goes down to explain to her pet dragon that she has the reincarnation of NM in the house and she wants to keep it a secret. They argue, but the dragon relents. Twilight names the filly Nyx. The next day, she takes her to Rarity's to get some new clothes.
Twilight now tells Nyx she has to go to school. Nyx goes to school and gets bullied. Eventually the bullies trick her into going into the woods by herself. She does, and she wanders around in there and finds a sea serpent. Nothing happens with the sea serpent, but she eventually finds the ruins of an old castle. While there, she starts having Nightmare Moon flashbacks. Twilight, meanwhile, is out looking for Nyx because she left a long time ago and hasn't come home. She looks for her everywhere except at the place where Nyx had told her she was going. She rounds up all of her friends, and they search the entire town, also steering clear of the place where Nyx had said she would be. Eventually Twilight finds DT/SS and gets the truth out of them. She also threatens to turn them into cacti.
Twilight rounds up all of her friends again and they go to the Everfree Forest. When they get there, Twilight realizes she needs to go in by herself so she tells her friends to wait there. Then she goes to the castle. Nyx is there lying on the ground, frothing at the mouth and having war flashbacks. Twilight revives her, and she begins crying about how she remembers wanting to hurt Twilight. Twilight consoles her. Once that's finished, they all go home. Twilight's friends offer her some generic words of comfort and leave. Then, Diamond Tiara's father and mother show up to yell at Twilight for threatening to turn their daughter into a cactus. Twilight tells them to eat a bag of dicks. They inform her that they will be speaking with the Mayor about it tomorrow, because apparently this is the sort of thing the Mayor deals with. We can assume that nothing comes of this meeting as it is not mentioned again.
After a brief interlude in which we are reminded that the cult still exists even though they haven't factored into the story much, Nyx is back at school. She is still getting bullied I guess. However she is more concerned about the weird memories she had of hurting Twilight. She tells her friends about it and they tell her not to worry. Later, she goes home. She tells Twilight about a play she's going to be in. Twilight leaves a book about NM on the counter and Nyx reads it.
Later, Twilight and Rarity are going to help with the play practice. They learn that it is going to be about the Nightmare Moon story and are perturbed but do little to intervene. Twilight waits until the night of the play to explicitly forbid Nyx from being in it. Nyx tells her to eat a bag of dicks and sneaks out by tricking the owl. The play goes well though and Twilight forgives her. Later, Diamond Tiara's father notices that Nyx resembles Nightmare Moon. Nyx also notices that she resembles Nightmare Moon, as do all of her classmates. If any of them are perturbed by this resemblance they don't mention it to her. She then asks Twilight if she is Nightmare Moon, and Twilight informs her that yes, she is Nightmare Moon. And that brings us to the present.
As you can see, at a high level, the story more or less makes sense, minus a few things I've already pointed out. However, it also tends to jump rather chaotically from event to event, without any real drama or buildup to anything. There is little tension and almost no rising action. Story threads are introduced and then promptly abandoned. The story's central premise, that Nyx is the reincarnation of NM, is handled without any mystery or buildup. The reader knows she is NM almost as soon as she is introduced. Twilight also pieces it together immediately. Even without making it a mystery to the reader or Twilight, Nyx's eventual discovery of this truth about herself should still be as a significant and dramatic event; however, the revelation is just casually dropped into the story without incident. There is no central conflict here; really, there is little conflict in this story at all. Nyx's internal struggle against her NM persona, which should be the central conflict, is barely addressed, and is all but wrapped up before we're even halfway done with the text. The most significant conflict that exists so far is between DT and Nyx, and the foreshadowing that her father may appear as an antagonist later in the story is the only clue we get as to what this 200k word salad is even supposed to be about. The religious cult seems like it still has a part to play, but what part exactly has not been hinted at or addressed. I almost regret having labeled this story as formulaic so early on, because at this point I think being formulaic would improve it.
The high level outline I wrote, again, was not done to prove that I could write it better. It was meant to illustrate that the same story could be told more effectively by tightening up the narrative, addressing a few logic issues and putting a bit more thought into character and conflict development.
>>253208
> This is actually my preferred method of writing; however, I've also learned from experience that you still need to be able to keep a general outline and structure in your head. This method is probably the easiest to jump into as it requires no planning and allows you to rely entirely on your imagination, but it's also the most difficult to master
>but it's also the most difficult to master
But why? How do you know this?
P.s. I really like your posts' mane.
> This is actually my preferred method of writing; however, I've also learned from experience that you still need to be able to keep a general outline and structure in your head. This method is probably the easiest to jump into as it requires no planning and allows you to rely entirely on your imagination, but it's also the most difficult to master
>but it's also the most difficult to master
But why? How do you know this?
P.s. I really like your posts' mane.
There were actually a few replies I've been meaning to address mostly from Sven. I think now might be a good time to take a quick break and do that.
>>252305
>Remember, even stories set in established worlds should be treated as if you are building the entire thing from the ground up.
>This is rule you have come up with, which I a bit unsure of. I don't really see why it has to be this way.
My point here was not that an author has to explain absolutely everything or can't assume some basic foreknowledge if he's writing in a well-known universe. I was more trying to point out that it's a good idea to treat any given work as a self-contained story that can stand on its own, with or without foreknowledge of the universe, and in order to do that you have to supply the reader with enough information for it to make sense. For instance, if you've got a story that starts off with AJ bucking apples, it's better to start it like:
>The orange earth pony slammed her hooves against the tree with a single thrust of her powerful haunches.
as opposed to something like:
>One day, Applejack was bucking apples.
The first sentence is something the reader can visualize regardless of whether or not they are familiar with AJ or know what applebucking is. The second sentence requires knowledge of MLP to make sense.
Actually, since it's been brought up so often in this thread, I'm going to use My Immortal as an example to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Take, for instance, this passage:
>“Hey Ebony!” shouted a voice. I looked up. It was…. Draco Malfoy!
>“What’s up Draco?” I asked.
>“Nothing.” he said shyly.
>But then, I heard my friends call me and I had to go away.
Note the way the author just drops Draco Malfoy into the story with no explanation of his identity or his role in the world. Imagine for a second that you have lived your entire life on a deserted island with no exposure to pop culture at all, and you suddenly picked up this story. What would you make of a passage like this? A character named Draco Malfoy appears, says hello, and then leaves. Who is this guy? What is his significance? We don't know. From the context, we can assume he is being introduced as some kind of love interest for the Ebony character, but aside from that we don't know anything about him.
If you're writing a Harry Potter fanfiction, you can probably assume that most of your readers will know the main characters. But it's still a good idea to provide some basic info for the benefit of anyone who doesn't; in this case you'd probably want to at least provide a basic physical description of Draco, mention that he goes to House Slytherin or whatever the name of his fruity magic club is, and drop in other details along the way that would provide the reader with enough information about this character for the story to make sense. You don't have to do this all at once, but at some point in the text this should be covered. You don't have to go over everything, but you still need to provide enough basic info about your world and its characters that someone who has never read a Harry Potter book can pick up your story and at least vaguely make sense of what's going on.
In this case, no introduction to Draco Malfoy is ever provided. The next scene has them going to a Good Charlotte concert together, and a couple scenes later they have sex. Never at any point do we get a description of him or any information about who he is, this story just assumes that the person reading it is already familiar with all of its characters. It's extremely bad form to do this.
To demonstrate, let's take My Immortal once again, but this time I'm going to replace the Harry Potter characters with new characters that I just made up:
>“Hey Ebony!” shouted a voice. I looked up. It was…. Skeeter McNiggerballs!
>“What’s up Skeeter McNiggerballs?” I asked.
>“Nothing.” he said shyly.
>But then, I heard my friends call me and I had to go away.
also this:
>I went outside. Skeeter McNiggerballs was waiting there in front of his flying car. He was wearing a Simple Plan t-shirt (they would play at the show too), baggy black skater pants, black nail polish and a little eyeliner (AN: A lot fo kewl boiz wer it ok!).
or this:
>And then…………… suddenly just as I Skeeter McNiggerballs kissed me passionately. Skeeter McNiggerballs climbed on top of me and we started to make out keenly against a tree. He took of my top and I took of his clothes. I even took of my bra. Then he put his thingie into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time.
>“Oh! Oh! Oh! ” I screamed. I was beginning to get an orgasm. We started to kiss everywhere and my pale body became all warm. And then….
>“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!”
>It was…………………………………………………….Jimmy Spooge!
and my favorite:
>I started to cry tears of blood down my pallid face. Skeeter McNiggerballs comforted me. When we went back to the castle Jimmy Spooge took us to Shitface McGee and Big Titty Sarah who were both looking very angry.
>“They were having sexual intercourse in the Forbidden Forest!” he yelled in a furious voice.
>“Why did you do such a thing, you mediocre dunces?” asked Big Titty Sarah.
>“How dare you?” demanded Shitface McGee.
>And then Skeeter McNiggerballs shrieked. “BECAUSE I LOVE HER!”
Now, this still basically makes....eh, let's be generous and call it "sense." We can follow the events of the story: a guy and a girl are romantically interested in each other. They go to a concert, and after the show they have sex in the woods and get caught by someone. He takes them to see some other characters and they get a reprimand. Beyond that though, what do we know? Nothing. No information is provided about Skeeter McNiggerballs beyond that he likes terrible music and has a flying car for some reason. Jimmy Spooge and the others we know nothing about at all, beyond that they are authority figures of some kind.
>>252305
>Remember, even stories set in established worlds should be treated as if you are building the entire thing from the ground up.
>This is rule you have come up with, which I a bit unsure of. I don't really see why it has to be this way.
My point here was not that an author has to explain absolutely everything or can't assume some basic foreknowledge if he's writing in a well-known universe. I was more trying to point out that it's a good idea to treat any given work as a self-contained story that can stand on its own, with or without foreknowledge of the universe, and in order to do that you have to supply the reader with enough information for it to make sense. For instance, if you've got a story that starts off with AJ bucking apples, it's better to start it like:
>The orange earth pony slammed her hooves against the tree with a single thrust of her powerful haunches.
as opposed to something like:
>One day, Applejack was bucking apples.
The first sentence is something the reader can visualize regardless of whether or not they are familiar with AJ or know what applebucking is. The second sentence requires knowledge of MLP to make sense.
Actually, since it's been brought up so often in this thread, I'm going to use My Immortal as an example to demonstrate what I'm talking about.
Take, for instance, this passage:
>“Hey Ebony!” shouted a voice. I looked up. It was…. Draco Malfoy!
>“What’s up Draco?” I asked.
>“Nothing.” he said shyly.
>But then, I heard my friends call me and I had to go away.
Note the way the author just drops Draco Malfoy into the story with no explanation of his identity or his role in the world. Imagine for a second that you have lived your entire life on a deserted island with no exposure to pop culture at all, and you suddenly picked up this story. What would you make of a passage like this? A character named Draco Malfoy appears, says hello, and then leaves. Who is this guy? What is his significance? We don't know. From the context, we can assume he is being introduced as some kind of love interest for the Ebony character, but aside from that we don't know anything about him.
If you're writing a Harry Potter fanfiction, you can probably assume that most of your readers will know the main characters. But it's still a good idea to provide some basic info for the benefit of anyone who doesn't; in this case you'd probably want to at least provide a basic physical description of Draco, mention that he goes to House Slytherin or whatever the name of his fruity magic club is, and drop in other details along the way that would provide the reader with enough information about this character for the story to make sense. You don't have to do this all at once, but at some point in the text this should be covered. You don't have to go over everything, but you still need to provide enough basic info about your world and its characters that someone who has never read a Harry Potter book can pick up your story and at least vaguely make sense of what's going on.
In this case, no introduction to Draco Malfoy is ever provided. The next scene has them going to a Good Charlotte concert together, and a couple scenes later they have sex. Never at any point do we get a description of him or any information about who he is, this story just assumes that the person reading it is already familiar with all of its characters. It's extremely bad form to do this.
To demonstrate, let's take My Immortal once again, but this time I'm going to replace the Harry Potter characters with new characters that I just made up:
>“Hey Ebony!” shouted a voice. I looked up. It was…. Skeeter McNiggerballs!
>“What’s up Skeeter McNiggerballs?” I asked.
>“Nothing.” he said shyly.
>But then, I heard my friends call me and I had to go away.
also this:
>I went outside. Skeeter McNiggerballs was waiting there in front of his flying car. He was wearing a Simple Plan t-shirt (they would play at the show too), baggy black skater pants, black nail polish and a little eyeliner (AN: A lot fo kewl boiz wer it ok!).
or this:
>And then…………… suddenly just as I Skeeter McNiggerballs kissed me passionately. Skeeter McNiggerballs climbed on top of me and we started to make out keenly against a tree. He took of my top and I took of his clothes. I even took of my bra. Then he put his thingie into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time.
>“Oh! Oh! Oh! ” I screamed. I was beginning to get an orgasm. We started to kiss everywhere and my pale body became all warm. And then….
>“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!”
>It was…………………………………………………….Jimmy Spooge!
and my favorite:
>I started to cry tears of blood down my pallid face. Skeeter McNiggerballs comforted me. When we went back to the castle Jimmy Spooge took us to Shitface McGee and Big Titty Sarah who were both looking very angry.
>“They were having sexual intercourse in the Forbidden Forest!” he yelled in a furious voice.
>“Why did you do such a thing, you mediocre dunces?” asked Big Titty Sarah.
>“How dare you?” demanded Shitface McGee.
>And then Skeeter McNiggerballs shrieked. “BECAUSE I LOVE HER!”
Now, this still basically makes....eh, let's be generous and call it "sense." We can follow the events of the story: a guy and a girl are romantically interested in each other. They go to a concert, and after the show they have sex in the woods and get caught by someone. He takes them to see some other characters and they get a reprimand. Beyond that though, what do we know? Nothing. No information is provided about Skeeter McNiggerballs beyond that he likes terrible music and has a flying car for some reason. Jimmy Spooge and the others we know nothing about at all, beyond that they are authority figures of some kind.
>>253254
lel everything I write turns into an essay. Anyway, the main takeaway is that if you're writing something, you shouldn't require the reader to be familiar with things outside of the story you're telling in order to be able to read it. The same is true in any medium. Someone who has never picked up a comic book should still be able to watch The Avengers and follow the plot without too much difficulty. Even sequels where it's assumed you've seen the first movie usually start out with a brief bit of exposition that introduces the characters before diving into the main plot.
>>252809
That actually didn't occur to me, but you're absolutely right. Casting Nyx in the role of the villain, subsequently calling attention to the fact that she resembles said villain, is actually a pretty dumb move on Cheerilee's part and would likely lead to Nyx being further ostracized and bullied. It's interesting in light of later events, in which Nyx comments that her classmates noticed the resemblance (which is how she deduced that she is Nightmare Moon you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). This actually calls attention to another point I haven't addressed much: that Nyx's relationship to the student milieu is handled rather vaguely. We know that she is picked on by DT/SS, and Peen Stroke has mentioned that the other kids were annoyed with her because she made them late for recess a few times. I don't get the impression she's popular, but it's hard to tell if the other students join in on bullying her or if they stay out of it. Even if the main focus of the story is the conflict between DT and Nyx, we should still have an impression of how she is treated by the rest of the class.
This actually relates to something I was saying earlier, that it's a good idea for an author to flesh out his world in detail and think about things like this, so that he can construct his scenes appropriately when writing. He doesn't necessarily need to go into a ton of detail, but we should get a general sense of how Nyx is treated by her class, ie whether all the students actively dislike her, or if they mostly accept her but don't intervene when DT/SS pick on her. It would be two completely different dynamics, but we don't really know which is the case here. Also, have events in the story changed that dynamic at all? It's something an author should think about, even if it doesn't factor into the story much.
>>253054
>You'd think that with a title like Past Sins, the story would essentially be a redemption arc wherein NMM learns to take responsibility for her shitty behavior and to move on from her petty jealousies
Not necessarily. I see the premise as being more of a Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde dynamic, in which Nyx has a separate evil personality that she struggles to overcome. The title also suggests that the story might deal with themes like karma or original sin; the question of whether one can be held responsible for actions committed in a previous existence or by an ancestor. The idea clashes with modern ideals of individualism, but in more traditional cultures that view individuals as representatives of a family or clan, the idea of sin transferring from one generation to the next is more accepted.
I tend to see Nyx and Nightmare Moon as two separate characters. Nyx technically is NM, but she's also herself. The original NM was a second personality of Luna's, which was somehow summoned out of the ether by the cult and given its own body. Nyx and NM are theoretically the same pony, but it's probably more accurate to call Nyx a reincarnation of NM. She has her own identity and personality, and at the same time she bears NM's karma from her past existence. That karma can't be erased, but at the same time is it fair to make a technically sinless person (pony, whatever) suffer for their soul's actions in a previous existence? That's the sort of question that I, at least, was rather hoping this story might explore. You could go several ways with it: you could make it a redemption arc for the NM personality, or you could make it a story about the Nyx personality shedding her past and creating a new future for herself. You could even make a Greek tragedy out of it, and have her embrace NM's power and attempt to fulfill her ambitions, only to end up losing her innocent soul and destroying herself in the process.
In any event, whether consciously or unconsciously (I suspect unconsciously), Peen Stroke has actually selected a very old, very classic theme for his opus, which is part of the reason I don't feel bad about mercilessly shitting on him for doing such a half-assed job of it.
>The "twist" at the end was that somehow all of the "evil" of NMM was contained in this evil blue smoke which grown-up Nyx brutally murders just to emphasize how not like NMM she is
Thanks for ruining the ending, shitlord. just kidding nigga I don't care :DDDDDD
>>253055
>Why is this fandom so faggoted?
>>253071
>Anything that has any following on Tumblr/by internet teens is inevitably so. MLP has nonetheless always been less "faggoted" than other fandoms and this board is evidence of that.
I agree with the kraut. There are considerably more insufferable fandoms than this one. The average Harry Potter fangirl is easily as obnoxious as the absolute worst kind of brony, and as far as source material goes MLP has more redeeming value imo. And don't even get me started on Steven Universe and all that kind of shit.
lel everything I write turns into an essay. Anyway, the main takeaway is that if you're writing something, you shouldn't require the reader to be familiar with things outside of the story you're telling in order to be able to read it. The same is true in any medium. Someone who has never picked up a comic book should still be able to watch The Avengers and follow the plot without too much difficulty. Even sequels where it's assumed you've seen the first movie usually start out with a brief bit of exposition that introduces the characters before diving into the main plot.
>>252809
That actually didn't occur to me, but you're absolutely right. Casting Nyx in the role of the villain, subsequently calling attention to the fact that she resembles said villain, is actually a pretty dumb move on Cheerilee's part and would likely lead to Nyx being further ostracized and bullied. It's interesting in light of later events, in which Nyx comments that her classmates noticed the resemblance (which is how she deduced that she is Nightmare Moon you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). This actually calls attention to another point I haven't addressed much: that Nyx's relationship to the student milieu is handled rather vaguely. We know that she is picked on by DT/SS, and Peen Stroke has mentioned that the other kids were annoyed with her because she made them late for recess a few times. I don't get the impression she's popular, but it's hard to tell if the other students join in on bullying her or if they stay out of it. Even if the main focus of the story is the conflict between DT and Nyx, we should still have an impression of how she is treated by the rest of the class.
This actually relates to something I was saying earlier, that it's a good idea for an author to flesh out his world in detail and think about things like this, so that he can construct his scenes appropriately when writing. He doesn't necessarily need to go into a ton of detail, but we should get a general sense of how Nyx is treated by her class, ie whether all the students actively dislike her, or if they mostly accept her but don't intervene when DT/SS pick on her. It would be two completely different dynamics, but we don't really know which is the case here. Also, have events in the story changed that dynamic at all? It's something an author should think about, even if it doesn't factor into the story much.
>>253054
>You'd think that with a title like Past Sins, the story would essentially be a redemption arc wherein NMM learns to take responsibility for her shitty behavior and to move on from her petty jealousies
Not necessarily. I see the premise as being more of a Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde dynamic, in which Nyx has a separate evil personality that she struggles to overcome. The title also suggests that the story might deal with themes like karma or original sin; the question of whether one can be held responsible for actions committed in a previous existence or by an ancestor. The idea clashes with modern ideals of individualism, but in more traditional cultures that view individuals as representatives of a family or clan, the idea of sin transferring from one generation to the next is more accepted.
I tend to see Nyx and Nightmare Moon as two separate characters. Nyx technically is NM, but she's also herself. The original NM was a second personality of Luna's, which was somehow summoned out of the ether by the cult and given its own body. Nyx and NM are theoretically the same pony, but it's probably more accurate to call Nyx a reincarnation of NM. She has her own identity and personality, and at the same time she bears NM's karma from her past existence. That karma can't be erased, but at the same time is it fair to make a technically sinless person (pony, whatever) suffer for their soul's actions in a previous existence? That's the sort of question that I, at least, was rather hoping this story might explore. You could go several ways with it: you could make it a redemption arc for the NM personality, or you could make it a story about the Nyx personality shedding her past and creating a new future for herself. You could even make a Greek tragedy out of it, and have her embrace NM's power and attempt to fulfill her ambitions, only to end up losing her innocent soul and destroying herself in the process.
In any event, whether consciously or unconsciously (I suspect unconsciously), Peen Stroke has actually selected a very old, very classic theme for his opus, which is part of the reason I don't feel bad about mercilessly shitting on him for doing such a half-assed job of it.
>The "twist" at the end was that somehow all of the "evil" of NMM was contained in this evil blue smoke which grown-up Nyx brutally murders just to emphasize how not like NMM she is
Thanks for ruining the ending, shitlord. just kidding nigga I don't care :DDDDDD
>>253055
>Why is this fandom so faggoted?
>>253071
>Anything that has any following on Tumblr/by internet teens is inevitably so. MLP has nonetheless always been less "faggoted" than other fandoms and this board is evidence of that.
I agree with the kraut. There are considerably more insufferable fandoms than this one. The average Harry Potter fangirl is easily as obnoxious as the absolute worst kind of brony, and as far as source material goes MLP has more redeeming value imo. And don't even get me started on Steven Universe and all that kind of shit.
>>253228
>But why? How do you know this?
I'm basing my statement on personal experience mostly. Some people find outlining really difficult to do and would much rather just sit down and start writing, which is usually how I am. However, I've tried outlining in the past, and I will say it's much easier to shit out a story quickly if you know exactly what needs to happen when, and usually less revision is required afterward. Writing off the cuff allows you to just pull a story directly out of your imagination and make it up as you go. However, if you're just making it up as you go, it's much easier to write yourself into a corner or veer off into a boring subplot that doesn't go anywhere. People who are really good can just start a story with some random event and some random characters, pull the whole thing out of their ass as they go, and still end up with a perfectly paced, fully logical story that has everything in the right order and requires little editing. It's a hard place to get to though and most can't manage it; nearly everyone writing this way, at least in my experience, will end up generating a story that is basically good but requires heavy editing.
>P.s. I really like your posts' mane.
Yes.......her mane is also what I was looking at.
>But why? How do you know this?
I'm basing my statement on personal experience mostly. Some people find outlining really difficult to do and would much rather just sit down and start writing, which is usually how I am. However, I've tried outlining in the past, and I will say it's much easier to shit out a story quickly if you know exactly what needs to happen when, and usually less revision is required afterward. Writing off the cuff allows you to just pull a story directly out of your imagination and make it up as you go. However, if you're just making it up as you go, it's much easier to write yourself into a corner or veer off into a boring subplot that doesn't go anywhere. People who are really good can just start a story with some random event and some random characters, pull the whole thing out of their ass as they go, and still end up with a perfectly paced, fully logical story that has everything in the right order and requires little editing. It's a hard place to get to though and most can't manage it; nearly everyone writing this way, at least in my experience, will end up generating a story that is basically good but requires heavy editing.
>P.s. I really like your posts' mane.
Yes.......her mane is also what I was looking at.
File (): 0C523FDA2F01E5338814B11DE60E1F4F-69747.jpg (68.1 KB, 411x600, 1573548930919.jpg)
>>253256
I'm very tired and I can't write this stuff right now. However, I have this advice.
So this review series: Yeah, I know I'ma hypocrite that get triggered over EZ PZ but I shill digibro. I got nothing to say for myself. I suck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZcI0Nk0c4A&list=PLw6UBKuaMyFBDjAE414AeRrmncbD6Trvc
The point here is that the story he reviews in this series is also a formulaic story, which he complains fails in following that generic formula and becomes worse because of it.
So what he does in his videos is what you sort of did in the begining when you began reviewing Silver Star.
He makes sections with titles and everything that relates to the topic he is going to criticise in each video. That is something you should bring back.
And another thing he does in this vid is that he touch these subjects by using other animes that did the same fomula but better for comparison. You could do something similar with this and then also tie in the topics of these sections.
Okay, for example.
The mystery of the LCIG, how it is executed in the differently in the diffferent shows. So like how does Chobits LCIG's real identity mystery managed compared to Nyx and what pros and cons are there in the different approches of these stories.
I'm very tired and I can't write this stuff right now. However, I have this advice.
So this review series: Yeah, I know I'ma hypocrite that get triggered over EZ PZ but I shill digibro. I got nothing to say for myself. I suck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZcI0Nk0c4A&list=PLw6UBKuaMyFBDjAE414AeRrmncbD6Trvc
The point here is that the story he reviews in this series is also a formulaic story, which he complains fails in following that generic formula and becomes worse because of it.
So what he does in his videos is what you sort of did in the begining when you began reviewing Silver Star.
He makes sections with titles and everything that relates to the topic he is going to criticise in each video. That is something you should bring back.
And another thing he does in this vid is that he touch these subjects by using other animes that did the same fomula but better for comparison. You could do something similar with this and then also tie in the topics of these sections.
Okay, for example.
The mystery of the LCIG, how it is executed in the differently in the diffferent shows. So like how does Chobits LCIG's real identity mystery managed compared to Nyx and what pros and cons are there in the different approches of these stories.
>>253257
>I'm tired and so I'll half-ass my argument by camping on someone else's work in a thread dedicated to reviewing someone who half-assed their story by camping on someone else's work
>I'm tired and so I'll half-ass my argument by camping on someone else's work in a thread dedicated to reviewing someone who half-assed their story by camping on someone else's work
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>>253257
Btw, I am aware of this https://mlpol.net/sp/res/5322.html
And I agree with the watthewut series on the subject since it is the ones I have watched.
I just like this video series of Digibro.
Btw, I am aware of this https://mlpol.net/sp/res/5322.html
And I agree with the watthewut series on the subject since it is the ones I have watched.
I just like this video series of Digibro.
>>248482
Been thinking...
This story's bad, but it's not that big a deal within the fandom. Aside from some Nyxposters still pissing people off after 6 years, does anyone truly give a fuck about it?
The story is bootleg Lilo and Stitch mixed with that "Little Orphan Naruto" cliche. The only intellectual value here is in seeing how good/bad the story is at using this formula, and in what ways it succeeds/fails. And that's because this story is just a faggot's take on a cliche formula.
Fallout Equestria is a bigger, more popular, and far worse story. Its very existence is a detriment to all Fallout+MLP crossover fanfics. Stories written within its setting has to deal with the bullshit it invented by mashing these together in the worst and laziest ways possible. Stories outside of its setting are ignored by the circlejerk.
To this day, people are still writing Fallout Equestria fanfiction. And its circlejerking subfandom seems quite certain that it'll outlast the FIM fandom.
There's more to be said about Fallout Equestria, the shit it rips off from Fallout and MLP, how it mixes these elements together for better and for worse, the original shit it adds in, and how the author executes his frequent "I ripped this off from Fallout 3 but did it '''better'''" moments. Long-ass blogposts can be written about the story's inconsistent DND Table morality, plot holes, writing mistakes, asspulls, tone, characters, and ending.
God, the fucking ending...
If you need a Fallout expert to say "Yeah they fucked that up, and that, and that. And see that bodyguard of Fuck Shit over here, named Sprinkle Moony? Ripping off Franky, one of the best and deepest characters from Fallout 2 just for the sake of a shallow reference", I volunteer as one. I've played all Fallouts 1-4+NV and Tactics, best Fallout is NV and I'm currently going through the New Vegas Bounties mods.
Been thinking...
This story's bad, but it's not that big a deal within the fandom. Aside from some Nyxposters still pissing people off after 6 years, does anyone truly give a fuck about it?
The story is bootleg Lilo and Stitch mixed with that "Little Orphan Naruto" cliche. The only intellectual value here is in seeing how good/bad the story is at using this formula, and in what ways it succeeds/fails. And that's because this story is just a faggot's take on a cliche formula.
Fallout Equestria is a bigger, more popular, and far worse story. Its very existence is a detriment to all Fallout+MLP crossover fanfics. Stories written within its setting has to deal with the bullshit it invented by mashing these together in the worst and laziest ways possible. Stories outside of its setting are ignored by the circlejerk.
To this day, people are still writing Fallout Equestria fanfiction. And its circlejerking subfandom seems quite certain that it'll outlast the FIM fandom.
There's more to be said about Fallout Equestria, the shit it rips off from Fallout and MLP, how it mixes these elements together for better and for worse, the original shit it adds in, and how the author executes his frequent "I ripped this off from Fallout 3 but did it '''better'''" moments. Long-ass blogposts can be written about the story's inconsistent DND Table morality, plot holes, writing mistakes, asspulls, tone, characters, and ending.
God, the fucking ending...
If you need a Fallout expert to say "Yeah they fucked that up, and that, and that. And see that bodyguard of Fuck Shit over here, named Sprinkle Moony? Ripping off Franky, one of the best and deepest characters from Fallout 2 just for the sake of a shallow reference", I volunteer as one. I've played all Fallouts 1-4+NV and Tactics, best Fallout is NV and I'm currently going through the New Vegas Bounties mods.
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OP, please disregard this faggot who can fuck off and start his own goddamn thread for whatever hate-boners he won't stop stroking and trying to get others to rub the tip of for him. Thank you for the time and effort you are putting forth in this thread/review. I look forward to and enjoy every update to this review series and appreciate the amount of time, effort, and consideration that goes into it.
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>>253439
>This story's bad, but it's not that big a deal within the fandom.
I really don't know how big this story is. I had the impression that it was a fairly popular work based on the amount of likes it has on FimFiction, but I've only been into MLP since 2017 and don't really follow the internal fandom drama that closely. It's possible I have my finger far from the pulse on this. However, I'm analyzing this story purely as literature. I agree that it seems to have little redeeming literary value, but I think it's educational for writers to analyze bad writing even if the work itself isn't significant. For example your work I analyzed in its entirety, despite it not being nearly as popular as this and having far less literary value, though I'll admit the entertainment value was much higher. You've been shilling for a Fallout Equestria review pretty hard in this thread; rest assured that I've heard you. I will get to it if and when I get to it.
>If you need a Fallout expert to say "Yeah they fucked that up, and that, and that. And see that bodyguard of Fuck Shit over here, named Sprinkle Moony? Ripping off Franky, one of the best and deepest characters from Fallout 2 just for the sake of a shallow reference", I volunteer as one.
Thank you. If I ever need something that specific, I will know who to call.
>>253444
Thank you, and nice digits. Next post is being written now.
>This story's bad, but it's not that big a deal within the fandom.
I really don't know how big this story is. I had the impression that it was a fairly popular work based on the amount of likes it has on FimFiction, but I've only been into MLP since 2017 and don't really follow the internal fandom drama that closely. It's possible I have my finger far from the pulse on this. However, I'm analyzing this story purely as literature. I agree that it seems to have little redeeming literary value, but I think it's educational for writers to analyze bad writing even if the work itself isn't significant. For example your work I analyzed in its entirety, despite it not being nearly as popular as this and having far less literary value, though I'll admit the entertainment value was much higher. You've been shilling for a Fallout Equestria review pretty hard in this thread; rest assured that I've heard you. I will get to it if and when I get to it.
>If you need a Fallout expert to say "Yeah they fucked that up, and that, and that. And see that bodyguard of Fuck Shit over here, named Sprinkle Moony? Ripping off Franky, one of the best and deepest characters from Fallout 2 just for the sake of a shallow reference", I volunteer as one.
Thank you. If I ever need something that specific, I will know who to call.
>>253444
Thank you, and nice digits. Next post is being written now.
>>253209
Alright, where the hell was I with this?
Basically, Peen Stroke just spoonfed his main character the details of her own backstory, completely deflating what little tension existed and nixing :^) any possibility of developing the "Nyx discovers her true identity" arc any further. He proceeds to tediously outline the entire beginning of the story that we've already read in the form of a dialog between Nyx and Twilight. This conversation provides us with absolutely no new information, it just recaps what we already know and informs Nyx of things that really shouldn't have been revealed to her yet. We're literally not even halfway done with the story. If anyone has ever watched The X-Files, this is kind of like that episode where they gave away all of the details about the alien conspiracy and killed all of the ongoing storylines, and then for some reason kept the show going for another 5 seasons. Okay, it's not that bad, but it was still a pretty dumb choice of direction.
The conversation itself is awkward. Going back to what I said earlier about suspension of disbelief, Peen Stroke is mostly just poking unnecessary holes in his own story here. Twilight tells Nyx that she was created as the result of a botched spell intended to resurrect not even the soul of a dead pony, but a second personality that had resided in the psyche of a still-living pony. The whole thing makes less and less sense the more you sit and think about it, and this dialog makes you sit and think about it. What is Nightmare Moon exactly? How was this "resurrection" supposed to work?
Looked at in the simplest possible way, NM was basically Princess Luna turning into Professor Chaos because she was rump-rustled over the fact that ponies go to sleep at night. In that view it's just Princess Luna playing a character to express her own anger. Looked at another way, NM is a separate personality that took over when Luna began to feel resentment towards her sister. I personally like this interpretation best, because it plays more into the Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde angle; Luna has an evil nature residing deep within her that she tries to suppress, but it eventually manifests itself as a separate ego. But in the context of this story, what does that make Nyx? If the cult was trying to bring back NM, it would stand to reason that the spell's effect would be to revive the personality in Luna herself, since it exists entirely in her mind.
A third possible interpretation is that NM was a separate entity entirely, which took over Luna's body. When Luna turned back to Celestia and asked for forgiveness, she expelled the NM persona from herself. The cult then attempted to summon this entity from the ether and give it physical form, resulting in the birth of Nyx. This interpretation makes more sense in terms of this story, but it also means that Luna is now no longer culpable for her actions as NM, since she was basically just possessed. This does her character a bit of a disservice imo, because it essentially invalidates her entire redemption and exculpates everything she did as NM.
In any event, this opens up a whole bunch of interesting metaphysical questions that unfortunately make this story feel weirder and more implausible, particularly since I doubt it's going to explore or address any of them. What is Nyx exactly? Is she some kind of physical embodiment of an aspect of Luna's psyche? Is she an evil spirit given physical form? Is she just a figment of Luna's imagination that was somehow plucked from her mind and made a physical presence in the world? Can she even be said to exist in the proper sense? Really gets the ol' noggin joggin'.
However, for Nyx herself, this is a pretty weird revelation, and the conversation is predictably awkward and painful. Then again, this isn't that different from the kind of awkward talk a single mother would have to eventually have when her genetically engineered test-tube daughter finally gets old enough to wonder where she came from and why she doesn't have a Dad. So maybe this is all just part of Twilight living out her box-wine-induced single mommy fantasy. Maybe I've gotten the whole thing wrong and that's really what this story is all about.
>When they started to cast the spell, I felt powerful magic… magic I have only sensed once before, when I was in the presence of the real Nightmare Moon.
dude lmao. Come on, Peen Stroke. How do you write a line like this and not snicker at yourself?
>Nightmare Moon was a bitter, vengeance-driven pony who was willing to doom Equestria to eternal night just because ponies didn’t stay up to look at the stars.
Is this a condemnation of Nightmare Moon or of Luna? Again, it raises an interesting question of who NM is exactly, a question that is made even more aggravating by the fact that it will probably never be answered. At least not in this story, because the author does not seem to realize that he's raised it.
Anyway, the other thing about this conversation I didn't care for is that Peen Stroke falls back into his usual schtick of making Nyx sob uncontrollably in a desperate effort to make the reader feel compassion for her. As usual, it doesn't work and just comes across as annoying at worst and saccharine at best.
The dialog also becomes tedious when it digresses into Twilight trying to comfort Nyx by telling her that the others she lives with are her family. The sentiment is nice enough, but the author dedicates a paragraph each to Spike, Owloysious, and Peewee. These are extremely minor characters in this story and Nyx has had little significant interaction with any of them. It can be assumed that Nyx has been interacting with them "off-camera", but we've seen none of it and the emotional impact attempted here falls flat.
>>253361
>camp F group
>kampfgruppe
I didn't notice that before, but I feel like you deserve some credit for that. That's a pretty clever pun.
Alright, where the hell was I with this?
Basically, Peen Stroke just spoonfed his main character the details of her own backstory, completely deflating what little tension existed and nixing :^) any possibility of developing the "Nyx discovers her true identity" arc any further. He proceeds to tediously outline the entire beginning of the story that we've already read in the form of a dialog between Nyx and Twilight. This conversation provides us with absolutely no new information, it just recaps what we already know and informs Nyx of things that really shouldn't have been revealed to her yet. We're literally not even halfway done with the story. If anyone has ever watched The X-Files, this is kind of like that episode where they gave away all of the details about the alien conspiracy and killed all of the ongoing storylines, and then for some reason kept the show going for another 5 seasons. Okay, it's not that bad, but it was still a pretty dumb choice of direction.
The conversation itself is awkward. Going back to what I said earlier about suspension of disbelief, Peen Stroke is mostly just poking unnecessary holes in his own story here. Twilight tells Nyx that she was created as the result of a botched spell intended to resurrect not even the soul of a dead pony, but a second personality that had resided in the psyche of a still-living pony. The whole thing makes less and less sense the more you sit and think about it, and this dialog makes you sit and think about it. What is Nightmare Moon exactly? How was this "resurrection" supposed to work?
Looked at in the simplest possible way, NM was basically Princess Luna turning into Professor Chaos because she was rump-rustled over the fact that ponies go to sleep at night. In that view it's just Princess Luna playing a character to express her own anger. Looked at another way, NM is a separate personality that took over when Luna began to feel resentment towards her sister. I personally like this interpretation best, because it plays more into the Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde angle; Luna has an evil nature residing deep within her that she tries to suppress, but it eventually manifests itself as a separate ego. But in the context of this story, what does that make Nyx? If the cult was trying to bring back NM, it would stand to reason that the spell's effect would be to revive the personality in Luna herself, since it exists entirely in her mind.
A third possible interpretation is that NM was a separate entity entirely, which took over Luna's body. When Luna turned back to Celestia and asked for forgiveness, she expelled the NM persona from herself. The cult then attempted to summon this entity from the ether and give it physical form, resulting in the birth of Nyx. This interpretation makes more sense in terms of this story, but it also means that Luna is now no longer culpable for her actions as NM, since she was basically just possessed. This does her character a bit of a disservice imo, because it essentially invalidates her entire redemption and exculpates everything she did as NM.
In any event, this opens up a whole bunch of interesting metaphysical questions that unfortunately make this story feel weirder and more implausible, particularly since I doubt it's going to explore or address any of them. What is Nyx exactly? Is she some kind of physical embodiment of an aspect of Luna's psyche? Is she an evil spirit given physical form? Is she just a figment of Luna's imagination that was somehow plucked from her mind and made a physical presence in the world? Can she even be said to exist in the proper sense? Really gets the ol' noggin joggin'.
However, for Nyx herself, this is a pretty weird revelation, and the conversation is predictably awkward and painful. Then again, this isn't that different from the kind of awkward talk a single mother would have to eventually have when her genetically engineered test-tube daughter finally gets old enough to wonder where she came from and why she doesn't have a Dad. So maybe this is all just part of Twilight living out her box-wine-induced single mommy fantasy. Maybe I've gotten the whole thing wrong and that's really what this story is all about.
>When they started to cast the spell, I felt powerful magic… magic I have only sensed once before, when I was in the presence of the real Nightmare Moon.
dude lmao. Come on, Peen Stroke. How do you write a line like this and not snicker at yourself?
>Nightmare Moon was a bitter, vengeance-driven pony who was willing to doom Equestria to eternal night just because ponies didn’t stay up to look at the stars.
Is this a condemnation of Nightmare Moon or of Luna? Again, it raises an interesting question of who NM is exactly, a question that is made even more aggravating by the fact that it will probably never be answered. At least not in this story, because the author does not seem to realize that he's raised it.
Anyway, the other thing about this conversation I didn't care for is that Peen Stroke falls back into his usual schtick of making Nyx sob uncontrollably in a desperate effort to make the reader feel compassion for her. As usual, it doesn't work and just comes across as annoying at worst and saccharine at best.
The dialog also becomes tedious when it digresses into Twilight trying to comfort Nyx by telling her that the others she lives with are her family. The sentiment is nice enough, but the author dedicates a paragraph each to Spike, Owloysious, and Peewee. These are extremely minor characters in this story and Nyx has had little significant interaction with any of them. It can be assumed that Nyx has been interacting with them "off-camera", but we've seen none of it and the emotional impact attempted here falls flat.
>>253361
>camp F group
>kampfgruppe
I didn't notice that before, but I feel like you deserve some credit for that. That's a pretty clever pun.
>>253468
Thabks bro.
Thanka, bro. I don't remember if I've said this already or not, but thanks for reviewing my fic and this one. It's an interesting read to see how this fic- Wait, did it mention Peewee once before that scene with Twilight? Also there are two things I really hate in Fallout Equestria but they're mild spoilers. At one point the heroes encounter a Vault full of radiation, everyone's a Centaur. Fallout Centaur. Tentacle demon. Why? Because "This vault's gimmick is that it has a male Overseer and therefore a manly culture. So when a doctor took his boy down into the nuclear reactor room to shoot a BB gun at a Radroach for his 10th birthday, aka what happened in Fallout 3's trashy brainlet overwritten underwritten opening, the result was the kid shooting a rad reactor and nuking everyone". This scene exists solely so the author could turn uphis faggy nose at Fallout 3, a game he steals almost the entire story from. The author thinks he is too good for what he is "improving" badly. Oh and the second bit that pisses me off? There's a cyborg villain named Red Eye, from a cyborg vault. The only other cyborg from this vault we encounter in this story is one bodyguard of some disposable villain based on a far better villain from Fallout 1. Do we learn about this cyberpony and her backstory and get new insight into Red Eye's backstory and vault and a new perspective on him? Do we at least learn how a fucking cyborg ended up the guard dog of some ripoff of Gizmo from Fallout 1? No, Littlepip kills the cyberpony bodyguard by jamming a pencil in her eye and that's all.
Thabks bro.
Thanka, bro. I don't remember if I've said this already or not, but thanks for reviewing my fic and this one. It's an interesting read to see how this fic- Wait, did it mention Peewee once before that scene with Twilight? Also there are two things I really hate in Fallout Equestria but they're mild spoilers. At one point the heroes encounter a Vault full of radiation, everyone's a Centaur. Fallout Centaur. Tentacle demon. Why? Because "This vault's gimmick is that it has a male Overseer and therefore a manly culture. So when a doctor took his boy down into the nuclear reactor room to shoot a BB gun at a Radroach for his 10th birthday, aka what happened in Fallout 3's trashy brainlet overwritten underwritten opening, the result was the kid shooting a rad reactor and nuking everyone". This scene exists solely so the author could turn uphis faggy nose at Fallout 3, a game he steals almost the entire story from. The author thinks he is too good for what he is "improving" badly. Oh and the second bit that pisses me off? There's a cyborg villain named Red Eye, from a cyborg vault. The only other cyborg from this vault we encounter in this story is one bodyguard of some disposable villain based on a far better villain from Fallout 1. Do we learn about this cyberpony and her backstory and get new insight into Red Eye's backstory and vault and a new perspective on him? Do we at least learn how a fucking cyborg ended up the guard dog of some ripoff of Gizmo from Fallout 1? No, Littlepip kills the cyberpony bodyguard by jamming a pencil in her eye and that's all.
>>248482
>I would say that it is a testament to the abilities of Mr. Stroke that his opus is still able to provoke controversy 7 years after its original publication.
Apologies for shitting on your parade, but Past Sins was written in 2011, 2012 was its revision incorporating elements of Season 2 and also I believe its first official posting on Fimfiction.
>I would say that it is a testament to the abilities of Mr. Stroke that his opus is still able to provoke controversy 7 years after its original publication.
Apologies for shitting on your parade, but Past Sins was written in 2011, 2012 was its revision incorporating elements of Season 2 and also I believe its first official posting on Fimfiction.
>>253711
Probably important for me to post this while I'm here.
>>248562
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WbE8kp7_btQbDlPE7NCKxO8X3S8ClN1o1XGQ2UOT1TQ/edit?hl=en_US
This appears to be the full original version. I'm still reading the thread so apologies if I missed this. It contains links to other chapters and I've searched for references to season 2 quickly using control+F and I cannot find references I remembered being used. So I'm assuming from a distance this is the original.
Probably important for me to post this while I'm here.
>>248562
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WbE8kp7_btQbDlPE7NCKxO8X3S8ClN1o1XGQ2UOT1TQ/edit?hl=en_US
This appears to be the full original version. I'm still reading the thread so apologies if I missed this. It contains links to other chapters and I've searched for references to season 2 quickly using control+F and I cannot find references I remembered being used. So I'm assuming from a distance this is the original.
I can't help but notice in most of chapter 1 you seem to be questioning why Nyx isn't more active. If it's of any help, there is First Hours, written again by Penstroke and is Chapter 1 written from the first person view of Nyx, it's obvious she's scared but it goes into detail of why.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/154784/first-hours
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/154784/first-hours
>>249234
Not to be "that guy" but Anonfilly shouldn't have a character at all from my point of view. She's not meant to be a set character with a set personality. She's just an Anon that became a pony. The reason I personally dislike Anonfilly is it's no longer about being a self-insert vassal like Anon is. Instead she's become her own seperate entity that exists outside of the anon-sphere.
Like making a Create Your Own Character then by the next game or sequel saying "yeah all your choices don't matter, you were actually a big benis'd girl who liked dabbing also all that side-quest stuff is non-canon"
Not to be "that guy" but Anonfilly shouldn't have a character at all from my point of view. She's not meant to be a set character with a set personality. She's just an Anon that became a pony. The reason I personally dislike Anonfilly is it's no longer about being a self-insert vassal like Anon is. Instead she's become her own seperate entity that exists outside of the anon-sphere.
Like making a Create Your Own Character then by the next game or sequel saying "yeah all your choices don't matter, you were actually a big benis'd girl who liked dabbing also all that side-quest stuff is non-canon"
>>253468
(You) are doing a great job Glim Glam. Hoping you do continue. Looking foward to whatever creative endeavor you do.
>>253255
>Anyway, the main takeaway is that if you're writing something, you shouldn't require the reader to be familiar with things outside of the story you're telling in order to be able to read it.
That is one flaw I sometimes like about some fanfiction. All the familiar pieces are set. The possibilities unfolding quickly as the prerequisite knowledge smooths everything over as the story goes at breakneck speeds.
Or fleshing out them out even more.
>>253715
Thanks for posting that. Another story that tries to fix the main story. Mind giving a quick summery?
>>253720
Derail the thread why don't you. It's not like there is an entire Anonfilly thread that you can cross post stuff in. While I do think it's a service to comment on posts from the very beginning it was also 2 months ago.
It's one line.
>>249234
>I think it also plays a bit to the brony instinct to be a little filly, since it also has a bit of the "Mommy Twilight" dynamic that the Anonfilly concept has, although frankly I think Anonfilly is a better character.
Anonfilly is essentially Anon (that's the whole of the character any specific characteristics is because that's who Anon used to be or changed into), or the specific writfag given the monkey paw of being turned into a filly by some means that is useful for driving conflict or character interactions that just being Anon wouldn't be able to do.
(You) are doing a great job Glim Glam. Hoping you do continue. Looking foward to whatever creative endeavor you do.
>>253255
>Anyway, the main takeaway is that if you're writing something, you shouldn't require the reader to be familiar with things outside of the story you're telling in order to be able to read it.
That is one flaw I sometimes like about some fanfiction. All the familiar pieces are set. The possibilities unfolding quickly as the prerequisite knowledge smooths everything over as the story goes at breakneck speeds.
Or fleshing out them out even more.
>>253715
Thanks for posting that. Another story that tries to fix the main story. Mind giving a quick summery?
>>253720
Derail the thread why don't you. It's not like there is an entire Anonfilly thread that you can cross post stuff in. While I do think it's a service to comment on posts from the very beginning it was also 2 months ago.
It's one line.
>>249234
>I think it also plays a bit to the brony instinct to be a little filly, since it also has a bit of the "Mommy Twilight" dynamic that the Anonfilly concept has, although frankly I think Anonfilly is a better character.
Anonfilly is essentially Anon (that's the whole of the character any specific characteristics is because that's who Anon used to be or changed into), or the specific writfag given the monkey paw of being turned into a filly by some means that is useful for driving conflict or character interactions that just being Anon wouldn't be able to do.
>>253745
>Thanks for posting that. Another story that tries to fix the main story. Mind giving a quick summery?
From what I recall, Penstroke wanted to write something involving the 5 senses in order of develop in the womb. Apparently he had a eureka moment and realised he had the perfect character and setting to use that in. So he wrote First Hours all inside Nyx's head/first person view of her...well first hours. I'd say it probably starts before Chapter 1 but after the Prologue and ends at Chapter 2.
>Thanks for posting that. Another story that tries to fix the main story. Mind giving a quick summery?
From what I recall, Penstroke wanted to write something involving the 5 senses in order of develop in the womb. Apparently he had a eureka moment and realised he had the perfect character and setting to use that in. So he wrote First Hours all inside Nyx's head/first person view of her...well first hours. I'd say it probably starts before Chapter 1 but after the Prologue and ends at Chapter 2.
>>253739
>One offhand mention of Anonfilly justifies an entire paragraph of butt-bothered ranting
Seriously kys
>One offhand mention of Anonfilly justifies an entire paragraph of butt-bothered ranting
Seriously kys
>>253516
>Wait, did it mention Peewee once before that scene with Twilight?
Peewee has been mentioned incidentally here and there, but has not appeared in the story much. To be honest I'd completely forgotten this character even existed, and had to google who he was. Nyx has had some incidental interaction with Spike and Owloysius, but overall I think this section of text is just more pointless name-dropping of background characters. Peewee barely factors into the story at all, and yet the author spends an entire paragraph on him.
>You spoil him with treats when Spike isn’t looking, and he loves you for that. He even let you have one of his feathers for show and tell one day.
If this had actually happened somewhere in the story, mentioning it might have had some sort of emotional impact on the reader. Here, the author is basically just referencing something that is supposed to have happened "off camera". This doesn't break any particular literary rule, it just comes across as phony. A character's life can be thought of as being full of all sorts of events, the vast majority of which never make it into the story. However, only the ones that the reader has actually witnessed are going to matter to them. If you just casually mention at some point that your protagonist saved a busload of drowning orphans one time, it doesn't have the same level of impact that it would if you had actually taken the reader through that event.
An effectively told story brings the reader along on the character's journey. You feel what the character feels because you've experienced it alongside them. As it stands, we have witnessed absolutely no development of any relationship between Nyx and Peewee, so learning that Nyx apparently feeds him treats does nothing for us. The anecdote about her bringing him to school one day for show and tell would have probably made a good addition to the story, and could have replaced any number of uninteresting and pointless scenes; however it didn't, and so this little factoid means nothing to us.
>all that shit about FoE
That's fine, Nigel. Your opinions have been duly noted.
>>253715
>If it's of any help, there is First Hours, written again by Penstroke and is Chapter 1 written from the first person view of Nyx, it's obvious she's scared but it goes into detail of why.
I might actually take a look at that out of curiosity once I'm finished with this. However, if an author needs to write supplementary materials in order to flesh out his original work, it's an indicator that the original work is not written well. We don't need to see inside Nyx's head during Chapter 1, in fact it's better if we don't, but my main gripe there is that the narrative focuses too much on the interior of Twilight's head, and there is no significant interaction between Twilight and Nyx. We don't know Nyx at all, and we get no real impression of her from these early events, beyond the fact that she looks like Nightmare Moon, a fact which is dwelt on entirely too much and serves as an indicator that Peen Stroke is a faggot. A supplemental story which shows us the same events from Nyx's point of view is actually a good idea and one I'd be interested to read, but it doesn't alter the fact that Chapter 1 needs a significant rewrite.
>>253720
>The reason I personally dislike Anonfilly is it's no longer about being a self-insert vassal like Anon is. Instead she's become her own seperate entity that exists outside of the anon-sphere.
I actually rather like Anonfilly for the same reason you seem to dislike her. She's a character that is basically the collective property of the fandom, and her nature and attributes have developed along the way based on the stories that have been told about her. Characters from folklore evolve in this way, with every story building upon what's been told previously and adding something new.
>Like making a Create Your Own Character then by the next game or sequel saying "yeah all your choices don't matter, you were actually a big benis'd girl who liked dabbing also all that side-quest stuff is non-canon"
Not sure I understand what you meant by this, but okay.
>Wait, did it mention Peewee once before that scene with Twilight?
Peewee has been mentioned incidentally here and there, but has not appeared in the story much. To be honest I'd completely forgotten this character even existed, and had to google who he was. Nyx has had some incidental interaction with Spike and Owloysius, but overall I think this section of text is just more pointless name-dropping of background characters. Peewee barely factors into the story at all, and yet the author spends an entire paragraph on him.
>You spoil him with treats when Spike isn’t looking, and he loves you for that. He even let you have one of his feathers for show and tell one day.
If this had actually happened somewhere in the story, mentioning it might have had some sort of emotional impact on the reader. Here, the author is basically just referencing something that is supposed to have happened "off camera". This doesn't break any particular literary rule, it just comes across as phony. A character's life can be thought of as being full of all sorts of events, the vast majority of which never make it into the story. However, only the ones that the reader has actually witnessed are going to matter to them. If you just casually mention at some point that your protagonist saved a busload of drowning orphans one time, it doesn't have the same level of impact that it would if you had actually taken the reader through that event.
An effectively told story brings the reader along on the character's journey. You feel what the character feels because you've experienced it alongside them. As it stands, we have witnessed absolutely no development of any relationship between Nyx and Peewee, so learning that Nyx apparently feeds him treats does nothing for us. The anecdote about her bringing him to school one day for show and tell would have probably made a good addition to the story, and could have replaced any number of uninteresting and pointless scenes; however it didn't, and so this little factoid means nothing to us.
>all that shit about FoE
That's fine, Nigel. Your opinions have been duly noted.
>>253715
>If it's of any help, there is First Hours, written again by Penstroke and is Chapter 1 written from the first person view of Nyx, it's obvious she's scared but it goes into detail of why.
I might actually take a look at that out of curiosity once I'm finished with this. However, if an author needs to write supplementary materials in order to flesh out his original work, it's an indicator that the original work is not written well. We don't need to see inside Nyx's head during Chapter 1, in fact it's better if we don't, but my main gripe there is that the narrative focuses too much on the interior of Twilight's head, and there is no significant interaction between Twilight and Nyx. We don't know Nyx at all, and we get no real impression of her from these early events, beyond the fact that she looks like Nightmare Moon, a fact which is dwelt on entirely too much and serves as an indicator that Peen Stroke is a faggot. A supplemental story which shows us the same events from Nyx's point of view is actually a good idea and one I'd be interested to read, but it doesn't alter the fact that Chapter 1 needs a significant rewrite.
>>253720
>The reason I personally dislike Anonfilly is it's no longer about being a self-insert vassal like Anon is. Instead she's become her own seperate entity that exists outside of the anon-sphere.
I actually rather like Anonfilly for the same reason you seem to dislike her. She's a character that is basically the collective property of the fandom, and her nature and attributes have developed along the way based on the stories that have been told about her. Characters from folklore evolve in this way, with every story building upon what's been told previously and adding something new.
>Like making a Create Your Own Character then by the next game or sequel saying "yeah all your choices don't matter, you were actually a big benis'd girl who liked dabbing also all that side-quest stuff is non-canon"
Not sure I understand what you meant by this, but okay.
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>>253468
>“Well… Nyx… if I was really honest, I’d say that I’m—” The words caught in her throat, and Twilight swallowed to force down the knot before saying, “I’m like… well… your mother.”
kek. She finally said it out loud. Meanwhile, I've said it before and I'll say it again: a character sketch of Twilight, with her biological clock going haywire and manifesting itself as a weird neurosis that prompts her to opportunistically kidnap a lost filly and raise it as her own daughter, would potentially make a much more interesting story than this half-cocked bullshit about the rebirth of Nightmare Moon.
Anyway, next we've got some more Thomas Kinkade-style pseudo-emotion in which Nyx proclaims that Twilight is the bestest mommy in the whole wide world, and then they hug and kiss and make out with tongues while Spike stands in the corner masturbating. Blecch.
>Sighing contently, Twilight stepped back from the bed and moved towards the door as quietly as she could. It wasn’t the way she had expected to be called mom for the first time. She had always thought she’d have a husband and a filly of her own some day.
kek. All she needs is a big-gulp cup full of Peter Vella chardonnay to make the scene complete.
Welp, that pretty much wraps up Chapter 6. The rest is just a quick, jokey dialog between Twilight and Spike where he expresses a desire to be Nyx's uncle. I could probably throw in a few jokes about that, particularly since he asks Twilight to once again give him a child-molester mustache to complete the effect, but at this point I feel like it would be a little beneath me. On to the next chapter.
Chapter 7: Careful Maneuvering
This chapter actually starts off somewhat promising. Right off the bat we learn that Filthy Rich is apparently a member of the NM revivalist cult, which is a development that I had not anticipated. Even more surprising is that the author actually foreshadowed it and built it up throughout the previous chapters, but did it subtly enough that only the most perceptive readers would catch on. The recurring conflict between Twilight/Nyx and the Rich family is introduced early on in the story, and begins as a completely innocuous playground scuffle between Nyx and Diamond Tiara, who is probably unaware of her father's politico-religious leanings. It is further developed as a conflict between DT's parents and Twilight, who get into it over the fact that the fillies pulled a mean prank that became dangerous, provoking Twilight to make threats against them. However, it's handled purely as a conflict between parents advocating for their own children; we really don't get much of a sense that Filthy Rich might have an interest in the matter beyond as a father. At another point, Peen Stroke drops in some breadcrumbs about the cult having an agent operating in Ponyville, and yet we don't get any sense of who this pony might be. When the bomb is finally dropped and we learn that this agent is none other than Filthy Rich, an influential pony in town as well as the father of the story's principal antagonist, it's a shocking reveal, but when we think back over previous events it makes perfect sense. You don't see it coming, but when it happens you feel like you should have seen it coming. This development was very artfully constructed. Today, Peen Stroke was not a faggot.
Anyway, next we've got a scene in which Spell Nexus muses to himself about what he should do with this tasty little morsel of information. I only really have one thing to nitpick here:
>Nexus opened the book, revealing pages filled with names etched out in his own hoof-writing.
I know that changing "hand" to "hoof" is the accepted convention in this fandom, and I'm generally okay with it. However, in this instance it feels awkward. "Handwriting" makes sense because that's literally what it is: a human being writes with his hand. "Hoof-writing," however, suggests that ponies write with their hooves. I have a hard time imagining how this would work. A single hoof can't grip a pen in any way that I'm aware of, and holding a pen between two hooves would be a rather laborious and time-consuming way of writing anything. It's possible that ponies dip their hooves in ink and tap-dance some kind of elaborate morse code onto the scrolls, but it seems to me if that were the case the scrolls would have to be pretty large. I've always assumed that most writing was done via Unicorn magic, in which case "horn-writing" would make more sense than "hoof-writing".
Okay, actually I do have one more thing to nitpick. Spell Nexus spends a fair amount of time expounding upon the need for secrecy and caution within his organization. He presents the operations of the cult as a delicate game of 5D chess between himself and Celestia, in which all moves have to be carefully planned. A moment later, his butler knocks on the door and hands him a scroll, containing a report by one of his agents.....wrapped in a purple ribbon and sealed with a silver moon. Seriously, think about this. A letter, written presumably in plain text, which could potentially be intercepted by anyone at any time during its long journey from point A to point B, is wrapped in a purple ribbon and stamped with a seal that practically screams Nightmare Moon. Why not just put it in a giant fucking envelope that says "Sensitive Nightmare Moon Cult Business - Please Do Not Open"?
I know this is a fairly minor gripe, but it detracts from believability somewhat, in addition to being rather cornball imagery to begin with. Because of this, I have no choice but to downgrade Peen Stroke's condition for today from "Not a Faggot" to "Somewhat Bi-Curious."
>“Well… Nyx… if I was really honest, I’d say that I’m—” The words caught in her throat, and Twilight swallowed to force down the knot before saying, “I’m like… well… your mother.”
kek. She finally said it out loud. Meanwhile, I've said it before and I'll say it again: a character sketch of Twilight, with her biological clock going haywire and manifesting itself as a weird neurosis that prompts her to opportunistically kidnap a lost filly and raise it as her own daughter, would potentially make a much more interesting story than this half-cocked bullshit about the rebirth of Nightmare Moon.
Anyway, next we've got some more Thomas Kinkade-style pseudo-emotion in which Nyx proclaims that Twilight is the bestest mommy in the whole wide world, and then they hug and kiss and make out with tongues while Spike stands in the corner masturbating. Blecch.
>Sighing contently, Twilight stepped back from the bed and moved towards the door as quietly as she could. It wasn’t the way she had expected to be called mom for the first time. She had always thought she’d have a husband and a filly of her own some day.
kek. All she needs is a big-gulp cup full of Peter Vella chardonnay to make the scene complete.
Welp, that pretty much wraps up Chapter 6. The rest is just a quick, jokey dialog between Twilight and Spike where he expresses a desire to be Nyx's uncle. I could probably throw in a few jokes about that, particularly since he asks Twilight to once again give him a child-molester mustache to complete the effect, but at this point I feel like it would be a little beneath me. On to the next chapter.
Chapter 7: Careful Maneuvering
This chapter actually starts off somewhat promising. Right off the bat we learn that Filthy Rich is apparently a member of the NM revivalist cult, which is a development that I had not anticipated. Even more surprising is that the author actually foreshadowed it and built it up throughout the previous chapters, but did it subtly enough that only the most perceptive readers would catch on. The recurring conflict between Twilight/Nyx and the Rich family is introduced early on in the story, and begins as a completely innocuous playground scuffle between Nyx and Diamond Tiara, who is probably unaware of her father's politico-religious leanings. It is further developed as a conflict between DT's parents and Twilight, who get into it over the fact that the fillies pulled a mean prank that became dangerous, provoking Twilight to make threats against them. However, it's handled purely as a conflict between parents advocating for their own children; we really don't get much of a sense that Filthy Rich might have an interest in the matter beyond as a father. At another point, Peen Stroke drops in some breadcrumbs about the cult having an agent operating in Ponyville, and yet we don't get any sense of who this pony might be. When the bomb is finally dropped and we learn that this agent is none other than Filthy Rich, an influential pony in town as well as the father of the story's principal antagonist, it's a shocking reveal, but when we think back over previous events it makes perfect sense. You don't see it coming, but when it happens you feel like you should have seen it coming. This development was very artfully constructed. Today, Peen Stroke was not a faggot.
Anyway, next we've got a scene in which Spell Nexus muses to himself about what he should do with this tasty little morsel of information. I only really have one thing to nitpick here:
>Nexus opened the book, revealing pages filled with names etched out in his own hoof-writing.
I know that changing "hand" to "hoof" is the accepted convention in this fandom, and I'm generally okay with it. However, in this instance it feels awkward. "Handwriting" makes sense because that's literally what it is: a human being writes with his hand. "Hoof-writing," however, suggests that ponies write with their hooves. I have a hard time imagining how this would work. A single hoof can't grip a pen in any way that I'm aware of, and holding a pen between two hooves would be a rather laborious and time-consuming way of writing anything. It's possible that ponies dip their hooves in ink and tap-dance some kind of elaborate morse code onto the scrolls, but it seems to me if that were the case the scrolls would have to be pretty large. I've always assumed that most writing was done via Unicorn magic, in which case "horn-writing" would make more sense than "hoof-writing".
Okay, actually I do have one more thing to nitpick. Spell Nexus spends a fair amount of time expounding upon the need for secrecy and caution within his organization. He presents the operations of the cult as a delicate game of 5D chess between himself and Celestia, in which all moves have to be carefully planned. A moment later, his butler knocks on the door and hands him a scroll, containing a report by one of his agents.....wrapped in a purple ribbon and sealed with a silver moon. Seriously, think about this. A letter, written presumably in plain text, which could potentially be intercepted by anyone at any time during its long journey from point A to point B, is wrapped in a purple ribbon and stamped with a seal that practically screams Nightmare Moon. Why not just put it in a giant fucking envelope that says "Sensitive Nightmare Moon Cult Business - Please Do Not Open"?
I know this is a fairly minor gripe, but it detracts from believability somewhat, in addition to being rather cornball imagery to begin with. Because of this, I have no choice but to downgrade Peen Stroke's condition for today from "Not a Faggot" to "Somewhat Bi-Curious."
>>254174
Anyway, all quibbling about scroll sealing methods and "hoof-writing" aside, the plot seems to be more or less picking up. The letter Spell Nexus reads contains a report from an insider on Celestia's task force investigating the spell used by the cult. We learn that apparently, Bastion Yorsets, the unicorn with the weird name whom Celestia has placed on her task force, made an offhanded remark about Nyx which was overheard by the observer. It's a bit complicated, so I'll just quote it verbatim here:
>He divulged that he had grown up knowing Twilight’s father. He had even written a letter of recommendation, at the father’s request, to help her secure an invitation to take the entrance exam for Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.
>In his comments, Bastion admitted it was strange that Twilight had called Nyx a half-cousin. According to Bastion, while Twilight’s father has siblings, her mother is an only child. He further pointed out that Twilight’s father and his siblings all share the same two parents, making it impossible for Twilight to have any half-cousins.
I have no idea how much of this info is verified canon and how much of it is artistic license taken for the sake of this story, but I will say that Peen Stroke's attention to certain details is impressive. "Bastion Yorsets" I still have no idea what that ridiculous name means or how it came to be applied by the fandom to this particular pony is an insanely obscure character, one which I had to google the first time he was mentioned and then google again this time around to refresh my memory. During his first appearance, I remember thinking that it was probably just Peen Stroke dropping some random obscure background pony into the story just because he liked the character (which, to be fair, he does do a lot; see my comments about the play casting). However, it's clear now that this character was not selected arbitrarily. According to the wiki he was one of the judges of Twilight's entrance exam to Celestia's school, and thus the artistic license taken here, that Yorsets was a friend of Twilight's father and would be in a position to know that she couldn't possibly have a half-cousin, makes sense. This choice reflects both an attention to continuity and a thorough knowledge of the MLP source material, for which I think Peen Stroke deserves a bit of credit.
Honestly, this detail is so autistic it's almost a little suspect that Twilight didn't think of it. She's normally very attentive to detail, to the point of being neurotic about it. Granted Nyx sort of fell into her lap and she had to pull most of her cover story out of her ass, but at the same time she had a reasonable amount of time to think about it. It seems like a technicality about cousins is the sort of detail that wouldn't have escaped her, and in any event her autism would have probably compelled her to think out scenarios in which Nyx's story might be challenged and come up with answers. Seems like "if she's your cousin, who are her parents?" would be near the top of that list.
In any case, though, the story seems to be moving along. The main takeaway from this letter is that Celestia was curious about the origins of Twilight's alleged cousin, and now seems to be investigating the matter herself. This comes immediately after Spell Nexus' having learned about Nyx from Filthy Rich. The plot thickens.
Meanwhile, back in Ponyville, another couple of weeks has passed. We rejoin Twilight as she is helping to organize another of Nyx's school functions, in this case some kind of weekend festival for the town called "Learn and Play Day" in which students create educational exhibits. There is a brief lighthearted scene in which the ponies set up booths and tables and goof around with each other. My only real complaint here is that there are too many instances of ponies covering their mouths with their hoofs and laughing. Seriously, read the section of text between Twilight's arrival and Rainbow Dash's appearance; like nearly everything said by one character elicits a laughing response from the other, who covers her mouth with her hoof. It's minor, but noticeable.
Later on at the event itself, Nyx gives a demonstration on transfiguration magic. Pinkie Pie is impressed by her ability to turn a rock into a potted flower, and suggests that she should then transform Fluttershy into a tree. Apparently there are no adults supervising any of this I don't think Pinkie Pie counts, and since both Nyx and Fluttershy are spineless cowards who cave to literally any form of peer pressure, Nyx agrees to try it and Fluttershy agrees to be the test subject. Cut to a scene of Rainbow Dash and Twilight chatting about sonic rainbooms or something, when suddenly they hear a noise.
In what is quite possibly the most unsettling mental image ever produced using these characters, Twi and RD come to Nyx's booth and see a huge weeping willow tree that is the same color as Fluttershy and appears to be...made out of her. pic related was the first place my mind went, if anyone knows what I'm referencing. Instead of focusing on the rather disturbing existential implications of what just happened to Fluttershy, the author inserts some comedy revolving around another obscure reference to some random snippet of dialog from an episode of the show. Twilight's main concern seems to be that Nyx is once again drawing attention to herself, and she uses her own magic to turn Fluttershy back to normal. Pinkie Pie gets an itchy neck, and...that's how the chapter ends.
Okay, to be fair the neck thing is part of her Pinkie sense and it's used as a device to indicate that they are being watched. The pony watching is probably one of Nexus' spies and this will likely segue into whatever main event Peen Stroke is building to here. Still, I came away from this scene feeling like a lot of really pointless stuff just happened.
Anyway, all quibbling about scroll sealing methods and "hoof-writing" aside, the plot seems to be more or less picking up. The letter Spell Nexus reads contains a report from an insider on Celestia's task force investigating the spell used by the cult. We learn that apparently, Bastion Yorsets, the unicorn with the weird name whom Celestia has placed on her task force, made an offhanded remark about Nyx which was overheard by the observer. It's a bit complicated, so I'll just quote it verbatim here:
>He divulged that he had grown up knowing Twilight’s father. He had even written a letter of recommendation, at the father’s request, to help her secure an invitation to take the entrance exam for Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.
>In his comments, Bastion admitted it was strange that Twilight had called Nyx a half-cousin. According to Bastion, while Twilight’s father has siblings, her mother is an only child. He further pointed out that Twilight’s father and his siblings all share the same two parents, making it impossible for Twilight to have any half-cousins.
I have no idea how much of this info is verified canon and how much of it is artistic license taken for the sake of this story, but I will say that Peen Stroke's attention to certain details is impressive. "Bastion Yorsets" I still have no idea what that ridiculous name means or how it came to be applied by the fandom to this particular pony is an insanely obscure character, one which I had to google the first time he was mentioned and then google again this time around to refresh my memory. During his first appearance, I remember thinking that it was probably just Peen Stroke dropping some random obscure background pony into the story just because he liked the character (which, to be fair, he does do a lot; see my comments about the play casting). However, it's clear now that this character was not selected arbitrarily. According to the wiki he was one of the judges of Twilight's entrance exam to Celestia's school, and thus the artistic license taken here, that Yorsets was a friend of Twilight's father and would be in a position to know that she couldn't possibly have a half-cousin, makes sense. This choice reflects both an attention to continuity and a thorough knowledge of the MLP source material, for which I think Peen Stroke deserves a bit of credit.
Honestly, this detail is so autistic it's almost a little suspect that Twilight didn't think of it. She's normally very attentive to detail, to the point of being neurotic about it. Granted Nyx sort of fell into her lap and she had to pull most of her cover story out of her ass, but at the same time she had a reasonable amount of time to think about it. It seems like a technicality about cousins is the sort of detail that wouldn't have escaped her, and in any event her autism would have probably compelled her to think out scenarios in which Nyx's story might be challenged and come up with answers. Seems like "if she's your cousin, who are her parents?" would be near the top of that list.
In any case, though, the story seems to be moving along. The main takeaway from this letter is that Celestia was curious about the origins of Twilight's alleged cousin, and now seems to be investigating the matter herself. This comes immediately after Spell Nexus' having learned about Nyx from Filthy Rich. The plot thickens.
Meanwhile, back in Ponyville, another couple of weeks has passed. We rejoin Twilight as she is helping to organize another of Nyx's school functions, in this case some kind of weekend festival for the town called "Learn and Play Day" in which students create educational exhibits. There is a brief lighthearted scene in which the ponies set up booths and tables and goof around with each other. My only real complaint here is that there are too many instances of ponies covering their mouths with their hoofs and laughing. Seriously, read the section of text between Twilight's arrival and Rainbow Dash's appearance; like nearly everything said by one character elicits a laughing response from the other, who covers her mouth with her hoof. It's minor, but noticeable.
Later on at the event itself, Nyx gives a demonstration on transfiguration magic. Pinkie Pie is impressed by her ability to turn a rock into a potted flower, and suggests that she should then transform Fluttershy into a tree. Apparently there are no adults supervising any of this I don't think Pinkie Pie counts, and since both Nyx and Fluttershy are spineless cowards who cave to literally any form of peer pressure, Nyx agrees to try it and Fluttershy agrees to be the test subject. Cut to a scene of Rainbow Dash and Twilight chatting about sonic rainbooms or something, when suddenly they hear a noise.
In what is quite possibly the most unsettling mental image ever produced using these characters, Twi and RD come to Nyx's booth and see a huge weeping willow tree that is the same color as Fluttershy and appears to be...made out of her. pic related was the first place my mind went, if anyone knows what I'm referencing. Instead of focusing on the rather disturbing existential implications of what just happened to Fluttershy, the author inserts some comedy revolving around another obscure reference to some random snippet of dialog from an episode of the show. Twilight's main concern seems to be that Nyx is once again drawing attention to herself, and she uses her own magic to turn Fluttershy back to normal. Pinkie Pie gets an itchy neck, and...that's how the chapter ends.
Okay, to be fair the neck thing is part of her Pinkie sense and it's used as a device to indicate that they are being watched. The pony watching is probably one of Nexus' spies and this will likely segue into whatever main event Peen Stroke is building to here. Still, I came away from this scene feeling like a lot of really pointless stuff just happened.
>>254605
Why was early-show fandom so obsessed over those constantly-repeated soundbites?
>haha fluttershy tree
>20% cooler haha
>I AM THE ELEMENT OF ____, GEE APPLEJACK I GUESS THAT'S WHY YOU'RE THE ELEMENT OF HONESTY, COME ON GIRLS IT'S TIME FOR EVERYONE TO MENTION WHAT THEIR ELEMENT IS WITHIN A SENTENCE BECAUSE THE AUTHOR CAN'T THINK OF A WAY FOR US TO DEMONSTRATE OUR ATTRIBUTES AND VIRTUES
God, shit like this makes me want to explode twice.
Why was early-show fandom so obsessed over those constantly-repeated soundbites?
>haha fluttershy tree
>20% cooler haha
>I AM THE ELEMENT OF ____, GEE APPLEJACK I GUESS THAT'S WHY YOU'RE THE ELEMENT OF HONESTY, COME ON GIRLS IT'S TIME FOR EVERYONE TO MENTION WHAT THEIR ELEMENT IS WITHIN A SENTENCE BECAUSE THE AUTHOR CAN'T THINK OF A WAY FOR US TO DEMONSTRATE OUR ATTRIBUTES AND VIRTUES
God, shit like this makes me want to explode twice.
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File (): 2A009CC9497C5EA48696A5D19A7F2163-287891.png (281.1 KB, 500x2682, the cropped text says some fear.png)
>>255036
>haha gak haha
>haha random line from show
>"my favourite meme is ponies that embody my fetish for snakes or masses of living flesh or hypnotism or ABDL or violent women! This is a meme and not my fetish I swear! It's fine for me to speak openly about my love for hypnotism and being coiled up in a lamia's cool scaly snake flesh and recruit for my WaifuForum/Tulpamancy/HypnoPonyFetish circlejerk on an all-ages child-friendly pony forum!"
>"I have named this random background pony and invented a backstory for her, therefore you aren't fucking permitted to use that character in anything unless you use my ideas and credit me."
>FUCKING FANFIC VERSES
>"Welcome to the herd! We all think the same things here, drink your soy juice and be weak liberals like us. Yay harmony! Celestia is such a fascist for thinking harmony should be enforced, but Glimmer is perfect because she reminds me of me and you're not allowed to dislike her. God I love this fandom so much and its cock tastes so good, we're so virtuouous and kind and loyal and we're special for loving a children's pony show! We're too good for this sinful earth! Don't worry everypony, the ride will never end! We can kick a new user out of the fandom for bullshit reasons every week without having to worry about a point where the influx of newbies slow down, because pony will always be good! and if it gets bad we can just ban this fact like it's fucking holocaust discussion!"
>haha gak haha
>haha random line from show
>"my favourite meme is ponies that embody my fetish for snakes or masses of living flesh or hypnotism or ABDL or violent women! This is a meme and not my fetish I swear! It's fine for me to speak openly about my love for hypnotism and being coiled up in a lamia's cool scaly snake flesh and recruit for my WaifuForum/Tulpamancy/HypnoPonyFetish circlejerk on an all-ages child-friendly pony forum!"
>"I have named this random background pony and invented a backstory for her, therefore you aren't fucking permitted to use that character in anything unless you use my ideas and credit me."
>FUCKING FANFIC VERSES
>"Welcome to the herd! We all think the same things here, drink your soy juice and be weak liberals like us. Yay harmony! Celestia is such a fascist for thinking harmony should be enforced, but Glimmer is perfect because she reminds me of me and you're not allowed to dislike her. God I love this fandom so much and its cock tastes so good, we're so virtuouous and kind and loyal and we're special for loving a children's pony show! We're too good for this sinful earth! Don't worry everypony, the ride will never end! We can kick a new user out of the fandom for bullshit reasons every week without having to worry about a point where the influx of newbies slow down, because pony will always be good! and if it gets bad we can just ban this fact like it's fucking holocaust discussion!"
>>255160
Hit send too early. I swear there was a point where I liked this fandom but for the life of me I can't place the exact moment where that ended.
Good thing this site's mostly faggot-free.
Hit send too early. I swear there was a point where I liked this fandom but for the life of me I can't place the exact moment where that ended.
Good thing this site's mostly faggot-free.
>>255162
Well, the whole idea behind this board is that pony porn will get rid of "le ebin leddit" tier posters... So yeah, kinda faggot-free indeed.
Well, the whole idea behind this board is that pony porn will get rid of "le ebin leddit" tier posters... So yeah, kinda faggot-free indeed.
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>>254174
> the author actually foreshadowed it and built it up throughout the previous chapters
I thought foreshaddowing was about having A happen because B. Then later it is revealed that A happned because C and your mind is blown.
This reminds me more of Harry Potter where it turns out that everyone(almost) whoever dislike Harry is a death eater or is in service to them.
Perhaps I just don't know the definition of foreshaddowing but I thought it was suppose to be some form of setup. Setup with the intent for payoff later rather than just using a character that already existed in the universe and for a new purpose.
I feel pedantic, this is probably just autistic drivel.
>Honestly, this detail is so autistic it's almost a little suspect that Twilight didn't think of it.
>Seems like "if she's your cousin, who are her parents?" would be near the top of that list.
Very observant. I really liked this analysis.
Otherwise, these review posts are great.
> the author actually foreshadowed it and built it up throughout the previous chapters
I thought foreshaddowing was about having A happen because B. Then later it is revealed that A happned because C and your mind is blown.
This reminds me more of Harry Potter where it turns out that everyone(almost) whoever dislike Harry is a death eater or is in service to them.
Perhaps I just don't know the definition of foreshaddowing but I thought it was suppose to be some form of setup. Setup with the intent for payoff later rather than just using a character that already existed in the universe and for a new purpose.
I feel pedantic, this is probably just autistic drivel.
>Honestly, this detail is so autistic it's almost a little suspect that Twilight didn't think of it.
>Seems like "if she's your cousin, who are her parents?" would be near the top of that list.
Very observant. I really liked this analysis.
Otherwise, these review posts are great.
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>>254605
Chapter 8: You Can't Hide Magic up your butt
Before we get too far into this chapter, I kind of want to dwell for a bit on what happened at the end of the last one. I can basically see where Peen Stroke is going with this: events in the story are beginning to accelerate, so Nyx's cover story starts to unravel. This is perfectly appropriate and he's doing this at the right time. The cult has figured out that Nightmare Moon is a filly living in Ponyville, they know her name, and it's been revealed that Filthy Rich is an agent of the cult. Meanwhile, Celestia is investigating Nyx as well and it will only be a matter of time before the whole ruse is blown wide open anyway. Having Nyx's true identity become known to her friends and classmates independently of these other plot lines completes the trifecta and makes the story more exciting. In terms of pacing and story structure he's doing everything correctly here.
However, I take issue with the specific choice of event he uses to move the plot forward. Nyx's physical transformation of Fluttershy into a tree is a jarring, bizarre, mostly uncalled for event. This is a universe in which magic exists and the rules that define what it can do are fairly loose, so it's not improbable that this could happen. However, it's bizarre because the events leading up to it are not entirely believable, and it's jarring because it's written like a gag but treated as a serious event in the story. It's uncalled for because, frankly, there's no logical reason for Pinkie to ask for it. As a humorous suggestion it's funny, but it's not something that Pinkie would logically expect Nyx to be able to do.
In MLP, Pinkie Pie is the established source for most of the cartoon-style humor. If I remember correctly, the show bible written by Faust that was leaked a couple of years ago specifies that Pinkie Pie is the only pony who should ever be shown doing anything "cartoony" (ie doing physically impossible things like stretching her body in weird ways or pulling random objects out of hammer space). Even though the show is set in a whimsical world in which improbable magic exists, there are set rules for how things work and all characters are expected to abide by them, the exception being Pinkie Pie. However, the catch is that she is usually only allowed to do impossible things for comic effect, and generally her gags don't direct the course of events in a story (there are a few exceptions, but for the most part the show adheres to this rule). The situation is similar to the genie character in Aladdin: he has a preposterous amount of magic power that can do just about anything, however most of the time it's just used for gags. Although there are some key events in the story that revolve around the genie's powers, the mortal characters still have to solve most of their problems on their own. If every problem was solved with magic, or if more than one character could do this type of magic, the story would be boring.
In this situation, we don't see Pinkie doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. The actual feat is performed by Nyx, and falls within her logical range of abilities, so it doesn't violate the rules of the universe. However, I would argue that this is still technically a Pinkie Pie gag. Nyx has no reason to transform Fluttershy into a tree, and she doesn't particularly want to do it. Fluttershy does not want or ask to be turned into a tree. Both Nyx and Flutters are goaded into it by Pinkie, who just randomly suggests it out of nowhere, and it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't. For all intents and purposes it's a "haha XD le random Pinkie Pie being le random" event. However, it's also a pivotal story event: Nyx performs a feat of magic which is within range of her real abilities but out of scope for the sort of run-of-the-mill unicorn filly she's pretending to be, thus the act proves she's not who she says she is and fatally erodes her disguise.
Also, even though the suggestion is mostly humorous, the story treats it seriously. Pinkie saying "Hey I know! Turn Fluttershy into a tree!" is funny and in character for Pinkie. Having Pinkie demand that it actually be done is another matter. An example from the Bible: a king tells his daughter that he will give her any gift she asks for. She responds by demanding the head of John the Baptist on a plate. Haha, how drole; what a delightfully edgy child she is. However, when the guards actually walk into the room carrying a human head on a plate, very few people will be laughing. That's why this event is jarring and uncomfortable: turning Flutters into a tree is funny idea, but when it actually plays out in reality we realize that it's a weird thing to do and an even weirder thing to ask for in the first place. Unless you're writing a slapstick comedy, you generally don't want to use gags as turning points in your story.
Now then, moving on. At the start of this chapter, we are once again back in Twilight's head, listening to her autistic circular thought patterns. Narrative wise, this is a bad place to be, for reasons I've already gone over extensively. Peen Stroke spends the first thirteen paragraphs of this chapter narrating all of her current worries, most of which we could probably deduce from what just happened, and as usual Nyx is just sitting quietly off to the side. Furthermore, a fair amount of Twi's thoughts are just confused babbling. For instance, he once again brings up the incident where Twilight accidentally turned her parents into potted plants, but then inexplicably states that it should have been impossible for Nyx to do essentially the same thing. Why is it impossible? There's probably a reasonable explanation, but the point is that once again Peen Stroke is veering his own story way off topic just to reference random events from the show, in this case something he's already referenced.
Chapter 8: You Can't Hide Magic up your butt
Before we get too far into this chapter, I kind of want to dwell for a bit on what happened at the end of the last one. I can basically see where Peen Stroke is going with this: events in the story are beginning to accelerate, so Nyx's cover story starts to unravel. This is perfectly appropriate and he's doing this at the right time. The cult has figured out that Nightmare Moon is a filly living in Ponyville, they know her name, and it's been revealed that Filthy Rich is an agent of the cult. Meanwhile, Celestia is investigating Nyx as well and it will only be a matter of time before the whole ruse is blown wide open anyway. Having Nyx's true identity become known to her friends and classmates independently of these other plot lines completes the trifecta and makes the story more exciting. In terms of pacing and story structure he's doing everything correctly here.
However, I take issue with the specific choice of event he uses to move the plot forward. Nyx's physical transformation of Fluttershy into a tree is a jarring, bizarre, mostly uncalled for event. This is a universe in which magic exists and the rules that define what it can do are fairly loose, so it's not improbable that this could happen. However, it's bizarre because the events leading up to it are not entirely believable, and it's jarring because it's written like a gag but treated as a serious event in the story. It's uncalled for because, frankly, there's no logical reason for Pinkie to ask for it. As a humorous suggestion it's funny, but it's not something that Pinkie would logically expect Nyx to be able to do.
In MLP, Pinkie Pie is the established source for most of the cartoon-style humor. If I remember correctly, the show bible written by Faust that was leaked a couple of years ago specifies that Pinkie Pie is the only pony who should ever be shown doing anything "cartoony" (ie doing physically impossible things like stretching her body in weird ways or pulling random objects out of hammer space). Even though the show is set in a whimsical world in which improbable magic exists, there are set rules for how things work and all characters are expected to abide by them, the exception being Pinkie Pie. However, the catch is that she is usually only allowed to do impossible things for comic effect, and generally her gags don't direct the course of events in a story (there are a few exceptions, but for the most part the show adheres to this rule). The situation is similar to the genie character in Aladdin: he has a preposterous amount of magic power that can do just about anything, however most of the time it's just used for gags. Although there are some key events in the story that revolve around the genie's powers, the mortal characters still have to solve most of their problems on their own. If every problem was solved with magic, or if more than one character could do this type of magic, the story would be boring.
In this situation, we don't see Pinkie doing anything particularly out of the ordinary. The actual feat is performed by Nyx, and falls within her logical range of abilities, so it doesn't violate the rules of the universe. However, I would argue that this is still technically a Pinkie Pie gag. Nyx has no reason to transform Fluttershy into a tree, and she doesn't particularly want to do it. Fluttershy does not want or ask to be turned into a tree. Both Nyx and Flutters are goaded into it by Pinkie, who just randomly suggests it out of nowhere, and it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't. For all intents and purposes it's a "haha XD le random Pinkie Pie being le random" event. However, it's also a pivotal story event: Nyx performs a feat of magic which is within range of her real abilities but out of scope for the sort of run-of-the-mill unicorn filly she's pretending to be, thus the act proves she's not who she says she is and fatally erodes her disguise.
Also, even though the suggestion is mostly humorous, the story treats it seriously. Pinkie saying "Hey I know! Turn Fluttershy into a tree!" is funny and in character for Pinkie. Having Pinkie demand that it actually be done is another matter. An example from the Bible: a king tells his daughter that he will give her any gift she asks for. She responds by demanding the head of John the Baptist on a plate. Haha, how drole; what a delightfully edgy child she is. However, when the guards actually walk into the room carrying a human head on a plate, very few people will be laughing. That's why this event is jarring and uncomfortable: turning Flutters into a tree is funny idea, but when it actually plays out in reality we realize that it's a weird thing to do and an even weirder thing to ask for in the first place. Unless you're writing a slapstick comedy, you generally don't want to use gags as turning points in your story.
Now then, moving on. At the start of this chapter, we are once again back in Twilight's head, listening to her autistic circular thought patterns. Narrative wise, this is a bad place to be, for reasons I've already gone over extensively. Peen Stroke spends the first thirteen paragraphs of this chapter narrating all of her current worries, most of which we could probably deduce from what just happened, and as usual Nyx is just sitting quietly off to the side. Furthermore, a fair amount of Twi's thoughts are just confused babbling. For instance, he once again brings up the incident where Twilight accidentally turned her parents into potted plants, but then inexplicably states that it should have been impossible for Nyx to do essentially the same thing. Why is it impossible? There's probably a reasonable explanation, but the point is that once again Peen Stroke is veering his own story way off topic just to reference random events from the show, in this case something he's already referenced.
File (): D98B535471F95957DDBA78A41BA7BF2B-245138.jpg (239.4 KB, 800x578, tnfCIYP.jpg)
>>255441
Never one to disappoint in this department, Peen Stroke also provides us with plenty of pointless digression and name-dropping of irrelevant characters for no reason other than to name drop them. For instance:
>No, despite what Twilight told herself and everypony else, Nyx wasn’t entirely normal. She was an alicorn, but not an alicorn like her old foalsitter, Cadance. No, Cadance was only of partial royal blood, and thus a mortal alicorn. Yes, Cadance’s talent for love magic was unique. In terms of sheer power, however, Twilight herself was more magically gifted.
Pretend I've never seen MLP before and my only exposure to this universe is from reading this story. Who is this Cadance, anyway? Is she in this story? If not, is she relevant in any way that would require us to know about her? We haven't heard her name mentioned before. Why is she being mentioned now? She has nothing to do with anything that's going on, and her name is just dropped into the text for no reason and then immediately forgotten about.
This goes back to what I was saying earlier, about how it's a good idea to write fanfiction as if the reader knows nothing about the universe, and to only include elements from the universe that matter to the story you're telling. In MLP, Cadance is an important character; however, in Past Sins, (so far, at least) she's just a random figure from Twilight's past, who is brought up for no reason and then never mentioned again. Let's look at the context in which she's presented here. All Peen Stroke has told us about her is that she was Twilight's foal-sitter, and that she had some kind of unique talent for something called "love magic." Spike, take a letter. "Dear Clophouse Forum..." We also learn that she was an alicorn, but not an immortal alicorn, because she was only of partial Royal blood, and....so what? All of this random backstory about a character we've never met matters because....why exactly? All this paragraph does is raise unnecessary questions about a character we don't know who has no apparent connection to the events of the story. It's like if I were telling you a story about something interesting that happened to me today, and then suddenly veered off into a random anecdote about my Uncle Jeff.
I could go on, but you probably get the point. This whole chapter intro is mostly just stream of consciousness rambling that should never have made it past the first draft. Every writer is guilty of doing stuff like this; I do it all the time, in fact. However, the point of revision and editing is to go through your text, find the parts of your narrative that are pointless and digressive, and pare it down until what remains is the stuff that matters. Many authors like to brag about high word count, but if most of your text is just verbal diarrhea it's not a sign that you're a good writer, it's a sign that you suck at revision and/or have no innate ability to separate wheat from chaff.
Maybe you really like Cadance and want her to play some incidental role in your story even if she's not a main character. Okay, fine; find a role for her that matters somehow and use her in that capacity. Don't just randomly drop her name into the text because you feel like mentioning her. Anyway this guy does this kind of shit all the time and it's starting to get on my nerves a little.
>The full weight of parenthood came crashing down on Twilight. What was she getting herself into? She was taking care of Nyx like a daughter, and she was barely an adult herself. That, and, for all she knew, she was raising a filly that could someday be like the princesses.
This paragraph, on the other hand (hoof, whatever) is somewhat more relevant, because it gets to the core of exactly what Twilight's problem is right now. She initially took in Nyx because...well, arguably because she's a neurotic single mare whose biological clock is a ticking time bomb. However, from the way that Peen Stroke seems to have been trying to portray her, she took in Nyx out of concern that she might be dangerous. She's since developed maternal feelings for her. Now, she's feeling the weight of responsibility pressing down on her shoulders, and it becomes even heavier with the realization that Nyx might be significantly more powerful than her and she may not be able to offer her any real guidance. I still don't think it's a particularly good use of page space to devote thirteen paragraphs to Twilight's inner thoughts, but if she's going to be musing about anything for that length of time, I'd focus on this.
>How long would it be before the royal guard was hunting Nyx down? How long would it be before Princess Celestia banished Nyx to the moon? Nyx didn’t deserve any of that… well, unless she was, in fact, Nightmare Moon.
*sigh*. Pic related.
Anyway, the rest of this sub-chapter consists of Twilight talking to Big Mac and ultimately deciding that going back to the festival and acting like everything is normal is better damage control than hiding in the library, which actually makes quite a bit of sense. Incidentally, the way Big Mac is used here is a good example of how to PROPERLY reference an extraneous character. Big Mac doesn't really matter here, Twilight is just hiding at his farm because it was nearby and is talking to him because he's there. This role could be filled by any incidental character just as easily, but the author chose Big Mac, and he's used sparingly and appropriately. Note that we aren't given a ton of information about him, but we are given more or less what we need to imagine him. Readers who don't know the character get enough of an impression of him to get a sense of who he is, and readers who know and love the character will nod with approval that he was included. At the same time, the story isn't bogged down with unnecessary details about a character who only appears once in a random side role.
Never one to disappoint in this department, Peen Stroke also provides us with plenty of pointless digression and name-dropping of irrelevant characters for no reason other than to name drop them. For instance:
>No, despite what Twilight told herself and everypony else, Nyx wasn’t entirely normal. She was an alicorn, but not an alicorn like her old foalsitter, Cadance. No, Cadance was only of partial royal blood, and thus a mortal alicorn. Yes, Cadance’s talent for love magic was unique. In terms of sheer power, however, Twilight herself was more magically gifted.
Pretend I've never seen MLP before and my only exposure to this universe is from reading this story. Who is this Cadance, anyway? Is she in this story? If not, is she relevant in any way that would require us to know about her? We haven't heard her name mentioned before. Why is she being mentioned now? She has nothing to do with anything that's going on, and her name is just dropped into the text for no reason and then immediately forgotten about.
This goes back to what I was saying earlier, about how it's a good idea to write fanfiction as if the reader knows nothing about the universe, and to only include elements from the universe that matter to the story you're telling. In MLP, Cadance is an important character; however, in Past Sins, (so far, at least) she's just a random figure from Twilight's past, who is brought up for no reason and then never mentioned again. Let's look at the context in which she's presented here. All Peen Stroke has told us about her is that she was Twilight's foal-sitter, and that she had some kind of unique talent for something called "love magic." Spike, take a letter. "Dear Clophouse Forum..." We also learn that she was an alicorn, but not an immortal alicorn, because she was only of partial Royal blood, and....so what? All of this random backstory about a character we've never met matters because....why exactly? All this paragraph does is raise unnecessary questions about a character we don't know who has no apparent connection to the events of the story. It's like if I were telling you a story about something interesting that happened to me today, and then suddenly veered off into a random anecdote about my Uncle Jeff.
I could go on, but you probably get the point. This whole chapter intro is mostly just stream of consciousness rambling that should never have made it past the first draft. Every writer is guilty of doing stuff like this; I do it all the time, in fact. However, the point of revision and editing is to go through your text, find the parts of your narrative that are pointless and digressive, and pare it down until what remains is the stuff that matters. Many authors like to brag about high word count, but if most of your text is just verbal diarrhea it's not a sign that you're a good writer, it's a sign that you suck at revision and/or have no innate ability to separate wheat from chaff.
Maybe you really like Cadance and want her to play some incidental role in your story even if she's not a main character. Okay, fine; find a role for her that matters somehow and use her in that capacity. Don't just randomly drop her name into the text because you feel like mentioning her. Anyway this guy does this kind of shit all the time and it's starting to get on my nerves a little.
>The full weight of parenthood came crashing down on Twilight. What was she getting herself into? She was taking care of Nyx like a daughter, and she was barely an adult herself. That, and, for all she knew, she was raising a filly that could someday be like the princesses.
This paragraph, on the other hand (hoof, whatever) is somewhat more relevant, because it gets to the core of exactly what Twilight's problem is right now. She initially took in Nyx because...well, arguably because she's a neurotic single mare whose biological clock is a ticking time bomb. However, from the way that Peen Stroke seems to have been trying to portray her, she took in Nyx out of concern that she might be dangerous. She's since developed maternal feelings for her. Now, she's feeling the weight of responsibility pressing down on her shoulders, and it becomes even heavier with the realization that Nyx might be significantly more powerful than her and she may not be able to offer her any real guidance. I still don't think it's a particularly good use of page space to devote thirteen paragraphs to Twilight's inner thoughts, but if she's going to be musing about anything for that length of time, I'd focus on this.
>How long would it be before the royal guard was hunting Nyx down? How long would it be before Princess Celestia banished Nyx to the moon? Nyx didn’t deserve any of that… well, unless she was, in fact, Nightmare Moon.
*sigh*. Pic related.
Anyway, the rest of this sub-chapter consists of Twilight talking to Big Mac and ultimately deciding that going back to the festival and acting like everything is normal is better damage control than hiding in the library, which actually makes quite a bit of sense. Incidentally, the way Big Mac is used here is a good example of how to PROPERLY reference an extraneous character. Big Mac doesn't really matter here, Twilight is just hiding at his farm because it was nearby and is talking to him because he's there. This role could be filled by any incidental character just as easily, but the author chose Big Mac, and he's used sparingly and appropriately. Note that we aren't given a ton of information about him, but we are given more or less what we need to imagine him. Readers who don't know the character get enough of an impression of him to get a sense of who he is, and readers who know and love the character will nod with approval that he was included. At the same time, the story isn't bogged down with unnecessary details about a character who only appears once in a random side role.
>>255217
I don't like that spammer.
And I don't trust him.
But why is he posting "Police bad" posts here so frequently?
Is this a trap?
Is MLPOL's servers located in a country where saying "Police bad" or saying something pussypolicies can call threatening is illegal?
I don't like that spammer.
And I don't trust him.
But why is he posting "Police bad" posts here so frequently?
Is this a trap?
Is MLPOL's servers located in a country where saying "Police bad" or saying something pussypolicies can call threatening is illegal?
>>255468
True. The second I can afford a house in a redpilled country with gun and free speech rights, I'm moving.
True. The second I can afford a house in a redpilled country with gun and free speech rights, I'm moving.
>>255543
I read the first book of Harry Potter acouple of days ago and I realise that I dislike it so much that if I ever write a review series it will be about it.
I don't want to deny the its pros because there are some, however, there are definely cons as well. My main problem is her unnuanced and contemptful character writing and that she strawmans my beliefs.
I remember that you said you had a blog post about why you disliked it. Would you spoonfeed me or will I have to look it up.
I read the first book of Harry Potter acouple of days ago and I realise that I dislike it so much that if I ever write a review series it will be about it.
I don't want to deny the its pros because there are some, however, there are definely cons as well. My main problem is her unnuanced and contemptful character writing and that she strawmans my beliefs.
I remember that you said you had a blog post about why you disliked it. Would you spoonfeed me or will I have to look it up.
>>255693
The single most important problem with that britcuck bitch's novel-lite books is that she plagiarized dozens of established, already finished book series. The second most important problem is that Rowling had """somehow""" gained a great deal of influence in the britcuck legal system (and by somehow I mean that she willingly let every judge, attorney, lawyer, etc. that she had contact with fuck her) in order to 'defeat' the lawsuits against her.
#1: In 1994, Nancy Kathleen Stouffer wrote two books called 'The Legend of Rah And The Muggles', then 'Larry Potter And His Best Friend Lilly'.
#1a: the word 'muggle' was used in a derogatory manner to describe a race of mutated humanoid-like beings.
#1b: the entire character of Lilly in Stouffer's books was >95% copy-pasted to create 'Hermione' in Rowling's knockoff books. Several entire paragraphs were plagiarized. Unlike Lilly, 'Hermione' was described as both ginger haired and slightly freckled.
#2: the character of Larry Potter is a specifically disenfranchised, unlucky, awkward, skinny, teenaged human boy with a pale complexion, dark hair, bears a particularly unique scar, and wears an older pair of metal-framed round glasses (often called spectacles).
#3: in the setting, there is a greatly important series of details about the 'castle built upon an island in the middle of a lake', a theme which Rowling copied nearly word for word.
#3a: most importantly in Stouffer's works, there was a unique DESCRIPTION of a receiving room with wooden doors, which was copied word-for-word in Rowling's last manuscript release. This was SLIGHTLY changed in the final version of her first novel-lite.
#4: another serious plagiarization occurred when cuckbitch Rowling wrote in a band called the "Weird Sisters" during her novel-lite named 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'. This is a direct reference to the Wyrd Sisters music band from Canada whom were fans of Discworld. The Wyrd Sisters band themselves contacted the owner of the Discworld series and was given a formal, legally binding agreement to using the name. In the Discworld novels there are three 'Wyrd Sisters', of which a short film called 'The Wyrd Sisters' is easily found on jewtube, that the band took their inspiration from.
#4a: the scene in which the 'Weird Sisters' band in the movie were to appear in was to be three women of specific ages: mid-20's, mid-30's, and mid-40's, of specific clothing, temperaments, and habits, which 100% copied the Wyrd Sisters in the Discworld setting.
#5: a children's book writer named Adrian Jacobs wrote a book called 'The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land' in 1994. In the book, a contest occurred where, quote: "Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures", end quote. The entire sequence is copied word for word in the final manuscript, yet changed in the published version.
#6: the actual number of plagiarized works is at least 50. There are paragraphs and specific scenes/events from numerous series and individual novels, including Sword of Shannara, Deadlands, The Dark Tower, various Starjew Whores novels, various Piers Anthony novels, various John Ringo novels, and numerous Star Trek novels.
As for her own actions, Rowling has launched over 230 lawsuits against websites, organizations, groups, corporations, affiliates, firms, and publishers, but mostly against individuals in order to "protect her (((intellectual property rights)))". tl;dr: Rowling is a basic bitch hack britcunt whore.
The single most important problem with that britcuck bitch's novel-lite books is that she plagiarized dozens of established, already finished book series. The second most important problem is that Rowling had """somehow""" gained a great deal of influence in the britcuck legal system (and by somehow I mean that she willingly let every judge, attorney, lawyer, etc. that she had contact with fuck her) in order to 'defeat' the lawsuits against her.
#1: In 1994, Nancy Kathleen Stouffer wrote two books called 'The Legend of Rah And The Muggles', then 'Larry Potter And His Best Friend Lilly'.
#1a: the word 'muggle' was used in a derogatory manner to describe a race of mutated humanoid-like beings.
#1b: the entire character of Lilly in Stouffer's books was >95% copy-pasted to create 'Hermione' in Rowling's knockoff books. Several entire paragraphs were plagiarized. Unlike Lilly, 'Hermione' was described as both ginger haired and slightly freckled.
#2: the character of Larry Potter is a specifically disenfranchised, unlucky, awkward, skinny, teenaged human boy with a pale complexion, dark hair, bears a particularly unique scar, and wears an older pair of metal-framed round glasses (often called spectacles).
#3: in the setting, there is a greatly important series of details about the 'castle built upon an island in the middle of a lake', a theme which Rowling copied nearly word for word.
#3a: most importantly in Stouffer's works, there was a unique DESCRIPTION of a receiving room with wooden doors, which was copied word-for-word in Rowling's last manuscript release. This was SLIGHTLY changed in the final version of her first novel-lite.
#4: another serious plagiarization occurred when cuckbitch Rowling wrote in a band called the "Weird Sisters" during her novel-lite named 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'. This is a direct reference to the Wyrd Sisters music band from Canada whom were fans of Discworld. The Wyrd Sisters band themselves contacted the owner of the Discworld series and was given a formal, legally binding agreement to using the name. In the Discworld novels there are three 'Wyrd Sisters', of which a short film called 'The Wyrd Sisters' is easily found on jewtube, that the band took their inspiration from.
#4a: the scene in which the 'Weird Sisters' band in the movie were to appear in was to be three women of specific ages: mid-20's, mid-30's, and mid-40's, of specific clothing, temperaments, and habits, which 100% copied the Wyrd Sisters in the Discworld setting.
#5: a children's book writer named Adrian Jacobs wrote a book called 'The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land' in 1994. In the book, a contest occurred where, quote: "Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures", end quote. The entire sequence is copied word for word in the final manuscript, yet changed in the published version.
#6: the actual number of plagiarized works is at least 50. There are paragraphs and specific scenes/events from numerous series and individual novels, including Sword of Shannara, Deadlands, The Dark Tower, various Starjew Whores novels, various Piers Anthony novels, various John Ringo novels, and numerous Star Trek novels.
As for her own actions, Rowling has launched over 230 lawsuits against websites, organizations, groups, corporations, affiliates, firms, and publishers, but mostly against individuals in order to "protect her (((intellectual property rights)))". tl;dr: Rowling is a basic bitch hack britcunt whore.
>>255693
If you ever wanted to do a read-through critique thread of it kind of like what I'm doing here I'd fully support it and would probably chime in.
>>255753
Do you have any references to back this up? I've always seen her books as fairly derivative but I didn't know that she blatantly plagiarized anyone.
The reason I've never particularly liked Harry Potter is because the series feels like it's attempting to be whimsical British children's fantasy in the style of C.S. Lewis or Roald Dahl, but without any of the depth or warmth or clever storytelling that made those authors' books great. Harry "Semenus Ingestus" Potter and his world is just a pastiche of tropes invented by and used to better effect by better writers: the lonely orphan protagonist with the shitty adoptive family, the whimsical fantasy world populated by creatures from mythology, the portal to access it hidden in plain sight in our world but only accessible to imaginative children, etc etc. To make matters worse, in later books Rowling tries to make the story more "serious" by making it darker, which really just amounts to introducing a lot of edgelord teenage tropes (still) without really adding any significant depth. Sort of like how children who listened to pop punk in the early 2000s "grew up" and started listening to emo in the late 2000s, despite it being essentially the same thing, just with more minor chords and "darker" lyrics.
The other problem I have with it is that it presents everything in terms of moral absolutes, but it doesn't really make its absolutes stand for anything. Everyone lives in terror of this Voldemort guy, but why? He's just the evil guy who does evil because he is evil. Most of the evil he does is limited to the magical realm of fudgepackery where Hogwarts is located and has little bearing on the external world. Why do I, the reader, give a shit if Voldemort comes back and wreaks a bunch of havoc on the Wizardy Faggot World of Harry Faggot-ass Potter? The answer: I don't.
You could arguably make a similar criticism of Lewis' Narnia books (which are among the British children's canon that Rowling borrows heavily from) in that most of the significant events take place within an imaginary realm with little connection to our own world. However, Lewis' villains are clearly allegories for various vices and evils that exist in any world, and his stories are clearly meant to be lessons in Christian morality as well as entertainment. If Rowling's stories are intended to teach any values at all, it's a lot of milquetoast SJW bullshit, and even that is mostly hamfisted in. This probably explains why most of her fans grew up to be whiny, obnoxious, soy-guzzling manchildren.
>castle built upon an island in the middle of a lake
This is an ancient, ancient trope that comes into British literature through the Arthurian legends of the Island of Avalon, and is found in other traditions as well. Julius Evola actually discusses it in great detail in The Mystery of the Grail. Rowling, for her part, just uses it as a setting and clearly has no idea of any of the symbolism or history behind it, or if she does her understanding is superficial at best. Not sure how Stouffer used it; again if you have references I'd be curious to take a look.
>In the Discworld novels there are three 'Wyrd Sisters', of which a short film called 'The Wyrd Sisters' is easily found on jewtube, that the band took their inspiration from.
The Weird Sisters come from Shakespeare, they appear in Macbeth and are basically the Three Fates from Greek mythology. They also show up in the Gargoyles cartoon from the 90s, another highly derivative work that nonetheless has more depth and entertainment value than Harry Potter.
>The Dark Tower
It would actually be a little ironic if she plagiarized this, since King has been one of her most enthusiastic supporters and even referenced material from her novels in the later Dark Tower books. In general I really like Stephen King, but the two things I've always found most difficult to stomach about him are his lefty political views and his baffling support of J.K. Rowling.
>Sword of Shannara
I'd be curious to learn exactly what she plagiarized from this. I haven't read any of them in a very long time, but I remember greatly enjoying the Shannara books. They are not top-notch fantasy by any means, but they are at least better than Harry "the golden snitch is hidden in my butthole, why don't you use your wand to fish it out" Potter.
>tl;dr: Rowling is a basic bitch hack britcunt whore.
Again, I'd be curious to see what evidence these claims are based on, but pretty much I 100% believe you. From what I understand she was a welfare queen who suddenly became a bestselling author out of absolutely nowhere because of a shoddily written children's novel. It would not even remotely surprise me to learn that there was some shady business behind the scenes that made this happen; that "rags to riches" shit almost never works out in real life without some kind of backroom deal.
If you ever wanted to do a read-through critique thread of it kind of like what I'm doing here I'd fully support it and would probably chime in.
>>255753
Do you have any references to back this up? I've always seen her books as fairly derivative but I didn't know that she blatantly plagiarized anyone.
The reason I've never particularly liked Harry Potter is because the series feels like it's attempting to be whimsical British children's fantasy in the style of C.S. Lewis or Roald Dahl, but without any of the depth or warmth or clever storytelling that made those authors' books great. Harry "Semenus Ingestus" Potter and his world is just a pastiche of tropes invented by and used to better effect by better writers: the lonely orphan protagonist with the shitty adoptive family, the whimsical fantasy world populated by creatures from mythology, the portal to access it hidden in plain sight in our world but only accessible to imaginative children, etc etc. To make matters worse, in later books Rowling tries to make the story more "serious" by making it darker, which really just amounts to introducing a lot of edgelord teenage tropes (still) without really adding any significant depth. Sort of like how children who listened to pop punk in the early 2000s "grew up" and started listening to emo in the late 2000s, despite it being essentially the same thing, just with more minor chords and "darker" lyrics.
The other problem I have with it is that it presents everything in terms of moral absolutes, but it doesn't really make its absolutes stand for anything. Everyone lives in terror of this Voldemort guy, but why? He's just the evil guy who does evil because he is evil. Most of the evil he does is limited to the magical realm of fudgepackery where Hogwarts is located and has little bearing on the external world. Why do I, the reader, give a shit if Voldemort comes back and wreaks a bunch of havoc on the Wizardy Faggot World of Harry Faggot-ass Potter? The answer: I don't.
You could arguably make a similar criticism of Lewis' Narnia books (which are among the British children's canon that Rowling borrows heavily from) in that most of the significant events take place within an imaginary realm with little connection to our own world. However, Lewis' villains are clearly allegories for various vices and evils that exist in any world, and his stories are clearly meant to be lessons in Christian morality as well as entertainment. If Rowling's stories are intended to teach any values at all, it's a lot of milquetoast SJW bullshit, and even that is mostly hamfisted in. This probably explains why most of her fans grew up to be whiny, obnoxious, soy-guzzling manchildren.
>castle built upon an island in the middle of a lake
This is an ancient, ancient trope that comes into British literature through the Arthurian legends of the Island of Avalon, and is found in other traditions as well. Julius Evola actually discusses it in great detail in The Mystery of the Grail. Rowling, for her part, just uses it as a setting and clearly has no idea of any of the symbolism or history behind it, or if she does her understanding is superficial at best. Not sure how Stouffer used it; again if you have references I'd be curious to take a look.
>In the Discworld novels there are three 'Wyrd Sisters', of which a short film called 'The Wyrd Sisters' is easily found on jewtube, that the band took their inspiration from.
The Weird Sisters come from Shakespeare, they appear in Macbeth and are basically the Three Fates from Greek mythology. They also show up in the Gargoyles cartoon from the 90s, another highly derivative work that nonetheless has more depth and entertainment value than Harry Potter.
>The Dark Tower
It would actually be a little ironic if she plagiarized this, since King has been one of her most enthusiastic supporters and even referenced material from her novels in the later Dark Tower books. In general I really like Stephen King, but the two things I've always found most difficult to stomach about him are his lefty political views and his baffling support of J.K. Rowling.
>Sword of Shannara
I'd be curious to learn exactly what she plagiarized from this. I haven't read any of them in a very long time, but I remember greatly enjoying the Shannara books. They are not top-notch fantasy by any means, but they are at least better than Harry "the golden snitch is hidden in my butthole, why don't you use your wand to fish it out" Potter.
>tl;dr: Rowling is a basic bitch hack britcunt whore.
Again, I'd be curious to see what evidence these claims are based on, but pretty much I 100% believe you. From what I understand she was a welfare queen who suddenly became a bestselling author out of absolutely nowhere because of a shoddily written children's novel. It would not even remotely surprise me to learn that there was some shady business behind the scenes that made this happen; that "rags to riches" shit almost never works out in real life without some kind of backroom deal.
>>255449
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The point of view rejoins Nyx, who is participating in a tug of war challenge as part of Learn and Play Day. She teams up with the CMC, and their team is able to make it into the semi-finals or something, mostly due to Scootaloo cleverly manipulating the rules by using her wings without flying. In a completely by the numbers plot twist that should surprise absolutely no one, they eventually face off against Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon's team.
DT/SS have made it this far by relying upon the strength of a couple of older, stronger colts. The story attempts to use this to paint DT/SS in a negative light, but this fails somewhat when you consider that the CMC basically did the same thing by relying on Scootaloo's wings. Anyway, the CMC eventually win the match by resorting to treachery, er, strategy.
Though I don't find myself particularly rooting for either side of this conflict since neither particularly deserves to win, I'll say that the scene does a fair job of depicting the CMC and Nyx working together as friends and teammates. Apple Bloom assumes the role of de facto leader who organizes and deploys their strategies, Scootaloo's stunted little freak wings provide the extra bit of strength they need to beat teams that would otherwise be stronger than them, Nyx comes up with the idea that eventually leads them to victory, and Sweetie Belle uses her own grit and determination to prevent them from being defeated before this can happen. Each one of the friends contributes something to the team's effort, and they win through cooperation. This is a good way to write interactions between groups of friends. It's particularly good friendship writing for a story where the protagonist is an author-created OC, as the temptation is usually for the author to make his own character the star of the show. Though Nyx is ultimately the one who thinks up the winning strategy, each member of the group deserves credit for the actual accomplishment. The best way to write a likable OC is to have her/him blend effectively into the world and become a part of it, rather than stand out and save the day all the time.
After this scene concludes, however, Peen Stroke makes the baffling decision to keep the contest going. The CMC, a group of young fillies analogous to maybe fourth grade girls, face off against a team of young-adult colts, analogous to older teenage boys. This match makes no sense, as usually the whole point of separating contestants by age group is to ensure that everyone is facing off against an opponent they can reasonably beat. It also makes little sense from a literary perspective, as the clear purpose of the scene (having Nyx get back at her rival DT for the stunt she pulled in the woods earlier) has already been accomplished.
However, never to be deterred by such minor matters as logical consistency or good storytelling, Peen Stroke sallies forth with this incredibly stupid plot development. A few lines later, we begin to get a sense of his reasoning. The lopsided contest pairing is basically just a clumsy vehicle that forces Nyx to use her supermagic in front of the townsponies for the second time in one day.
>The older colts were grinning, finding some perverse joy in sending four little fillies crashing into the mud.
I find this visual image funny because I am a colossal dick, but in all seriousness this was a very poor judgement call on the part of the adults supposedly in charge.
>The mud pit was drawing closer. The older colts on the other team were all wearing smiles, playing with Nyx as they inched her closer and closer to the pit. Most of the crowd had given up cheering and was now just waiting for the inevitable. The only ones still cheering were supporters of The Boulders. The only cheers that still rang out for Nyx came from Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, and Apple Bloom.
Seriously, visualize this scene. Imagine a schoolteacher setting up and sanctioning this preposterously one-sided tug of war match. Imagine a crowd of spectators standing around cheering for these near-adult boys, proudly dragging a team of preteen girls into the mud using their obviously superior brute strength. How does Cheerilee even have a job after this?
>Shutting her eyes, Nyx cast her first spell with a flash from her horn, and a moment later her hooves became rooted to the ground. This stopped The Boulders from pulling her closer to the mud pit, but stopping them alone wouldn’t win the match.
Also, I feel as if technically this would break or even sever her legs, since the momentum of the older colts tugging on the rope hasn't changed, and presumably whatever magic is holding her to the ground is an unstoppable force.
Anyway, blah blah blah. This ends about how you would expect: Nyx uses her Mary Sue superpowers to win the tug of war match that logically she should not have been a contestant in to begin with, and instead of cheering for her the town now sees her as some kind of freaky Rosemary's Baby type character. What the fuck did I just read?
>“Boy, that was crazy,” Rainbow Dash stated as she fluttered through the air with a box in her hooves. “I mean, can you believe little Nyx beating that whole team of older colts? I didn’t think the crybaby had it in her. What are the chances?”
Also, this is a pretty mean-spirited line from Rainbow Dash. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but this comes across as an incredibly cunty thing to say.
She also mentions Shining Armor and his shield spell, another character who hasn't been mentioned in the story and doesn't appear relevant to it. See my comments above on the namedropping of Cadance. This is followed up by an unnecessarily verbose discussion on Fluttershy's stare, which also isn't particularly relevant to anything. Oy vey, Peen Stroke; always with the show references.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The point of view rejoins Nyx, who is participating in a tug of war challenge as part of Learn and Play Day. She teams up with the CMC, and their team is able to make it into the semi-finals or something, mostly due to Scootaloo cleverly manipulating the rules by using her wings without flying. In a completely by the numbers plot twist that should surprise absolutely no one, they eventually face off against Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon's team.
DT/SS have made it this far by relying upon the strength of a couple of older, stronger colts. The story attempts to use this to paint DT/SS in a negative light, but this fails somewhat when you consider that the CMC basically did the same thing by relying on Scootaloo's wings. Anyway, the CMC eventually win the match by resorting to treachery, er, strategy.
Though I don't find myself particularly rooting for either side of this conflict since neither particularly deserves to win, I'll say that the scene does a fair job of depicting the CMC and Nyx working together as friends and teammates. Apple Bloom assumes the role of de facto leader who organizes and deploys their strategies, Scootaloo's stunted little freak wings provide the extra bit of strength they need to beat teams that would otherwise be stronger than them, Nyx comes up with the idea that eventually leads them to victory, and Sweetie Belle uses her own grit and determination to prevent them from being defeated before this can happen. Each one of the friends contributes something to the team's effort, and they win through cooperation. This is a good way to write interactions between groups of friends. It's particularly good friendship writing for a story where the protagonist is an author-created OC, as the temptation is usually for the author to make his own character the star of the show. Though Nyx is ultimately the one who thinks up the winning strategy, each member of the group deserves credit for the actual accomplishment. The best way to write a likable OC is to have her/him blend effectively into the world and become a part of it, rather than stand out and save the day all the time.
After this scene concludes, however, Peen Stroke makes the baffling decision to keep the contest going. The CMC, a group of young fillies analogous to maybe fourth grade girls, face off against a team of young-adult colts, analogous to older teenage boys. This match makes no sense, as usually the whole point of separating contestants by age group is to ensure that everyone is facing off against an opponent they can reasonably beat. It also makes little sense from a literary perspective, as the clear purpose of the scene (having Nyx get back at her rival DT for the stunt she pulled in the woods earlier) has already been accomplished.
However, never to be deterred by such minor matters as logical consistency or good storytelling, Peen Stroke sallies forth with this incredibly stupid plot development. A few lines later, we begin to get a sense of his reasoning. The lopsided contest pairing is basically just a clumsy vehicle that forces Nyx to use her supermagic in front of the townsponies for the second time in one day.
>The older colts were grinning, finding some perverse joy in sending four little fillies crashing into the mud.
I find this visual image funny because I am a colossal dick, but in all seriousness this was a very poor judgement call on the part of the adults supposedly in charge.
>The mud pit was drawing closer. The older colts on the other team were all wearing smiles, playing with Nyx as they inched her closer and closer to the pit. Most of the crowd had given up cheering and was now just waiting for the inevitable. The only ones still cheering were supporters of The Boulders. The only cheers that still rang out for Nyx came from Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, and Apple Bloom.
Seriously, visualize this scene. Imagine a schoolteacher setting up and sanctioning this preposterously one-sided tug of war match. Imagine a crowd of spectators standing around cheering for these near-adult boys, proudly dragging a team of preteen girls into the mud using their obviously superior brute strength. How does Cheerilee even have a job after this?
>Shutting her eyes, Nyx cast her first spell with a flash from her horn, and a moment later her hooves became rooted to the ground. This stopped The Boulders from pulling her closer to the mud pit, but stopping them alone wouldn’t win the match.
Also, I feel as if technically this would break or even sever her legs, since the momentum of the older colts tugging on the rope hasn't changed, and presumably whatever magic is holding her to the ground is an unstoppable force.
Anyway, blah blah blah. This ends about how you would expect: Nyx uses her Mary Sue superpowers to win the tug of war match that logically she should not have been a contestant in to begin with, and instead of cheering for her the town now sees her as some kind of freaky Rosemary's Baby type character. What the fuck did I just read?
>“Boy, that was crazy,” Rainbow Dash stated as she fluttered through the air with a box in her hooves. “I mean, can you believe little Nyx beating that whole team of older colts? I didn’t think the crybaby had it in her. What are the chances?”
Also, this is a pretty mean-spirited line from Rainbow Dash. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but this comes across as an incredibly cunty thing to say.
She also mentions Shining Armor and his shield spell, another character who hasn't been mentioned in the story and doesn't appear relevant to it. See my comments above on the namedropping of Cadance. This is followed up by an unnecessarily verbose discussion on Fluttershy's stare, which also isn't particularly relevant to anything. Oy vey, Peen Stroke; always with the show references.
>>255797
You are killing me here, sir. All joking aside I sincerely approve of your inquisitiveness. Here are the common resources available based on a 1 hour search:
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2010/02/18/jk_rowling_sued_for_plagiarism.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1193283/JK-Rowling-sued-500m-plagiarism-lawsuit-family-late-Willy-The-Wizard-author.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20090619205429/http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Lifestyle/Story/STIStory_390898.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150703134826/http://news.moviefone.com/2010/02/18/j-k-rowling-accused-of-stealing-ideas-from-1987-childrens-wiza/
https://web.archive.org/web/20070518113345/http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/01/author_stouffer032801.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20071028093257/http://www.realmuggles.com/action.html#notice1#notice1
https://web.archive.org/web/20090405020832/http://www.chartattack.com/news/41504/winnipegs-wyrd-sisters-still-fighting-harry-potter
https://web.archive.org/web/20070527023912/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2005/11/04/wyrdlawsuit_051104.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20070507075524/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/07/03/wyrd-potter-court.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20070917053558/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=bc5b3049-56dc-493b-9ccc-5d4bd0389392
https://web.archive.org/web/20150929144426
https://web.archive.org/web/20110714174133/http://www.news919.com/news/national/article/39866--wyrd-five-year-court-battle-over-harry-potter-movie-ends-with-secret-settlement
https://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2015/07/harry-potter-lawsuits-and-where-to-find-them/
/http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=ece18f65-1eb9-4829-9e2b-1d50a0dca298
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1032154 - requires an archive program to read
https://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/04/18/final-for-now-reflections-on-the-harry-potter-trial/
https://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCAN0845394920080908
https://web.archive.org/web/20071102040520/http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=3803111
Last, yet not least:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_analogues
Yes, I know, it's fucking jewpedia, yet does a (((good job))) of dismissing and handholding that britcuck bitch's insane number of (((won))) lawsuits.
You are killing me here, sir. All joking aside I sincerely approve of your inquisitiveness. Here are the common resources available based on a 1 hour search:
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2010/02/18/jk_rowling_sued_for_plagiarism.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1193283/JK-Rowling-sued-500m-plagiarism-lawsuit-family-late-Willy-The-Wizard-author.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20090619205429/http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Lifestyle/Story/STIStory_390898.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150703134826/http://news.moviefone.com/2010/02/18/j-k-rowling-accused-of-stealing-ideas-from-1987-childrens-wiza/
https://web.archive.org/web/20070518113345/http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/01/author_stouffer032801.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20071028093257/http://www.realmuggles.com/action.html#notice1#notice1
https://web.archive.org/web/20090405020832/http://www.chartattack.com/news/41504/winnipegs-wyrd-sisters-still-fighting-harry-potter
https://web.archive.org/web/20070527023912/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2005/11/04/wyrdlawsuit_051104.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20070507075524/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/07/03/wyrd-potter-court.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20070917053558/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=bc5b3049-56dc-493b-9ccc-5d4bd0389392
https://web.archive.org/web/20150929144426
https://web.archive.org/web/20110714174133/http://www.news919.com/news/national/article/39866--wyrd-five-year-court-battle-over-harry-potter-movie-ends-with-secret-settlement
https://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2015/07/harry-potter-lawsuits-and-where-to-find-them/
/http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=ece18f65-1eb9-4829-9e2b-1d50a0dca298
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1032154 - requires an archive program to read
https://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/04/18/final-for-now-reflections-on-the-harry-potter-trial/
https://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCAN0845394920080908
https://web.archive.org/web/20071102040520/http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=3803111
Last, yet not least:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_analogues
Yes, I know, it's fucking jewpedia, yet does a (((good job))) of dismissing and handholding that britcuck bitch's insane number of (((won))) lawsuits.
>>255797
tl;dr: there are potentially hundreds of references that I have not personally researched, nor know by memory.
#1: there is an event in one of the Sword of Shannara volumes that gives explicit detail on how a cruel shadow-being/magician is tricked into performing a good deed against their will and ceases to exist out of shame.
#2: there are multiple Star Trek references attributed by others, the most notable (remembered) one being a dismissal expy of the following phrase: "a sufficiently advanced technological level is equally indiscernible from magic".
#3: a book from the Deadlands series (from an author I do not know) features a character attributing his survival to being, quote: "cursed to live beyond those that are trying to kill me". While the Deadlands take is (according to friends) canon for reasons of in-universe humor, this causes Rowling's 'Harry Potter' protagonist to read like a power fantasy/isekai where the main protagonist SOMEHOW always survives the consequences of their actions/unknown actions of unknown characters, and becomes ever greater in the story.
#4: I will not read anything from Starjew Whores. George Jewcas can fuck right off the end of a 100 foot Eldritch whale cock. A colleague mentioned that one particular situation from two books, the first named 'The Last Command' by Timothy Zan (Zahn?), and the second from 'Truce At Bakura', are featured event-for-event across one each of Rowling's "novels". The first is an isekai like scene where Harry inevitably triumphs over his foe just as Mahra/Marra Jade (spelling not confirmed) does to her opponent, while the second is a "negotiation" that goes so well as to be a power fantasy.
#5: in the events of The Dark Tower volumes, specifically 1 and 2, there is an ultra-specific meeting of subplot characters whom are integrally vital to the storyline of each. The first occurs when Harry meets a semi-hostile, tiny faction, and in true isekai fashion manages to make them completely trust them, just as the main character in The Dark Tower volume 1 does. The second occurs when a horrible event involving, from what I can recall, an Eldritch house attempts to consume and kill everything in it, yet the titular main character in The Dark Tower volume 2 completely euthanizes and castrates it with little difficulty to himself.
#6: I know nothing about the Sword of Shannara however a former "colleague" of mine, that being a loose term, enjoyed the series greatly. In a volume of that series called 'Antrax which was published in 2001 by Terry Brooks, an Impossible Scenario is presented in which the main character attempts to complete his goals and is utterly thwarted by an advanced, hyper-sapient techno-magical system which has degraded throughout numerous centuries and 'now' subsists off purely magical means. Unexpectedly the main character succeeds, yet not for the same reasons said main character expects or tells his few surviving companions about. This is, according to said "colleague", heavily referenced throughout Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
#7: there are a number of direct ripoffs from Rudyard Kipling poems specifically related to the "poor/abandoned/fatherless/bastard boy in a boarding school" trope so beloved by britcucks. Fuck him, the traitorous proto-neocon cuckservative that he was.
#8: the 'Tanya Grotter' series from Russia. Pure comedy/nonsensical/farcical approach, yet sued to death.
#9: a highly specific situation featured in an earlier Star Trek novelization (not a series I am familiar with) of the Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, is lifted event-for-event and repurposed in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
#10: I do not have Stouffer's volumes nor do I know anyone in possession them. What I have read are a number of excerpts that indicate distinct knowledge of Stouffer's world setting, taken nearly word-for-word.
I acknowledge that performing far more in depth research would be a crippling time constraint, yet the dozens of """coincidental""" plagiarization are hyper-suspicious.
Other newfound sources:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12134288
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/18/harry-potter-plagiarism-struck-out
https://web.archive.org/web/20070629165519/http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/UK/09/19/rowling.court/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/books/arts/arts-briefly-harry-potter-crosses-wands-with-the-us-army.html
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/21/warner_brothers_bullying_ruins_field/
tl;dr: there are potentially hundreds of references that I have not personally researched, nor know by memory.
#1: there is an event in one of the Sword of Shannara volumes that gives explicit detail on how a cruel shadow-being/magician is tricked into performing a good deed against their will and ceases to exist out of shame.
#2: there are multiple Star Trek references attributed by others, the most notable (remembered) one being a dismissal expy of the following phrase: "a sufficiently advanced technological level is equally indiscernible from magic".
#3: a book from the Deadlands series (from an author I do not know) features a character attributing his survival to being, quote: "cursed to live beyond those that are trying to kill me". While the Deadlands take is (according to friends) canon for reasons of in-universe humor, this causes Rowling's 'Harry Potter' protagonist to read like a power fantasy/isekai where the main protagonist SOMEHOW always survives the consequences of their actions/unknown actions of unknown characters, and becomes ever greater in the story.
#4: I will not read anything from Starjew Whores. George Jewcas can fuck right off the end of a 100 foot Eldritch whale cock. A colleague mentioned that one particular situation from two books, the first named 'The Last Command' by Timothy Zan (Zahn?), and the second from 'Truce At Bakura', are featured event-for-event across one each of Rowling's "novels". The first is an isekai like scene where Harry inevitably triumphs over his foe just as Mahra/Marra Jade (spelling not confirmed) does to her opponent, while the second is a "negotiation" that goes so well as to be a power fantasy.
#5: in the events of The Dark Tower volumes, specifically 1 and 2, there is an ultra-specific meeting of subplot characters whom are integrally vital to the storyline of each. The first occurs when Harry meets a semi-hostile, tiny faction, and in true isekai fashion manages to make them completely trust them, just as the main character in The Dark Tower volume 1 does. The second occurs when a horrible event involving, from what I can recall, an Eldritch house attempts to consume and kill everything in it, yet the titular main character in The Dark Tower volume 2 completely euthanizes and castrates it with little difficulty to himself.
#6: I know nothing about the Sword of Shannara however a former "colleague" of mine, that being a loose term, enjoyed the series greatly. In a volume of that series called 'Antrax which was published in 2001 by Terry Brooks, an Impossible Scenario is presented in which the main character attempts to complete his goals and is utterly thwarted by an advanced, hyper-sapient techno-magical system which has degraded throughout numerous centuries and 'now' subsists off purely magical means. Unexpectedly the main character succeeds, yet not for the same reasons said main character expects or tells his few surviving companions about. This is, according to said "colleague", heavily referenced throughout Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
#7: there are a number of direct ripoffs from Rudyard Kipling poems specifically related to the "poor/abandoned/fatherless/bastard boy in a boarding school" trope so beloved by britcucks. Fuck him, the traitorous proto-neocon cuckservative that he was.
#8: the 'Tanya Grotter' series from Russia. Pure comedy/nonsensical/farcical approach, yet sued to death.
#9: a highly specific situation featured in an earlier Star Trek novelization (not a series I am familiar with) of the Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, is lifted event-for-event and repurposed in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
#10: I do not have Stouffer's volumes nor do I know anyone in possession them. What I have read are a number of excerpts that indicate distinct knowledge of Stouffer's world setting, taken nearly word-for-word.
I acknowledge that performing far more in depth research would be a crippling time constraint, yet the dozens of """coincidental""" plagiarization are hyper-suspicious.
Other newfound sources:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12134288
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/18/harry-potter-plagiarism-struck-out
https://web.archive.org/web/20070629165519/http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/UK/09/19/rowling.court/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/books/arts/arts-briefly-harry-potter-crosses-wands-with-the-us-army.html
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/21/warner_brothers_bullying_ruins_field/
>>255809
If all of this is true, it is sort of funny read: disturbing considering she has a character in her series called Gilderoy Lockman. His entire character is about how he stole other peoples' achivements for himself.
If all of this is true, it is sort of funny read: disturbing considering she has a character in her series called Gilderoy Lockman. His entire character is about how he stole other peoples' achivements for himself.
>>255809
>I will not read anything from Starjew Whores. George Jewcas can fuck right off the end of a 100 foot Eldritch whale cock.
Agreed, and well said.
>there are a number of direct ripoffs from Rudyard Kipling poems specifically related to the "poor/abandoned/fatherless/bastard boy in a boarding school" trope so beloved by britcucks.
Literally nothing about this surprises me, but in general once something becomes an ingrained and well-known enough part of the literary canon of a given culture, it is usually considered fair game for authors to borrow from it at will. For instance, the Weird Sisters from Macbeth are fairly well known, and using them for the name of a rock band could probably be seen more as a reference than as a direct ripoff. As I mentioned, Rowling borrows heavily from C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and probably any number of others. Rudyard Kipling would fall into this category I think. Borrowing established tropes from well-known literary works isn't necessarily plagiarism, but if the author isn't adding anything original or valuable to the cauldron, it's usually a sign that you're dealing with a hack.
>Fuck him, the traitorous proto-neocon cuckservative that he was.
That's probably true enough, although I still enjoy The Jungle Book.
Anyway, I suppose whether or not something should be considered plagiarism depends on the spirit in which it was done. If you make an obvious reference to something famous or quote a passage but give credit to the original author, it's usually ok. If you're ripping off something obscure that a lot of people wouldn't be familiar with and passing it off as your own work, that's another matter. It sounds like that's what she was probably doing with Willy the Wizard and the other one about Muggles that you cited. The situation is definitely very fishy there and as I said it wouldn't surprise me, as Rowling strikes me as a rather shady and opportunistic person who might do something like this.
>I acknowledge that performing far more in depth research would be a crippling time constraint, yet the dozens of """coincidental""" plagiarization are hyper-suspicious.
Certainly, and I largely agree with you that Rowling is suspicious. Thank you for taking the time to unearth all of this, I will try to go through all of these articles. I find the connection between the Willy the Wizard story and Rowling's literary agent to be especially suspect. My best guess is that she probably came up with a vague idea about a boy wizard, and the agent spoonfed ideas to her and helped her write the novels because she can't write particularly well on her own. He probably figured nobody would ever recognize Willy the Wizard. I also wouldn't be surprised if it turned out she'd fucked quite a bit of her way to the top, as she is fairly good looking from the pictures I've seen, and probably looked even better in the 90s.
>I will not read anything from Starjew Whores. George Jewcas can fuck right off the end of a 100 foot Eldritch whale cock.
Agreed, and well said.
>there are a number of direct ripoffs from Rudyard Kipling poems specifically related to the "poor/abandoned/fatherless/bastard boy in a boarding school" trope so beloved by britcucks.
Literally nothing about this surprises me, but in general once something becomes an ingrained and well-known enough part of the literary canon of a given culture, it is usually considered fair game for authors to borrow from it at will. For instance, the Weird Sisters from Macbeth are fairly well known, and using them for the name of a rock band could probably be seen more as a reference than as a direct ripoff. As I mentioned, Rowling borrows heavily from C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and probably any number of others. Rudyard Kipling would fall into this category I think. Borrowing established tropes from well-known literary works isn't necessarily plagiarism, but if the author isn't adding anything original or valuable to the cauldron, it's usually a sign that you're dealing with a hack.
>Fuck him, the traitorous proto-neocon cuckservative that he was.
That's probably true enough, although I still enjoy The Jungle Book.
Anyway, I suppose whether or not something should be considered plagiarism depends on the spirit in which it was done. If you make an obvious reference to something famous or quote a passage but give credit to the original author, it's usually ok. If you're ripping off something obscure that a lot of people wouldn't be familiar with and passing it off as your own work, that's another matter. It sounds like that's what she was probably doing with Willy the Wizard and the other one about Muggles that you cited. The situation is definitely very fishy there and as I said it wouldn't surprise me, as Rowling strikes me as a rather shady and opportunistic person who might do something like this.
>I acknowledge that performing far more in depth research would be a crippling time constraint, yet the dozens of """coincidental""" plagiarization are hyper-suspicious.
Certainly, and I largely agree with you that Rowling is suspicious. Thank you for taking the time to unearth all of this, I will try to go through all of these articles. I find the connection between the Willy the Wizard story and Rowling's literary agent to be especially suspect. My best guess is that she probably came up with a vague idea about a boy wizard, and the agent spoonfed ideas to her and helped her write the novels because she can't write particularly well on her own. He probably figured nobody would ever recognize Willy the Wizard. I also wouldn't be surprised if it turned out she'd fucked quite a bit of her way to the top, as she is fairly good looking from the pictures I've seen, and probably looked even better in the 90s.
>>255693
>>255694
I am "that guy" but getting my life together means I can't check forum multiple times per day like I used to. Also, please stop calling me/other brits that.
Here are the posts on why Harry Potter is shit.
They're long as fuck and pretty old but the stories have shit-tier broken worldbuilding and they don't remember their own rules.
Or the lefty rules they're written to abide by.
Remember when it breaks the leftyrule against justifying and excusing child abuse when Dumbledore says to Harry's face "We knew about the abuse the Dursleys put you through because your wacky cat-lady next door neighbour was a spy for us, and we intentionally left you in the house with them because muh blood wards. That's something I just pulled out of my ass. Remember in book 1 when touching you turned Voldemort-Quirrel to ash? It's because you spent enough time in the home Lily was in when she died for you. Don't question why we didn't kick the Dursleys out of your inherited house and send Muggle-born spies working for us to raise you without knowledge of the magical world."
I know leftists are hypocritical demons with fake antihuman rules but still. Lol.
Literally nothing about Harry Potter magic/potions/anything is explained beyond "it works because it does when the author wants it to". Magic is a crutch the author uses for infinite get-out-of-jail-free cards.
https://www.deviantart.com/silverstarapple/journal/Some-Thoughts-on-the-Worldbuilding-in-Harry-Potter-684540926
And I wrote this while sleep-deprived but it's right too.
https://www.deviantart.com/silverstarapple/journal/Harry-Potter-Wrote-this-on-3-nights-of-nosleep-746953691
>>255694
I am "that guy" but getting my life together means I can't check forum multiple times per day like I used to. Also, please stop calling me/other brits that.
Here are the posts on why Harry Potter is shit.
They're long as fuck and pretty old but the stories have shit-tier broken worldbuilding and they don't remember their own rules.
Or the lefty rules they're written to abide by.
Remember when it breaks the leftyrule against justifying and excusing child abuse when Dumbledore says to Harry's face "We knew about the abuse the Dursleys put you through because your wacky cat-lady next door neighbour was a spy for us, and we intentionally left you in the house with them because muh blood wards. That's something I just pulled out of my ass. Remember in book 1 when touching you turned Voldemort-Quirrel to ash? It's because you spent enough time in the home Lily was in when she died for you. Don't question why we didn't kick the Dursleys out of your inherited house and send Muggle-born spies working for us to raise you without knowledge of the magical world."
I know leftists are hypocritical demons with fake antihuman rules but still. Lol.
Literally nothing about Harry Potter magic/potions/anything is explained beyond "it works because it does when the author wants it to". Magic is a crutch the author uses for infinite get-out-of-jail-free cards.
https://www.deviantart.com/silverstarapple/journal/Some-Thoughts-on-the-Worldbuilding-in-Harry-Potter-684540926
And I wrote this while sleep-deprived but it's right too.
https://www.deviantart.com/silverstarapple/journal/Harry-Potter-Wrote-this-on-3-nights-of-nosleep-746953691
>>255797
When I was a child browsing the internet, I once found a blog that featured "Annotated Copies" of the first two Harry Potter novels, with a third half-done and more on the way.
It's the entirety of the text of these stories, uploaded chapter by chapter, except whenever there is highlighted text you can move your mouse over it to view a popup that says what this idea, line of text, or scene is stolen from. It's colour-coordinated to show whether this is stolen from an old british mythology, a movie, an old famous british author, a foreign author who wrote a book in foreignese translated into english, an obscure fantasy author, or something else.
If you click the highlighted text, a new tab is opened up to show a bigger explanation of where the ripped-off work came from, when it was published, even showing screencaps and passages of stolen text and timestamps for movies or links to old websites full of old mythologies, whatever's necessary to back up the "She stole this from this" claim.
I used this site to read the first two Harry Potter books for free since I didn't have either and the TV propaganda "Omg this is the best book and it's making kids reeeeead!" BBC shows were making me feel left-out for not having or reading these books.
I swear on my life, I saw this once and for the life of me I can't find it again. It might have been taken down, but I swear I've seen this damn blog somewhere.
And it would be a damn noble endeavor to make a new blog like this. Or evade lawsuits by making it something torrentable and publishing it anonymously.
When I was a child browsing the internet, I once found a blog that featured "Annotated Copies" of the first two Harry Potter novels, with a third half-done and more on the way.
It's the entirety of the text of these stories, uploaded chapter by chapter, except whenever there is highlighted text you can move your mouse over it to view a popup that says what this idea, line of text, or scene is stolen from. It's colour-coordinated to show whether this is stolen from an old british mythology, a movie, an old famous british author, a foreign author who wrote a book in foreignese translated into english, an obscure fantasy author, or something else.
If you click the highlighted text, a new tab is opened up to show a bigger explanation of where the ripped-off work came from, when it was published, even showing screencaps and passages of stolen text and timestamps for movies or links to old websites full of old mythologies, whatever's necessary to back up the "She stole this from this" claim.
I used this site to read the first two Harry Potter books for free since I didn't have either and the TV propaganda "Omg this is the best book and it's making kids reeeeead!" BBC shows were making me feel left-out for not having or reading these books.
I swear on my life, I saw this once and for the life of me I can't find it again. It might have been taken down, but I swear I've seen this damn blog somewhere.
And it would be a damn noble endeavor to make a new blog like this. Or evade lawsuits by making it something torrentable and publishing it anonymously.
>>255809
>The Last Command' by Timothy Zan (Zahn?),
Is that the one where a blue Marty Stu, a blue-skinned human bloke, rises through the ranks in Imperial Command despite dealing with "Muh racism from da whites" and is able to magically predict and understand literal alien races AND THEIR MILITARY TACTICS AND THE WEAKNESSES OF THOSE TACTICS AND THE WEAKNESSES OF THEIR STARSHIPS by looking at their art for a bit?
>The Last Command' by Timothy Zan (Zahn?),
Is that the one where a blue Marty Stu, a blue-skinned human bloke, rises through the ranks in Imperial Command despite dealing with "Muh racism from da whites" and is able to magically predict and understand literal alien races AND THEIR MILITARY TACTICS AND THE WEAKNESSES OF THOSE TACTICS AND THE WEAKNESSES OF THEIR STARSHIPS by looking at their art for a bit?
>>255797
I once heard Feminist authors have it easy because Feminist "Charities" will hold fundraisers for "Children's literacy", raise millions tax-free, exploit actual artists without paying them to gain more tax-free dollars, and then spend all that money on bulk-buying shitloads of Harry Potter copies and sending them out to schools all over the place so bored kids with nothing better to do can read them.
I once heard Feminist authors have it easy because Feminist "Charities" will hold fundraisers for "Children's literacy", raise millions tax-free, exploit actual artists without paying them to gain more tax-free dollars, and then spend all that money on bulk-buying shitloads of Harry Potter copies and sending them out to schools all over the place so bored kids with nothing better to do can read them.
File (): F20FC47EA9A73BCC68026C1520A3B45A-106098.jpg (103.6 KB, 1600x941, Pony Starlight 1.jpg)
>>255806
Anyway, the Stare thing comes up because Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy discover Pinkie Pie, frozen in place in some kind of karate stance inside the schoolhouse. They wake her up with another show reference, whispering to her that Celestia wants her to plan the next Grand Galloping Gala. This provides the opportunity to drop in yet another reference in the form of a song, which approximates the form and meter of a song Pinkie sings from the show, which if I'm not mistaken appears in the episode where Twilight has the extra Gala ticket and can't decide who to give it to.
It's possible I'm being a little unfair on Peen Stroke by always coming down on him for his constant referencing of events from the show, but personally I just think it's all a little too much. Maybe bronies c. 2012 enjoyed this sort of thing; I don't know, I wasn't around. But I guess I'm sort of a stickler for the idea that a story should be self-contained and should focus primarily on its own events, instead of relying on references to external or source material. In fanfiction, there's nothing wrong with giving the occasional nod to some in-joke from the fandom, or referencing an event or two from the source; in fact it can actually enhance enjoyment if done in proper quantities. But moderation is the key; to do it constantly like this is just bad form, and after awhile it's just plain obnoxious.
>Hey, remember that one thing from S1 that happened that one time? Haha so do I, and look, the characters in my story are talking about it! How zany is that?
>How about that one scene from S2e05 with the things and stuff that happened? I'm sure we all remember that! Here's some bizarre incongruous plot twist I'm awkwardly wedging into the story for no reason other than to bring that up! Haha, isn't my story just the best?
>Hey, anypony remember how in S3e68 about 14 minutes and 31.8 seconds in, Pinkie Pie is wearing a pirate hat briefly during an inbetween frame? I'm sure we all do! Here's a ten page conversation about it! Haha! References!
Seriously, Peen Stroke, you Chinese-dong-nobbling, nigger-sperm-gargling, Jewish-scrotum-tickling, Mexican-butthole-polishing super-duper-duraflaming-Liberace-tier megafaggot; we've all seen the fucking show. We don't need to be continuously reminded of every single thing that happened in every single episode. Just tell your own story, ffs. Alright, I'm off my soapbox now. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah.
Anywho, after a long and incredibly stupid gag sequence in which Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy awaken Pinkie from her stare-stupor by barraging her with near-lethal doses of show-referencing radiation, she finally wakes up and informs them that "the spy" was the nigger what did this to her. She is then quite livid to learn that the spy's stare-powers have caused her to miss the rest of Learn and Play day, at which point she swears a blood oath to track him to the ends of the earth, rip out his entrails, and avenge her family's honor. Not really, but you get the idea.
>“Oh… oh now I am going to find that spy!” Pinkie Pie declared, her eyes dark with resolve. “Not just because he was being a Spy Spyerton McSpy. No, now it’s personal. Nopony makes Pinkie Pie miss Pin the Tail on the Pony!”
Since this passage concludes the chapter and I've still got some space left, I'd like to bring up a relatively minor detail that I nonetheless noticed. In the passage I just quoted, as well as the earlier scene in which Pinkie is tracking the unnamed spy, I notice that she continuously refers to him as "Spy Spyerton McSpy." I'm assuming this is not actually his name, although given Peen Stroke's track record of lazily naming his minor OCs, I wouldn't rule it out entirely. However, even as a Pinkie Pie nickname, it's a little stupid. Obviously it's in character for Pinkie to think up something rather childish and silly like this, but the humor wears thin when she uses the same childish nickname over and over and over. I personally think it would be funnier to have her give the spy a different nickname each time she mentions him, and have the names get progressively sillier and sillier.
We've spent a fair amount of time today discussing references, so I feel it would be appropriate to mention that if you absolutely love dropping references, it's a perfectly acceptable convention to reference things other than the original source material of the fan universe. Again, I'd like to stress that it's important not to overdo it with referential humor. To use an analogy that Pinkie would no doubt appreciate, references are like sprinkles on a cupcake: a light dusting adds color and makes it fun, but you need to know when the fuck to stop.
That said, a well-placed cultural reference can definitely generate some mirthful chuckles. The show references outside material all the time in its gags, and it's actually long-running tradition in children's cartoons to occasionally drop in obscure adult references that will probably go over the heads of the children watching, but will make their parents laugh.
I think that Pinkie's spy nicknames would be a perfect opportunity to do this, and if nothing else it will break up the tedium of having her constantly referring to him as "Spy Spyerton McSpy." Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head:
>Spy-ghetti and Meatballs
>The Spyin' King
>Spy Cooper
>Spy and the Family Stone
>Marty McSpy
>Spy Hard II: Spy Harder
>Spyan Adams
>Bill Spy the Spyance Spy
>Princess Spyanna
>Spy, Robot
Anyway, the Stare thing comes up because Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy discover Pinkie Pie, frozen in place in some kind of karate stance inside the schoolhouse. They wake her up with another show reference, whispering to her that Celestia wants her to plan the next Grand Galloping Gala. This provides the opportunity to drop in yet another reference in the form of a song, which approximates the form and meter of a song Pinkie sings from the show, which if I'm not mistaken appears in the episode where Twilight has the extra Gala ticket and can't decide who to give it to.
It's possible I'm being a little unfair on Peen Stroke by always coming down on him for his constant referencing of events from the show, but personally I just think it's all a little too much. Maybe bronies c. 2012 enjoyed this sort of thing; I don't know, I wasn't around. But I guess I'm sort of a stickler for the idea that a story should be self-contained and should focus primarily on its own events, instead of relying on references to external or source material. In fanfiction, there's nothing wrong with giving the occasional nod to some in-joke from the fandom, or referencing an event or two from the source; in fact it can actually enhance enjoyment if done in proper quantities. But moderation is the key; to do it constantly like this is just bad form, and after awhile it's just plain obnoxious.
>Hey, remember that one thing from S1 that happened that one time? Haha so do I, and look, the characters in my story are talking about it! How zany is that?
>How about that one scene from S2e05 with the things and stuff that happened? I'm sure we all remember that! Here's some bizarre incongruous plot twist I'm awkwardly wedging into the story for no reason other than to bring that up! Haha, isn't my story just the best?
>Hey, anypony remember how in S3e68 about 14 minutes and 31.8 seconds in, Pinkie Pie is wearing a pirate hat briefly during an inbetween frame? I'm sure we all do! Here's a ten page conversation about it! Haha! References!
Seriously, Peen Stroke, you Chinese-dong-nobbling, nigger-sperm-gargling, Jewish-scrotum-tickling, Mexican-butthole-polishing super-duper-duraflaming-Liberace-tier megafaggot; we've all seen the fucking show. We don't need to be continuously reminded of every single thing that happened in every single episode. Just tell your own story, ffs. Alright, I'm off my soapbox now. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah.
Anywho, after a long and incredibly stupid gag sequence in which Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy awaken Pinkie from her stare-stupor by barraging her with near-lethal doses of show-referencing radiation, she finally wakes up and informs them that "the spy" was the nigger what did this to her. She is then quite livid to learn that the spy's stare-powers have caused her to miss the rest of Learn and Play day, at which point she swears a blood oath to track him to the ends of the earth, rip out his entrails, and avenge her family's honor. Not really, but you get the idea.
>“Oh… oh now I am going to find that spy!” Pinkie Pie declared, her eyes dark with resolve. “Not just because he was being a Spy Spyerton McSpy. No, now it’s personal. Nopony makes Pinkie Pie miss Pin the Tail on the Pony!”
Since this passage concludes the chapter and I've still got some space left, I'd like to bring up a relatively minor detail that I nonetheless noticed. In the passage I just quoted, as well as the earlier scene in which Pinkie is tracking the unnamed spy, I notice that she continuously refers to him as "Spy Spyerton McSpy." I'm assuming this is not actually his name, although given Peen Stroke's track record of lazily naming his minor OCs, I wouldn't rule it out entirely. However, even as a Pinkie Pie nickname, it's a little stupid. Obviously it's in character for Pinkie to think up something rather childish and silly like this, but the humor wears thin when she uses the same childish nickname over and over and over. I personally think it would be funnier to have her give the spy a different nickname each time she mentions him, and have the names get progressively sillier and sillier.
We've spent a fair amount of time today discussing references, so I feel it would be appropriate to mention that if you absolutely love dropping references, it's a perfectly acceptable convention to reference things other than the original source material of the fan universe. Again, I'd like to stress that it's important not to overdo it with referential humor. To use an analogy that Pinkie would no doubt appreciate, references are like sprinkles on a cupcake: a light dusting adds color and makes it fun, but you need to know when the fuck to stop.
That said, a well-placed cultural reference can definitely generate some mirthful chuckles. The show references outside material all the time in its gags, and it's actually long-running tradition in children's cartoons to occasionally drop in obscure adult references that will probably go over the heads of the children watching, but will make their parents laugh.
I think that Pinkie's spy nicknames would be a perfect opportunity to do this, and if nothing else it will break up the tedium of having her constantly referring to him as "Spy Spyerton McSpy." Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head:
>Spy-ghetti and Meatballs
>The Spyin' King
>Spy Cooper
>Spy and the Family Stone
>Marty McSpy
>Spy Hard II: Spy Harder
>Spyan Adams
>Bill Spy the Spyance Spy
>Princess Spyanna
>Spy, Robot
>>255888
Commendable digits. Also, if you're ever able to scrounge up an archived version of that site I would be very interested to see it. If someone could locate the original code it might be a nice public service to upload it somewhere, maybe a Tor hidden service where it could exist outside the clutches of Rowling and her minions.
>>255890
Nothing about that would surprise me.
Commendable digits. Also, if you're ever able to scrounge up an archived version of that site I would be very interested to see it. If someone could locate the original code it might be a nice public service to upload it somewhere, maybe a Tor hidden service where it could exist outside the clutches of Rowling and her minions.
>>255890
Nothing about that would surprise me.
>>255900
>Maybe bronies c. 2012 enjoyed this sort of thing
They did and it was goddamn suffering to listen to it. Saying "20% cooler" around them was like mentioning cake around a Portal fanboy or pie around a Foster's Home fangirl. They might fantasize about being ponies, but bad references made them bray like mules.
>Hey, remember that one thing from S1 that happened that one time? Haha so do I, and look, the characters in my story are talking about it! How zany is that?
>How about that one scene from S2e05 with the things and stuff that happened? I'm sure we all remember that! Here's some bizarre incongruous plot twist I'm awkwardly wedging into the story for no reason other than to bring that up! Haha, isn't my story just the best?
>Hey, anypony remember how in S3e68 about 14 minutes and 31.8 seconds in, Pinkie Pie is wearing a pirate hat briefly during an inbetween frame? I'm sure we all do! Here's a ten page conversation about it! Haha! References!
I also hate this thing, almost as much as I hate
>remember that time Fluttershy showed off an unexpected ability to speak perfect Spanish? Here's my headcanon rationalization for why this asspull ability that came out of nowhere exists. Look at my story for why it exists and how cool and clever I think I am!
>remember that time someone slighted a character I like, did something I didn't like, or wronged a character I like? Here's a scene where someone threatens that offending character into submission or beats him up or just calls him a wanker for it. Even if the offending incident happens years ago and nobody dealing with a world-threatening crisis right now should have any reason to bring up the time the girls pranked Rainbow Dash with Mare Do Well instead of talking things out with her and saying "stop with the posing and pre-saving monologue bullshit before someone gets squished while waiting for you to save them! save people, then call yourself the bestest evar!"
>Or, very rarely, the two will bring it up, discuss it, admit that they were both at fault, and hug each other for it.
>Maybe bronies c. 2012 enjoyed this sort of thing
They did and it was goddamn suffering to listen to it. Saying "20% cooler" around them was like mentioning cake around a Portal fanboy or pie around a Foster's Home fangirl. They might fantasize about being ponies, but bad references made them bray like mules.
>Hey, remember that one thing from S1 that happened that one time? Haha so do I, and look, the characters in my story are talking about it! How zany is that?
>How about that one scene from S2e05 with the things and stuff that happened? I'm sure we all remember that! Here's some bizarre incongruous plot twist I'm awkwardly wedging into the story for no reason other than to bring that up! Haha, isn't my story just the best?
>Hey, anypony remember how in S3e68 about 14 minutes and 31.8 seconds in, Pinkie Pie is wearing a pirate hat briefly during an inbetween frame? I'm sure we all do! Here's a ten page conversation about it! Haha! References!
I also hate this thing, almost as much as I hate
>remember that time Fluttershy showed off an unexpected ability to speak perfect Spanish? Here's my headcanon rationalization for why this asspull ability that came out of nowhere exists. Look at my story for why it exists and how cool and clever I think I am!
>remember that time someone slighted a character I like, did something I didn't like, or wronged a character I like? Here's a scene where someone threatens that offending character into submission or beats him up or just calls him a wanker for it. Even if the offending incident happens years ago and nobody dealing with a world-threatening crisis right now should have any reason to bring up the time the girls pranked Rainbow Dash with Mare Do Well instead of talking things out with her and saying "stop with the posing and pre-saving monologue bullshit before someone gets squished while waiting for you to save them! save people, then call yourself the bestest evar!"
>Or, very rarely, the two will bring it up, discuss it, admit that they were both at fault, and hug each other for it.
>>255929
I think the only time these "Accusation Fic" scenes work is when it really is justified for someone to beat the shit out of the resident Karma Houdini, when calling the creator's pet out on all his/her flaws is legitimately funny, or when expanding on something glossed over in canon results in a better story. A character being shamed or shot for fucking up once in season 1 episode 14 isn't very interesting but a character feeling guilty over that and trying to make it up to others can be.
For example, in my Silver fic, I don't plan on giving Glimmer or Trixie a significant role. So their fans would be pissed at me anyway. But because of how they're written, I need an excuse to shoo them out of town or readers will just keep asking "Why is nobody trying to get the massively overpowered Starlight Glimmer to join in on fights?". And while I think the scene needs a rewrite and Glimmer would make a better recurring antagonist mad at him for stealing her "seventh ranger role", canon Glimmer's plot armour makes writing her in a realistic scenario impossible. It's not realistic for some random nobody to have all that power and a "guardian author angel" on her shoulder rigging things in her favour to that extent. But if I suddenly rip that away from her and let her fail, it's jarring. It feels like a bad James Bond movie where he's suddenly a pathetic wanker. Better to rip the bandage off and burn the festering thing to ash.
To bring up Naruto fanfiction again-
>mass groans
I know, I know. They usually aren't good, but the way the fandom treated the show's overly-large cast of characters is interesting from a writing standpoint.
Most fics tended to take three approaches to the much-loathed Sasuke Uchiha, Naruto's "Rival character" who swallowed up the spotlight while his Magical Family or "Clan" swallowed up the setting by becoming the most important clan ever:
>start him lower than he'd ever canonically been and send him spiralling down from there
Why? So God!Naruto can look better when compared to this whiny, petulant, entitled, egotistical, narcissistic, technique-stealing(taking knowledge from others will invariably be treated like a major crime that makes all Uchiha shit, even though learning is a big part of the show and Naruto stole his best technique "clone myself for a big gay orgy jutsu" from the village's forbidden scroll he stole one night, and was taught his second technique from his porn book-writing sensei Pervy Sage, which was invented by either him or Naruto's Dad or the Second Ninja President of The Hidden Leaf, I forget), wife-abusing drug-abusing kitten-kicking puppy-eating bastard who treats his doting brainwashed yappy chihuaua-like fangirl Sakura like shit. Also Sakura is made extra-shit and extra-girly to make the "kewler and manlier and stabbier and more baddasss" girls Naruto fucks look cooler.
>make him a dickish rival whose relevance quickly wanes as Naruto and his new friends grow in power and leave his playground-bully ass in the dust. The "Uchiha-ization" Masashi Kishimoto did to his story never happened, so Uchihas are no longer the bestest clan ever. Sasuke just sort of grumbles in the corner and begs his teacher Kakashi for more spells, as if that's going to bridge the gap between him and infinite-stamina god!Naruto.
No comment
>make him a prat, and then fix him through character development and the influence of other characters. Prevent his [DOWNWARD SPIRAL], making him a completely different character from who he ended up becoming.
Now Sasuke never leaves the village like he canonically did, he never gets seduced by the Snake guy, and he has a brotherly "We're brothers so we call each other cunt/dumbass but only we can call each other that and we'll always have each other's backs" kind of bond with Naruto. This one's common in "Naruto is cooler in this story" fics that don't feel like sacrificing Sasuke at the altar of God!Naruto. And the classic "I decided to make this useless overlooked forgotten canon character way more competent, so now Asuma or Kurenai a barely-mentioned name and a face from AnBu BlackOps or some other fucking who is now a god-tier teacher whose infinite wisdom and fix-fic influence turns other forgotten characters into top-tier fighters" story.
I think the only time these "Accusation Fic" scenes work is when it really is justified for someone to beat the shit out of the resident Karma Houdini, when calling the creator's pet out on all his/her flaws is legitimately funny, or when expanding on something glossed over in canon results in a better story. A character being shamed or shot for fucking up once in season 1 episode 14 isn't very interesting but a character feeling guilty over that and trying to make it up to others can be.
For example, in my Silver fic, I don't plan on giving Glimmer or Trixie a significant role. So their fans would be pissed at me anyway. But because of how they're written, I need an excuse to shoo them out of town or readers will just keep asking "Why is nobody trying to get the massively overpowered Starlight Glimmer to join in on fights?". And while I think the scene needs a rewrite and Glimmer would make a better recurring antagonist mad at him for stealing her "seventh ranger role", canon Glimmer's plot armour makes writing her in a realistic scenario impossible. It's not realistic for some random nobody to have all that power and a "guardian author angel" on her shoulder rigging things in her favour to that extent. But if I suddenly rip that away from her and let her fail, it's jarring. It feels like a bad James Bond movie where he's suddenly a pathetic wanker. Better to rip the bandage off and burn the festering thing to ash.
To bring up Naruto fanfiction again-
>mass groans
I know, I know. They usually aren't good, but the way the fandom treated the show's overly-large cast of characters is interesting from a writing standpoint.
Most fics tended to take three approaches to the much-loathed Sasuke Uchiha, Naruto's "Rival character" who swallowed up the spotlight while his Magical Family or "Clan" swallowed up the setting by becoming the most important clan ever:
>start him lower than he'd ever canonically been and send him spiralling down from there
Why? So God!Naruto can look better when compared to this whiny, petulant, entitled, egotistical, narcissistic, technique-stealing(taking knowledge from others will invariably be treated like a major crime that makes all Uchiha shit, even though learning is a big part of the show and Naruto stole his best technique "clone myself for a big gay orgy jutsu" from the village's forbidden scroll he stole one night, and was taught his second technique from his porn book-writing sensei Pervy Sage, which was invented by either him or Naruto's Dad or the Second Ninja President of The Hidden Leaf, I forget), wife-abusing drug-abusing kitten-kicking puppy-eating bastard who treats his doting brainwashed yappy chihuaua-like fangirl Sakura like shit. Also Sakura is made extra-shit and extra-girly to make the "kewler and manlier and stabbier and more baddasss" girls Naruto fucks look cooler.
>make him a dickish rival whose relevance quickly wanes as Naruto and his new friends grow in power and leave his playground-bully ass in the dust. The "Uchiha-ization" Masashi Kishimoto did to his story never happened, so Uchihas are no longer the bestest clan ever. Sasuke just sort of grumbles in the corner and begs his teacher Kakashi for more spells, as if that's going to bridge the gap between him and infinite-stamina god!Naruto.
No comment
>make him a prat, and then fix him through character development and the influence of other characters. Prevent his [DOWNWARD SPIRAL], making him a completely different character from who he ended up becoming.
Now Sasuke never leaves the village like he canonically did, he never gets seduced by the Snake guy, and he has a brotherly "We're brothers so we call each other cunt/dumbass but only we can call each other that and we'll always have each other's backs" kind of bond with Naruto. This one's common in "Naruto is cooler in this story" fics that don't feel like sacrificing Sasuke at the altar of God!Naruto. And the classic "I decided to make this useless overlooked forgotten canon character way more competent, so now Asuma or Kurenai a barely-mentioned name and a face from AnBu BlackOps or some other fucking who is now a god-tier teacher whose infinite wisdom and fix-fic influence turns other forgotten characters into top-tier fighters" story.
>>255900
>>255929
Yeah, referencial humour was annoying back then. I think it was because back then people were young and memeing was young so it seemed cool to do.
I think it isn't the refrences or memes themselves that is the problem or the high frequency but the clumsy way they are skewhorned in.
Take Kill La Kill. While I'm similar to you gilglam that I don't really care for plots that demand that you know external things (except fanfiction because it is just tedious to read character descriptions of RD when you already know how she looks after a few fanfics that does this), I do think that if you are bringing in external things then either you don't require your readers to know of this things to enjoy the plot (nothing hinges on this information) or you explain it if it is relevant to the plot.
The reason, I think, this is obnoxious is not because of the amount of refrences but the way they are handled. So, Kill La Kill, it is on the surface and you won't get anything more from it if you don't know the external material just an action-comedy romp but if one knows these outside material then one can enjoy it on the refrences alone. I have learnt that there are many subtle refrences throughout the show. While when I learned of this it didn't change my perspective of the show. I don't care what you are refrencing if it doesn't tie in to the story in someway or is enjoyable on its on.
For example, Satsuki's battle armour's design is a refrence to some mecha, I think Gundam. This is nothing you notice as a none fan of whatever mecha series that and therefore not something you are bothered with and for those that are familiar with it, it is like finding a little easter egg since it is not lampshaded at all.
Anyway, I think there are ways to include refrences to the show, one just has to not be obnoxious with it.
Either have the refrence be sublime and woven into the story in way that makes sense or if you are going to lampshade it at least do one of these: Tie it into a joke, make it significant to the plot, and mayeb something else...
I just came up with and idea for a running gag that would fit this story that is bacse on a refrence.
So prince Blueblood is running around ponyville with a glued-together glass horse?shoe and is making different mares try out this shoe tofindhte right one. We can have that he actually really needs glasses but didn't use them at the gala for why he can just use his eyes to verify who it had belonged to or something or maybe nay.
Rarity has leanred of this and everytime Blueblood is near she runs excuses herself.
So know we have to potential running gags: Rarity and her weird behavoir and excuses when blueblood is around; and Blueblood hunt.
Blue blood could end up offending mares such as Mrs. Cake because her meaty hoof breaks the shoe and Rarity has to tell ridicolous excuses to leave different events such as the play to escape Blueblood.
Or other types of iterations on this joke. Regardless, it is refrence that can be made very discrete if one wants to or built into something like a subplot if one wants to do that instead.
One could also turn RD's 20% cooler into a joke if used it more for the setup of the joke rather than the payoff. Like RD is about to say this line as a comment on something and instead she gets interupted as Nyx says: "I think it needs to be 30% more edgy." And Rainbow just stands there with her mouth agape cause she just got refrence cucked or ssomething...
>>255753
Thanks, for sharing. I would probably never have known about this otherwise.
>>255797
>If you ever wanted to do a read-through critique thread of it kind of like what I'm doing here I'd fully support it and would probably chime in.
Thanks. I might but I won't make any promises yet I'm working on another project right now.
>>255888
Very intresting. Yes, that would be ggood to hhave.
>>255887
Yes, the inconsistent and overly convenient worldbuilding is oneof my biggest problems wwith her writing as well. Well, my biggest is that she is so unuanced in her writing. All people Harry has a problem with are evil and all who aren't are good. It is funny that Harry, just based on rumours about Syltherin that he had heard from Ron and that Malfoy was in Slytherin, he chooses to be in Gryffindor and after that he is basically proven right. ALL the Sylkterin are evil shitheads throughout the first book. In fact, I didn't dislike Malfoy for his character in the end, because he wasn'tone he wasjust a puppet, but because it was so tedious that he constantly started a fight with innocent Harry for what seemed like no reason. Like Malfoy has nothing better to do.
So it is just laughable later on in the series where Sirious talks about the world not being split into good people annd bad people (Saw this in the movie, I don't know if it is in the books). I mean the conflict is pretty straight forward because Harry's enemies are such twats. It is just hard to deal with. Darco talks about pure-blood and is evil but like I as a nationalist cannot recoognice myself in him because of his sitty behavoir and lack of arguments. It is like she hasn't considered her own universe at all. In the series, it seems to be implied that either you have the right genetics for magic or you don't. That's why the Weasley's children are all mages while most muggles give birth too muggles. It seems to be a recessive trait that or at least a rare trait. Is it so weird or are they so unjustified to see to it that this trait is preserved. Like literally, their entire culture will vanish if their are noone who can do magic. In fact, there are creatures, such as the dementors, that muggles can't see. If there are no wizards to combat them, wouldn't be muggles be fucked?
>Don't question why we didn't kick the Dursleys out of your inherited house
I never thought about it but yeah. It is dumb and I bet it is only there so Harry can have a pity backstory.
>>255929
Yeah, referencial humour was annoying back then. I think it was because back then people were young and memeing was young so it seemed cool to do.
I think it isn't the refrences or memes themselves that is the problem or the high frequency but the clumsy way they are skewhorned in.
Take Kill La Kill. While I'm similar to you gilglam that I don't really care for plots that demand that you know external things (except fanfiction because it is just tedious to read character descriptions of RD when you already know how she looks after a few fanfics that does this), I do think that if you are bringing in external things then either you don't require your readers to know of this things to enjoy the plot (nothing hinges on this information) or you explain it if it is relevant to the plot.
The reason, I think, this is obnoxious is not because of the amount of refrences but the way they are handled. So, Kill La Kill, it is on the surface and you won't get anything more from it if you don't know the external material just an action-comedy romp but if one knows these outside material then one can enjoy it on the refrences alone. I have learnt that there are many subtle refrences throughout the show. While when I learned of this it didn't change my perspective of the show. I don't care what you are refrencing if it doesn't tie in to the story in someway or is enjoyable on its on.
For example, Satsuki's battle armour's design is a refrence to some mecha, I think Gundam. This is nothing you notice as a none fan of whatever mecha series that and therefore not something you are bothered with and for those that are familiar with it, it is like finding a little easter egg since it is not lampshaded at all.
Anyway, I think there are ways to include refrences to the show, one just has to not be obnoxious with it.
Either have the refrence be sublime and woven into the story in way that makes sense or if you are going to lampshade it at least do one of these: Tie it into a joke, make it significant to the plot, and mayeb something else...
I just came up with and idea for a running gag that would fit this story that is bacse on a refrence.
So prince Blueblood is running around ponyville with a glued-together glass horse?shoe and is making different mares try out this shoe tofindhte right one. We can have that he actually really needs glasses but didn't use them at the gala for why he can just use his eyes to verify who it had belonged to or something or maybe nay.
Rarity has leanred of this and everytime Blueblood is near she runs excuses herself.
So know we have to potential running gags: Rarity and her weird behavoir and excuses when blueblood is around; and Blueblood hunt.
Blue blood could end up offending mares such as Mrs. Cake because her meaty hoof breaks the shoe and Rarity has to tell ridicolous excuses to leave different events such as the play to escape Blueblood.
Or other types of iterations on this joke. Regardless, it is refrence that can be made very discrete if one wants to or built into something like a subplot if one wants to do that instead.
One could also turn RD's 20% cooler into a joke if used it more for the setup of the joke rather than the payoff. Like RD is about to say this line as a comment on something and instead she gets interupted as Nyx says: "I think it needs to be 30% more edgy." And Rainbow just stands there with her mouth agape cause she just got refrence cucked or ssomething...
>>255753
Thanks, for sharing. I would probably never have known about this otherwise.
>>255797
>If you ever wanted to do a read-through critique thread of it kind of like what I'm doing here I'd fully support it and would probably chime in.
Thanks. I might but I won't make any promises yet I'm working on another project right now.
>>255888
Very intresting. Yes, that would be ggood to hhave.
>>255887
Yes, the inconsistent and overly convenient worldbuilding is oneof my biggest problems wwith her writing as well. Well, my biggest is that she is so unuanced in her writing. All people Harry has a problem with are evil and all who aren't are good. It is funny that Harry, just based on rumours about Syltherin that he had heard from Ron and that Malfoy was in Slytherin, he chooses to be in Gryffindor and after that he is basically proven right. ALL the Sylkterin are evil shitheads throughout the first book. In fact, I didn't dislike Malfoy for his character in the end, because he wasn'tone he wasjust a puppet, but because it was so tedious that he constantly started a fight with innocent Harry for what seemed like no reason. Like Malfoy has nothing better to do.
So it is just laughable later on in the series where Sirious talks about the world not being split into good people annd bad people (Saw this in the movie, I don't know if it is in the books). I mean the conflict is pretty straight forward because Harry's enemies are such twats. It is just hard to deal with. Darco talks about pure-blood and is evil but like I as a nationalist cannot recoognice myself in him because of his sitty behavoir and lack of arguments. It is like she hasn't considered her own universe at all. In the series, it seems to be implied that either you have the right genetics for magic or you don't. That's why the Weasley's children are all mages while most muggles give birth too muggles. It seems to be a recessive trait that or at least a rare trait. Is it so weird or are they so unjustified to see to it that this trait is preserved. Like literally, their entire culture will vanish if their are noone who can do magic. In fact, there are creatures, such as the dementors, that muggles can't see. If there are no wizards to combat them, wouldn't be muggles be fucked?
>Don't question why we didn't kick the Dursleys out of your inherited house
I never thought about it but yeah. It is dumb and I bet it is only there so Harry can have a pity backstory.
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=DOP-2ulq2bk
>>255941
Yes. Humor or any kind of information really can also be sectioned off for specific audiences. Especially for seeing the joke a second time that contrxtually changes it.
>>255900
From what I'm understanding is that the writing should be relevant even as a red herring. For the specific goal, inducing a feeling, connecting the audience to the character(s), ect.
Now time for a bad joke.
A man and a pony walk into a bar.
The bartender says
>"Why the long face?"
"Mine isn't stuck in a tall gin."
>Visual gag of the bartender pony with a cloth in their mouth cleaning the bottom of the tall thin cylindrical glass.
As visual humor it'd be best to cut to the scene rather than dialog.
A more referencial kind of humor.
Twilight want to keep her Ice Cream cold
The freezer is having a tough time with so much Ice Cream.
Twilight: "It needs to be 20% cooler!"
Rainbow Dash one of her assistants goes off to get what is needed.
Spike also leaves, and so does Princess Celestia.
The sun has set, and only now Rainbow Dash comes back with sunglasses.
Spike just walks in.
Celestia just walks in.
Twilight: Did anypony bring anything?
Rainbow Dash puts the glasses on the freezer.
R.D.:"Twenty percent cooler."
Twi: "Princess?"
Celeatia points to the setting sun.
Celestia: "It's twenty percent cooler."
Twi: "Spike?"
Spike doesn't answer, and just turns away.
The freezer breaks down from how cold that is and says
"But, you're my number one assistant!"
>>255941
Yes. Humor or any kind of information really can also be sectioned off for specific audiences. Especially for seeing the joke a second time that contrxtually changes it.
>>255900
From what I'm understanding is that the writing should be relevant even as a red herring. For the specific goal, inducing a feeling, connecting the audience to the character(s), ect.
Now time for a bad joke.
A man and a pony walk into a bar.
The bartender says
>"Why the long face?"
"Mine isn't stuck in a tall gin."
>Visual gag of the bartender pony with a cloth in their mouth cleaning the bottom of the tall thin cylindrical glass.
As visual humor it'd be best to cut to the scene rather than dialog.
A more referencial kind of humor.
Twilight want to keep her Ice Cream cold
The freezer is having a tough time with so much Ice Cream.
Twilight: "It needs to be 20% cooler!"
Rainbow Dash one of her assistants goes off to get what is needed.
Spike also leaves, and so does Princess Celestia.
The sun has set, and only now Rainbow Dash comes back with sunglasses.
Spike just walks in.
Celestia just walks in.
Twilight: Did anypony bring anything?
Rainbow Dash puts the glasses on the freezer.
R.D.:"Twenty percent cooler."
Twi: "Princess?"
Celeatia points to the setting sun.
Celestia: "It's twenty percent cooler."
Twi: "Spike?"
Spike doesn't answer, and just turns away.
The freezer breaks down from how cold that is and says
"But, you're my number one assistant!"
>>255941
I would like to add one of my latest discoveries to this diatribe. There is an explaination for the timetravel in the third book, which I don't find convincing but I'm sure the diehard potter fans like.
The idea is that why didn't somebody use the timeturners that the minisery had to beat Voldemort? Or used it to solve any problem against voldemort.
The idea that I don't know if it actaully is canon. Im not sure if that was what Rowling instended when she wrote the third book. I have suspicsion that if she says that this is how the timetravel works in her universe, then that was because it was a convenient excuse for her bad writing.
Time-travel in Harry Potter works like a closed loop according to this idea. History has already happend. Timetravel cannot cahnge anything that happened in the past only fulfill what one should have already done in the past.
So unless your future self has already change something in your present, you won't go back into the past to change it. Notice that it is won't there and not can't.
So the idea is strange from somebody who says she doesn't believe in fate, she says this in an interview where she and Daniel Radcliffe talks soley to each other for and hour (iff am not mistaking), since this design couldn't be more artifical. The fact is that this timeline is completely linear, as if time travel wasn't real in this universe, because it cannot change the past. So that means that this linear timeline who is already set in stone actually goes through weird timetravel loops that doesn't change anything.
The problem is, why the timetravel loops exist at all in a linear timeline and why were they created and why is there this arbitary restriction on what time travel that makes so you can't change the past? It is literally like God *cough* the author has enginered this timeline to follow this contrived progression. It implies a creator, which one can argue that other things do as well, but this is just ridicolous. It is like the hand of God is hovering above. How could this have happened otherwise? It must have been orchestrated. It is just hard to imagine otherwise.
The point is that why would she make this weird timetravel restiction if not to save her books' believability? Why wouldn't the universe just accept that you changed the past and move on in the new timeline that is created? That wouldn't even be against fate as a concept because anyone able to calculate choas math with with nature, which spawned humans which spawned timetravel, would be able to predict what the furture would be even if you could change it with timetravel.
It is hard to explain because it is hard to understand since it is false in the first place. It took my a long time to wrap my head around this. But here is a thought experiment that puts some restrictions on the time travel in Rowling's books if not more.
So I lock my apartment at time A. An hour passed were I am in my apartment and the time is now B.
I have a timeturner. One turn of the hourglass equal one hour back in time.
So we have to make some assumptions here. Either my future self arrives in my apartment at A or they don't.
Whichever we pick when we arrive at time B we can choose to do tthe opposite.
1)My future self from B travels back in time to meet my present self at A. After an hour we both are at B but I am there for the first time and he is there for the second time. Why wouldn't I be able to choose not to go back to A at this point? Couldn't I stay at point B? This is not explained in the story.
2) My future self does not travel from B to A and meet me in the present so when time B comes around I travel back to A and meet my past self.
Both of these scenarios change the past and history. And I have never heard that this would be impossible to do either in the stories but then again i haven't read them. It didn't come up on the forum that I visited that I found the explaination for this type of timetravel in the first place either.
So the few reasons I can come up with why this wouldn't work are: Either the timeturners don't work at times like this because of reasons or the universe itself conspires against anyone who would have the inclination to do this so they are never able to.
To be continued maybe.
I would like to add one of my latest discoveries to this diatribe. There is an explaination for the timetravel in the third book, which I don't find convincing but I'm sure the diehard potter fans like.
The idea is that why didn't somebody use the timeturners that the minisery had to beat Voldemort? Or used it to solve any problem against voldemort.
The idea that I don't know if it actaully is canon. Im not sure if that was what Rowling instended when she wrote the third book. I have suspicsion that if she says that this is how the timetravel works in her universe, then that was because it was a convenient excuse for her bad writing.
Time-travel in Harry Potter works like a closed loop according to this idea. History has already happend. Timetravel cannot cahnge anything that happened in the past only fulfill what one should have already done in the past.
So unless your future self has already change something in your present, you won't go back into the past to change it. Notice that it is won't there and not can't.
So the idea is strange from somebody who says she doesn't believe in fate, she says this in an interview where she and Daniel Radcliffe talks soley to each other for and hour (iff am not mistaking), since this design couldn't be more artifical. The fact is that this timeline is completely linear, as if time travel wasn't real in this universe, because it cannot change the past. So that means that this linear timeline who is already set in stone actually goes through weird timetravel loops that doesn't change anything.
The problem is, why the timetravel loops exist at all in a linear timeline and why were they created and why is there this arbitary restriction on what time travel that makes so you can't change the past? It is literally like God *cough* the author has enginered this timeline to follow this contrived progression. It implies a creator, which one can argue that other things do as well, but this is just ridicolous. It is like the hand of God is hovering above. How could this have happened otherwise? It must have been orchestrated. It is just hard to imagine otherwise.
The point is that why would she make this weird timetravel restiction if not to save her books' believability? Why wouldn't the universe just accept that you changed the past and move on in the new timeline that is created? That wouldn't even be against fate as a concept because anyone able to calculate choas math with with nature, which spawned humans which spawned timetravel, would be able to predict what the furture would be even if you could change it with timetravel.
It is hard to explain because it is hard to understand since it is false in the first place. It took my a long time to wrap my head around this. But here is a thought experiment that puts some restrictions on the time travel in Rowling's books if not more.
So I lock my apartment at time A. An hour passed were I am in my apartment and the time is now B.
I have a timeturner. One turn of the hourglass equal one hour back in time.
So we have to make some assumptions here. Either my future self arrives in my apartment at A or they don't.
Whichever we pick when we arrive at time B we can choose to do tthe opposite.
1)My future self from B travels back in time to meet my present self at A. After an hour we both are at B but I am there for the first time and he is there for the second time. Why wouldn't I be able to choose not to go back to A at this point? Couldn't I stay at point B? This is not explained in the story.
2) My future self does not travel from B to A and meet me in the present so when time B comes around I travel back to A and meet my past self.
Both of these scenarios change the past and history. And I have never heard that this would be impossible to do either in the stories but then again i haven't read them. It didn't come up on the forum that I visited that I found the explaination for this type of timetravel in the first place either.
So the few reasons I can come up with why this wouldn't work are: Either the timeturners don't work at times like this because of reasons or the universe itself conspires against anyone who would have the inclination to do this so they are never able to.
To be continued maybe.
You know that you live in the Twilight Zone when the US is a bankrupt warmongering police state and Americans look you in the eye and say that the USA is a peaceful and free country with a balanced budget.
File (): FABDC71D753A00AE86D0FED35C127A30-56884.jpg (55.6 KB, 998x750, rodserlingfed-998x750.jpg)
>>255996
Personally, I know that I live in the Twilight Zone when I notice Rod Serling standing in the corner giving a monologue to no one in particular. When I listen to what he's saying and realize he's talking about me, that's when I realize I am truly good and fucked, and that whatever activity I'm engaged in at the moment is going to end in some kind of creepy, ironic twist.
Like, this one time, I was sitting in my apartment, writing a message board post about this guy named Peen Stroke who wrote a really sub-par My Little Pony fanfiction that a lot of people loved even though it was terrible and stupid. Just as I'm about to call him a massive fag and hit post, the camera cuts to Rod Serling, standing in the corner of my apartment holding a cigarette. Spoopy music begins to play, and Serling speaks:
>Submitted for your approval: Glim Glam, pen name of a caucasian male who likes to complain about ponies on the internet. He begins today as he begins every other day: posting complaints about pony fiction authors who write about ponies in ways that he feels should be written differently. But as he is about to discover, his views on ponies are being posted to a message board of the mind, a twisted little corner of cyberspace that we like to call...the Twilight Zone.
As that spoopy piano music begins to play, I suddenly get a bad feeling. I look around my apartment, but everything is as it should be. I am simply a caucasian male named Glim Glam, complaining about pony stories on the internet, just as I always have been. But then I realize something:
>I am OP
>OP is a massive faggot
>Peen Stroke is a massive faggot
>wait, it can't be.....
In a flash of terror I rise from my Dorito-crumb-spattered couch and rush to the bathroom mirror. It is only now that I realize the truth: I was Peen Stroke all along. Spoopy music plays and the credits roll.
Anyway, that's how I know I'm living in the Twilight Zone. It's pretty annoying, actually. I swear to God if my life takes one more creepy ironic twist I'm probably going to have to write my Congressman about it, or whatever people in the 50s used to do when they were upset about things.
What are your thoughts on the subject, automated spam bot that keeps posting this moronic gibberish in my thread?
Personally, I know that I live in the Twilight Zone when I notice Rod Serling standing in the corner giving a monologue to no one in particular. When I listen to what he's saying and realize he's talking about me, that's when I realize I am truly good and fucked, and that whatever activity I'm engaged in at the moment is going to end in some kind of creepy, ironic twist.
Like, this one time, I was sitting in my apartment, writing a message board post about this guy named Peen Stroke who wrote a really sub-par My Little Pony fanfiction that a lot of people loved even though it was terrible and stupid. Just as I'm about to call him a massive fag and hit post, the camera cuts to Rod Serling, standing in the corner of my apartment holding a cigarette. Spoopy music begins to play, and Serling speaks:
>Submitted for your approval: Glim Glam, pen name of a caucasian male who likes to complain about ponies on the internet. He begins today as he begins every other day: posting complaints about pony fiction authors who write about ponies in ways that he feels should be written differently. But as he is about to discover, his views on ponies are being posted to a message board of the mind, a twisted little corner of cyberspace that we like to call...the Twilight Zone.
As that spoopy piano music begins to play, I suddenly get a bad feeling. I look around my apartment, but everything is as it should be. I am simply a caucasian male named Glim Glam, complaining about pony stories on the internet, just as I always have been. But then I realize something:
>I am OP
>OP is a massive faggot
>Peen Stroke is a massive faggot
>wait, it can't be.....
In a flash of terror I rise from my Dorito-crumb-spattered couch and rush to the bathroom mirror. It is only now that I realize the truth: I was Peen Stroke all along. Spoopy music plays and the credits roll.
Anyway, that's how I know I'm living in the Twilight Zone. It's pretty annoying, actually. I swear to God if my life takes one more creepy ironic twist I'm probably going to have to write my Congressman about it, or whatever people in the 50s used to do when they were upset about things.
What are your thoughts on the subject, automated spam bot that keeps posting this moronic gibberish in my thread?
File (): A1B43C5A421C22BC3E51033C871181B3-468265.png (457.3 KB, 1280x720, 11B79D74-A702-4AC1-9E62-5BEB982AAC87.png)
File (): D7DF9AE235E001831D5A89CC7DC3149F-50560.jpg (49.4 KB, 500x375, tumblr_lo0sf5OTFI1qifkhpo1_500.jpg)
>>255900
Anyway...plugging right along, we now find ourselves at:
Chapter 9: Revealing Truths
The chapter begins with Twilight and Nyx walking home together. Twilight has apparently decided that the best way to deal with Nyx's most recent use of her powers is to slink away quietly, completely negating her earlier strategy of being socially visible and trying to pretend like nothing unusual happened. Nyx, for her part, seems completely oblivious to anything being wrong, which completely negates her earlier feelings of something being actually very wrong. These first occurred when she single-handedly won a tug of war match against four male ponies twice her size, and instead of clapping, the entire town stared at her like she had just shat all over the place.
Here's the problem: Nyx behaves as if she has no situational awareness at all. She knows she's not supposed to reveal her full power level in public, and yet she does anyway. Twice. In one day. Since she's only a child, it would make sense for her to not entirely grasp the danger and occasionally ignore Twilight's warning to remain incognito. However, the problem is that child or no, because of previous events she should be fully capable of understanding the danger at this point. In the aftermath of the play scene, she apparently deduced on her own that she is, in fact, Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). She asked Twilight about it, and Twilight confirmed. She has above average intelligence and has read the story of Nightmare Moon. Even if she is still emotionally a child and can be expected to act like one most of the time, she can at least intellectually understand the implications of being NM's reincarnation, and how the town might react to this knowledge if she inadvertently revealed it to them. Thus, she knows exactly why she needs to hide her wings and horn, and why she needs to keep her magic under wraps. Keeping her identity a secret should be more important to her than it is to Twilight at this point.
However, despite this, she uses her magic to transform Fluttershy into a tree. Well, Pinkie Pie kind of pushed her into it, so maybe we can chalk that one up to peer pressure. She then sees the town freak out, and she should at least understand why. Considering that she bursts into tears at the slightest provocation and seems constantly terrified that everyone hates her, wouldn't it stand to reason that this sort of negative attention would bother her? Shouldn't she be freaking out and begging Twilight to take her back home? And yet, a couple scenes later, she just participates in the tug of war with the CMC like everything is perfectly normal. Her mind is so focused on the competition, in fact, that she manages to slip up and go full power level [i]again.[/b] Once more, the town freaks out, and she sees it, and should understand why and be bothered. Yet a scene later, here she is, just skipping happily along next to Twilight like everything is just fine.
There is no consistency to any of these characters' actions. Peen Stroke seems to more or less have his characters' personalities down and writes them appropriately enough. The scenes themselves are sometimes very well written. The problem is there is no continuity between what happens in one scene and what happens in the next. The result is that characters react appropriately to whatever specific situation they are in at the present moment, but nothing that happens in one scene has any bearing on how the next one plays out. This story is like a bunch of disconnected events happening in dreamtime, with every character simply doing whatever the situation demands with no memory of previous events.
Earlier, Nyx learns that she is NM. This scene is an emotional moment for her, and there is naturally a lot of tears and angst and Twilight comforting her and so forth and so on. However, the next time she appears, she's just a happy little kid again, excited about Learn and Play Day. Setting aside the issues I have with the timing of this big reveal, shouldn't it at least have caused some significant change in Nyx? Logically she should be in the middle of a massive identity crisis right now; winning a tug of war contest should be the least of her worries.
Twilight's behavior is also strange. She's the adult, and should understand the severity of Nyx's situation better than Nyx. And it's made clear that she does indeed understand. But what does she ever do? Nothing; she just stands passively in the background and worries to herself about it. Her actions are erratic and inconsistent; one minute she wants Nyx to just blend in and act normal, next minute she wants to barricade her in the library and hide her from view.
Next, the town. They've seen two random, bizarre acts of magic perpetrated by this one filly, who just showed up out of nowhere and looks suspiciously like Nightmare Moon, and also by sheer coincidence portrayed Nightmare Moon unsettlingly well in a play not two weeks prior. What happens there? When Fluttershy turns into a tree, they murmur and seem suspicious. However, they all show up for the tug of war competition a scene later and appear to have completely forgotten. When Nyx performs yet another feat of uncommon magic, they once again murmur and seem suspicious. Are they ever going to do anything else?
The events of the story in general often don't make sense. As I've already explained, it would be highly inappropriate and unfair to have a tug of war contest between a group of near-adult males and a group of prepubescent females take place at a friendly school competition. So why is it happening and being treated as normal? The reason is because Peen Stroke wanted to have Nyx use magic to win an unwinnable contest by herself in order to advance his plot, so he just set up the scene without thinking about how little sense it actually makes.
Pic related, because this stinks.
Anyway...plugging right along, we now find ourselves at:
Chapter 9: Revealing Truths
The chapter begins with Twilight and Nyx walking home together. Twilight has apparently decided that the best way to deal with Nyx's most recent use of her powers is to slink away quietly, completely negating her earlier strategy of being socially visible and trying to pretend like nothing unusual happened. Nyx, for her part, seems completely oblivious to anything being wrong, which completely negates her earlier feelings of something being actually very wrong. These first occurred when she single-handedly won a tug of war match against four male ponies twice her size, and instead of clapping, the entire town stared at her like she had just shat all over the place.
Here's the problem: Nyx behaves as if she has no situational awareness at all. She knows she's not supposed to reveal her full power level in public, and yet she does anyway. Twice. In one day. Since she's only a child, it would make sense for her to not entirely grasp the danger and occasionally ignore Twilight's warning to remain incognito. However, the problem is that child or no, because of previous events she should be fully capable of understanding the danger at this point. In the aftermath of the play scene, she apparently deduced on her own that she is, in fact, Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). She asked Twilight about it, and Twilight confirmed. She has above average intelligence and has read the story of Nightmare Moon. Even if she is still emotionally a child and can be expected to act like one most of the time, she can at least intellectually understand the implications of being NM's reincarnation, and how the town might react to this knowledge if she inadvertently revealed it to them. Thus, she knows exactly why she needs to hide her wings and horn, and why she needs to keep her magic under wraps. Keeping her identity a secret should be more important to her than it is to Twilight at this point.
However, despite this, she uses her magic to transform Fluttershy into a tree. Well, Pinkie Pie kind of pushed her into it, so maybe we can chalk that one up to peer pressure. She then sees the town freak out, and she should at least understand why. Considering that she bursts into tears at the slightest provocation and seems constantly terrified that everyone hates her, wouldn't it stand to reason that this sort of negative attention would bother her? Shouldn't she be freaking out and begging Twilight to take her back home? And yet, a couple scenes later, she just participates in the tug of war with the CMC like everything is perfectly normal. Her mind is so focused on the competition, in fact, that she manages to slip up and go full power level [i]again.[/b] Once more, the town freaks out, and she sees it, and should understand why and be bothered. Yet a scene later, here she is, just skipping happily along next to Twilight like everything is just fine.
There is no consistency to any of these characters' actions. Peen Stroke seems to more or less have his characters' personalities down and writes them appropriately enough. The scenes themselves are sometimes very well written. The problem is there is no continuity between what happens in one scene and what happens in the next. The result is that characters react appropriately to whatever specific situation they are in at the present moment, but nothing that happens in one scene has any bearing on how the next one plays out. This story is like a bunch of disconnected events happening in dreamtime, with every character simply doing whatever the situation demands with no memory of previous events.
Earlier, Nyx learns that she is NM. This scene is an emotional moment for her, and there is naturally a lot of tears and angst and Twilight comforting her and so forth and so on. However, the next time she appears, she's just a happy little kid again, excited about Learn and Play Day. Setting aside the issues I have with the timing of this big reveal, shouldn't it at least have caused some significant change in Nyx? Logically she should be in the middle of a massive identity crisis right now; winning a tug of war contest should be the least of her worries.
Twilight's behavior is also strange. She's the adult, and should understand the severity of Nyx's situation better than Nyx. And it's made clear that she does indeed understand. But what does she ever do? Nothing; she just stands passively in the background and worries to herself about it. Her actions are erratic and inconsistent; one minute she wants Nyx to just blend in and act normal, next minute she wants to barricade her in the library and hide her from view.
Next, the town. They've seen two random, bizarre acts of magic perpetrated by this one filly, who just showed up out of nowhere and looks suspiciously like Nightmare Moon, and also by sheer coincidence portrayed Nightmare Moon unsettlingly well in a play not two weeks prior. What happens there? When Fluttershy turns into a tree, they murmur and seem suspicious. However, they all show up for the tug of war competition a scene later and appear to have completely forgotten. When Nyx performs yet another feat of uncommon magic, they once again murmur and seem suspicious. Are they ever going to do anything else?
The events of the story in general often don't make sense. As I've already explained, it would be highly inappropriate and unfair to have a tug of war contest between a group of near-adult males and a group of prepubescent females take place at a friendly school competition. So why is it happening and being treated as normal? The reason is because Peen Stroke wanted to have Nyx use magic to win an unwinnable contest by herself in order to advance his plot, so he just set up the scene without thinking about how little sense it actually makes.
Pic related, because this stinks.
>>255941
>So it is just laughable later on in the series where Sirious talks about the world not being split into good people annd bad people (Saw this in the movie, I don't know if it is in the books). I mean the conflict is pretty straight forward because Harry's enemies are such twats.
Yes, the books try to say "People aren't black and white!" often even though everything is as black and white as it gets. Usually "Not always black and whiiiiiite!" is sang whenever Rowling wants to excuse an incompetent abusive adult who used Harry like a goddamn disposable lighter, or made his journey harder through malice/incompetence.
And
>You think that's bad?
During the final battle, the Battle of Hogwarts, where all the forces of light fight all the forces of darkness, aka like 38 good guys in a school of varying ages fight against 50ish Death Gobblers until Voldemort shows up to get one-shotted by Harry after Neville slices Voldemort's snake in half(killing the final horcrux Respawn Point of Voldy's even though Harry Ron and Hermione went on a multi-month adventure to hunt down all the other horcrux Respawn Points and destroy them leaving the Wizard Kids behind to suffer and get abused by Umbridge and two, count em two, abusive evil death gobbler teachers. All of this torture is mentioned briefly and then glossed over), and there's a scene where "Voldemort's terrifying Number Two bitch, the eeeevil Bellatrix LeStrange, with her spooky wide eyes and crazy love for Voldy and willingness to torture kittens", doesn't get killed by a character-developed Neville on the way to killing Voldy's Snake. Instead Bellatrix LeShit is killed by the Weasley's mom for trying to shoot Ginny Weasley aka Harry's love interest...
Got distracted, I'll start again.
During the final battle, where all the goodies "prepare to fight the baddies" aka sit around and wait for the baddies to show up and smash their shield wall and begin a free-for-all gunfight where only the teachers use interesting magic and all baddies Cast Instant Death (all scenes of the kids having Signature Spells were added in the movie)
All of the Slytherin kids refuse to fight the Death Gobblers and this is treated as proof of their villainy, even though most of them probably have parents or older brothers in that army. So the Slytherin kids are locked away in the dungeons to do fuck all during the fight, which goes off without a hitch as Harry wins in the end when Voldy and Harry shoot each other, both die because of something Rowling retconned in at the last moment, Harry talks to Dumbledore in the afterlife for some pseudo-philosophy, then Harry gets a +1up videogame style and comes back to life.
What was retconned in at the last moment? A fundamental law about how wands work: If you disarm someone with Harry's signature move Expelliarmus, then you become the New Boss of that wand forever and it will kill its owner if its owner tries to use it against you. Yes even though harry used Expelliarmus all the time until that point and it never caused that until now.
So yeah, in the end all Slytherin kids are either on the side of Voldemort and his Dick Eaters- I mean Death Eaters, or they're hiding in the dungeon like cowards.
Rowling later realized how profitable it would be for the Pottermore website to sort people into all four houses including Slytherin. And she decided she wanted to sell more Slytherin merch to everyone, not just the little girls so sexually attracted to wearing lacy black bodices while getting fucked by brooding abusive dark-haired tall rich pretty-boys, that they fail to notice how Draco and all other Slytheries are fucking losers who fail to be "cool evil" and just act like childish one-dimensional school bullies all fucking story.
So Rowling retconned her book quite blatantly by yelling "Ackshually, the kids didn't hide in the dungeon and do nothing. Instead they ran off to the Wizard Village of Hogsmeade to gather a bunch of adults not working for Hogwarts. Then they brought this fresh new army to the Battle of Hogwarts to overwhelm the Death Gobblers from behind! It was clever and tactical, because why fight now in a fair fight when you can run away and then come back to crush your enemies when the fight is no longer fair?".
>So it is just laughable later on in the series where Sirious talks about the world not being split into good people annd bad people (Saw this in the movie, I don't know if it is in the books). I mean the conflict is pretty straight forward because Harry's enemies are such twats.
Yes, the books try to say "People aren't black and white!" often even though everything is as black and white as it gets. Usually "Not always black and whiiiiiite!" is sang whenever Rowling wants to excuse an incompetent abusive adult who used Harry like a goddamn disposable lighter, or made his journey harder through malice/incompetence.
And
>You think that's bad?
During the final battle, the Battle of Hogwarts, where all the forces of light fight all the forces of darkness, aka like 38 good guys in a school of varying ages fight against 50ish Death Gobblers until Voldemort shows up to get one-shotted by Harry after Neville slices Voldemort's snake in half(killing the final horcrux Respawn Point of Voldy's even though Harry Ron and Hermione went on a multi-month adventure to hunt down all the other horcrux Respawn Points and destroy them leaving the Wizard Kids behind to suffer and get abused by Umbridge and two, count em two, abusive evil death gobbler teachers. All of this torture is mentioned briefly and then glossed over), and there's a scene where "Voldemort's terrifying Number Two bitch, the eeeevil Bellatrix LeStrange, with her spooky wide eyes and crazy love for Voldy and willingness to torture kittens", doesn't get killed by a character-developed Neville on the way to killing Voldy's Snake. Instead Bellatrix LeShit is killed by the Weasley's mom for trying to shoot Ginny Weasley aka Harry's love interest...
Got distracted, I'll start again.
During the final battle, where all the goodies "prepare to fight the baddies" aka sit around and wait for the baddies to show up and smash their shield wall and begin a free-for-all gunfight where only the teachers use interesting magic and all baddies Cast Instant Death (all scenes of the kids having Signature Spells were added in the movie)
All of the Slytherin kids refuse to fight the Death Gobblers and this is treated as proof of their villainy, even though most of them probably have parents or older brothers in that army. So the Slytherin kids are locked away in the dungeons to do fuck all during the fight, which goes off without a hitch as Harry wins in the end when Voldy and Harry shoot each other, both die because of something Rowling retconned in at the last moment, Harry talks to Dumbledore in the afterlife for some pseudo-philosophy, then Harry gets a +1up videogame style and comes back to life.
What was retconned in at the last moment? A fundamental law about how wands work: If you disarm someone with Harry's signature move Expelliarmus, then you become the New Boss of that wand forever and it will kill its owner if its owner tries to use it against you. Yes even though harry used Expelliarmus all the time until that point and it never caused that until now.
So yeah, in the end all Slytherin kids are either on the side of Voldemort and his Dick Eaters- I mean Death Eaters, or they're hiding in the dungeon like cowards.
Rowling later realized how profitable it would be for the Pottermore website to sort people into all four houses including Slytherin. And she decided she wanted to sell more Slytherin merch to everyone, not just the little girls so sexually attracted to wearing lacy black bodices while getting fucked by brooding abusive dark-haired tall rich pretty-boys, that they fail to notice how Draco and all other Slytheries are fucking losers who fail to be "cool evil" and just act like childish one-dimensional school bullies all fucking story.
So Rowling retconned her book quite blatantly by yelling "Ackshually, the kids didn't hide in the dungeon and do nothing. Instead they ran off to the Wizard Village of Hogsmeade to gather a bunch of adults not working for Hogwarts. Then they brought this fresh new army to the Battle of Hogwarts to overwhelm the Death Gobblers from behind! It was clever and tactical, because why fight now in a fair fight when you can run away and then come back to crush your enemies when the fight is no longer fair?".
>>255941
>Darco talks about pure-blood and is evil but like I as a nationalist cannot recoognice myself in him because of his sitty behavoir and lack of arguments. It is like she hasn't considered her own universe at all. In the series, it seems to be implied that either you have the right genetics for magic or you don't. That's why the Weasley's children are all mages while most muggles give birth too muggles. It seems to be a recessive trait that or at least a rare trait. Is it so weird or are they so unjustified to see to it that this trait is preserved. Like literally, their entire culture will vanish if their are noone who can do magic. In fact, there are creatures, such as the dementors, that muggles can't see. If there are no wizards to combat them, wouldn't be muggles be fucked?
Rowling accidentally created a world where humans mean absolutely nothing because Wizards are the superior race in body, mind, and spirit. I've seen shitty Elf stories by Elfkin faggots that don't go as far as she did. Wizards learn faster, heal faster, have tougher bones, and can use any spell ever. There are never "I am not strong enough to use this spell" scenes, only "My spell failed because my wand is broken" or "I am not born with the gift to use this arbitrarily-rare magic like Specific Animal Transformation, Limitless Transformation, or Snake-ese Speaking".
Rowling wrote the strongest and meanest and oldest and stupidest wizards as the strongest, and only Hermione is allowed to buck this trend because she's Muggle Sue. Neville going from coward to hero doesn't count because he was an afterthought in the books. Nobody can escape the destiny they are born with no matter how hard one tries. You're born a hero, a baddie, or a nobody. For fuck's sake, I saw a Power Rangers series as a kid that did "Destiny can be changed" way better than this.
Fanfics of the era often used this premise where women are taken by the government and given to the pure-bloods(strongest wizards) as an excuse for pairings to quicky get together. Hermione would be given to Draco and they'd hate it at first, then they'd fuck and like it.
I've
>Darco talks about pure-blood and is evil but like I as a nationalist cannot recoognice myself in him because of his sitty behavoir and lack of arguments. It is like she hasn't considered her own universe at all. In the series, it seems to be implied that either you have the right genetics for magic or you don't. That's why the Weasley's children are all mages while most muggles give birth too muggles. It seems to be a recessive trait that or at least a rare trait. Is it so weird or are they so unjustified to see to it that this trait is preserved. Like literally, their entire culture will vanish if their are noone who can do magic. In fact, there are creatures, such as the dementors, that muggles can't see. If there are no wizards to combat them, wouldn't be muggles be fucked?
Rowling accidentally created a world where humans mean absolutely nothing because Wizards are the superior race in body, mind, and spirit. I've seen shitty Elf stories by Elfkin faggots that don't go as far as she did. Wizards learn faster, heal faster, have tougher bones, and can use any spell ever. There are never "I am not strong enough to use this spell" scenes, only "My spell failed because my wand is broken" or "I am not born with the gift to use this arbitrarily-rare magic like Specific Animal Transformation, Limitless Transformation, or Snake-ese Speaking".
Rowling wrote the strongest and meanest and oldest and stupidest wizards as the strongest, and only Hermione is allowed to buck this trend because she's Muggle Sue. Neville going from coward to hero doesn't count because he was an afterthought in the books. Nobody can escape the destiny they are born with no matter how hard one tries. You're born a hero, a baddie, or a nobody. For fuck's sake, I saw a Power Rangers series as a kid that did "Destiny can be changed" way better than this.
Fanfics of the era often used this premise where women are taken by the government and given to the pure-bloods(strongest wizards) as an excuse for pairings to quicky get together. Hermione would be given to Draco and they'd hate it at first, then they'd fuck and like it.
I've
>>256012
only ever seen one fandom use this premise in my life, and it's Naruto where your "Bloodline" and heritage quite literally dictates whether you are or are not allowed to use certain spells.
It doesn't matter how hard someone like Rock Lee trains, he can't outfight someone born with special eyes like Madara or Pain.
Ice, Magma, magnetism, growing extra bones to chop someone up with bone swords, white eyes with a 360-degree sphere of sight, eyes that see the future and spit magical black flames and make Gundams around you, eyes that summon meteors and reanimate the dead and give you 24 unique powers to split across up to 6 bodies, mouths on your hands that chew up and spit out exploding clay, eyes that can perfectly mind-control anyone once per day, superheated fireballs that evaporate the water in your body on contact, CREATING A PERFECT COPY OF SOMEONE YOU CAN COMMAND AND CONTROL FULLY FROM ANY DISTANCE WHILST STILL RETAINING THEIR SKILLS AND ABILITIES, merging your body with someone else's to kill it or become a freaky mutant, being born fast, laser beams made of electrified water, being a god of wood and nature and life, all of these bullshit abilities are things some people are born with, and some people are not.
Then there are the techniques that are basically clan-only but not really. Shooting your mind into someone else to control them, stabbing someone with your shadow or linking your shadow to theirs to control them, growing fifty feet tall, merging with your dog, things that are "family secrets" but not actual bloodline-only abilities.
HOWEVER
Naruto ADMITS that this is a fucked-up and unfair system.
Harry Potter refuses to look deeply at its own system. The villain is BORN EVIL because his RAPIST MOTHER drugged a MUGGLE MAN with LOVE POTION, so due to the circumstances of his birth he's physically unable to feel love.
And LOVE POTIONS are sold on school grounds by "Good guys" like the Prankster Twins Fred and George.
Harry Potter is a fucked-up world that fails to admit this! It doesn't write its heroes as people who want to change things for the better. Harry just becomes a cop for the fucked-up govt once everything is said and done, no muggle-wizard integration happens, the magic and muggle worlds are still secret, nobody learns anything from Voldemort's existence or rise to power, nobody feels like decentralizing government power or banning Love Potions, and Hermione's treated like a dumbfuck SJW for thinking the House Elves (Creatures created to be slaves, be abused, and love it) deserve rights.
Meanwhile Naruto admits what a fucked-up world it has.
It admits that child soldiers are fucked up things to use, even when used out of necessity. It admits how fucked up it is that some adult swordsman who trained his whole life can find some gutter-trash orphan in the middle of nowhere and recruit him, getting a deadly ice god on his side willing to kill for the man who made him feel important and wanted.
The protagonist Naruto Uzumaki wants to bring about world peace and end the cycles of violence that chew Ninjas up and spit them out after using them like tools. And he wants the love of his village even though it treated him like shit. This contrasts him with Sasuke whose goal is just to "kill the bad individuals" he hates this week, until he has this stupidity beaten out of him by the hero Naruto.
Naruto has villains who lack Kekkei Genkais (bloodline-limited abilities), yet still work as threats because of money and influence and having people with KGs working for them. A villainous organization of eleven people with OP KGs are able to threaten the entire world because KGs are bullshit. Some villains are motivated by their desire to steal these bullshit abilities and collect them all and matter. The final villain (before godly retcon bullshit) ends up being the KGless understudy of a KGless villain who steals a ton of KGs and then resurrects an army of dead ninjas with KGs to declare war on the entire world.
Naruto turns a fight between someone "born perfect" by having a monster shoved into him and some nobody who trained real hard into a goddamn work of art.
Someone who doesn't need to try, and can just stand with arms folded while his sand blocks everything for him, VS someone who tries with all his might to fight destiny and become somebody.
This one fight in a cheesy battle shonen aimed at kids is literally better storytelling than everything in the multi-million-word Harry Potter series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFvaq-Ntds4
only ever seen one fandom use this premise in my life, and it's Naruto where your "Bloodline" and heritage quite literally dictates whether you are or are not allowed to use certain spells.
It doesn't matter how hard someone like Rock Lee trains, he can't outfight someone born with special eyes like Madara or Pain.
Ice, Magma, magnetism, growing extra bones to chop someone up with bone swords, white eyes with a 360-degree sphere of sight, eyes that see the future and spit magical black flames and make Gundams around you, eyes that summon meteors and reanimate the dead and give you 24 unique powers to split across up to 6 bodies, mouths on your hands that chew up and spit out exploding clay, eyes that can perfectly mind-control anyone once per day, superheated fireballs that evaporate the water in your body on contact, CREATING A PERFECT COPY OF SOMEONE YOU CAN COMMAND AND CONTROL FULLY FROM ANY DISTANCE WHILST STILL RETAINING THEIR SKILLS AND ABILITIES, merging your body with someone else's to kill it or become a freaky mutant, being born fast, laser beams made of electrified water, being a god of wood and nature and life, all of these bullshit abilities are things some people are born with, and some people are not.
Then there are the techniques that are basically clan-only but not really. Shooting your mind into someone else to control them, stabbing someone with your shadow or linking your shadow to theirs to control them, growing fifty feet tall, merging with your dog, things that are "family secrets" but not actual bloodline-only abilities.
HOWEVER
Naruto ADMITS that this is a fucked-up and unfair system.
Harry Potter refuses to look deeply at its own system. The villain is BORN EVIL because his RAPIST MOTHER drugged a MUGGLE MAN with LOVE POTION, so due to the circumstances of his birth he's physically unable to feel love.
And LOVE POTIONS are sold on school grounds by "Good guys" like the Prankster Twins Fred and George.
Harry Potter is a fucked-up world that fails to admit this! It doesn't write its heroes as people who want to change things for the better. Harry just becomes a cop for the fucked-up govt once everything is said and done, no muggle-wizard integration happens, the magic and muggle worlds are still secret, nobody learns anything from Voldemort's existence or rise to power, nobody feels like decentralizing government power or banning Love Potions, and Hermione's treated like a dumbfuck SJW for thinking the House Elves (Creatures created to be slaves, be abused, and love it) deserve rights.
Meanwhile Naruto admits what a fucked-up world it has.
It admits that child soldiers are fucked up things to use, even when used out of necessity. It admits how fucked up it is that some adult swordsman who trained his whole life can find some gutter-trash orphan in the middle of nowhere and recruit him, getting a deadly ice god on his side willing to kill for the man who made him feel important and wanted.
The protagonist Naruto Uzumaki wants to bring about world peace and end the cycles of violence that chew Ninjas up and spit them out after using them like tools. And he wants the love of his village even though it treated him like shit. This contrasts him with Sasuke whose goal is just to "kill the bad individuals" he hates this week, until he has this stupidity beaten out of him by the hero Naruto.
Naruto has villains who lack Kekkei Genkais (bloodline-limited abilities), yet still work as threats because of money and influence and having people with KGs working for them. A villainous organization of eleven people with OP KGs are able to threaten the entire world because KGs are bullshit. Some villains are motivated by their desire to steal these bullshit abilities and collect them all and matter. The final villain (before godly retcon bullshit) ends up being the KGless understudy of a KGless villain who steals a ton of KGs and then resurrects an army of dead ninjas with KGs to declare war on the entire world.
Naruto turns a fight between someone "born perfect" by having a monster shoved into him and some nobody who trained real hard into a goddamn work of art.
Someone who doesn't need to try, and can just stand with arms folded while his sand blocks everything for him, VS someone who tries with all his might to fight destiny and become somebody.
This one fight in a cheesy battle shonen aimed at kids is literally better storytelling than everything in the multi-million-word Harry Potter series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFvaq-Ntds4
>>255958
>Time-travel in Harry Potter works like a closed loop according to this idea.
Yeah, except when time travel isn't working as a closed loop and is being used to make permanent changes like saving Buckbeak's pointless life.
And when it's used in a shitty sequel The Cursed Child where someone goes back in time to fuck up the Harry Potter series and then has to go back to unfuck it a few times until everything's hunky dory once more.
>Time-travel in Harry Potter works like a closed loop according to this idea.
Yeah, except when time travel isn't working as a closed loop and is being used to make permanent changes like saving Buckbeak's pointless life.
And when it's used in a shitty sequel The Cursed Child where someone goes back in time to fuck up the Harry Potter series and then has to go back to unfuck it a few times until everything's hunky dory once more.
>>255889
Had to read a review, regardless: answer to that is yes. It's power fantasy jew-wank material.
>>256009
I warned you about this shit. Look what happened: Rod Serling came to visit you, and now you're enacting a self-fulfillying prophecy. You were warned. You could have prevented this. All of this. Why didn't you read the warnings?
Had to read a review, regardless: answer to that is yes. It's power fantasy jew-wank material.
>>256009
I warned you about this shit. Look what happened: Rod Serling came to visit you, and now you're enacting a self-fulfillying prophecy. You were warned. You could have prevented this. All of this. Why didn't you read the warnings?
File (): 50E4A9DBAC2DD21679A5FC03D271A395-615285.jpg (600.9 KB, 1300x810, 1573942211153.jpg)
>>256009
>Logically she should be in the middle of a massive identity crisis right now; winning a tug of war contest should be the least of her worries.
As I don't read this, I have obviously not thought about this but this is so true. That is the most intresting part after all. If Nyx isn't suppose to contemplate what this revaletion means for her alone and with Twilight, what is intresting about this?
Predictably, the story continue to be shallow not deep. Nyx will probably whine about how she can't change who she is or something else equally melodramtic. I mean consider that both Nyx and Twilight have had, so far, such a surface level analysis of the situation why should we expect anything more from them.
But yeah, your right, "This stinks" and I like many more things in this post.
>Pic is very related and I use it as subtle commantary on the world as we know it
>Logically she should be in the middle of a massive identity crisis right now; winning a tug of war contest should be the least of her worries.
As I don't read this, I have obviously not thought about this but this is so true. That is the most intresting part after all. If Nyx isn't suppose to contemplate what this revaletion means for her alone and with Twilight, what is intresting about this?
Predictably, the story continue to be shallow not deep. Nyx will probably whine about how she can't change who she is or something else equally melodramtic. I mean consider that both Nyx and Twilight have had, so far, such a surface level analysis of the situation why should we expect anything more from them.
But yeah, your right, "This stinks" and I like many more things in this post.
>Pic is very related and I use it as subtle commantary on the world as we know it
File (): 999019115327C3F9C798514F2BD64BD8-152116.png (148.6 KB, 1600x1200, ponerwithhitleronaisland.png)
>>256013
>Harry Potter refuses to look deeply at its own system. The villain is BORN EVIL because his RAPIST MOTHER drugged a MUGGLE MAN with LOVE POTION, so due to the circumstances of his birth he's physically unable to feel love.
And LOVE POTIONS are sold on school grounds by "Good guys" like the Prankster Twins Fred and George.
Kek, I didn't know that about Voldemort. Wtf.
>It doesn't write its heroes as people who want to change things for the better.
>nobody learns anything from Voldemort's existence or rise to power
Yeah, it is like the status quo that was before was perfect and didn't need to change. You think they would at least removed the slytherin house or different houses altogether since it is pretty clear, to them anyway, who becomes evil and who doesn't. I wouldn't really have liked that inclusion in the story but it would make since for these characters to do so.
If I was a wizard in that world I would actually be against house-elf liberation as well (but I agree that these wizards and witches should be
considering this based on theiir own values). Not because I'm too lazy to wave a wand to manage shores but because the elfs are just way stronger in magic so it would be a logical conclusion that they would take over the world if they were given a chance.
From what I know of the HP universe wands are used to direct ones magic for wizards and only the most talented wizards (I guess you might be able to train for it as well but I don't know), like Dumbledore really use magic without a wand. Wands are like a support item for people with lesser magic ability, it seems to imply.
But house elves? They don't point as I have seen Dumbledore do in the movies to direct their magic, they SNAP their fingers. I don't know how they direct their magic with snapping their fingers but they do.
I have head-canon theory for why this is. It is also intreting to note that ancient magic are the most powerfulest, for example the magic that saved Harry that his mother used. And we also know that the house-elves became servants/slaves to wizards, well I assume, far back in the past.
It seems to sugguest that Wizards were superior than elfs back in time but due to mixing with no magic people they have no become less powerful than the elves.
In fact, Dobby is a liabilty to the entire humanity. What if a free house elf would start going after other wizard families that has house-elves to free them. Torture them and say, "Free your house-elf or you die." Then there is two house-elves to worry about.
>What was retconned in at the last moment? A fundamental law about how wands work: If you disarm someone with Harry's signature move Expelliarmus, then you become the New Boss of that wand forever and it will kill its owner if its owner tries to use it against you. Yes even though harry used Expelliarmus all the time until that point and it never caused that until now.
Yeah, I have been trying to make sense of what happend there but there based on the movie alone. Nice explaination. Yeah, why did he die from expelliarmus?
However, I have thought about this stupid retcon that she did about wands. Through the series, people have been disarming eachother left and right. I mean they even have practice duals in Hogwarts. Are theyy not allowed to use disarming spell then or what?
I mean if a wizard disarms a witch then he now owns both of their wands. This means the witch cannot use either of that guys wand to attack him with since, as you pointed out, fucking expelliarmus can (or always will?) kill you if you cast that spell at the master of the wand you cast the spell with. Or is it in stream wands off that that happens? Idk.
What I really wanted to get to is that you can never get back to the original situation were the wizard had his wand and the witch had hers so practice is impossible with this rules.
I mean if the witch who lost her wand...
Oh, I forgot a puzzle piece in this. Right, the rule is: So long as you beat the master (disarms them) then all of his wands belong to you. This is ture because that is how Harry gains ownership of the Elderwand. He doesn't disarm the Elderwand from Draco because he doesn't posses iit, Voldemort does, but at that moment he is the master of it. This means that so long as you dis arm a person, you now own all of their wands or was that just the Elderwand?
It seems to imply that you can never return to the status quo because you can't win back just your wand, you win all the other person's wands.
This should make it impossible to train disarming spells with students.
Don't know what it means to use anothers wand either. Do they ever go through that in the books and explain what one can do with another wand and what one can't odwith anothers wand? Like in normal cases, a master can give their servant an order, is it similar here. Wouldn't it be kinda funny if all this time Voldemort used the Elderwand, Harry could have just ordered it to stop.
>doesn't get killed by a character-developed Neville on the way to killing Voldy's Snake. Instead Bellatrix LeShit is killed by the Weasley's mom
Yeah, it made me go like. Wait, was Voldemort's elites just a bunch of pussies or is Molly the secret chief director of aurors or what is happening here? It isn't satisfying I any remote way. Especially for me that kind of like her constant crazy behavoir. Yeah, she wasn't very deep but she stood out among the death eaters and had some form of personality.
>Harry Potter refuses to look deeply at its own system. The villain is BORN EVIL because his RAPIST MOTHER drugged a MUGGLE MAN with LOVE POTION, so due to the circumstances of his birth he's physically unable to feel love.
And LOVE POTIONS are sold on school grounds by "Good guys" like the Prankster Twins Fred and George.
Kek, I didn't know that about Voldemort. Wtf.
>It doesn't write its heroes as people who want to change things for the better.
>nobody learns anything from Voldemort's existence or rise to power
Yeah, it is like the status quo that was before was perfect and didn't need to change. You think they would at least removed the slytherin house or different houses altogether since it is pretty clear, to them anyway, who becomes evil and who doesn't. I wouldn't really have liked that inclusion in the story but it would make since for these characters to do so.
If I was a wizard in that world I would actually be against house-elf liberation as well (but I agree that these wizards and witches should be
considering this based on theiir own values). Not because I'm too lazy to wave a wand to manage shores but because the elfs are just way stronger in magic so it would be a logical conclusion that they would take over the world if they were given a chance.
From what I know of the HP universe wands are used to direct ones magic for wizards and only the most talented wizards (I guess you might be able to train for it as well but I don't know), like Dumbledore really use magic without a wand. Wands are like a support item for people with lesser magic ability, it seems to imply.
But house elves? They don't point as I have seen Dumbledore do in the movies to direct their magic, they SNAP their fingers. I don't know how they direct their magic with snapping their fingers but they do.
I have head-canon theory for why this is. It is also intreting to note that ancient magic are the most powerfulest, for example the magic that saved Harry that his mother used. And we also know that the house-elves became servants/slaves to wizards, well I assume, far back in the past.
It seems to sugguest that Wizards were superior than elfs back in time but due to mixing with no magic people they have no become less powerful than the elves.
In fact, Dobby is a liabilty to the entire humanity. What if a free house elf would start going after other wizard families that has house-elves to free them. Torture them and say, "Free your house-elf or you die." Then there is two house-elves to worry about.
>What was retconned in at the last moment? A fundamental law about how wands work: If you disarm someone with Harry's signature move Expelliarmus, then you become the New Boss of that wand forever and it will kill its owner if its owner tries to use it against you. Yes even though harry used Expelliarmus all the time until that point and it never caused that until now.
Yeah, I have been trying to make sense of what happend there but there based on the movie alone. Nice explaination. Yeah, why did he die from expelliarmus?
However, I have thought about this stupid retcon that she did about wands. Through the series, people have been disarming eachother left and right. I mean they even have practice duals in Hogwarts. Are theyy not allowed to use disarming spell then or what?
I mean if a wizard disarms a witch then he now owns both of their wands. This means the witch cannot use either of that guys wand to attack him with since, as you pointed out, fucking expelliarmus can (or always will?) kill you if you cast that spell at the master of the wand you cast the spell with. Or is it in stream wands off that that happens? Idk.
What I really wanted to get to is that you can never get back to the original situation were the wizard had his wand and the witch had hers so practice is impossible with this rules.
I mean if the witch who lost her wand...
Oh, I forgot a puzzle piece in this. Right, the rule is: So long as you beat the master (disarms them) then all of his wands belong to you. This is ture because that is how Harry gains ownership of the Elderwand. He doesn't disarm the Elderwand from Draco because he doesn't posses iit, Voldemort does, but at that moment he is the master of it. This means that so long as you dis arm a person, you now own all of their wands or was that just the Elderwand?
It seems to imply that you can never return to the status quo because you can't win back just your wand, you win all the other person's wands.
This should make it impossible to train disarming spells with students.
Don't know what it means to use anothers wand either. Do they ever go through that in the books and explain what one can do with another wand and what one can't odwith anothers wand? Like in normal cases, a master can give their servant an order, is it similar here. Wouldn't it be kinda funny if all this time Voldemort used the Elderwand, Harry could have just ordered it to stop.
>doesn't get killed by a character-developed Neville on the way to killing Voldy's Snake. Instead Bellatrix LeShit is killed by the Weasley's mom
Yeah, it made me go like. Wait, was Voldemort's elites just a bunch of pussies or is Molly the secret chief director of aurors or what is happening here? It isn't satisfying I any remote way. Especially for me that kind of like her constant crazy behavoir. Yeah, she wasn't very deep but she stood out among the death eaters and had some form of personality.
>>256035
I guess that I would still be for houe-elves having their own nation. It is just hat security measurments would be needed to be in place before that so that we aren't fucked. Otherwise, a slave master relationship doesn't necessary needs to be vile. As pets and their owners have good relationships afterall.
I guess that I would still be for houe-elves having their own nation. It is just hat security measurments would be needed to be in place before that so that we aren't fucked. Otherwise, a slave master relationship doesn't necessary needs to be vile. As pets and their owners have good relationships afterall.
>>256035
>>256013
>Harry Potter refuses to look deeply at its own system. The villain is BORN EVIL because his RAPIST MOTHER drugged a MUGGLE MAN with LOVE POTION, so due to the circumstances of his birth he's physically unable to feel love.
This is kind of amusing, actually. As much as these books are hyped by lefties as being some kind of progressive feminist fairy tale, this is basically Catholic original sin doctrine: man is born evil because of the sins of woman. I guess we can add the Bible to the list of things that no-talent cunt plagiarized.
>Harry Potter is a fucked-up world that fails to admit this! It doesn't write its heroes as people who want to change things for the better. Harry just becomes a cop for the fucked-up govt once everything is said and done, no muggle-wizard integration happens, the magic and muggle worlds are still secret, nobody learns anything from Voldemort's existence or rise to power, nobody feels like decentralizing government power or banning Love Potions, and Hermione's treated like a dumbfuck SJW for thinking the House Elves (Creatures created to be slaves, be abused, and love it) deserve rights.
This is more or less a summation of my problem with it. It presents itself as a tale of moral absolutes, but its absolutes don't stand for anything. The good guys are the good guys because they're wearing the white hats and the bad guys are the bad guys because they're wearing the black hats.
Compare Harry Potter to something like The Lord of the Rings: they both take place in worlds of absolute good and absolute evil. The difference is, Tolkien takes an explicit stance on what good and evil actually are. Evil is corruption, pursuit of power for its own sake, unbridled conquest, destruction of natural environment, unchecked industry, and world empire without morals, goals or purpose. Good is nature, natural order, aesthetic beauty, self-determination of national groups, and striving for excellence.
In Harry Potter, evil is some scary-looking guy who wants to destroy magical faggot wizard-land for no reason other than that he wants to and can, and good is some faggot and his faggot friends who want to save magical faggot wizard-land for no reason other than to save it. The reader is clearly supposed to side with Harry and the Good Guys™, but the stories never make any particularly compelling argument for why the good guys are good, or why magical wizard-land ought to be saved. the whole story of Harry Potter takes place in a separate realm cut off from our own, with no meaningful connection to it even though there is technically commerce between the two worlds. Middle Earth, by contrast, is a realm completely separate from our own, yet it can be read either as a direct allegory for our world, or more accurately as a story depicting universal truths that are as applicable to our world as any other.
Harry Potter is a completely modern story in that regard: it presents moral absolutes, but its absolutes are simply ideological statements with no substance behind them, that are used as definitions for themselves. Hogwarts™ and Dumbledore™ are good because they're Good™. Harry Potter™ fights for Good™, therefore Voldemort™ is bad by definition for opposing what has been decreed Good™ by the people whose job it is to tell us what "good" means. By the same logic, Democracy™ is good because it's Good™, therefore anything opposed to it is bad. We're allowed to occasionally criticize specific Democracies for not living up to the ideals of Democracy™, but we're never allowed to criticize Democracy™ itself. Same thing goes for Diversity™, Equality™, Civil Rights™, Science™, Feminism™, etc.
The more you pull these books apart, the easier it is to see why progressives are so gay for them, despite (or perhaps because of) their extremely low quality and complete lack of literary value.
>>256013
>Harry Potter refuses to look deeply at its own system. The villain is BORN EVIL because his RAPIST MOTHER drugged a MUGGLE MAN with LOVE POTION, so due to the circumstances of his birth he's physically unable to feel love.
This is kind of amusing, actually. As much as these books are hyped by lefties as being some kind of progressive feminist fairy tale, this is basically Catholic original sin doctrine: man is born evil because of the sins of woman. I guess we can add the Bible to the list of things that no-talent cunt plagiarized.
>Harry Potter is a fucked-up world that fails to admit this! It doesn't write its heroes as people who want to change things for the better. Harry just becomes a cop for the fucked-up govt once everything is said and done, no muggle-wizard integration happens, the magic and muggle worlds are still secret, nobody learns anything from Voldemort's existence or rise to power, nobody feels like decentralizing government power or banning Love Potions, and Hermione's treated like a dumbfuck SJW for thinking the House Elves (Creatures created to be slaves, be abused, and love it) deserve rights.
This is more or less a summation of my problem with it. It presents itself as a tale of moral absolutes, but its absolutes don't stand for anything. The good guys are the good guys because they're wearing the white hats and the bad guys are the bad guys because they're wearing the black hats.
Compare Harry Potter to something like The Lord of the Rings: they both take place in worlds of absolute good and absolute evil. The difference is, Tolkien takes an explicit stance on what good and evil actually are. Evil is corruption, pursuit of power for its own sake, unbridled conquest, destruction of natural environment, unchecked industry, and world empire without morals, goals or purpose. Good is nature, natural order, aesthetic beauty, self-determination of national groups, and striving for excellence.
In Harry Potter, evil is some scary-looking guy who wants to destroy magical faggot wizard-land for no reason other than that he wants to and can, and good is some faggot and his faggot friends who want to save magical faggot wizard-land for no reason other than to save it. The reader is clearly supposed to side with Harry and the Good Guys™, but the stories never make any particularly compelling argument for why the good guys are good, or why magical wizard-land ought to be saved. the whole story of Harry Potter takes place in a separate realm cut off from our own, with no meaningful connection to it even though there is technically commerce between the two worlds. Middle Earth, by contrast, is a realm completely separate from our own, yet it can be read either as a direct allegory for our world, or more accurately as a story depicting universal truths that are as applicable to our world as any other.
Harry Potter is a completely modern story in that regard: it presents moral absolutes, but its absolutes are simply ideological statements with no substance behind them, that are used as definitions for themselves. Hogwarts™ and Dumbledore™ are good because they're Good™. Harry Potter™ fights for Good™, therefore Voldemort™ is bad by definition for opposing what has been decreed Good™ by the people whose job it is to tell us what "good" means. By the same logic, Democracy™ is good because it's Good™, therefore anything opposed to it is bad. We're allowed to occasionally criticize specific Democracies for not living up to the ideals of Democracy™, but we're never allowed to criticize Democracy™ itself. Same thing goes for Diversity™, Equality™, Civil Rights™, Science™, Feminism™, etc.
The more you pull these books apart, the easier it is to see why progressives are so gay for them, despite (or perhaps because of) their extremely low quality and complete lack of literary value.
>>256009
Anyway, back to the story itself. The first few paragraphs of this chapter are basically the tug of war scene from Twilight's perspective. Nyx's use of extremely OP magic seems to have caused a physical transformation as well, resulting in her mane and tail shifting into the physics-defying shimmery thing that all the princesses have.
At this point, it's probably safe to say that Nyx's cover is 100% blown. Forget the cult and Princess Celestia; literally anypony who is not an absolute fucking retard would logically have to have figured it out by now. Comprehensively, the events of the last few chapters were about as subtle as Bruce Wayne driving around Gotham in the Batmobile with the top down, in broad daylight, playing the "Batman" theme through the sound system and tossing Batarangs at passersby that have his Wayne Enterprises business card taped to the back, with "Bruce Wayne" scratched out and replaced with "Batman".
However, instead of maybe acknowledging this and contemplating what moves she can make from here in order to protect Nyx from the now inevitable fallout, Twilight instead delves headlong into her usual meditations:
>For the first time since the evening Nyx had called her “mom”, Twilight doubted herself. Could Nyx really be Nightmare Moon? She had always argued that Nyx just looked like the infamous Mare in the Moon, but, with those memories returning and her level of magic, was it possible she really was Nightmare Moon?
>Part of Twilight’s mind snapped at these thoughts, cracking a mental whip like an animal tamer driving a beast back into its cage. No, Nyx was not Nightmare Moon! The filly was too sweet, too well behaved, too… sensitive to ever be Nightmare Moon! She was happy. She played and laughed with her friends. Yes, Nightmare Moon laughed at times, but her laughter was maddening and born of scorn and thoughts of domination, not true happiness.
*sigh*. Peen Stroke, at this point, "faggot" is too mild a word. You are beyond the common faggotry of mere mortals. You have ascended to levels of gayness previously thought unattainable by sciences both Profane and Sacred. You have gone beyond merely sucking dick; you inhale dicks the way that normal men inhale oxygen. Doctors and biologists are currently scrambling to think up Latin names for the new human orifices you have invented in your own body, simply because you needed new holes to stuff dicks in. You have transcended the very laws of time and space itself, to exist in a quantum realm of infinite states, just so you could simultaneously experience every single possible moment in every single possible timeline, cramming every single dick that exists, has ever existed, ever will exist, and ever could exist, into every conceivable crevice of your body, and exist that way in 10 dimensional gay space for all eternity. You are the Faggot Nataraja, meditating eternally in Penis Nirvana under the Bodhi Tree of Infinite Cocks. Not even Giga Mike Pence supplied with infinite electricity could shock the gay out of you. You, sir, are the one whom the scriptures foretold, the Alpha and the Omega, the Faggot to end all Faggots, the One who shall absorb all penises in the known universe into the Great Penis Singularity, destroying this Multiverse and giving birth to another; a great and terrible Multiverse comprised solely of the pure, unadulterated, Platonic Form of pure faggotry. You, Peen Stroke, are the Quantum Faggot.
Anyway, the problem here is that at this point this whole concern is redundant on Twilight's part. It goes back to what I was saying in my previous post, that even though these characters behave in accordance with their personalities and react more or less appropriately to situations, there's no real continuity or growth between scenes. How many damn times is Twilight going to go over this? She's just stuck on endless repeat with the same batch of questions, and even the story, such as it is, has moved on.
The pressing question is not "Is Nyx really Nightmare Moon?" At this point it's quite obvious that she is. Not only to the reader, but to pretty much every significant character in the story. Nyx herself is aware of it. Thanks to the frankly preposterous events of the preceding chapter, the entire town of Ponyville should be aware of it at this point. Not only should Twilight be aware of it, it's established fact at this point that she is. She and Nyx had an extensive conversation about it. Thus, there is no reason for her to still be meditating on the subject. At this point, the question is not: "is this cute little filly really Nightmare Moon?" The question is: "What the shit do I do about the fact that this cute little filly, with whom I have formed a relationship and to whom I am now responsible, is Nightmare Moon?"
And if I may offer a suggestion, this question should ideally be explored through the events of the story, rather than in Twilight's head.
Anyway, with all that said, I will admit that an interesting question is brought up here. Twilight at one point realizes that if Nyx is really an alicorn princess, her "daughter" is basically a being of substantially greater power than she is, who will outlive her by probably thousands of years. Sort of a Mary Mother of God thing. This is an interesting story theme and could potentially be fertile ground for some interesting developments in Twilight and Nyx's relationship were it to be explored. Will this story rise to the challenge and explore it in a way that does it justice?
>Nyx nodded, returned the kazoo to her mouth, and blew on it loudly as she ran inside. Twilight smiled at this, but it was a smile destined to wither and die.
I'm not holding my breath. pic related, it's Peen Stroke's inspiration for Twilight
Anyway, back to the story itself. The first few paragraphs of this chapter are basically the tug of war scene from Twilight's perspective. Nyx's use of extremely OP magic seems to have caused a physical transformation as well, resulting in her mane and tail shifting into the physics-defying shimmery thing that all the princesses have.
At this point, it's probably safe to say that Nyx's cover is 100% blown. Forget the cult and Princess Celestia; literally anypony who is not an absolute fucking retard would logically have to have figured it out by now. Comprehensively, the events of the last few chapters were about as subtle as Bruce Wayne driving around Gotham in the Batmobile with the top down, in broad daylight, playing the "Batman" theme through the sound system and tossing Batarangs at passersby that have his Wayne Enterprises business card taped to the back, with "Bruce Wayne" scratched out and replaced with "Batman".
However, instead of maybe acknowledging this and contemplating what moves she can make from here in order to protect Nyx from the now inevitable fallout, Twilight instead delves headlong into her usual meditations:
>For the first time since the evening Nyx had called her “mom”, Twilight doubted herself. Could Nyx really be Nightmare Moon? She had always argued that Nyx just looked like the infamous Mare in the Moon, but, with those memories returning and her level of magic, was it possible she really was Nightmare Moon?
>Part of Twilight’s mind snapped at these thoughts, cracking a mental whip like an animal tamer driving a beast back into its cage. No, Nyx was not Nightmare Moon! The filly was too sweet, too well behaved, too… sensitive to ever be Nightmare Moon! She was happy. She played and laughed with her friends. Yes, Nightmare Moon laughed at times, but her laughter was maddening and born of scorn and thoughts of domination, not true happiness.
*sigh*. Peen Stroke, at this point, "faggot" is too mild a word. You are beyond the common faggotry of mere mortals. You have ascended to levels of gayness previously thought unattainable by sciences both Profane and Sacred. You have gone beyond merely sucking dick; you inhale dicks the way that normal men inhale oxygen. Doctors and biologists are currently scrambling to think up Latin names for the new human orifices you have invented in your own body, simply because you needed new holes to stuff dicks in. You have transcended the very laws of time and space itself, to exist in a quantum realm of infinite states, just so you could simultaneously experience every single possible moment in every single possible timeline, cramming every single dick that exists, has ever existed, ever will exist, and ever could exist, into every conceivable crevice of your body, and exist that way in 10 dimensional gay space for all eternity. You are the Faggot Nataraja, meditating eternally in Penis Nirvana under the Bodhi Tree of Infinite Cocks. Not even Giga Mike Pence supplied with infinite electricity could shock the gay out of you. You, sir, are the one whom the scriptures foretold, the Alpha and the Omega, the Faggot to end all Faggots, the One who shall absorb all penises in the known universe into the Great Penis Singularity, destroying this Multiverse and giving birth to another; a great and terrible Multiverse comprised solely of the pure, unadulterated, Platonic Form of pure faggotry. You, Peen Stroke, are the Quantum Faggot.
Anyway, the problem here is that at this point this whole concern is redundant on Twilight's part. It goes back to what I was saying in my previous post, that even though these characters behave in accordance with their personalities and react more or less appropriately to situations, there's no real continuity or growth between scenes. How many damn times is Twilight going to go over this? She's just stuck on endless repeat with the same batch of questions, and even the story, such as it is, has moved on.
The pressing question is not "Is Nyx really Nightmare Moon?" At this point it's quite obvious that she is. Not only to the reader, but to pretty much every significant character in the story. Nyx herself is aware of it. Thanks to the frankly preposterous events of the preceding chapter, the entire town of Ponyville should be aware of it at this point. Not only should Twilight be aware of it, it's established fact at this point that she is. She and Nyx had an extensive conversation about it. Thus, there is no reason for her to still be meditating on the subject. At this point, the question is not: "is this cute little filly really Nightmare Moon?" The question is: "What the shit do I do about the fact that this cute little filly, with whom I have formed a relationship and to whom I am now responsible, is Nightmare Moon?"
And if I may offer a suggestion, this question should ideally be explored through the events of the story, rather than in Twilight's head.
Anyway, with all that said, I will admit that an interesting question is brought up here. Twilight at one point realizes that if Nyx is really an alicorn princess, her "daughter" is basically a being of substantially greater power than she is, who will outlive her by probably thousands of years. Sort of a Mary Mother of God thing. This is an interesting story theme and could potentially be fertile ground for some interesting developments in Twilight and Nyx's relationship were it to be explored. Will this story rise to the challenge and explore it in a way that does it justice?
>Nyx nodded, returned the kazoo to her mouth, and blew on it loudly as she ran inside. Twilight smiled at this, but it was a smile destined to wither and die.
I'm not holding my breath. pic related, it's Peen Stroke's inspiration for Twilight
>>256049
>Harry Potter is a completely modern story in that regard: it presents moral absolutes, but its absolutes are simply ideological statements with no substance behind them, that are used as definitions for themselves. Hogwarts™ and Dumbledore™ are good because they're Good™. Harry Potter™ fights for Good™, therefore Voldemort™ is bad by definition for opposing what has been decreed Good™ by the people whose job it is to tell us what "good" means. By the same logic, Democracy™ is good because it's Good™, therefore anything opposed to it is bad. We're allowed to occasionally criticize specific Democracies for not living up to the ideals of Democracy™, but we're never allowed to criticize Democracy™ itself. Same thing goes for Diversity™, Equality™, Civil Rights™, Science™, Feminism™, etc.
Yeah, really well put.
I agree. It is weird because there are always some faggot justifying their degenerate behavoir by saying that good and evil doesn't exist but these people alwasy see mt ofail to understadn that if goo and evil doesn't exist there is no reason for me to tolerate your disgusting degenerate behavoir. It is weird right because, especially were I live, it seems status quo that morality is fake (I don't use the word artifical becausse yes it is but that doesn't mean it doesn't carry value and artifical just mean +++someone+++ create it ;P) so it is weird when people are outrage over racism. Either they are jusst dishonest, as they don't actually believe in morality, and are just acting for sycophantic reasons or they actually belive there is something that is good and something that is wrong(racism).
Anyway, so
>but we're never allowed to criticize Democracy™ itself. Same thing goes for Diversity™, Equality™, Civil Rights™, Science™, Feminism™, etc.
is well put I think. Because yeah, it ties int othis idea I think that. What this system really is about is that we have learnt that good is love the authorities and evil is to not do so. It seems to be all about hte law not a deeper discussion were the superior reasoning why something is good is what is right but because the law and by extention the powers that are says so.
It is almost funny in that regard that Harry is just answering to the threats, just like a lot of ther heroes of our time, becausethe stories that I think about and want to write are about characters like, Light Yagami, who took it upon himself to do something. He was proactive and tried to change the world to for the better rather than being attack.
I don't mean to disrespect stories, such as lord of the rings, that does this. I don't necessarily think that a story is autmoatically better if they do either of these thing to the other. I do, think it is intersting though that the superhero movies and harry potter and so on are stories wih heores that protect the status quo rather than challenging it.
Maybe. but i don't know. This analysis of mine might be kinda pointless since Star wars and Django unchained are both movies that are about challenging the status quo.
I feel that there is something to this analysis, though, but I can't pput my finger on it. Whaterver.
>Harry Potter is a completely modern story in that regard: it presents moral absolutes, but its absolutes are simply ideological statements with no substance behind them, that are used as definitions for themselves. Hogwarts™ and Dumbledore™ are good because they're Good™. Harry Potter™ fights for Good™, therefore Voldemort™ is bad by definition for opposing what has been decreed Good™ by the people whose job it is to tell us what "good" means. By the same logic, Democracy™ is good because it's Good™, therefore anything opposed to it is bad. We're allowed to occasionally criticize specific Democracies for not living up to the ideals of Democracy™, but we're never allowed to criticize Democracy™ itself. Same thing goes for Diversity™, Equality™, Civil Rights™, Science™, Feminism™, etc.
Yeah, really well put.
I agree. It is weird because there are always some faggot justifying their degenerate behavoir by saying that good and evil doesn't exist but these people alwasy see mt ofail to understadn that if goo and evil doesn't exist there is no reason for me to tolerate your disgusting degenerate behavoir. It is weird right because, especially were I live, it seems status quo that morality is fake (I don't use the word artifical becausse yes it is but that doesn't mean it doesn't carry value and artifical just mean +++someone+++ create it ;P) so it is weird when people are outrage over racism. Either they are jusst dishonest, as they don't actually believe in morality, and are just acting for sycophantic reasons or they actually belive there is something that is good and something that is wrong(racism).
Anyway, so
>but we're never allowed to criticize Democracy™ itself. Same thing goes for Diversity™, Equality™, Civil Rights™, Science™, Feminism™, etc.
is well put I think. Because yeah, it ties int othis idea I think that. What this system really is about is that we have learnt that good is love the authorities and evil is to not do so. It seems to be all about hte law not a deeper discussion were the superior reasoning why something is good is what is right but because the law and by extention the powers that are says so.
It is almost funny in that regard that Harry is just answering to the threats, just like a lot of ther heroes of our time, becausethe stories that I think about and want to write are about characters like, Light Yagami, who took it upon himself to do something. He was proactive and tried to change the world to for the better rather than being attack.
I don't mean to disrespect stories, such as lord of the rings, that does this. I don't necessarily think that a story is autmoatically better if they do either of these thing to the other. I do, think it is intersting though that the superhero movies and harry potter and so on are stories wih heores that protect the status quo rather than challenging it.
Maybe. but i don't know. This analysis of mine might be kinda pointless since Star wars and Django unchained are both movies that are about challenging the status quo.
I feel that there is something to this analysis, though, but I can't pput my finger on it. Whaterver.
>>256062
This whole post was pretty funny actually.
But yeah, why is Twilight still in this roundabout of thoughts. Like how did this fic get popular when it should drive them insane. I mean, yeah, hasn't Twilight already stated and confirmed that Nyx is Nightmare Moon to Nyx herself?
This review series just opens up a new can of worms of questions. As in, why did this fic ever get popular when is has all of these problems?
This whole post was pretty funny actually.
But yeah, why is Twilight still in this roundabout of thoughts. Like how did this fic get popular when it should drive them insane. I mean, yeah, hasn't Twilight already stated and confirmed that Nyx is Nightmare Moon to Nyx herself?
This review series just opens up a new can of worms of questions. As in, why did this fic ever get popular when is has all of these problems?
>>256062
>I will admit that an interesting question is brought up here. Twilight at one point realizes that if Nyx is really an alicorn princess, her "daughter" is basically a being of substantially greater power than she is, who will outlive her by probably thousands of years. Sort of a Mary Mother of God thing. This is an interesting story theme and could potentially be fertile ground for some interesting developments in Twilight and Nyx's relationship were it to be explored. Will this story rise to the challenge and explore it in a way that does it justice?
Yeah, that would be intresting. Especially since she wasn't an Alicorn and the fandom did have it confirmed that she would become one either at this point in time.
>I will admit that an interesting question is brought up here. Twilight at one point realizes that if Nyx is really an alicorn princess, her "daughter" is basically a being of substantially greater power than she is, who will outlive her by probably thousands of years. Sort of a Mary Mother of God thing. This is an interesting story theme and could potentially be fertile ground for some interesting developments in Twilight and Nyx's relationship were it to be explored. Will this story rise to the challenge and explore it in a way that does it justice?
Yeah, that would be intresting. Especially since she wasn't an Alicorn and the fandom did have it confirmed that she would become one either at this point in time.
>>256094
I know I would.
I know I would.
>>256082
One could pose the same question of alot of the fandom-related music.
Pretty sure for alot of people the answer is "cuz ponies!"
One could pose the same question of alot of the fandom-related music.
Pretty sure for alot of people the answer is "cuz ponies!"
>>256035
If I remember right, the Love Potion bit was metaphorical, rather then literal.
Still a shit series tho
If I remember right, the Love Potion bit was metaphorical, rather then literal.
Still a shit series tho
>>256099
Unless that infinicunt Rowling retconned it, Voldy's mother literally used a date-rape potion on a muggle man to give birth to a boy who feels bad about not being fully wizard.
Eventually the mother stops giving the father the drugs, so he flees with the child.
The orphaned rapebaby is then given to the orphanage system so he can scare other kids with his power to magically abuse kids and talk to snakes.
He is a product of the wizarding world's treatment of muggles.
Getting all wizards to treat muggles better would prevent future Voldemorts.
But nobody thinks of this because Liberals refuse to admit their corrupt mockeries of civilization can fail people or birth people who want it burned down for any reason other than "mwa ha ha".
So like all "not true nazis who wanna exterminate all other not treue nazis ahahahaa hypocrite hahaha" faggots who exist in the minds of Liberals, he's a Mudblood who wants to exterminate all other Mudbloods while creating a "Blood Supremacists and pureblood wizards only" world that would kill him upon finding out who he truly is, because faggoty liberal writers think just because the Aryan Ideal exists also begins and ends at "blonde hair blue eyes" so because not all Germans looked like that all Germans are hypocrites.
Don't think too hard about why the school with records on all students doesn't just publish all data on Tom Marvolo Riddle aka "I am Lord Voldemort" himself.
Unless that infinicunt Rowling retconned it, Voldy's mother literally used a date-rape potion on a muggle man to give birth to a boy who feels bad about not being fully wizard.
Eventually the mother stops giving the father the drugs, so he flees with the child.
The orphaned rapebaby is then given to the orphanage system so he can scare other kids with his power to magically abuse kids and talk to snakes.
He is a product of the wizarding world's treatment of muggles.
Getting all wizards to treat muggles better would prevent future Voldemorts.
But nobody thinks of this because Liberals refuse to admit their corrupt mockeries of civilization can fail people or birth people who want it burned down for any reason other than "mwa ha ha".
So like all "not true nazis who wanna exterminate all other not treue nazis ahahahaa hypocrite hahaha" faggots who exist in the minds of Liberals, he's a Mudblood who wants to exterminate all other Mudbloods while creating a "Blood Supremacists and pureblood wizards only" world that would kill him upon finding out who he truly is, because faggoty liberal writers think just because the Aryan Ideal exists also begins and ends at "blonde hair blue eyes" so because not all Germans looked like that all Germans are hypocrites.
Don't think too hard about why the school with records on all students doesn't just publish all data on Tom Marvolo Riddle aka "I am Lord Voldemort" himself.
>>256111
>a boy who feels bad about not being fully wizard.
and also can't love thanks to the effects of being conceived under love potion
>a boy who feels bad about not being fully wizard.
and also can't love thanks to the effects of being conceived under love potion
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>>256082
Those questions, and hundreds more, are precisely why most of us that came from j00t's microdick website happen to shit on every nyxcuck that rears their inbred faces on the horizon. All it has is a basic nigger bitch bandwagon appeal with emotional screeching moments and a !!DeEpLy EnGaGiNg PloT!! that is filled with !!PoNy CuLtUrE!! references. Nothing more, nor less.
Those questions, and hundreds more, are precisely why most of us that came from j00t's microdick website happen to shit on every nyxcuck that rears their inbred faces on the horizon. All it has is a basic nigger bitch bandwagon appeal with emotional screeching moments and a !!DeEpLy EnGaGiNg PloT!! that is filled with !!PoNy CuLtUrE!! references. Nothing more, nor less.
>>256139
Aye. I'm not trying to doubt or dick on Glim here but I'm not sure what else he can say about this fic. The sooner this is over and done with so any other story can be analyzed and shat on, the better.
How many more ways can anyone say "This story is terrible because: the writing is low-iq, nobody acts in a reasonable manner that makes sense given their characterizations and backstories, scene to scene continuity is nonexistent, it's a paint-by-numbers frankenstein's monster of popular cliches stolen and misused Rowling-style, unfunny pony references to please bronyfags are everywhere, emotions are tools the author uses clumsily to try and make you feeeeel instead of telling an actual interesting story, and the fundamental premise of the story is broken because Nyx is not the embodiment of any past sins and she doesn't really suffer due to the sins of others anyway, and in the end she kills Nega Nightmare Moon to become her own pony and that's the end"?
I'll keep reading because I want to see how it ends, but the same valid complaints keep redundantly repeating because the faggot author never grows or improves or moves away from a framework he lacks the skill to use correctly. You'd think he'd get SOME improvement as he keeps writing and keeps getting more "feedback" (cocksucking) from his 14 cheerleaders- I mean reviewers, but he just keeps being a faggot.
Aye. I'm not trying to doubt or dick on Glim here but I'm not sure what else he can say about this fic. The sooner this is over and done with so any other story can be analyzed and shat on, the better.
How many more ways can anyone say "This story is terrible because: the writing is low-iq, nobody acts in a reasonable manner that makes sense given their characterizations and backstories, scene to scene continuity is nonexistent, it's a paint-by-numbers frankenstein's monster of popular cliches stolen and misused Rowling-style, unfunny pony references to please bronyfags are everywhere, emotions are tools the author uses clumsily to try and make you feeeeel instead of telling an actual interesting story, and the fundamental premise of the story is broken because Nyx is not the embodiment of any past sins and she doesn't really suffer due to the sins of others anyway, and in the end she kills Nega Nightmare Moon to become her own pony and that's the end"?
I'll keep reading because I want to see how it ends, but the same valid complaints keep redundantly repeating because the faggot author never grows or improves or moves away from a framework he lacks the skill to use correctly. You'd think he'd get SOME improvement as he keeps writing and keeps getting more "feedback" (cocksucking) from his 14 cheerleaders- I mean reviewers, but he just keeps being a faggot.
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>>256170
Hmm. This is actually a rather good point. Nevertheless, my autism compels me to finish this. I might try to speed it up a bit, though.
>>256172
I am. If you guys want to keep blabbering about it in the background though I'm not going to stop you.
>>256062
Moving right along.
The next subchapter begins with Rarity running errands. I'd like to have a quick look at this paragraph:
>Rarity stopped in her tracks. She had been running errands in Ponyville, but they were now a trivial concern. Twilight had been uncommonly reclusive for a few days, ever since the Learn and Play Day. Now, that alone wasn’t too abnormal, but the aggravated shout Rarity had just heard made her worry. Abandoning her planned route, she strode right up to the library’s front door and knocked several times.
This is a rather clumsy way of doing this. If I understand this correctly, Rarity is going about her daily business, when she hears a shout coming from Twilight's tree and goes to investigate. That alone is fine, but with the way this is written, Rarity's behavior seems weird and robotic. She's just walking around shopping and thinking about fashion, and then the second she hears a noise, her train of thought just instantly leaps from whatever she's doing to Twilight and all this stuff from Learn and Play Day that happened (presumably) days ago. It doesn't make a ton of sense. Unless Rarity has been really hung up on what happened with Nyx (which is possible I suppose, but I don't get that impression from this passage), her attention should mostly be focused on her errands and whatever fashion project she's in the middle of. The noise suddenly alarms her, and she goes to investigate. That's all that really needs to be said here.
While it makes sense for the reader's focus to be on the events of the previous chapter, for the characters in the story life has moved on. Even if these characters are still thinking about it (which from the strangeness of the events we can probably assume many of them would be) it still has to be approached in a believable way.
Anyway, Rarity goes into the library and Twilight immediately panics and starts hiding things the second she enters. Rarity picks up one of the crumpled papers she'd tried to hide, probably expecting to find that Twilight was looking at Rule 34 of her, but is disappointed to find that it's just a letter she was writing to Princess Celestia about Nyx. Twilight confesses that she has been awake for the last three days agonizing about this, and Rarity decides to offer a friendly ear.
>Despite the odd looks she received from passersby on the street, Rarity carried Twilight all the way back to Carousel Boutique. She then sat Twilight at her kitchen table and prepared an early afternoon tea.
This seems completely unnecessary. They could have just as easily had tea at Twilight's place, and just because Twilight hasn't slept doesn't mean she can't walk. Protip for authors: try not to make your story any more complicated than it has to be.
>Twilight didn’t lift her head from the table. She only rolled her head enough to look at Rarity from the corner of the eye before she said, “Rarity… I know, I finally know for sure that Nyx is Nightmare Moon.”
>Rarity lifted her hoof from Twilight’s shoulder, unable to believe the words she had just heard leave Twilight’s mouth. “You know? How do you know?”
I...just...*sigh*. There's no point in going over all this again. Peen Stroke, you are a sperm-gargling homosexual from beyond the stars.
Anyway, it's looking like all of this deliberation about Nightmare Moon may finally be drawing to a close. Twilight seems to pick a side when she stops herself from referring to Nyx by name and instead calls her Nightmare Moon.
>Twilight looked up at Rarity, desperation in her eyes. “Rarity, what if she takes her away? What if she sends her to the moon? I’d never see her again. She’d be all alone, and she hates that. And what would I tell her friends when they ask where she’s gone? They’d want to see her, want to write her letters, but how would I send letters to the moon?”
This is probably meant to be heart-wrenching, and I suppose if you're able to ignore all of the clumsy storytelling up to this point, it could be. Twilight is understandably in agony here: she's caught between what her rational mind and sense of duty tells her is the right thing to do, and what her heart is telling her.
However, if you're like me and you're not able to ignore the clumsy storytelling, this passage is laughably ridiculous. "H-h-how would I send letters to the moon?" Tippity top kekkles. I laughed for like twelve solid minutes after I read that.
Incidentally, in "the business", this kind of decision is usually referred to as the crossroads moment, or the point in a character's arc where she has to make a moral choice which determines how the rest of the story is going to go. This crossroads moment is remarkably similar to the one in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck has to decide whether to help Jim the slave escape and find his family, or to dutifully return Miss Watson's missing property, so that he may be appropriately flogged and then re-harnessed to his cotton gin. And, much like Huck Finn, I rather suspect Twilight is going to make the wrong choice here. But let's watch.
Hmm. This is actually a rather good point. Nevertheless, my autism compels me to finish this. I might try to speed it up a bit, though.
>>256172
I am. If you guys want to keep blabbering about it in the background though I'm not going to stop you.
>>256062
Moving right along.
The next subchapter begins with Rarity running errands. I'd like to have a quick look at this paragraph:
>Rarity stopped in her tracks. She had been running errands in Ponyville, but they were now a trivial concern. Twilight had been uncommonly reclusive for a few days, ever since the Learn and Play Day. Now, that alone wasn’t too abnormal, but the aggravated shout Rarity had just heard made her worry. Abandoning her planned route, she strode right up to the library’s front door and knocked several times.
This is a rather clumsy way of doing this. If I understand this correctly, Rarity is going about her daily business, when she hears a shout coming from Twilight's tree and goes to investigate. That alone is fine, but with the way this is written, Rarity's behavior seems weird and robotic. She's just walking around shopping and thinking about fashion, and then the second she hears a noise, her train of thought just instantly leaps from whatever she's doing to Twilight and all this stuff from Learn and Play Day that happened (presumably) days ago. It doesn't make a ton of sense. Unless Rarity has been really hung up on what happened with Nyx (which is possible I suppose, but I don't get that impression from this passage), her attention should mostly be focused on her errands and whatever fashion project she's in the middle of. The noise suddenly alarms her, and she goes to investigate. That's all that really needs to be said here.
While it makes sense for the reader's focus to be on the events of the previous chapter, for the characters in the story life has moved on. Even if these characters are still thinking about it (which from the strangeness of the events we can probably assume many of them would be) it still has to be approached in a believable way.
Anyway, Rarity goes into the library and Twilight immediately panics and starts hiding things the second she enters. Rarity picks up one of the crumpled papers she'd tried to hide, probably expecting to find that Twilight was looking at Rule 34 of her, but is disappointed to find that it's just a letter she was writing to Princess Celestia about Nyx. Twilight confesses that she has been awake for the last three days agonizing about this, and Rarity decides to offer a friendly ear.
>Despite the odd looks she received from passersby on the street, Rarity carried Twilight all the way back to Carousel Boutique. She then sat Twilight at her kitchen table and prepared an early afternoon tea.
This seems completely unnecessary. They could have just as easily had tea at Twilight's place, and just because Twilight hasn't slept doesn't mean she can't walk. Protip for authors: try not to make your story any more complicated than it has to be.
>Twilight didn’t lift her head from the table. She only rolled her head enough to look at Rarity from the corner of the eye before she said, “Rarity… I know, I finally know for sure that Nyx is Nightmare Moon.”
>Rarity lifted her hoof from Twilight’s shoulder, unable to believe the words she had just heard leave Twilight’s mouth. “You know? How do you know?”
I...just...*sigh*. There's no point in going over all this again. Peen Stroke, you are a sperm-gargling homosexual from beyond the stars.
Anyway, it's looking like all of this deliberation about Nightmare Moon may finally be drawing to a close. Twilight seems to pick a side when she stops herself from referring to Nyx by name and instead calls her Nightmare Moon.
>Twilight looked up at Rarity, desperation in her eyes. “Rarity, what if she takes her away? What if she sends her to the moon? I’d never see her again. She’d be all alone, and she hates that. And what would I tell her friends when they ask where she’s gone? They’d want to see her, want to write her letters, but how would I send letters to the moon?”
This is probably meant to be heart-wrenching, and I suppose if you're able to ignore all of the clumsy storytelling up to this point, it could be. Twilight is understandably in agony here: she's caught between what her rational mind and sense of duty tells her is the right thing to do, and what her heart is telling her.
However, if you're like me and you're not able to ignore the clumsy storytelling, this passage is laughably ridiculous. "H-h-how would I send letters to the moon?" Tippity top kekkles. I laughed for like twelve solid minutes after I read that.
Incidentally, in "the business", this kind of decision is usually referred to as the crossroads moment, or the point in a character's arc where she has to make a moral choice which determines how the rest of the story is going to go. This crossroads moment is remarkably similar to the one in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck has to decide whether to help Jim the slave escape and find his family, or to dutifully return Miss Watson's missing property, so that he may be appropriately flogged and then re-harnessed to his cotton gin. And, much like Huck Finn, I rather suspect Twilight is going to make the wrong choice here. But let's watch.
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>>256180
Continuing.
>Twilight, do you know what happened last week? The Cutie Mark Crusaders, Nyx included, came stumbling into my shop covered in honey, leaving sticky hoofprints all across my front room.
Wakka chicka wokka chicka.
Anyway, despite all this retardation about sending ponies to the moon and so forth, this conversation isn't terrible. Twilight, unfortunately, just keeps repeating the same fears she has voiced to the reader over and over up until now, most of which were fairly stupid to begin with, and we don't really get anything new or insightful out of her. As such, the pathos attempted here mostly falls flat. However, Rarity's side of the dialog is more or less ok. She makes some fairly sensible points: that Nyx may have NM's personality and memories, but she is her own person (pony, whatever), and that Twilight's care has likely had a positive influence on her. Twilight has been sperging out in isolation over a serious problem, and Rarity listens to her friend's concerns and puts them into perspective for her. All in all it's a nice friendship moment, consistent with the show's overall themes.
Naturally, Peen Stroke ruins it by dropping in some more unnecessary references to events from the series, including the bit about Twilight turning her parents into plants that he's referenced several times already. Seriously, it was like a two second gag from a flashback clip; it does not deserve this much attention.
We are also reminded that the aftermath of the last chapter's events really wasn't made clear. How did the town react to what Nyx did? Has the temperature changed somewhat? Are the townsponies treating the two of them differently now? It really wasn't resolved. The way the chapter ends, it sort of implies that Twilight just sort of scooped up Nyx and slunk away, and that's how they left it, but we don't know for certain that was the case.
It isn't made significantly clearer here. At one point, Rarity mentions that rumors are circulating about what happened, and suggests that Twilight and Nyx remain visible and act normal. Twilight mentions that she "considered" hiding. This implies that...she hasn't been hiding? Yet the whole premise of this scene is that she's been cooped up in the library for three days and Rarity has been worried. And where has Nyx been lately? Has she just been wandering around town, playing with her friends? If the town is starting to view her differently, wouldn't that make things a bit uncomfortable for her? Shouldn't Twilight be worried that she might get targeted for more bullying, or could inadvertently draw more attention to herself? And what about that spy Pinkie was chasing? Are Twilight and Rarity aware of that situation, or is that Pinkie's deal? Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash know about it, but they could have mentioned it to Twilight, since it was Nyx they were watching. Which of her friends has Twilight been in contact with since Learn and Play Day, or has she just been sitting in the library alone writing letters all this time?
This story has so many frayed loose ends flapping around in the breeze right now it's ridiculous. You have to think about these kinds of things when you're writing. Obviously you don't want to bog down your text with a ton of unnecessary details, but an author should generally know where his characters are and what each of them are doing at all times, even if it happens "off camera" or if none of it factors into the story. Maintaining a consistent, logical timeline of events when writing helps avoid continuity errors and confusion.
Anyway, whatever. Twilight and Rarity go to the spa and that's how the subchapter ends. I wonder if Rarity had to carry Twilight to the spa as well? Maybe the tea rejuvenated her fucking legs and she can miraculously walk now.
Next scene is Nyx's sleepover. When the scene begins, the fillies appear to have played some sort of game that got out of hand and resulted in Big Mac being tied up wakka chicka wokka chicka. They are subsequently sent to bed early, but don't want to go to sleep yet. Unsurprisingly, Peen Stroke drops in yet another show reference in the form of Twilight's book on sleepovers from the sleepover episode. Although this reference is a little better, in that it actually fits into the story instead of pulling the story off track just to make the reference. This is an example of the kind of referencing of source material that it's usually ok to do, as long as they don't end up spending their sleepover talking about Twilight's sleepover.
>We… could… have a pillow fight.”
>“We’ve only got four pillows, and my bedroom is too small,” Apple Bloom said, shooting down the idea.
This makes no fucking sense. There's four of them, and they have four pillows; that is literally all you need to have a pillow fight.
Anyway, they end up playing truth or dare wakka chicka wokka chicka. They change it to "truth or challenge," and it's a little unclear what the difference is exactly, but I can probably let that slide. Nyx is inexplicably uncomfortable with the idea, which seems to foreshadow that something bad is going to happen as a result. Personally, I think they should have just played Trivial Pursuit: MLP Edition. That way, Peen Stroke could have gotten all of his stupid obscure references and background character namedrops out of his system. But whatever, let's see where it goes.
One more minor thing: I'm not complaining about her being gone, but I have to say it's a little odd that Twist seems to have faded out of the story. In this world she was originally part of this group of friends, and as I recall Nyx was closer to her than she was to Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo. However, it's mostly been the CMC plus Nyx for awhile now, with no mention of Twist. It's somewhat odd for the author to set up one group of friends, then suddenly change it without explanation.
Continuing.
>Twilight, do you know what happened last week? The Cutie Mark Crusaders, Nyx included, came stumbling into my shop covered in honey, leaving sticky hoofprints all across my front room.
Wakka chicka wokka chicka.
Anyway, despite all this retardation about sending ponies to the moon and so forth, this conversation isn't terrible. Twilight, unfortunately, just keeps repeating the same fears she has voiced to the reader over and over up until now, most of which were fairly stupid to begin with, and we don't really get anything new or insightful out of her. As such, the pathos attempted here mostly falls flat. However, Rarity's side of the dialog is more or less ok. She makes some fairly sensible points: that Nyx may have NM's personality and memories, but she is her own person (pony, whatever), and that Twilight's care has likely had a positive influence on her. Twilight has been sperging out in isolation over a serious problem, and Rarity listens to her friend's concerns and puts them into perspective for her. All in all it's a nice friendship moment, consistent with the show's overall themes.
Naturally, Peen Stroke ruins it by dropping in some more unnecessary references to events from the series, including the bit about Twilight turning her parents into plants that he's referenced several times already. Seriously, it was like a two second gag from a flashback clip; it does not deserve this much attention.
We are also reminded that the aftermath of the last chapter's events really wasn't made clear. How did the town react to what Nyx did? Has the temperature changed somewhat? Are the townsponies treating the two of them differently now? It really wasn't resolved. The way the chapter ends, it sort of implies that Twilight just sort of scooped up Nyx and slunk away, and that's how they left it, but we don't know for certain that was the case.
It isn't made significantly clearer here. At one point, Rarity mentions that rumors are circulating about what happened, and suggests that Twilight and Nyx remain visible and act normal. Twilight mentions that she "considered" hiding. This implies that...she hasn't been hiding? Yet the whole premise of this scene is that she's been cooped up in the library for three days and Rarity has been worried. And where has Nyx been lately? Has she just been wandering around town, playing with her friends? If the town is starting to view her differently, wouldn't that make things a bit uncomfortable for her? Shouldn't Twilight be worried that she might get targeted for more bullying, or could inadvertently draw more attention to herself? And what about that spy Pinkie was chasing? Are Twilight and Rarity aware of that situation, or is that Pinkie's deal? Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash know about it, but they could have mentioned it to Twilight, since it was Nyx they were watching. Which of her friends has Twilight been in contact with since Learn and Play Day, or has she just been sitting in the library alone writing letters all this time?
This story has so many frayed loose ends flapping around in the breeze right now it's ridiculous. You have to think about these kinds of things when you're writing. Obviously you don't want to bog down your text with a ton of unnecessary details, but an author should generally know where his characters are and what each of them are doing at all times, even if it happens "off camera" or if none of it factors into the story. Maintaining a consistent, logical timeline of events when writing helps avoid continuity errors and confusion.
Anyway, whatever. Twilight and Rarity go to the spa and that's how the subchapter ends. I wonder if Rarity had to carry Twilight to the spa as well? Maybe the tea rejuvenated her fucking legs and she can miraculously walk now.
Next scene is Nyx's sleepover. When the scene begins, the fillies appear to have played some sort of game that got out of hand and resulted in Big Mac being tied up wakka chicka wokka chicka. They are subsequently sent to bed early, but don't want to go to sleep yet. Unsurprisingly, Peen Stroke drops in yet another show reference in the form of Twilight's book on sleepovers from the sleepover episode. Although this reference is a little better, in that it actually fits into the story instead of pulling the story off track just to make the reference. This is an example of the kind of referencing of source material that it's usually ok to do, as long as they don't end up spending their sleepover talking about Twilight's sleepover.
>We… could… have a pillow fight.”
>“We’ve only got four pillows, and my bedroom is too small,” Apple Bloom said, shooting down the idea.
This makes no fucking sense. There's four of them, and they have four pillows; that is literally all you need to have a pillow fight.
Anyway, they end up playing truth or dare wakka chicka wokka chicka. They change it to "truth or challenge," and it's a little unclear what the difference is exactly, but I can probably let that slide. Nyx is inexplicably uncomfortable with the idea, which seems to foreshadow that something bad is going to happen as a result. Personally, I think they should have just played Trivial Pursuit: MLP Edition. That way, Peen Stroke could have gotten all of his stupid obscure references and background character namedrops out of his system. But whatever, let's see where it goes.
One more minor thing: I'm not complaining about her being gone, but I have to say it's a little odd that Twist seems to have faded out of the story. In this world she was originally part of this group of friends, and as I recall Nyx was closer to her than she was to Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo. However, it's mostly been the CMC plus Nyx for awhile now, with no mention of Twist. It's somewhat odd for the author to set up one group of friends, then suddenly change it without explanation.
>>256180
>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Never got around to reading that, what's it like?
I read a bastardized shortened version of Great Expectations in school as a kid once, though. It was shite. Haven't read the real GE yet but I assume it's got a less bare-bones story with some actual sense to it. This kiddy short version felt like someone explained it poorly while leaving out what the writer wanted these "this happen then this then this" shit to mean.
>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Never got around to reading that, what's it like?
I read a bastardized shortened version of Great Expectations in school as a kid once, though. It was shite. Haven't read the real GE yet but I assume it's got a less bare-bones story with some actual sense to it. This kiddy short version felt like someone explained it poorly while leaving out what the writer wanted these "this happen then this then this" shit to mean.
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>>256192
>pic
>>256194
>what's it like reading a book
>GE
South Park doesn't count. Read a book nigga
>>256180
Please continue. Some people come to this thread to enjoy your autismal breakdown, and don't have a hardon for you to hurry the fuck up and break apart whatever they have a hate-boner for
>Rowling
Seriouly, who the fuck cares? You thought Nigel's opus was bad, this is 7 fucking books!
>pic
>>256194
>what's it like reading a book
>GE
South Park doesn't count. Read a book nigga
>>256180
Please continue. Some people come to this thread to enjoy your autismal breakdown, and don't have a hardon for you to hurry the fuck up and break apart whatever they have a hate-boner for
>Rowling
Seriouly, who the fuck cares? You thought Nigel's opus was bad, this is 7 fucking books!
>>256194
It's worth reading. Mark Twain was a witty guy and he spins a good yarn. One of the things that's noteworthy about Huckleberry Finn is that Twain got super autistic about writing dialog accurately, to the point where he actually went around to various parts of the United States and took extensive notes on regional dialects. He has each of his characters speaking very accurately in the dialect that they would have used based on where they came from. It's a really good study if you want to learn techniques for writing character speech patterns. He writes the Southern Negro dialect of the time so accurately that modern lefties reeee about it being super racist, plus the word "nigger" is used copiously throughout the text, to the point where it's one of the main things you notice. That alone should be enough to recommend it.
>Great Expectations
That's a good one too. I can imagine an abridged or summarized version being bad, because the story relies on a lot of really implausible coincidences that probably don't summarize well. You have to read it in Dickens' prose to get the full effect.
It's worth reading. Mark Twain was a witty guy and he spins a good yarn. One of the things that's noteworthy about Huckleberry Finn is that Twain got super autistic about writing dialog accurately, to the point where he actually went around to various parts of the United States and took extensive notes on regional dialects. He has each of his characters speaking very accurately in the dialect that they would have used based on where they came from. It's a really good study if you want to learn techniques for writing character speech patterns. He writes the Southern Negro dialect of the time so accurately that modern lefties reeee about it being super racist, plus the word "nigger" is used copiously throughout the text, to the point where it's one of the main things you notice. That alone should be enough to recommend it.
>Great Expectations
That's a good one too. I can imagine an abridged or summarized version being bad, because the story relies on a lot of really implausible coincidences that probably don't summarize well. You have to read it in Dickens' prose to get the full effect.
>>256201
Stop trying to suck the dick of every Nigel and becoming more popular than them by gargling mannaise. That only makes you more of a colossal faggot. Britcucks are trash on principle, which makes you triple their own trash, goy.
Stop trying to suck the dick of every Nigel and becoming more popular than them by gargling mannaise. That only makes you more of a colossal faggot. Britcucks are trash on principle, which makes you triple their own trash, goy.
>>256201
Some people came just for glimglam and would prefer to analysis something that is more relavant to the rest of the world no matter what we think about that. It is nice to say to people, if the conversation ever arise, that, "Rowling is a hack and here's why." This is more intresting to me than why a fanfic to a dying fandom has already many detractors. This is why I read her first book because I am curious to why it was successful and trying to pinpoint why I dislike it.
You are allowed to have your opinion just as others can have their's. Glimglam can do whatever he wants to do in the end.
So it was good that you gave him your input in the end otherwise he would have not known there are people who like him to take his time with the review.
Some people came just for glimglam and would prefer to analysis something that is more relavant to the rest of the world no matter what we think about that. It is nice to say to people, if the conversation ever arise, that, "Rowling is a hack and here's why." This is more intresting to me than why a fanfic to a dying fandom has already many detractors. This is why I read her first book because I am curious to why it was successful and trying to pinpoint why I dislike it.
You are allowed to have your opinion just as others can have their's. Glimglam can do whatever he wants to do in the end.
So it was good that you gave him your input in the end otherwise he would have not known there are people who like him to take his time with the review.
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>>256192
Anyway, it does indeed look like the foreshadowing was intentional. When Nyx's turn rolls around, she chooses "Truth" and is told to reveal something about herself that she has never told any other pony. She chooses to reveal her wings.
The reveal is a bit of a letdown. The CMC don't really seem to grasp the implication that she's an alicorn or the reincarnation of NM, nor do they seem particularly curious about why she kept it a secret. Their reactions are a little strange, actually. Initially they stand there with their jaws hanging open, as if they're completely shocked. But then they just sort of launch into a casual discussion about it that makes it clear that the whole "alicorn" implication has gone completely over their heads. This is actually fine, since they're kids and based on their personalities and backgrounds couldn't really be expected to know about alicorns and higher level magic unless it had been covered in class. I'm guessing the affairs of Canterlot and the Princesses are pretty far removed from the concerns of the average provincial schoolchild, so they might not know that an alicorn is rare or that being one indicates higher magic. The problem I have is more "what the hell was the point of all this in the first place?"
There's some rather questionable logic to all of this. When she reveals her wings, her primary concern is that her friends might be "jealous," and she's relieved to find that they aren't. This is consistent with the earlier part of the story, where Twilight and Rarity tell her she needs to keep her wings a secret because other ponies might be jealous of her. However, that was just a bullshit lie they fed her so she'd agree to keep her vest on without them needing to tell her why. Remember, it's been established that Nyx knows that she's Nightmare Moon now. She's figured it out; she's no longer innocent. She knows perfectly well why Twilight and Rarity wanted her to keep her wings hidden. She can also be presumed to understand why they lied to her about it.
The whole thing makes less sense the more you think about it. If Nyx knows who she is and why she needs to hide her wings, why take such a huge risk in revealing them? Maybe she is getting tired of carrying the burden and wants to confide in her friends, but if that's the case why didn't she actually confide anything? All she does is tell them that she has wings, and they clearly don't catch on to the significance. At this point it would probably have made more sense to have her just flat out confess to them that she's Nightmare Moon's reincarnation, and pour her guts out about the whole thing. If written correctly, it could be the first genuine emotion we've seen in the whole story. At that point, the CMC's acceptance of her after the confession would actually mean something. Instead, we get this half-assed goofy scene, where Nyx just comes right out and says "Hey guys, I've got wings!", completely blowing her own cover for no reason, and her friends are just like "Hey, cool! Wings!" and that's that. What the hell was even the point?
Anyway, they are apparently making too much noise, so Applejack bangs on the door and threatens to hogtie them. Apparently, AJ has the same philosophy about sleepovers as Kahn Souphanousinphone. Peen Stroke casually tosses in yet another reference, this time the Cutie Mark Crusaders theme from that episode where they sing a song at the talent show. He helpfully drops the lyrics into the text in case anyone reading has forgotten them. Peen Stroke, please see pic related.
The narrative cuts to Spell Nexus, sipping orange juice in his secret lair and reading his fan mail. We are given a completely unnecessary synopsis of a bunch of events that we've already read about, as well as a slightly interesting but mostly just confusing tidbit of information: apparently Learn and Play Day was an event orchestrated by Nexus himself. Then, Celestia shows up at his front door. Nexus, as you'll recall, is the director of Celestia's school, and as far as we know she has no current suspicion that he is involved in the cult.
>He motioned to a large cushion that was kept in his study specifically as a seat for royal alicorn guests.
That seems like an oddly specific thing to have in your house.
Anyway, they talk. Most of it is fairly predictable, but generally necessary dialog that starts bringing some of the various plot threads together. Celestia seems to be getting closer to the truth than Nexus is comfortable with. She knows about Nyx, she knows that Twilight doesn't have a cousin, she's checked genealogy records and there hasn't been a Nyx born in X number of years, etc etc.
Of somewhat more interest is Celestia's assessment of Nyx. She acknowledges that Nyx is nothing like NM, and goes on to describe NM as a "a vindictive, deceptive, hateful pony." This once again raises the question of who, exactly, NM actually was/is. The way Celestia talks about her here, it's almost as if she's describing a separate entity from her sister Luna. So what was NM exactly? Was she Luna? An aspect of Luna? Or some kind of evil demon who possessed her?
>“She was a threat to all Equestria… and I watched it happen. I watched as Luna, my dear sister, became that monstrous mare bent on vengeance. It was my duty as a big sister to protect her, and I failed. I failed so horribly that I had to banish her to the moon and wait a thousand years for six ponies to do what I could not.
The whole backstory of the two sisters doesn't exactly make a fuckton of sense to begin with, but I feel like that one's probably on Lauren Faust.
Anyway, it does indeed look like the foreshadowing was intentional. When Nyx's turn rolls around, she chooses "Truth" and is told to reveal something about herself that she has never told any other pony. She chooses to reveal her wings.
The reveal is a bit of a letdown. The CMC don't really seem to grasp the implication that she's an alicorn or the reincarnation of NM, nor do they seem particularly curious about why she kept it a secret. Their reactions are a little strange, actually. Initially they stand there with their jaws hanging open, as if they're completely shocked. But then they just sort of launch into a casual discussion about it that makes it clear that the whole "alicorn" implication has gone completely over their heads. This is actually fine, since they're kids and based on their personalities and backgrounds couldn't really be expected to know about alicorns and higher level magic unless it had been covered in class. I'm guessing the affairs of Canterlot and the Princesses are pretty far removed from the concerns of the average provincial schoolchild, so they might not know that an alicorn is rare or that being one indicates higher magic. The problem I have is more "what the hell was the point of all this in the first place?"
There's some rather questionable logic to all of this. When she reveals her wings, her primary concern is that her friends might be "jealous," and she's relieved to find that they aren't. This is consistent with the earlier part of the story, where Twilight and Rarity tell her she needs to keep her wings a secret because other ponies might be jealous of her. However, that was just a bullshit lie they fed her so she'd agree to keep her vest on without them needing to tell her why. Remember, it's been established that Nyx knows that she's Nightmare Moon now. She's figured it out; she's no longer innocent. She knows perfectly well why Twilight and Rarity wanted her to keep her wings hidden. She can also be presumed to understand why they lied to her about it.
The whole thing makes less sense the more you think about it. If Nyx knows who she is and why she needs to hide her wings, why take such a huge risk in revealing them? Maybe she is getting tired of carrying the burden and wants to confide in her friends, but if that's the case why didn't she actually confide anything? All she does is tell them that she has wings, and they clearly don't catch on to the significance. At this point it would probably have made more sense to have her just flat out confess to them that she's Nightmare Moon's reincarnation, and pour her guts out about the whole thing. If written correctly, it could be the first genuine emotion we've seen in the whole story. At that point, the CMC's acceptance of her after the confession would actually mean something. Instead, we get this half-assed goofy scene, where Nyx just comes right out and says "Hey guys, I've got wings!", completely blowing her own cover for no reason, and her friends are just like "Hey, cool! Wings!" and that's that. What the hell was even the point?
Anyway, they are apparently making too much noise, so Applejack bangs on the door and threatens to hogtie them. Apparently, AJ has the same philosophy about sleepovers as Kahn Souphanousinphone. Peen Stroke casually tosses in yet another reference, this time the Cutie Mark Crusaders theme from that episode where they sing a song at the talent show. He helpfully drops the lyrics into the text in case anyone reading has forgotten them. Peen Stroke, please see pic related.
The narrative cuts to Spell Nexus, sipping orange juice in his secret lair and reading his fan mail. We are given a completely unnecessary synopsis of a bunch of events that we've already read about, as well as a slightly interesting but mostly just confusing tidbit of information: apparently Learn and Play Day was an event orchestrated by Nexus himself. Then, Celestia shows up at his front door. Nexus, as you'll recall, is the director of Celestia's school, and as far as we know she has no current suspicion that he is involved in the cult.
>He motioned to a large cushion that was kept in his study specifically as a seat for royal alicorn guests.
That seems like an oddly specific thing to have in your house.
Anyway, they talk. Most of it is fairly predictable, but generally necessary dialog that starts bringing some of the various plot threads together. Celestia seems to be getting closer to the truth than Nexus is comfortable with. She knows about Nyx, she knows that Twilight doesn't have a cousin, she's checked genealogy records and there hasn't been a Nyx born in X number of years, etc etc.
Of somewhat more interest is Celestia's assessment of Nyx. She acknowledges that Nyx is nothing like NM, and goes on to describe NM as a "a vindictive, deceptive, hateful pony." This once again raises the question of who, exactly, NM actually was/is. The way Celestia talks about her here, it's almost as if she's describing a separate entity from her sister Luna. So what was NM exactly? Was she Luna? An aspect of Luna? Or some kind of evil demon who possessed her?
>“She was a threat to all Equestria… and I watched it happen. I watched as Luna, my dear sister, became that monstrous mare bent on vengeance. It was my duty as a big sister to protect her, and I failed. I failed so horribly that I had to banish her to the moon and wait a thousand years for six ponies to do what I could not.
The whole backstory of the two sisters doesn't exactly make a fuckton of sense to begin with, but I feel like that one's probably on Lauren Faust.
>>256213
Anyway, the rest of this is just the usual tedious back and forth about whether an innocent filly could ever truly be as evil as Nightmare Moon. All of the arguments are just rehashes of what Twilight has already spent half the book pondering, and a summary of stuff we've already read, with a little bit of Spell Nexus crowing to himself about how Celestia isn't fit to rule and Nightmare Moon is the only true queen thrown in for good measure.
I'll be honest, this conversation goes on for way too long and it's mostly stuff that could stand to be cut or at least shortened. The scene is necessary because its clearly setting up the next major plot development, but the essential information could probably be condensed into a scene maybe a third as long. Generally, excessively long conversations are something you want to avoid when writing, particularly when it's just two characters discussing something abstract that would be better suited to discussion threads about a work rather than the work itself.
The main takeaway is that Nexus needs to do some kind of complex spell to transform Nyx fully into Nightmare Moon (or something like that), and he's pondering how to do it when Celestia conveniently shows up and gives him an opportunity. He tells her he can set up a spell that will allow them to see inside Nyx and tell if she's truly a threat to Equestria or not, Celestia just needs to separate Nyx from Twilight and bring her to Canterlot so he can do the spell. Celestia thanks him and goes home.
Welp, that's the end of the chapter and I think I'm at my limit for this for tonight, so I'm going to leave it here.
Anyway, the rest of this is just the usual tedious back and forth about whether an innocent filly could ever truly be as evil as Nightmare Moon. All of the arguments are just rehashes of what Twilight has already spent half the book pondering, and a summary of stuff we've already read, with a little bit of Spell Nexus crowing to himself about how Celestia isn't fit to rule and Nightmare Moon is the only true queen thrown in for good measure.
I'll be honest, this conversation goes on for way too long and it's mostly stuff that could stand to be cut or at least shortened. The scene is necessary because its clearly setting up the next major plot development, but the essential information could probably be condensed into a scene maybe a third as long. Generally, excessively long conversations are something you want to avoid when writing, particularly when it's just two characters discussing something abstract that would be better suited to discussion threads about a work rather than the work itself.
The main takeaway is that Nexus needs to do some kind of complex spell to transform Nyx fully into Nightmare Moon (or something like that), and he's pondering how to do it when Celestia conveniently shows up and gives him an opportunity. He tells her he can set up a spell that will allow them to see inside Nyx and tell if she's truly a threat to Equestria or not, Celestia just needs to separate Nyx from Twilight and bring her to Canterlot so he can do the spell. Celestia thanks him and goes home.
Welp, that's the end of the chapter and I think I'm at my limit for this for tonight, so I'm going to leave it here.
>>256202
Thanks, mate! By the way I still appreciate your review of this shite story.
The way I saw the nightmare moon stuff was always:
Luna felt bad about ponies sleeping at night instead of appreciating how hard she tried to make pretty patterns in the sky. Darkness festered within her heart and took form to create Nightmare Moon, possessing her and turning her crazy. A bigass animu fight scene would result in massive collateral damage, and immortality might let them go at it forever. So Celestia sealed her sister within the moon using the EOH because she doesn't have all 6 personal virtues strongly enough to use the Purify function, plus a thousand years is a blink of an eye to immortal alicorns and it'd give Celestia plenty of time to look for a pony or many ponies strong enough to use the EOH to purify the darkness from Luna's heart completely, letting her think clearly again and say "sorry for being a massive faggot and making you do what needed to be done".
So a pony who's been alive for 20 years would say "omg 1000 years? dick move celestia, thats a very long time!"
but that's because they lack an immortal's perspective on time.
Also if she found 1-6 ponies strong enough to use the EOH at max power at any point before 1000 years passed, she could spring NMM early for the purification.
>>256251
The brony fandom isn't dying per se, it's splitting up. Some parts are rotten to the core, full of commie faggots chasing activity and diverse thought out of their circlejerks because they still think it's 2012 and for every one they ban and harass and chase away and silence ten more will show up. They're dying. Some parts feel dead as fuck because we're used to a sea of noisy selfish greedy brainlet faggots screaming for new content that appeals solely to their isekaifag tastes, and we're not used to a slower and more intellectual discussion atmosphere now that most of those faggots have moved on to media that works better as isekai fantasy trash.
Show discussion however is pretty much dead because what else is there to do except say "yeah bad episodes are bad and good episodes are good" all day? Argue over which episodes are best and worst?
We can't speculate over things the show could have revealed because the show already chose to answer every possible question as disappointingly as possible.
Except we totally fucking can and it would be fun to do so, because the show's mistakes made in later seasons should only as "canon" to us as the shitty Disney Stawaws films are. Nobody here "really" thinks Chewbacca ate people in a cave in the middle of nowhere before meeting Han, who killed a space cthulhu during the Kessel Run, right? Nobody here really thinks Faust's vision (or the shared vision of her creative team) involved throwing out cute comfy slice of life adventures with a moral at the end in favour of preachy shite meant to shill this week's freelancer's bland OCs, right? Nobody here really thinks Sheev "My shlong is bigger than the Senate" Palpatine knocked up some sith bitch to produce a random nobody who knocked up some other random nobody to produce a god-tier Ma-Rey Sue, and nobody here really thinks the real world of ponies has a random bitter nopony in the middle of nowhere who's three times stronger than everyone else but doesn't know what letters or consequences or the rights of others are, right? Nobody here really thinks Luke Skywalker became a hermit who gave up on life and Equestria really ended up going open-borders and becoming diversified trash where ponies are outnumbered six to one, right?
Once upon a time we had fun speculating on what the show might do some day, and what amazing secrets could be revealed. We can still recapture that fun by speculating on what the show could have done better. In our fanfics, the world of ponies can be anything.
Thanks, mate! By the way I still appreciate your review of this shite story.
The way I saw the nightmare moon stuff was always:
Luna felt bad about ponies sleeping at night instead of appreciating how hard she tried to make pretty patterns in the sky. Darkness festered within her heart and took form to create Nightmare Moon, possessing her and turning her crazy. A bigass animu fight scene would result in massive collateral damage, and immortality might let them go at it forever. So Celestia sealed her sister within the moon using the EOH because she doesn't have all 6 personal virtues strongly enough to use the Purify function, plus a thousand years is a blink of an eye to immortal alicorns and it'd give Celestia plenty of time to look for a pony or many ponies strong enough to use the EOH to purify the darkness from Luna's heart completely, letting her think clearly again and say "sorry for being a massive faggot and making you do what needed to be done".
So a pony who's been alive for 20 years would say "omg 1000 years? dick move celestia, thats a very long time!"
but that's because they lack an immortal's perspective on time.
Also if she found 1-6 ponies strong enough to use the EOH at max power at any point before 1000 years passed, she could spring NMM early for the purification.
>>256251
The brony fandom isn't dying per se, it's splitting up. Some parts are rotten to the core, full of commie faggots chasing activity and diverse thought out of their circlejerks because they still think it's 2012 and for every one they ban and harass and chase away and silence ten more will show up. They're dying. Some parts feel dead as fuck because we're used to a sea of noisy selfish greedy brainlet faggots screaming for new content that appeals solely to their isekaifag tastes, and we're not used to a slower and more intellectual discussion atmosphere now that most of those faggots have moved on to media that works better as isekai fantasy trash.
Show discussion however is pretty much dead because what else is there to do except say "yeah bad episodes are bad and good episodes are good" all day? Argue over which episodes are best and worst?
We can't speculate over things the show could have revealed because the show already chose to answer every possible question as disappointingly as possible.
Except we totally fucking can and it would be fun to do so, because the show's mistakes made in later seasons should only as "canon" to us as the shitty Disney Stawaws films are. Nobody here "really" thinks Chewbacca ate people in a cave in the middle of nowhere before meeting Han, who killed a space cthulhu during the Kessel Run, right? Nobody here really thinks Faust's vision (or the shared vision of her creative team) involved throwing out cute comfy slice of life adventures with a moral at the end in favour of preachy shite meant to shill this week's freelancer's bland OCs, right? Nobody here really thinks Sheev "My shlong is bigger than the Senate" Palpatine knocked up some sith bitch to produce a random nobody who knocked up some other random nobody to produce a god-tier Ma-Rey Sue, and nobody here really thinks the real world of ponies has a random bitter nopony in the middle of nowhere who's three times stronger than everyone else but doesn't know what letters or consequences or the rights of others are, right? Nobody here really thinks Luke Skywalker became a hermit who gave up on life and Equestria really ended up going open-borders and becoming diversified trash where ponies are outnumbered six to one, right?
Once upon a time we had fun speculating on what the show might do some day, and what amazing secrets could be revealed. We can still recapture that fun by speculating on what the show could have done better. In our fanfics, the world of ponies can be anything.
>>256213
>Remember, it's been established that Nyx knows that she's Nightmare Moon now. She's figured it out; she's no longer innocent. She knows perfectly well why Twilight and Rarity wanted her to keep her wings hidden. She can also be presumed to understand why they lied to her about it.
The whole thing makes less sense the more you think about it. If Nyx knows who she is and why she needs to hide her wings, why take such a huge risk in revealing them? Maybe she is getting tired of carrying the burden and wants to confide in her friends, but if that's the case why didn't she actually confide anything? All she does is tell them that she has wings, and they clearly don't catch on to the significance. At this point it would probably have made more sense to have her just flat out confess to them that she's Nightmare Moon's reincarnation, and pour her guts out about the whole thing.
It is really cool that you caught this. I'm actually impressed. This right here is some high-tier analysism.
It is so good in fact that I'm rationalizing in my head right now that I would also have caught that if I read this.
>What the hell was even the point?
The only point I can come up with (yes, rhetorical question but still) is that it is jsut to cement howspecial she is.
> He helpfully drops the lyrics into the text in case anyone reading has forgotten them.
It makes you think about the fact that he had betareaders/editors/prereaders or whatever they are called in this situation. Like why was this no cut?
> Learn and Play Day was an event orchestrated by Nexus himself
"All according to keikaku." What the fuck. Such nonsense. How did he do that and what the fuck for? To test Nyx? In that case why did he not arrage for fromthing to happen so she was forced into using her epic powers instead of just hoping she would do something so retarded. Like if she is in hiding with Twilight Sparkle wouldn't Twi have adviced her not do use her magic. Would that be a crazy assumption for Spell Nexus to make? I don't think so.
Wouldn't it be better to push her into a situation were she has to use her powers to like save her friends or whatever. Like a tree falling over or somone from the cult pretending to be a pedo and attempt a kidnapping. Like arenn't these cult memebers devoted? Wouldn't his name be clear anyway when Nightmare Moon came back into power.
To be honest, if I was Spell Nexus, after I would have my suspicions confirmed that; yes, Nyx is NNM; my next step wouldn't be to get her powers back but to make her join his side. What garantee does he even have that Nyx, now that she has had a loving reltionship with Twi and who knows what else they have discussed alone, wouldn't juse have these values not to be a comic villain but actually be the Nyx of today but grown up and with all her powers. Maybe she doesn't want to rule Equestria anymore. Has he even considered that Twilight might have "brainwahsed" NNM while she has kept Nyx with her?
>Remember, it's been established that Nyx knows that she's Nightmare Moon now. She's figured it out; she's no longer innocent. She knows perfectly well why Twilight and Rarity wanted her to keep her wings hidden. She can also be presumed to understand why they lied to her about it.
The whole thing makes less sense the more you think about it. If Nyx knows who she is and why she needs to hide her wings, why take such a huge risk in revealing them? Maybe she is getting tired of carrying the burden and wants to confide in her friends, but if that's the case why didn't she actually confide anything? All she does is tell them that she has wings, and they clearly don't catch on to the significance. At this point it would probably have made more sense to have her just flat out confess to them that she's Nightmare Moon's reincarnation, and pour her guts out about the whole thing.
It is really cool that you caught this. I'm actually impressed. This right here is some high-tier analysism.
It is so good in fact that I'm rationalizing in my head right now that I would also have caught that if I read this.
>What the hell was even the point?
The only point I can come up with (yes, rhetorical question but still) is that it is jsut to cement howspecial she is.
> He helpfully drops the lyrics into the text in case anyone reading has forgotten them.
It makes you think about the fact that he had betareaders/editors/prereaders or whatever they are called in this situation. Like why was this no cut?
> Learn and Play Day was an event orchestrated by Nexus himself
"All according to keikaku." What the fuck. Such nonsense. How did he do that and what the fuck for? To test Nyx? In that case why did he not arrage for fromthing to happen so she was forced into using her epic powers instead of just hoping she would do something so retarded. Like if she is in hiding with Twilight Sparkle wouldn't Twi have adviced her not do use her magic. Would that be a crazy assumption for Spell Nexus to make? I don't think so.
Wouldn't it be better to push her into a situation were she has to use her powers to like save her friends or whatever. Like a tree falling over or somone from the cult pretending to be a pedo and attempt a kidnapping. Like arenn't these cult memebers devoted? Wouldn't his name be clear anyway when Nightmare Moon came back into power.
To be honest, if I was Spell Nexus, after I would have my suspicions confirmed that; yes, Nyx is NNM; my next step wouldn't be to get her powers back but to make her join his side. What garantee does he even have that Nyx, now that she has had a loving reltionship with Twi and who knows what else they have discussed alone, wouldn't juse have these values not to be a comic villain but actually be the Nyx of today but grown up and with all her powers. Maybe she doesn't want to rule Equestria anymore. Has he even considered that Twilight might have "brainwahsed" NNM while she has kept Nyx with her?
>>256511
>If Nyx knows who she is and why she needs to hide her wings, why take such a huge risk in revealing them?
The "Little Orphan Naruto" cliche exists for Acceptance Porn, aka emotional manipulation. When the sad special orphan reveals to his friends that he has wings and special powers and special eyes and a monster sealed within him, his friends lovingly accept him like the acceptance-porn Whorrasami scenes from the shit Legend Of Whorra comics.
Their acceptance is contrasted with the minor characters and characters the writer dislikes, who hate the Special.
Good characters exist to tell the Special "We love you even though you're special!"
Bad characters exist to tell the Special "We hate/fear/suspect/exclude you because you're special!"
The story is only over once the writer decides it's time for the Special to prove he's a good Special and not a bad one. By sparing the life of a baddie, saving the live of a goodie/baddie/the town/the world, befriending the demon inside him to gain use of its powers, or defeating your inner darkness once and for all to become the strongest Special ever.
It's the faggiest evolution of The Hidden King cliche yet. Which is already faggoted, being the "I'm special and bullied for it. But turns out I'm the best and most useful Rudolph chosen one ever! Those bullies must bow down to me and apologize and kiss the earth I fucking walk on because I'm the best!" fantasy.
>If Nyx knows who she is and why she needs to hide her wings, why take such a huge risk in revealing them?
The "Little Orphan Naruto" cliche exists for Acceptance Porn, aka emotional manipulation. When the sad special orphan reveals to his friends that he has wings and special powers and special eyes and a monster sealed within him, his friends lovingly accept him like the acceptance-porn Whorrasami scenes from the shit Legend Of Whorra comics.
Their acceptance is contrasted with the minor characters and characters the writer dislikes, who hate the Special.
Good characters exist to tell the Special "We love you even though you're special!"
Bad characters exist to tell the Special "We hate/fear/suspect/exclude you because you're special!"
The story is only over once the writer decides it's time for the Special to prove he's a good Special and not a bad one. By sparing the life of a baddie, saving the live of a goodie/baddie/the town/the world, befriending the demon inside him to gain use of its powers, or defeating your inner darkness once and for all to become the strongest Special ever.
It's the faggiest evolution of The Hidden King cliche yet. Which is already faggoted, being the "I'm special and bullied for it. But turns out I'm the best and most useful Rudolph chosen one ever! Those bullies must bow down to me and apologize and kiss the earth I fucking walk on because I'm the best!" fantasy.
>>256513
I am sure you are already aware but what you qouted was what glimglam wrote not me. I just fucked up my use of arrows ">".
>Good characters exist to tell the Special "We love you even though you're special!"
>Bad characters exist to tell the Special "We hate/fear/suspect/exclude you because you're special!"
Anyway, I agree. You really hit the nail on the head. This is so common that I feel like I got several simulantous ptsd flashbakcs to diifferent animes that I have seen.
>Which is already faggoted, being the "I'm special and bullied for it. But turns out I'm the best and most useful Rudolph chosen one ever! Those bullies must bow down to me and apologize and kiss the earth I fucking walk on because I'm the best!" fantasy.
It isn't really that I hate the idea. A character an indeed be special and people can have different reactions to this character. I think my main problem is the lack of naunce when it came to the subject. As you say, the friends of themc are always over it imediately, so you wonder why we ever feared there would be a problem and the bad guys are just so heavy handed and clumsy in their behvoir that you can stop rolling your eyes.
I mean wouldn't not be a fnny twist if the bad guys were the accpating ones while the good guys were the ones that hated the mc.
>>256266
I saw a review of the last skywalker or whatever name it has. I don't think that reviewer is great or anything, it was Mauler, but like I think he is good at checking consitency in a work rather than any more deeper analysis. But I don't dislike him or anything I just have some problems with some of his stuff and I really don't like the criclejerk that is efap.
To contrast him with E;R and it would reveal that while E;R does critize plot concistency as well, he doesn't only do that. Most ofhis critism is about context and other such intresting things about the film. He only lists the worst errors in the script before moving on to things like, why an already established charater like Han is intresting as a foil to Luke but not on his own. Mauler, on the other hand, is plot consitency error listing machine.
But like, I thought that he would be a good source to know wheater or not the movie, that I wasn't going to watch anyway, was good or not.
Oh man. This I the first time in years when I have been wanting to go and watch a movie in the cinema.
To think they could actually make it worse. I honestly, just expected a reboot of the "return of the jedi" and that Abrahams would just try to pretend that "The last jedi" didn't happend but... Holy shit.
Where do you even start? It is a cringecomedy.
Ah, it is fucking great.
I am sure you are already aware but what you qouted was what glimglam wrote not me. I just fucked up my use of arrows ">".
>Good characters exist to tell the Special "We love you even though you're special!"
>Bad characters exist to tell the Special "We hate/fear/suspect/exclude you because you're special!"
Anyway, I agree. You really hit the nail on the head. This is so common that I feel like I got several simulantous ptsd flashbakcs to diifferent animes that I have seen.
>Which is already faggoted, being the "I'm special and bullied for it. But turns out I'm the best and most useful Rudolph chosen one ever! Those bullies must bow down to me and apologize and kiss the earth I fucking walk on because I'm the best!" fantasy.
It isn't really that I hate the idea. A character an indeed be special and people can have different reactions to this character. I think my main problem is the lack of naunce when it came to the subject. As you say, the friends of themc are always over it imediately, so you wonder why we ever feared there would be a problem and the bad guys are just so heavy handed and clumsy in their behvoir that you can stop rolling your eyes.
I mean wouldn't not be a fnny twist if the bad guys were the accpating ones while the good guys were the ones that hated the mc.
>>256266
I saw a review of the last skywalker or whatever name it has. I don't think that reviewer is great or anything, it was Mauler, but like I think he is good at checking consitency in a work rather than any more deeper analysis. But I don't dislike him or anything I just have some problems with some of his stuff and I really don't like the criclejerk that is efap.
To contrast him with E;R and it would reveal that while E;R does critize plot concistency as well, he doesn't only do that. Most ofhis critism is about context and other such intresting things about the film. He only lists the worst errors in the script before moving on to things like, why an already established charater like Han is intresting as a foil to Luke but not on his own. Mauler, on the other hand, is plot consitency error listing machine.
But like, I thought that he would be a good source to know wheater or not the movie, that I wasn't going to watch anyway, was good or not.
Oh man. This I the first time in years when I have been wanting to go and watch a movie in the cinema.
To think they could actually make it worse. I honestly, just expected a reboot of the "return of the jedi" and that Abrahams would just try to pretend that "The last jedi" didn't happend but... Holy shit.
Where do you even start? It is a cringecomedy.
Ah, it is fucking great.
>I mean wouldn't not be a fnny twist if the bad guys were the accpating ones while the good guys were the ones that hated the mc.
That's fucking genius!
By the way this site's code still lets people hit new reply with an empty post. That should be patched out (perhaps with a minimum letter count of 1 letter per post? so you can still post a one-word "no" if need arises) before some cunty shill uses it to flood a thread and get it to bump limit.
That's fucking genius!
By the way this site's code still lets people hit new reply with an empty post. That should be patched out (perhaps with a minimum letter count of 1 letter per post? so you can still post a one-word "no" if need arises) before some cunty shill uses it to flood a thread and get it to bump limit.
File (): 785A1035DC4C8351BABF07DFB780C98D-261706.png (255.6 KB, 417x1000, 125001.png)
>>256214
Chapter 10: Treachery
>School was officially out for the summer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBqiC5ox8Bw
Welp, it looks like the school ponies are on vacation now. I'll note once again that it seems odd that the central group of Nyx's friends has shifted entirely to Nyx + the CMC, as opposed to the original dynamic of Nyx, Apple Bloom and Twist. This is further enforced by a discussion taking place between the fillies, in which they brainstorm ways to spend the summer trying to get their cutie marks. Nyx suggests keeping a list of ways, and then going down the list and trying each one. This, combined with her wearing a CMC cape in the tug of war scene previously, seems to imply that she has been officially inducted as a Crusader and Twist is history. Again, Twist sucks and I'm not really complaining about her being gone, but I'll say again that it's somewhat odd from a storytelling perspective to set up a group of supporting characters for the protagonist at the beginning, and then just randomly drop one without explanation and add two more to make a new group. If Peen Stroke wanted her to join the CMC from the beginning, which I honestly think is the most practical choice even though it's also the least original, it would have made more sense to just have her befriend Apple Bloom in the beginning, and then get introduced to the other two through her without even bringing Twist into it.
Anyway, Nyx runs home bursting with excitement about summer vacation. She proudly shows Twilight her grades, they go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes to celebrate, they play in the park, blah blah blah, a fun day is had by all. Just as we're beginning to wonder if this chapter is just going to be one long chain of pointless yet soothing pastoral scenes of Twilight living out her neurotic single mommy fantasies, suddenly stuff happens.
Twilight returns home to find Princess Celestia's chariot parked out front and the Princess herself waiting for her in the library. Based on the events at the end of the last chapter, we can probably assume that this visit will involve >rape.
This scene is actually somewhat interesting. Peen Stroke gets to the point admirably quickly, and does not waste page space with a lot of pointless dialog summarizing what we already know. Celestia listens to Twilight's story, and then zeros in on the central question: how does Twilight see her relationship to Nyx? Princess Cadance is once again namedropped, which is mildly annoying since she has only been mentioned once in passing and her identity or connection to the current story was not really elaborated upon there either. However, the mention is probably minor enough not to be a huge deal. The main point is that Twilight finally puts it all out in the open, and confesses to Celestia that she (and according to her, Nyx) see their relationship as being mother and daughter.
Unfortunately, once Twilight drops that rather large and spicy meat-a-ball, it's just sort of left hanging in the air without ever being addressed. Celestia simply laments that this relationship makes her task more difficult, and then the conversation veers off into some technical backstory about the summoning ritual, which I will address in a second. But first, some rather technical literary stuff needs to be addressed.
With this subterfuge that Nyx is her cousin, Twilight has essentially created a conflict between herself and the outside world, or more accurately between herself and reality. She has assumed the role of mother to Nyx, and Nyx has basically accepted her as such. However, at present this relationship can only exist in a bubble that depends on the perpetuation of a falsehood to maintain itself and denies certain realities within the external world. For the relationship to continue indefinitely (the happily-ever-after ending), a situation where it can permanently exist needs to be created. For that to happen, the deception first needs to come down, and the issues in reality need to be dealt with and resolved.
Here are the issues: First, Twilight is not Nyx's real mother. Regardless of how either of them feels about each other, this remains a fact. Second, Twilight has intentionally misled the town, Princess Celestia, and all of her friends with a false story about Nyx's origins which could be easily disproven, in order to clumsily construct a situation where she has a right to be Nyx's guardian. This story has been disproven, so the required situation no longer exists; it is now known that Twilight and Nyx are not related to each other, so Twilight has no legitimate claim to guardianship over Nyx. Third, Nyx's identity as Nightmare Moon. Twilights oft-vocalized concern that Celestia could take Nyx away from her is actually justified; Celestia has every right and every reason to do this. Fourth, reality; there are things happening in the external world that are at present unknown to both Celestia and Twilight, but are known to the reader. The cult summoned Nyx into the world for a purpose, and are searching for her in order to fulfill that purpose. They have found her and are coming to get her. Thus, for all these reasons, Twilight and Nyx can no longer continue the life that they have lived up until this point.
Peen Stroke seems to more or less get this, but he misses something rather crucial. Celestia presses Twilight on how she sees herself in relation to Nyx, and Twilight admits that she feels like a mother to her, but Celestia just lets it go after that. The scene ultimately concludes with Celestia taking Nyx away, which needs to happen one way or the other. However, the false situation Twilight has created is not challenged, Celestia does not morally rebuke Twilight for her deception, and despite the tension of the scene no real confrontation is taking place. I'm almost out of space so I will try to explain this a little better in my next post.
Chapter 10: Treachery
>School was officially out for the summer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBqiC5ox8Bw
Welp, it looks like the school ponies are on vacation now. I'll note once again that it seems odd that the central group of Nyx's friends has shifted entirely to Nyx + the CMC, as opposed to the original dynamic of Nyx, Apple Bloom and Twist. This is further enforced by a discussion taking place between the fillies, in which they brainstorm ways to spend the summer trying to get their cutie marks. Nyx suggests keeping a list of ways, and then going down the list and trying each one. This, combined with her wearing a CMC cape in the tug of war scene previously, seems to imply that she has been officially inducted as a Crusader and Twist is history. Again, Twist sucks and I'm not really complaining about her being gone, but I'll say again that it's somewhat odd from a storytelling perspective to set up a group of supporting characters for the protagonist at the beginning, and then just randomly drop one without explanation and add two more to make a new group. If Peen Stroke wanted her to join the CMC from the beginning, which I honestly think is the most practical choice even though it's also the least original, it would have made more sense to just have her befriend Apple Bloom in the beginning, and then get introduced to the other two through her without even bringing Twist into it.
Anyway, Nyx runs home bursting with excitement about summer vacation. She proudly shows Twilight her grades, they go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes to celebrate, they play in the park, blah blah blah, a fun day is had by all. Just as we're beginning to wonder if this chapter is just going to be one long chain of pointless yet soothing pastoral scenes of Twilight living out her neurotic single mommy fantasies, suddenly stuff happens.
Twilight returns home to find Princess Celestia's chariot parked out front and the Princess herself waiting for her in the library. Based on the events at the end of the last chapter, we can probably assume that this visit will involve >rape.
This scene is actually somewhat interesting. Peen Stroke gets to the point admirably quickly, and does not waste page space with a lot of pointless dialog summarizing what we already know. Celestia listens to Twilight's story, and then zeros in on the central question: how does Twilight see her relationship to Nyx? Princess Cadance is once again namedropped, which is mildly annoying since she has only been mentioned once in passing and her identity or connection to the current story was not really elaborated upon there either. However, the mention is probably minor enough not to be a huge deal. The main point is that Twilight finally puts it all out in the open, and confesses to Celestia that she (and according to her, Nyx) see their relationship as being mother and daughter.
Unfortunately, once Twilight drops that rather large and spicy meat-a-ball, it's just sort of left hanging in the air without ever being addressed. Celestia simply laments that this relationship makes her task more difficult, and then the conversation veers off into some technical backstory about the summoning ritual, which I will address in a second. But first, some rather technical literary stuff needs to be addressed.
With this subterfuge that Nyx is her cousin, Twilight has essentially created a conflict between herself and the outside world, or more accurately between herself and reality. She has assumed the role of mother to Nyx, and Nyx has basically accepted her as such. However, at present this relationship can only exist in a bubble that depends on the perpetuation of a falsehood to maintain itself and denies certain realities within the external world. For the relationship to continue indefinitely (the happily-ever-after ending), a situation where it can permanently exist needs to be created. For that to happen, the deception first needs to come down, and the issues in reality need to be dealt with and resolved.
Here are the issues: First, Twilight is not Nyx's real mother. Regardless of how either of them feels about each other, this remains a fact. Second, Twilight has intentionally misled the town, Princess Celestia, and all of her friends with a false story about Nyx's origins which could be easily disproven, in order to clumsily construct a situation where she has a right to be Nyx's guardian. This story has been disproven, so the required situation no longer exists; it is now known that Twilight and Nyx are not related to each other, so Twilight has no legitimate claim to guardianship over Nyx. Third, Nyx's identity as Nightmare Moon. Twilights oft-vocalized concern that Celestia could take Nyx away from her is actually justified; Celestia has every right and every reason to do this. Fourth, reality; there are things happening in the external world that are at present unknown to both Celestia and Twilight, but are known to the reader. The cult summoned Nyx into the world for a purpose, and are searching for her in order to fulfill that purpose. They have found her and are coming to get her. Thus, for all these reasons, Twilight and Nyx can no longer continue the life that they have lived up until this point.
Peen Stroke seems to more or less get this, but he misses something rather crucial. Celestia presses Twilight on how she sees herself in relation to Nyx, and Twilight admits that she feels like a mother to her, but Celestia just lets it go after that. The scene ultimately concludes with Celestia taking Nyx away, which needs to happen one way or the other. However, the false situation Twilight has created is not challenged, Celestia does not morally rebuke Twilight for her deception, and despite the tension of the scene no real confrontation is taking place. I'm almost out of space so I will try to explain this a little better in my next post.
>>256601
It's a little complicated to explain this, but I'm going to do my best.
Here is the issue with the confrontation between Twilight and Celestia. Though it technically resolves itself correctly, with Nyx being taken away, Celestia does not challenge Twilight's guardianship over Nyx, nor does she call her out or hold her accountable for her deception, thus the central issue remains unresolved. In literature, at least in modern Western pop literature where the existence of objective good and evil is assumed and the "good guys" always live happily ever after, conflicts need to resolve and wrongs need to be righted. This includes unintentional wrongs or wrongs that were done for the right reasons. A "good guy" who commits a wrong act needs to face, or be made to face, the wrong and acknowledge it. Then, they must lose whatever they have gained as a result of the wrong. Finally, they must atone for the wrong, and at that point, if they have proven themselves worthy of it, they can get back some or all of what they lost. There are many examples of this type of thing, especially in movies. Most romantic comedies follow this formula, actually: guy sees girl he likes but she's unattainable, guy engages in some sort of clever deception to get girl, everything goes great for a while, then girl finds out about deception, guy loses girl, guy goes through some kind of trial and works to win back the girl on his own, girl forgives guy and they end up together. Disney's Aladdin is also a good example.
Given this formula, here is how this scene should work. Celestia finds out the truth and goes to confront Twilight. Twilight realizes she's out of moves and confesses everything. Celestia becomes angry. She can probably understand Twilight's feelings, and may have a soft spot for her favorite student, but at the same time she has all of Equestria to worry about. Twilight has been keeping a potentially dangerous entity hidden for what amounts to a basically selfish reason: she wanted to be a mother. Moreover, she's a liar liar pants on fire. Celestia sternly admonishes Twilight for keeping this a secret, and for potentially endangering all of Equestria. She can acknowledge that Twilight may have had her reasons, but she needs to remain resolute in her position that what Twilight did was inexcusable. If this seems a little cunty and unreasonable, that's by design; in order for this scene to work Celestia has to play the villain for a minute here. Twilight cries and pleads with her not to take Nyx away. Celestia appears moved by her emotional plea, but ultimately remains firm in her judgement. Nyx, who at this point is still just getting dinner ready like everything is fine, is suddenly taken away by Celestia. Plenty of opportunity here for the sobbing and general waterworks that Peen Stroke is so fond of. Twilight, meanwhile, realizes that she dun goofed; she endangered Equestria, she hurt Nyx, she lied to her friends, she disappointed Celestia. Feels batman. /scene.
Now, here is what actually happens in the text: Celestia comes to confront Twilight. Twilight confesses everything, Celestia seems to understand. She asks about how she sees herself in relation to Nyx, Twilight confesses that she thinks of herself as Nyx's mother. Again, Celestia doesn't question this at all, she's just sympathetic and understanding. Celestia goes on to explain a bunch of technical stuff about how the spell worked, and explains how this proves incontrovertibly that Nyx is NM. Twilight seems shocked even though she has already reached the same conclusion multiple times herself. They argue back and forth for awhile, but ultimately Celestia insists on taking Nyx back. However, she assures Twilight that it will only be for one night. She then explains the plan that Spell Nexus came up with, rehashing details which the reader already knows. Twilight is all like "b-b-but what happens if she really is Nightmare Moon?" (Jesus fucking Christ, Peen Stroke). Celestia, again being as sympathetic and warm as possible, gently informs her that....yep, you guessed it. Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon. However, even the impact of this is blunted; before Twilight even has a chance to be horrified, Celestia reassures her that if everything is ok, she will most likely get Nyx back the following morning.
See how the second version doesn't hit the feels nearly as hard? Also: the detail about the separation being only for one night dilutes the punch even further. That detail should be dropped. As far as anyone knows, Nyx is going away forever and she and Twilight will never see each other again. Anything less than that is too low-stakes for the reader to give a shit.
Anyway, as is par for the course with this story, Peen Stroke attempts to shore up the weaknesses in his narrative with pseudo-emotion, like a director trying to cover up a bad script by ordering his actors to ham up the drama. There is all sorts of crying and weeping and pleading. Celestia is also crying; she feels just awful about tearing Twilight and Nyx apart for one literal night. Here's the worst though:
>“So please,” Celestia whispered. “Please, Twilight Sparkle, I ask this of you not as a princess of Equestria or as your teacher, but as a pony who fears for those she cares about. Let me take Nyx. Allow me to put these fears to rest, for you do not know how much they torture me.”
You ask this of her? Let you take Nyx? Allow you to put these fears to rest? Bitch, you the Princess of Equestria; you don't ask, you tell. Twilight is your subordinate, you don't need her permission. Not for sex, not for anything. Jesus H. Christ. Not only does this completely fail to address the fact that Twilight was the one who fucked up here, Peen Stroke has Celestia apologizing to Twilight for doing her job. This scene fails bigly, which is a shame, because it's an important scene.
It's a little complicated to explain this, but I'm going to do my best.
Here is the issue with the confrontation between Twilight and Celestia. Though it technically resolves itself correctly, with Nyx being taken away, Celestia does not challenge Twilight's guardianship over Nyx, nor does she call her out or hold her accountable for her deception, thus the central issue remains unresolved. In literature, at least in modern Western pop literature where the existence of objective good and evil is assumed and the "good guys" always live happily ever after, conflicts need to resolve and wrongs need to be righted. This includes unintentional wrongs or wrongs that were done for the right reasons. A "good guy" who commits a wrong act needs to face, or be made to face, the wrong and acknowledge it. Then, they must lose whatever they have gained as a result of the wrong. Finally, they must atone for the wrong, and at that point, if they have proven themselves worthy of it, they can get back some or all of what they lost. There are many examples of this type of thing, especially in movies. Most romantic comedies follow this formula, actually: guy sees girl he likes but she's unattainable, guy engages in some sort of clever deception to get girl, everything goes great for a while, then girl finds out about deception, guy loses girl, guy goes through some kind of trial and works to win back the girl on his own, girl forgives guy and they end up together. Disney's Aladdin is also a good example.
Given this formula, here is how this scene should work. Celestia finds out the truth and goes to confront Twilight. Twilight realizes she's out of moves and confesses everything. Celestia becomes angry. She can probably understand Twilight's feelings, and may have a soft spot for her favorite student, but at the same time she has all of Equestria to worry about. Twilight has been keeping a potentially dangerous entity hidden for what amounts to a basically selfish reason: she wanted to be a mother. Moreover, she's a liar liar pants on fire. Celestia sternly admonishes Twilight for keeping this a secret, and for potentially endangering all of Equestria. She can acknowledge that Twilight may have had her reasons, but she needs to remain resolute in her position that what Twilight did was inexcusable. If this seems a little cunty and unreasonable, that's by design; in order for this scene to work Celestia has to play the villain for a minute here. Twilight cries and pleads with her not to take Nyx away. Celestia appears moved by her emotional plea, but ultimately remains firm in her judgement. Nyx, who at this point is still just getting dinner ready like everything is fine, is suddenly taken away by Celestia. Plenty of opportunity here for the sobbing and general waterworks that Peen Stroke is so fond of. Twilight, meanwhile, realizes that she dun goofed; she endangered Equestria, she hurt Nyx, she lied to her friends, she disappointed Celestia. Feels batman. /scene.
Now, here is what actually happens in the text: Celestia comes to confront Twilight. Twilight confesses everything, Celestia seems to understand. She asks about how she sees herself in relation to Nyx, Twilight confesses that she thinks of herself as Nyx's mother. Again, Celestia doesn't question this at all, she's just sympathetic and understanding. Celestia goes on to explain a bunch of technical stuff about how the spell worked, and explains how this proves incontrovertibly that Nyx is NM. Twilight seems shocked even though she has already reached the same conclusion multiple times herself. They argue back and forth for awhile, but ultimately Celestia insists on taking Nyx back. However, she assures Twilight that it will only be for one night. She then explains the plan that Spell Nexus came up with, rehashing details which the reader already knows. Twilight is all like "b-b-but what happens if she really is Nightmare Moon?" (Jesus fucking Christ, Peen Stroke). Celestia, again being as sympathetic and warm as possible, gently informs her that....yep, you guessed it. Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon. However, even the impact of this is blunted; before Twilight even has a chance to be horrified, Celestia reassures her that if everything is ok, she will most likely get Nyx back the following morning.
See how the second version doesn't hit the feels nearly as hard? Also: the detail about the separation being only for one night dilutes the punch even further. That detail should be dropped. As far as anyone knows, Nyx is going away forever and she and Twilight will never see each other again. Anything less than that is too low-stakes for the reader to give a shit.
Anyway, as is par for the course with this story, Peen Stroke attempts to shore up the weaknesses in his narrative with pseudo-emotion, like a director trying to cover up a bad script by ordering his actors to ham up the drama. There is all sorts of crying and weeping and pleading. Celestia is also crying; she feels just awful about tearing Twilight and Nyx apart for one literal night. Here's the worst though:
>“So please,” Celestia whispered. “Please, Twilight Sparkle, I ask this of you not as a princess of Equestria or as your teacher, but as a pony who fears for those she cares about. Let me take Nyx. Allow me to put these fears to rest, for you do not know how much they torture me.”
You ask this of her? Let you take Nyx? Allow you to put these fears to rest? Bitch, you the Princess of Equestria; you don't ask, you tell. Twilight is your subordinate, you don't need her permission. Not for sex, not for anything. Jesus H. Christ. Not only does this completely fail to address the fact that Twilight was the one who fucked up here, Peen Stroke has Celestia apologizing to Twilight for doing her job. This scene fails bigly, which is a shame, because it's an important scene.
File (): F453BE05C7ACD0C3BA15397E96AD2C85-10208.jpg (10.0 KB, 236x132, f4c5e21bfe0bdcbdfac19ed978b398eb--balloons-pies.jpg)
>>256602
Anyway, a few other minor things to take away from this scene. For one, we learn the technical details of how NM was resurrected in the first place. Apparently when NM was defeated in episode 1, or 2, or whichever episode it happened in, her armor shattered into pieces and scattered around the floor of the castle. Since Peen Stroke seems to be one of those fans who is incredibly autistic about details like this, I'm assuming this is true. Celestia ordered the fragments collected and gave them to Spell Nexus to study. Nexus of course eventually reported that they had been "stolen" from his manor, and yada yada yada that's how the cult wound up with them.
This is all basically fine. One could probably raise an eyebrow at the level of trust Celestia places in Spell Nexus, and that he doesn't seem to have ever lost her trust despite him being the most glaringly obvious suspect when the fragments are stolen, but honestly I could go either way. Having the villain of the story turn out to be the ruler's most trusted advisor is a fairly common trope, and it's perfectly acceptable to do in this type of story, even if it isn't 100% plausible. More to the point here is the issue of the armor itself, because it once again raises the question of just what NM is to begin with.
The armor is the evidence that Celestia uses to conclude, once and for all, that Nyx is Nightmare Moon (you suck all the dicks, Peen Stroke). The essence of NM was somehow extracted from this armor, and then given physical form in the person (pony, whatever) of Nyx. So this means...what? Nightmare Moon was an entity separate from Luna, who was forced out of Luna's body when the Mane 6 did their whatever the fuck harmony magic, and it broke apart with her armor? Did the spirit live in the armor to begin with, and Luna became possessed when she put the armor on? Or was NM some aspect of Luna's personality that was forced out of her by the magic and then absorbed into the armor fragments? Or was Nightmare Moon just some run of the mill wandering spirit that possessed Luna, and then remained in her armor after it was broken?
I'll be honest, analyzing a story like this to this level of detail is probably going a bit overboard, but since bronies analyze the show to this level all the time, I feel like it's fair game. The source material falls so squarely into the realm of fairy tales that it's almost impossible to write anything in this world without some degree of "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit." But I think for authors, it's good to think about this stuff. Even if you intend to leave a detail like this intentionally vague, you should assume that you're going to get the occasional autismo reader who will ask about it, and in that case you should probably have an answer prepared. Having a concrete explanation in your head for how things work is also a good way to ensure continuity in the story.
Anyway, what else? Once the Twilight/Celestia discussion concludes and Twilight agrees to have Nyx taken away for a minimum of one night, Celestia goes into the kitchen to break the news to Nyx herself. Really, it would have made more sense for Peen Stroke to just end the scene here, since we already know what's going to happen, and the details of how Nyx is transported to the castle don't really matter that much. Celestia basically feeds Nyx some bullshit, telling her she needs to take her back to the castle to be examined by the royal doctor wakka chicka wokka chicka. This seems out of character for Celestia; she's usually pretty straightforward, and anyway she's supposed to be a monarch. It's a little beneath her dignity to stoop to this level of petty trickery just to get a child to obey her. Again, you the princess, bitch; act like it. Anyway, Nyx falls for it because she's retarded, but then on the way out she sees the look on Twilight's face, senses that something is up, changes her mind and resists, so Celestia drags her away by force, in a scene so hammed up it got this story banned in most Muslim countries.
Again, this entire sequence is completely unnecessary; it could have just ended with Celestia going into the kitchen to grab Nyx and we could have assumed the rest. If anything it's more effective to just end a scene like this on an ominous note and leave the rest to the reader's imagination. My suspicion though is that Peen Stroke instinctively senses that this scene doesn't quite have the emotional punch that it ought to, but instead of fixing what's wrong with it, he just patches it over by hamming up the drama and the pseudo-emotion. Nyx is wrenched away from Twilight as violently as possible, the tears and emotion are over the top. Even without the underlying structural issues I pointed out, this scene lacks punch anyway because of the mundane fact that as far as anyone knows so far Nyx is only going away for one night, so on top of everything else all this drama feels like it's basically for nothing anyway. The only reason the reader has to suspect that Nyx won't just be back at Twilight's by this time tomorrow is because we know that Spell Nexus is really trying to release Nyx's evil nature rather than just test it. However, neither Nyx nor Celestia nor Twilight would know this; hence there's no reason for them to behave this way. Nyx, maybe, since she's young and she doesn't know what's going on.
And I feel as if I would be remiss in my duties not to lob an appropriate amount of snark at the sub-chapter's ending line:
>It was then Nyx cried out with all the force and volume her small voice would allow.
>“MOMMY!!!”
Come on, dude. There's laying it on thick, and then there's just being ridiculous.
Anyway, a few other minor things to take away from this scene. For one, we learn the technical details of how NM was resurrected in the first place. Apparently when NM was defeated in episode 1, or 2, or whichever episode it happened in, her armor shattered into pieces and scattered around the floor of the castle. Since Peen Stroke seems to be one of those fans who is incredibly autistic about details like this, I'm assuming this is true. Celestia ordered the fragments collected and gave them to Spell Nexus to study. Nexus of course eventually reported that they had been "stolen" from his manor, and yada yada yada that's how the cult wound up with them.
This is all basically fine. One could probably raise an eyebrow at the level of trust Celestia places in Spell Nexus, and that he doesn't seem to have ever lost her trust despite him being the most glaringly obvious suspect when the fragments are stolen, but honestly I could go either way. Having the villain of the story turn out to be the ruler's most trusted advisor is a fairly common trope, and it's perfectly acceptable to do in this type of story, even if it isn't 100% plausible. More to the point here is the issue of the armor itself, because it once again raises the question of just what NM is to begin with.
The armor is the evidence that Celestia uses to conclude, once and for all, that Nyx is Nightmare Moon (you suck all the dicks, Peen Stroke). The essence of NM was somehow extracted from this armor, and then given physical form in the person (pony, whatever) of Nyx. So this means...what? Nightmare Moon was an entity separate from Luna, who was forced out of Luna's body when the Mane 6 did their whatever the fuck harmony magic, and it broke apart with her armor? Did the spirit live in the armor to begin with, and Luna became possessed when she put the armor on? Or was NM some aspect of Luna's personality that was forced out of her by the magic and then absorbed into the armor fragments? Or was Nightmare Moon just some run of the mill wandering spirit that possessed Luna, and then remained in her armor after it was broken?
I'll be honest, analyzing a story like this to this level of detail is probably going a bit overboard, but since bronies analyze the show to this level all the time, I feel like it's fair game. The source material falls so squarely into the realm of fairy tales that it's almost impossible to write anything in this world without some degree of "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit." But I think for authors, it's good to think about this stuff. Even if you intend to leave a detail like this intentionally vague, you should assume that you're going to get the occasional autismo reader who will ask about it, and in that case you should probably have an answer prepared. Having a concrete explanation in your head for how things work is also a good way to ensure continuity in the story.
Anyway, what else? Once the Twilight/Celestia discussion concludes and Twilight agrees to have Nyx taken away for a minimum of one night, Celestia goes into the kitchen to break the news to Nyx herself. Really, it would have made more sense for Peen Stroke to just end the scene here, since we already know what's going to happen, and the details of how Nyx is transported to the castle don't really matter that much. Celestia basically feeds Nyx some bullshit, telling her she needs to take her back to the castle to be examined by the royal doctor wakka chicka wokka chicka. This seems out of character for Celestia; she's usually pretty straightforward, and anyway she's supposed to be a monarch. It's a little beneath her dignity to stoop to this level of petty trickery just to get a child to obey her. Again, you the princess, bitch; act like it. Anyway, Nyx falls for it because she's retarded, but then on the way out she sees the look on Twilight's face, senses that something is up, changes her mind and resists, so Celestia drags her away by force, in a scene so hammed up it got this story banned in most Muslim countries.
Again, this entire sequence is completely unnecessary; it could have just ended with Celestia going into the kitchen to grab Nyx and we could have assumed the rest. If anything it's more effective to just end a scene like this on an ominous note and leave the rest to the reader's imagination. My suspicion though is that Peen Stroke instinctively senses that this scene doesn't quite have the emotional punch that it ought to, but instead of fixing what's wrong with it, he just patches it over by hamming up the drama and the pseudo-emotion. Nyx is wrenched away from Twilight as violently as possible, the tears and emotion are over the top. Even without the underlying structural issues I pointed out, this scene lacks punch anyway because of the mundane fact that as far as anyone knows so far Nyx is only going away for one night, so on top of everything else all this drama feels like it's basically for nothing anyway. The only reason the reader has to suspect that Nyx won't just be back at Twilight's by this time tomorrow is because we know that Spell Nexus is really trying to release Nyx's evil nature rather than just test it. However, neither Nyx nor Celestia nor Twilight would know this; hence there's no reason for them to behave this way. Nyx, maybe, since she's young and she doesn't know what's going on.
And I feel as if I would be remiss in my duties not to lob an appropriate amount of snark at the sub-chapter's ending line:
>It was then Nyx cried out with all the force and volume her small voice would allow.
>“MOMMY!!!”
Come on, dude. There's laying it on thick, and then there's just being ridiculous.
>>256605
Anyway, we rejoin Twilight as she dwindles off into the twilight realm of her own secret thoughts, sobbing and cutting herself and chugging Peter Vella and generally writhing in maternal agony. Fortunately, we don't have to listen to another ten page inner monologue about whether Nyx is or is not Nightmare Moon, as the matter seems to have finally been settled (you're merciful but still a faggot, Peen Stroke). However, just when you thought all the ridiculous over the top drama from the previous sub-chapter was over, it just...keeps on going.
Nyx's scream of "mommy" apparently snaps Twilight out of her gloomy reverie, and she suddenly decides to go chase after Celestia and take her symbolic daughter back by force. This action would have made far more sense had the conflict of the previous scene been handled the way I suggested, and left Twilight with the impression that Nyx is being taken away forever. As it stands, rushing to commit possible regicide against her mentor and liege, along with her contingent of royal guards, just to save Nyx from having to spend one night in Canterlot and undergo an examination is probably the most neurotic thing Twilight has done in this entire story, and that's honestly saying a lot. It's also worth noting that she apparently leaves Spike locked in the kitchen, and we don't hear anything more about him for the rest of the fucking chapter. Wait, I thought the kitchen was just sealed off by a spell that Celestia cast, which she probably would have taken down by now, and for that matter does the golden oak kitchen even have a door, and...oh, who even gives a shit at this point?
Anywho, she goes charging out the door, but oh no, the chariot is already flying away. She goes chasing after it, tries to teleport but fails for some reason or another (protip: at this point nobody is thinking about her teleportation powers and it's a fairly inconsistent ability anyway, even in the source material, so it's probably best to just not even bring it up here), lands facedown in the mud, and watches helplessly as it flies away. Naturally, she then bursts into even more tears than the tears she was already in from having burst into them before.
>It all came rushing in too fast. The realizations and heartaches filled Twilight to the brim. She couldn’t cry hard enough or fast enough; the pain was just too severe. In the end, it simply overwhelmed her, and she screamed. She cried out to the night with the loudest, most pain-filled voice that had ever escaped her lips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXNqEURmKtA
And oy vey, it just keeps going. Without even a moment's reprieve (seriously, with a scene this heavy it's usually better to break the tension with something before diving into another equally heavy scene, not sure what would work here, but there really ought to be at least one somewhat calmer scene before the spell takes place), we cut to Canterlot, where Celestia's chariot lands and Spell Nexus and his fruity little cult are waiting. Celestia, of course, is crying, because why the hell wouldn't anypony in this story not be crying.
>“No… no, I’m not,” Princess Celestia replied, trying to keep her composure but finding it difficult. “I just stole a filly away from her mother. If Nyx isn’t a threat, then what I’ve done is inexcusable.”
>“Such a task should not have fallen to one with a heart as tender as yours, Your Highness,” Nexus offered solemnly. “But, hopefully, you shall be able to return her to Twilight unharmed in the morning.”
>“No,” Celestia corrected, “the harm has already been done.”
Again, this reaction is way over the top for what is actually happening right now. If Nyx is going to be returned unharmed to Twilight in the morning, this was nothing but a mild inconvenience. There's a chance that she wont be, which I guess raises the stakes, but that's about as far as you can go with it. As I said before, if you want the scene to have this much emotional punch, it would have been far better to not even introduce the whole "it's just for one night" possibility in the first place. Just have Nexus inform Celestia that he can run a spell on Nyx to test whether or not she's evil, don't say how long it takes or give any sort of time frame at all. Then, have Celestia go to collect Nyx and chew out Twilight. Have the scene end with Nyx being dragged away, and as far as Twilight or Nyx or the reader knows, they are never going to see each other again. Then you have a heart-wrenching emotional scene if you want, because there is actually something heart-wrenching going on. As it stands, this is a pretty weak brew. I know what the author wants me to feel, but I don't feel it, because the level of emotion he's forcing is not proportional to what's actually happening. The fact that instead of correcting it, he just keeps trying harder and harder to make me feel without giving me a valid reason just makes it worse. Peen Stroke is using about 150% of his ass to try and make me feel here, and yet somehow he still manages to be half-assed about it. I didn't even know that was possible.
>“Please, my little pony… Please, let Twilight be right about you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u0wg3t6osM
Anyway, yada yada yada they do the spell. It goes about as you would expect: Nexus has Celestia pour all her magic into it, she just blindly trusts him even as he stands there snickering in the background, and then the light turns evil and the spell blows up, as Nexus stands there cackling in triumph.
>It was then, all too late, that Princess Celestia realized the treachery that thrived in her royal court.
Even without third-person omniscience literally anyone could have seen this coming like ten miles away. Seriously bitch, you suck at your job.
Anyway, we rejoin Twilight as she dwindles off into the twilight realm of her own secret thoughts, sobbing and cutting herself and chugging Peter Vella and generally writhing in maternal agony. Fortunately, we don't have to listen to another ten page inner monologue about whether Nyx is or is not Nightmare Moon, as the matter seems to have finally been settled (you're merciful but still a faggot, Peen Stroke). However, just when you thought all the ridiculous over the top drama from the previous sub-chapter was over, it just...keeps on going.
Nyx's scream of "mommy" apparently snaps Twilight out of her gloomy reverie, and she suddenly decides to go chase after Celestia and take her symbolic daughter back by force. This action would have made far more sense had the conflict of the previous scene been handled the way I suggested, and left Twilight with the impression that Nyx is being taken away forever. As it stands, rushing to commit possible regicide against her mentor and liege, along with her contingent of royal guards, just to save Nyx from having to spend one night in Canterlot and undergo an examination is probably the most neurotic thing Twilight has done in this entire story, and that's honestly saying a lot. It's also worth noting that she apparently leaves Spike locked in the kitchen, and we don't hear anything more about him for the rest of the fucking chapter. Wait, I thought the kitchen was just sealed off by a spell that Celestia cast, which she probably would have taken down by now, and for that matter does the golden oak kitchen even have a door, and...oh, who even gives a shit at this point?
Anywho, she goes charging out the door, but oh no, the chariot is already flying away. She goes chasing after it, tries to teleport but fails for some reason or another (protip: at this point nobody is thinking about her teleportation powers and it's a fairly inconsistent ability anyway, even in the source material, so it's probably best to just not even bring it up here), lands facedown in the mud, and watches helplessly as it flies away. Naturally, she then bursts into even more tears than the tears she was already in from having burst into them before.
>It all came rushing in too fast. The realizations and heartaches filled Twilight to the brim. She couldn’t cry hard enough or fast enough; the pain was just too severe. In the end, it simply overwhelmed her, and she screamed. She cried out to the night with the loudest, most pain-filled voice that had ever escaped her lips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXNqEURmKtA
And oy vey, it just keeps going. Without even a moment's reprieve (seriously, with a scene this heavy it's usually better to break the tension with something before diving into another equally heavy scene, not sure what would work here, but there really ought to be at least one somewhat calmer scene before the spell takes place), we cut to Canterlot, where Celestia's chariot lands and Spell Nexus and his fruity little cult are waiting. Celestia, of course, is crying, because why the hell wouldn't anypony in this story not be crying.
>“No… no, I’m not,” Princess Celestia replied, trying to keep her composure but finding it difficult. “I just stole a filly away from her mother. If Nyx isn’t a threat, then what I’ve done is inexcusable.”
>“Such a task should not have fallen to one with a heart as tender as yours, Your Highness,” Nexus offered solemnly. “But, hopefully, you shall be able to return her to Twilight unharmed in the morning.”
>“No,” Celestia corrected, “the harm has already been done.”
Again, this reaction is way over the top for what is actually happening right now. If Nyx is going to be returned unharmed to Twilight in the morning, this was nothing but a mild inconvenience. There's a chance that she wont be, which I guess raises the stakes, but that's about as far as you can go with it. As I said before, if you want the scene to have this much emotional punch, it would have been far better to not even introduce the whole "it's just for one night" possibility in the first place. Just have Nexus inform Celestia that he can run a spell on Nyx to test whether or not she's evil, don't say how long it takes or give any sort of time frame at all. Then, have Celestia go to collect Nyx and chew out Twilight. Have the scene end with Nyx being dragged away, and as far as Twilight or Nyx or the reader knows, they are never going to see each other again. Then you have a heart-wrenching emotional scene if you want, because there is actually something heart-wrenching going on. As it stands, this is a pretty weak brew. I know what the author wants me to feel, but I don't feel it, because the level of emotion he's forcing is not proportional to what's actually happening. The fact that instead of correcting it, he just keeps trying harder and harder to make me feel without giving me a valid reason just makes it worse. Peen Stroke is using about 150% of his ass to try and make me feel here, and yet somehow he still manages to be half-assed about it. I didn't even know that was possible.
>“Please, my little pony… Please, let Twilight be right about you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u0wg3t6osM
Anyway, yada yada yada they do the spell. It goes about as you would expect: Nexus has Celestia pour all her magic into it, she just blindly trusts him even as he stands there snickering in the background, and then the light turns evil and the spell blows up, as Nexus stands there cackling in triumph.
>It was then, all too late, that Princess Celestia realized the treachery that thrived in her royal court.
Even without third-person omniscience literally anyone could have seen this coming like ten miles away. Seriously bitch, you suck at your job.
File (): 0A4B1E3972152C930488D341D7BA9877-50657.jpg (49.5 KB, 532x364, 50122aa0ce53b.jpeg)
>>256608
And even though the chapter should have logically ended right then and there, the insanity keeps on going for another three subchapters.
For no good reason I can discern, Spell Nexus teleports the whole fucking ritual into the middle of Ponyville. The reason given in the text is that apparently the spell needs time to complete, and Nexus wants to ensure that Celestia and her guards and whatnot can't interfere. This makes enough sense I suppose, but why go to Ponyville of all places? It's pretty far away, if distance is a factor in what is probably a complex teleportation, and it's probably the first place Celestia would look if she were trying to find Nyx. There are literally thousands of locations, like, oh, I don't know, the middle of a remote forest or the top of a mountain or literally anywhere remote and unpopulated, that would make more sense for them to hide out than Ponyville, where the only other pony in Equestria who has a connection to Nyx and might try to interfere with their evil schemes lives.
In an even stupider development, Peen Stroke chooses this moment of all moments to reveal that the spy that Pinkie was chasing around two chapters ago was none other than Horte Cuisine, another irrelevant background pony that literally no one except the most turbo-autistic of bronies would know or give a shit about. Had Peen Stroke chosen to wait a little bit longer to drop the inevitable H-bomb on all of his story threads, the cute little sub-plot about Pinkie investigating the spy could have probably been milked for another couple of scenes, with Pinkie eventually discovering his identity anyway. But nope, it was totally essential that we all learn right here and now that the spy was actually some waiter pony who probably made one appearance in one scene in one episode and was never seen again. Glad we cleared up that mystery.
>“Should we be worried about the villagers?” Stonewall asked. He looked over his shoulder and took note of the crowd of ponies that was growing beyond the perimeter formed by the rest of the cult. The residents of the small community looked on in confusion, fear, and awe.
>“Our brothers and sisters will keep the crowd at bay, and Princess Celestia will not be able to follow us quickly enough to interfere,” Spell Nexus assured before smiling down at Nyx, who had already grown much larger. “Look, our queen is already at half the size she should be. We have nothing to fear. Nopony can stop us.”
Again, this makes no sense whatsoever. Why come here of all places? Now you have to worry about crowd control and the spell. However, as the next subchapter begins, we learn the reason that Nexus decided to come here: because Peen Stroke needed to set up a confrontation scene between nu-evil-Nyx and all of the ponies who up until earlier that afternoon had been her friends, but now she hates for some reason. Who gives a shit about logic or continuity when you've got a cool scene mapped out in your head, amirite Peen Stroke? Anyway, in the next subchapter Twilight feels the dread power of the magic, and sees the lightning flash, and blah blah blah. She runs to the scene just in time to see another giant lightning flash hit the center of the spell.
Switch camera to Nyx. Celestia apparently sedated her so she wouldn't have to listen to her crying and moaning all the way back to Canterlot (an ability I'm guessing most readers rather wish they had), and now she suddenly wakes up as a much taller, much powerfuler, much eviler poner. Naturally, the first thing she does is cackle madly like a psychopath.
>It was the laughter of somepony who had just realized a cruel and terrible truth.
>Nyx finally understood everything. She understood why she woke up in the Everfree Forest when she did. She understood why she had memories of fighting Twilight Sparkle. She understood why she was able to say those lines in that school play so well.
>She remembered what she was, who she was.
*sigh*. If this episode ever makes it to DVD, the commentary track will be nothing but the sound of writer/director Peen Stroke gobbling schlong after schlong after schlong.
Anyway, I would just like to take this moment to remind everyone that Nyx already knows all of this, and as such it is not much of a revelation. She knows what and who she is, she deduced it on her own weeks ago. She and Twilight had a long, emotional chat about it, and since then she would have had ample time to process the information. Since it didn't seem to affect her much in any of the scenes between then and now (despite it being the kind of revelation that would open up a Pandora's box of existential questions for nearly anyone, let alone a child), maybe she came down with a case of explosive amnesia and forgot, and now she's remembering again; who knows. Let's see what happens next.
Next we are presented with yet another reason that the cult chose Ponyville as the place to finish up their ceremony: in true edgelord style, Nyx now has the ability to wreak bloody revenge on everyone who was ever mean to her, which basically means Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon since everyone else has actually been quite nice to her. We have arrived at the point which should logically be the climax, and yet somehow it manages to be anticlimactic; nothing in the story so far really justifies the amount of anger she displays here. She literally talks about killing them. Sure, they were pretty awful to her in the beginning, but for the most part it seems to have ebbed off, and most of the recent events have just shown her as a normal happy kid living a normal happy kid life. I guess the thing in the woods was a bit traumatic for her and could have left some kind of lasting scar, and that is the specific event that gets referenced here, but still; overkill much?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-b89zcruko
And even though the chapter should have logically ended right then and there, the insanity keeps on going for another three subchapters.
For no good reason I can discern, Spell Nexus teleports the whole fucking ritual into the middle of Ponyville. The reason given in the text is that apparently the spell needs time to complete, and Nexus wants to ensure that Celestia and her guards and whatnot can't interfere. This makes enough sense I suppose, but why go to Ponyville of all places? It's pretty far away, if distance is a factor in what is probably a complex teleportation, and it's probably the first place Celestia would look if she were trying to find Nyx. There are literally thousands of locations, like, oh, I don't know, the middle of a remote forest or the top of a mountain or literally anywhere remote and unpopulated, that would make more sense for them to hide out than Ponyville, where the only other pony in Equestria who has a connection to Nyx and might try to interfere with their evil schemes lives.
In an even stupider development, Peen Stroke chooses this moment of all moments to reveal that the spy that Pinkie was chasing around two chapters ago was none other than Horte Cuisine, another irrelevant background pony that literally no one except the most turbo-autistic of bronies would know or give a shit about. Had Peen Stroke chosen to wait a little bit longer to drop the inevitable H-bomb on all of his story threads, the cute little sub-plot about Pinkie investigating the spy could have probably been milked for another couple of scenes, with Pinkie eventually discovering his identity anyway. But nope, it was totally essential that we all learn right here and now that the spy was actually some waiter pony who probably made one appearance in one scene in one episode and was never seen again. Glad we cleared up that mystery.
>“Should we be worried about the villagers?” Stonewall asked. He looked over his shoulder and took note of the crowd of ponies that was growing beyond the perimeter formed by the rest of the cult. The residents of the small community looked on in confusion, fear, and awe.
>“Our brothers and sisters will keep the crowd at bay, and Princess Celestia will not be able to follow us quickly enough to interfere,” Spell Nexus assured before smiling down at Nyx, who had already grown much larger. “Look, our queen is already at half the size she should be. We have nothing to fear. Nopony can stop us.”
Again, this makes no sense whatsoever. Why come here of all places? Now you have to worry about crowd control and the spell. However, as the next subchapter begins, we learn the reason that Nexus decided to come here: because Peen Stroke needed to set up a confrontation scene between nu-evil-Nyx and all of the ponies who up until earlier that afternoon had been her friends, but now she hates for some reason. Who gives a shit about logic or continuity when you've got a cool scene mapped out in your head, amirite Peen Stroke? Anyway, in the next subchapter Twilight feels the dread power of the magic, and sees the lightning flash, and blah blah blah. She runs to the scene just in time to see another giant lightning flash hit the center of the spell.
Switch camera to Nyx. Celestia apparently sedated her so she wouldn't have to listen to her crying and moaning all the way back to Canterlot (an ability I'm guessing most readers rather wish they had), and now she suddenly wakes up as a much taller, much powerfuler, much eviler poner. Naturally, the first thing she does is cackle madly like a psychopath.
>It was the laughter of somepony who had just realized a cruel and terrible truth.
>Nyx finally understood everything. She understood why she woke up in the Everfree Forest when she did. She understood why she had memories of fighting Twilight Sparkle. She understood why she was able to say those lines in that school play so well.
>She remembered what she was, who she was.
*sigh*. If this episode ever makes it to DVD, the commentary track will be nothing but the sound of writer/director Peen Stroke gobbling schlong after schlong after schlong.
Anyway, I would just like to take this moment to remind everyone that Nyx already knows all of this, and as such it is not much of a revelation. She knows what and who she is, she deduced it on her own weeks ago. She and Twilight had a long, emotional chat about it, and since then she would have had ample time to process the information. Since it didn't seem to affect her much in any of the scenes between then and now (despite it being the kind of revelation that would open up a Pandora's box of existential questions for nearly anyone, let alone a child), maybe she came down with a case of explosive amnesia and forgot, and now she's remembering again; who knows. Let's see what happens next.
Next we are presented with yet another reason that the cult chose Ponyville as the place to finish up their ceremony: in true edgelord style, Nyx now has the ability to wreak bloody revenge on everyone who was ever mean to her, which basically means Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon since everyone else has actually been quite nice to her. We have arrived at the point which should logically be the climax, and yet somehow it manages to be anticlimactic; nothing in the story so far really justifies the amount of anger she displays here. She literally talks about killing them. Sure, they were pretty awful to her in the beginning, but for the most part it seems to have ebbed off, and most of the recent events have just shown her as a normal happy kid living a normal happy kid life. I guess the thing in the woods was a bit traumatic for her and could have left some kind of lasting scar, and that is the specific event that gets referenced here, but still; overkill much?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-b89zcruko
>>256610
If they were going to include Nyx turning into NNM why not called the chapter, "The Revival." Also,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYxY1lgnqw
If they were going to include Nyx turning into NNM why not called the chapter, "The Revival." Also,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYxY1lgnqw
File (): 2AEACEB6DF8277B3C15CF3AB640610A8-16301.jpg (15.9 KB, 256x198, 2atd-1519257099-401766-medium.jpeg)
>>256610
>“Hello, Cheerilee, my teacher. Yes, I am no longer Nyx, but I’m sure you could tell all these ponies who I really am. After all, you saw the resemblance just as everypony else did. And was it not you who called me ‘wicked and dastardly’? Was that not why I was perfect for the part in your little spring play?”
What the shit, yo? What did Cheerilee ever do to her? I don't remember her ever calling Nyx 'wicked and dastardly.' I'd like to call attention to something I wrote in an earlier post ( >>254167 ), when Twilight was trying to cheer Nyx up by telling her all the nice things she did for Peewee that we never saw:
>An effectively told story brings the reader along on the character's journey. You feel what the character feels because you've experienced it alongside them. As it stands, we have witnessed absolutely no development of any relationship between Nyx and Peewee, so learning that Nyx apparently feeds him treats does nothing for us. The anecdote about her bringing him to school one day for show and tell would have probably made a good addition to the story, and could have replaced any number of uninteresting and pointless scenes; however it didn't, and so this little factoid means nothing to us.
This bit about Cheerilee seems to be the same kind of thing. Maybe it happened and I'm not remembering it, and if that's the case and someone can point to a place in the text where Cheerilee calls Nyx 'wicked and dastardly,' or anything to that effect, please call me out on it. However, I feel like once again something that happened 'off-camera' is being referenced, which again is a huge no-no. Any major event that has a serious effect on a character's development needs to be in the text somewhere, you can't just suddenly drop it on the reader out of nowhere and use it as a justification for whatever the character is doing in the present.
Even if it's something that happened in the distant past before the story started, it at least needs to have been mentioned or implied or referenced at least once prior to its being used as a character motivation. This is just Writing 101 shit here. In fact, it isn't even Writing 101; this is the kind of basic shit you're just expected to know, and if you don't know it you have to take remedial English for a year just to get into Writing 101. So far, Cheerilee has been written as a completely sympathetic character; maybe a little inept as a teacher sometimes, but generally good-hearted and well-intentioned. It makes no sense for Nyx to just attack her on this pretext. It's like if she were to suddenly turn around and say "oh yeah, also Rarity molested me after we had tea that one time back in Chapter Two, so now I'm going to atomize her for that even though there's been absolutely nothing in the story to hint at it or that would make anyone dislike her." If it's not in the text, it didn't happen.
Anyway, next she confronts Twilight. This at least was more or less set up properly. Although the scene where Celestia takes her away was handled poorly, we still saw Nyx being taken away by force, and Twilight not intervening. It's not unreasonable to assume that Nyx would not have understood what was happening other than that she was being separated from Twilight and Twilight was allowing it. A sense of betrayal is understandable here. However, there really hasn't been enough time elapsed between then and now for it to have sunken in that much; I still think there should have been some kind of intermediary events in between Nyx's being taken and NM's awakening.
>“Or are you here to apologize to me? To beg and grovel at my hooves? To admit that you were wrong to keep me in the dark? Or were you simply so desperate to care for a filly of your own that you didn’t want to believe the truth?”
kek. Looks like she saw through Twilight's neurotic Mommy complex.
Seriously though, even this doesn't make a ton of sense. Twilight really didn't keep her in the dark. She initially didn't tell her that she was Nightmare Moon of course, but when Nyx figured it out on her own Twilight was honest about it. Really, I'm still a little baffled by Peen Stroke's decision to even have Nyx realize her true identity in the first place. It happened way too early, it made the story complicated in ways I've already discussed, and he didn't even end up doing anything with it. Most of the characters have been behaving as if that conversation never took place. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just have her not figure it out at all?
Imagine this scenario: Celestia comes to take Nyx away. Nyx is scared shitless and doesn't know what's going on, she just knows that big scary ponies are here to take her away from Twilight forever, and Twilight is just standing there letting it happen. Betrayal hits her like a pineapple in the ponut. Then, later, she is locked up in a cage or something feeling hurt and alone, and some scary pony she's never met before (Spell Nexus) comes in and starts talking to her. He explains everything to her: the spell, her identity, all of it; full redpill, nothing held back. Now, Nyx realizes that not only did Twilight let her get taken away, she's been lying to her this whole time. A giant invisible mallet is now pounding that betrayal pineapple deeper and deeper. She feels rage and pain as she is led to the chamber where the spell is being cast. Then, when her true nature awakens, the rage takes over and consumes her. Boom; there you have it. You now have a bridge scene to put between Nyx's abduction and the spell, and a legit motivation for her to turn evil, all in one fell swoop. This is how you build a story; it's really not that hard. Seriously, Peen Stroke, do you have any interest in those remedial English courses? Registration is open.
>“Hello, Cheerilee, my teacher. Yes, I am no longer Nyx, but I’m sure you could tell all these ponies who I really am. After all, you saw the resemblance just as everypony else did. And was it not you who called me ‘wicked and dastardly’? Was that not why I was perfect for the part in your little spring play?”
What the shit, yo? What did Cheerilee ever do to her? I don't remember her ever calling Nyx 'wicked and dastardly.' I'd like to call attention to something I wrote in an earlier post ( >>254167 ), when Twilight was trying to cheer Nyx up by telling her all the nice things she did for Peewee that we never saw:
>An effectively told story brings the reader along on the character's journey. You feel what the character feels because you've experienced it alongside them. As it stands, we have witnessed absolutely no development of any relationship between Nyx and Peewee, so learning that Nyx apparently feeds him treats does nothing for us. The anecdote about her bringing him to school one day for show and tell would have probably made a good addition to the story, and could have replaced any number of uninteresting and pointless scenes; however it didn't, and so this little factoid means nothing to us.
This bit about Cheerilee seems to be the same kind of thing. Maybe it happened and I'm not remembering it, and if that's the case and someone can point to a place in the text where Cheerilee calls Nyx 'wicked and dastardly,' or anything to that effect, please call me out on it. However, I feel like once again something that happened 'off-camera' is being referenced, which again is a huge no-no. Any major event that has a serious effect on a character's development needs to be in the text somewhere, you can't just suddenly drop it on the reader out of nowhere and use it as a justification for whatever the character is doing in the present.
Even if it's something that happened in the distant past before the story started, it at least needs to have been mentioned or implied or referenced at least once prior to its being used as a character motivation. This is just Writing 101 shit here. In fact, it isn't even Writing 101; this is the kind of basic shit you're just expected to know, and if you don't know it you have to take remedial English for a year just to get into Writing 101. So far, Cheerilee has been written as a completely sympathetic character; maybe a little inept as a teacher sometimes, but generally good-hearted and well-intentioned. It makes no sense for Nyx to just attack her on this pretext. It's like if she were to suddenly turn around and say "oh yeah, also Rarity molested me after we had tea that one time back in Chapter Two, so now I'm going to atomize her for that even though there's been absolutely nothing in the story to hint at it or that would make anyone dislike her." If it's not in the text, it didn't happen.
Anyway, next she confronts Twilight. This at least was more or less set up properly. Although the scene where Celestia takes her away was handled poorly, we still saw Nyx being taken away by force, and Twilight not intervening. It's not unreasonable to assume that Nyx would not have understood what was happening other than that she was being separated from Twilight and Twilight was allowing it. A sense of betrayal is understandable here. However, there really hasn't been enough time elapsed between then and now for it to have sunken in that much; I still think there should have been some kind of intermediary events in between Nyx's being taken and NM's awakening.
>“Or are you here to apologize to me? To beg and grovel at my hooves? To admit that you were wrong to keep me in the dark? Or were you simply so desperate to care for a filly of your own that you didn’t want to believe the truth?”
kek. Looks like she saw through Twilight's neurotic Mommy complex.
Seriously though, even this doesn't make a ton of sense. Twilight really didn't keep her in the dark. She initially didn't tell her that she was Nightmare Moon of course, but when Nyx figured it out on her own Twilight was honest about it. Really, I'm still a little baffled by Peen Stroke's decision to even have Nyx realize her true identity in the first place. It happened way too early, it made the story complicated in ways I've already discussed, and he didn't even end up doing anything with it. Most of the characters have been behaving as if that conversation never took place. Wouldn't it have been simpler to just have her not figure it out at all?
Imagine this scenario: Celestia comes to take Nyx away. Nyx is scared shitless and doesn't know what's going on, she just knows that big scary ponies are here to take her away from Twilight forever, and Twilight is just standing there letting it happen. Betrayal hits her like a pineapple in the ponut. Then, later, she is locked up in a cage or something feeling hurt and alone, and some scary pony she's never met before (Spell Nexus) comes in and starts talking to her. He explains everything to her: the spell, her identity, all of it; full redpill, nothing held back. Now, Nyx realizes that not only did Twilight let her get taken away, she's been lying to her this whole time. A giant invisible mallet is now pounding that betrayal pineapple deeper and deeper. She feels rage and pain as she is led to the chamber where the spell is being cast. Then, when her true nature awakens, the rage takes over and consumes her. Boom; there you have it. You now have a bridge scene to put between Nyx's abduction and the spell, and a legit motivation for her to turn evil, all in one fell swoop. This is how you build a story; it's really not that hard. Seriously, Peen Stroke, do you have any interest in those remedial English courses? Registration is open.
>>256610
Son of a bitch, this really is a bad Naruto fanfiction.
The "Scene where elderly powerful ruler of village is 'forced' to take a child away from a good home and a traitor in his/her court is to blame for everything that ever went wrong" scene is stupid enough
But it even ends in a character being knocked out so a "Character actually tries to save kid, and finds it quite easy thanks to important characters always winning" scene can't happen!
I thought having Twilight not get knocked out was something comparatively original, but nope, Peen Sucker just decided he wanted to have Nyx get knocked out.
And now we get this "Naruto is taken over by the Kyubi so a mind-controlled evil Naruto can berate everyone in his shitty village for being a cunt to him. The will be an obligatory part where the Kyubi demo fox thing even says: I might be a demon but even I wouldn't be this cunty!" scene.
The child completely snaps, just like the authors of these fics often feel like doing.
You're probably sick of hearing me talk about Naruto by now, and I'm sick of bringing it up. But scene for scene, line for line, beat for fucking plot beat, this is a Naruto fanfiction template ripped off completely, and it fails.
Why does it fail?
Well obviously, this author is such a goddamn faggot.
But the other reason why this fails?
THE PONY WORLD IS NOT AN ANIME WORLD!
The pony world might be darker than its brightly-coloured bullshit seems, but it's absolutely nowhere near as dark as Naruto and shit like this Orphan Naruto cliche just doesn't belong in this setting.
There are no child soldiers in MLP.
That one gloomy child in MLP isn't gloomy because of a backstory that makes Neji Hyuga's backstory look tame.
Nobody in MLP is destined for a long and miserable and potentially-short career as a red shirt and murderer for hire due to being born without a magical superpower that puts them above the "standard" magical superpowers everyone has.
For god's sake it's a joke in my story that Silver considers his backstory to be tragic because by cartoonishly ideal pony world standards "I grew up without friends" is as tragic as it gets barring extreme circumstances!
This story's writer is like a faggot in a bakery.
Unwilling to put the effort in to bake anything, yet still wants cake.
Son of a bitch, this really is a bad Naruto fanfiction.
The "Scene where elderly powerful ruler of village is 'forced' to take a child away from a good home and a traitor in his/her court is to blame for everything that ever went wrong" scene is stupid enough
But it even ends in a character being knocked out so a "Character actually tries to save kid, and finds it quite easy thanks to important characters always winning" scene can't happen!
I thought having Twilight not get knocked out was something comparatively original, but nope, Peen Sucker just decided he wanted to have Nyx get knocked out.
And now we get this "Naruto is taken over by the Kyubi so a mind-controlled evil Naruto can berate everyone in his shitty village for being a cunt to him. The will be an obligatory part where the Kyubi demo fox thing even says: I might be a demon but even I wouldn't be this cunty!" scene.
The child completely snaps, just like the authors of these fics often feel like doing.
You're probably sick of hearing me talk about Naruto by now, and I'm sick of bringing it up. But scene for scene, line for line, beat for fucking plot beat, this is a Naruto fanfiction template ripped off completely, and it fails.
Why does it fail?
Well obviously, this author is such a goddamn faggot.
But the other reason why this fails?
THE PONY WORLD IS NOT AN ANIME WORLD!
The pony world might be darker than its brightly-coloured bullshit seems, but it's absolutely nowhere near as dark as Naruto and shit like this Orphan Naruto cliche just doesn't belong in this setting.
There are no child soldiers in MLP.
That one gloomy child in MLP isn't gloomy because of a backstory that makes Neji Hyuga's backstory look tame.
Nobody in MLP is destined for a long and miserable and potentially-short career as a red shirt and murderer for hire due to being born without a magical superpower that puts them above the "standard" magical superpowers everyone has.
For god's sake it's a joke in my story that Silver considers his backstory to be tragic because by cartoonishly ideal pony world standards "I grew up without friends" is as tragic as it gets barring extreme circumstances!
This story's writer is like a faggot in a bakery.
Unwilling to put the effort in to bake anything, yet still wants cake.
>>256616
We didn't get a scene where it's revealed that the Little Orphan's infamous love for a certain food (ramen noodles in naruto) actually has a dark secret behind it: literally nobody will sell him food without spitting in it or overcharging him, his comically shitty apartment building has no running water or gas or electric or anything beyond a microwave he was given for a birthday, and only a tiny ramen stand in the middle of nowhere treats kid Naruto with any respect.
We didn't get any scenes of the Little Orphan running for his life from a gang of angry drunken assholes who eventually catch him and beat him up just to give the writer's chosen favourite character an excuse to show up and save the orphan by kicking asshole ass and reminding them that "This is illegal, you know! If you don't stop beating up my son I will chop your arms off and have that scarred-scalp bloke from the Chunin Exams everyone forgot about torture you for years! He'll shove hot needles right in your fucking eyes!"
We didn't get any scenes of the Little Orphan talking to his inner darkness and struggling to hold it in, having no idea what's going on because the Ninja President made talking about Kyubi bullshit illegal and his psychologically fucked up murder preparedness training in child soldier school was sabotaged and he was taught everything ever wrong because everyone in the village wanted this child to be utterly unlikely to survive a life-threatening combat situation.
All of this is shit that happens in Little Orphan Naruto fics in an attempt to extract emotion out of the reader. And it's shit that just wouldn't fucking work in the pony world!
It says something that the naruto fandom considers "Naruto is a miserable orphan... but his Kyubi demon starts talking to him and giving him advice and raising him to be kewl!" to be more orginal. Even if it's only because what two authors consider a "cooler naruto" to be usually differ. I don't know what that says but it says something.
The writer reminds me of Rowling: Desperate to rip off popular things and sell them to audiences who've never seen them before, without knowing why they ever worked in the first place.
Here, let me predict the rest of the story:
A battle inside the mind of Nyx takes place. Good Nyx fights and defeats evil Nyx. Evil Nyx is defeated forever, leaving the good Nyx with all of her power.
The cultists are killed by Dark Nyx, or arrested by Celestia and sent to the dungeons because when Konoha citizens are bad in Naruto they got sent to Morino Ibiki's Torture and Interrogation Room. And the state's love of sending prickish civilians to torture gulags with the aid of the secret police for being mean to child soldiers is always treated as an overwhelmingly good thing because fuck dem stupid civilians they'd be dead without muh military. Also wow, I remembered his name this time.
The townsfolk who were mean to Nyx realize being bad is wrong, and they apologize for being pricks.
Nyx says "I must go now, my planet needs me" and becomes a wandering "badass" because the writer is out of ideas now that he's at the end of the template. He wants the story to end and thinks if "tomorrow, everyone woke up and an ordinary day happened" can be written in the next chapter then a new chapter must be written.
Normally this is where the Ninja President says "But child soldier, I want to use you!" and Naruto says "No I'm free now" and Ninja President says "I guess this truly is better for everyone, be free my sort-of adoptive grandson!"
Adoptive Parent says "I'm proud of you, my offspring! Go now, be free!"
and the writer completely fucking forgets about the realities of life as a travelling homeless superstrong ninja because fuck it the story needs to end somehow and he sacrificed the likability of Leaf Village already so Naruto staying here would be a sad end.
We didn't get a scene where it's revealed that the Little Orphan's infamous love for a certain food (ramen noodles in naruto) actually has a dark secret behind it: literally nobody will sell him food without spitting in it or overcharging him, his comically shitty apartment building has no running water or gas or electric or anything beyond a microwave he was given for a birthday, and only a tiny ramen stand in the middle of nowhere treats kid Naruto with any respect.
We didn't get any scenes of the Little Orphan running for his life from a gang of angry drunken assholes who eventually catch him and beat him up just to give the writer's chosen favourite character an excuse to show up and save the orphan by kicking asshole ass and reminding them that "This is illegal, you know! If you don't stop beating up my son I will chop your arms off and have that scarred-scalp bloke from the Chunin Exams everyone forgot about torture you for years! He'll shove hot needles right in your fucking eyes!"
We didn't get any scenes of the Little Orphan talking to his inner darkness and struggling to hold it in, having no idea what's going on because the Ninja President made talking about Kyubi bullshit illegal and his psychologically fucked up murder preparedness training in child soldier school was sabotaged and he was taught everything ever wrong because everyone in the village wanted this child to be utterly unlikely to survive a life-threatening combat situation.
All of this is shit that happens in Little Orphan Naruto fics in an attempt to extract emotion out of the reader. And it's shit that just wouldn't fucking work in the pony world!
It says something that the naruto fandom considers "Naruto is a miserable orphan... but his Kyubi demon starts talking to him and giving him advice and raising him to be kewl!" to be more orginal. Even if it's only because what two authors consider a "cooler naruto" to be usually differ. I don't know what that says but it says something.
The writer reminds me of Rowling: Desperate to rip off popular things and sell them to audiences who've never seen them before, without knowing why they ever worked in the first place.
Here, let me predict the rest of the story:
A battle inside the mind of Nyx takes place. Good Nyx fights and defeats evil Nyx. Evil Nyx is defeated forever, leaving the good Nyx with all of her power.
The cultists are killed by Dark Nyx, or arrested by Celestia and sent to the dungeons because when Konoha citizens are bad in Naruto they got sent to Morino Ibiki's Torture and Interrogation Room. And the state's love of sending prickish civilians to torture gulags with the aid of the secret police for being mean to child soldiers is always treated as an overwhelmingly good thing because fuck dem stupid civilians they'd be dead without muh military. Also wow, I remembered his name this time.
The townsfolk who were mean to Nyx realize being bad is wrong, and they apologize for being pricks.
Nyx says "I must go now, my planet needs me" and becomes a wandering "badass" because the writer is out of ideas now that he's at the end of the template. He wants the story to end and thinks if "tomorrow, everyone woke up and an ordinary day happened" can be written in the next chapter then a new chapter must be written.
Normally this is where the Ninja President says "But child soldier, I want to use you!" and Naruto says "No I'm free now" and Ninja President says "I guess this truly is better for everyone, be free my sort-of adoptive grandson!"
Adoptive Parent says "I'm proud of you, my offspring! Go now, be free!"
and the writer completely fucking forgets about the realities of life as a travelling homeless superstrong ninja because fuck it the story needs to end somehow and he sacrificed the likability of Leaf Village already so Naruto staying here would be a sad end.
>>256616
Also, "Twilight attempted to teleport but it didn't work for some reason"?
Yeah, and somehow Palpatine is back.
For fuck's sake if you're dead set on having her teleportation fail just have her be too emotional to focus on a spell.
Or she focuses on Nyx and tries to teleport, but because most memories were had elsewhere in ponyville or back at her home she teleports there instead of onto Celestia's sky-taxi.
Also, "Twilight attempted to teleport but it didn't work for some reason"?
Yeah, and somehow Palpatine is back.
For fuck's sake if you're dead set on having her teleportation fail just have her be too emotional to focus on a spell.
Or she focuses on Nyx and tries to teleport, but because most memories were had elsewhere in ponyville or back at her home she teleports there instead of onto Celestia's sky-taxi.
>>256614
ANYWAY, there's a little bit of emotional back and forth, her kind and gentle nature is clearly struggling against the influence of NM's personality and all that. This mostly falls flat since her motivation for turning evil in the first place is pretty flimsy. She's got a somewhat valid reason to be mad at Twilight, at least from a child's perspective, though I would still suggest to Peen Stroke (in the event he ever solicited my advice, I guess) that he apply the revisions I suggested to make it more solid. Beyond that, she's actually had a pretty happy life in Ponyville from what I've seen; she's been picked on a couple of times and she had a fight with her mommy a few hours ago, but beyond that she hasn't unduly suffered. It's not as if the town singled her out and persecuted her just for looking like Nightmare Moon; in fact most of the time it's hard to tell whether or not they even notice, which is funny considering how often the subject comes up. Once again, Peen Stroke is really stroking into overdrive trying to make the reader feel something, but there's just no reason for us to feel what he wants us to. I don't sympathize with Nyx at all here; she's basically shooting up the school because she had kind of a rough day.
The only real conclusion one can draw, in fact, is that most of this is just coming from the influence of the Nightmare Moon personality, which once again raises the philosophical question of what that is exactly. I'm sorry to keep harping on the subject, but more and more I'm beginning to suspect it may be at (or near) the core of what makes this story so spectacularly mediocre. This story is fundamentally about Nightmare Moon, but the author doesn't seem to have ever decided (or even thought about) who or what Nightmare Moon is at the deepest possible level. Here, she seems to be presented as kind of a generic spirit of hate and anger, that possesses an otherwise normal pony and transforms her into an evil version of herself. If that's the case, it makes this whole scene rather dull, because if I'm reading the situation correctly, Nyx is about to spend the next...Jesus Christ, ten more chapters...doing a lot of really bad things that she doesn't have any real motive to do. If the NM persona is making her do this, it's roughly the same as if she were on drugs or mentally ill; she can't really be held completely responsible for her actions. This annoys me because it basically lets her off the hook in advance for whatever she's going to do, like some kind of wacky Equestrian Papal indulgence. At the same time, according to this story's own canon, Nyx is Nightmare Moon, so...what then? She possessed herself? She was really evil all along? Maybe the spell supercharged her evil side and now she's all hopped up on some kind of magical PCP? she is black, after all :^) I'm not really sure how to interpret this, but more importantly, I can't really think of an excuse for it that makes it suck less.
Anyway, after Nyx gets done giving Twilight a proper tongue lashing wakka chicka wokka chicka, Spell Nexus and his little circlejerk step up and give her a lot of obsequious "allow us to escort you to your palace, my queen" type bullshit. She goes off with them, just as Celestia and Luna show up. That's pretty much the end of the chapter.
wew lad, that was a whole lot of concentrated autism. I think I need to go lie down for a while. Stay tuned, we will continue with chapter 11...soon, I think.
ANYWAY, there's a little bit of emotional back and forth, her kind and gentle nature is clearly struggling against the influence of NM's personality and all that. This mostly falls flat since her motivation for turning evil in the first place is pretty flimsy. She's got a somewhat valid reason to be mad at Twilight, at least from a child's perspective, though I would still suggest to Peen Stroke (in the event he ever solicited my advice, I guess) that he apply the revisions I suggested to make it more solid. Beyond that, she's actually had a pretty happy life in Ponyville from what I've seen; she's been picked on a couple of times and she had a fight with her mommy a few hours ago, but beyond that she hasn't unduly suffered. It's not as if the town singled her out and persecuted her just for looking like Nightmare Moon; in fact most of the time it's hard to tell whether or not they even notice, which is funny considering how often the subject comes up. Once again, Peen Stroke is really stroking into overdrive trying to make the reader feel something, but there's just no reason for us to feel what he wants us to. I don't sympathize with Nyx at all here; she's basically shooting up the school because she had kind of a rough day.
The only real conclusion one can draw, in fact, is that most of this is just coming from the influence of the Nightmare Moon personality, which once again raises the philosophical question of what that is exactly. I'm sorry to keep harping on the subject, but more and more I'm beginning to suspect it may be at (or near) the core of what makes this story so spectacularly mediocre. This story is fundamentally about Nightmare Moon, but the author doesn't seem to have ever decided (or even thought about) who or what Nightmare Moon is at the deepest possible level. Here, she seems to be presented as kind of a generic spirit of hate and anger, that possesses an otherwise normal pony and transforms her into an evil version of herself. If that's the case, it makes this whole scene rather dull, because if I'm reading the situation correctly, Nyx is about to spend the next...Jesus Christ, ten more chapters...doing a lot of really bad things that she doesn't have any real motive to do. If the NM persona is making her do this, it's roughly the same as if she were on drugs or mentally ill; she can't really be held completely responsible for her actions. This annoys me because it basically lets her off the hook in advance for whatever she's going to do, like some kind of wacky Equestrian Papal indulgence. At the same time, according to this story's own canon, Nyx is Nightmare Moon, so...what then? She possessed herself? She was really evil all along? Maybe the spell supercharged her evil side and now she's all hopped up on some kind of magical PCP? she is black, after all :^) I'm not really sure how to interpret this, but more importantly, I can't really think of an excuse for it that makes it suck less.
Anyway, after Nyx gets done giving Twilight a proper tongue lashing wakka chicka wokka chicka, Spell Nexus and his little circlejerk step up and give her a lot of obsequious "allow us to escort you to your palace, my queen" type bullshit. She goes off with them, just as Celestia and Luna show up. That's pretty much the end of the chapter.
wew lad, that was a whole lot of concentrated autism. I think I need to go lie down for a while. Stay tuned, we will continue with chapter 11...soon, I think.
>>256619
Holy shit that's a lot of posts in a short while. How many are you gonna do today?
Ugh, fucking lust my greatest sin. Though, I could not resist the temptation of making that joke.
Holy shit that's a lot of posts in a short while. How many are you gonna do today?
Ugh, fucking lust my greatest sin. Though, I could not resist the temptation of making that joke.
>>256622
That's a dump of like a week's worth of posts. I've been writing them up on my breaks at work and saving them to post later. Shitting on Peen Stroke is actually a pretty good stress reliever. I was originally going to space them out over a few days but I wound up dumping them all yesterday.
That's a dump of like a week's worth of posts. I've been writing them up on my breaks at work and saving them to post later. Shitting on Peen Stroke is actually a pretty good stress reliever. I was originally going to space them out over a few days but I wound up dumping them all yesterday.
>>256587
Tanks.
>>249783
I will watch the entire video of it when I have time. I'm sorry I was so agressive. I while I still am unsure of him, I think I should been more open minded to your points.
Are you still here? Cause I do like your input. You and I share some similarities I have notices by inspecting your posts so I hope that you are still lurking on this thread and that I didn't push you away.
>>256601
I will take this in parts since i have things to say but there are lot of posts and therefore a lot of things to say but not enough time.
>>256601
>>256602
I mostly agree if not totally with your points in these posts about Celestia's and Twilight's conversation. I feel there is something off with it though that I can't put my finger on yet so I will hold off on that. It might just be my imagination.
Anyway, I would like to bring forth an issue that I has been bugging me throughout this review but that I couldn't place what the problem was for most of the while. But now I know. As I don't know the script, you might correct me on this and give me some insight how correct my issue is for this story.
My issue is this: Why is Twilight so uncommitted? It doesn't make sense to me? It ties into Twilight repeating to herself if Nyx might be nightmare moon or not but even later when it is clear for Twilight that she is, it becomes even more annoying.
If Nyx is nightmare moon, what will Celestia do to her? If it is obvious that she will be sent to the moon, the nwouldn't be obvious that what you are doing, Twilight my dear, is high treason? Shouldn't you be more paranoid about this then. I mean shouldn't you either tell Celestia immediately about Nyx if you don't think she is so heartless (you know what i mean) to banish a filly to the moon? Aren't you and Celestia close? Should you be able to tell how Celestia would act? Maybe not, but then commit to either idea?
If Nyx is nightmare Moon then she is literally a threat to the entirety of Equestria, she was last time anyway. Twilight might actually be sentenced to death along with Nyx for this. Twilight, why if you decided to prrotect Nyx, live out your dream of being a mother and you realize that this is high treason, are you not going full, "There's a fake bottom in this drawer and should it a tampered with, it will ignite a fire and all the evidence will be destoryed and ontop of that I keep a diary as a dummy." You are suppose to be a clever pony. Your nevrotic mommy motivations aside. Twilight should have been constatnly worried about who knows what about Nyx and how much Clestia knows. After Celestia saw Nyx in the play (she should obviously not been in that play), she should have gone into hyperparanoia mode. She should also have connected the dots about the cult that had been in the same place as she found Nyx. Also, she might actually want to track them down if anything, to gain infor about them. And she should always have a packed bags in her home, ready to flee the country. In fact, when she saw the chariot, (well, at that point it might be pointless and better to show ones loyalty in the end) she should have tried to run for it with Nyx, if she would be ready to do anything for Nyx's survival.
Instead, she just lives out her mother fantasy, while the clock is ticking.
Tanks.
>>249783
I will watch the entire video of it when I have time. I'm sorry I was so agressive. I while I still am unsure of him, I think I should been more open minded to your points.
Are you still here? Cause I do like your input. You and I share some similarities I have notices by inspecting your posts so I hope that you are still lurking on this thread and that I didn't push you away.
>>256601
I will take this in parts since i have things to say but there are lot of posts and therefore a lot of things to say but not enough time.
>>256601
>>256602
I mostly agree if not totally with your points in these posts about Celestia's and Twilight's conversation. I feel there is something off with it though that I can't put my finger on yet so I will hold off on that. It might just be my imagination.
Anyway, I would like to bring forth an issue that I has been bugging me throughout this review but that I couldn't place what the problem was for most of the while. But now I know. As I don't know the script, you might correct me on this and give me some insight how correct my issue is for this story.
My issue is this: Why is Twilight so uncommitted? It doesn't make sense to me? It ties into Twilight repeating to herself if Nyx might be nightmare moon or not but even later when it is clear for Twilight that she is, it becomes even more annoying.
If Nyx is nightmare moon, what will Celestia do to her? If it is obvious that she will be sent to the moon, the nwouldn't be obvious that what you are doing, Twilight my dear, is high treason? Shouldn't you be more paranoid about this then. I mean shouldn't you either tell Celestia immediately about Nyx if you don't think she is so heartless (you know what i mean) to banish a filly to the moon? Aren't you and Celestia close? Should you be able to tell how Celestia would act? Maybe not, but then commit to either idea?
If Nyx is nightmare Moon then she is literally a threat to the entirety of Equestria, she was last time anyway. Twilight might actually be sentenced to death along with Nyx for this. Twilight, why if you decided to prrotect Nyx, live out your dream of being a mother and you realize that this is high treason, are you not going full, "There's a fake bottom in this drawer and should it a tampered with, it will ignite a fire and all the evidence will be destoryed and ontop of that I keep a diary as a dummy." You are suppose to be a clever pony. Your nevrotic mommy motivations aside. Twilight should have been constatnly worried about who knows what about Nyx and how much Clestia knows. After Celestia saw Nyx in the play (she should obviously not been in that play), she should have gone into hyperparanoia mode. She should also have connected the dots about the cult that had been in the same place as she found Nyx. Also, she might actually want to track them down if anything, to gain infor about them. And she should always have a packed bags in her home, ready to flee the country. In fact, when she saw the chariot, (well, at that point it might be pointless and better to show ones loyalty in the end) she should have tried to run for it with Nyx, if she would be ready to do anything for Nyx's survival.
Instead, she just lives out her mother fantasy, while the clock is ticking.
>>257660
>My issue is this: Why is Twilight so uncommitted? It doesn't make sense to me? It ties into Twilight repeating to herself if Nyx might be nightmare moon or not but even later when it is clear for Twilight that she is, it becomes even more annoying.
Short answer is: bad writing. Now, here's the long answer.
It's fairly obvious what Peen Stroke is attempting to do with Twilight here, the problem is that it's very poorly executed. By having her constantly waffling back and forth between "Is Nyx Nightmare Moon?" and "Nyx is such a cute wittle filly and I wuv her so much", he's trying to show that she is emotionally conflicted. She's torn between her own feelings and what she perceives as her social duty. On the one hand (hoof, whatever) her rational mind tells her that this filly bears a more than passing resemblance to Nightmare Moon and her origins are suspect; therefore she should do the dutiful thing and turn her over to Princess Celestia. However, she develops maternal feelings for Nyx and instinctively wants to protect her from harm. This creates an inner conflict because if she does the socially correct thing and turns Nyx over to the Princess, she throws her symbolic daughter to the wolves; but if she follows her heart and protects Nyx from Celestia, she not only betrays her duty but is potentially endangering all of Equestria. Nyx and Nightmare Moon are essentially two different souls in the same being; Nyx is blameless whereas Nightmare Moon is not. You can't condemn Nightmare Moon without sacrificing Nyx, and if you save Nyx then Nightmare Moon goes free. Wat do?
As far as conflicts go it's actually a pretty good one, and as I've said before this story could actually have been quite good if it had been developed better. Peen Stroke's problem is that he doesn't know how to write what he's trying to write. He expresses this conflict almost entirely through Twilight's own inner monologue, which just has her repeating the same question over and over again. As you've pointed out, it becomes even more absurd once the answer is made obvious. I suspect that by having her keep meditating on the subject well past the point where it's obvious that Nyx is Nightmare Moon, he's trying to show that Twilight is at least partially in denial about it; however, it just comes across as annoying and nonsensical. It's also unconvincing because on the other hand we have "Mommy Twilight," who is constantly showering Nyx with love and affection and behaving as if Nyx were just a normal filly and never seems to worry about Nightmare Moon. Rather than coming across as conflicted, Twilight seems to have a split personality, where the two halves are aware of each other but never interact.
>If Nyx is nightmare moon, what will Celestia do to her? If it is obvious that she will be sent to the moon, the nwouldn't be obvious that what you are doing, Twilight my dear, is high treason? Shouldn't you be more paranoid about this then. I mean shouldn't you either tell Celestia immediately about Nyx if you don't think she is so heartless (you know what i mean) to banish a filly to the moon? Aren't you and Celestia close? Should you be able to tell how Celestia would act? Maybe not, but then commit to either idea?
Yeah, I find this to be a little vague as well, which sort of ties into my complaints about the way the Celestia/Twilight confrontation is handled. We're never quite sure what exactly Celestia is going to do about Nyx, so we don't know if she's really in danger or if Twilight is just overreacting. I think Peen Stroke's reasoning here was that Twilight doesn't know either, her autism just causes her to think up wacky extreme scenarios. However, when she is constantly sperging to herself about Celestia sending Nyx to the moon, we're never quite sure if we're supposed to take this as hyperbole or not. Even when Celestia is dragging Nyx away in her chariot and the forced emotion is dialed up way past eleven, it's never made clear whether or not Nyx is even in any real danger, so the emotional impact is severely blunted.
>If Nyx is nightmare Moon then she is literally a threat to the entirety of Equestria, she was last time anyway. Twilight might actually be sentenced to death along with Nyx for this. Twilight, why if you decided to prrotect Nyx, live out your dream of being a mother and you realize that this is high treason, are you not going full, "There's a fake bottom in this drawer and should it a tampered with, it will ignite a fire and all the evidence will be destoryed and ontop of that I keep a diary as a dummy."
This too. Twilight's cover story for Nyx is incredibly flimsy, and it stands to reason she would have thought up a better one, or at least worked out some of the details in case it was investigated. Her actions in this story don't always make a ton of sense. Probably a better way to handle this would have been to think up an airtight, Twilight-esque cover story for Nyx that has every contingency planned for, and then just have her get discovered either by accident (ie overuse of magic) or by some incidental, minor thing that Twilight overlooked (ie not something major and obvious, like the fact that Twilight doesn't have any cousins and Celestia, who has access to genealogical records and also knows Twilight's family, was just expected not to know this or to "just forget").
Actually, the Light Yagami angle that you seem to be hinting at here could have made for a funny subplot; having Twilight constantly scheming and obsessing and weaving lies upon lies to keep Nyx's identity a secret.
>My issue is this: Why is Twilight so uncommitted? It doesn't make sense to me? It ties into Twilight repeating to herself if Nyx might be nightmare moon or not but even later when it is clear for Twilight that she is, it becomes even more annoying.
Short answer is: bad writing. Now, here's the long answer.
It's fairly obvious what Peen Stroke is attempting to do with Twilight here, the problem is that it's very poorly executed. By having her constantly waffling back and forth between "Is Nyx Nightmare Moon?" and "Nyx is such a cute wittle filly and I wuv her so much", he's trying to show that she is emotionally conflicted. She's torn between her own feelings and what she perceives as her social duty. On the one hand (hoof, whatever) her rational mind tells her that this filly bears a more than passing resemblance to Nightmare Moon and her origins are suspect; therefore she should do the dutiful thing and turn her over to Princess Celestia. However, she develops maternal feelings for Nyx and instinctively wants to protect her from harm. This creates an inner conflict because if she does the socially correct thing and turns Nyx over to the Princess, she throws her symbolic daughter to the wolves; but if she follows her heart and protects Nyx from Celestia, she not only betrays her duty but is potentially endangering all of Equestria. Nyx and Nightmare Moon are essentially two different souls in the same being; Nyx is blameless whereas Nightmare Moon is not. You can't condemn Nightmare Moon without sacrificing Nyx, and if you save Nyx then Nightmare Moon goes free. Wat do?
As far as conflicts go it's actually a pretty good one, and as I've said before this story could actually have been quite good if it had been developed better. Peen Stroke's problem is that he doesn't know how to write what he's trying to write. He expresses this conflict almost entirely through Twilight's own inner monologue, which just has her repeating the same question over and over again. As you've pointed out, it becomes even more absurd once the answer is made obvious. I suspect that by having her keep meditating on the subject well past the point where it's obvious that Nyx is Nightmare Moon, he's trying to show that Twilight is at least partially in denial about it; however, it just comes across as annoying and nonsensical. It's also unconvincing because on the other hand we have "Mommy Twilight," who is constantly showering Nyx with love and affection and behaving as if Nyx were just a normal filly and never seems to worry about Nightmare Moon. Rather than coming across as conflicted, Twilight seems to have a split personality, where the two halves are aware of each other but never interact.
>If Nyx is nightmare moon, what will Celestia do to her? If it is obvious that she will be sent to the moon, the nwouldn't be obvious that what you are doing, Twilight my dear, is high treason? Shouldn't you be more paranoid about this then. I mean shouldn't you either tell Celestia immediately about Nyx if you don't think she is so heartless (you know what i mean) to banish a filly to the moon? Aren't you and Celestia close? Should you be able to tell how Celestia would act? Maybe not, but then commit to either idea?
Yeah, I find this to be a little vague as well, which sort of ties into my complaints about the way the Celestia/Twilight confrontation is handled. We're never quite sure what exactly Celestia is going to do about Nyx, so we don't know if she's really in danger or if Twilight is just overreacting. I think Peen Stroke's reasoning here was that Twilight doesn't know either, her autism just causes her to think up wacky extreme scenarios. However, when she is constantly sperging to herself about Celestia sending Nyx to the moon, we're never quite sure if we're supposed to take this as hyperbole or not. Even when Celestia is dragging Nyx away in her chariot and the forced emotion is dialed up way past eleven, it's never made clear whether or not Nyx is even in any real danger, so the emotional impact is severely blunted.
>If Nyx is nightmare Moon then she is literally a threat to the entirety of Equestria, she was last time anyway. Twilight might actually be sentenced to death along with Nyx for this. Twilight, why if you decided to prrotect Nyx, live out your dream of being a mother and you realize that this is high treason, are you not going full, "There's a fake bottom in this drawer and should it a tampered with, it will ignite a fire and all the evidence will be destoryed and ontop of that I keep a diary as a dummy."
This too. Twilight's cover story for Nyx is incredibly flimsy, and it stands to reason she would have thought up a better one, or at least worked out some of the details in case it was investigated. Her actions in this story don't always make a ton of sense. Probably a better way to handle this would have been to think up an airtight, Twilight-esque cover story for Nyx that has every contingency planned for, and then just have her get discovered either by accident (ie overuse of magic) or by some incidental, minor thing that Twilight overlooked (ie not something major and obvious, like the fact that Twilight doesn't have any cousins and Celestia, who has access to genealogical records and also knows Twilight's family, was just expected not to know this or to "just forget").
Actually, the Light Yagami angle that you seem to be hinting at here could have made for a funny subplot; having Twilight constantly scheming and obsessing and weaving lies upon lies to keep Nyx's identity a secret.
File (): C39A6E59FDF2ACEEED544AD8DC506B2B-633707.png (618.9 KB, 799x708, 1418206887836.png)
>>257828
Except for the obvious fact that nigger microdickstroke never reaches a competent enough writing level which would allow Twaslut to perform any of those actions with even the slimmest character changes to allow her a different attitude. The entire """story""" is a hamfisted power fantasy that self-satisfies the writer's cuckold nature: microdickstroke has no talent. He is a pseudo-'brony' furfag whom has nothing more than a pathetically obvious "!!b-b-b-b-ut m-m-muh w-waifu!!" attitude. He could not salvage his incoherent """story""" after 10 rewrites.
Except for the obvious fact that nigger microdickstroke never reaches a competent enough writing level which would allow Twaslut to perform any of those actions with even the slimmest character changes to allow her a different attitude. The entire """story""" is a hamfisted power fantasy that self-satisfies the writer's cuckold nature: microdickstroke has no talent. He is a pseudo-'brony' furfag whom has nothing more than a pathetically obvious "!!b-b-b-b-ut m-m-muh w-waifu!!" attitude. He could not salvage his incoherent """story""" after 10 rewrites.
>>256695
Don't feel pressured to release these steadily, broken up by sections of people discussing them. You can dump shitloads of posts in a row and we'll read them all.
>>249769
Yeah, you get it!
Imagine there's an episode where some Extreme Motorbike Racer shows up and becomes Rainbow Dash's friend. Rad Racer's the name.
But it's an early-season episode so instead of jarringly driving cars they're riding on magical creatures.
And this person is "Extreme!", the kind of loud person who has tons of scars and will show you each one while telling you the wacky story behind every crash that caused each one in extreme detail.
Twilight might find animal-riding to be interesting on an intellectual level, but while I could see her swooning over the internal mechanisms of a car, I can't see her or Fluttershy swooning over trained animals.
She'd probably call this cruel and exploitative, giving the writers a chance to make characters to say "No, Dragon Riders love their Dragons! The bond between Man and Pikachu is a good one."
I can't see Rarity finding scar stories interesting, or enjoying it when Rad Racer shoves her scarred butt into Rarity's face in front of fancy ponies while saying "And this one's from the time I tried to jump the eifel tower! I didn't make it, and I got stuck on top of it for hours!".
And Pinkie? Rad Racer's fun at parties but letting a bull into a china shop is a better idea than trying to bake with this girl.
There are interesting character interactions here because Rad Racer has character.
All these generic "Anon" humans, sad mopey humans with the rough edges filed off? They're nothing. Ponies are nice to them and they might be nice back. Or ponies are cruel to them and only a handful of ponies are good.
The story is so artificial. There isn't a drive here, you don't get the sense that someone WANTED to write this, just that he knew it'd either get popular or avoid triggering people like something riskier and more original would.
>remember, reddit crowd!
>Pony OCs bad, human good!
>If a character's backstory is even slightly less-than-ideal it's edgey and bad, but if a dragon/halfdragon is cynical and edgy thanks to ponyland treating her wrong then it's good!
>female characters good because I want to stick my dick in them, male characters bad unless they're exactly like me, because if they're not exactly like me then they compete with me in my fantasies for fantasy mare pusspuss!
The Brony fandom is full of faggots and that's why cocksucking gigafaggots like this author get so popular and remain so "Beloved" by all.
Don't feel pressured to release these steadily, broken up by sections of people discussing them. You can dump shitloads of posts in a row and we'll read them all.
>>249769
Yeah, you get it!
Imagine there's an episode where some Extreme Motorbike Racer shows up and becomes Rainbow Dash's friend. Rad Racer's the name.
But it's an early-season episode so instead of jarringly driving cars they're riding on magical creatures.
And this person is "Extreme!", the kind of loud person who has tons of scars and will show you each one while telling you the wacky story behind every crash that caused each one in extreme detail.
Twilight might find animal-riding to be interesting on an intellectual level, but while I could see her swooning over the internal mechanisms of a car, I can't see her or Fluttershy swooning over trained animals.
She'd probably call this cruel and exploitative, giving the writers a chance to make characters to say "No, Dragon Riders love their Dragons! The bond between Man and Pikachu is a good one."
I can't see Rarity finding scar stories interesting, or enjoying it when Rad Racer shoves her scarred butt into Rarity's face in front of fancy ponies while saying "And this one's from the time I tried to jump the eifel tower! I didn't make it, and I got stuck on top of it for hours!".
And Pinkie? Rad Racer's fun at parties but letting a bull into a china shop is a better idea than trying to bake with this girl.
There are interesting character interactions here because Rad Racer has character.
All these generic "Anon" humans, sad mopey humans with the rough edges filed off? They're nothing. Ponies are nice to them and they might be nice back. Or ponies are cruel to them and only a handful of ponies are good.
The story is so artificial. There isn't a drive here, you don't get the sense that someone WANTED to write this, just that he knew it'd either get popular or avoid triggering people like something riskier and more original would.
>remember, reddit crowd!
>Pony OCs bad, human good!
>If a character's backstory is even slightly less-than-ideal it's edgey and bad, but if a dragon/halfdragon is cynical and edgy thanks to ponyland treating her wrong then it's good!
>female characters good because I want to stick my dick in them, male characters bad unless they're exactly like me, because if they're not exactly like me then they compete with me in my fantasies for fantasy mare pusspuss!
The Brony fandom is full of faggots and that's why cocksucking gigafaggots like this author get so popular and remain so "Beloved" by all.
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>>256619
Chapter 11: The Castle of 10,000 Cocks
>Princess Celestia’s worst fears had come true. Nyx had become Nightmare Moon, and she had been the one to deliver her to those who would complete the transformation.
Was that Celestia's worst fear? She really hasn't been in the story all that much so far, and in the parts where she has appeared, she's mostly been portrayed as wishy-washy and indecisive.
>Yet that impossibility had become a reality. Spell Nexus had betrayed her, but, before Princess Celestia could try to figure out why, she was drawn from her thoughts. The doors to the throne room opened, and Celestia couldn’t help but look to see who had entered the room. She didn’t think her generals could have arrived so quickly, and they hadn’t. The pony that was now striding across the room, moving with purpose in each step, was her sister, Luna.
This paragraph is just pure stream of consciousness writing. It's fine for a first draft, but this is an example of the kind of thing you're supposed to clean up during revision. I mean, look at some of this shit:
>The doors to the throne room opened, and Celestia couldn't help but look to see who had entered the room.
Is this seriously the best way you could think of to word this, Mr. P? To say that she couldn't help but look suggests that she was unnaturally compelled to look, which is stupid because looking up when someone opens a door is a pretty natural thing to do.
>She didn’t think her generals could have arrived so quickly, and they hadn’t.
This sentence is stupid and unnecessary. When someone enters a room, we don't need to know who it wasn't. Declaring the identity of who entered by extension eliminates all other possible suspects. For instance, you don't need to tell us that it wasn't Batman kicking down the door to inform Celestia that he lieks chocolate milk.
>The pony that was now striding across the room, moving with purpose in each step, was her sister, Luna.
This is an unnecessarily verbose way to explain what's happening.
Jesus H. Christ. I don't want to fall back into my habit of greentext-nitpicking the entire text line by line, but this scene really is horrendously written. Among other things, the dialogue is pure cringe. For example:
>Celestia rose from the throne and walked to meet her. “Luna, I’m surprised you were able to return so quickly. Have you already finished interviewing the residents of Ponyville?”
>Luna did not reciprocate the warm welcome her sister offered. She instead glared at Celestia with hard eyes and a deep frown. “I delegated the task to a number of guards, because there is only one pony I want to talk to at the moment: You. What have you been hiding from me?”
For one thing, interviewing witnesses is basically just routine police work. Luna is the Princess, or Vice-Princess or whatever, of Equestria; this kind of garbage detail is obviously well beneath her rank and it's implausible that Celestia would even be audacious enough to assign it in the first place. Second of all, it's implied through the exchange that follows that Luna was kept in the dark about the whole Nightmare Moon cult thing, and presumably Celestia is still trying to keep it from her by giving her this dumb assignment. However, if she were to interview the townsponies, she'd learn the truth fairly quickly anyway.
Also, the spoken dialogue here reads quite poorly. I remember making the observation during the play scene that Luna's spoken parts are rather stiff and awkward, and this continues here. For the most part the other canon characters are written well enough, at least in terms of their speech, but for some reason the two royal sisters both come across as wooden. Maybe it's the Royal Canterlot dialect; writing overly formal speech in a way that still conveys familiarity can be tricky. But mostly it's just bad dialogue. For example, here's this gem:
>The Elements of Harmony are not a force of destruction. They could only separate you from the power and jealousy that once possessed you. They peeled Nightmare Moon off of you and left behind the tattered shreds like discarded fruit peels.
And the award for worst simile of 2012 goes to...
Anyway, as this scene unfolds, the more I question the wisdom of even including it in the first place. Mostly what happens here is an exchange between Celestia and Luna, which as far as I can tell was written to clear up some of the confusion about the resurrection of NM. It seems that some of the questions that occurred to me earlier, ie what exactly is NM in the first place and how exactly could she be resurrected if she was just part of Luna's mind, probably occurred to Peen Stroke after he'd already written two thirds of the book, and he inserted this scene to try and explain some of it after the fact. However, rather than clearing things up, it just calls attention to how implausible the premise is to begin with. This is part of the reason why you should really work out these sorts of details in the story planning stage.
I will give Peen Stroke credit for at least attempting to address the bizarre philosophical implications of all of this. Consider this line of Luna's:
>"No, that can’t have been enough. A body could be formed of such magic, and perhaps a mind, but that would not be enough. For Nightmare Moon to exist once more, she would need to possess her own—"
She stops just short of saying it, but basically she's implying that any entity summoned by this sort of process would need to possess its own soul or life force in order to exist as an individual. Celestia cuts her off, probably because she realizes this would mean Nyx is her own person (pony, whatever), rather than just a crystallization of Luna's NM persona. This further reinforces the story's central theme of original sin, and returns focus to Nyx's conflict between herself and her past. So, good job there, Mr. P. Today you were only mostly a faggot.
Chapter 11: The Castle of 10,000 Cocks
>Princess Celestia’s worst fears had come true. Nyx had become Nightmare Moon, and she had been the one to deliver her to those who would complete the transformation.
Was that Celestia's worst fear? She really hasn't been in the story all that much so far, and in the parts where she has appeared, she's mostly been portrayed as wishy-washy and indecisive.
>Yet that impossibility had become a reality. Spell Nexus had betrayed her, but, before Princess Celestia could try to figure out why, she was drawn from her thoughts. The doors to the throne room opened, and Celestia couldn’t help but look to see who had entered the room. She didn’t think her generals could have arrived so quickly, and they hadn’t. The pony that was now striding across the room, moving with purpose in each step, was her sister, Luna.
This paragraph is just pure stream of consciousness writing. It's fine for a first draft, but this is an example of the kind of thing you're supposed to clean up during revision. I mean, look at some of this shit:
>The doors to the throne room opened, and Celestia couldn't help but look to see who had entered the room.
Is this seriously the best way you could think of to word this, Mr. P? To say that she couldn't help but look suggests that she was unnaturally compelled to look, which is stupid because looking up when someone opens a door is a pretty natural thing to do.
>She didn’t think her generals could have arrived so quickly, and they hadn’t.
This sentence is stupid and unnecessary. When someone enters a room, we don't need to know who it wasn't. Declaring the identity of who entered by extension eliminates all other possible suspects. For instance, you don't need to tell us that it wasn't Batman kicking down the door to inform Celestia that he lieks chocolate milk.
>The pony that was now striding across the room, moving with purpose in each step, was her sister, Luna.
This is an unnecessarily verbose way to explain what's happening.
Jesus H. Christ. I don't want to fall back into my habit of greentext-nitpicking the entire text line by line, but this scene really is horrendously written. Among other things, the dialogue is pure cringe. For example:
>Celestia rose from the throne and walked to meet her. “Luna, I’m surprised you were able to return so quickly. Have you already finished interviewing the residents of Ponyville?”
>Luna did not reciprocate the warm welcome her sister offered. She instead glared at Celestia with hard eyes and a deep frown. “I delegated the task to a number of guards, because there is only one pony I want to talk to at the moment: You. What have you been hiding from me?”
For one thing, interviewing witnesses is basically just routine police work. Luna is the Princess, or Vice-Princess or whatever, of Equestria; this kind of garbage detail is obviously well beneath her rank and it's implausible that Celestia would even be audacious enough to assign it in the first place. Second of all, it's implied through the exchange that follows that Luna was kept in the dark about the whole Nightmare Moon cult thing, and presumably Celestia is still trying to keep it from her by giving her this dumb assignment. However, if she were to interview the townsponies, she'd learn the truth fairly quickly anyway.
Also, the spoken dialogue here reads quite poorly. I remember making the observation during the play scene that Luna's spoken parts are rather stiff and awkward, and this continues here. For the most part the other canon characters are written well enough, at least in terms of their speech, but for some reason the two royal sisters both come across as wooden. Maybe it's the Royal Canterlot dialect; writing overly formal speech in a way that still conveys familiarity can be tricky. But mostly it's just bad dialogue. For example, here's this gem:
>The Elements of Harmony are not a force of destruction. They could only separate you from the power and jealousy that once possessed you. They peeled Nightmare Moon off of you and left behind the tattered shreds like discarded fruit peels.
And the award for worst simile of 2012 goes to...
Anyway, as this scene unfolds, the more I question the wisdom of even including it in the first place. Mostly what happens here is an exchange between Celestia and Luna, which as far as I can tell was written to clear up some of the confusion about the resurrection of NM. It seems that some of the questions that occurred to me earlier, ie what exactly is NM in the first place and how exactly could she be resurrected if she was just part of Luna's mind, probably occurred to Peen Stroke after he'd already written two thirds of the book, and he inserted this scene to try and explain some of it after the fact. However, rather than clearing things up, it just calls attention to how implausible the premise is to begin with. This is part of the reason why you should really work out these sorts of details in the story planning stage.
I will give Peen Stroke credit for at least attempting to address the bizarre philosophical implications of all of this. Consider this line of Luna's:
>"No, that can’t have been enough. A body could be formed of such magic, and perhaps a mind, but that would not be enough. For Nightmare Moon to exist once more, she would need to possess her own—"
She stops just short of saying it, but basically she's implying that any entity summoned by this sort of process would need to possess its own soul or life force in order to exist as an individual. Celestia cuts her off, probably because she realizes this would mean Nyx is her own person (pony, whatever), rather than just a crystallization of Luna's NM persona. This further reinforces the story's central theme of original sin, and returns focus to Nyx's conflict between herself and her past. So, good job there, Mr. P. Today you were only mostly a faggot.
>>258091
Anyway, the conversation just sort of meanders from there. We get a lot of back and forth between Celestia and Luna, where Luna demands to know why Celestia didn't tell her about all of this, and Celestia tells her it was for her own good, and blah blah blah. I'll point out here that this is really the first we've seen the subject addressed. We haven't spent that much time in Canterlot except for a few incidental scenes, and we really don't know what's been going on in Celestia's mind all this time, but we haven't heard much about the details of this investigation or how it's being conducted or who knows about it. Probably better to have just not even brought it up, eh Mr. P?
Moving on, Celestia and Luna go at it for a while. Luna gets pissy about being kept in the dark, Celestia goes into an explanation about Nyx and Spell Nexus which just tediously rehashes details we already know, Luna actually makes a good point about how it probably would have been smarter to just leave Nyx alone in Twilight's care and keep an eye on the situation instead of taking her away to be "tested", blah blah blah, more assmad and buttrage from Luna, more wailing and justification after the fact from Celestia, blah blah BLAH....and, of course, it wouldn't be a Peen Stroke Moment(™) without somepony bursting into tears, so naturally Celestia starts crying. Anyway, blah blah blah, they make up, and they decide to face the challenge together as sisters.
In the next subchapter, the scene cuts to Nightmare Nyx, sitting on an ornate throne in a jewel-encrusted underground castle that was apparently built for her in secret by Diamond Dogs. And no, I'm not exaggerating or trying to be funny here, this is literally what's in the text. In what initially appears to be one of Peen Stroke's random brony tangents, Nyx begins sperging to herself about what exactly the Diamond Dogs do with jewels, but it appears that in this case he's actually going somewhere with it. Nyx finds herself drifting back into her old inquisitive self, and briefly remembers her time in Cheerilee's class, giving her old personality a chance to drift back in for a second until she shakes it away.
Once again, I get what Peen Stroke is trying to do here, but once again it's not executed terribly well. The root of the problem is ultimately that Nyx's transformation into Nightmare Moon is not believable in the first place, so the internal struggle is not believable. As I noted during the last chapter, she basically goes from zero to evil in a matter of seconds. This in itself is actually not that big a deal, since in the LCIG story model that Peen Stroke is still more or less following there's usually a point in the script where the LCIG (who as you'll recall is usually some kind of super OP alien or robot or something that lost her memory) has her power awakened and suddenly goes berserk, and it's usually a rather jarring transition.
However, in this case I have a problem with it because the event that Peen Stroke set up as the trigger was not jarring enough to justify such a jarring transformation. Arbitrarily Nyx's powers were awakened by Nexus' spell, but the key story event was Nyx's feeling as if Twilight had betrayed her. The spell would have awakened the NM persona and fed it power, but ultimately it was the emotional trigger of feeling betrayed and abandoned that would have lowered Nyx's resistance to NM's influence and allowed her to take over. At least, this makes the most sense story-wise. But as I've already explained in previous posts, Twilight's "betrayal" of Nyx isn't really all that devastating; she basically just consents to have her spend the night in Canterlot and take a test. Peen Stroke seems to instinctively realize that this is a pretty flimsy reason to have Nyx go full super-saiyan, and so he tries to compensate by expanding the scope of her anger to include the entire town. This, however, also falls flat because there isn't really a sincere motivation here either. Nyx yells at Cheerilee, who hasn't really mistreated her in any significant way, and confronts DT/SS over the incident in the woods. While it's true that Nyx was initially mistreated by DT/SS and the forest thing was probably traumatic for her, she wasn't the sort of town pariah that the scene seems to be implying that she sees herself as, and as I said the bullying seems mostly to have abated.
The problem here is that, lacking any serious personal motivation to flip her shit like this, Nyx's transformation can only be explained in two possible ways. One is that the dormant NM personality was awakened by the spell and took over her body because magic, and from here on out everything she does is the result of being under a spell. The other possibility is that Nyx actually is evil and has been all along, and thus accepted becoming NM without trying to fight it. Either way, it's a bad direction for the story to go. In the latter case, Nyx is no longer a sympathetic character. In the former, the story becomes boring because Nyx basically gets a free pass on anything she does from here on out, no matter how reprehensible, which renders any resolution meaningless.
The only way to have Nyx transform into NM and become temporarily evil, while still maintaining the reader's interest as well as their sympathy for Nyx, is to give her a valid reason to lose control of herself long enough for the NM personality to take over. A tragic misunderstanding that causes her to mistakenly believe she's been betrayed or abandoned would be sufficient. It would also work if she had been unfairly ostracized or mistreated by the town or the school up to this point because of her resemblance to NM. Peen Stroke attempts both here, and both fall flat. The first scenario basically fails because the tragedy isn't tragic enough. The second one fails because it wasn't properly set up.
Anyway, the conversation just sort of meanders from there. We get a lot of back and forth between Celestia and Luna, where Luna demands to know why Celestia didn't tell her about all of this, and Celestia tells her it was for her own good, and blah blah blah. I'll point out here that this is really the first we've seen the subject addressed. We haven't spent that much time in Canterlot except for a few incidental scenes, and we really don't know what's been going on in Celestia's mind all this time, but we haven't heard much about the details of this investigation or how it's being conducted or who knows about it. Probably better to have just not even brought it up, eh Mr. P?
Moving on, Celestia and Luna go at it for a while. Luna gets pissy about being kept in the dark, Celestia goes into an explanation about Nyx and Spell Nexus which just tediously rehashes details we already know, Luna actually makes a good point about how it probably would have been smarter to just leave Nyx alone in Twilight's care and keep an eye on the situation instead of taking her away to be "tested", blah blah blah, more assmad and buttrage from Luna, more wailing and justification after the fact from Celestia, blah blah BLAH....and, of course, it wouldn't be a Peen Stroke Moment(™) without somepony bursting into tears, so naturally Celestia starts crying. Anyway, blah blah blah, they make up, and they decide to face the challenge together as sisters.
In the next subchapter, the scene cuts to Nightmare Nyx, sitting on an ornate throne in a jewel-encrusted underground castle that was apparently built for her in secret by Diamond Dogs. And no, I'm not exaggerating or trying to be funny here, this is literally what's in the text. In what initially appears to be one of Peen Stroke's random brony tangents, Nyx begins sperging to herself about what exactly the Diamond Dogs do with jewels, but it appears that in this case he's actually going somewhere with it. Nyx finds herself drifting back into her old inquisitive self, and briefly remembers her time in Cheerilee's class, giving her old personality a chance to drift back in for a second until she shakes it away.
Once again, I get what Peen Stroke is trying to do here, but once again it's not executed terribly well. The root of the problem is ultimately that Nyx's transformation into Nightmare Moon is not believable in the first place, so the internal struggle is not believable. As I noted during the last chapter, she basically goes from zero to evil in a matter of seconds. This in itself is actually not that big a deal, since in the LCIG story model that Peen Stroke is still more or less following there's usually a point in the script where the LCIG (who as you'll recall is usually some kind of super OP alien or robot or something that lost her memory) has her power awakened and suddenly goes berserk, and it's usually a rather jarring transition.
However, in this case I have a problem with it because the event that Peen Stroke set up as the trigger was not jarring enough to justify such a jarring transformation. Arbitrarily Nyx's powers were awakened by Nexus' spell, but the key story event was Nyx's feeling as if Twilight had betrayed her. The spell would have awakened the NM persona and fed it power, but ultimately it was the emotional trigger of feeling betrayed and abandoned that would have lowered Nyx's resistance to NM's influence and allowed her to take over. At least, this makes the most sense story-wise. But as I've already explained in previous posts, Twilight's "betrayal" of Nyx isn't really all that devastating; she basically just consents to have her spend the night in Canterlot and take a test. Peen Stroke seems to instinctively realize that this is a pretty flimsy reason to have Nyx go full super-saiyan, and so he tries to compensate by expanding the scope of her anger to include the entire town. This, however, also falls flat because there isn't really a sincere motivation here either. Nyx yells at Cheerilee, who hasn't really mistreated her in any significant way, and confronts DT/SS over the incident in the woods. While it's true that Nyx was initially mistreated by DT/SS and the forest thing was probably traumatic for her, she wasn't the sort of town pariah that the scene seems to be implying that she sees herself as, and as I said the bullying seems mostly to have abated.
The problem here is that, lacking any serious personal motivation to flip her shit like this, Nyx's transformation can only be explained in two possible ways. One is that the dormant NM personality was awakened by the spell and took over her body because magic, and from here on out everything she does is the result of being under a spell. The other possibility is that Nyx actually is evil and has been all along, and thus accepted becoming NM without trying to fight it. Either way, it's a bad direction for the story to go. In the latter case, Nyx is no longer a sympathetic character. In the former, the story becomes boring because Nyx basically gets a free pass on anything she does from here on out, no matter how reprehensible, which renders any resolution meaningless.
The only way to have Nyx transform into NM and become temporarily evil, while still maintaining the reader's interest as well as their sympathy for Nyx, is to give her a valid reason to lose control of herself long enough for the NM personality to take over. A tragic misunderstanding that causes her to mistakenly believe she's been betrayed or abandoned would be sufficient. It would also work if she had been unfairly ostracized or mistreated by the town or the school up to this point because of her resemblance to NM. Peen Stroke attempts both here, and both fall flat. The first scenario basically fails because the tragedy isn't tragic enough. The second one fails because it wasn't properly set up.
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>>248482
>Words: 128799
I just copied and pasted this entire thread into google docs to get the wordcount on this bitch. Yall happy? are yall fucking happy? This thread OPENS with a word count discussion.
Jesus christ. I guess I'm gonna get to scrolling then.
>Words: 128799
I just copied and pasted this entire thread into google docs to get the wordcount on this bitch. Yall happy? are yall fucking happy? This thread OPENS with a word count discussion.
Jesus christ. I guess I'm gonna get to scrolling then.
>>258301
It nearly takes as long to throughly deconstruct the writing of le peen stroke.
Does that include the tangents by other anons?
It nearly takes as long to throughly deconstruct the writing of le peen stroke.
Does that include the tangents by other anons?
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>>258319
One time I saw a 5 hour review that revealed every flaw and hole in an 80 hour game.
Another time, I saw a 6 hour review of a 1-ish hour movie.
One time I saw a 5 hour review that revealed every flaw and hole in an 80 hour game.
Another time, I saw a 6 hour review of a 1-ish hour movie.
>>248482
Thats an actual work of fiction
>like a little babby
>something like only 30K words more
>comparing a work of fiction to a thread
i dont SEE threads this fucking long dude, and this is a thread chewing up and digesting fanfiction like raw fucking venison. Whats your point again?
Thats an actual work of fiction
>like a little babby
>something like only 30K words more
>comparing a work of fiction to a thread
i dont SEE threads this fucking long dude, and this is a thread chewing up and digesting fanfiction like raw fucking venison. Whats your point again?
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>>258351
You're going to have to stop speaking gibberish and make a complete idea. That's my gimmick, and having you steal it isn't on my agenda.
>i dont SEE threads this fucking long dude
You just did.
>Thats an actual work of fiction
Hold on I have the words somewhere around here... Lurk moar newfag there's a thread with 131,488 words for you to read, and an entire website.
You're going to have to stop speaking gibberish and make a complete idea. That's my gimmick, and having you steal it isn't on my agenda.
>i dont SEE threads this fucking long dude
You just did.
>Thats an actual work of fiction
Hold on I have the words somewhere around here... Lurk moar newfag there's a thread with 131,488 words for you to read, and an entire website.
>>258357
I'm not speaking gibberish, and I din't think I'd have to defend a point I made that's small. I guess what I'm saying is that you fuckers are both crazy and impressive. And yeah, I am a newfag, so what? Gotta start somewhere.
>That's my gimmick
can you stop? Can you please stop? Self degridation on the internet isn't funny or cool, especially when it goes at the beginning of a post calling someone out for being a newfag. Just post your shit and get on with it -- no one cares what your "gimmick" is.
I'm not speaking gibberish, and I din't think I'd have to defend a point I made that's small. I guess what I'm saying is that you fuckers are both crazy and impressive. And yeah, I am a newfag, so what? Gotta start somewhere.
>That's my gimmick
can you stop? Can you please stop? Self degridation on the internet isn't funny or cool, especially when it goes at the beginning of a post calling someone out for being a newfag. Just post your shit and get on with it -- no one cares what your "gimmick" is.
>>258364
Glad to have you newfag. Thank you very much. We are indeed jolly mad over here, yes.
If you wanna see a lot bigger thread then look through the archive for a thread called, "I think I have a problem." The golden oak version is incomplete and has not updated with its last posts, which were a lot so you don't wanna miss them.
Glad to have you newfag. Thank you very much. We are indeed jolly mad over here, yes.
If you wanna see a lot bigger thread then look through the archive for a thread called, "I think I have a problem." The golden oak version is incomplete and has not updated with its last posts, which were a lot so you don't wanna miss them.
>>258381
>Glad to have you newfag
Ah! Hospitality! Who would have guessed? I'm doing my prerequisite lurking and quite a bit of it -- I just finished the Coronachan thread. I'm a little terrified that its apocalypse time but overall pleased. What are some other thread that you would recommend so that I can get my fill of what this place is about?
>I think I have a problem
Will get right on it-
>Glad to have you newfag
Ah! Hospitality! Who would have guessed? I'm doing my prerequisite lurking and quite a bit of it -- I just finished the Coronachan thread. I'm a little terrified that its apocalypse time but overall pleased. What are some other thread that you would recommend so that I can get my fill of what this place is about?
>I think I have a problem
Will get right on it-
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>>258417
No, since he is american. And besides, that ship has already left and traveled all across the world. Appearently, the captain has hanged up his hat and settled with his family on a ranch somewhere.
No, since he is american. And besides, that ship has already left and traveled all across the world. Appearently, the captain has hanged up his hat and settled with his family on a ranch somewhere.
>>258417
Well, sure. You are obviously allowed to think whatever you want but I'm personally kinda tired of the joke. Also, I have begun to doubt how well that thread was handled or rather that it became such a controversy for something so small and insignificant as a fanfic.
Like, I like Nigel. He has passion and he can make insighful commantary and analysis on media. His main trouble is, or rather what I don't like about his writing, is that he infodumps to the degree that he puts tolkien to shame.
But anyway, all he did was post a fanfic in the end, and two threads about it. I think it blew out of porportions because the fic in question had some, lets say ripable qualities.
The reason why I pointed you to that thread is because that is were a lot of this began, (aka Glimglam) and also it has a lot of intresting discussion on writing going on in it.
Well, sure. You are obviously allowed to think whatever you want but I'm personally kinda tired of the joke. Also, I have begun to doubt how well that thread was handled or rather that it became such a controversy for something so small and insignificant as a fanfic.
Like, I like Nigel. He has passion and he can make insighful commantary and analysis on media. His main trouble is, or rather what I don't like about his writing, is that he infodumps to the degree that he puts tolkien to shame.
But anyway, all he did was post a fanfic in the end, and two threads about it. I think it blew out of porportions because the fic in question had some, lets say ripable qualities.
The reason why I pointed you to that thread is because that is were a lot of this began, (aka Glimglam) and also it has a lot of intresting discussion on writing going on in it.
>>258351
>i dont SEE threads this fucking long dude
Maybe if you did, you'd be less ignorant of the quality that can be found in long-form analysis.
>i dont SEE threads this fucking long dude
Maybe if you did, you'd be less ignorant of the quality that can be found in long-form analysis.
>>258423
I enjoyed the analysis of my fanfic, it was informative and helped me to create a better rewrite of it. I would have uploaded it by now but Rabbit Game and finishing off that Fallout NV mod takes priority.
That 'Silver "I suck a lot of penis" Star' running gag was funny, but only because the gay dicks part was different every time.
What I didn't enjoy was the faggy commie discord army repeating the same lie over and over.
>"Reee, if you don't like my favourite pony you're morally inferior! And obsessed, stop caring stop talking stop thinking stop talking everyone hates you you're a nazi! ...oh wait shit this is a nazi site. uh... you're not nazi enough for this site!"
Insisting that they're right when they're wrong,
insisting that I'm the problem because I think they're uncool when they're the problem because they Act Up like a nigger when they feel like someone thinks they're uncool,
insisting that I'm doing something I'm not,
trying to "Personalize" a view they hate by tying it with me and then slandering that person to try and attack perception of the view,
insisting that I am to blame for their behaviour as if it's on me to not make myself an appealing target to them rather than on them to manage their own behaviour or get a hobby or grow moral fibre(when they were only targeting me because I had a view they openly said they wanted purged from the site),
begging moderators to "Deputize" them and make them "Janitors", a class of Commissars able to delete posts and ban people and purge whatever they want from the site without oversight (Thank you for not doing that mods, giving commies that kind of power would have ended this site in a week)
insisting that I lack the right to say anything because they do not like what I have to say,
leaving the thread I'm in to spin out-of-context events to suit their delusions,
slandering me in other threads in an attempt to turn opinion against me,
calling me obsessed when I posted archived thread copies that debunked the lies they just made,
blaming me for the shit effects their shit loww-IQ anti-debate lefty agitprop tactics had on threads...
So many subversive anti-thought tactics on display from the most psychotic obsessed fans of a trash character you'll hopefully ever see.
I legitimately hope none of us ever encounter people crazier than those fucks, and I'm glad they've fucked off back to Derpibooru where nobody's allowed to criticize their precious fucking commie waifu or her ruined pet Trixie.
And you know what makes it all so fucking exhausting? These are tactics they usually pull on 4chan's immensely popular /pol/ board, and other boards they consider to be high-importance battlegrounds, in an attempt to obfuscate truth and make redpilled opinions seem less popular than they are.
They pulled their insect tactics out on mlpol, a board that was far smaller then than it is now.
And they pulled their insect tactics out on me because I didn't like a fictitious character they like.
This is so fucking patheitc!
Glimmer is just an objectively badly-written character, and The Rise of Skywalker is an objectively badly-written film. Faggot consoomers are allowed to like these shite things despite their lack of quality, but problems arise when they try to bury criticism under mountains of screams and lies and lefty shit because they lack self-esteem and can't admit that they have shit taste.
These faggots play life on easy mode by caring about nothing, and yet life is still a "Struggle" for these faggots because they feel the need to convince themselves and everyone else that they're "discerning high-iq" redditors with "enlightened tastes".
They treat someone on the internet who thinks they're uncool like they treat supporters of a dangerously powerful rising ideology that would hang them from fucking trees and crucify them on telephone poles and purge all of leftist degeneracy from planet earth if it ever got the chance.
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
I enjoyed the analysis of my fanfic, it was informative and helped me to create a better rewrite of it. I would have uploaded it by now but Rabbit Game and finishing off that Fallout NV mod takes priority.
That 'Silver "I suck a lot of penis" Star' running gag was funny, but only because the gay dicks part was different every time.
What I didn't enjoy was the faggy commie discord army repeating the same lie over and over.
>"Reee, if you don't like my favourite pony you're morally inferior! And obsessed, stop caring stop talking stop thinking stop talking everyone hates you you're a nazi! ...oh wait shit this is a nazi site. uh... you're not nazi enough for this site!"
Insisting that they're right when they're wrong,
insisting that I'm the problem because I think they're uncool when they're the problem because they Act Up like a nigger when they feel like someone thinks they're uncool,
insisting that I'm doing something I'm not,
trying to "Personalize" a view they hate by tying it with me and then slandering that person to try and attack perception of the view,
insisting that I am to blame for their behaviour as if it's on me to not make myself an appealing target to them rather than on them to manage their own behaviour or get a hobby or grow moral fibre(when they were only targeting me because I had a view they openly said they wanted purged from the site),
begging moderators to "Deputize" them and make them "Janitors", a class of Commissars able to delete posts and ban people and purge whatever they want from the site without oversight (Thank you for not doing that mods, giving commies that kind of power would have ended this site in a week)
insisting that I lack the right to say anything because they do not like what I have to say,
leaving the thread I'm in to spin out-of-context events to suit their delusions,
slandering me in other threads in an attempt to turn opinion against me,
calling me obsessed when I posted archived thread copies that debunked the lies they just made,
blaming me for the shit effects their shit loww-IQ anti-debate lefty agitprop tactics had on threads...
So many subversive anti-thought tactics on display from the most psychotic obsessed fans of a trash character you'll hopefully ever see.
I legitimately hope none of us ever encounter people crazier than those fucks, and I'm glad they've fucked off back to Derpibooru where nobody's allowed to criticize their precious fucking commie waifu or her ruined pet Trixie.
And you know what makes it all so fucking exhausting? These are tactics they usually pull on 4chan's immensely popular /pol/ board, and other boards they consider to be high-importance battlegrounds, in an attempt to obfuscate truth and make redpilled opinions seem less popular than they are.
They pulled their insect tactics out on mlpol, a board that was far smaller then than it is now.
And they pulled their insect tactics out on me because I didn't like a fictitious character they like.
This is so fucking patheitc!
Glimmer is just an objectively badly-written character, and The Rise of Skywalker is an objectively badly-written film. Faggot consoomers are allowed to like these shite things despite their lack of quality, but problems arise when they try to bury criticism under mountains of screams and lies and lefty shit because they lack self-esteem and can't admit that they have shit taste.
These faggots play life on easy mode by caring about nothing, and yet life is still a "Struggle" for these faggots because they feel the need to convince themselves and everyone else that they're "discerning high-iq" redditors with "enlightened tastes".
They treat someone on the internet who thinks they're uncool like they treat supporters of a dangerously powerful rising ideology that would hang them from fucking trees and crucify them on telephone poles and purge all of leftist degeneracy from planet earth if it ever got the chance.
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
File (): 74004BFBB53AE77CDA68F6C4F2C92AC5-190635.jpg (186.2 KB, 1000x1000, mayor peen.jpg)
>>258235
Anyway, Nyx's weak effort to engage in an internal struggle plods dolefully on into the next subchapter. Spell Nexus turns out to be as much of an insufferable edgelord as his behavior to this point would suggest. Not only does he cosplay as Nightmare Moon and expect his underlings to do the same, he had the castle he built for her decorated with edgy murals depicting edgy revenge fantasies where NM lays waste to Equestria.
An interesting event occurs when Nyx goes into the library that has been prepared for her. The library is empty because apparently Spell Nexus' plan was to build a new castle underground, conquer Canterlot, raise the underground castle to the surface, move all of the books from Celestia's library here, and then burn down Canterlot, because apparently that makes more sense than just moving into the existing palace once the Princesses are vanquished. They could even redecorate it, if the current decor wasn't evil enough. However, all of that is beside the point. The main thing here is that one of the few books that is in the library catches Nyx's eye.
An italicized subchapter flashes back to a scene in which Twilight is reading a bedtime story to Nyx. The story is apparently the "Nyx of the Night" story whose titular character Nyx was named for. The book in the library contains the same story, and reading it tugs at Nyx's feels. This is actually rather artfully done, and I would say that Peen Stroke was not a faggot today.........had it not been for the fact that even this was not handled properly.
Going back to something I've said multiple times already, referencing something that happened "off-camera" and expecting it to make an emotional impact on the reader just doesn't work. This is made all the more frustrating here by the fact that the italicized scene is not only well written but is a rare moment of genuine warmth, one of the few we've encountered so far. The emotion here is not artificial in the way that it usually is in this story. This isn't a lot of fluffy saccharine cuteness or characters bursting into tears for no good reason; it's just a touching scene of a mother reading a bedtime story to her child. I can even overlook Peen Stroke's obnoxiously slipping yet another show reference in here (Twilight needlessly brings up the time that she and her friends had to face a dragon) because this is a pretty good scene overall. What am I going to bitch about, then, you may ask? Well, here's the issue: it didn't actually happen.
This scene appears in the text as Nyx's recollection, however this is our first time seeing it. The scene isn't unbelievable or implausible; we could easily surmise that Twilight probably read Nyx a bedtime story or two during their time together. Remember, though: if it isn't in the text, it didn't happen, at least not for the reader.
Without doing any revision or editing, Peen Stroke could just copy the text of this subchapter verbatim, remove the italics, and paste it at an earlier point where it could reasonably have happened. Better yet, he could take one of his many, many unnecessary blocks of text (one of Twilight's ten page rambles about Celestia sending fillies to the moon springs to mind) and replace it with this. Now, when Nyx recalls this event fondly while going through the book in the library, we will have a point of reference for what she is feeling. The italicized scene will now be a flashback, a reference to something that happened earlier on that the reader remembers. We will have lived through this touching moment in Nyx's life and experienced it alongside her, and will understand her feelings about it. We will be able to recall the way we felt while reading it, the touching atmosphere and casual intimacy of the moment, and be able to contrast this with Nyx's current environment, this silly grimdark castle populated by Equestria's answer to the goth kids from South Park. From that, we will be able to feel sympathy for Nyx: we will understand that even though she has gained magic and power and the ability to give everyone who was ever mean to her a sound thrashing, obtaining that power has cost her something much more important. We will understand this and commiserate, even if Nyx herself hasn't quite figured it out yet.
However, none of this works without a point of reference. As the text is written, we are simply informed that this is an event that happened at some undisclosed point in Nyx's past. Even though it's a significant event for Nyx, this is our first time hearing about it and we don't have any memory of it. Our memories of Twilight and Nyx's time together mostly consist of a few cutesy scenes, some needless bawling, and a lot of listening to Twilight babble incoherently to herself about Nightmare Moon. I'll say it again, because the point bears repeating: if it's not in the text, it didn't happen. If an event is important enough that you need to reference it later, make sure it's at least mentioned in the text somewhere. The ending to Citizen Kane doesn't work if we don't see the sled at the beginning of the movie.
What's especially frustrating here is that way back at the beginning of this critique, I was complaining about the lack of any real interaction scenes between Nyx and Twilight. This is a fine example of the kind of scene I was saying that the story needed; and here it is, wasted as a disconnected flashback to an event we've never seen. If Peen Stroke were to write up a few scenes like this one, go back through the expositional part of the story, find all of Twilight's annoying rambling monologues and replace each of them with the new scenes, it would go a long way toward improving the early part of this story. Total missed opportunity.
Peen Stroke, today you are not a faggot; you are ten faggots sitting on each other's shoulders inside a coat, pretending to be one extremely tall faggot.
Anyway, Nyx's weak effort to engage in an internal struggle plods dolefully on into the next subchapter. Spell Nexus turns out to be as much of an insufferable edgelord as his behavior to this point would suggest. Not only does he cosplay as Nightmare Moon and expect his underlings to do the same, he had the castle he built for her decorated with edgy murals depicting edgy revenge fantasies where NM lays waste to Equestria.
An interesting event occurs when Nyx goes into the library that has been prepared for her. The library is empty because apparently Spell Nexus' plan was to build a new castle underground, conquer Canterlot, raise the underground castle to the surface, move all of the books from Celestia's library here, and then burn down Canterlot, because apparently that makes more sense than just moving into the existing palace once the Princesses are vanquished. They could even redecorate it, if the current decor wasn't evil enough. However, all of that is beside the point. The main thing here is that one of the few books that is in the library catches Nyx's eye.
An italicized subchapter flashes back to a scene in which Twilight is reading a bedtime story to Nyx. The story is apparently the "Nyx of the Night" story whose titular character Nyx was named for. The book in the library contains the same story, and reading it tugs at Nyx's feels. This is actually rather artfully done, and I would say that Peen Stroke was not a faggot today.........had it not been for the fact that even this was not handled properly.
Going back to something I've said multiple times already, referencing something that happened "off-camera" and expecting it to make an emotional impact on the reader just doesn't work. This is made all the more frustrating here by the fact that the italicized scene is not only well written but is a rare moment of genuine warmth, one of the few we've encountered so far. The emotion here is not artificial in the way that it usually is in this story. This isn't a lot of fluffy saccharine cuteness or characters bursting into tears for no good reason; it's just a touching scene of a mother reading a bedtime story to her child. I can even overlook Peen Stroke's obnoxiously slipping yet another show reference in here (Twilight needlessly brings up the time that she and her friends had to face a dragon) because this is a pretty good scene overall. What am I going to bitch about, then, you may ask? Well, here's the issue: it didn't actually happen.
This scene appears in the text as Nyx's recollection, however this is our first time seeing it. The scene isn't unbelievable or implausible; we could easily surmise that Twilight probably read Nyx a bedtime story or two during their time together. Remember, though: if it isn't in the text, it didn't happen, at least not for the reader.
Without doing any revision or editing, Peen Stroke could just copy the text of this subchapter verbatim, remove the italics, and paste it at an earlier point where it could reasonably have happened. Better yet, he could take one of his many, many unnecessary blocks of text (one of Twilight's ten page rambles about Celestia sending fillies to the moon springs to mind) and replace it with this. Now, when Nyx recalls this event fondly while going through the book in the library, we will have a point of reference for what she is feeling. The italicized scene will now be a flashback, a reference to something that happened earlier on that the reader remembers. We will have lived through this touching moment in Nyx's life and experienced it alongside her, and will understand her feelings about it. We will be able to recall the way we felt while reading it, the touching atmosphere and casual intimacy of the moment, and be able to contrast this with Nyx's current environment, this silly grimdark castle populated by Equestria's answer to the goth kids from South Park. From that, we will be able to feel sympathy for Nyx: we will understand that even though she has gained magic and power and the ability to give everyone who was ever mean to her a sound thrashing, obtaining that power has cost her something much more important. We will understand this and commiserate, even if Nyx herself hasn't quite figured it out yet.
However, none of this works without a point of reference. As the text is written, we are simply informed that this is an event that happened at some undisclosed point in Nyx's past. Even though it's a significant event for Nyx, this is our first time hearing about it and we don't have any memory of it. Our memories of Twilight and Nyx's time together mostly consist of a few cutesy scenes, some needless bawling, and a lot of listening to Twilight babble incoherently to herself about Nightmare Moon. I'll say it again, because the point bears repeating: if it's not in the text, it didn't happen. If an event is important enough that you need to reference it later, make sure it's at least mentioned in the text somewhere. The ending to Citizen Kane doesn't work if we don't see the sled at the beginning of the movie.
What's especially frustrating here is that way back at the beginning of this critique, I was complaining about the lack of any real interaction scenes between Nyx and Twilight. This is a fine example of the kind of scene I was saying that the story needed; and here it is, wasted as a disconnected flashback to an event we've never seen. If Peen Stroke were to write up a few scenes like this one, go back through the expositional part of the story, find all of Twilight's annoying rambling monologues and replace each of them with the new scenes, it would go a long way toward improving the early part of this story. Total missed opportunity.
Peen Stroke, today you are not a faggot; you are ten faggots sitting on each other's shoulders inside a coat, pretending to be one extremely tall faggot.
>>258364
Welcome, newfag. Basically these threads are a project of mine where I take a particular work of pony fiction, usually something I've never read, and go through it blind, commenting on what I think works and what doesn't. It seems to entertain people, and I also think it's a useful exercise for anyone interested in writing. A good way to become a better writer is to take something you either like or don't like, and pull it apart at the seams to see if you can figure out exactly why you like it or don't like it.
The tradition started in the thread mentioned by >>258381 in which a particular British poster of ours had posted a chapter of a fanfic he was working on, and everyone was shitting on it because it was basically just 30,000 words of "why I hate Starlight Glimmer." Nigel was being a complete ass about it, so eventually I just decided to let him have it and go through the chapter line by line and explain literally everything that was wrong with it, which as it turned out was quite a lot. It eventually expanded into a full-blown critique of the entire work in which the chapter was contained. It wound up being a fun project and I feel like I gave him some decent notes overall. I have a tendency to get a bit wordy myself while doing this, but I think overall it's a good writing exercise.
>>258427
>I enjoyed the analysis of my fanfic, it was informative and helped me to create a better rewrite of it.
Glad I could help. I had fun doing it.
Welcome, newfag. Basically these threads are a project of mine where I take a particular work of pony fiction, usually something I've never read, and go through it blind, commenting on what I think works and what doesn't. It seems to entertain people, and I also think it's a useful exercise for anyone interested in writing. A good way to become a better writer is to take something you either like or don't like, and pull it apart at the seams to see if you can figure out exactly why you like it or don't like it.
The tradition started in the thread mentioned by >>258381 in which a particular British poster of ours had posted a chapter of a fanfic he was working on, and everyone was shitting on it because it was basically just 30,000 words of "why I hate Starlight Glimmer." Nigel was being a complete ass about it, so eventually I just decided to let him have it and go through the chapter line by line and explain literally everything that was wrong with it, which as it turned out was quite a lot. It eventually expanded into a full-blown critique of the entire work in which the chapter was contained. It wound up being a fun project and I feel like I gave him some decent notes overall. I have a tendency to get a bit wordy myself while doing this, but I think overall it's a good writing exercise.
>>258427
>I enjoyed the analysis of my fanfic, it was informative and helped me to create a better rewrite of it.
Glad I could help. I had fun doing it.
File (): 71DD1C95F481E6F7C99411D3CF8A825B-18225.jpg (17.8 KB, 474x474, 7bf06c9ca90a754e49acf9ab66fc3ef7--pixel-art-my-little-pony.jpg)
>>258590
Moving right along, Spell Nexus continues taking Nyx on a tour of her new castle. They see some guards practice-fighting some dummies of the Mane 6. This predictably disturbs Nyx, and she predictably tries to hide it. She then requests to have a practice dummy of Twilight Sparkle brought to her room, presumably for the same reason any of us would want one. They go to the kitchen, the dining hall...
Reee, here's another one. A scene of Nyx and the CMC learning to make cupcakes with Pinkie Pie, italicized and presented as a flashback. Exact same criticism as above applies: this is a memory of a well-written, cute and endearing little scene, a fact made all the more tragic because it occurs nowhere in the preceding text. My suspicion is that there will be more of these. What's so utterly galling about it is that once again, we have a nice little scene that could easily have fit somewhere earlier in the story, replacing any number of pointless and rambling events, being used only as a disconnected flashback. Recall this earlier post:
>>252603
>Anyway, after the Pinkie Pie gag, a bizarre conversation follows. Nyx begins sputtering about how she keeps having thoughts about hurting Twilight and shooting up the school, and how she wants the voices in her head to stop. AB and Twist respond to this by telling her it's nothing, and that she should just relax and have fun by swinging on the swingset.
This scene occurs near the beginning of Chapter 5 if you would like to go back and read it, and it's every bit as weird and dull as it sounds. Literally nothing of value would be lost if Peen Stroke were to select all of it and "accidentally" hit backspace. Maybe the cupcakes scene could have gone here instead?
Anyone following this thread who is a writer, pay attention here: this is a very important lesson. Revision is important. This story is not unsalvageable; in fact as I've tried to demonstrate through my alternate-version outline I've been doing off and on, it could actually be tightened up and turned into something quite good without needing to change that many key events. The problem is, what exists here is essentially an unpolished rough draft. This thing is over 200,000 words long, mostly because it's full of unnecessary pointless schlock that could easily be changed, shortened or outright deleted. What's even more aggravating is that these two flashbacks demonstrate that Peen Stroke is fully capable of writing good scenes, but most of the time he'd rather fill space with meandering narration and stupid references. The entire expositional part of this novel should be nothing but scenes like this one and the one with the bedtime story, interspersed with the occasional cutaway to Canterlot or Spell Nexus. If it had been written this way, Peen Stroke wouldn't need to tell us that Twilight sees Nyx as a daughter, or that Nyx is a happy child who enjoys life despite its occasional difficulties; we'd already know, because he would have shown it all to us. If some tragic event suddenly changed that situation for them, we'd feel sad on our own without being told to. He wouldn't need to force emotion by having his characters start sobbing uncontrollably every time something a little sad happens, because we'd already feel what he wanted us to feel.
I've managed to dig up an EqD interview with Peen Stroke where he discusses his writing process. It more or less reveals what I've been suspecting about him, that he starts with an idea he'd like to explore, sits down and starts writing, and lets the story build itself from there. That's perfectly fine; in fact it's more or less how I write. However, I can say from personal experience that what you inevitably end up with is not the finished product. The secret to becoming a good author is not just writing, it's learning how to kill your baby over and over so you can rebirth it as something better. Here's what you do:
Let's say you have an idea, and you really want to write about it. According to Mr. P himself, his idea for Past Sins was:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
Alright. So, you've got an idea and you're really excited about developing it. Now it's time to sit down, fire up that ol' Commodore 64 of yours, and start pecking away. You write and write and write, and soon enough you've churned out 201,810 words. Wow! You feel rather proud of yourself. You may even be brimming with enthusiasm, because you know in your heart of hearts that what you have just vomited out is literally the best thing ever and the entire world needs to read it immediately. This is the point where you need to stop.
Don't show it to anyone yet. Especially do not show it to anyone who is likely to tell you it's good even if it sucks massive balls. Trust me, I've learned this one the hard way. If necessary, set it aside for a while. Then, read through it; try to be as objective as you can. If something strikes you as bad, it's probably bad. Be as vicious to yourself as possible. Make a mental list of things that suck, and ridicule yourself for writing them. Call yourself a massive faggot.
Now, take the events of your story and write a short summary, like you were writing a Wikipedia summary of the plot, but be sure to be thorough and include all events. Read the bird's eye view. Does it look good? Odds are, you'll probably notice a lot of things that don't quite work or don't make a ton of sense or are just plain dumb and don't belong in the story.
Next, revise the summary until you fix all of the problems you noticed, kind of like I did with Peen Stroke's work. Now, create a new blank document on your computer, sit down, and write it again. You can grab passages from the original if you like the wording, but try to rewrite as much as possible. It's time consuming but you'll like the results.
Moving right along, Spell Nexus continues taking Nyx on a tour of her new castle. They see some guards practice-fighting some dummies of the Mane 6. This predictably disturbs Nyx, and she predictably tries to hide it. She then requests to have a practice dummy of Twilight Sparkle brought to her room, presumably for the same reason any of us would want one. They go to the kitchen, the dining hall...
Reee, here's another one. A scene of Nyx and the CMC learning to make cupcakes with Pinkie Pie, italicized and presented as a flashback. Exact same criticism as above applies: this is a memory of a well-written, cute and endearing little scene, a fact made all the more tragic because it occurs nowhere in the preceding text. My suspicion is that there will be more of these. What's so utterly galling about it is that once again, we have a nice little scene that could easily have fit somewhere earlier in the story, replacing any number of pointless and rambling events, being used only as a disconnected flashback. Recall this earlier post:
>>252603
>Anyway, after the Pinkie Pie gag, a bizarre conversation follows. Nyx begins sputtering about how she keeps having thoughts about hurting Twilight and shooting up the school, and how she wants the voices in her head to stop. AB and Twist respond to this by telling her it's nothing, and that she should just relax and have fun by swinging on the swingset.
This scene occurs near the beginning of Chapter 5 if you would like to go back and read it, and it's every bit as weird and dull as it sounds. Literally nothing of value would be lost if Peen Stroke were to select all of it and "accidentally" hit backspace. Maybe the cupcakes scene could have gone here instead?
Anyone following this thread who is a writer, pay attention here: this is a very important lesson. Revision is important. This story is not unsalvageable; in fact as I've tried to demonstrate through my alternate-version outline I've been doing off and on, it could actually be tightened up and turned into something quite good without needing to change that many key events. The problem is, what exists here is essentially an unpolished rough draft. This thing is over 200,000 words long, mostly because it's full of unnecessary pointless schlock that could easily be changed, shortened or outright deleted. What's even more aggravating is that these two flashbacks demonstrate that Peen Stroke is fully capable of writing good scenes, but most of the time he'd rather fill space with meandering narration and stupid references. The entire expositional part of this novel should be nothing but scenes like this one and the one with the bedtime story, interspersed with the occasional cutaway to Canterlot or Spell Nexus. If it had been written this way, Peen Stroke wouldn't need to tell us that Twilight sees Nyx as a daughter, or that Nyx is a happy child who enjoys life despite its occasional difficulties; we'd already know, because he would have shown it all to us. If some tragic event suddenly changed that situation for them, we'd feel sad on our own without being told to. He wouldn't need to force emotion by having his characters start sobbing uncontrollably every time something a little sad happens, because we'd already feel what he wanted us to feel.
I've managed to dig up an EqD interview with Peen Stroke where he discusses his writing process. It more or less reveals what I've been suspecting about him, that he starts with an idea he'd like to explore, sits down and starts writing, and lets the story build itself from there. That's perfectly fine; in fact it's more or less how I write. However, I can say from personal experience that what you inevitably end up with is not the finished product. The secret to becoming a good author is not just writing, it's learning how to kill your baby over and over so you can rebirth it as something better. Here's what you do:
Let's say you have an idea, and you really want to write about it. According to Mr. P himself, his idea for Past Sins was:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
Alright. So, you've got an idea and you're really excited about developing it. Now it's time to sit down, fire up that ol' Commodore 64 of yours, and start pecking away. You write and write and write, and soon enough you've churned out 201,810 words. Wow! You feel rather proud of yourself. You may even be brimming with enthusiasm, because you know in your heart of hearts that what you have just vomited out is literally the best thing ever and the entire world needs to read it immediately. This is the point where you need to stop.
Don't show it to anyone yet. Especially do not show it to anyone who is likely to tell you it's good even if it sucks massive balls. Trust me, I've learned this one the hard way. If necessary, set it aside for a while. Then, read through it; try to be as objective as you can. If something strikes you as bad, it's probably bad. Be as vicious to yourself as possible. Make a mental list of things that suck, and ridicule yourself for writing them. Call yourself a massive faggot.
Now, take the events of your story and write a short summary, like you were writing a Wikipedia summary of the plot, but be sure to be thorough and include all events. Read the bird's eye view. Does it look good? Odds are, you'll probably notice a lot of things that don't quite work or don't make a ton of sense or are just plain dumb and don't belong in the story.
Next, revise the summary until you fix all of the problems you noticed, kind of like I did with Peen Stroke's work. Now, create a new blank document on your computer, sit down, and write it again. You can grab passages from the original if you like the wording, but try to rewrite as much as possible. It's time consuming but you'll like the results.
>>258602
Peen Stroke is really gay
Why do you think so many faggots love this?
I reckon it's because they're too stupid to see through the emotional manipulation attempts like we do.
Peen Stroke is really gay
Why do you think so many faggots love this?
I reckon it's because they're too stupid to see through the emotional manipulation attempts like we do.
>>258602
Also, here's the Peen Stroke interview if anyone cares:
https://www.equestriadaily.com/2018/11/napowrimo-interview-pen-stroke-on-heavy.html
Also, here's the Peen Stroke interview if anyone cares:
https://www.equestriadaily.com/2018/11/napowrimo-interview-pen-stroke-on-heavy.html
File (): 6238FA388418CFE34C0396E68E8220CC-122313.jpg (119.4 KB, 570x855, il_570xN.1690225898_lgmg.jpg)
>>258885
>>258602
>“My Queen, do the cupcakes displease you?” Nexus asked, noticing Nightmare Moon had once more fallen silent.
This might actually be the best line in the entire book.
Anyway, after the chef runs off to commit sudoku over his failure to provide adequately nightmarish cupcakes, the tour continues. They move into the research laboratory, where apparently a group of spergs are devoted to figuring out how to make grass grow at night. The author's intent here seems to be putting Nightmare Moon into a position where she's forced to consider the real-world impact of plunging the world into eternal night; however, as with other parts of the text, what it accomplishes instead is forcing the reader to consider how ridiculous most of this story is in the first place.
I can't put all the blame on Peen Stroke here, of course. His train of thought seems to be one of those brony musings, where a fan ponders the real implications of something that had happened in the show, that the show itself doesn't address on account of how it is, you know, a fantasy cartoon for children. It's kind of fun to explore these kinds of issues I'll admit, but ultimately I don't think anyone involved in the early development of this show ever expected it to be watched by anyone other than children, and I certainly don't think anyone expected the world mechanics to be heavily scrutinized or explored to its literal extremes. So, when Lauren Faust had the idea of making the pony princesses use magic to control the sun and the moon, the producers were probably fine signing off on it. As mythology it's an elegant image, but when taken literally as part of the canon world mechanics it just makes things weird.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Nightmare Nyx is basically forced to admit to herself that the scheme she tried to enact in her past existence really didn't make a fuckton of sense, and due to rapidly declining temperatures on half of the globe and rapidly rising temperatures on the other would have probably killed everypony on the planet in a matter of hours. So, naturally, having realized this, she decides to carry on with her plans and change nothing.
Come to think of it, what are her plans exactly? What is she going to do, and why is she doing it? Neither question has really been addressed. It's clear that this fruity cult basically wants what the original Nightmare Moon wanted, which is to have Equestria bathed in eternal darkness. Why exactly they want this is considerably less clear, but at this point who even cares. More important for our purposes is that Nyx's actions make progressively less sense as this story goes on. What is her goal in all of this? What is she trying to accomplish? It seems like the cult just woke her up under the assumption that they would all just resume NM's former Mr. Burns-esque scheme of blocking out the sun, and Nyx just said "okay, since I'm evil now I guess that's what we'll do." y tho?
The original Nightmare Moon was actually Princess Luna, who was angry because the ponies didn't appreciate the beauty of the night she made. Luna's motivations for doing what she did therefore make sense. Nyx, despite "being" Nightmare Moon, does not seem to have inherited any of Luna's personality or memories beyond what she did while she was NM. Thus, she does not have the same motivations. Why would she care if it's day or night out? When the cult woke her up and said "hey NM still wanna block out the sun?", I'm sure she could have just said "no, fuck it, we're doing something else now" and they'd all have to go along with it. She's supposed to be in charge of this cult, since they all worship her and call her the queen, and even if they resisted her she could just blast them with her unicorn lasers or whatever.
This basically reveals why treating Nightmare Moon as a separate character from Luna creates a problem, one which Peen Stroke should have put a little more thought into during the pre-writing stage than it seems like he did. If NM is just Luna's anger and hatred detached from Luna and reformed as the persona of Nyx, which as far as I can tell is what we're dealing with here, then Nyx's actions as NM should be based on whatever Nyx is angry about now, not what Luna was angry about 1000 years ago.
Which again leads us back to the question of what Nyx is even angry about? We still don't have a clear motivation for her. She's pissed because Twilight, who in all other regards has shown her nothing but kindness, kinda-sorta let her down that one time just now, and a couple of mean fillies picked on her in school a while back, so now she's going to join up with some faggy cult that wants to block out the sun for some reason? My biggest concern right now is figuring out what I'm going to do with all of these "what the fucks?" I suddenly find myself holding.
The problem is that once you make Nightmare Moon her own separate character, independent of Luna, all you have to work with is a villain who is simply doing villainous things for no reason beyond that she's a villain. This is basically hack melodrama 101. In fact, even calling it melodrama is giving it too much credit. Even in the simplest, most childish story formulas, the villain still has some kind of believable motivation. The cat is chasing the bird because he wants to eat him. The guys in black masks are robbing the bank because they want money. The Democrats are rigging their own primary because they want Biden to lose to Trump instead of Bernie. There's always at least some kind of plausible "A is doing B because C" formula; that isn't present here at all. All we have is Nightmare Moon trying to black out the sun because she's Nightmare Moon and that's what she does.
Well, whatever, let's keep going and see what happens.
>>258602
>“My Queen, do the cupcakes displease you?” Nexus asked, noticing Nightmare Moon had once more fallen silent.
This might actually be the best line in the entire book.
Anyway, after the chef runs off to commit sudoku over his failure to provide adequately nightmarish cupcakes, the tour continues. They move into the research laboratory, where apparently a group of spergs are devoted to figuring out how to make grass grow at night. The author's intent here seems to be putting Nightmare Moon into a position where she's forced to consider the real-world impact of plunging the world into eternal night; however, as with other parts of the text, what it accomplishes instead is forcing the reader to consider how ridiculous most of this story is in the first place.
I can't put all the blame on Peen Stroke here, of course. His train of thought seems to be one of those brony musings, where a fan ponders the real implications of something that had happened in the show, that the show itself doesn't address on account of how it is, you know, a fantasy cartoon for children. It's kind of fun to explore these kinds of issues I'll admit, but ultimately I don't think anyone involved in the early development of this show ever expected it to be watched by anyone other than children, and I certainly don't think anyone expected the world mechanics to be heavily scrutinized or explored to its literal extremes. So, when Lauren Faust had the idea of making the pony princesses use magic to control the sun and the moon, the producers were probably fine signing off on it. As mythology it's an elegant image, but when taken literally as part of the canon world mechanics it just makes things weird.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Nightmare Nyx is basically forced to admit to herself that the scheme she tried to enact in her past existence really didn't make a fuckton of sense, and due to rapidly declining temperatures on half of the globe and rapidly rising temperatures on the other would have probably killed everypony on the planet in a matter of hours. So, naturally, having realized this, she decides to carry on with her plans and change nothing.
Come to think of it, what are her plans exactly? What is she going to do, and why is she doing it? Neither question has really been addressed. It's clear that this fruity cult basically wants what the original Nightmare Moon wanted, which is to have Equestria bathed in eternal darkness. Why exactly they want this is considerably less clear, but at this point who even cares. More important for our purposes is that Nyx's actions make progressively less sense as this story goes on. What is her goal in all of this? What is she trying to accomplish? It seems like the cult just woke her up under the assumption that they would all just resume NM's former Mr. Burns-esque scheme of blocking out the sun, and Nyx just said "okay, since I'm evil now I guess that's what we'll do." y tho?
The original Nightmare Moon was actually Princess Luna, who was angry because the ponies didn't appreciate the beauty of the night she made. Luna's motivations for doing what she did therefore make sense. Nyx, despite "being" Nightmare Moon, does not seem to have inherited any of Luna's personality or memories beyond what she did while she was NM. Thus, she does not have the same motivations. Why would she care if it's day or night out? When the cult woke her up and said "hey NM still wanna block out the sun?", I'm sure she could have just said "no, fuck it, we're doing something else now" and they'd all have to go along with it. She's supposed to be in charge of this cult, since they all worship her and call her the queen, and even if they resisted her she could just blast them with her unicorn lasers or whatever.
This basically reveals why treating Nightmare Moon as a separate character from Luna creates a problem, one which Peen Stroke should have put a little more thought into during the pre-writing stage than it seems like he did. If NM is just Luna's anger and hatred detached from Luna and reformed as the persona of Nyx, which as far as I can tell is what we're dealing with here, then Nyx's actions as NM should be based on whatever Nyx is angry about now, not what Luna was angry about 1000 years ago.
Which again leads us back to the question of what Nyx is even angry about? We still don't have a clear motivation for her. She's pissed because Twilight, who in all other regards has shown her nothing but kindness, kinda-sorta let her down that one time just now, and a couple of mean fillies picked on her in school a while back, so now she's going to join up with some faggy cult that wants to block out the sun for some reason? My biggest concern right now is figuring out what I'm going to do with all of these "what the fucks?" I suddenly find myself holding.
The problem is that once you make Nightmare Moon her own separate character, independent of Luna, all you have to work with is a villain who is simply doing villainous things for no reason beyond that she's a villain. This is basically hack melodrama 101. In fact, even calling it melodrama is giving it too much credit. Even in the simplest, most childish story formulas, the villain still has some kind of believable motivation. The cat is chasing the bird because he wants to eat him. The guys in black masks are robbing the bank because they want money. The Democrats are rigging their own primary because they want Biden to lose to Trump instead of Bernie. There's always at least some kind of plausible "A is doing B because C" formula; that isn't present here at all. All we have is Nightmare Moon trying to black out the sun because she's Nightmare Moon and that's what she does.
Well, whatever, let's keep going and see what happens.
>>258617
>Why do you think so many faggots love this?
>I reckon it's because they're too stupid to see through the emotional manipulation attempts like we do.
I don't want to sound like too much of a condescending dickwad here although it may be a little late for that :^), but I think there's a certain kind of person who just laughs whenever the laugh track rolls regardless of whether or not the joke is funny, and cries when the sad music plays even if everyone else in the theater is rolling their eyes. I don't want to denigrate Peen Stroke's audience too much, because I'd rather be denigrating Peen Stroke, but I usually skim the comments section after I'm finished with each chapter, and I'm honestly a little amazed at some of the positive responses he gets. People seem to gobble this schlock up the way Peen Stroke gobbles a thick succulent wang. Here's a couple of examples grabbed at random from the chapter I happen to be on:
>only One way to describe how I feel about those fish poop crud bucket cultists. (this is followed by a bunch of angry pony emojis)
>Wow, Nyxy sure does seem to be having a lot of internal conflict going down.
I had a good forty keks at this one.
>The feels... *clutches chest*
>It's too much... *slowly dying*
>*awesome music*
>Not today! *slowly rises from the grave*
me: *cringes visibly*
>This fic is tearing my feels apart, putting them back together then TEARING THEM APART AGAIN, AND STOMPING ON THEM.
>My Celestia, how am I gonna survive this? *braces self for next chapter*
>These feels are going to kill me, but I'll try and hold out until the end. Their is still hope that Nyx is in there.
and my personal favorite:
>You hit a type of sadness I have only seen in Revenge of the Sith, how much worse does it get?
Granted, these are a bit cherry-picked, and to be fair there are some intelligent ones here and there too. A few people even point out grammatical errors he made, or call attention to some of his more obvious logic problems. But for the most part, this is a pretty good sample of the sort of comments he gets. And the chapter where Celestia carries Nyx away was absolutely filled to the brim with people bawling at all the parts he clearly wanted them to bawl at. So who knows; maybe Peen Stroke knows his audience and plays to the crowd.
I also get the impression that a lot of these people probably don't read much outside of fanfiction. They may even read pony-fanfiction exclusively. I also suspect many are underage b&, or were at the time their comments were posted (some comments are quite old).
>Why do you think so many faggots love this?
>I reckon it's because they're too stupid to see through the emotional manipulation attempts like we do.
I don't want to sound like too much of a condescending dickwad here although it may be a little late for that :^), but I think there's a certain kind of person who just laughs whenever the laugh track rolls regardless of whether or not the joke is funny, and cries when the sad music plays even if everyone else in the theater is rolling their eyes. I don't want to denigrate Peen Stroke's audience too much, because I'd rather be denigrating Peen Stroke, but I usually skim the comments section after I'm finished with each chapter, and I'm honestly a little amazed at some of the positive responses he gets. People seem to gobble this schlock up the way Peen Stroke gobbles a thick succulent wang. Here's a couple of examples grabbed at random from the chapter I happen to be on:
>only One way to describe how I feel about those fish poop crud bucket cultists. (this is followed by a bunch of angry pony emojis)
>Wow, Nyxy sure does seem to be having a lot of internal conflict going down.
I had a good forty keks at this one.
>The feels... *clutches chest*
>It's too much... *slowly dying*
>*awesome music*
>Not today! *slowly rises from the grave*
me: *cringes visibly*
>This fic is tearing my feels apart, putting them back together then TEARING THEM APART AGAIN, AND STOMPING ON THEM.
>My Celestia, how am I gonna survive this? *braces self for next chapter*
>These feels are going to kill me, but I'll try and hold out until the end. Their is still hope that Nyx is in there.
and my personal favorite:
>You hit a type of sadness I have only seen in Revenge of the Sith, how much worse does it get?
Granted, these are a bit cherry-picked, and to be fair there are some intelligent ones here and there too. A few people even point out grammatical errors he made, or call attention to some of his more obvious logic problems. But for the most part, this is a pretty good sample of the sort of comments he gets. And the chapter where Celestia carries Nyx away was absolutely filled to the brim with people bawling at all the parts he clearly wanted them to bawl at. So who knows; maybe Peen Stroke knows his audience and plays to the crowd.
I also get the impression that a lot of these people probably don't read much outside of fanfiction. They may even read pony-fanfiction exclusively. I also suspect many are underage b&, or were at the time their comments were posted (some comments are quite old).
File (): F09DA44E3F85797835E787B3E49629FB-2125230.mp4 (2.0 MB, Resolution:640x360 Length:00:00:44, soy wars niggas be like.mp4) [play once] [loop]
>>258888
I really want to see an edit where Eric Butts (yes that's his actual name) watches/reads Past Sins.
I really want to see an edit where Eric Butts (yes that's his actual name) watches/reads Past Sins.
>>258886
>>258888
>Glimglam hasn't posted in three days.
~Oh, I'm never gonna dance again.~
*Chokes on tears*
>Glimglam posts again
~Halleluiah~
*Starts dancing and crying rivers*
*Slurp Slurp Slurp*
"Thank, you master for returning."
>>258617
>I reckon it's because they're too stupid to see through the emotional manipulation attempts like we do.
I weirdly related to this as well. I have always been a person who has seen the strings in movies. Like what is the person who made this movie trying to make me think and feel?
>>258888
>Glimglam hasn't posted in three days.
~Oh, I'm never gonna dance again.~
*Chokes on tears*
>Glimglam posts again
~Halleluiah~
*Starts dancing and crying rivers*
*Slurp Slurp Slurp*
"Thank, you master for returning."
>>258617
>I reckon it's because they're too stupid to see through the emotional manipulation attempts like we do.
I weirdly related to this as well. I have always been a person who has seen the strings in movies. Like what is the person who made this movie trying to make me think and feel?
>>258888
Oh christ, that's depressing.
Almost as depressing as knowing these easily-pleased consoomer faggots are also the type to think they're discerning high-IQ fancy fucks because they only consoom media of a very specific low-quality type.
>"Is that a very high-quality fanfic about an original character? That isn't RariDash porn! I don't want to look that, I want to look at RariDash porn fics and love them no matter how badly they are written! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a very high-quality oil painting of a hill during sunset? That isn't titties! I don't want to look that, I want to look at drawings of titties and love them no matter how badly they are drawn! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a deep intellectual exploration of a character who's gained what he dreamed of but lost everything else and forgot why he wanted it in the first place? That isn't trollgod Anon fucking with dumb ponies! I don't want to look that, I want to look at trollgod Anon fucking with dumb ponies no matter how badly Anon needs to lose to a fucking cartoon turtle and die! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a high quality action game?! Fuck off with that shit, I'm a R E A L G A M E R and I only goom like a true goomer if it's a 300 hour RPG an autoclicker could play for me if I wasn't stupider and more easily entertained than an autoclicker! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a high quality puzzle game?! Fuck off with that shit, I'm a R E A L G A M E R and I only goom like a true goomer if it's a 1.2 hour schuut game like Call of Duty! Games that don't look realistic aka exactly like COD does aren't games! I only know how to handle one control scheme and anything faster than my chest high wall simulator bewilders me! Popularity equals quality and if my masters haven't told me to buy it through advertising and commercializing and dumbing down your hobby I won't financially support it with my govt faggotbucks! I'm a huge fucking faggot and I shouldn't own money! edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger! hoo boy i love being a redditor"
god I fucking hate niggers
>>258886
Normally in shitty tryhard brony fanfiction there's a Cult of assholes who want some asshole to take over Equestria because they think their boss will make a better ruler than Celestia. Even if the ruler in question is a petty cruel abusive cunt, or a weakling, or a fraud who promises free shit to his idiot followers, or a powerful but stupid asshole, or an old god who promises a swift death to his summoners and a slow death to everyone else.
They're literally willing to die because they think this nicey-nice Equestria where a monster can attack your village any day (and get beaten by some random nobodies through the power of friendship) isn't an Equestria worth living in, and an equestria ruled by some obviously-evil prick is worth dying for.
And if the baddies ever do take over they instantly ruin Equestria because they're baddies, and things only get good once the good guys take over.
That's what makes them cultists the heroes can slaughter by the thousands without remorse, regardless of whatever name they have.
Author is a faggot.
also
>having trouble with rapidly declining temperatures on half of the globe and rapidly
Oh christ, that's depressing.
Almost as depressing as knowing these easily-pleased consoomer faggots are also the type to think they're discerning high-IQ fancy fucks because they only consoom media of a very specific low-quality type.
>"Is that a very high-quality fanfic about an original character? That isn't RariDash porn! I don't want to look that, I want to look at RariDash porn fics and love them no matter how badly they are written! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a very high-quality oil painting of a hill during sunset? That isn't titties! I don't want to look that, I want to look at drawings of titties and love them no matter how badly they are drawn! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a deep intellectual exploration of a character who's gained what he dreamed of but lost everything else and forgot why he wanted it in the first place? That isn't trollgod Anon fucking with dumb ponies! I don't want to look that, I want to look at trollgod Anon fucking with dumb ponies no matter how badly Anon needs to lose to a fucking cartoon turtle and die! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a high quality action game?! Fuck off with that shit, I'm a R E A L G A M E R and I only goom like a true goomer if it's a 300 hour RPG an autoclicker could play for me if I wasn't stupider and more easily entertained than an autoclicker! Hoo boy I sure do love having standards!"
>"Is that a high quality puzzle game?! Fuck off with that shit, I'm a R E A L G A M E R and I only goom like a true goomer if it's a 1.2 hour schuut game like Call of Duty! Games that don't look realistic aka exactly like COD does aren't games! I only know how to handle one control scheme and anything faster than my chest high wall simulator bewilders me! Popularity equals quality and if my masters haven't told me to buy it through advertising and commercializing and dumbing down your hobby I won't financially support it with my govt faggotbucks! I'm a huge fucking faggot and I shouldn't own money! edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger! hoo boy i love being a redditor"
god I fucking hate niggers
>>258886
Normally in shitty tryhard brony fanfiction there's a Cult of assholes who want some asshole to take over Equestria because they think their boss will make a better ruler than Celestia. Even if the ruler in question is a petty cruel abusive cunt, or a weakling, or a fraud who promises free shit to his idiot followers, or a powerful but stupid asshole, or an old god who promises a swift death to his summoners and a slow death to everyone else.
They're literally willing to die because they think this nicey-nice Equestria where a monster can attack your village any day (and get beaten by some random nobodies through the power of friendship) isn't an Equestria worth living in, and an equestria ruled by some obviously-evil prick is worth dying for.
And if the baddies ever do take over they instantly ruin Equestria because they're baddies, and things only get good once the good guys take over.
That's what makes them cultists the heroes can slaughter by the thousands without remorse, regardless of whatever name they have.
Author is a faggot.
also
>having trouble with rapidly declining temperatures on half of the globe and rapidly
>>258933
rising temperatures on the other and food not growing at night
>not just casting a Reverse spell on the "eats sunlight" part of plants and then creating a network of magical radio towers that magically normalize the planet's temperature
It's fucking magic, it's like sci-fi technobabble but it doesn't even have to pretend to not be bullshit. As long as it sounds about right like "I used a Push spell to push the Damage out of this wall, fixing it" then you can literally do anything in your shitty magic story. This is why magic should be limited to only work in ways that make sense, otherwise magic is a blank cheque and you're expected to pretend everything it can be used for makes sense.
In Fullmetal Alchemist, if you want to make something, you need its ingredients so you can shuffle them around into what you want made.
In Sword Art Online, magic isn't real and everyone's a faggot trapped in a videogame, so the "Magic" is just programming bullshit and the "Super sword moves" are just animations forced onto your character model when you choose them from a menu.
In Bleach, in addition to all your DBZ "Speed skill strength and magic stats and toughness are all tied to one Power Level Number so a weakling can't defeat his superior" bullshit, on top of that, everyone has one or more bullshit tricks that can do anything like "Control all your senses through illusion perfectly" or "Insert events into your past" or "See the future and change it, to the point where I can make that gun you are about to pull out of your pocket shatter apart instantly". And nothing feels earned because it's bullshit magic, anything can do anything.
In JJBA, Stands can do any 1-4 bullshit things if their user's will is strong enough but because their users are weak squishy humans and an OP combat god can still be shot or stabbed or blindsided by a bullshit cheaty "turn target into books" power there is always tension.
In Avatar, if you want to push a big rock or whip someone with water or push air or make a lot of fire, you have to push real hard and move in the right martial artsy way with the right spiritual mindset. Even the "Legendary all-powerful Philosopher's Stone that lets you break alchemy's rules of equivalent exchange" is just a type of rock made from crushed-together souls you can spend like money in the place of required ingredients.
Even in Naruto (something I admit is pretty shit) if you want to cast a spell you need to expend energy to cast it and usually also do Ninja handsigns first. Plus you're restricted to elements you're allowed to use based on family bloodline, and you're restricted to elements you've gotten good at using over years of practice, and the elemental spell can only do what it's designed to do. You can't improvise with elements in this show, only use the 1-5 spells you know in the way they're intended.
But pony magic? We're never told HOW it works, so it's a blank cheque that exists specifically so authors only have to let reality and realism and science get in the way of their fairytale kiddy stories if they think doing that makes them smarter writers.
Author is not smart.
>>258924
When I was a child I thought there was something wrong with me because I was rolling my eyes through all of Marley And Me when we saw it in school as kids, while everyone else even the adults were bawling like schoolchildren.
At the time I thought it was a low-quality Lilo and Stitch knockoff because that was the only Dog Movie I'd ever seen.
also fuck Dog Movies they're formulaic low-IQ garbage and the only fun ones are ones that move away from the formula by making the dog play basketball or rip off Buzz from Toy Story or play soccer or be spies or go to space or shit like that.
rising temperatures on the other and food not growing at night
>not just casting a Reverse spell on the "eats sunlight" part of plants and then creating a network of magical radio towers that magically normalize the planet's temperature
It's fucking magic, it's like sci-fi technobabble but it doesn't even have to pretend to not be bullshit. As long as it sounds about right like "I used a Push spell to push the Damage out of this wall, fixing it" then you can literally do anything in your shitty magic story. This is why magic should be limited to only work in ways that make sense, otherwise magic is a blank cheque and you're expected to pretend everything it can be used for makes sense.
In Fullmetal Alchemist, if you want to make something, you need its ingredients so you can shuffle them around into what you want made.
In Sword Art Online, magic isn't real and everyone's a faggot trapped in a videogame, so the "Magic" is just programming bullshit and the "Super sword moves" are just animations forced onto your character model when you choose them from a menu.
In Bleach, in addition to all your DBZ "Speed skill strength and magic stats and toughness are all tied to one Power Level Number so a weakling can't defeat his superior" bullshit, on top of that, everyone has one or more bullshit tricks that can do anything like "Control all your senses through illusion perfectly" or "Insert events into your past" or "See the future and change it, to the point where I can make that gun you are about to pull out of your pocket shatter apart instantly". And nothing feels earned because it's bullshit magic, anything can do anything.
In JJBA, Stands can do any 1-4 bullshit things if their user's will is strong enough but because their users are weak squishy humans and an OP combat god can still be shot or stabbed or blindsided by a bullshit cheaty "turn target into books" power there is always tension.
In Avatar, if you want to push a big rock or whip someone with water or push air or make a lot of fire, you have to push real hard and move in the right martial artsy way with the right spiritual mindset. Even the "Legendary all-powerful Philosopher's Stone that lets you break alchemy's rules of equivalent exchange" is just a type of rock made from crushed-together souls you can spend like money in the place of required ingredients.
Even in Naruto (something I admit is pretty shit) if you want to cast a spell you need to expend energy to cast it and usually also do Ninja handsigns first. Plus you're restricted to elements you're allowed to use based on family bloodline, and you're restricted to elements you've gotten good at using over years of practice, and the elemental spell can only do what it's designed to do. You can't improvise with elements in this show, only use the 1-5 spells you know in the way they're intended.
But pony magic? We're never told HOW it works, so it's a blank cheque that exists specifically so authors only have to let reality and realism and science get in the way of their fairytale kiddy stories if they think doing that makes them smarter writers.
Author is not smart.
>>258924
When I was a child I thought there was something wrong with me because I was rolling my eyes through all of Marley And Me when we saw it in school as kids, while everyone else even the adults were bawling like schoolchildren.
At the time I thought it was a low-quality Lilo and Stitch knockoff because that was the only Dog Movie I'd ever seen.
also fuck Dog Movies they're formulaic low-IQ garbage and the only fun ones are ones that move away from the formula by making the dog play basketball or rip off Buzz from Toy Story or play soccer or be spies or go to space or shit like that.
>>258933
>Normally in shitty tryhard brony fanfiction there's a Cult of assholes who want some asshole to take over Equestria because they think their boss will make a better ruler than Celestia. Even if the ruler in question is a petty cruel abusive cunt, or a weakling, or a fraud who promises free shit to his idiot followers, or a powerful but stupid asshole, or an old god who promises a swift death to his summoners and a slow death to everyone else.
>They're literally willing to die because they think this nicey-nice Equestria where a monster can attack your village any day (and get beaten by some random nobodies through the power of friendship) isn't an Equestria worth living in, and an equestria ruled by some obviously-evil prick is worth dying for.
>And if the baddies ever do take over they instantly ruin Equestria because they're baddies, and things only get good once the good guys take over.
>That's what makes them cultists the heroes can slaughter by the thousands without remorse, regardless of whatever name they have.
We have those irl too. They're called socialists.
>also fuck Dog Movies they're formulaic low-IQ garbage and the only fun ones are ones that move away from the formula by making the dog play basketball or rip off Buzz from Toy Story or play soccer or be spies or go to space or shit like that.
That's because they rip off classics like Old Yeller and Lassie and distill their elements into lowest-common-denominator bathos.
>Normally in shitty tryhard brony fanfiction there's a Cult of assholes who want some asshole to take over Equestria because they think their boss will make a better ruler than Celestia. Even if the ruler in question is a petty cruel abusive cunt, or a weakling, or a fraud who promises free shit to his idiot followers, or a powerful but stupid asshole, or an old god who promises a swift death to his summoners and a slow death to everyone else.
>They're literally willing to die because they think this nicey-nice Equestria where a monster can attack your village any day (and get beaten by some random nobodies through the power of friendship) isn't an Equestria worth living in, and an equestria ruled by some obviously-evil prick is worth dying for.
>And if the baddies ever do take over they instantly ruin Equestria because they're baddies, and things only get good once the good guys take over.
>That's what makes them cultists the heroes can slaughter by the thousands without remorse, regardless of whatever name they have.
We have those irl too. They're called socialists.
>also fuck Dog Movies they're formulaic low-IQ garbage and the only fun ones are ones that move away from the formula by making the dog play basketball or rip off Buzz from Toy Story or play soccer or be spies or go to space or shit like that.
That's because they rip off classics like Old Yeller and Lassie and distill their elements into lowest-common-denominator bathos.
>>258939
Speaking of animals, you ever notice how one of the biggest red flags for shit women is when she fetishizes the bad behavior of shitty cats, and decides those who dislike this cattyy cunty small-brained rat-eating-rat behaviour and prefer dogs/iguanas/horses/anything else have something wrong with them?
Speaking of animals, you ever notice how one of the biggest red flags for shit women is when she fetishizes the bad behavior of shitty cats, and decides those who dislike this cattyy cunty small-brained rat-eating-rat behaviour and prefer dogs/iguanas/horses/anything else have something wrong with them?
>>258888
I hope that you don't feel like I'm using you, which in autistic pedantic sense (correct sense) I am. However, I thought that might as well ask, you know. So I wondered if you can comment on something I wrote. This, >>258514 → >>258683 → >>258684 →
So if you have any comments at all it would be a big help.
I have a story in the making. I intended to post it in its own thread when I have written more on it.
So I will probably ask if you can comment on that piece as well.
I hope that you don't feel like I'm using you, which in autistic pedantic sense (correct sense) I am. However, I thought that might as well ask, you know. So I wondered if you can comment on something I wrote. This, >>258514 → >>258683 → >>258684 →
So if you have any comments at all it would be a big help.
I have a story in the making. I intended to post it in its own thread when I have written more on it.
So I will probably ask if you can comment on that piece as well.
>>258886
Nightmare Nyx eventually retires into an opulent bedroom the cult has prepared for her. She finds the cupcakes and the Twilight Sparkle dakimakura laid out for her as she requested. She tries one of the cupcakes, but it only reminds her of her old life, so she angrily throws them at the wall. After that, she beats up the Twilight Sparkle doll and goes out onto the balcony to brood angrily.
This scene is actually not badly done. The vivid descriptions of the room are quite good; it's easy to visualize everything, and it's a pretty nice looking room. Peen Stroke draws a nice contrast between the superficial beauty of the furnishings and the ugliness of Nyx's mood. She now has an opulent bedroom in her own private castle, a cult of gay little edgelord ponies climbing over each other to do her bidding, round the clock cupcake service...she's got it all, and yet she's miserable because all she can think about is the happy childhood she left behind. It's very Citizen Kane.
Unfortunately, like most of the other good scenes we've seen so far, it's basically wasted because again, she really has no good motivation for doing any of this or even being here.
>She would be Equestria’s queen, she would overthrow Celestia and Luna, and she… she would make Twilight Sparkle pay.
Y tho? Because you're Nightmare Moon and that's what Nightmare Moon does? Because you're mad at Twilight because she kinda-sorta betrayed you a little by agreeing to have you spend the night in Canterlot and possibly get sent to the moon but probably not as far as she knew? Even though in all other regards she's been quite nice to you, just like Cheerilee and your school friends and everypony else that you heaped insults on before running off to join this gay little cult?
For starters, this would work a lot better if the confrontation scene between Celestia and Twilight had been written better, and had been more clearly defined as a separation between Twilight and Nyx. Let's imagine: Celestia chews out Twilight and demands she hand over Nyx, Twilight is torn between her loyalty to Celestia and her love for Nyx. Ultimately she gives in to Celestia, for reasons that she knows Nyx won't understand which makes it that much harder. She hands Nyx over with tears in her eyes, and it's made clear that they are never to see each other again. All of this happens right after Nyx and Twilight just had a nice afternoon of mommy-daughter fun. At this point, Nyx feels as if the entire world has just been ripped out from under her feet (hooves, whatever). She's got a little more reason to be angry now.
This would be better than what we have, although even fixing that pivotal scene wouldn't completely solve our problems. If we really want to get to the core of why none of this is convincing, we need to go much deeper. Even if Twilight's betrayal of Nyx is made more appropriately tragic, it still doesn't address the fact that up until this point, Nyx has had a fairly idyllic life and even being suddenly betrayed by her mommy doesn't quite justify her sudden decision to go Columbine on all of Equestria. We need to look deeper at Twilight and Nyx's relationship, and explore not only why it doesn't quite feel genuine, but also why it doesn't appropriately build up to this kind of an explosion from Nyx. There's been no tension whatsoever between Twilight and Nyx, and betrayal or no, I can't see anything that justifies her being this angry. However, I will get to this in a little bit.
At any rate, this all just looks like a childish temper tantrum from Nyx, and I really can't sympathize with her at all here. A child who gets mad at her mother over some dumb arbitrary thing and locks herself in her room to pout about it is sympathetic enough, but if she tries to actually murder her mother over it she's obviously psychotic, and the reader stops sympathizing. Moreover, she's clearly angry about more than just Twilight betraying her. She pretty much chewed out the entire town a few scenes ago, but other than getting picked on a little at the beginning of the story there's not much justification for it. Even though this particular scene we're on is well written, it fails to deliver its punch because it's built on a weak foundation, and if your foundation is weak, anything built on top of it won't stand.
Right now, we should be feeling both anger and sadness. As the partly-omniscient reader, we understand that Twilight was only doing what she thought was right when she agreed to let Celestia take Nyx. However, we also understand how Nyx would feel. We feel sadness for Nyx, anger at the unfairness of the situation, and even more anger at the fact that this misunderstanding is about to unfold into tragedy and there's nothing we can do about it except watch. This is what we are supposed to be feeling. However, what we mostly feel instead is boredom, because basically we're now reading a story about a pony who gets turned into a cliche villain by magic and is about to spend the next several tedious chapters behaving like a cliche villain for no reason in particular until she eventually attains some kind of deus ex machina redemption at the end.
Anyway, that's the end of the chapter. Sorry if today's post was a little incoherent, I'm pretty tired right now.
Nightmare Nyx eventually retires into an opulent bedroom the cult has prepared for her. She finds the cupcakes and the Twilight Sparkle dakimakura laid out for her as she requested. She tries one of the cupcakes, but it only reminds her of her old life, so she angrily throws them at the wall. After that, she beats up the Twilight Sparkle doll and goes out onto the balcony to brood angrily.
This scene is actually not badly done. The vivid descriptions of the room are quite good; it's easy to visualize everything, and it's a pretty nice looking room. Peen Stroke draws a nice contrast between the superficial beauty of the furnishings and the ugliness of Nyx's mood. She now has an opulent bedroom in her own private castle, a cult of gay little edgelord ponies climbing over each other to do her bidding, round the clock cupcake service...she's got it all, and yet she's miserable because all she can think about is the happy childhood she left behind. It's very Citizen Kane.
Unfortunately, like most of the other good scenes we've seen so far, it's basically wasted because again, she really has no good motivation for doing any of this or even being here.
>She would be Equestria’s queen, she would overthrow Celestia and Luna, and she… she would make Twilight Sparkle pay.
Y tho? Because you're Nightmare Moon and that's what Nightmare Moon does? Because you're mad at Twilight because she kinda-sorta betrayed you a little by agreeing to have you spend the night in Canterlot and possibly get sent to the moon but probably not as far as she knew? Even though in all other regards she's been quite nice to you, just like Cheerilee and your school friends and everypony else that you heaped insults on before running off to join this gay little cult?
For starters, this would work a lot better if the confrontation scene between Celestia and Twilight had been written better, and had been more clearly defined as a separation between Twilight and Nyx. Let's imagine: Celestia chews out Twilight and demands she hand over Nyx, Twilight is torn between her loyalty to Celestia and her love for Nyx. Ultimately she gives in to Celestia, for reasons that she knows Nyx won't understand which makes it that much harder. She hands Nyx over with tears in her eyes, and it's made clear that they are never to see each other again. All of this happens right after Nyx and Twilight just had a nice afternoon of mommy-daughter fun. At this point, Nyx feels as if the entire world has just been ripped out from under her feet (hooves, whatever). She's got a little more reason to be angry now.
This would be better than what we have, although even fixing that pivotal scene wouldn't completely solve our problems. If we really want to get to the core of why none of this is convincing, we need to go much deeper. Even if Twilight's betrayal of Nyx is made more appropriately tragic, it still doesn't address the fact that up until this point, Nyx has had a fairly idyllic life and even being suddenly betrayed by her mommy doesn't quite justify her sudden decision to go Columbine on all of Equestria. We need to look deeper at Twilight and Nyx's relationship, and explore not only why it doesn't quite feel genuine, but also why it doesn't appropriately build up to this kind of an explosion from Nyx. There's been no tension whatsoever between Twilight and Nyx, and betrayal or no, I can't see anything that justifies her being this angry. However, I will get to this in a little bit.
At any rate, this all just looks like a childish temper tantrum from Nyx, and I really can't sympathize with her at all here. A child who gets mad at her mother over some dumb arbitrary thing and locks herself in her room to pout about it is sympathetic enough, but if she tries to actually murder her mother over it she's obviously psychotic, and the reader stops sympathizing. Moreover, she's clearly angry about more than just Twilight betraying her. She pretty much chewed out the entire town a few scenes ago, but other than getting picked on a little at the beginning of the story there's not much justification for it. Even though this particular scene we're on is well written, it fails to deliver its punch because it's built on a weak foundation, and if your foundation is weak, anything built on top of it won't stand.
Right now, we should be feeling both anger and sadness. As the partly-omniscient reader, we understand that Twilight was only doing what she thought was right when she agreed to let Celestia take Nyx. However, we also understand how Nyx would feel. We feel sadness for Nyx, anger at the unfairness of the situation, and even more anger at the fact that this misunderstanding is about to unfold into tragedy and there's nothing we can do about it except watch. This is what we are supposed to be feeling. However, what we mostly feel instead is boredom, because basically we're now reading a story about a pony who gets turned into a cliche villain by magic and is about to spend the next several tedious chapters behaving like a cliche villain for no reason in particular until she eventually attains some kind of deus ex machina redemption at the end.
Anyway, that's the end of the chapter. Sorry if today's post was a little incoherent, I'm pretty tired right now.
File (): 397CB8180CF4D1F3A5B023DC10D34569-27523.jpg (26.9 KB, 300x300, princess-molestia_fb_853585.jpg)
>>259000
Chapter 12: Mother of a Nightmare
>“I can’t believe Nyx turned out to be Nightmare Moon. It… it makes just about as much sense as a blue apple,” Applejack commented.
Thank you AJ, you have summed up my thoughts about this entire story quite succinctly. Leave it to you to be the voice of reason even here.
Anyway, the chapter opens in Twilight's treehouse. Twilight is, of course, crying her eyes out, but fortunately we're spared the play by play. Instead, the scene focuses on Twilights five friends sitting around discussing the situation.
Actually it looks like I spoke too soon. After only a few brief moments of discussion, the scene cuts upstairs to Twilight, and....you know what, I'm just going to quote this verbatim, because no summary would really do it justice:
>Twilight was lying on top of her bed. Her eyes were puffy and red, and a portion of her pillow was soaked with tears. She was hugging a ripped purple vest, a bent headband, and a pair of cracked glasses to her chest and staring at the distant moon through the window.
All this scene needs to make it complete is a gramophone playing My Chemical Romance and some heavy description of Twilight's fetlocks crying tears of blood.
In all seriousness, Twilight's reaction here is probably not that far over the top. Her sort-of-daughter suddenly turned evil and declared open war on all of Equestria and so forth and so on; most people (ponies, whatever) would probably not be at their best after something like that. But again, Peen Stroke is really trying hard to force emotion here, because again the real thing is in short supply here, yet nevertheless he expects the reader to feel. Sorry if I sound like a broken My Chemical Romance record at this point, but it's true.
The next few paragraphs basically walk us through Twilight's thought process during the argument with Celestia, which really shouldn't be necessary at this point. We should already know how she feels and why she feels that way. Plus, I've noticed that this story spends a lot of time rehashing previous events, either by having Twilight think about them or by having characters explaining things to each other that the reader already knows. This is a bad habit; it adds bloat to an already bloated novel, and conveys no new information.
>There was only one thing Twilight desired more than having Nyx back.
Yep, and I've got it right here, baby. Bam. lol I'm sorry, it's getting harder and harder to take this seriously, but I've come far enough that I pretty much feel like I have to finish this.
Anyway, this goes more or less as you'd expect. Twilight moans internally about how she wishes she could tell Nyx she was sorry, but she doesn't know where she is, etc. etc. The narrative does some rather obnoxious cutting back and forth between Twilight alone upstairs and her friends talking downstairs, which I find jarring because it's not always clear who is talking to whom, or what we're supposed to be visualizing. For some goddamn idiotic reason, Peen Stroke takes this opportunity to once again needlessly mention that the cult member who had been following Pinkie around was Horte Cuisine, an irrelevant background pony that literally no one on earth except the Grand Poobah of Autism himself could be expected to know or give a fuck about. Then, Twilight jumps out the window for some reason and the subchapter ends.
Alright, next subchapter.
>Within minutes, Twilight had made her way to Horte Cuisine’s home.
Well I'll be damned, it looks like Peen Stroke is actually going somewhere with the Horte Cuisine thing. Welp, let's see where he takes it. Twilight breaks into the guy's house and uses some of his belongings to perform some kind of tracking spell to see if she can divine his location, so she can follow him to wherever Nyx is.
This isn't terrible as far as convoluted schemes go, although I do have a few issues. For one, Twilight just barges right into his house on the assumption that he won't be inside. Since the cult members blew their cover, presumably anyone associated with the cult would have fled after the ritual, which I assume is Twilight's reasoning here. However, it's not a guarantee that the house will be empty. He might have returned home to grab his things, he might have decided to remain in hiding rather than escape, the cult might have wanted him to stay behind and keep an eye on the town, the house could have a protection spell on it; any number of possible dangers could exist here. Twilight just barges right in without any forethought.
The other thing to consider is that tracking down Horte Cuisine doesn't necessarily mean finding Nyx. The guy could be anywhere, and may or may not be at the cult's hideout. If she finds him and he's alone, what is she planning to do exactly? Beat the truth out of him? According to the wiki, Horte Cuisine appears in the series as both an Earth Pony and a Unicorn (you have to love the continuity of this show sometimes), and it's unclear which version Peen Stroke is using here. If he's a Unicorn and in the cult, he might be more powerful than he looks (considering they work with powerful, arcane magic). Even if he's just a mudpony, he could still put up enough of a fight to make subduing him a pain in the ass, especially if Twilight is alone. And what does Twilight plan to do if he's with other members of the cult? No matter how you slice it, Twilight is just rushing headlong into a situation fraught with any number of potential dangers, up to and including >rape.
Anyway, none of this really matters since what actually happens in the story is that Twilight tracks his location until his signal suddenly disappears in a magically shielded area, which one could logically deduce is where the cult is hiding. Still, I maintain that her actions were unreasonably reckless, especially for an obsessive planner like Twi, and I don't entirely believe this scene.
Chapter 12: Mother of a Nightmare
>“I can’t believe Nyx turned out to be Nightmare Moon. It… it makes just about as much sense as a blue apple,” Applejack commented.
Thank you AJ, you have summed up my thoughts about this entire story quite succinctly. Leave it to you to be the voice of reason even here.
Anyway, the chapter opens in Twilight's treehouse. Twilight is, of course, crying her eyes out, but fortunately we're spared the play by play. Instead, the scene focuses on Twilights five friends sitting around discussing the situation.
Actually it looks like I spoke too soon. After only a few brief moments of discussion, the scene cuts upstairs to Twilight, and....you know what, I'm just going to quote this verbatim, because no summary would really do it justice:
>Twilight was lying on top of her bed. Her eyes were puffy and red, and a portion of her pillow was soaked with tears. She was hugging a ripped purple vest, a bent headband, and a pair of cracked glasses to her chest and staring at the distant moon through the window.
All this scene needs to make it complete is a gramophone playing My Chemical Romance and some heavy description of Twilight's fetlocks crying tears of blood.
In all seriousness, Twilight's reaction here is probably not that far over the top. Her sort-of-daughter suddenly turned evil and declared open war on all of Equestria and so forth and so on; most people (ponies, whatever) would probably not be at their best after something like that. But again, Peen Stroke is really trying hard to force emotion here, because again the real thing is in short supply here, yet nevertheless he expects the reader to feel. Sorry if I sound like a broken My Chemical Romance record at this point, but it's true.
The next few paragraphs basically walk us through Twilight's thought process during the argument with Celestia, which really shouldn't be necessary at this point. We should already know how she feels and why she feels that way. Plus, I've noticed that this story spends a lot of time rehashing previous events, either by having Twilight think about them or by having characters explaining things to each other that the reader already knows. This is a bad habit; it adds bloat to an already bloated novel, and conveys no new information.
>There was only one thing Twilight desired more than having Nyx back.
Yep, and I've got it right here, baby. Bam. lol I'm sorry, it's getting harder and harder to take this seriously, but I've come far enough that I pretty much feel like I have to finish this.
Anyway, this goes more or less as you'd expect. Twilight moans internally about how she wishes she could tell Nyx she was sorry, but she doesn't know where she is, etc. etc. The narrative does some rather obnoxious cutting back and forth between Twilight alone upstairs and her friends talking downstairs, which I find jarring because it's not always clear who is talking to whom, or what we're supposed to be visualizing. For some goddamn idiotic reason, Peen Stroke takes this opportunity to once again needlessly mention that the cult member who had been following Pinkie around was Horte Cuisine, an irrelevant background pony that literally no one on earth except the Grand Poobah of Autism himself could be expected to know or give a fuck about. Then, Twilight jumps out the window for some reason and the subchapter ends.
Alright, next subchapter.
>Within minutes, Twilight had made her way to Horte Cuisine’s home.
Well I'll be damned, it looks like Peen Stroke is actually going somewhere with the Horte Cuisine thing. Welp, let's see where he takes it. Twilight breaks into the guy's house and uses some of his belongings to perform some kind of tracking spell to see if she can divine his location, so she can follow him to wherever Nyx is.
This isn't terrible as far as convoluted schemes go, although I do have a few issues. For one, Twilight just barges right into his house on the assumption that he won't be inside. Since the cult members blew their cover, presumably anyone associated with the cult would have fled after the ritual, which I assume is Twilight's reasoning here. However, it's not a guarantee that the house will be empty. He might have returned home to grab his things, he might have decided to remain in hiding rather than escape, the cult might have wanted him to stay behind and keep an eye on the town, the house could have a protection spell on it; any number of possible dangers could exist here. Twilight just barges right in without any forethought.
The other thing to consider is that tracking down Horte Cuisine doesn't necessarily mean finding Nyx. The guy could be anywhere, and may or may not be at the cult's hideout. If she finds him and he's alone, what is she planning to do exactly? Beat the truth out of him? According to the wiki, Horte Cuisine appears in the series as both an Earth Pony and a Unicorn (you have to love the continuity of this show sometimes), and it's unclear which version Peen Stroke is using here. If he's a Unicorn and in the cult, he might be more powerful than he looks (considering they work with powerful, arcane magic). Even if he's just a mudpony, he could still put up enough of a fight to make subduing him a pain in the ass, especially if Twilight is alone. And what does Twilight plan to do if he's with other members of the cult? No matter how you slice it, Twilight is just rushing headlong into a situation fraught with any number of potential dangers, up to and including >rape.
Anyway, none of this really matters since what actually happens in the story is that Twilight tracks his location until his signal suddenly disappears in a magically shielded area, which one could logically deduce is where the cult is hiding. Still, I maintain that her actions were unreasonably reckless, especially for an obsessive planner like Twi, and I don't entirely believe this scene.
>>259012
>>258994
This is unrelated to Past Sins, this is just a side project I'm doing for Sven. I'm posting it here to avoid derailing the Anonfilly thread. My regular readers can disregard this.
>>258514 →
>”Nonny!” a brown filly with a black and white mane called as she waved her entire length of her hoof back and forth like a window wiper.
You might want to consider using a different analogy here. For one thing, from the context I'm assuming you probably mean "windshield wiper" rather than "window wiper," as a windshield wiper makes the same sort of motion that a person's (pony's, whatever) arm makes when they're waving. However, to my knowledge, such devices don't exist in Equestria. If the story is focused on Anonfilly, one can assume that he/she would remember what windshield wipers are from his/her previous life, but still, it's usually better to keep your imagery confined to the world you're writing in. It's not a huge deal one way or the other, but it's something to think about.
>The brown filly bounced over to the other filly and brought a packet out of her saddlebag.
How is she performing this action? If she's a Unicorn, she would use her horn magic, but if she's an Earth Pony or a Pegasus, it would be slightly more complicated. Other than coloring, we don't really have a visual for this character yet. "Green filly" is probably fine for describing Anonfilly since most readers probably know what she looks like, but the brown filly is an unknown character, so you may want to at least add an additional descriptor indicating which type of pony she is. Again, not a huge deal, but something to think about.
Also, in the next line she undoes the paper wrapping on a pair of chocolate cookies, an action which could be even more complicated if she doesn't have magic. Writing characters who don't have opposable thumbs can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
>”No, butts. You pervert! Here.”
I get the joke here, but it's awkwardly phrased. Also, I hate to nitpick, but you don't want to use a comma after "no". "No butts" indicates the speaker's refusal to accept butts, which seems to be what she means to say. Conversely, "No, butts" indicates the speaker is answering a question in the negative, which they follow with an assertion that "butts" is the correct answer. Obviously, that doesn't make a ton of sense in this (or any) context, so you'll want to remove the comma. The English language can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
Also, you probably want to say "buts" instead of "butts", even though it ruins the joke somewhat. As I said, the joke is a little awkward anyway. You could still have this joke work by breaking up the dialogue a bit. I would have it go:
"Choco, thank you but-"
"No buts. Here."
Then, have Anonfilly start making some kind of lewd joke about butts, but then Choco stuffs the cookie in his mouth before he can finish. She calls him a pervert after that, while he's chewing. Calls her a pervert while she's chewing, I guess. Gender ambiguity can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
The next thing I notice about this is that it's a little difficult to tell what lines are being spoken by whom. It's easier if I just demonstrate this line by line with greentext quotes:
>”No, butts. You pervert! Here.”
This line is clearly being spoken by Choco. BUTT then:
>She bit hold of one of the cookies and then poked her in cheek with it.
From context, one would infer that "she" refers to Anonfilly, since Anonfilly is the one with a cookie in her mouth. But on the other hand, the last character referenced was Choco, so logically the pronoun should refer to her.
>”Unmmmgh Gaurmmmde,” she said while clenching her teeth around the cookie.
At this point I am completely confused as to which of these fillies has a cookie in her mouth, and my confusion only increases from here. Also, I get that the spoken line here (Unmmmgh Gaurmmmde) is meant to be garbled because the filly is talking with her mouth full wakka chicka wokka chicka. However, usually when you do this, you want the reader to at least be able to tell what the character was trying to say. I can't really tell here. Best I've been able to figure is that she's saying "Umm, good", but I'm not really sure.
>”Thank you. Really, I appriciate it but-”
This line is presumably Anonfilly speaking.
>”Mmmeeeph!”
Grammatically this should be Choco speaking, but logically this seems like Anonfilly should be saying it, so I'm not sure who says this line. But the fact that I'm even this confused about it should suggest that you need to make it clearer.
>”Alright, alright. Just stop making that sound… Whatever it is.” She held up her hooves over her head.
Assuming we're still alternating lines, this should be Anonfilly speaking, however from context I'm assuming Choco. In any case, the previous line about the fillies and colts looking at them is part of the narration, not the dialogue, so it breaks up the conversation. When it resumes again, either character could be speaking, so this is a place where you would want to use a name (AF/Choco) or a descriptor (green filly/brown filly).
In any event, you can probably see what I'm getting at here. The exchange is a bit hard to follow. If this were an exchange between a male and a female you could get away with just using the he/she pronouns and it would be easy to tell who was speaking. However, when it's two females it can get confusing. You don't need to have "green filly said" and "brown filly said" after every line, in fact I'd highly recommend that you not. However, you probably want to add a name or a descriptor every couple of lines so the reader can keep track. Either that, or clarify through narration exactly what is going on here, ie, who has a cookie in her mouth and who doesn't, and then the reader should be able to figure out who's speaking from context.
1/2
>>258994
This is unrelated to Past Sins, this is just a side project I'm doing for Sven. I'm posting it here to avoid derailing the Anonfilly thread. My regular readers can disregard this.
>>258514 →
>”Nonny!” a brown filly with a black and white mane called as she waved her entire length of her hoof back and forth like a window wiper.
You might want to consider using a different analogy here. For one thing, from the context I'm assuming you probably mean "windshield wiper" rather than "window wiper," as a windshield wiper makes the same sort of motion that a person's (pony's, whatever) arm makes when they're waving. However, to my knowledge, such devices don't exist in Equestria. If the story is focused on Anonfilly, one can assume that he/she would remember what windshield wipers are from his/her previous life, but still, it's usually better to keep your imagery confined to the world you're writing in. It's not a huge deal one way or the other, but it's something to think about.
>The brown filly bounced over to the other filly and brought a packet out of her saddlebag.
How is she performing this action? If she's a Unicorn, she would use her horn magic, but if she's an Earth Pony or a Pegasus, it would be slightly more complicated. Other than coloring, we don't really have a visual for this character yet. "Green filly" is probably fine for describing Anonfilly since most readers probably know what she looks like, but the brown filly is an unknown character, so you may want to at least add an additional descriptor indicating which type of pony she is. Again, not a huge deal, but something to think about.
Also, in the next line she undoes the paper wrapping on a pair of chocolate cookies, an action which could be even more complicated if she doesn't have magic. Writing characters who don't have opposable thumbs can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
>”No, butts. You pervert! Here.”
I get the joke here, but it's awkwardly phrased. Also, I hate to nitpick, but you don't want to use a comma after "no". "No butts" indicates the speaker's refusal to accept butts, which seems to be what she means to say. Conversely, "No, butts" indicates the speaker is answering a question in the negative, which they follow with an assertion that "butts" is the correct answer. Obviously, that doesn't make a ton of sense in this (or any) context, so you'll want to remove the comma. The English language can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
Also, you probably want to say "buts" instead of "butts", even though it ruins the joke somewhat. As I said, the joke is a little awkward anyway. You could still have this joke work by breaking up the dialogue a bit. I would have it go:
"Choco, thank you but-"
"No buts. Here."
Then, have Anonfilly start making some kind of lewd joke about butts, but then Choco stuffs the cookie in his mouth before he can finish. She calls him a pervert after that, while he's chewing. Calls her a pervert while she's chewing, I guess. Gender ambiguity can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
The next thing I notice about this is that it's a little difficult to tell what lines are being spoken by whom. It's easier if I just demonstrate this line by line with greentext quotes:
>”No, butts. You pervert! Here.”
This line is clearly being spoken by Choco. BUTT then:
>She bit hold of one of the cookies and then poked her in cheek with it.
From context, one would infer that "she" refers to Anonfilly, since Anonfilly is the one with a cookie in her mouth. But on the other hand, the last character referenced was Choco, so logically the pronoun should refer to her.
>”Unmmmgh Gaurmmmde,” she said while clenching her teeth around the cookie.
At this point I am completely confused as to which of these fillies has a cookie in her mouth, and my confusion only increases from here. Also, I get that the spoken line here (Unmmmgh Gaurmmmde) is meant to be garbled because the filly is talking with her mouth full wakka chicka wokka chicka. However, usually when you do this, you want the reader to at least be able to tell what the character was trying to say. I can't really tell here. Best I've been able to figure is that she's saying "Umm, good", but I'm not really sure.
>”Thank you. Really, I appriciate it but-”
This line is presumably Anonfilly speaking.
>”Mmmeeeph!”
Grammatically this should be Choco speaking, but logically this seems like Anonfilly should be saying it, so I'm not sure who says this line. But the fact that I'm even this confused about it should suggest that you need to make it clearer.
>”Alright, alright. Just stop making that sound… Whatever it is.” She held up her hooves over her head.
Assuming we're still alternating lines, this should be Anonfilly speaking, however from context I'm assuming Choco. In any case, the previous line about the fillies and colts looking at them is part of the narration, not the dialogue, so it breaks up the conversation. When it resumes again, either character could be speaking, so this is a place where you would want to use a name (AF/Choco) or a descriptor (green filly/brown filly).
In any event, you can probably see what I'm getting at here. The exchange is a bit hard to follow. If this were an exchange between a male and a female you could get away with just using the he/she pronouns and it would be easy to tell who was speaking. However, when it's two females it can get confusing. You don't need to have "green filly said" and "brown filly said" after every line, in fact I'd highly recommend that you not. However, you probably want to add a name or a descriptor every couple of lines so the reader can keep track. Either that, or clarify through narration exactly what is going on here, ie, who has a cookie in her mouth and who doesn't, and then the reader should be able to figure out who's speaking from context.
1/2
>>259127
>>258514 →
2/2
From what I've been able to gather, the situation is as follows: Choco opens her pack (somehow) and takes out some cookies. She then offers one to Anonfilly, who attempts to refuse, but before she can get the words out Choco stuffs the cookie into her mouth. Anonfilly becomes self conscious that people (ponies, whatever) may be watching them. If I am getting the details wrong feel free to correct me, but the more important thing here is that the action is a little hard to follow because of the way it's written.
Also, I notice that you mention the green filly's horn, indicating that Anonfilly in this story is a unicorn. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but you may want to consider mentioning this fact earlier. If you don't intend this for publication outside of an Anonfilly thread, you can probably get away with just saying "Nonny" or "the green filly" without any additional description and readers will know the character you're referencing. However, be aware that when you do that, the reader's image of the character will default to the most commonly accepted depiction of that character, which in Anonfilly's case is a green earth pony filly with a black mane. If you're going to add uncommon modifications like a horn or wings, it's better to clarify that up front. For instance if I were writing a story about Rainbow Dash, except it's the humanized EqG version of her, while the story takes place in Equestria and all the other characters are their regular pony selves, I'd want to explain this within the first paragraph or so of the text. You don't need to go into autistic detail about it, in fact I'd recommend that you not, but just casually mentioning it early on will let the reader know how you're depicting the character.
The only other thing I notice is that your dialog is occasionally a bit stiff and awkward. This line for example:
>By my own mother, sometimes you are really dense.
This line just doesn't feel natural. For one, "by my own mother" is a rather odd thing to swear on, and this type of oath would be a little anachronous for Anon anyway, assuming he comes from our world in the present day as he usually does. Swearing "by Jove" or "by the spirits" or even "By God" is kind of an old-timey dialect usually reserved for characters in fantasy or period stories; modern people, particularly younger ones (again, I'm assuming you're using the standard Anon, who is usually in the same demographic as the average 4chan user) don't typically use this form of speech. Also, I've mentioned this before, although I don't remember if it was to you or Nigel, but generally in dialogue you want to use contractions and slang, even though it's usually proper to avoid it in narration. Think about the way people speak in real life. Do you say "you are" when speaking to someone, or do you usually just contract it to "you're"?
I'm inclined to be a bit lenient on this front, since this may just be more of the ESL problems I've noticed in other things you've written, which I feel like I can't reasonably hold you accountable for. Still, though, if you're going to be writing in English, you may want to grab a story written by an American or a Brit to use as a reference, and pay particular attention to the characters' speaking styles. Dialect can be a hard thing to nail down in prose even for native speakers of a language, and that goes double for dialects that you don't typically speak, but putting in the extra effort is worth it.
That said, the scene itself is actually pretty good, and could probably be cleaned up quite easily just by addressing the few things I mentioned. I mostly noticed technical problems, which is a good sign because it means you've got a solid scene, you just need to tweak the writing a bit. Anonfilly and another filly named Choco are presumably in some kind of romantic relationship, only Nonny wants to keep it low-key. Choco is less self-conscious, and chafes a bit at Nonny's priggish behavior. It's a cute scene, even if I'm not entirely clear who is feeding cookies to whom, and it leaves me feeling curious about where you intend to take it. All in all an auspicious start.
I will continue with the other two quoted posts a little later.
>>258514 →
2/2
From what I've been able to gather, the situation is as follows: Choco opens her pack (somehow) and takes out some cookies. She then offers one to Anonfilly, who attempts to refuse, but before she can get the words out Choco stuffs the cookie into her mouth. Anonfilly becomes self conscious that people (ponies, whatever) may be watching them. If I am getting the details wrong feel free to correct me, but the more important thing here is that the action is a little hard to follow because of the way it's written.
Also, I notice that you mention the green filly's horn, indicating that Anonfilly in this story is a unicorn. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but you may want to consider mentioning this fact earlier. If you don't intend this for publication outside of an Anonfilly thread, you can probably get away with just saying "Nonny" or "the green filly" without any additional description and readers will know the character you're referencing. However, be aware that when you do that, the reader's image of the character will default to the most commonly accepted depiction of that character, which in Anonfilly's case is a green earth pony filly with a black mane. If you're going to add uncommon modifications like a horn or wings, it's better to clarify that up front. For instance if I were writing a story about Rainbow Dash, except it's the humanized EqG version of her, while the story takes place in Equestria and all the other characters are their regular pony selves, I'd want to explain this within the first paragraph or so of the text. You don't need to go into autistic detail about it, in fact I'd recommend that you not, but just casually mentioning it early on will let the reader know how you're depicting the character.
The only other thing I notice is that your dialog is occasionally a bit stiff and awkward. This line for example:
>By my own mother, sometimes you are really dense.
This line just doesn't feel natural. For one, "by my own mother" is a rather odd thing to swear on, and this type of oath would be a little anachronous for Anon anyway, assuming he comes from our world in the present day as he usually does. Swearing "by Jove" or "by the spirits" or even "By God" is kind of an old-timey dialect usually reserved for characters in fantasy or period stories; modern people, particularly younger ones (again, I'm assuming you're using the standard Anon, who is usually in the same demographic as the average 4chan user) don't typically use this form of speech. Also, I've mentioned this before, although I don't remember if it was to you or Nigel, but generally in dialogue you want to use contractions and slang, even though it's usually proper to avoid it in narration. Think about the way people speak in real life. Do you say "you are" when speaking to someone, or do you usually just contract it to "you're"?
I'm inclined to be a bit lenient on this front, since this may just be more of the ESL problems I've noticed in other things you've written, which I feel like I can't reasonably hold you accountable for. Still, though, if you're going to be writing in English, you may want to grab a story written by an American or a Brit to use as a reference, and pay particular attention to the characters' speaking styles. Dialect can be a hard thing to nail down in prose even for native speakers of a language, and that goes double for dialects that you don't typically speak, but putting in the extra effort is worth it.
That said, the scene itself is actually pretty good, and could probably be cleaned up quite easily just by addressing the few things I mentioned. I mostly noticed technical problems, which is a good sign because it means you've got a solid scene, you just need to tweak the writing a bit. Anonfilly and another filly named Choco are presumably in some kind of romantic relationship, only Nonny wants to keep it low-key. Choco is less self-conscious, and chafes a bit at Nonny's priggish behavior. It's a cute scene, even if I'm not entirely clear who is feeding cookies to whom, and it leaves me feeling curious about where you intend to take it. All in all an auspicious start.
I will continue with the other two quoted posts a little later.
File (): 4A3E020795ECDA8FC0340D45AA5D75E7-218121.png (213.0 KB, 781x900, 1498090956885.png)
>>259000
Nice digits. The entire story, no matter how marely times Micropeen Stroke attempts to reword it cannot be salvaged. Now, a "rewrite" directly implies that a writer fixes broken shit. In this specific instance the entire concept would have to be researched, studied, interpreted, and entirely rewritten in order to NOT be a faggatrocious cesspool of incoherent nu-cuck mulp idealogies.
>>259123
I warned you, yet you did not listen.
Nice digits. The entire story, no matter how marely times Micropeen Stroke attempts to reword it cannot be salvaged. Now, a "rewrite" directly implies that a writer fixes broken shit. In this specific instance the entire concept would have to be researched, studied, interpreted, and entirely rewritten in order to NOT be a faggatrocious cesspool of incoherent nu-cuck mulp idealogies.
>>259123
I warned you, yet you did not listen.
>>259127
>>259130
Thanks for the the critique. Will go explain later what I was going for more clearly if needed later. Here's the berief version: Choco has the cookie in her mouth and she pokes Anonfilly in the cheek with it. Then with cookie in mouth she tries to say, "En Garde!" Yeah, hehehe.
Anyway, the rest of her sounds are approving and disapproving.
>>259130
Thanks for the the critique. Will go explain later what I was going for more clearly if needed later. Here's the berief version: Choco has the cookie in her mouth and she pokes Anonfilly in the cheek with it. Then with cookie in mouth she tries to say, "En Garde!" Yeah, hehehe.
Anyway, the rest of her sounds are approving and disapproving.
>>259137
It could work as a parody, but then everything could work as a parody. Even Fallout Equestria. I was a fucking fool, this story can not be salvaged.
A Nyx parody could be fun, though. You could have some cool dude walk in after Nyx's transformation into NMM-Nyx. He could call Nyx a faggot, and kick her ass while saying cool shit like "Your name is Nix? Guess your mother didn't love you very much, since your name sucks!" and "I'll write this on your tombstone: Here lies Nyx, who was Nixed!"
By the way in less than a three weeks of time I will upload a file that needs to be spread and shared around, so it can be downloaded by anyone even if I am DMCA'd for it.
It could work as a parody, but then everything could work as a parody. Even Fallout Equestria. I was a fucking fool, this story can not be salvaged.
A Nyx parody could be fun, though. You could have some cool dude walk in after Nyx's transformation into NMM-Nyx. He could call Nyx a faggot, and kick her ass while saying cool shit like "Your name is Nix? Guess your mother didn't love you very much, since your name sucks!" and "I'll write this on your tombstone: Here lies Nyx, who was Nixed!"
By the way in less than a three weeks of time I will upload a file that needs to be spread and shared around, so it can be downloaded by anyone even if I am DMCA'd for it.
File (): A3F410B6D29F714A1B3196B8E610A1A9-482051.gif (470.8 KB, 330x400, tumblr_mdw0ylcasW1rcsx3uo1_400.gif)
>>259123
>She turned towards the door, and didn’t even glance at the mess she was leaving. In fact, she smiled a little at the thought of Horte Cuisine coming back home to find his bedroom ransacked. It was her small way of getting back at him for spying on her, her friends, and Nyx.
If you really want to get back at him, you should take a shit on his bed. Or better yet, leave a note on his refrigerator reminding him that he's a background pony and nobody except Peen Stroke remembers or cares that he exists.
Anyway, speaking of background ponies, the scene cuts to Applejack. She's up in Twilight's bedroom trying to see if she can get her to wake up and come join in their counsels; however, she notices that Twilight has inexplicably transformed herself into pillows stuffed under a blanket. On closer inspection, Applejack realizes that she is the victim of a ruse; Twilight is nowhere to be found, and she left a note explaining why.
The note explains that Twilight has run away to search forNightmare Nyx Mary Sue her daughter, and she doesn't expect to return and they will never see her again and Rainbow Dash can have her collection of My Chemical Romance LPs and blah blah blah, edge edge edge. This is a bit overdramatic imo, and I don't entirely understand why she chose not to involve her friends. My best guess is that, since they are keeping their Elements of Harmony close at hand, Twilight must assume that if Nyx does indeed show up they intend to blast her with their friendship rainbows of death like they did to the first Nightmare Moon. It makes sense that Twilight would be hesitant about using lethal force, but there's still a bit of a logic problem here.
In the series, blasting NM with the rainbow death rays simply turns NM back into Princess Luna. So by that logic wouldn't using the Elements on this NM cause her to simply revert back into Nyx? Or, since the NM personality is apparently a separate entity which may or may not be one and the same as Nyx, would firin' the rainbow lazars kill her? It's unclear.
I want to clarify that from a storytelling perspective, Peen Stroke actually made the right choice here. Twilight needs to go after Nyx by herself and face her alone. The conflict here is between Twilight and Nyx, Twilight is the one who (kinda sorta) did wrong by (kinda sorta) betraying Nyx, and she needs to (kinda sorta) resolve it and make it right without relying on any sort of magic lasers or deus ex machina friendship power. Her friends would have just been in the way on this quest (story wise). I'm simply calling attention to the fact that her in-world thought process is a tad illogical, and even if you're doing the correct thing narrative wise, it still needs to make sense.
Anywho, moving right along.
>After reaching the empty rock quarries outside Ponyville, it didn’t take long for Twilight to figure out that she needed to head down into the elaborate tunnel network of the Diamond Dogs. Then, after a few hours of navigating corridors, she almost walked into a pair of patrolling guards. It had been a close call, but it let Twilight know she was in the right place.
Peen Stroke, you are once again using after-the-fact narration to skip over bits of story that could potentially have been interesting. Exploring the Diamond Dog tunnels might have turned into a mini-adventure on its own, you might have even been able to milk a few subchapters out of it. This text somehow manages to bloat itself up to a preposterous size with extra junk, while simultaneously truncating stuff that could have been fun to read, even if it left the text a bit word-heavy. This is the literal opposite of how books are supposed to work.
Here's a quick example:
After reaching the base of the mountains, Frodo and Sam were able to navigate the underground passages with Gollum's help and make it into Mordor. It turns out Gollum had betrayed them, which came as no surprise to Sam, and they had run into a bit of a snafu when a big-ass spider started chasing them around. Frodo had almost been eaten, and in the end Sam had to break into an Orc fortress and rescue him. What a crazy weekend that was! But, ultimately, they had made it out unscathed, and now they stood at the edge of the volcano, ready to throw in the ring. However, Frodo was hesitating.
See how this paragraph technically explains what happens, but it manages to gloss over some of the most memorable events in the story? I basically took like a third of the plot of Return of the King and condensed it down into a single paragraph. Is it efficient in terms of word economy? Yes, very. Is it interesting to read? Probably not. People want to see things happen in a story, especially the exciting parts. Nobody wants to read a scene where a character is standing around talking about something interesting that happened to him on the way there; they would much rather read about the thing that happened.
Now, if I were to take the above paragraph and follow it with another ten paragraphs of Frodo musing to himself about whether or not the ring is evil, and whether he ought to throw it into the fire, and then suddenly have Frodo and Sam start making out with tongues while crying, I'd basically have written The Lord of the Rings as told by Peen Stroke.
One of the hardest parts of storytelling is knowing which events are important and need to be told play by play, and which events can be skimmed over or left out entirely. It's an art rather than a science, and I can't really explain how to do it, you just kind of have to re-read your own story and figure it out. Peen Stroke seems to have this instinct, but unfortunately it works in reverse for him.
Anyway, after glossing over Twilight's entrance into the tunnels, Mr. P follows it up with a decently-written scene in which she distracts some guards and sneaks into the cavern where the castle is built.
Pic unrelated but cute.
>She turned towards the door, and didn’t even glance at the mess she was leaving. In fact, she smiled a little at the thought of Horte Cuisine coming back home to find his bedroom ransacked. It was her small way of getting back at him for spying on her, her friends, and Nyx.
If you really want to get back at him, you should take a shit on his bed. Or better yet, leave a note on his refrigerator reminding him that he's a background pony and nobody except Peen Stroke remembers or cares that he exists.
Anyway, speaking of background ponies, the scene cuts to Applejack. She's up in Twilight's bedroom trying to see if she can get her to wake up and come join in their counsels; however, she notices that Twilight has inexplicably transformed herself into pillows stuffed under a blanket. On closer inspection, Applejack realizes that she is the victim of a ruse; Twilight is nowhere to be found, and she left a note explaining why.
The note explains that Twilight has run away to search for
In the series, blasting NM with the rainbow death rays simply turns NM back into Princess Luna. So by that logic wouldn't using the Elements on this NM cause her to simply revert back into Nyx? Or, since the NM personality is apparently a separate entity which may or may not be one and the same as Nyx, would firin' the rainbow lazars kill her? It's unclear.
I want to clarify that from a storytelling perspective, Peen Stroke actually made the right choice here. Twilight needs to go after Nyx by herself and face her alone. The conflict here is between Twilight and Nyx, Twilight is the one who (kinda sorta) did wrong by (kinda sorta) betraying Nyx, and she needs to (kinda sorta) resolve it and make it right without relying on any sort of magic lasers or deus ex machina friendship power. Her friends would have just been in the way on this quest (story wise). I'm simply calling attention to the fact that her in-world thought process is a tad illogical, and even if you're doing the correct thing narrative wise, it still needs to make sense.
Anywho, moving right along.
>After reaching the empty rock quarries outside Ponyville, it didn’t take long for Twilight to figure out that she needed to head down into the elaborate tunnel network of the Diamond Dogs. Then, after a few hours of navigating corridors, she almost walked into a pair of patrolling guards. It had been a close call, but it let Twilight know she was in the right place.
Peen Stroke, you are once again using after-the-fact narration to skip over bits of story that could potentially have been interesting. Exploring the Diamond Dog tunnels might have turned into a mini-adventure on its own, you might have even been able to milk a few subchapters out of it. This text somehow manages to bloat itself up to a preposterous size with extra junk, while simultaneously truncating stuff that could have been fun to read, even if it left the text a bit word-heavy. This is the literal opposite of how books are supposed to work.
Here's a quick example:
After reaching the base of the mountains, Frodo and Sam were able to navigate the underground passages with Gollum's help and make it into Mordor. It turns out Gollum had betrayed them, which came as no surprise to Sam, and they had run into a bit of a snafu when a big-ass spider started chasing them around. Frodo had almost been eaten, and in the end Sam had to break into an Orc fortress and rescue him. What a crazy weekend that was! But, ultimately, they had made it out unscathed, and now they stood at the edge of the volcano, ready to throw in the ring. However, Frodo was hesitating.
See how this paragraph technically explains what happens, but it manages to gloss over some of the most memorable events in the story? I basically took like a third of the plot of Return of the King and condensed it down into a single paragraph. Is it efficient in terms of word economy? Yes, very. Is it interesting to read? Probably not. People want to see things happen in a story, especially the exciting parts. Nobody wants to read a scene where a character is standing around talking about something interesting that happened to him on the way there; they would much rather read about the thing that happened.
Now, if I were to take the above paragraph and follow it with another ten paragraphs of Frodo musing to himself about whether or not the ring is evil, and whether he ought to throw it into the fire, and then suddenly have Frodo and Sam start making out with tongues while crying, I'd basically have written The Lord of the Rings as told by Peen Stroke.
One of the hardest parts of storytelling is knowing which events are important and need to be told play by play, and which events can be skimmed over or left out entirely. It's an art rather than a science, and I can't really explain how to do it, you just kind of have to re-read your own story and figure it out. Peen Stroke seems to have this instinct, but unfortunately it works in reverse for him.
Anyway, after glossing over Twilight's entrance into the tunnels, Mr. P follows it up with a decently-written scene in which she distracts some guards and sneaks into the cavern where the castle is built.
Pic unrelated but cute.
>>259226
>>259137
I actually still maintain that it could be salvaged, it just needs a serious rewrite, ideally from scratch. Peen Stroke just needs to take the general idea he's got here, put a little more thought into who his characters are and how they relate to each other, get a handle on which characters are the most important and focus primarily on them, use this information and the general plot from this draft to compose an outline of major events that need to happen, break the outline into individual scenes, tighten up the outline so that only essential scenes are included and the timing of events is correct, and then take another whack at writing the book.
The main thing that I think needs to happen is that Twilight and Nyx need to be better developed as characters, and their relationship needs to be built in a way that is convincing to the reader. They need to interact with each other in more meaningful ways than just the cutesy stuff he has them doing now. Peen Stroke also needs to start laying the foundation for Nyx's transformation early; instead of making Twilight this ideal mommy and Nyx just some happy-go-lucky kid, there needs to be a barrier or a misunderstanding between the two of them related to Nyx's NM identity that can expand as the story progresses. Since Twilight is so obsessed about the NM resemblance, instead of just having her babbling to herself about it, have it affect the way she treats Nyx sometimes. Have her get unreasonably angry sometimes, in a way that would make Nyx wonder why she was being yelled at. Maybe foreshadow NM a bit in Nyx, too, instead of just having her be this perfect little filly until she's not anymore. Maybe she gets in a fight with someone at school in retaliation to being bullied, and gets maybe a little too enthusiastically violent. She comes home with bloody hooves bragging to Twilight about how she broke Diamond Tiara's jaw or something, completely oblivious that she probably went way overboard. Twilight recoils in horror and yells at her. Now Twilight is afraid of Nyx for reasons that aren't purely theoretical, and Nyx is angry about something genuine, since from her view she wouldn't see how she did something wrong.
He could definitely take what he's got here and spin it into something much better. It still may not turn out amazing, but it definitely has potential to be better than it is.
>>259137
I actually still maintain that it could be salvaged, it just needs a serious rewrite, ideally from scratch. Peen Stroke just needs to take the general idea he's got here, put a little more thought into who his characters are and how they relate to each other, get a handle on which characters are the most important and focus primarily on them, use this information and the general plot from this draft to compose an outline of major events that need to happen, break the outline into individual scenes, tighten up the outline so that only essential scenes are included and the timing of events is correct, and then take another whack at writing the book.
The main thing that I think needs to happen is that Twilight and Nyx need to be better developed as characters, and their relationship needs to be built in a way that is convincing to the reader. They need to interact with each other in more meaningful ways than just the cutesy stuff he has them doing now. Peen Stroke also needs to start laying the foundation for Nyx's transformation early; instead of making Twilight this ideal mommy and Nyx just some happy-go-lucky kid, there needs to be a barrier or a misunderstanding between the two of them related to Nyx's NM identity that can expand as the story progresses. Since Twilight is so obsessed about the NM resemblance, instead of just having her babbling to herself about it, have it affect the way she treats Nyx sometimes. Have her get unreasonably angry sometimes, in a way that would make Nyx wonder why she was being yelled at. Maybe foreshadow NM a bit in Nyx, too, instead of just having her be this perfect little filly until she's not anymore. Maybe she gets in a fight with someone at school in retaliation to being bullied, and gets maybe a little too enthusiastically violent. She comes home with bloody hooves bragging to Twilight about how she broke Diamond Tiara's jaw or something, completely oblivious that she probably went way overboard. Twilight recoils in horror and yells at her. Now Twilight is afraid of Nyx for reasons that aren't purely theoretical, and Nyx is angry about something genuine, since from her view she wouldn't see how she did something wrong.
He could definitely take what he's got here and spin it into something much better. It still may not turn out amazing, but it definitely has potential to be better than it is.
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>>259262
Next, we get yet another quick bypass of some potentially interesting stuff. This time, Twilight encounters a well-fortified castle full of guards, that would be incredibly difficult to infiltrate for anyone who can't just teleport past them. Fortunately for Twilight, though, she can do that very thing, and so she does. Jesus Christ, what an obnoxious ability.
Anyway, whatever, I'll overlook it I guess. Twilight teleports onto a balcony, which fortunately is not the balcony to Nightmare Nyx's bedroom, because if she were able to do that I don't think there would be enough synonyms for "fag" in the English language to describe how much of a fag Peen Stroke is.
After taking a moment to smirk obnoxiously to herself over how cool her teleportation powers are, she heads into the castle. However, once she's inside, she apparently can't teleport anymore...or something. She now has to go slowly and tread carefully, because she doesn't want to alert the guards that she was able to just teleport past before. Jesus Christ, what an obnoxious and inconsistent ability.
Once again, we just get a very broad overview of what she is doing, without any mood or excitement whatsoever. We are informed that Twilight makes a methodical, tedious room-by-room search of the castle, while deftly avoiding all guards...somehow...(we are never really given an example of how she does this). At this point, it probably would have been better for her to just teleport straight into Nyx's bedroom, if this is all that's going to happen here.
It gets on my nerves how lazily this whole sequence has been written so far. This type of action-adventure is the easiest thing in the world to write. You don't need to keep any complex plot threads in your head or worry about themes or characters' feelings or anything literary; it's pure action. Put the heroine in a dangerous situation, keep throwing twists and turns in her path, and keep the mood tense; that's literally all you have to do. The only thing easier to write than action is porn, in fact I'd argue they're basically the same thing. Here, Twilight is sneaking through an underground cave into an enemy fortress full of guards that will kill her on sight. The scene practically writes itself, and yet Peen Stroke still manages to make it about as exciting to read as an IRS tax form instruction booklet.
Here's an example of the kind of magnificent prose I'm currently slogging my way through:
>And it wasn’t like Nightmare Moon was just sitting somewhere, waiting to be found. She could easily walk to another part of the castle Twilight had already checked, making the search all the more difficult. In truth, Twilight was beginning to contemplate trying to find Nightmare Moon’s bedchamber. She could simply wait there until Nightmare Moon was alone and then reveal herself.
As we're biting our nails watching Twilight ponder whether she should begin to contemplate trying to find Nightmare Moon's bedchamber, all of a sudden something starts happening. She hears approaching hoofsteps, and has nowhere to hide. She panics, and ducks into the nearest room she can find, which to her horror turns out to be a storage room full of mutilated effigies of herself and her friends. Alright, now we're getting somewhere.
She stifles a scream and backs up against the door, making a noise that alerts the approaching guards. Twilight dives into the pile of ripped up dummies and hides. The guard enters the room and begins sweeping it with his horn, but just as he's about to dig into the pile Twilight is hiding in, the other guard calls him away.
See what I'm talking about? Easy peasy. This exact same hiding-and-almost-found-but-saved-by-sheer-luck routine appears in just about every action/adventure/suspense story ever written, but if done correctly it always works. All you had to do, Mr. P, was string a few events like this together and you'd have a nice little Twilight-infiltrates-the-spoopy-castle sequence. I'd give you a brief nod of approval, say "well done", and we could move on to something more important that you screwed up. Instead, I have to waste time browbeating you about this bullshit. Slap yourself.
Anyway, Twilight, who apparently does not yet know that Spell Nexus is a member of the cult, hears the guards talking about going to get Spell Nexus to bring him to NM. She misinterprets this as his being in some sort of danger (she knows him from Celestia's school) and decides to trail the guards in order to help him.
This works well as a plot twist, but I'm not sure if it makes sense logically. Nexus reveals himself as a member of the cult in Celestia's castle, at the moment when he unleashes the spell to reawaken NM. He then transports the entire ritual to Ponyville, where Nyx makes her speech. The entire town witnesses the event, Twilight and her friends included. It was dark out, and probably the cult all had hoods or something on, so maybe Twilight didn't notice Spell Nexus. However, her friends somehow managed to notice that Horte fucking Cuisine was one of the cult members, so by the same logic Twilight should have easily recognized Spell Nexus, especially since he was leading the ritual and was thus much more visible.
Anyway, Twilight follows after them to rescue Spell Nexus and help him escape.
One more minor thing:
>This hid the sound of her own hooffalls
"Hooffalls" is a very regrettable wording choice. Brony-speak gives us a little leeway here so I can ignore the fact that it's not a real word; however, you just can't swap "hoof" for "foot" in every instance and expect it to always work. Sometimes it comes out sounding awkward, and this is one of those cases. In my mind, I initially pronounced this like "huffles," and it took me a second to figure out what was being said here. At the very least, the word should be hyphenated (hoof-falls) so the meaning is clear. It's minor, but it breaks up the reader's rhythm.
Next, we get yet another quick bypass of some potentially interesting stuff. This time, Twilight encounters a well-fortified castle full of guards, that would be incredibly difficult to infiltrate for anyone who can't just teleport past them. Fortunately for Twilight, though, she can do that very thing, and so she does. Jesus Christ, what an obnoxious ability.
Anyway, whatever, I'll overlook it I guess. Twilight teleports onto a balcony, which fortunately is not the balcony to Nightmare Nyx's bedroom, because if she were able to do that I don't think there would be enough synonyms for "fag" in the English language to describe how much of a fag Peen Stroke is.
After taking a moment to smirk obnoxiously to herself over how cool her teleportation powers are, she heads into the castle. However, once she's inside, she apparently can't teleport anymore...or something. She now has to go slowly and tread carefully, because she doesn't want to alert the guards that she was able to just teleport past before. Jesus Christ, what an obnoxious and inconsistent ability.
Once again, we just get a very broad overview of what she is doing, without any mood or excitement whatsoever. We are informed that Twilight makes a methodical, tedious room-by-room search of the castle, while deftly avoiding all guards...somehow...(we are never really given an example of how she does this). At this point, it probably would have been better for her to just teleport straight into Nyx's bedroom, if this is all that's going to happen here.
It gets on my nerves how lazily this whole sequence has been written so far. This type of action-adventure is the easiest thing in the world to write. You don't need to keep any complex plot threads in your head or worry about themes or characters' feelings or anything literary; it's pure action. Put the heroine in a dangerous situation, keep throwing twists and turns in her path, and keep the mood tense; that's literally all you have to do. The only thing easier to write than action is porn, in fact I'd argue they're basically the same thing. Here, Twilight is sneaking through an underground cave into an enemy fortress full of guards that will kill her on sight. The scene practically writes itself, and yet Peen Stroke still manages to make it about as exciting to read as an IRS tax form instruction booklet.
Here's an example of the kind of magnificent prose I'm currently slogging my way through:
>And it wasn’t like Nightmare Moon was just sitting somewhere, waiting to be found. She could easily walk to another part of the castle Twilight had already checked, making the search all the more difficult. In truth, Twilight was beginning to contemplate trying to find Nightmare Moon’s bedchamber. She could simply wait there until Nightmare Moon was alone and then reveal herself.
As we're biting our nails watching Twilight ponder whether she should begin to contemplate trying to find Nightmare Moon's bedchamber, all of a sudden something starts happening. She hears approaching hoofsteps, and has nowhere to hide. She panics, and ducks into the nearest room she can find, which to her horror turns out to be a storage room full of mutilated effigies of herself and her friends. Alright, now we're getting somewhere.
She stifles a scream and backs up against the door, making a noise that alerts the approaching guards. Twilight dives into the pile of ripped up dummies and hides. The guard enters the room and begins sweeping it with his horn, but just as he's about to dig into the pile Twilight is hiding in, the other guard calls him away.
See what I'm talking about? Easy peasy. This exact same hiding-and-almost-found-but-saved-by-sheer-luck routine appears in just about every action/adventure/suspense story ever written, but if done correctly it always works. All you had to do, Mr. P, was string a few events like this together and you'd have a nice little Twilight-infiltrates-the-spoopy-castle sequence. I'd give you a brief nod of approval, say "well done", and we could move on to something more important that you screwed up. Instead, I have to waste time browbeating you about this bullshit. Slap yourself.
Anyway, Twilight, who apparently does not yet know that Spell Nexus is a member of the cult, hears the guards talking about going to get Spell Nexus to bring him to NM. She misinterprets this as his being in some sort of danger (she knows him from Celestia's school) and decides to trail the guards in order to help him.
This works well as a plot twist, but I'm not sure if it makes sense logically. Nexus reveals himself as a member of the cult in Celestia's castle, at the moment when he unleashes the spell to reawaken NM. He then transports the entire ritual to Ponyville, where Nyx makes her speech. The entire town witnesses the event, Twilight and her friends included. It was dark out, and probably the cult all had hoods or something on, so maybe Twilight didn't notice Spell Nexus. However, her friends somehow managed to notice that Horte fucking Cuisine was one of the cult members, so by the same logic Twilight should have easily recognized Spell Nexus, especially since he was leading the ritual and was thus much more visible.
Anyway, Twilight follows after them to rescue Spell Nexus and help him escape.
One more minor thing:
>This hid the sound of her own hooffalls
"Hooffalls" is a very regrettable wording choice. Brony-speak gives us a little leeway here so I can ignore the fact that it's not a real word; however, you just can't swap "hoof" for "foot" in every instance and expect it to always work. Sometimes it comes out sounding awkward, and this is one of those cases. In my mind, I initially pronounced this like "huffles," and it took me a second to figure out what was being said here. At the very least, the word should be hyphenated (hoof-falls) so the meaning is clear. It's minor, but it breaks up the reader's rhythm.
File (): 1D83564F8C549439D778318E7F7BA846-309405.png (302.2 KB, 1003x797, 1384832216578.png)
>>259226
Sir, I sincerely object to your first statemarent. I've done numerous rewrites before of stories, small books, and fanfic works. Not ONE has functioned well enough to become even remotely decent. In effect what would happen is the "rewriter" would be forced to plagiarize the work, lead it in a different direction, and solve ALL of the basic fucking problems via writer's bias. Yeah, no, good fucking luck with that especially with all the milquetoast nyxcuck soygoys out there. Also: Failout Ekwestritard is absolute nigger shit.
>>259265
Dude, that isn't remotely comparable to creating your own original work. As stated above, you would HAVE to plagiarize all of the basic topics, ideas, and events which would unfortunately turn all of this shitheel nyxcuck faggotry into an Alternate Universe Of An Alternate Universe fucking meme. Which is overdone to death. Sure, your second paragraph is a good illustration on how to begin, yet I will reserve my admittedly low standards against plagiarization from start to finish. I stated how marely times Micropeen Stroke'd "rewrote" his story. You're looking at the "finished" version which occurred after he got his ass banned from a host of sites, skype servers, and dozens of small mIRC servers by people that didn't give a shit about his fuckbrained !!HYPE!!NEW!!AU!!PONY!!FIC!!
tl;dr: are you willing to attempt salvaging a mess that would have to be constructed from bloody scratch, and willing to throw all 'necessary criteria' out the door from a shittily composed, created, and overly bastardized drawn out AU of an AU? Is there enough time in the world to make nyxcuckery less cucked? While I personally do not think so, that isn't an opinion changer for most. As a reward for making me respond, have a pony.
Sir, I sincerely object to your first statemarent. I've done numerous rewrites before of stories, small books, and fanfic works. Not ONE has functioned well enough to become even remotely decent. In effect what would happen is the "rewriter" would be forced to plagiarize the work, lead it in a different direction, and solve ALL of the basic fucking problems via writer's bias. Yeah, no, good fucking luck with that especially with all the milquetoast nyxcuck soygoys out there. Also: Failout Ekwestritard is absolute nigger shit.
>>259265
Dude, that isn't remotely comparable to creating your own original work. As stated above, you would HAVE to plagiarize all of the basic topics, ideas, and events which would unfortunately turn all of this shitheel nyxcuck faggotry into an Alternate Universe Of An Alternate Universe fucking meme. Which is overdone to death. Sure, your second paragraph is a good illustration on how to begin, yet I will reserve my admittedly low standards against plagiarization from start to finish. I stated how marely times Micropeen Stroke'd "rewrote" his story. You're looking at the "finished" version which occurred after he got his ass banned from a host of sites, skype servers, and dozens of small mIRC servers by people that didn't give a shit about his fuckbrained !!HYPE!!NEW!!AU!!PONY!!FIC!!
tl;dr: are you willing to attempt salvaging a mess that would have to be constructed from bloody scratch, and willing to throw all 'necessary criteria' out the door from a shittily composed, created, and overly bastardized drawn out AU of an AU? Is there enough time in the world to make nyxcuckery less cucked? While I personally do not think so, that isn't an opinion changer for most. As a reward for making me respond, have a pony.
>>259298
I don't think I understand what you're saying here.
Nyx and Fallout Equestria are terrible stories because their writers took bad cliches and made terrible writing choices, executing these cliches poorly.
If you took these cliches these stories are built on and executed them competently, you would have a completely different story that lacks all the dumb bullshit due to not being dumb or bullshit.
A competent crossover of Fallout and MLP would have ponies go to Fallout and fix it through friendship and kindness. First the horrible world would say "Open your eyes and stop believing in friendship, faggots" and the ponies would feel bad. Then friendship and teamwork would save the day by getting heroes to work together and storm the villain of the region's castle.
Because the other way would mean Fallout going into MLP, being stunned by this beautiful world, and abandoning Wastelander life to be a pony. Maybe fighting off raiders that don't want to give up the rape pillage burn lifestyle. No attempt to plunder it for resources would work. The US Military of today couldn't handle magical bullshit, The Minutemen couldn't. Maybe the Enclave could if you said their power armours are magic-immune. oh wait no floors to turn into mud/lava can't be made magic proof. nevermind.
A Fusion Fic of fallout and MLP would have MLP turn into fallout, or the other way around. IF FRIENDSHIP FAILS EQUESTRIA AND NUKES THE WORLD, FRIENDSHIP CAN'T ALSO SAVE EQUESTRIA FROM THE NUKES AND MAGICALLY FIX EVERYTHING. If the old understanding of friendship and magic and goodness wrong then a new one is needed. faggot kkunt didn't understand that.
So I'd say ponies went rotten thanks to luxuries and sins and degeneracy and potion drugs pushed onto them by Griffons and the world went to shit, and it only got good once ponies became good again and fought back the darkness using magic and big guns while motivated by friendship and goodness even after all the pre-war anti-doomsday world-healing friendship devices fell apart due to disrepair/age/sabotage.
Much better than "Equestria fell because they didn't slaughter the inherently evil and incompatible-with-Luna's-existence Zebras fast enough".
Sure as fuck better than "And then the hero found the weather god machine to make her a weather god, she removed the cloud covering to give everyone sunlight and plants so all raiders gave up on being raiders. there were still bandits but no raiders."
fucking gay faggotry.
I don't think I understand what you're saying here.
Nyx and Fallout Equestria are terrible stories because their writers took bad cliches and made terrible writing choices, executing these cliches poorly.
If you took these cliches these stories are built on and executed them competently, you would have a completely different story that lacks all the dumb bullshit due to not being dumb or bullshit.
A competent crossover of Fallout and MLP would have ponies go to Fallout and fix it through friendship and kindness. First the horrible world would say "Open your eyes and stop believing in friendship, faggots" and the ponies would feel bad. Then friendship and teamwork would save the day by getting heroes to work together and storm the villain of the region's castle.
Because the other way would mean Fallout going into MLP, being stunned by this beautiful world, and abandoning Wastelander life to be a pony. Maybe fighting off raiders that don't want to give up the rape pillage burn lifestyle. No attempt to plunder it for resources would work. The US Military of today couldn't handle magical bullshit, The Minutemen couldn't. Maybe the Enclave could if you said their power armours are magic-immune. oh wait no floors to turn into mud/lava can't be made magic proof. nevermind.
A Fusion Fic of fallout and MLP would have MLP turn into fallout, or the other way around. IF FRIENDSHIP FAILS EQUESTRIA AND NUKES THE WORLD, FRIENDSHIP CAN'T ALSO SAVE EQUESTRIA FROM THE NUKES AND MAGICALLY FIX EVERYTHING. If the old understanding of friendship and magic and goodness wrong then a new one is needed. faggot kkunt didn't understand that.
So I'd say ponies went rotten thanks to luxuries and sins and degeneracy and potion drugs pushed onto them by Griffons and the world went to shit, and it only got good once ponies became good again and fought back the darkness using magic and big guns while motivated by friendship and goodness even after all the pre-war anti-doomsday world-healing friendship devices fell apart due to disrepair/age/sabotage.
Much better than "Equestria fell because they didn't slaughter the inherently evil and incompatible-with-Luna's-existence Zebras fast enough".
Sure as fuck better than "And then the hero found the weather god machine to make her a weather god, she removed the cloud covering to give everyone sunlight and plants so all raiders gave up on being raiders. there were still bandits but no raiders."
fucking gay faggotry.
>>259298
lol I think we may be talking about two different things when we say "rewrite." I'm certainly not suggesting that I have any intention of trying to rewrite this book, as I've probably spent enough time on it already and as you say there are much worthier projects. Nor am I suggesting that any one of us try to write it, although if anyone tried I'd be curious to look at what they came up with. All I'm saying is that if you forget about the pony side and whatever internal fandom drama has been generated by Peen Stroke himself, and just break this story down to its core literary components, his basic idea is salvageable.
I probably could develop this story into something much better if I wanted, but again it would be a ton of work and I'm not terribly interested in undertaking the project. Theoretically, though, if Peen Stroke himself were ever to come across this thread, I've dropped more than enough bread crumbs in his path to lead him to a significantly better version of the same story, without needing to change that many core events. I consider this a pretty remote possibility, and I suspect that even Peen Stroke has probably moved on from this. And if the dreck I've been reading is actually the product of several revisions, I'm probably still overestimating his abilities anyway.
In any case, I'm not doing this long-ass review because I give two shits about Peen Stroke or Nyx or any of this; I see this project more as a general writing workshop that anyone could learn from. I don't care if you're writing about ponies or Naruto or trying to write some super-srs highbrow work of literary realism; a story is a story. Even a heavily used formula full of cliches that everyone has seen a million times can be turned into something good or even great if you know what you're doing. Shakespeare's entire career was literally based on this concept. However, it's very easy to go off the rails, and if you're not disciplined even a good formula can produce shit results, which is basically what happened here.
What I'd like people to take away from this is that even if something sucks, it's worthwhile to study it and pull it apart to understand why it sucks, and if it could have been better, what precisely could have been done to make it better. You should all try to do this with your own writing as well. The more you internalize these ideas the more your own writing will improve. It's like that shit in the Karate Kid, where the kid spends the summer painting some gook's house and washing his car for him, and then gets mad at him for making him do all this work, but then finds out he's been subconsciously learning karate moves the entire time.
Whether or not a particular work is salvageable depends on the underlying elements more than what the author has specifically done with them. For example, My Immortal is probably not salvageable, because there basically are no underlying elements. It's a bad story because it's not a story at all, it's just a bunch of events that happen in sequence. There are no apparent themes, nor does it appear that the author had anything to express through this story beyond a desire to either sexually fantasize about goth versions of Harry Potter characters, or troll the entire internet. Even if you developed each character into a real human personality and handed the actual task of writing to someone with a basic grasp of the English language, it would still be just as awful because nothing of any real significance ever happens.
With Past Sins it's a little different, because there is some decent clay to work with here. You've got a theme of original sin and redemption, a relationship between a mother and daughter, a set of quality characters (the MLP characters are already well developed, and even Nyx has some underutilized potential), and a plot-in-a-box story structure that starts with "character A randomly encounters character B, character B has no memories and behaves like an innocent child, but is actually some kind of super-powered something-or-other"; the model I've flippantly termed LCIG. Any half-decent writer could take this and spin it into something.
lol I think we may be talking about two different things when we say "rewrite." I'm certainly not suggesting that I have any intention of trying to rewrite this book, as I've probably spent enough time on it already and as you say there are much worthier projects. Nor am I suggesting that any one of us try to write it, although if anyone tried I'd be curious to look at what they came up with. All I'm saying is that if you forget about the pony side and whatever internal fandom drama has been generated by Peen Stroke himself, and just break this story down to its core literary components, his basic idea is salvageable.
I probably could develop this story into something much better if I wanted, but again it would be a ton of work and I'm not terribly interested in undertaking the project. Theoretically, though, if Peen Stroke himself were ever to come across this thread, I've dropped more than enough bread crumbs in his path to lead him to a significantly better version of the same story, without needing to change that many core events. I consider this a pretty remote possibility, and I suspect that even Peen Stroke has probably moved on from this. And if the dreck I've been reading is actually the product of several revisions, I'm probably still overestimating his abilities anyway.
In any case, I'm not doing this long-ass review because I give two shits about Peen Stroke or Nyx or any of this; I see this project more as a general writing workshop that anyone could learn from. I don't care if you're writing about ponies or Naruto or trying to write some super-srs highbrow work of literary realism; a story is a story. Even a heavily used formula full of cliches that everyone has seen a million times can be turned into something good or even great if you know what you're doing. Shakespeare's entire career was literally based on this concept. However, it's very easy to go off the rails, and if you're not disciplined even a good formula can produce shit results, which is basically what happened here.
What I'd like people to take away from this is that even if something sucks, it's worthwhile to study it and pull it apart to understand why it sucks, and if it could have been better, what precisely could have been done to make it better. You should all try to do this with your own writing as well. The more you internalize these ideas the more your own writing will improve. It's like that shit in the Karate Kid, where the kid spends the summer painting some gook's house and washing his car for him, and then gets mad at him for making him do all this work, but then finds out he's been subconsciously learning karate moves the entire time.
Whether or not a particular work is salvageable depends on the underlying elements more than what the author has specifically done with them. For example, My Immortal is probably not salvageable, because there basically are no underlying elements. It's a bad story because it's not a story at all, it's just a bunch of events that happen in sequence. There are no apparent themes, nor does it appear that the author had anything to express through this story beyond a desire to either sexually fantasize about goth versions of Harry Potter characters, or troll the entire internet. Even if you developed each character into a real human personality and handed the actual task of writing to someone with a basic grasp of the English language, it would still be just as awful because nothing of any real significance ever happens.
With Past Sins it's a little different, because there is some decent clay to work with here. You've got a theme of original sin and redemption, a relationship between a mother and daughter, a set of quality characters (the MLP characters are already well developed, and even Nyx has some underutilized potential), and a plot-in-a-box story structure that starts with "character A randomly encounters character B, character B has no memories and behaves like an innocent child, but is actually some kind of super-powered something-or-other"; the model I've flippantly termed LCIG. Any half-decent writer could take this and spin it into something.
>>259312
The latter.
My Immortal is obviously a parody of bad fanfiction, it does every bad thing HP did outside of using "Rich people start using low birth rates to buy mudblood women and fuck kids out of them" to start a relationship between romanticized Draco and reader-hermione living the reader's "A hot rich boy buys me and gives me a makeover and buys me nice clothes and makes me a classy girl" fantasy.
You can tell it's a parody because sometimes "Enoby" slips up and calls her self-insert Tara.
Because the author's name is supposedly Tara Gilsbie, right?
Except sometimes, the author calls Ebony "Taebony" or "Tar- ebony".
As if she's verbally starting "Tara" and stopping, then saying ebony.
or enoby.
But who types like that? Some fags taip funetikally like niggers when they don't know how to spell something, but nobody starts typing the wrong word, notices their mistake, adds in the right word, and leaves part of the wrong word there.
Nobody does that unintentionally.
It's a parody.
Twenty to eighty years from now the author will be old and dying or just give up on the mystery after the Enoby myth starts to fade, and when that happens he or she will say "I did this, here's proof, here's my book about writing it and its response and its impact on culture only amped up to sell more books, gimmie money and please put me in the history books".
The latter.
My Immortal is obviously a parody of bad fanfiction, it does every bad thing HP did outside of using "Rich people start using low birth rates to buy mudblood women and fuck kids out of them" to start a relationship between romanticized Draco and reader-hermione living the reader's "A hot rich boy buys me and gives me a makeover and buys me nice clothes and makes me a classy girl" fantasy.
You can tell it's a parody because sometimes "Enoby" slips up and calls her self-insert Tara.
Because the author's name is supposedly Tara Gilsbie, right?
Except sometimes, the author calls Ebony "Taebony" or "Tar- ebony".
As if she's verbally starting "Tara" and stopping, then saying ebony.
or enoby.
But who types like that? Some fags taip funetikally like niggers when they don't know how to spell something, but nobody starts typing the wrong word, notices their mistake, adds in the right word, and leaves part of the wrong word there.
Nobody does that unintentionally.
It's a parody.
Twenty to eighty years from now the author will be old and dying or just give up on the mystery after the Enoby myth starts to fade, and when that happens he or she will say "I did this, here's proof, here's my book about writing it and its response and its impact on culture only amped up to sell more books, gimmie money and please put me in the history books".
>>259312
https://new.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=Tara+Gilesbie&t=500&a=n
Because "I am lord voldemort" is "Tom marvolo riddle" in Harry Potter I decided to check if taragilesbie is an anagram. Nothing promising on the link, so I checked something myself.
garble taiesi (saetii? i sit ae? no, not garble.)
lesbian tragie/it lesbian rage. This makes more sense, since "Tara" has plenty of gay in her story.
https://new.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=Tara+Gilesbie&t=500&a=n
Because "I am lord voldemort" is "Tom marvolo riddle" in Harry Potter I decided to check if taragilesbie is an anagram. Nothing promising on the link, so I checked something myself.
garble taiesi (saetii? i sit ae? no, not garble.)
lesbian tragie/it lesbian rage. This makes more sense, since "Tara" has plenty of gay in her story.
File (): D4114E3DF0EC4008913C1D8DB59A8DBF-1009617.png (986.0 KB, 3648x2736, D587cbu-90b1e172-065f-4b84-af9c-385d8de0a3da.png)
>>259267
The next thing I notice here is that Peen Stroke still has not gotten a bead on Twilight's feelings regarding Nyx/NM.
>Ducking behind a statue of Nightmare Moon, Twilight watched as one guard went inside. She intended to wait for the guard to come back out, and, as she did, her eyes wandered to the statue she was hiding behind. It portrayed Nightmare Moon with wicked, fang like teeth. She was holding a young pony whose face had been carved into a silent scream. It reminded Twilight of the old Nightmare Night fable: You gave Nightmare Moon some of your candy so she wouldn’t gobble you up.
>Twilight shivered, and prayed that Nightmare Moon hadn’t fallen so far that she was willing to cannibalize another pony.
Nightmare Nyx hasn't even been in this castle a full 24 hours; anyone could deduce that she hasn't had time yet to commission statues of herself eating children. By contrast, the cult has been building all of this in secret for months or even years, so this statue would have been carved by them and is a reflection of their edgy fantasy of NM, not necessarily NM's view of herself. There's no reason for Twilight to interpret this as an accurate depiction of reality.
More to the point though is that we still have Twilight alternating schizophrenically between maternal feelings for Nyx and supernatural terror of NM. Obviously this is by design, since the whole point is that she's supposed to be in conflict over her feelings here, but the problem is that there's no ambiguity; she's always either fawning lovingly over her daughter or shuddering in terror of NM. This isn't how this kind of internal emotional conflict works. If someone has a child, and they find out that the child tortures kittens or something, they tend to deal with the moral ambiguity by rationalizing it somehow, either by pretending not to see the behavior (which enables it sometimes), or else becoming overly protective and domineering in order to try and actively prevent it from happening. In either case they generally work to keep it a secret from others, hoping to deal with it on their own.
We get some of that with Twilight, and to Peen Stroke's credit I do believe that he tried to think some of this stuff through. Even though she immediately picks up on the danger when she sees the resemblance between the filly and NM, Twilight still goes to elaborate lengths to conceal the filly's true identity, and convinces herself that she can just go to the Princess if things get out of hand, which she probably has no real intention of ever doing. This is basically the type of rationalization and over-protective behavior I'm talking about, which now that I think about it is probably where my whole "crazy Twilight" headcanon for this particular story came from. Poor spinster Twilight wants a baby so bad she'll even adopt filly Nightmare Moon. The real problem, though, is that while I get what Peen Stroke is trying to do, he never manages to execute it convincingly.
So far, we have two Twilights: the purely emotional Twilight, who unconditionally loves Nyx whether she's NM or not, and the purely rational Twilight, who can clearly see the problem posed by Nyx's true identity, and is on some level afraid of her since she knows what NM is capable of. This in itself is fine; the problem, though, is that her thought process is always consciously influenced by one or the other, and the two sides never meet or interact. In reality, both her filial see what I did there? affection for Nyx and her rational fear of her would occur at a subconscious level, and they would be constantly duking it out with each other behind the scenes. The effect on her conscious mind would be a state of continuous turmoil probably resulting in erratic behavior (again, "crazy Twilight").
Even when she and Nyx are just having normal day to day interactions and Nyx is just behaving like a normal kid, the lurking fear of Twilight's rationality would be exerting influence over her. This would manifest in weird ways; maybe she occasionally recoils from Nyx when she shows affection, or gets mad at her for strange things. This in turn would affect Nyx, who may feel like Twilight doesn't love her sometimes for reasons she can't explain (and in turn, this could affect her gradual descent into the NM persona). At the same time, the emotional side of her exerts influence over her rational thought process. A fine example of this is her going so far to conceal Nyx's identity that she lies to her friends and to Princess Celestia, something she would normally never do. The issue is, though, that she wouldn't explicitly acknowledge to herself that she was doing this, nor would she concoct a 100% logical explanation for her actions; she would rationalize or deceive herself into thinking it was somehow better to keep things a secret. "Celestia's got so many problems, I don't want to trouble her with something like this. I don't even know for certain that Nyx is NM, the resemblance is probably just a coincidence." That sort of thing.
This is part of why I find Twilight's inner monologues so excruciating to read. It's not just that she keeps talking in circles without ever saying anything, it's that it's just not convincing as literature. Her thought process isn't in any way natural for this sort of thing. Most of her ramblings are a reflection of the author thinking out loud about his own story, more than Twilight trying to sort her own problems out. This is what I mean when I say that the emotions and the interactions between Nyx and Twilight don't feel genuine. These characters all behave like marionettes on strings; when Twilight is supposed to feel lovey-dovey toward Nyx, the author yanks a string and she jerks one way. When she's supposed to be all like "oh noes, Nightmare Moon", she gets yanked the other way. This is not how human (pony, whatever) emotions work.
The next thing I notice here is that Peen Stroke still has not gotten a bead on Twilight's feelings regarding Nyx/NM.
>Ducking behind a statue of Nightmare Moon, Twilight watched as one guard went inside. She intended to wait for the guard to come back out, and, as she did, her eyes wandered to the statue she was hiding behind. It portrayed Nightmare Moon with wicked, fang like teeth. She was holding a young pony whose face had been carved into a silent scream. It reminded Twilight of the old Nightmare Night fable: You gave Nightmare Moon some of your candy so she wouldn’t gobble you up.
>Twilight shivered, and prayed that Nightmare Moon hadn’t fallen so far that she was willing to cannibalize another pony.
Nightmare Nyx hasn't even been in this castle a full 24 hours; anyone could deduce that she hasn't had time yet to commission statues of herself eating children. By contrast, the cult has been building all of this in secret for months or even years, so this statue would have been carved by them and is a reflection of their edgy fantasy of NM, not necessarily NM's view of herself. There's no reason for Twilight to interpret this as an accurate depiction of reality.
More to the point though is that we still have Twilight alternating schizophrenically between maternal feelings for Nyx and supernatural terror of NM. Obviously this is by design, since the whole point is that she's supposed to be in conflict over her feelings here, but the problem is that there's no ambiguity; she's always either fawning lovingly over her daughter or shuddering in terror of NM. This isn't how this kind of internal emotional conflict works. If someone has a child, and they find out that the child tortures kittens or something, they tend to deal with the moral ambiguity by rationalizing it somehow, either by pretending not to see the behavior (which enables it sometimes), or else becoming overly protective and domineering in order to try and actively prevent it from happening. In either case they generally work to keep it a secret from others, hoping to deal with it on their own.
We get some of that with Twilight, and to Peen Stroke's credit I do believe that he tried to think some of this stuff through. Even though she immediately picks up on the danger when she sees the resemblance between the filly and NM, Twilight still goes to elaborate lengths to conceal the filly's true identity, and convinces herself that she can just go to the Princess if things get out of hand, which she probably has no real intention of ever doing. This is basically the type of rationalization and over-protective behavior I'm talking about, which now that I think about it is probably where my whole "crazy Twilight" headcanon for this particular story came from. Poor spinster Twilight wants a baby so bad she'll even adopt filly Nightmare Moon. The real problem, though, is that while I get what Peen Stroke is trying to do, he never manages to execute it convincingly.
So far, we have two Twilights: the purely emotional Twilight, who unconditionally loves Nyx whether she's NM or not, and the purely rational Twilight, who can clearly see the problem posed by Nyx's true identity, and is on some level afraid of her since she knows what NM is capable of. This in itself is fine; the problem, though, is that her thought process is always consciously influenced by one or the other, and the two sides never meet or interact. In reality, both her filial see what I did there? affection for Nyx and her rational fear of her would occur at a subconscious level, and they would be constantly duking it out with each other behind the scenes. The effect on her conscious mind would be a state of continuous turmoil probably resulting in erratic behavior (again, "crazy Twilight").
Even when she and Nyx are just having normal day to day interactions and Nyx is just behaving like a normal kid, the lurking fear of Twilight's rationality would be exerting influence over her. This would manifest in weird ways; maybe she occasionally recoils from Nyx when she shows affection, or gets mad at her for strange things. This in turn would affect Nyx, who may feel like Twilight doesn't love her sometimes for reasons she can't explain (and in turn, this could affect her gradual descent into the NM persona). At the same time, the emotional side of her exerts influence over her rational thought process. A fine example of this is her going so far to conceal Nyx's identity that she lies to her friends and to Princess Celestia, something she would normally never do. The issue is, though, that she wouldn't explicitly acknowledge to herself that she was doing this, nor would she concoct a 100% logical explanation for her actions; she would rationalize or deceive herself into thinking it was somehow better to keep things a secret. "Celestia's got so many problems, I don't want to trouble her with something like this. I don't even know for certain that Nyx is NM, the resemblance is probably just a coincidence." That sort of thing.
This is part of why I find Twilight's inner monologues so excruciating to read. It's not just that she keeps talking in circles without ever saying anything, it's that it's just not convincing as literature. Her thought process isn't in any way natural for this sort of thing. Most of her ramblings are a reflection of the author thinking out loud about his own story, more than Twilight trying to sort her own problems out. This is what I mean when I say that the emotions and the interactions between Nyx and Twilight don't feel genuine. These characters all behave like marionettes on strings; when Twilight is supposed to feel lovey-dovey toward Nyx, the author yanks a string and she jerks one way. When she's supposed to be all like "oh noes, Nightmare Moon", she gets yanked the other way. This is not how human (pony, whatever) emotions work.
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>>259739
There's even potentially an MLP-style friendship lesson in here that's not being properly explored: the more Twilight tries to hide things from her friends and solve everything herself, the bigger her problems become. She should have been honest and trusted her friends and Celestia from the very beginning, instead she tries to deceive everypony and weaves intricate webs of lies to keep this filly a secret, until eventually everything blows up in her face. This is basically what Celestia should have been lecturing Twilight about during their confrontation scene, instead of just bawling and overacting: when you try to deceive others, you really only deceive yourself.
Anyway, what the fuck was going on in the actual story? Oh yeah, Twilight was following the two guards.
The guards go into a room and get Spell Nexus, and begin escorting him to NM. This also doesn't entirely make sense, since Spell Nexus isn't actually under guard as Twilight mistakenly believes, nor would he have any need of an armed escort inside his own castle. But whatever, it's minor I guess. Twilight seizes her opportunity, knocks out the guards, and teleports Nexus and herself back to the room where she first entered the castle.
If Nexus is in any way surprised or alarmed at being suddenly ambushed and dragged off by the tail to a random part of the castle, he doesn't show it. Twilight autistically volunteers all of the information about how she found the castle and got past all of the guards, which basically amounts to "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit." In a stunning plot twist that should surprise absolutely no one, Nexus then attacks Twilight from behind and knocks her unconscious.
You know, it also just now occurred to me that Nexus and Twilight had interactions at the very beginning of the story. Nexus was the one who abducted her and cut her with the knife in order to perform the resurrection ritual. He would have been in his Nightmare Moon cosplay at the time, so Twilight probably didn't recognize him, but still; they seem to know each other. Wouldn't she recognize his voice?
Anyway, fuck it, who cares. Nexus knocks Twilight unconscious, calls the guards, has her put in the dungeon, yada yada yada. Next scene, we rejoin Nyx, who is now dressed up in her Nightmare Moon outfit because why the hell not. Spell Nexus has Twilight brought out of the dungeon and presented to her, and she has clearly been kicked around quite a bit.
>“She was found sneaking around the castle corridors, and it appears that she came here alone,” Spell Nexus explained as he looked over the mare. “A rather stupid thing to do, considering she is supposed to be the smartest one in her group of friends.”
I'm inclined to agree.
If Nyx feels any emotion whatsoever at seeing the pony who has spent the last several months caring for her and literally just took her out for ice cream a few hours ago lying in a bloody mess on the floor, she doesn't show it. She does, however, order the room cleared so they can speak alone. Nyx is basically full-blown Nightmare Moon at this point, because why the hell not. If a bunch of weird religious people suddenly abduct you and transform you into their god, you may as well just roll with it I guess. She demands to know what Twilight is doing here, and Twilight simply says that she came to say "I'm sorry."
This is probably meant to be yet another heart-wrenching emotional scene, but once again, this whole thing is just so preposterous at this point that it falls flat on its ass instead. Nopony's motivations here make even the slightest bit of sense; Nyx has no good reason to be acting like Nightmare Moon, Twilight had no good reason to sneak into the castle alone, and her reasons for wanting to apologize are as dumb as Nyx's reasons for being this angry in the first place. There's no justification for any of this to even be happening right now.
Here is Nyx's response:
>“Don’t try to lie to me!” Nightmare Moon snapped. “I see through your charade. Celestia came to visit, you two talked in private, and then she came into the library’s kitchen. She spoke sweet words about wanting me to see a doctor, to make sure I was healthy, and how I could spend the night at the palace and even see your old room at her school. Of course, I was naive enough to believe her, but you knew what was going on. You knew, and that’s why you couldn’t even look at me when she was taking me out the door. You conspired with her against me, just as you do now! You knew what she was going to do, and you. Did! Nothing! To stop her!”
This version of events more or less makes sense from Nyx's point of view I guess, since she would have had no way of knowing exactly where she was being taken or why, but she doesn't have sufficient cause to be this angry. Up until this point, Twilight has been kind to Nyx and has given her no reason to distrust her. Even if she feels as if Twilight has betrayed that trust, it doesn't negate their entire history together. For example, if you take your child to the doctor without telling her where she's going or why, and then distract her with funny faces until suddenly the doctor rams a needle into her arm, she will cry and scream and probably feel very betrayed. She will most likely be angry at you for a while. However, she will probably not stay angry for very long, and she certainly won't be angry enough to want you actually dead. If you explain to her that the shot she received was for her own good, and that you didn't tell her what was going to happen because you didn't want her to be afraid, she may not immediately accept this explanation, but on some level she will realize that you didn't intend her any real harm. If you have a good relationship with your child, that trust isn't just going to instantly evaporate because of one minor incident.
Running out of space, will continue in another post.
There's even potentially an MLP-style friendship lesson in here that's not being properly explored: the more Twilight tries to hide things from her friends and solve everything herself, the bigger her problems become. She should have been honest and trusted her friends and Celestia from the very beginning, instead she tries to deceive everypony and weaves intricate webs of lies to keep this filly a secret, until eventually everything blows up in her face. This is basically what Celestia should have been lecturing Twilight about during their confrontation scene, instead of just bawling and overacting: when you try to deceive others, you really only deceive yourself.
Anyway, what the fuck was going on in the actual story? Oh yeah, Twilight was following the two guards.
The guards go into a room and get Spell Nexus, and begin escorting him to NM. This also doesn't entirely make sense, since Spell Nexus isn't actually under guard as Twilight mistakenly believes, nor would he have any need of an armed escort inside his own castle. But whatever, it's minor I guess. Twilight seizes her opportunity, knocks out the guards, and teleports Nexus and herself back to the room where she first entered the castle.
If Nexus is in any way surprised or alarmed at being suddenly ambushed and dragged off by the tail to a random part of the castle, he doesn't show it. Twilight autistically volunteers all of the information about how she found the castle and got past all of the guards, which basically amounts to "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit." In a stunning plot twist that should surprise absolutely no one, Nexus then attacks Twilight from behind and knocks her unconscious.
You know, it also just now occurred to me that Nexus and Twilight had interactions at the very beginning of the story. Nexus was the one who abducted her and cut her with the knife in order to perform the resurrection ritual. He would have been in his Nightmare Moon cosplay at the time, so Twilight probably didn't recognize him, but still; they seem to know each other. Wouldn't she recognize his voice?
Anyway, fuck it, who cares. Nexus knocks Twilight unconscious, calls the guards, has her put in the dungeon, yada yada yada. Next scene, we rejoin Nyx, who is now dressed up in her Nightmare Moon outfit because why the hell not. Spell Nexus has Twilight brought out of the dungeon and presented to her, and she has clearly been kicked around quite a bit.
>“She was found sneaking around the castle corridors, and it appears that she came here alone,” Spell Nexus explained as he looked over the mare. “A rather stupid thing to do, considering she is supposed to be the smartest one in her group of friends.”
I'm inclined to agree.
If Nyx feels any emotion whatsoever at seeing the pony who has spent the last several months caring for her and literally just took her out for ice cream a few hours ago lying in a bloody mess on the floor, she doesn't show it. She does, however, order the room cleared so they can speak alone. Nyx is basically full-blown Nightmare Moon at this point, because why the hell not. If a bunch of weird religious people suddenly abduct you and transform you into their god, you may as well just roll with it I guess. She demands to know what Twilight is doing here, and Twilight simply says that she came to say "I'm sorry."
This is probably meant to be yet another heart-wrenching emotional scene, but once again, this whole thing is just so preposterous at this point that it falls flat on its ass instead. Nopony's motivations here make even the slightest bit of sense; Nyx has no good reason to be acting like Nightmare Moon, Twilight had no good reason to sneak into the castle alone, and her reasons for wanting to apologize are as dumb as Nyx's reasons for being this angry in the first place. There's no justification for any of this to even be happening right now.
Here is Nyx's response:
>“Don’t try to lie to me!” Nightmare Moon snapped. “I see through your charade. Celestia came to visit, you two talked in private, and then she came into the library’s kitchen. She spoke sweet words about wanting me to see a doctor, to make sure I was healthy, and how I could spend the night at the palace and even see your old room at her school. Of course, I was naive enough to believe her, but you knew what was going on. You knew, and that’s why you couldn’t even look at me when she was taking me out the door. You conspired with her against me, just as you do now! You knew what she was going to do, and you. Did! Nothing! To stop her!”
This version of events more or less makes sense from Nyx's point of view I guess, since she would have had no way of knowing exactly where she was being taken or why, but she doesn't have sufficient cause to be this angry. Up until this point, Twilight has been kind to Nyx and has given her no reason to distrust her. Even if she feels as if Twilight has betrayed that trust, it doesn't negate their entire history together. For example, if you take your child to the doctor without telling her where she's going or why, and then distract her with funny faces until suddenly the doctor rams a needle into her arm, she will cry and scream and probably feel very betrayed. She will most likely be angry at you for a while. However, she will probably not stay angry for very long, and she certainly won't be angry enough to want you actually dead. If you explain to her that the shot she received was for her own good, and that you didn't tell her what was going to happen because you didn't want her to be afraid, she may not immediately accept this explanation, but on some level she will realize that you didn't intend her any real harm. If you have a good relationship with your child, that trust isn't just going to instantly evaporate because of one minor incident.
Running out of space, will continue in another post.
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>>259740
The more observant reader may have noticed by now that a lot of these points I keep harping on are all interconnected. Twilight and Nyx's relationship doesn't feel genuine because the story has focused more on Twilight's inner thoughts than it has on their interactions. Because their relationship isn't genuine, the emotional moments in the story don't feel genuine, no matter how thickly Peen Stroke tries to layer them on. The lack of emotion nixes Nyx's :^) motivations, which makes her transformation into NM feel pointless and random, which makes everything she then does as NM feel pointless and random. Instead of feeling heartbroken as we stand helplessly to the side, watching poor Nyx beat up her mother because she feels hurt and abandoned (as Peen Stroke doubtlessly intended us to feel here), we instead feel incredulous that any of this nonsense is happening at all. They were literally just having ice cream and goofing around a few chapters ago; what happened to Nyx to make her suddenly this assblasted? If this story had been told properly, we wouldn't be asking this question.
Everything in a story is interconnected, and it all sits on a foundation. If you fuck up the foundation, anything you build on top of it is structurally weak. In this story, the foundation is the relationship between Twilight and Nyx. Instead of building their relationship organically through interaction, the author simply informs us over and over that they have one, and tries to reinforce it with saccharine Hallmark moments that just feel phony. This story's attempts to make us feel basically alternate between cuteness porn and sadness porn, with little or no real depth to any of it.
Two posts ago, I went into some armchair psychology about how I think Twilight's mindset would work in this story. Now I'd like to explore how things might look from Nyx's perspective, had her character been properly explored:
Nyx has no idea what's going on, she just wakes up in the woods one day with no memories and is essentially innocent, despite being Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). Twilight finds her and takes care of her, and she implicitly trusts Twilight; however, Twilight is a bit weird. Nyx doesn't know why; Nyx doesn't know anything. All she knows is that it sometimes feels like Twilight doesn't like her, or is repulsed by her or something. She internalizes this but mostly tries to ignore it. However, there is a weird voice in the back of her head telling her that Twilight doesn't like her because she's bad.
Nyx's internal conflict is that she is caught between feelings of unconditional love for her adoptive mother, and a subconscious resentment for the way she sometimes treats her. On the one hand, she's a child, and children usually want their parent(s)'s approval. Thus on one level, she thinks Twilight is being weird to her because she must have done something wrong. At a deeper level, though, she knows that she didn't do anything wrong and doesn't deserve to be treated this way, so hostility begins to build up. However, she can't acknowledge to herself that she feels this way about her mother, so she compensates by blaming herself. This only adds to her resentment and hostility, however, which consciously focuses on herself, and subconsciously focuses on Twilight.
This probably carries over into her school life. Although she initially gets picked on, she eventually finds friends and the class seems to basically accept her. However, because Twilight is occasionally cunty to her for no apparent reason, she is gradually developing an inferiority complex that makes her believe that there must be something wrong with her. This is reinforced by the fact that Twilight makes her hide her wings and eyes, and getting bullied reinforces it further. She now believes that she must be somehow defective or inferior, but again, she knows that she hasn't done anything to deserve this, so it just gets added to her little ball of hostility in the back of her mind.
Eventually, she learns the truth about herself, and it all clicks into place. She knows why Twilight doesn't like her, and why she got picked on. Now she is angry, because she can't help who she is, but she again suppresses it and directs it mostly at herself. However, this knowledge basically puts the first serious crack in her relationship with Twilight, which begins to slowly and imperceptibly expand.
When Twilight finally makes the decision to hand her over to Celestia for buttsecks and experimentation, the bomb goes off. Nyx realizes that Twilight's love and affection were just an act, and that really she was just using her as some kind of science project, fully intending to hand her off to Celestia all along. She's furious, so when Nexus uses his magic to revive her power, she accepts it gladly and gives herself over fully to the NM personality. She doesn't really give two shits about Nightmare Moon or what she intended to do, and she cares even less about Nexus and his gay little cult; however, she is consumed by nihilistic rage at this point and just wants to watch the world burn. She joins the cult out of convenience but probably intends to betray them later once she's done with them.
This would be a real motivation, which would explain and on some level justify her actions. The reader, having seen both her view and Twilight's, would understand that she's wrong about why Twilight did what she did; but the misunderstanding is part of the tragedy. The reader now desperately wants to see this tragedy resolved, and keeps reading to find out what happens.
I actually suspect that this is more or less what Peen Stroke had in mind; however, an idea is only worth something if you can execute it. Can anyone find anything in the text so far that convincingly establishes a motivation like this for Nyx? I will personally send $5 via paypal to anyone who can make an effective argument.
The more observant reader may have noticed by now that a lot of these points I keep harping on are all interconnected. Twilight and Nyx's relationship doesn't feel genuine because the story has focused more on Twilight's inner thoughts than it has on their interactions. Because their relationship isn't genuine, the emotional moments in the story don't feel genuine, no matter how thickly Peen Stroke tries to layer them on. The lack of emotion nixes Nyx's :^) motivations, which makes her transformation into NM feel pointless and random, which makes everything she then does as NM feel pointless and random. Instead of feeling heartbroken as we stand helplessly to the side, watching poor Nyx beat up her mother because she feels hurt and abandoned (as Peen Stroke doubtlessly intended us to feel here), we instead feel incredulous that any of this nonsense is happening at all. They were literally just having ice cream and goofing around a few chapters ago; what happened to Nyx to make her suddenly this assblasted? If this story had been told properly, we wouldn't be asking this question.
Everything in a story is interconnected, and it all sits on a foundation. If you fuck up the foundation, anything you build on top of it is structurally weak. In this story, the foundation is the relationship between Twilight and Nyx. Instead of building their relationship organically through interaction, the author simply informs us over and over that they have one, and tries to reinforce it with saccharine Hallmark moments that just feel phony. This story's attempts to make us feel basically alternate between cuteness porn and sadness porn, with little or no real depth to any of it.
Two posts ago, I went into some armchair psychology about how I think Twilight's mindset would work in this story. Now I'd like to explore how things might look from Nyx's perspective, had her character been properly explored:
Nyx has no idea what's going on, she just wakes up in the woods one day with no memories and is essentially innocent, despite being Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke). Twilight finds her and takes care of her, and she implicitly trusts Twilight; however, Twilight is a bit weird. Nyx doesn't know why; Nyx doesn't know anything. All she knows is that it sometimes feels like Twilight doesn't like her, or is repulsed by her or something. She internalizes this but mostly tries to ignore it. However, there is a weird voice in the back of her head telling her that Twilight doesn't like her because she's bad.
Nyx's internal conflict is that she is caught between feelings of unconditional love for her adoptive mother, and a subconscious resentment for the way she sometimes treats her. On the one hand, she's a child, and children usually want their parent(s)'s approval. Thus on one level, she thinks Twilight is being weird to her because she must have done something wrong. At a deeper level, though, she knows that she didn't do anything wrong and doesn't deserve to be treated this way, so hostility begins to build up. However, she can't acknowledge to herself that she feels this way about her mother, so she compensates by blaming herself. This only adds to her resentment and hostility, however, which consciously focuses on herself, and subconsciously focuses on Twilight.
This probably carries over into her school life. Although she initially gets picked on, she eventually finds friends and the class seems to basically accept her. However, because Twilight is occasionally cunty to her for no apparent reason, she is gradually developing an inferiority complex that makes her believe that there must be something wrong with her. This is reinforced by the fact that Twilight makes her hide her wings and eyes, and getting bullied reinforces it further. She now believes that she must be somehow defective or inferior, but again, she knows that she hasn't done anything to deserve this, so it just gets added to her little ball of hostility in the back of her mind.
Eventually, she learns the truth about herself, and it all clicks into place. She knows why Twilight doesn't like her, and why she got picked on. Now she is angry, because she can't help who she is, but she again suppresses it and directs it mostly at herself. However, this knowledge basically puts the first serious crack in her relationship with Twilight, which begins to slowly and imperceptibly expand.
When Twilight finally makes the decision to hand her over to Celestia for buttsecks and experimentation, the bomb goes off. Nyx realizes that Twilight's love and affection were just an act, and that really she was just using her as some kind of science project, fully intending to hand her off to Celestia all along. She's furious, so when Nexus uses his magic to revive her power, she accepts it gladly and gives herself over fully to the NM personality. She doesn't really give two shits about Nightmare Moon or what she intended to do, and she cares even less about Nexus and his gay little cult; however, she is consumed by nihilistic rage at this point and just wants to watch the world burn. She joins the cult out of convenience but probably intends to betray them later once she's done with them.
This would be a real motivation, which would explain and on some level justify her actions. The reader, having seen both her view and Twilight's, would understand that she's wrong about why Twilight did what she did; but the misunderstanding is part of the tragedy. The reader now desperately wants to see this tragedy resolved, and keeps reading to find out what happens.
I actually suspect that this is more or less what Peen Stroke had in mind; however, an idea is only worth something if you can execute it. Can anyone find anything in the text so far that convincingly establishes a motivation like this for Nyx? I will personally send $5 via paypal to anyone who can make an effective argument.
>>259387
>My Immortal is obviously a parody of bad fanfiction
I tend to agree that it's probably satire, however it still works as a technical example of a bad story even if it was bad on purpose.
>My Immortal is obviously a parody of bad fanfiction
I tend to agree that it's probably satire, however it still works as a technical example of a bad story even if it was bad on purpose.
Will read later.
>>259746
By the way, the third post of those three I asked for your opinion on is just lewd. You don't need to comment on that part really if you don't want to. I just wanted you opinon on the writing style I use.
By the way, the third post of those three I asked for your opinion on is just lewd. You don't need to comment on that part really if you don't want to. I just wanted you opinon on the writing style I use.
>>259919
Lewdness shouldn't be a problem. I don't mean to toot my own lower horn, but I have some familiarity with the subject. Sorry, I meant to look at your other two posts a couple of days ago but I forgot; I'll do them later tonight. In the meantime, here's a bit more of Ass Sins.
Lewdness shouldn't be a problem. I don't mean to toot my own lower horn, but I have some familiarity with the subject. Sorry, I meant to look at your other two posts a couple of days ago but I forgot; I'll do them later tonight. In the meantime, here's a bit more of Ass Sins.
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>>259744
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Twilight apologizes to Nyx, Nyx berates her for turning her over to Celestia.
>“You can call yourself what you want,” Twilight said, her voice taking on a comforting tone. “Nightmare Moon, Queen Moon, the Empress of Equestria. To me, you'll always be Nyx.”
This is just patronizing, but honestly who cares. Nyx doesn't fall for it, but she's not supposed to fall for it, because Peen Stroke needs her to stay mad for a while. More to the point is that none of us are falling for it either.
>“Oh, how so very sentimental of you, Twilight Sparkle. Pity that sentiment wasn’t there when Celestia was taking me away. Now that I think about it, you probably wanted her to take me away.”
This statement from Nyx confirms my suspicion that Peen Stroke probably imagined some kind of long-building resentment against Twilight as a motivation for Nyx's anger. It's a good motivation and reveals a good instinct on Peen Stroke's part, but again, the problem is execution. Where in the preceding cutesy story about a filly's idyllic school life do we find any hint that she might feel this way about her mother beneath the surface? Where in her interactions with Nyx do we get any indication that Twilight might harbor reservations about her daughter? We have pages and pages of Twilight's circular thoughts on the subject of course, but her interactions with Nyx are just cutesy mommy-daughter stuff. Even when Nyx figures out the truth about herself and Twilight confirms it for her, the revelation seems to have no impact on either character. All of their interactions thereafter are as superficial as they were before. You have to show, not tell. It's not enough to simply inform us that Twilight is worried that Nyx is Nightmare Moon or that Nyx is doubting herself, you have to make us feel it.
Anyway, this conversation just kind of goes back and forth along these lines. Nyx accuses Twilight of being afraid of her and trying to pawn her off on Celestia so she could go back to her normal life, Twilight admits that she was scared, but she didn't intend for her to go away forever, and....ok, here's something.
>“I was scared. I’ll admit it,” Twilight said, trying to defend herself. She took another anxious step closer to Nightmare Moon. “Princess Celestia was scared too, and… and she convinced me that I had to let her take you, so that you could be tested. She just wanted to be sure you wouldn’t be a threat to Equestria. Princess Celestia never meant to take you away forever.”
It's interesting that she says "Princess Celestia never meant to take you away forever" instead of "I never meant for Princess Celestia to take you away forever," or something to that effect. This almost suggests that she's apologizing on behalf of the Princess. She's defending Celestia here more than herself. Good student, I guess.
Next, Twilight explains how she ran after the chariot crying, which again is something we already knew that doesn't really need a recap. This is followed by some unintentionally interesting comments by Nyx:
>“No matter what your intentions were, it was your actions that set all this in motion. It is through your actions that you have done ill against me, and it’s your actions for which you shall receive no forgiveness.
Nyx must have been reading a different story than I was, although I can't really blame her for wanting to do that I guess. In the story I read, though, Twilight's actions towards Nyx are sterile but generally kind; all the fear and loathing stuff takes place entirely inside her mind, which Nyx wouldn't have had access to.
>After the spring play, you said that I was not Nightmare Moon, that I could never be her.
I might be remembering this wrong, but as I recall Twilight actually told her the complete opposite of that. As I recall, Nyx basically asked Twilight "Am I Nightmare Moon?", to which Twilight basically replied "Yes, you are Nightmare Moon." This was followed by a lengthy montage of Peen Stroke being gangbanged by the entire city of San Francisco.
Unfortunately, that's the last somewhat interesting thing either of them says for awhile. The conversation is mostly banal from here. There's some semantic arguments about whether or not Nyx is truly Nightmare Moon, Twilight tells Nyx to come back home because she's making her friends worry, Nyx cries tears of blood and proclaims that she has no friends, Twilight reminds her of the three actual friends she has, that she basically turned her back on for no reason a few scenes ago when she decided to join this fudge-packing cult, and then Nyx is all like "oh yeah, I forgot about them." This seems to make her wistfully recall the joys of friendship for a few brief seconds, and then naturally she decides to just remain on the pointless course of action she chose for no reason at all. She summons Spell Nexus, yells at him for a while, and then tells him to take Twilight to the dungeon, but make sure it's the nice dungeon, because reasons.
I'm guessing that once again, Peen Stroke is trying to portray Nyx as conflicted, but once again, it's not working. Her actions here just come across as erratic and nonsensical. She's mad at Twilight for weak reasons, and despite having her reasons exposed as weak she chooses to stay mad. She has no reason at all to give a shit about deposing the royal sisters or taking over Equestria, but she decides to do it anyway. She yells at Spell Nexus for torturing Twilight but then orders Twilight to be thrown into the dungeon, but also given medical treatment and nourishing food. This story is so far off the rails at this point I'm not even sure what to call it.
>Twilight Sparkle has failed utterly. Her foolish ploy at sentimentality has crumbled, and, in her failure, she has ensured our victory.
Replace "Twilight Sparkle" with "Past Sins." The age of Peen Stroke is over. The time of GlimGlam has come!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Twilight apologizes to Nyx, Nyx berates her for turning her over to Celestia.
>“You can call yourself what you want,” Twilight said, her voice taking on a comforting tone. “Nightmare Moon, Queen Moon, the Empress of Equestria. To me, you'll always be Nyx.”
This is just patronizing, but honestly who cares. Nyx doesn't fall for it, but she's not supposed to fall for it, because Peen Stroke needs her to stay mad for a while. More to the point is that none of us are falling for it either.
>“Oh, how so very sentimental of you, Twilight Sparkle. Pity that sentiment wasn’t there when Celestia was taking me away. Now that I think about it, you probably wanted her to take me away.”
This statement from Nyx confirms my suspicion that Peen Stroke probably imagined some kind of long-building resentment against Twilight as a motivation for Nyx's anger. It's a good motivation and reveals a good instinct on Peen Stroke's part, but again, the problem is execution. Where in the preceding cutesy story about a filly's idyllic school life do we find any hint that she might feel this way about her mother beneath the surface? Where in her interactions with Nyx do we get any indication that Twilight might harbor reservations about her daughter? We have pages and pages of Twilight's circular thoughts on the subject of course, but her interactions with Nyx are just cutesy mommy-daughter stuff. Even when Nyx figures out the truth about herself and Twilight confirms it for her, the revelation seems to have no impact on either character. All of their interactions thereafter are as superficial as they were before. You have to show, not tell. It's not enough to simply inform us that Twilight is worried that Nyx is Nightmare Moon or that Nyx is doubting herself, you have to make us feel it.
Anyway, this conversation just kind of goes back and forth along these lines. Nyx accuses Twilight of being afraid of her and trying to pawn her off on Celestia so she could go back to her normal life, Twilight admits that she was scared, but she didn't intend for her to go away forever, and....ok, here's something.
>“I was scared. I’ll admit it,” Twilight said, trying to defend herself. She took another anxious step closer to Nightmare Moon. “Princess Celestia was scared too, and… and she convinced me that I had to let her take you, so that you could be tested. She just wanted to be sure you wouldn’t be a threat to Equestria. Princess Celestia never meant to take you away forever.”
It's interesting that she says "Princess Celestia never meant to take you away forever" instead of "I never meant for Princess Celestia to take you away forever," or something to that effect. This almost suggests that she's apologizing on behalf of the Princess. She's defending Celestia here more than herself. Good student, I guess.
Next, Twilight explains how she ran after the chariot crying, which again is something we already knew that doesn't really need a recap. This is followed by some unintentionally interesting comments by Nyx:
>“No matter what your intentions were, it was your actions that set all this in motion. It is through your actions that you have done ill against me, and it’s your actions for which you shall receive no forgiveness.
Nyx must have been reading a different story than I was, although I can't really blame her for wanting to do that I guess. In the story I read, though, Twilight's actions towards Nyx are sterile but generally kind; all the fear and loathing stuff takes place entirely inside her mind, which Nyx wouldn't have had access to.
>After the spring play, you said that I was not Nightmare Moon, that I could never be her.
I might be remembering this wrong, but as I recall Twilight actually told her the complete opposite of that. As I recall, Nyx basically asked Twilight "Am I Nightmare Moon?", to which Twilight basically replied "Yes, you are Nightmare Moon." This was followed by a lengthy montage of Peen Stroke being gangbanged by the entire city of San Francisco.
Unfortunately, that's the last somewhat interesting thing either of them says for awhile. The conversation is mostly banal from here. There's some semantic arguments about whether or not Nyx is truly Nightmare Moon, Twilight tells Nyx to come back home because she's making her friends worry, Nyx cries tears of blood and proclaims that she has no friends, Twilight reminds her of the three actual friends she has, that she basically turned her back on for no reason a few scenes ago when she decided to join this fudge-packing cult, and then Nyx is all like "oh yeah, I forgot about them." This seems to make her wistfully recall the joys of friendship for a few brief seconds, and then naturally she decides to just remain on the pointless course of action she chose for no reason at all. She summons Spell Nexus, yells at him for a while, and then tells him to take Twilight to the dungeon, but make sure it's the nice dungeon, because reasons.
I'm guessing that once again, Peen Stroke is trying to portray Nyx as conflicted, but once again, it's not working. Her actions here just come across as erratic and nonsensical. She's mad at Twilight for weak reasons, and despite having her reasons exposed as weak she chooses to stay mad. She has no reason at all to give a shit about deposing the royal sisters or taking over Equestria, but she decides to do it anyway. She yells at Spell Nexus for torturing Twilight but then orders Twilight to be thrown into the dungeon, but also given medical treatment and nourishing food. This story is so far off the rails at this point I'm not even sure what to call it.
>Twilight Sparkle has failed utterly. Her foolish ploy at sentimentality has crumbled, and, in her failure, she has ensured our victory.
Replace "Twilight Sparkle" with "Past Sins." The age of Peen Stroke is over. The time of GlimGlam has come!
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>>259937
ANYWAY, the scene ends with Twilight crying (naturally) and Spell Nexus groveling. Nyx zaps him with a lightning bolt because reasons, and he runs off to masturbate while some guards carry Twilight off to the dungeon, but they're totally nice to her about it now instead of beating her senseless for no reason.
Nyx goes back to her bedroom to cry tears of blood and listen to her My Chemical Romance records. She takes off her armor and puts on a black skirt from Hot Topic, black fishnet stockings, black eyeliner and white foundation. She cuts her fetlocks open while yelling angrily at the mirror, and blood pools on the floor get it ? beccause she's goffik!.
Continuing to unravel at an almost faster clip than even the rapidly-unraveling story can keep up with, she punches the mirror and rants about anything and everything. At first she swears revenge against Twilight for the stuff she's mentioned already, Celestia for wanting to take her away I guess, Spell Nexus for being kind of a faggot or something, and so forth and so on. Then, she apparently decides that even this short list of flimsy reasons she has for being suddenly very angry with everypony she knows is too much of a connection to the happy past that she suddenly wants nothing to do with for some reason, so she instead swears revenge on Celestia for trapping her in the moon 1000 years ago and on Twilight for using the elements of harmony on her (Twilight's friends, who also participated in this, are not mentioned).
Once again, we are running into problems because of Nightmare Moon's rather poorly established identity. Nightmare Moon is being treated as a separate character from Luna, who is barely mentioned in this story at all and can't really be considered more than a minor character, despite being a major character in the canon. Nyx, despite technically being Nightmare Moon, is treated more like a reincarnation of her; she has her memories and personality, but at the same time has her own life distinct from NM, same as Luna now does. So, on top of her already weak motivations for suddenly turning evil, we are now suddenly presented with this even weaker reason for suddenly turning even eviler. Nyx is now angry about being sent to the moon 1000 years ago? Nyx is angry about being zapped by the Elements of Harmony? Who did those things happen to, exactly?
The way I see it we have three separate characters here: Princess Luna, Nightmare Moon, and Nyx. They are treated as distinct individuals, but at the same time the lines between them are heavily blurred. Nightmare Moon seems to be portrayed as some kind of parasitic entity made out of anger and magic (or something), who is very powerful but has no corporeal form. Nyx and Luna are two individuals with no obvious connection to each other at all, beyond that each was possessed by Nightmare Moon at one time. So why is the current Nightmare Moon, who was created from Nyx, angry about things that happened to the previous Nightmare Moon, who was created from Luna? From what I've been able to discern, Nightmare Moon is some kind of spirit of anger, but the personality manifests on top of the host. Thus, when Luna was NM, she was acting on Luna's anger, and Nightmare Nyx is acting on Nyx's. Nyx being angry about something that happened to Luna 1000 years ago implies a connection between Luna and Nyx that has not been established. Furthermore, we once again have events within this story being driven by events that happened outside of it, in this case the show. This is bad literary form for reasons I've already explained; a story needs to stand on its own merits, even if it draws from an existing canon.
The problem is, Peen Stroke is drawing on elements of Luna's past as motivation for Nightmare Nyx. However, there are two problems with this: one, that Nyx and Luna aren't connected; and two, that Luna barely exists as a character in this story. While it's probably a safe bet that most people reading this are familiar with the show and know the story of Nightmare Moon, that doesn't mean you can just use the canon source material as a bottomless story well that you can draw content from to shore up the crap-holes in your own story. And besides, Nyx doesn't exist in the canon source, so if she fits into this world you still need to weave her into it in a believable way. If Luna and Nyx are related or connected somehow, you need to establish that connection. If you want to go the opposite route and establish Nightmare Moon and Nyx as distinct separate characters that have nothing to do with Luna, then you need to give Nyx her own motivations and build her a separate arc based on those.
Anyway, that's one more chapter in the bag. Only 99,258 more words to go. Jesus Christ, we have not even technically reached the halfway mark yet. God save us all.
ANYWAY, the scene ends with Twilight crying (naturally) and Spell Nexus groveling. Nyx zaps him with a lightning bolt because reasons, and he runs off to masturbate while some guards carry Twilight off to the dungeon, but they're totally nice to her about it now instead of beating her senseless for no reason.
Nyx goes back to her bedroom to cry tears of blood and listen to her My Chemical Romance records. She takes off her armor and puts on a black skirt from Hot Topic, black fishnet stockings, black eyeliner and white foundation. She cuts her fetlocks open while yelling angrily at the mirror, and blood pools on the floor get it ? beccause she's goffik!.
Continuing to unravel at an almost faster clip than even the rapidly-unraveling story can keep up with, she punches the mirror and rants about anything and everything. At first she swears revenge against Twilight for the stuff she's mentioned already, Celestia for wanting to take her away I guess, Spell Nexus for being kind of a faggot or something, and so forth and so on. Then, she apparently decides that even this short list of flimsy reasons she has for being suddenly very angry with everypony she knows is too much of a connection to the happy past that she suddenly wants nothing to do with for some reason, so she instead swears revenge on Celestia for trapping her in the moon 1000 years ago and on Twilight for using the elements of harmony on her (Twilight's friends, who also participated in this, are not mentioned).
Once again, we are running into problems because of Nightmare Moon's rather poorly established identity. Nightmare Moon is being treated as a separate character from Luna, who is barely mentioned in this story at all and can't really be considered more than a minor character, despite being a major character in the canon. Nyx, despite technically being Nightmare Moon, is treated more like a reincarnation of her; she has her memories and personality, but at the same time has her own life distinct from NM, same as Luna now does. So, on top of her already weak motivations for suddenly turning evil, we are now suddenly presented with this even weaker reason for suddenly turning even eviler. Nyx is now angry about being sent to the moon 1000 years ago? Nyx is angry about being zapped by the Elements of Harmony? Who did those things happen to, exactly?
The way I see it we have three separate characters here: Princess Luna, Nightmare Moon, and Nyx. They are treated as distinct individuals, but at the same time the lines between them are heavily blurred. Nightmare Moon seems to be portrayed as some kind of parasitic entity made out of anger and magic (or something), who is very powerful but has no corporeal form. Nyx and Luna are two individuals with no obvious connection to each other at all, beyond that each was possessed by Nightmare Moon at one time. So why is the current Nightmare Moon, who was created from Nyx, angry about things that happened to the previous Nightmare Moon, who was created from Luna? From what I've been able to discern, Nightmare Moon is some kind of spirit of anger, but the personality manifests on top of the host. Thus, when Luna was NM, she was acting on Luna's anger, and Nightmare Nyx is acting on Nyx's. Nyx being angry about something that happened to Luna 1000 years ago implies a connection between Luna and Nyx that has not been established. Furthermore, we once again have events within this story being driven by events that happened outside of it, in this case the show. This is bad literary form for reasons I've already explained; a story needs to stand on its own merits, even if it draws from an existing canon.
The problem is, Peen Stroke is drawing on elements of Luna's past as motivation for Nightmare Nyx. However, there are two problems with this: one, that Nyx and Luna aren't connected; and two, that Luna barely exists as a character in this story. While it's probably a safe bet that most people reading this are familiar with the show and know the story of Nightmare Moon, that doesn't mean you can just use the canon source material as a bottomless story well that you can draw content from to shore up the crap-holes in your own story. And besides, Nyx doesn't exist in the canon source, so if she fits into this world you still need to weave her into it in a believable way. If Luna and Nyx are related or connected somehow, you need to establish that connection. If you want to go the opposite route and establish Nightmare Moon and Nyx as distinct separate characters that have nothing to do with Luna, then you need to give Nyx her own motivations and build her a separate arc based on those.
Anyway, that's one more chapter in the bag. Only 99,258 more words to go. Jesus Christ, we have not even technically reached the halfway mark yet. God save us all.
>>259936
Actually, you are right. Now that I think of it that was kinda dumb of me. Obviously, the gay who has written many many silver"insert more than a sexjoke here"star miight know a thing or two about hte subject.
Actually, you are right. Now that I think of it that was kinda dumb of me. Obviously, the gay who has written many many silver"insert more than a sexjoke here"star miight know a thing or two about hte subject.
>>259939
No Gods, No Masters, No Brakes, No Stopping, No Safety, No Protection. You WERE warned, right?
No Gods, No Masters, No Brakes, No Stopping, No Safety, No Protection. You WERE warned, right?
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>>259127
>>259130
>>258994
Resuming with the second post:
>>258683 →
First thing that jumps out at me here is that you have a lot of misspelled words. I'd highly recommend running these through a spell-checker before posting them. You also have a lot of missing spaces where words are runtogether likethis. Keep an eye on that as well.
>”Yeah, it is a lot isn't it?”
This goes back to what I was talking about in the previous post. With spoken dialogue you're going to want to use contractions whenever possible, ie "it's" instead of "it is", "you're" instead of "you are", etc. In narration you can be as formal as you like, but spoken dialogue usually flows better when it feels more like natural speech. The only exception to this rule might be a character like Celestia, who speaks more formally. I notice there are a few more instances of this in your dialogue, so try to pay attention to this; it's one of those minor literary tricks that will help give your characters' spoken parts a much more natural feeling.
>Choco's jaw hanged as she gawked at everything.
You'll want to say "Choco's jaw hung open" here. "Hanged" is a word that refers specifically to a person being hanged, as in execution by dangling from a rope. Unless you're planning on channeling Doki Doki Literature Club in your filly romance story, you're probably going to use "hung" 99% of the time something is hanging. The English language is a pain in the ass sometimes.
As with the previous installment of this that I read, most of my biggest complaints are related to grammar, spelling and ESL type issues; beyond that your writing is actually quite good. You exhibit a good intuitive grasp of how to build a scene: you don't bog down the text with heavy description, but you sketch out enough of the scenery that the reader can keep a picture in their head. The story mostly unfolds through character interaction and dialogue and the pacing is good. Aside from what I mentioned about the spoken lines being occasionally stiff or awkwardly worded (which I suspect is also partly an ESL issue) the dialogue flows well and feels like natural interaction.
Since I've spent a fair amount of time in this thread complaining about Peen Stroke constantly dropping autistic references to the show into his text, I'd like to briefly call attention to this:
>”Woah. I have seen batponies and I have heard of the crystal ponies in the north but I have never even heard of a kirin before.” She grinned at a metal kirin which mouth sugguested singing but blurted out a stream of rainbow juice.
There are a lot of grammatical issues here, obviously; "suggested" is misspelled, it should be "whose" mouth instead of "which" mouth, and the wording is a bit awkward. Again, ESL and grammar issues; these should be corrected but they don't ruin the story. The reason I bring this up, though, is that this is actually a very good example of how to drop in canon world references the right way.
If Peen Stroke had written this, he would have probably inserted at least three or four paragraphs of narration describing the batponies and the kirins and their history in Equestria. This would have been followed by some dialogue between the two fillies, probably Anon explaining a bunch of bullshit about the kirin and the batponies, and probably the crystal ponies and Cadance and Shining Armor and whatever the fuck else. Doubtless there would be multiple direct references to the episodes of the show that these events were featured in, and direct references to specific characters otherwise unrelated to this story, who don't appear in it and will never be mentioned again. That's if Peen Stroke had written it.
However, all of that is notably absent from your text. Why is that? Well, it's because you, the author, either consciously or unconsciously, deduced that none of that shit has anything to do with what's going on in the current scene. So, you didn't include it. You just casually call attention to the fact that batponies, crystal ponies, and kirin are things that exist in this world, have Choco comment that she has never seen them before, and then move on with the scene. This was the correct decision, and shows good literary instinct. Have a cookie, you've earned it.
Big picture wise, we don't have enough of a story yet to be able to analyze this work as a whole, but I like the way things are going so far. You're constructing the story well, and that's what's important. You don't tell us exactly what's going on yet, but that's good. We have a couple of characters and a couple of scenes that illustrate who they are and the nature of their relationship. Details about the world and these two characters' place within it are gradually sketched in as the story progresses. This is the proper way to build a story. Have another cookie.
>>258684 →
Same comments as above apply to this post as well. Keep an eye on grammar, maybe try to word your sentences a little more carefully, and run your segments through a spellchecker before posting.
>the lewd
The lewd here is actually well done; this is a cute, intimate scene. Pay attention to your dialogue, though; some of your spoken lines are awkwardly phrased and come out a little stiff wakka chicka wokka chicka. Also, wording, spelling, grammar, etc; all the stuff I mentioned above. Nothing kills the mood of a good wank like forcing the reader to mentally correct a story's grammar while he's trying to get into it.
All in all, good work. Even if you don't build anything larger from this what you have is good, and stands well on its own. As far as I'm concerned, your three-post-long degenerate lesbian filly porn story outshines most of what I've read so far in Past Sins by a wide margin, bad grammar and all. Feel free to email Peen Stroke and tell him I said so.
>>259130
>>258994
Resuming with the second post:
>>258683 →
First thing that jumps out at me here is that you have a lot of misspelled words. I'd highly recommend running these through a spell-checker before posting them. You also have a lot of missing spaces where words are runtogether likethis. Keep an eye on that as well.
>”Yeah, it is a lot isn't it?”
This goes back to what I was talking about in the previous post. With spoken dialogue you're going to want to use contractions whenever possible, ie "it's" instead of "it is", "you're" instead of "you are", etc. In narration you can be as formal as you like, but spoken dialogue usually flows better when it feels more like natural speech. The only exception to this rule might be a character like Celestia, who speaks more formally. I notice there are a few more instances of this in your dialogue, so try to pay attention to this; it's one of those minor literary tricks that will help give your characters' spoken parts a much more natural feeling.
>Choco's jaw hanged as she gawked at everything.
You'll want to say "Choco's jaw hung open" here. "Hanged" is a word that refers specifically to a person being hanged, as in execution by dangling from a rope. Unless you're planning on channeling Doki Doki Literature Club in your filly romance story, you're probably going to use "hung" 99% of the time something is hanging. The English language is a pain in the ass sometimes.
As with the previous installment of this that I read, most of my biggest complaints are related to grammar, spelling and ESL type issues; beyond that your writing is actually quite good. You exhibit a good intuitive grasp of how to build a scene: you don't bog down the text with heavy description, but you sketch out enough of the scenery that the reader can keep a picture in their head. The story mostly unfolds through character interaction and dialogue and the pacing is good. Aside from what I mentioned about the spoken lines being occasionally stiff or awkwardly worded (which I suspect is also partly an ESL issue) the dialogue flows well and feels like natural interaction.
Since I've spent a fair amount of time in this thread complaining about Peen Stroke constantly dropping autistic references to the show into his text, I'd like to briefly call attention to this:
>”Woah. I have seen batponies and I have heard of the crystal ponies in the north but I have never even heard of a kirin before.” She grinned at a metal kirin which mouth sugguested singing but blurted out a stream of rainbow juice.
There are a lot of grammatical issues here, obviously; "suggested" is misspelled, it should be "whose" mouth instead of "which" mouth, and the wording is a bit awkward. Again, ESL and grammar issues; these should be corrected but they don't ruin the story. The reason I bring this up, though, is that this is actually a very good example of how to drop in canon world references the right way.
If Peen Stroke had written this, he would have probably inserted at least three or four paragraphs of narration describing the batponies and the kirins and their history in Equestria. This would have been followed by some dialogue between the two fillies, probably Anon explaining a bunch of bullshit about the kirin and the batponies, and probably the crystal ponies and Cadance and Shining Armor and whatever the fuck else. Doubtless there would be multiple direct references to the episodes of the show that these events were featured in, and direct references to specific characters otherwise unrelated to this story, who don't appear in it and will never be mentioned again. That's if Peen Stroke had written it.
However, all of that is notably absent from your text. Why is that? Well, it's because you, the author, either consciously or unconsciously, deduced that none of that shit has anything to do with what's going on in the current scene. So, you didn't include it. You just casually call attention to the fact that batponies, crystal ponies, and kirin are things that exist in this world, have Choco comment that she has never seen them before, and then move on with the scene. This was the correct decision, and shows good literary instinct. Have a cookie, you've earned it.
Big picture wise, we don't have enough of a story yet to be able to analyze this work as a whole, but I like the way things are going so far. You're constructing the story well, and that's what's important. You don't tell us exactly what's going on yet, but that's good. We have a couple of characters and a couple of scenes that illustrate who they are and the nature of their relationship. Details about the world and these two characters' place within it are gradually sketched in as the story progresses. This is the proper way to build a story. Have another cookie.
>>258684 →
Same comments as above apply to this post as well. Keep an eye on grammar, maybe try to word your sentences a little more carefully, and run your segments through a spellchecker before posting.
>the lewd
The lewd here is actually well done; this is a cute, intimate scene. Pay attention to your dialogue, though; some of your spoken lines are awkwardly phrased and come out a little stiff wakka chicka wokka chicka. Also, wording, spelling, grammar, etc; all the stuff I mentioned above. Nothing kills the mood of a good wank like forcing the reader to mentally correct a story's grammar while he's trying to get into it.
All in all, good work. Even if you don't build anything larger from this what you have is good, and stands well on its own. As far as I'm concerned, your three-post-long degenerate lesbian filly porn story outshines most of what I've read so far in Past Sins by a wide margin, bad grammar and all. Feel free to email Peen Stroke and tell him I said so.
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>>259939
Chapter 13: All Hail the Queen of Peen
The chapter opens at Canterlot Castle, where Celestia has just returned from a long hard search for Nyx, apparently conducted by physically flying around to different places in Equestria to see if she was there. Apparently Luna was supposed to have been doing the same thing around Canterlot. This creates a number of glaringly obvious logic problems that we should probably get out of the way before we progress.
First off, Celestia physically flying around looking for Nyx's cult by herself is about as plausible as Luna performing eyewitness interrogation earlier. Literally any pony with wings could have done the same thing, so there's no reason this task couldn't have been delegated. Second, the way the search is being conducted is a little absurd in the first place. The text specifically mentions that Celestia spent the day searching around Las Pegasus. Is there any particular reason why she would pick there to look? It doesn't make much sense; the cult has no connection to this city and there are no clues pointing in this direction. Again, this is just a waste of resources.
Third is the issue of the cult's whereabouts having been so easy for Twilight Sparkle to find and yet so difficult for the royal sisters, who have all the manpower (ponypower, whatever) of the Equestrian nation at their disposal. I'm almost hesitant to count this as a logic problem, since this is actually a rather common plot device in simplistic melodrama stories like this one. It's in the same category as having a villain place the hero in an elaborate death trap that that they can easily escape from, instead of just summarily executing them; a little implausibility is sometimes required to keep things interesting. However, in combination with the other issues I mentioned, I feel this creates a problem.
Twilight finds the cult by tracking Horte "nopony knows who I am, but Peen Stroke will slob my knobby horse dong anyway" Cuisine to his home and using a locator spell on him, which she only thought to do because her friends had noticed that Horte was one of the cult members. Celestia could not have been expected to have the same idea right off the bat, but since the cult's last appearance was in Ponyville, it would make sense for her to focus her search there and in the surrounding area, instead of just flying to random cities in Equestria and asking the locals if anypony has noticed a suspicious-looking cult hanging around. It therefore stands to reason that the search would have begun with an investigation in and around Ponyville, as well as interviews with anypony who witnessed Nyx's transformation. This would have included Twilight and her friends, in fact it stands to reason that Twilight would have been the first pony Celestia would have wanted to speak with, given her connection to Nyx. Had she done this, Celestia would have very quickly learned about Horte Cuisine, which she could then have followed up with a search of his residence. When it was found to be empty, she could have used the same methods Twilight did to track him down. Even the most incompetent detective (or writer of detective stories) would have followed this very basic line of logic without even thinking about it.
Anyway, all that is relatively minor. A more significant issue occurs when Celestia asks about Cadance. I've called attention several times to Peen Stroke's bad habit of derailing his own story just so he can randomly reference characters or events from the show that are otherwise irrelevant to what's happening, but this next section of text is probably the most egregious example I've come across yet.
Aside from it being yet another obnoxious namedrop (and also ignoring the fact that there is no more logical reason to search for the cult in the Crystal Empire than there is to look for them in Las Pegasus), bringing up Cadance here is not a huge deal in itself. The problem is that this bit segues into a completely irrelevant three paragraph ramble about how the aristocracy of Equestria is structured. Apparently, way back when, the three different pony castes had their own separate kings and queens and so forth, and the two sisters took power and united the kingdoms in sort of a Charlemagne-esque maneuver that pissed off the other royals, who were then made subordinate to the sisters.
This is probably interesting enough in terms of world-building or personal headcanon, but this isn't really the appropriate place to bring it up. In fact, since it doesn't really seem to pertain to anything that's going on in the story we're reading, I'd personally go a step further and say that there really isn't an appropriate place to bring it up, so it's probably better to just cut it entirely.
World-building is a whole separate discussion, but a brief word on it might be appropriate here. Don't get me wrong, it's good that Peen Stroke is thinking about stuff like this; nailing down details like how the Equestrian government is structured and its history and so forth fleshes out his fictional world. However, as I remember telling Nigel quite often, just because you have a detail worked out doesn't mean that it needs to go into the story.
I find it's better to do all of your world-building in a second document, which you then keep on hand as a reference. But if information isn't relevant to the story, it shouldn't be in the text. For instance, if you were writing a story about WWI that focuses on a single German soldier's experiences, you probably wouldn't need to include background information on the economic situation in the UK at that time. That info would technically be relevant to the story, and would be good for the author to know, but it wouldn't matter to the reader. It's very easy to go off on tangents like this when you're excited about the world you're writing in, so it's something I usually advise authors to keep an eye out for.
Chapter 13: All Hail the Queen of Peen
The chapter opens at Canterlot Castle, where Celestia has just returned from a long hard search for Nyx, apparently conducted by physically flying around to different places in Equestria to see if she was there. Apparently Luna was supposed to have been doing the same thing around Canterlot. This creates a number of glaringly obvious logic problems that we should probably get out of the way before we progress.
First off, Celestia physically flying around looking for Nyx's cult by herself is about as plausible as Luna performing eyewitness interrogation earlier. Literally any pony with wings could have done the same thing, so there's no reason this task couldn't have been delegated. Second, the way the search is being conducted is a little absurd in the first place. The text specifically mentions that Celestia spent the day searching around Las Pegasus. Is there any particular reason why she would pick there to look? It doesn't make much sense; the cult has no connection to this city and there are no clues pointing in this direction. Again, this is just a waste of resources.
Third is the issue of the cult's whereabouts having been so easy for Twilight Sparkle to find and yet so difficult for the royal sisters, who have all the manpower (ponypower, whatever) of the Equestrian nation at their disposal. I'm almost hesitant to count this as a logic problem, since this is actually a rather common plot device in simplistic melodrama stories like this one. It's in the same category as having a villain place the hero in an elaborate death trap that that they can easily escape from, instead of just summarily executing them; a little implausibility is sometimes required to keep things interesting. However, in combination with the other issues I mentioned, I feel this creates a problem.
Twilight finds the cult by tracking Horte "nopony knows who I am, but Peen Stroke will slob my knobby horse dong anyway" Cuisine to his home and using a locator spell on him, which she only thought to do because her friends had noticed that Horte was one of the cult members. Celestia could not have been expected to have the same idea right off the bat, but since the cult's last appearance was in Ponyville, it would make sense for her to focus her search there and in the surrounding area, instead of just flying to random cities in Equestria and asking the locals if anypony has noticed a suspicious-looking cult hanging around. It therefore stands to reason that the search would have begun with an investigation in and around Ponyville, as well as interviews with anypony who witnessed Nyx's transformation. This would have included Twilight and her friends, in fact it stands to reason that Twilight would have been the first pony Celestia would have wanted to speak with, given her connection to Nyx. Had she done this, Celestia would have very quickly learned about Horte Cuisine, which she could then have followed up with a search of his residence. When it was found to be empty, she could have used the same methods Twilight did to track him down. Even the most incompetent detective (or writer of detective stories) would have followed this very basic line of logic without even thinking about it.
Anyway, all that is relatively minor. A more significant issue occurs when Celestia asks about Cadance. I've called attention several times to Peen Stroke's bad habit of derailing his own story just so he can randomly reference characters or events from the show that are otherwise irrelevant to what's happening, but this next section of text is probably the most egregious example I've come across yet.
Aside from it being yet another obnoxious namedrop (and also ignoring the fact that there is no more logical reason to search for the cult in the Crystal Empire than there is to look for them in Las Pegasus), bringing up Cadance here is not a huge deal in itself. The problem is that this bit segues into a completely irrelevant three paragraph ramble about how the aristocracy of Equestria is structured. Apparently, way back when, the three different pony castes had their own separate kings and queens and so forth, and the two sisters took power and united the kingdoms in sort of a Charlemagne-esque maneuver that pissed off the other royals, who were then made subordinate to the sisters.
This is probably interesting enough in terms of world-building or personal headcanon, but this isn't really the appropriate place to bring it up. In fact, since it doesn't really seem to pertain to anything that's going on in the story we're reading, I'd personally go a step further and say that there really isn't an appropriate place to bring it up, so it's probably better to just cut it entirely.
World-building is a whole separate discussion, but a brief word on it might be appropriate here. Don't get me wrong, it's good that Peen Stroke is thinking about stuff like this; nailing down details like how the Equestrian government is structured and its history and so forth fleshes out his fictional world. However, as I remember telling Nigel quite often, just because you have a detail worked out doesn't mean that it needs to go into the story.
I find it's better to do all of your world-building in a second document, which you then keep on hand as a reference. But if information isn't relevant to the story, it shouldn't be in the text. For instance, if you were writing a story about WWI that focuses on a single German soldier's experiences, you probably wouldn't need to include background information on the economic situation in the UK at that time. That info would technically be relevant to the story, and would be good for the author to know, but it wouldn't matter to the reader. It's very easy to go off on tangents like this when you're excited about the world you're writing in, so it's something I usually advise authors to keep an eye out for.
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>>260088
Anyway, Peen Stroke manages to weakly rope this bit about the nobility into his story towards the end, by mentioning that because of their somewhat lukewarm loyalty to the sisters, most of the nobles have been hostile or indifferent to the search effort, a fact which Celestia laments. Luna tells her to calm her tits, and then pointlessly flies off to Manehattan to see if the cult might be there for some reason also, Peen Stroke misspells Manehattan as "Manehatten". This concludes the subchapter, which I have to say was mostly pointless. Nothing particularly interesting happened in this scene, nor was any particularly important information communicated. This scene could be cut at no loss.
Next, we cut to Shining Armor, who I guess has been summoned down to Canterlot to help with the defenses. This is really more of an issue with the show than it is with Peen Stroke, but I never quite understood what Shining's deal is. He's the captain of the guard in Canterlot but he also lives like 50 miles away in the Crystal Empire? You'd think he would have been discharged from his duties when he got married. Plus, wouldn't he technically be like a duke or a prince or something now? But whatever, who cares.
More important is that Shining has made the highly questionable decision to not summon a large reserve of veteran guards that are currently off-duty, and instead is relying entirely on an army of untested recruits with a handful of vets to supervise them, on the grounds that the veteran soldiers need to rest and spend time with their families. This seems like an unbelievably stupid move considering the nation is supposed to be in a state of emergency now, what with Nightmare Moon returning and so forth. But whatever, who cares.
This scene is mercifully short, and seems to be mostly laying the foundation and setting a tense mood for what is probably going to be an attack on Canterlot happening in the next scene, unless Peen Stroke wants to namedrop some more ancillary characters or cut away to see what Horte Cuisine or Bastion Yorsets or some other literally-who is up to first. Other than the logic issues mentioned above, this dry and utilitarian scene is executed decently enough.
The following scene deserves some scrutiny. In this scene, two guards are standing watch, one of them a new recruit, the other a seasoned veteran. The new recruit is on edge and is jumping at every shadow that she sees, and the older guard is attempting to calm her down and get her to focus. The first thing I notice about it is that it is significantly more interesting and better written than the two which preceded it. This kind of small, intimate, personal depiction of two guards on night watch duty does a much better job of setting a calm-before-the-storm mood than the previous two scenes, which mostly dealt with a bird's eye view of the situation from the perspective of the royals. Basically, this works for the same reason that a soldier's personal account of a battle is usually more interesting to read than a dry academic account of the same battle written by a historian, even if the historian's account contains more information and is more technically accurate.
Another thing that's interesting about this scene is that it actually conveys the same essential information found in the last two scenes: it mentions that Luna (along with half of the army) is away in Manehattan (for some idiotic unexplained reason), and that Shining Armor is in Canterlot overseeing the guards (instead of at home banging his hot wife). In fact, it actually elaborates on Shining's specific reason for being there.
This redundancy means that there is really no good reason for all three of these scenes to be in the text. The first scene, with Celestia and Luna, is dull as fuck to read and communicates almost nothing of value (apart from the setup of Luna's absence, of course, which I'm sure will be significant when NM attacks). It could be chopped at no significant loss. The second scene with Shining Armor is better done, but it's also somewhat dry, and was probably just written because Peen Stroke wanted to put Shining Armor in the story somewhere. Therefore, if I were in Mr. P's (probably high-heeled) shoes, I'd just cut the first two scenes and open the chapter with the stronger third scene.
Anyway, as it turns out, the fraidy-cat recruit is actually one of the cult's minions, and as soon as the guard exhaustively explains the details of their defense strategy, she reveals herself and casts a sleep spell on him and blah blah blah. This next sequence basically proves what I was saying above: that Shining's plan to use new recruits instead of veterans to guard the castle during a state of emergency is completely idiotic. As it turns out, all of the new recruits are actually cult members, and they all rise up and incapacitate the veteran guards supervising them.
The amount of effort Peen Stroke puts into setting this up frankly ruins it. Protip for authors: don't do shit like this. Don't have your characters do implausibly stupid things just to set up a cool scene you have in mind. It's not worth it, because odds are your scene is not going to turn out as cool as you think it will. Like I said, a certain amount of this is ok; like it's ok to have your hero get conveniently locked in the one jail cell that has a loose bar in the window he can kick out, or have his cell watched by a single inept guard that he can easily overpower. People might roll their eyes, but they'll still accept it. However, there are limits to how far you can push this kind of thing before the reader finally calls bullshit. This whole setup just reflects sheer criminal incompetence on the parts of Luna, Celestia and Shining together. If you have to go this far out of your way to make your ideas work, it's usually an indication that your ideas are bad.
Anyway, Peen Stroke manages to weakly rope this bit about the nobility into his story towards the end, by mentioning that because of their somewhat lukewarm loyalty to the sisters, most of the nobles have been hostile or indifferent to the search effort, a fact which Celestia laments. Luna tells her to calm her tits, and then pointlessly flies off to Manehattan to see if the cult might be there for some reason also, Peen Stroke misspells Manehattan as "Manehatten". This concludes the subchapter, which I have to say was mostly pointless. Nothing particularly interesting happened in this scene, nor was any particularly important information communicated. This scene could be cut at no loss.
Next, we cut to Shining Armor, who I guess has been summoned down to Canterlot to help with the defenses. This is really more of an issue with the show than it is with Peen Stroke, but I never quite understood what Shining's deal is. He's the captain of the guard in Canterlot but he also lives like 50 miles away in the Crystal Empire? You'd think he would have been discharged from his duties when he got married. Plus, wouldn't he technically be like a duke or a prince or something now? But whatever, who cares.
More important is that Shining has made the highly questionable decision to not summon a large reserve of veteran guards that are currently off-duty, and instead is relying entirely on an army of untested recruits with a handful of vets to supervise them, on the grounds that the veteran soldiers need to rest and spend time with their families. This seems like an unbelievably stupid move considering the nation is supposed to be in a state of emergency now, what with Nightmare Moon returning and so forth. But whatever, who cares.
This scene is mercifully short, and seems to be mostly laying the foundation and setting a tense mood for what is probably going to be an attack on Canterlot happening in the next scene, unless Peen Stroke wants to namedrop some more ancillary characters or cut away to see what Horte Cuisine or Bastion Yorsets or some other literally-who is up to first. Other than the logic issues mentioned above, this dry and utilitarian scene is executed decently enough.
The following scene deserves some scrutiny. In this scene, two guards are standing watch, one of them a new recruit, the other a seasoned veteran. The new recruit is on edge and is jumping at every shadow that she sees, and the older guard is attempting to calm her down and get her to focus. The first thing I notice about it is that it is significantly more interesting and better written than the two which preceded it. This kind of small, intimate, personal depiction of two guards on night watch duty does a much better job of setting a calm-before-the-storm mood than the previous two scenes, which mostly dealt with a bird's eye view of the situation from the perspective of the royals. Basically, this works for the same reason that a soldier's personal account of a battle is usually more interesting to read than a dry academic account of the same battle written by a historian, even if the historian's account contains more information and is more technically accurate.
Another thing that's interesting about this scene is that it actually conveys the same essential information found in the last two scenes: it mentions that Luna (along with half of the army) is away in Manehattan (for some idiotic unexplained reason), and that Shining Armor is in Canterlot overseeing the guards (instead of at home banging his hot wife). In fact, it actually elaborates on Shining's specific reason for being there.
This redundancy means that there is really no good reason for all three of these scenes to be in the text. The first scene, with Celestia and Luna, is dull as fuck to read and communicates almost nothing of value (apart from the setup of Luna's absence, of course, which I'm sure will be significant when NM attacks). It could be chopped at no significant loss. The second scene with Shining Armor is better done, but it's also somewhat dry, and was probably just written because Peen Stroke wanted to put Shining Armor in the story somewhere. Therefore, if I were in Mr. P's (probably high-heeled) shoes, I'd just cut the first two scenes and open the chapter with the stronger third scene.
Anyway, as it turns out, the fraidy-cat recruit is actually one of the cult's minions, and as soon as the guard exhaustively explains the details of their defense strategy, she reveals herself and casts a sleep spell on him and blah blah blah. This next sequence basically proves what I was saying above: that Shining's plan to use new recruits instead of veterans to guard the castle during a state of emergency is completely idiotic. As it turns out, all of the new recruits are actually cult members, and they all rise up and incapacitate the veteran guards supervising them.
The amount of effort Peen Stroke puts into setting this up frankly ruins it. Protip for authors: don't do shit like this. Don't have your characters do implausibly stupid things just to set up a cool scene you have in mind. It's not worth it, because odds are your scene is not going to turn out as cool as you think it will. Like I said, a certain amount of this is ok; like it's ok to have your hero get conveniently locked in the one jail cell that has a loose bar in the window he can kick out, or have his cell watched by a single inept guard that he can easily overpower. People might roll their eyes, but they'll still accept it. However, there are limits to how far you can push this kind of thing before the reader finally calls bullshit. This whole setup just reflects sheer criminal incompetence on the parts of Luna, Celestia and Shining together. If you have to go this far out of your way to make your ideas work, it's usually an indication that your ideas are bad.
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>>260090
Anyway, the literal Trojan horse recruits all incapacitate the real guards, and with some kind of wacky unexplained magic transform themselves into clouds, which then congeal into a single large cloud. The cloud floats underneath the door to the library, incapacitates all of the guards in there (as well as Shining Armor, who by now probably wishes was at home banging his hot wife), and then finally reforms into...ah, I see what Mr. P is up to here. The cloud is actually none other than Nightmare Moon herself.
I can visualize all of this fairly clearly and I can understand why Peen Stroke thought it would be a cool scene. It's definitely a neat visual, and since we all knew that NM was probably going to take over the castle one way or the other, I'll give him credit for thinking up something creative like this instead of just sharting out a generic battle scene. However, it requires way too much of a setup and is far too implausible for the reader to accept imo. For one thing, this seems like an extremely complicated feat of magic even for a character like Nightmare Nyx. The exact number of new recruits is not specified, but the text mentions that there are a few dozen of them, so it's probably safe to assume at least 60 or so. A powerful sorceress transforming herself into a swarm of bats or something I could probably accept, but simultaneously shapeshifting into that many sentient entities, each with their own personality and mannerisms, and maintaining the illusion long enough to fool the real guards? Highly dubious. The text says she maintained this illusion for several days. That seems preposterously difficult; I have a hard time even imagining an entity like Discord pulling it off. We're veering dangerously into Mary Sue territory here, even for a magical cartoon world.
On top of that, there's the setup required. Shining's decision to not recall the veteran guards in a state of emergency is a huge blunder, one that it's hard to imagine somepony competent enough to rise to the position of Captain would make. Even if you assume that no one thought to do background checks or whatever on the new recruits, it's still a very dumb idea to rely entirely on an untested force for a defense operation this important. If the veteran guards needed to rest and there was no way around it, at least split them up into two shifts, let half of them sleep for like five hours, and then have them switch so the other half can sleep. And keep them close at hand in the barracks for Celestia's sake; don't just send them home. You don't send the entire core of your defensive force home to sleep on the evening of an expected attack, and then just keep a skeleton crew of seasoned troops around to manage a group of fresh grunts who just signed up that afternoon, that's completely retarded.
And on top of that, it's also stupid to have Luna off in Manehattan with the other half of the army. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the cult's hideout is located there, so why send an army? Even ignoring what I said before, that just searching randomly all over Equestria for them instead of focusing on places where they're likely to be is a dumb strategy, there's still no reason to send half of your fighting force away to help in the search. A couple of Pegasus scouts or even Luna herself could easily have gone to Manehattan, and if they found something, then you send the army to deal with it. Until then, it makes far more sense to just keep your troops close at hand, since you're clearly anticipating an attack on your home turf anyway. Seriously, has Peen Stroke never played a strategy game before?
It's also worth considering that if NM has this much power, is it even necessary for her to create this elaborate ruse in the first place? I mean, when you think about all the things I mentioned above, this plan requires a preposterous number of things to go exactly the right way; it might honestly have been easier for NM to assault the castle directly with an army, or even just sneak inside through teleportation (or shapeshifting into smoke) the way Twilight snuck into her castle. Food for thought.
Also:
>Much like the time she became the Shadowbolts to tempt Rainbow Dash, Nightmare Moon had divided herself into multiple clones that then took on the shapes of other ponies.
Peen Stroke, I really, really wish you'd stop doing this. Neither the Shadowbolts nor Rainbow Dash are relevant to this scene; they don't need to be mentioned. At all. If your character is doing something, you don't need to have her autistically reference an earlier point in history where she did exactly the same thing. Just have her do the thing and let the reader infer the rest; if they're familiar with the show they'll see what you were referencing and nod approvingly, and if they don't it's no huge loss.
Anyway, also noteworthy is that Nightmare Nyx manages to take the castle without killing anypony, a fact which seems to annoy Spell Nexus and probably indicates that Nyx hasn't completely sold her soul yet, in the unlikely event that the reader still cares. I'm also detecting a subtle power struggle between Nexus and Nyx that might turn into something bigger at some point.
I suppose if one completely ignores how preposterous the whole thing is (something we've been doing a lot of lately), we could probably count this scene as an example of how Nyx differs from Nightmare Moon, in that Nyx's intelligence and cleverness managed to cook up this clean albeit implausible plan which results in her taking the castle with no loss of life and no alarm being raised, whereas NM would have probably just relied on cruelty and brute force. This is probably what Peen Stroke was attempting to illustrate, but imo the whole sequence of events is still far too ridiculous.
Anyway, the literal Trojan horse recruits all incapacitate the real guards, and with some kind of wacky unexplained magic transform themselves into clouds, which then congeal into a single large cloud. The cloud floats underneath the door to the library, incapacitates all of the guards in there (as well as Shining Armor, who by now probably wishes was at home banging his hot wife), and then finally reforms into...ah, I see what Mr. P is up to here. The cloud is actually none other than Nightmare Moon herself.
I can visualize all of this fairly clearly and I can understand why Peen Stroke thought it would be a cool scene. It's definitely a neat visual, and since we all knew that NM was probably going to take over the castle one way or the other, I'll give him credit for thinking up something creative like this instead of just sharting out a generic battle scene. However, it requires way too much of a setup and is far too implausible for the reader to accept imo. For one thing, this seems like an extremely complicated feat of magic even for a character like Nightmare Nyx. The exact number of new recruits is not specified, but the text mentions that there are a few dozen of them, so it's probably safe to assume at least 60 or so. A powerful sorceress transforming herself into a swarm of bats or something I could probably accept, but simultaneously shapeshifting into that many sentient entities, each with their own personality and mannerisms, and maintaining the illusion long enough to fool the real guards? Highly dubious. The text says she maintained this illusion for several days. That seems preposterously difficult; I have a hard time even imagining an entity like Discord pulling it off. We're veering dangerously into Mary Sue territory here, even for a magical cartoon world.
On top of that, there's the setup required. Shining's decision to not recall the veteran guards in a state of emergency is a huge blunder, one that it's hard to imagine somepony competent enough to rise to the position of Captain would make. Even if you assume that no one thought to do background checks or whatever on the new recruits, it's still a very dumb idea to rely entirely on an untested force for a defense operation this important. If the veteran guards needed to rest and there was no way around it, at least split them up into two shifts, let half of them sleep for like five hours, and then have them switch so the other half can sleep. And keep them close at hand in the barracks for Celestia's sake; don't just send them home. You don't send the entire core of your defensive force home to sleep on the evening of an expected attack, and then just keep a skeleton crew of seasoned troops around to manage a group of fresh grunts who just signed up that afternoon, that's completely retarded.
And on top of that, it's also stupid to have Luna off in Manehattan with the other half of the army. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the cult's hideout is located there, so why send an army? Even ignoring what I said before, that just searching randomly all over Equestria for them instead of focusing on places where they're likely to be is a dumb strategy, there's still no reason to send half of your fighting force away to help in the search. A couple of Pegasus scouts or even Luna herself could easily have gone to Manehattan, and if they found something, then you send the army to deal with it. Until then, it makes far more sense to just keep your troops close at hand, since you're clearly anticipating an attack on your home turf anyway. Seriously, has Peen Stroke never played a strategy game before?
It's also worth considering that if NM has this much power, is it even necessary for her to create this elaborate ruse in the first place? I mean, when you think about all the things I mentioned above, this plan requires a preposterous number of things to go exactly the right way; it might honestly have been easier for NM to assault the castle directly with an army, or even just sneak inside through teleportation (or shapeshifting into smoke) the way Twilight snuck into her castle. Food for thought.
Also:
>Much like the time she became the Shadowbolts to tempt Rainbow Dash, Nightmare Moon had divided herself into multiple clones that then took on the shapes of other ponies.
Peen Stroke, I really, really wish you'd stop doing this. Neither the Shadowbolts nor Rainbow Dash are relevant to this scene; they don't need to be mentioned. At all. If your character is doing something, you don't need to have her autistically reference an earlier point in history where she did exactly the same thing. Just have her do the thing and let the reader infer the rest; if they're familiar with the show they'll see what you were referencing and nod approvingly, and if they don't it's no huge loss.
Anyway, also noteworthy is that Nightmare Nyx manages to take the castle without killing anypony, a fact which seems to annoy Spell Nexus and probably indicates that Nyx hasn't completely sold her soul yet, in the unlikely event that the reader still cares. I'm also detecting a subtle power struggle between Nexus and Nyx that might turn into something bigger at some point.
I suppose if one completely ignores how preposterous the whole thing is (something we've been doing a lot of lately), we could probably count this scene as an example of how Nyx differs from Nightmare Moon, in that Nyx's intelligence and cleverness managed to cook up this clean albeit implausible plan which results in her taking the castle with no loss of life and no alarm being raised, whereas NM would have probably just relied on cruelty and brute force. This is probably what Peen Stroke was attempting to illustrate, but imo the whole sequence of events is still far too ridiculous.
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>>260092
Next, we get a repeat performance of Twilight's nail-biting room-by-room search of the castle, except this time, in a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, it's Nyx searching Canterlot Castle for Celestia's bedroom. In an even dumber turn of events, Peen Stroke has her wandering around the castle looking every which way for Celestia, until eventually she finds some fucking waiter who tells her that Celestia is in the throne room. Seriously? Nyx is searching the castle for the Princess, and she doesn't think to check the throne room? I don't presume to tell Nightmare faggot Moon how to do her job, and to be fair I've never been inside Canterlot Castle before, but personally if I were trying to find Celestia in the middle of the night, I'd probably start with her bedroom, and then hit the throne room next if she wasn't there. If I still couldn't find her, I'd assume she was probably in the shitter or something. But I digress.
Anyway, to Peen Stroke's credit, the scene with the waiter (who is called Silver Platter, which I will say is actually a not that awful pony name) is executed well enough. NM disguises herself as a guard, and manages to fool the waiter into leading her to Celestia. On the way there, they chat, and apart from a meandering, pointless and extremely autistic discussion about different types of soup, the interaction feels real enough. He mentions that apparently the extra security was put in place over Celestia's objections, which seems odd considering she had every reason to anticipate an attack, but whatever, who cares. Once they reach Celestia's bedroom, NM puts the waiter to sleep, then transforms herself into him and takes the tray of food in to Celestia.
>Celestia sat back in her throne, staring mindlessly at the ceiling. She was tired, and would have rather been asleep, but sleep did not come easily. She dreaded Nightmare Moon’s coming attack, feared for Luna’s safety, and, to top it all off, nopony had seen or heard from Twilight Sparkle in days. There was simply too much weighing on her mind to get any sleep.
So...let me see if I understand this. Celestia is worried about an attack from Nightmare Moon, but doesn't want extra guards. She sends Luna and half the army off to Manehattan for no good reason at all, and on top of that, Twilight Sparkle, her prize student who also had a personal relationship with the pony who turned out to be Nightmare Moon, has been missing for days but she doesn't seem to have bothered with an investigation or anything like that. Can we all agree that Celestia pretty much sucks at her job?
Anyway, after a long, rambling, easily deletable digression about Celestia's eating habits including an unnecessary reference to the Gabby Gums episode of the show (god dammit I hate you Peen Stroke), Silver Platter reveals himself to actually be none other than Nightmare Moon herself, much to Celestia's shock. It might actually have made more sense to just poison the food or put a spell on it or something, since from what we've seen thus far Nyx seems to eschew direct force whenever possible. However, since Nightmare Moon would probably want to confront her archenemy in the most melodramatic way possible, this route makes sense enough I guess.
>“I would think, Celestia, that after being betrayed by Spell Nexus, you would be a little more cautious,” Nightmare Moon mused with a taunting smile on her lips.
Yeah, I kind of have to agree with this statement. I'll say it again: Celestia sucks at her job.
ANYWAY, Nightmare Nyx wastes no time delving right into the boilerplate villain routine. She cackles triumphantly while explaining her nefarious plan to Celestia. A couple of details are revealed that are worth noting. Apparently, the reason she went through all the trouble of disguising herself as a bunch of guards had to do with Shining Armor's barrier. I guess the barrier was designed to keep Nightmare Moon out, but if Nightmare Moon was actually a bunch of different ponies then it wouldn't work...or something. I don't really get it, but I'm sure it's autistic as hell, so fuck it, who cares. Also, I think this was mentioned earlier, but apparently Night Wind, who as you'll surely recall was one of the higher-ranking cult members, was one of the guards, and this is how NM learned how the barrier worked.
There is also a bit of explanation regarding the separation between NM and Luna. It looks like Nyx is basically Luna's Nightmare Moon persona and some portion of her magic, separated from Luna and reconstituted as a new entity. Spell Nexus apparently filled in the edges using magic drawn from the Everfree forest. This explanation probably raises more questions than it answers, but at this point fuck it, I'll accept it. Nyx is basically an entity separate from Luna, retaining Nightmare Moon's memories but having her own personality. Fine; from here on out, I will work with this definition.
I'll say that this confrontation scene is actually handled pretty decently. This is the kind of scene where Peen Stroke's autistic obsession with the show and its world works for him rather than against him. It paints a nice dramatic visual of the two adversaries pacing slowly around each other, warily sizing each other up. Nightmare Nyx demonstrates her transformation ability by shapeshifting into the group of guards, then into smoke, then back into herself while she throws taunts at Celestia. Celestia, meanwhile, maintains an icy, regal composure, and faces her old enemy calmly. It's very easy to imagine what this scene would look like if it were actually animated as an episode of the show; I can almost hear the dramatic music playing in the background as I read.
Anyway, the main takeaway here is that Celestia notices that Nightmare Nyx didn't kill the guards, further reinforcing the distinction between this Nightmare Moon and the previous one.
Next, we get a repeat performance of Twilight's nail-biting room-by-room search of the castle, except this time, in a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, it's Nyx searching Canterlot Castle for Celestia's bedroom. In an even dumber turn of events, Peen Stroke has her wandering around the castle looking every which way for Celestia, until eventually she finds some fucking waiter who tells her that Celestia is in the throne room. Seriously? Nyx is searching the castle for the Princess, and she doesn't think to check the throne room? I don't presume to tell Nightmare faggot Moon how to do her job, and to be fair I've never been inside Canterlot Castle before, but personally if I were trying to find Celestia in the middle of the night, I'd probably start with her bedroom, and then hit the throne room next if she wasn't there. If I still couldn't find her, I'd assume she was probably in the shitter or something. But I digress.
Anyway, to Peen Stroke's credit, the scene with the waiter (who is called Silver Platter, which I will say is actually a not that awful pony name) is executed well enough. NM disguises herself as a guard, and manages to fool the waiter into leading her to Celestia. On the way there, they chat, and apart from a meandering, pointless and extremely autistic discussion about different types of soup, the interaction feels real enough. He mentions that apparently the extra security was put in place over Celestia's objections, which seems odd considering she had every reason to anticipate an attack, but whatever, who cares. Once they reach Celestia's bedroom, NM puts the waiter to sleep, then transforms herself into him and takes the tray of food in to Celestia.
>Celestia sat back in her throne, staring mindlessly at the ceiling. She was tired, and would have rather been asleep, but sleep did not come easily. She dreaded Nightmare Moon’s coming attack, feared for Luna’s safety, and, to top it all off, nopony had seen or heard from Twilight Sparkle in days. There was simply too much weighing on her mind to get any sleep.
So...let me see if I understand this. Celestia is worried about an attack from Nightmare Moon, but doesn't want extra guards. She sends Luna and half the army off to Manehattan for no good reason at all, and on top of that, Twilight Sparkle, her prize student who also had a personal relationship with the pony who turned out to be Nightmare Moon, has been missing for days but she doesn't seem to have bothered with an investigation or anything like that. Can we all agree that Celestia pretty much sucks at her job?
Anyway, after a long, rambling, easily deletable digression about Celestia's eating habits including an unnecessary reference to the Gabby Gums episode of the show (god dammit I hate you Peen Stroke), Silver Platter reveals himself to actually be none other than Nightmare Moon herself, much to Celestia's shock. It might actually have made more sense to just poison the food or put a spell on it or something, since from what we've seen thus far Nyx seems to eschew direct force whenever possible. However, since Nightmare Moon would probably want to confront her archenemy in the most melodramatic way possible, this route makes sense enough I guess.
>“I would think, Celestia, that after being betrayed by Spell Nexus, you would be a little more cautious,” Nightmare Moon mused with a taunting smile on her lips.
Yeah, I kind of have to agree with this statement. I'll say it again: Celestia sucks at her job.
ANYWAY, Nightmare Nyx wastes no time delving right into the boilerplate villain routine. She cackles triumphantly while explaining her nefarious plan to Celestia. A couple of details are revealed that are worth noting. Apparently, the reason she went through all the trouble of disguising herself as a bunch of guards had to do with Shining Armor's barrier. I guess the barrier was designed to keep Nightmare Moon out, but if Nightmare Moon was actually a bunch of different ponies then it wouldn't work...or something. I don't really get it, but I'm sure it's autistic as hell, so fuck it, who cares. Also, I think this was mentioned earlier, but apparently Night Wind, who as you'll surely recall was one of the higher-ranking cult members, was one of the guards, and this is how NM learned how the barrier worked.
There is also a bit of explanation regarding the separation between NM and Luna. It looks like Nyx is basically Luna's Nightmare Moon persona and some portion of her magic, separated from Luna and reconstituted as a new entity. Spell Nexus apparently filled in the edges using magic drawn from the Everfree forest. This explanation probably raises more questions than it answers, but at this point fuck it, I'll accept it. Nyx is basically an entity separate from Luna, retaining Nightmare Moon's memories but having her own personality. Fine; from here on out, I will work with this definition.
I'll say that this confrontation scene is actually handled pretty decently. This is the kind of scene where Peen Stroke's autistic obsession with the show and its world works for him rather than against him. It paints a nice dramatic visual of the two adversaries pacing slowly around each other, warily sizing each other up. Nightmare Nyx demonstrates her transformation ability by shapeshifting into the group of guards, then into smoke, then back into herself while she throws taunts at Celestia. Celestia, meanwhile, maintains an icy, regal composure, and faces her old enemy calmly. It's very easy to imagine what this scene would look like if it were actually animated as an episode of the show; I can almost hear the dramatic music playing in the background as I read.
Anyway, the main takeaway here is that Celestia notices that Nightmare Nyx didn't kill the guards, further reinforcing the distinction between this Nightmare Moon and the previous one.
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>>260348
As with many events in this story, the conversation goes on for a bit too long, and veers off into details that could easily have been ignored. For instance, a confrontation between Celestia and the "changeling queen" (I'm assuming this is a reference to the Canterlot Wedding episodes) is brought up needlessly, and woven into an explanation of why Nyx decides to fight Celestia with a magic sword instead of with spells. This answers a question that was asked by literally no one. Protip for authors: don't waste time explaining things that don't need to be explained. If you want your characters to have a swordfight, just make them have a swordfight and if the reader wonders about it you can just let him wonder.
There is also a bit of needless discussion over what Nyx intends to do with Twilight and her friends. Nyx basically tells Celestia that she's planning to capture them unharmed, and then offers an autistic explanation about why she doesn't want to harm them when Celestia asks about it. There's no need to bring this up here. As I've mentioned before, it's usually a bad idea in a story to explain something in detail that's going to happen later. It kills the suspense, and in this case it adds tedium to what should be an exciting scene. Besides, it's usually a good rule of thumb to focus on the present in any given scene. Unless there's a specific need to reference past or future events, conversation should focus mainly on what's going on now.
When you're writing this type of fight sequence, the formula is generally to have the two combatants face off, make a few quick jibes at each other, and then dive into the fight. If you want to have your villain explain her plan in order to clear up some of the details you've heretofore left unexplained, that's fine; just keep it succinct. We definitely don't need to hear about what Nightmare Moon is planning to do in the future; we can just read about what she does when she does it.
And oh god it just keeps going. Now she's rambling on about how she doesn't want Spell Nexus to hurt Twilight because only she can harm Twilight and blah blah blah. I have to say, having just complimented Peen Stroke on his well executed confrontation scene, he really sabotages himself here by loading it up with all this extraneous dialogue. He could probably squeeze a pretty rad magic sword fight out of what he's got here, which would be a rather nice, albeit temporary, distraction from how god-awful the rest of the rest of the story is. Instead, he chooses to use this scene to remind us how poorly developed Nyx is as a character.
Her rambling explanations about why she doesn't want Twilight Sparkle harmed, or why she's angry at the Mane 6, or how she deals with subordinates like Spell Nexus (which is really not something she should be discussing with her archenemy in the first place) just come across as pure spaghetti-in-the-pockets autism. Rather than adding tension to an exciting scene, this extra dialogue just showcases how schizophrenic Nyx's motivations have become, and calls attention to how little sense most of her actions as Nightmare Moon have made thus far.
At this point I'm probably just repeating myself on a lot of these points, but that's only because they keep recurring. Nyx is all over the place here, and her motivations remain weak. She's angry at Twilight because of the "betrayal", which as I've said time and time again is not demonstrably traumatizing enough to warrant this crazy of a reaction. She's angry at Twilight's friends, with whom she's had little to no interaction in this story, because of events that took place outside of it. She's angry at Celestia over stuff that happened 1000 years ago and also took place outside of the story.
A huge weakness in this story comes from its reliance upon events from the show. At least half of Nyx's character consists of Nightmare Moon, and from what I can tell a sizable portion of her reasons for doing what she's currently doing revolve around the events of the series opener. This text has not presented any of these events to us in any form, not even in flashback; it relies entirely upon the assumption that the reader has seen the show and knows what happened. While this is probably a fair assumption for Pony fanfiction, it's still bad storytelling because the main character's motivations are built on things that have nothing to do with the current story. The first half of the story is about Nyx and her childhood in Ponyville; Nightmare Moon is discussed, but we don't really get a sense of her past or who she was. As I've said before: if it's not in the text, it didn't happen.
This could be fixed a couple of different ways. The best would be for Peen Stroke to forget about the original Nightmare Moon and focus entirely on Nyx. She becomes Nightmare Moon, but her anger and whatever subsequent actions she takes are focused entirely on stuff that happened to her, not stuff that happened to Luna 1000 years ago or Nightmare Moon in s1e01. This would also require Peen Stroke to do a better job of developing Nyx's character in the first place, along the lines that I've already discussed.
Another option is to meld the original Nightmare Moon into the character of Nyx more elegantly, which would require the earlier part of the story to include at least some cursory exploration of these past events. This could be done either through narrative flashbacks to the past, or by having Nyx intermittently "remember" past events through dreams or visions or something along those lines. Either of these methods would improve the story, although I'm personally more inclined towards the first option that focuses on Nyx. However, it seems as if Peen Stroke's original vision for this was to explore Nightmare Moon as a separate character, so the second option might make more sense from his perspective. Either way though, the way it currently exists is not working.
As with many events in this story, the conversation goes on for a bit too long, and veers off into details that could easily have been ignored. For instance, a confrontation between Celestia and the "changeling queen" (I'm assuming this is a reference to the Canterlot Wedding episodes) is brought up needlessly, and woven into an explanation of why Nyx decides to fight Celestia with a magic sword instead of with spells. This answers a question that was asked by literally no one. Protip for authors: don't waste time explaining things that don't need to be explained. If you want your characters to have a swordfight, just make them have a swordfight and if the reader wonders about it you can just let him wonder.
There is also a bit of needless discussion over what Nyx intends to do with Twilight and her friends. Nyx basically tells Celestia that she's planning to capture them unharmed, and then offers an autistic explanation about why she doesn't want to harm them when Celestia asks about it. There's no need to bring this up here. As I've mentioned before, it's usually a bad idea in a story to explain something in detail that's going to happen later. It kills the suspense, and in this case it adds tedium to what should be an exciting scene. Besides, it's usually a good rule of thumb to focus on the present in any given scene. Unless there's a specific need to reference past or future events, conversation should focus mainly on what's going on now.
When you're writing this type of fight sequence, the formula is generally to have the two combatants face off, make a few quick jibes at each other, and then dive into the fight. If you want to have your villain explain her plan in order to clear up some of the details you've heretofore left unexplained, that's fine; just keep it succinct. We definitely don't need to hear about what Nightmare Moon is planning to do in the future; we can just read about what she does when she does it.
And oh god it just keeps going. Now she's rambling on about how she doesn't want Spell Nexus to hurt Twilight because only she can harm Twilight and blah blah blah. I have to say, having just complimented Peen Stroke on his well executed confrontation scene, he really sabotages himself here by loading it up with all this extraneous dialogue. He could probably squeeze a pretty rad magic sword fight out of what he's got here, which would be a rather nice, albeit temporary, distraction from how god-awful the rest of the rest of the story is. Instead, he chooses to use this scene to remind us how poorly developed Nyx is as a character.
Her rambling explanations about why she doesn't want Twilight Sparkle harmed, or why she's angry at the Mane 6, or how she deals with subordinates like Spell Nexus (which is really not something she should be discussing with her archenemy in the first place) just come across as pure spaghetti-in-the-pockets autism. Rather than adding tension to an exciting scene, this extra dialogue just showcases how schizophrenic Nyx's motivations have become, and calls attention to how little sense most of her actions as Nightmare Moon have made thus far.
At this point I'm probably just repeating myself on a lot of these points, but that's only because they keep recurring. Nyx is all over the place here, and her motivations remain weak. She's angry at Twilight because of the "betrayal", which as I've said time and time again is not demonstrably traumatizing enough to warrant this crazy of a reaction. She's angry at Twilight's friends, with whom she's had little to no interaction in this story, because of events that took place outside of it. She's angry at Celestia over stuff that happened 1000 years ago and also took place outside of the story.
A huge weakness in this story comes from its reliance upon events from the show. At least half of Nyx's character consists of Nightmare Moon, and from what I can tell a sizable portion of her reasons for doing what she's currently doing revolve around the events of the series opener. This text has not presented any of these events to us in any form, not even in flashback; it relies entirely upon the assumption that the reader has seen the show and knows what happened. While this is probably a fair assumption for Pony fanfiction, it's still bad storytelling because the main character's motivations are built on things that have nothing to do with the current story. The first half of the story is about Nyx and her childhood in Ponyville; Nightmare Moon is discussed, but we don't really get a sense of her past or who she was. As I've said before: if it's not in the text, it didn't happen.
This could be fixed a couple of different ways. The best would be for Peen Stroke to forget about the original Nightmare Moon and focus entirely on Nyx. She becomes Nightmare Moon, but her anger and whatever subsequent actions she takes are focused entirely on stuff that happened to her, not stuff that happened to Luna 1000 years ago or Nightmare Moon in s1e01. This would also require Peen Stroke to do a better job of developing Nyx's character in the first place, along the lines that I've already discussed.
Another option is to meld the original Nightmare Moon into the character of Nyx more elegantly, which would require the earlier part of the story to include at least some cursory exploration of these past events. This could be done either through narrative flashbacks to the past, or by having Nyx intermittently "remember" past events through dreams or visions or something along those lines. Either of these methods would improve the story, although I'm personally more inclined towards the first option that focuses on Nyx. However, it seems as if Peen Stroke's original vision for this was to explore Nightmare Moon as a separate character, so the second option might make more sense from his perspective. Either way though, the way it currently exists is not working.
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>>260350
Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about:
>“And don’t think I’ll ever forgive you, either!” seethed Nightmare Moon. She pointed the tip of her sword at Celestia. “It’s all your fault! Everything is your fault! You allowed the ponies of the past to ignore the night sky, turning Luna into me! You sent your student to Ponyville where she and her friends murdered me with the Elements of Harmony! You took me away from Ponyville, from my simple, ignorant life!”
Let's pick this apart. For one, this statement is the last thing Nyx says before (finally) lunging at Celestia and beginning the fight in earnest. This makes Celestia the focal point of her anger. Does that make any sense? Celestia has been a presence in the story to be sure: Twilight mentions her often in her rambling monologues to herself, and it's been made clear that she's an authority figure capable of separating Twilight and Nyx, which eventually is what happens. Even though she hasn't technically been in the story much, she's been clearly established as a significant character. Nyx has some valid motivation to see her as an enemy or at least an impediment, but this speech makes it clear that the grudge is personal. She also makes the accusation that everything that happened is Celestia's fault. So let's examine her statements further.
Nyx basically lays three charges on Celestia. First, that she turned Luna into NM by allowing the ponies of the past to ignore the night. Second, that she sent Twilight to Ponyville which began a series of events that culminated in the death of the first NM. Third, that she took Nyx away from Ponyville and ended her childhood.
Of these three charges, only the third is actually relevant to this story, and it's noteworthy that it's almost added as an afterthought. It's almost as if Peen Stroke has completely forgotten that Nyx is even in the story, let alone that she's the main character. This focuses almost entirely on not only Nightmare Moon, but the Nightmare Moon from the show, who has not been a character at all here. This third accusation should really be the most important one, since it's ostensibly the whole reason Nyx is even doing any of this wacky shit.
The other two accusations reference events that do not occur anywhere in the text. It's one thing to occasionally mention random unrelated tidbits from the show in passing; building your main character's entire motivation on events that occur outside the text of your story, though, is a whole other animal. The first event referenced, regarding Luna and the ponies ignoring the night sky, happened literally a thousand years in the past. Also, as I've mentioned, Luna is a minor character in this story at best, and has been distinctly established as a separate character from Nyx; whatever happened to her in the past shouldn't matter to Nyx right now. The second event, with Twilight and her friends, may be somewhat more relevant because Nyx knows these ponies, but it still has nothing in particular to do with her.
All of this culminates in Nyx's ultimate accusation against Celestia: that it's all her fault. This essentially makes Celestia the antagonist and changes the whole focus of the story: instead of being a story about Twilight and Nyx and the rift that forms in their relationship, or Nyx's internal struggles against her own dual nature, it's now a story about Nightmare Moon versus Celestia. Since neither Nightmare Moon or Celestia have been developed as personalities nor has any conflict between them been established outside of what the reader may or may not already know about what happened in the show, this is almost criminally bad storytelling.
Imagine you're reading a story about a kid who doesn't get along with his father, and just for fun let's say his father's name is Peen Stroke and he's dying of terminal AIDS along with complications from a prolapsed rectum. The text spends two thirds of its length building a story about the kid and his father, but then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the kid gets hit by a radioactive meteor from Krypton and becomes Superman. So, he abandons his dying father and goes off to Metropolis, where he proceeds to spend the rest of the book fighting Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor has not been much of a character in the story up until this point, but now all of a sudden he's the primary antagonist. Why? Because the kid is now Superman, and fighting Lex Luthor is just what Superman does. That's basically what Past Sins has become.
Anyway, like I said, at this point I'm basically just repeating myself. However, I will add one more thing to reinforce this point: as the fight drags on (even during what should be an exciting swordfight, they continue to argue back and forth with each other), Celestia is constantly pointing out to Nyx that she is showing restraint and reminding her that she is still human (pony, whatever) underneath it all. This is the sort of exchange that Nyx should have with Twilight, not Celestia. Twilight is her symbolic mother; she should be the one constantly trying to bring Nyx back from the edge of the abyss. It makes sense to have Nyx want to subdue Celestia for pragmatic reasons, but there's no reason that this much emotion should be invested in the confrontation.
The rest of this fight probably does not need to be analyzed. Most of it is just more of the same, interspersed with occasional (unintentionally) hilarious lines like this:
>“It was always TOO LATE FOR ME!” Nightmare Moon yelled, her voice growing until she was shouting at the top of her lungs. At the same time her mane began to surge and swirl, reflecting the storm of anger that raged within.
Anyway, Nyx wins the fight, but predictably chooses not to kill Celestia. She opts instead to banish her to the sun, because apparently she can do that.
Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about:
>“And don’t think I’ll ever forgive you, either!” seethed Nightmare Moon. She pointed the tip of her sword at Celestia. “It’s all your fault! Everything is your fault! You allowed the ponies of the past to ignore the night sky, turning Luna into me! You sent your student to Ponyville where she and her friends murdered me with the Elements of Harmony! You took me away from Ponyville, from my simple, ignorant life!”
Let's pick this apart. For one, this statement is the last thing Nyx says before (finally) lunging at Celestia and beginning the fight in earnest. This makes Celestia the focal point of her anger. Does that make any sense? Celestia has been a presence in the story to be sure: Twilight mentions her often in her rambling monologues to herself, and it's been made clear that she's an authority figure capable of separating Twilight and Nyx, which eventually is what happens. Even though she hasn't technically been in the story much, she's been clearly established as a significant character. Nyx has some valid motivation to see her as an enemy or at least an impediment, but this speech makes it clear that the grudge is personal. She also makes the accusation that everything that happened is Celestia's fault. So let's examine her statements further.
Nyx basically lays three charges on Celestia. First, that she turned Luna into NM by allowing the ponies of the past to ignore the night. Second, that she sent Twilight to Ponyville which began a series of events that culminated in the death of the first NM. Third, that she took Nyx away from Ponyville and ended her childhood.
Of these three charges, only the third is actually relevant to this story, and it's noteworthy that it's almost added as an afterthought. It's almost as if Peen Stroke has completely forgotten that Nyx is even in the story, let alone that she's the main character. This focuses almost entirely on not only Nightmare Moon, but the Nightmare Moon from the show, who has not been a character at all here. This third accusation should really be the most important one, since it's ostensibly the whole reason Nyx is even doing any of this wacky shit.
The other two accusations reference events that do not occur anywhere in the text. It's one thing to occasionally mention random unrelated tidbits from the show in passing; building your main character's entire motivation on events that occur outside the text of your story, though, is a whole other animal. The first event referenced, regarding Luna and the ponies ignoring the night sky, happened literally a thousand years in the past. Also, as I've mentioned, Luna is a minor character in this story at best, and has been distinctly established as a separate character from Nyx; whatever happened to her in the past shouldn't matter to Nyx right now. The second event, with Twilight and her friends, may be somewhat more relevant because Nyx knows these ponies, but it still has nothing in particular to do with her.
All of this culminates in Nyx's ultimate accusation against Celestia: that it's all her fault. This essentially makes Celestia the antagonist and changes the whole focus of the story: instead of being a story about Twilight and Nyx and the rift that forms in their relationship, or Nyx's internal struggles against her own dual nature, it's now a story about Nightmare Moon versus Celestia. Since neither Nightmare Moon or Celestia have been developed as personalities nor has any conflict between them been established outside of what the reader may or may not already know about what happened in the show, this is almost criminally bad storytelling.
Imagine you're reading a story about a kid who doesn't get along with his father, and just for fun let's say his father's name is Peen Stroke and he's dying of terminal AIDS along with complications from a prolapsed rectum. The text spends two thirds of its length building a story about the kid and his father, but then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the kid gets hit by a radioactive meteor from Krypton and becomes Superman. So, he abandons his dying father and goes off to Metropolis, where he proceeds to spend the rest of the book fighting Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor has not been much of a character in the story up until this point, but now all of a sudden he's the primary antagonist. Why? Because the kid is now Superman, and fighting Lex Luthor is just what Superman does. That's basically what Past Sins has become.
Anyway, like I said, at this point I'm basically just repeating myself. However, I will add one more thing to reinforce this point: as the fight drags on (even during what should be an exciting swordfight, they continue to argue back and forth with each other), Celestia is constantly pointing out to Nyx that she is showing restraint and reminding her that she is still human (pony, whatever) underneath it all. This is the sort of exchange that Nyx should have with Twilight, not Celestia. Twilight is her symbolic mother; she should be the one constantly trying to bring Nyx back from the edge of the abyss. It makes sense to have Nyx want to subdue Celestia for pragmatic reasons, but there's no reason that this much emotion should be invested in the confrontation.
The rest of this fight probably does not need to be analyzed. Most of it is just more of the same, interspersed with occasional (unintentionally) hilarious lines like this:
>“It was always TOO LATE FOR ME!” Nightmare Moon yelled, her voice growing until she was shouting at the top of her lungs. At the same time her mane began to surge and swirl, reflecting the storm of anger that raged within.
Anyway, Nyx wins the fight, but predictably chooses not to kill Celestia. She opts instead to banish her to the sun, because apparently she can do that.
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>>260355
Logically the chapter should end here, but Peen Stroke is seldom that merciful. With Celestia safely banished and the castle in Nyx's possession, Mr. P could easily have concluded with Nyx's implied victory and moved on to more important matters. Instead, he chooses to write out another long confrontation scene, this one between Nyx and Luna.
Unlike Peen Stroke, I do have at least a modicum of compassion for my readers, so I'm not going to go into excessive detail on this one. Nearly everything I said above about Celestia v. Nyx applies equally here: it's an overly dramatic confrontation between Nyx and a character she has had virtually no interaction with at all, and has no motivation to hate that doesn't rely on events from the show.
One thing I will give Peen Stroke credit for here is that he at least seems to acknowledge how little motivation Nyx actually has to pursue Nightmare Moon's ambitions. When Nyx tries to give her the whole "blah blah blah I'm mad because ponies didn't like my beautiful night" routine, Luna points out that this happened to her and not to Nyx, and that it's not something that Nyx has any business being angry about. Unfortunately, since Nyx has no better motivations underlying this, it really just calls attention to the fact that she is now just doing reprehensible things for no good reason at all, which effectively kills any remaining sympathy the reader might have had for her.
Anyway, long story short, Luna ends up imprisoned on the moon again because why not. So now, Nyx is the Queen of Equestria, which is what she wanted I guess. Again, if Peen Stroke had any sense, he'd call it good on Nyx's takeover of Canterlot, end the chapter here, and then skip forward in time a bit so he could move on to whatever insane thing she's going to do next. However, it would seem he's not quite done milking fake emotion out of his characters yet.
In the next scene, we rejoin the Mayor of Ponyville announcing to the citizens that Nightmare Moon is now in charge, the cult will not tolerate any disobedience, Celestia was banished to the sun where she was no doubt burnt to a crisp in a matter of seconds, and Luna is on the moon, slowly dying from lack of oxygen as we speak. Blah blah blah, all hope is lost; cue the waterworks.
For some reason, Nightmare Nyx decides that her time would be best spent in returning to Ponyville to gloat over these poor ponies she subjugated for no good reason other than to be a complete cunt. So, she appears in front of them and delivers an impromptu speech.
>Citizens of Ponyville, it is hard to believe that merely a week ago I stood amongst you, freshly reborn, and now I am already your queen. One must truly wonder how sturdy your monarchy was, considering how easily it was conquered.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my thoughts as well. Really, Mr. P, if you're incisive enough to notice the absurd holes in your story, why not just fix them instead of making your characters point them out to us?
Anyway, for some bizarre autistic reason that only Peen Stroke could possibly explain, Nightmare Nyx announces that she is going to make Ponyville the new capital of Equestria. She raises her goofy edgelord castle up out of the ground, and the ponies all recoil in horror. The apparent parallel to Twilight's Crystal Castle is somewhat interesting, considering this story predates that development by a season or two iirc. However, more than likely it's just a coincidence that in the best case scenario simply illustrates that coming up with terrible ideas is something that Peen Stroke and Hasbro have in common.
Then, just when you thought this whole story could not possibly get any more ridiculous, the Mane 6 show up with their Elements of Harmony on. However, since Twilight is currently doing hard time in Nyx's >rape dungeon, Twilight's element is being wielded by...Trixie, of all ponies. Of course, Peen Stroke takes the opportunity to further derail his already pretty-well-derailed story by dropping in a reference to the episode where Twilight had to fight an Ursa Minor because of Trixie. After that, it just sort of...well...
I'm really not sure what to make of this scene. Just calling it bad writing doesn't quite do it justice. This is the kind of scene that makes me honestly wonder if Peen Stroke is supposed to be on medication, but for some reason he stopped taking it and then sat down and started writing. I'll be perfectly honest here: I have no idea what the fuck this is. Is this meant to be a tense battle? Comic relief? Some kind of emotional trigger for Nyx that connects her to her past life? I just don't know, because it seems to alternate between being all three, but never quite pulls anything off convincingly.
They all square off to fight, but then Nyx recognizes Trixie from Twilight's stories about her, and then suddenly they all break character and the scene devolves into half a page of shitposting about how much of a braggart Trixie is. Not once is there any sort of explanation offered as to how or why Trixie came to be selected as Twilight's replacement in the Mane 6. However, there is an explanation of how the Mane 6 retrieved the elements from Canterlot; it's rather complicated and verbose and involves Princess Cadance (Peen Stroke keeps bringing Cadance up in this story, but so far she still has yet to appear as an actual character).
It's all the more confusing in that it's completely unnecessary: the last time we saw the Mane 6 was at Twilight's tree on the night she disappeared, and they all had their Elements then; also, Twilight left hers behind as I recall. Wouldn't it stand to reason that they would have simply kept them? The text specifically refers to them as having been in Canterlot when Cadance came and got them, so I suspect this is just a glaringly obvious continuity error that somehow not one of Peen Stroke's 20 fucking editors managed to notice.
Logically the chapter should end here, but Peen Stroke is seldom that merciful. With Celestia safely banished and the castle in Nyx's possession, Mr. P could easily have concluded with Nyx's implied victory and moved on to more important matters. Instead, he chooses to write out another long confrontation scene, this one between Nyx and Luna.
Unlike Peen Stroke, I do have at least a modicum of compassion for my readers, so I'm not going to go into excessive detail on this one. Nearly everything I said above about Celestia v. Nyx applies equally here: it's an overly dramatic confrontation between Nyx and a character she has had virtually no interaction with at all, and has no motivation to hate that doesn't rely on events from the show.
One thing I will give Peen Stroke credit for here is that he at least seems to acknowledge how little motivation Nyx actually has to pursue Nightmare Moon's ambitions. When Nyx tries to give her the whole "blah blah blah I'm mad because ponies didn't like my beautiful night" routine, Luna points out that this happened to her and not to Nyx, and that it's not something that Nyx has any business being angry about. Unfortunately, since Nyx has no better motivations underlying this, it really just calls attention to the fact that she is now just doing reprehensible things for no good reason at all, which effectively kills any remaining sympathy the reader might have had for her.
Anyway, long story short, Luna ends up imprisoned on the moon again because why not. So now, Nyx is the Queen of Equestria, which is what she wanted I guess. Again, if Peen Stroke had any sense, he'd call it good on Nyx's takeover of Canterlot, end the chapter here, and then skip forward in time a bit so he could move on to whatever insane thing she's going to do next. However, it would seem he's not quite done milking fake emotion out of his characters yet.
In the next scene, we rejoin the Mayor of Ponyville announcing to the citizens that Nightmare Moon is now in charge, the cult will not tolerate any disobedience, Celestia was banished to the sun where she was no doubt burnt to a crisp in a matter of seconds, and Luna is on the moon, slowly dying from lack of oxygen as we speak. Blah blah blah, all hope is lost; cue the waterworks.
For some reason, Nightmare Nyx decides that her time would be best spent in returning to Ponyville to gloat over these poor ponies she subjugated for no good reason other than to be a complete cunt. So, she appears in front of them and delivers an impromptu speech.
>Citizens of Ponyville, it is hard to believe that merely a week ago I stood amongst you, freshly reborn, and now I am already your queen. One must truly wonder how sturdy your monarchy was, considering how easily it was conquered.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my thoughts as well. Really, Mr. P, if you're incisive enough to notice the absurd holes in your story, why not just fix them instead of making your characters point them out to us?
Anyway, for some bizarre autistic reason that only Peen Stroke could possibly explain, Nightmare Nyx announces that she is going to make Ponyville the new capital of Equestria. She raises her goofy edgelord castle up out of the ground, and the ponies all recoil in horror. The apparent parallel to Twilight's Crystal Castle is somewhat interesting, considering this story predates that development by a season or two iirc. However, more than likely it's just a coincidence that in the best case scenario simply illustrates that coming up with terrible ideas is something that Peen Stroke and Hasbro have in common.
Then, just when you thought this whole story could not possibly get any more ridiculous, the Mane 6 show up with their Elements of Harmony on. However, since Twilight is currently doing hard time in Nyx's >rape dungeon, Twilight's element is being wielded by...Trixie, of all ponies. Of course, Peen Stroke takes the opportunity to further derail his already pretty-well-derailed story by dropping in a reference to the episode where Twilight had to fight an Ursa Minor because of Trixie. After that, it just sort of...well...
I'm really not sure what to make of this scene. Just calling it bad writing doesn't quite do it justice. This is the kind of scene that makes me honestly wonder if Peen Stroke is supposed to be on medication, but for some reason he stopped taking it and then sat down and started writing. I'll be perfectly honest here: I have no idea what the fuck this is. Is this meant to be a tense battle? Comic relief? Some kind of emotional trigger for Nyx that connects her to her past life? I just don't know, because it seems to alternate between being all three, but never quite pulls anything off convincingly.
They all square off to fight, but then Nyx recognizes Trixie from Twilight's stories about her, and then suddenly they all break character and the scene devolves into half a page of shitposting about how much of a braggart Trixie is. Not once is there any sort of explanation offered as to how or why Trixie came to be selected as Twilight's replacement in the Mane 6. However, there is an explanation of how the Mane 6 retrieved the elements from Canterlot; it's rather complicated and verbose and involves Princess Cadance (Peen Stroke keeps bringing Cadance up in this story, but so far she still has yet to appear as an actual character).
It's all the more confusing in that it's completely unnecessary: the last time we saw the Mane 6 was at Twilight's tree on the night she disappeared, and they all had their Elements then; also, Twilight left hers behind as I recall. Wouldn't it stand to reason that they would have simply kept them? The text specifically refers to them as having been in Canterlot when Cadance came and got them, so I suspect this is just a glaringly obvious continuity error that somehow not one of Peen Stroke's 20 fucking editors managed to notice.
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>>260557
Anyway, Jesus Christ the autism here.
>“You can thank Princess Cadance for that,” Rainbow Dash said with a confident smile. “She got the Elements out of Canterlot and to us before Twilight disappeared, because Princess Celestia knew you’d try to take them from Canterlot when you attacked.”
I went back and read this bit again a couple more times, and I think I've got it figured out. It looks like this is an explanation of how the Elements came to be in the possession of the Mane 6 before Twilight ran off to Nyx's castle. Apparently, the Elements were in storage in Canterlot, then when Nightmare Moon returned, Cadance figured they might be needing them sometime soon, and also deduced that Nightmare Moon would try to get hold of them. So, she traveled to Canterlot, picked them up, and brought them to the Mane 6.
Does this make sense? Yes, technically; this is a more or less reasonable explanation for how the Elements traveled from Canterlot to Ponyville. However, did we need to know any of it in order for the story to make sense? Jesus Christ no; if anything this just added confusion to an already confusing scene in a story growing more confusing by the page. Protip for authors: DON'T DO SHIT LIKE THIS. You do not need to explain every minor turn of events in your story at this level of autistic detail. Not once when I was reading this scene did I question how or why the Elements of Harmony were being wielded by the Mane 6. The Mane 6 are the rightful bearers of those weapons and this is a situation where they would come in handy, so it makes sense that they would have them. How they specifically worked out the details of retrieving them from Canterlot doesn't matter. If your character owns a gun and finds himself in a situation where that gun might come in handy, you can just say "he had his gun." You don't need to explain that he went down to the basement, got the gun from where he kept it, also got the bullets, put the bullets in the gun, put the gun in the holster, put on the holster, and then went to the gun fight. Jesus tap dancing Christ; I really shouldn't have to explain this.
This kind of thing also vexes me because it seems to be a recurring problem with fanfiction in general. Many authors, obviously, are fans of the thing they're writing about, which is usually how they end up writing fanfiction. However, they tend to have a bad habit of geeking out about minor mechanical details in the world, while simultaneously neglecting the important parts of their story. When I began reading this work, I honestly had high hopes that Peen Stroke would exhibit a little more professionalism than average, but if anything he's worse.
This incoherent prelude to a sort-of fight scene is probably the end result of a lot of adderall-fueled meditation on a variety of inane questions: how did the Elements of Harmony get from Canterlot to Ponyville? Who brought them there? Was it Cadance? What kind of spells did she use to transport them? Who is going to wear Twilight's tiara if she's in the dungeon? And so forth and so on.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this; if anything I usually encourage writers to put a little extra thought into the minor details. However, every writer also needs to learn restraint, especially when it comes to topics he's interested in. As I was saying earlier, just because you, the author, can explain a particular detail doesn't mean that the reader needs it explained. Second, if you're putting excessive thought into the autistic brony details but are neglecting the nuts and bolts of story construction, your story is going to suck massive balls and stroke massive peen no matter how encyclopedic your knowledge of Ponyland is. If Peen Stroke had spent even half the time thinking about the literary aspects of his work, ie themes, character arcs, motivations, etc, that he clearly spent geeking out about the MLP universe, that alone would make this story considerably less ass than it is.
Anyway, fuck. This whole scene turns out to be pointless anyway, because as any autistic obsessive brony would know, the Elements of Harmony are powered by friendship, and if the ponies trying to use them are not the very bestest of friends, the magic doesn't work. So, unsurprisingly, this fight ends in a big fat nothingburger. The Mane 5 + Trixie™ manage to squirt out a rather pathetic rainbow that grazes harmlessly off of Nightmare Moon before fizzling out on the grass. NM pretends to be defeated, then surprise attacks them and steals the Elements. She also steals Trixie's hat and cape for some dumb reason.
The rest of this is just plain bloody awful. NM impersonates Trixie, then there's a painfully long discussion about sending the Mane 5 to the gallows, a bunch of unconvincing whining and wailing and failed attempts at emotion (par for the course at this point), everypony cries (of course), and then, NM randomly decides to just let them go, because apparently she sees her options here as a binary choice between following a death-penalty law imposed by Spell Nexus (her subordinate, whom she can override if she wants) and just letting her would-be assassins off the hook without any consequences at all (which makes no sense). Once again, we have Peen Stroke trying to show emotional conflict in Nyx, but once again it just comes across as erratic, schizophrenic behavior.
Her original intention had been to just imprison the 5 in the dungeon with Twilight, which would have made the most sense since it would have shown relative compassion and also ensured that her enemies could no longer interfere with her nefarious schemes. But whatever, who am I to tell Nightmare faggot Moon how to do her job.
Anyway, then she takes the Elements, along with Trixie's hat and cape, flies home, and goes to bed. Finally, the chapter is at an end.
Holy shitballs, this might have been the worst one yet.
Anyway, Jesus Christ the autism here.
>“You can thank Princess Cadance for that,” Rainbow Dash said with a confident smile. “She got the Elements out of Canterlot and to us before Twilight disappeared, because Princess Celestia knew you’d try to take them from Canterlot when you attacked.”
I went back and read this bit again a couple more times, and I think I've got it figured out. It looks like this is an explanation of how the Elements came to be in the possession of the Mane 6 before Twilight ran off to Nyx's castle. Apparently, the Elements were in storage in Canterlot, then when Nightmare Moon returned, Cadance figured they might be needing them sometime soon, and also deduced that Nightmare Moon would try to get hold of them. So, she traveled to Canterlot, picked them up, and brought them to the Mane 6.
Does this make sense? Yes, technically; this is a more or less reasonable explanation for how the Elements traveled from Canterlot to Ponyville. However, did we need to know any of it in order for the story to make sense? Jesus Christ no; if anything this just added confusion to an already confusing scene in a story growing more confusing by the page. Protip for authors: DON'T DO SHIT LIKE THIS. You do not need to explain every minor turn of events in your story at this level of autistic detail. Not once when I was reading this scene did I question how or why the Elements of Harmony were being wielded by the Mane 6. The Mane 6 are the rightful bearers of those weapons and this is a situation where they would come in handy, so it makes sense that they would have them. How they specifically worked out the details of retrieving them from Canterlot doesn't matter. If your character owns a gun and finds himself in a situation where that gun might come in handy, you can just say "he had his gun." You don't need to explain that he went down to the basement, got the gun from where he kept it, also got the bullets, put the bullets in the gun, put the gun in the holster, put on the holster, and then went to the gun fight. Jesus tap dancing Christ; I really shouldn't have to explain this.
This kind of thing also vexes me because it seems to be a recurring problem with fanfiction in general. Many authors, obviously, are fans of the thing they're writing about, which is usually how they end up writing fanfiction. However, they tend to have a bad habit of geeking out about minor mechanical details in the world, while simultaneously neglecting the important parts of their story. When I began reading this work, I honestly had high hopes that Peen Stroke would exhibit a little more professionalism than average, but if anything he's worse.
This incoherent prelude to a sort-of fight scene is probably the end result of a lot of adderall-fueled meditation on a variety of inane questions: how did the Elements of Harmony get from Canterlot to Ponyville? Who brought them there? Was it Cadance? What kind of spells did she use to transport them? Who is going to wear Twilight's tiara if she's in the dungeon? And so forth and so on.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this; if anything I usually encourage writers to put a little extra thought into the minor details. However, every writer also needs to learn restraint, especially when it comes to topics he's interested in. As I was saying earlier, just because you, the author, can explain a particular detail doesn't mean that the reader needs it explained. Second, if you're putting excessive thought into the autistic brony details but are neglecting the nuts and bolts of story construction, your story is going to suck massive balls and stroke massive peen no matter how encyclopedic your knowledge of Ponyland is. If Peen Stroke had spent even half the time thinking about the literary aspects of his work, ie themes, character arcs, motivations, etc, that he clearly spent geeking out about the MLP universe, that alone would make this story considerably less ass than it is.
Anyway, fuck. This whole scene turns out to be pointless anyway, because as any autistic obsessive brony would know, the Elements of Harmony are powered by friendship, and if the ponies trying to use them are not the very bestest of friends, the magic doesn't work. So, unsurprisingly, this fight ends in a big fat nothingburger. The Mane 5 + Trixie™ manage to squirt out a rather pathetic rainbow that grazes harmlessly off of Nightmare Moon before fizzling out on the grass. NM pretends to be defeated, then surprise attacks them and steals the Elements. She also steals Trixie's hat and cape for some dumb reason.
The rest of this is just plain bloody awful. NM impersonates Trixie, then there's a painfully long discussion about sending the Mane 5 to the gallows, a bunch of unconvincing whining and wailing and failed attempts at emotion (par for the course at this point), everypony cries (of course), and then, NM randomly decides to just let them go, because apparently she sees her options here as a binary choice between following a death-penalty law imposed by Spell Nexus (her subordinate, whom she can override if she wants) and just letting her would-be assassins off the hook without any consequences at all (which makes no sense). Once again, we have Peen Stroke trying to show emotional conflict in Nyx, but once again it just comes across as erratic, schizophrenic behavior.
Her original intention had been to just imprison the 5 in the dungeon with Twilight, which would have made the most sense since it would have shown relative compassion and also ensured that her enemies could no longer interfere with her nefarious schemes. But whatever, who am I to tell Nightmare faggot Moon how to do her job.
Anyway, then she takes the Elements, along with Trixie's hat and cape, flies home, and goes to bed. Finally, the chapter is at an end.
Holy shitballs, this might have been the worst one yet.
>>260087
I haven't had access to internet sicne my last post so I'm late to tell you thanks regarding your analysis.
And while I would like to post some sort of follow-up question regarding things, there arn't any I can think up so I won't force it.
Will now read you newest posts about, Penis Choke's Past Inserts.
I haven't had access to internet sicne my last post so I'm late to tell you thanks regarding your analysis.
And while I would like to post some sort of follow-up question regarding things, there arn't any I can think up so I won't force it.
Will now read you newest posts about, Penis Choke's Past Inserts.
>>260560
Thanks for still reviewing this shit story.
You are adding light and humor to a pit of darkness and misery.
Also the justification this story uses for Magic Swordfights is retarded.
Maybe if you're in a sports game of some sort where scoring hits on the other foe using your interesting weird bullshit magic blade gets you points, then sure, magic swords can be cool.
Maybe if really fast sharp strong magic swords is your gimmick, throwing them around makes sense.
But just forming one magic sword, swinging and locking it with your foe's, and yelling insults at your foe? Fucking gay when you've got access to CELESTIAL BODY-MOVING MAGIC.
Where are the mountains they're throwing at each other? Where are the physically impossible things they're creating through magic?
Imagine if in the Harry Potter films, a fight broke out between Old Cat Lady McGonagall and Moody Cunt Snape.
So they put away their wands and pull out flip-knives and start swinging them at each other, as if they're tiny swords to swordfight and dramatically clash with.
That's how limiting it is to focus purely on one stupid-ass type of magic combat when so much more is on the table.
Telekinetically-wielded weapons can move however you want, swing however you want, travel as fast as you want, travel as far away from you as you want, get snapped apart so you can kill with two ends of one broken sword, they can do bullshit a sword held by human arms just can't fucking do! You can position your sword behind the foe, force him to block a backstab, and shoot a laser through your foe's spine for turning his back on you!
Even "I don't want to damage the kingdom I will soon rule" doesn't cut it as an excuse for two powerful foes to limit themselves like this.
If Nightmare Moon is willing to pull clone bullshit like this why doesn't she just cast Darkness Cloud on her face, then cast Blind Sight on herself so she can see despite being blinded by her own darkness cloud, then have one clone turn himself into a T-shirt with mind-shattering eldritch runes written onto them, so when Celestia looks at her she becomes a twitching fucking vegetable with zero sanity or spellcasting ability?
Queef Chode doesn't have the creativity required to properly write a fight about two pissed-off Alicorns with at least moon-tier power.
Why is this such a common trend in media? Why are so many faggy writers unable to bring creativity to the table when it comes to writing fights involving a guy who can turn into anything including superpowered aliens, a guy whose ring can make any weapon or anything else out of light, a guy who can pull fucking anything out of his utility belt and throw it, a girl who can command magic to do FUCKING ANYTHING for her at no energy effort or blood/soul cost if she can say the required command backwards, and similar wild and wacky shit like that?!
Thanks for still reviewing this shit story.
You are adding light and humor to a pit of darkness and misery.
Also the justification this story uses for Magic Swordfights is retarded.
Maybe if you're in a sports game of some sort where scoring hits on the other foe using your interesting weird bullshit magic blade gets you points, then sure, magic swords can be cool.
Maybe if really fast sharp strong magic swords is your gimmick, throwing them around makes sense.
But just forming one magic sword, swinging and locking it with your foe's, and yelling insults at your foe? Fucking gay when you've got access to CELESTIAL BODY-MOVING MAGIC.
Where are the mountains they're throwing at each other? Where are the physically impossible things they're creating through magic?
Imagine if in the Harry Potter films, a fight broke out between Old Cat Lady McGonagall and Moody Cunt Snape.
So they put away their wands and pull out flip-knives and start swinging them at each other, as if they're tiny swords to swordfight and dramatically clash with.
That's how limiting it is to focus purely on one stupid-ass type of magic combat when so much more is on the table.
Telekinetically-wielded weapons can move however you want, swing however you want, travel as fast as you want, travel as far away from you as you want, get snapped apart so you can kill with two ends of one broken sword, they can do bullshit a sword held by human arms just can't fucking do! You can position your sword behind the foe, force him to block a backstab, and shoot a laser through your foe's spine for turning his back on you!
Even "I don't want to damage the kingdom I will soon rule" doesn't cut it as an excuse for two powerful foes to limit themselves like this.
If Nightmare Moon is willing to pull clone bullshit like this why doesn't she just cast Darkness Cloud on her face, then cast Blind Sight on herself so she can see despite being blinded by her own darkness cloud, then have one clone turn himself into a T-shirt with mind-shattering eldritch runes written onto them, so when Celestia looks at her she becomes a twitching fucking vegetable with zero sanity or spellcasting ability?
Queef Chode doesn't have the creativity required to properly write a fight about two pissed-off Alicorns with at least moon-tier power.
Why is this such a common trend in media? Why are so many faggy writers unable to bring creativity to the table when it comes to writing fights involving a guy who can turn into anything including superpowered aliens, a guy whose ring can make any weapon or anything else out of light, a guy who can pull fucking anything out of his utility belt and throw it, a girl who can command magic to do FUCKING ANYTHING for her at no energy effort or blood/soul cost if she can say the required command backwards, and similar wild and wacky shit like that?!
Story prediction:
That bitchy cult ruler guy will say "You aren't tough and edgy enough for me! You are too soft and you aren't doing exactly what I want! You are not my Nightmare Moon! I always just wanted a big edgy brute to manipulate so I could rule all! But if you won't be a good Nightmare Moon... I will!" and try to power-drain the magic out of Nyx.
This kills the "Nightmare Moon" persona by sucking it out of Nyx, and leaves behind a good Nyx in the name of having a powerless weak earth pony without weird eyes to gloat over.
Cult Darknessguy now tries to become the new Nightmare Moon, cackling madly. "I have become your king! Nightmare Doom!" he says or some bullshit like that.
Nyx looks up in horror. "I... allowed my rage... to turn me into that?"
Twilight says "I no longer feel morally conflicted about locking Nightmare Moon away".
She and her friends Rainbow Beam this new Nightmare Doom into a nearby Nightmare Moon statue for 1000 years, then Celestia time-spells that statue to loop forever so every 999 years it is rewound to the start of its imprisonment and the soul trapped inside it can suffer forever in a statue that can never be escaped.
Then she punts that statue into orbit, where it lands on the moon and screams silently forever.
That's how I'd end it, anyway.
Because I'm not a colossal faggot.
Nyx is a fucking plot device, not a character.
She doesn't have the right to win an internal struggle against herself, battle Nightmare Moon within her own mind, defeat it, save the day, say "I'm good now but I'm still too cool to remain a canon character and hang with you jerks. I must now leave dramatically to explain my absence from all future pony episodes within the author's mind" and ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle made of stars, only to return whenever a sequel is penned.
If the reader is meant to feel sympathy for this tool we need to see her quest for vengeance end in disaster.
Say "Nyx is nothing, Nightmare Moon is evil, kill it and then imprison Cult Guy in a normal prison" and end it there
or say "Nyx is a blameless tool in over her head, Cult Guy is responsible for everything and NMM is just magic and rage, both Cult Guy and his fake NMM can suffer together forever in space and Nyx finally becomes the normal filly she always wanted to be" and end things like that.
That bitchy cult ruler guy will say "You aren't tough and edgy enough for me! You are too soft and you aren't doing exactly what I want! You are not my Nightmare Moon! I always just wanted a big edgy brute to manipulate so I could rule all! But if you won't be a good Nightmare Moon... I will!" and try to power-drain the magic out of Nyx.
This kills the "Nightmare Moon" persona by sucking it out of Nyx, and leaves behind a good Nyx in the name of having a powerless weak earth pony without weird eyes to gloat over.
Cult Darknessguy now tries to become the new Nightmare Moon, cackling madly. "I have become your king! Nightmare Doom!" he says or some bullshit like that.
Nyx looks up in horror. "I... allowed my rage... to turn me into that?"
Twilight says "I no longer feel morally conflicted about locking Nightmare Moon away".
She and her friends Rainbow Beam this new Nightmare Doom into a nearby Nightmare Moon statue for 1000 years, then Celestia time-spells that statue to loop forever so every 999 years it is rewound to the start of its imprisonment and the soul trapped inside it can suffer forever in a statue that can never be escaped.
Then she punts that statue into orbit, where it lands on the moon and screams silently forever.
That's how I'd end it, anyway.
Because I'm not a colossal faggot.
Nyx is a fucking plot device, not a character.
She doesn't have the right to win an internal struggle against herself, battle Nightmare Moon within her own mind, defeat it, save the day, say "I'm good now but I'm still too cool to remain a canon character and hang with you jerks. I must now leave dramatically to explain my absence from all future pony episodes within the author's mind" and ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle made of stars, only to return whenever a sequel is penned.
If the reader is meant to feel sympathy for this tool we need to see her quest for vengeance end in disaster.
Say "Nyx is nothing, Nightmare Moon is evil, kill it and then imprison Cult Guy in a normal prison" and end it there
or say "Nyx is a blameless tool in over her head, Cult Guy is responsible for everything and NMM is just magic and rage, both Cult Guy and his fake NMM can suffer together forever in space and Nyx finally becomes the normal filly she always wanted to be" and end things like that.
Also, has anyone here seen Spiderman 3?
What if, after Nyx goes to see the Nightmare Moon castle and some leftover NMM darkness gets into her, it turns her angry and edgy like what happened to Spiderman when he wore Venom?
At first, the kids love this cool new Nyx for standing up to her bullies and being confident in her excessive power. Nyx also talks back to Twilight now and she's got Nightmare Moon whispering "She hates you, she won't let you read from the Restricted Section of the library or stay up past your bedtime reading because she haaates yooou" in her hear now.
Then she accidentally hurts someone in a big incident Twilight can't cover up, Nyx flees, Twilight is forced to send a letter to Celestia asking for help and forgiveness, Nurse Redheart (the nurse in Ponyville) heals the wounded pony easily with magic plant paste and tells everyone to stop making a big fuss over nothing.
"Can I still get some days off school?" asks the healed pony.
"No." Nurse Redheart says.
comedy.
When Nyx is gone NMM is all "Darkness! We are doom and despair, we were meant to be evil!" and Nyx gives in to the evil, becoming a confused mess that doesn't even know where Nyx ends and NMM begins any more.
What if, after Nyx goes to see the Nightmare Moon castle and some leftover NMM darkness gets into her, it turns her angry and edgy like what happened to Spiderman when he wore Venom?
At first, the kids love this cool new Nyx for standing up to her bullies and being confident in her excessive power. Nyx also talks back to Twilight now and she's got Nightmare Moon whispering "She hates you, she won't let you read from the Restricted Section of the library or stay up past your bedtime reading because she haaates yooou" in her hear now.
Then she accidentally hurts someone in a big incident Twilight can't cover up, Nyx flees, Twilight is forced to send a letter to Celestia asking for help and forgiveness, Nurse Redheart (the nurse in Ponyville) heals the wounded pony easily with magic plant paste and tells everyone to stop making a big fuss over nothing.
"Can I still get some days off school?" asks the healed pony.
"No." Nurse Redheart says.
comedy.
When Nyx is gone NMM is all "Darkness! We are doom and despair, we were meant to be evil!" and Nyx gives in to the evil, becoming a confused mess that doesn't even know where Nyx ends and NMM begins any more.
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>>260560
Alright, let's dive right back into this mountain of feces.
Chapter 14: Once, Twice, Three Times a Crusader
>Cheerilee looked up from her book. She was curled up with a blanket and a fire roared in the fireplace. Nightmare Moon had taken over Equestria one week prior, and, without the sun’s warmth, the kingdom had been slowly getting colder and colder. At the moment, the air outside was still mildly bearable. Cheerilee doubted that would last for much longer.
This right here is an example of an interesting story development that is being handled poorly. The sun is gone, the world is gradually becoming colder and colder, soon temperatures might drop to the point where survival may be threatened. Do you think an event like this is important enough to deserve more than a glib summary of a couple of sentences, passing casually through the head of a minor character while she sits comfortably reading a book?
This isn't to say that Peen Stroke should go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about it here, either. As ever, it's important to show, not tell. The gradual degradation of the world under Nightmare Nyx's erratic rule shouldn't be a point of focus, but we should notice it happening as the story progresses. Protip for authors: whenever you're writing, no matter what the scene is about, keep what's going on in the world at large in the back of your mind. I find it's usually a good idea to write out a timeline, and place your scenes somewhere along it so you can use the appropriate world state as a background for whatever scenes you're writing.
For instance, right now it's been about a week since the events of the last chapter, and the world has gotten colder. Instead of simply stating this, just drop in a couple of details that reflect it. Try to write in the present moment instead of discussing things relative to the past or the future.
>At the moment, the air outside was still mildly bearable. Cheerilee doubted that would last for much longer.
This right here is the sentence that I think is the main offender in this paragraph. This focuses the reader's attention on what's going to happen later instead of what's happening now. Also, "mildly bearable" is a relative term. Instead of saying how cold it is outside relative to how cold it was a week ago, or how cold it's likely to be a week later, tell us how cold it is right now. Is Cheerilee freezing her tits off, or is it still warm enough for them to still be attached?
>The second set of knocks drew Cheerilee out of the warm spot she had made for herself on the couch. She moved to the door and looked through the peephole. She never used to worry about which ponies were on her doorstep, but she didn’t feel as safe as she used to. However, the ponies outside her door weren’t royal guards, Nightmare Moon, or anypony that looked dangerous. They were three familiar fillies, who Cheerilee willingly opened the door for. “Girls, what are you doing out here in the dark?”
This, by contrast, is a little better. Here, we have a direct, relatable example of what life is like in the present moment for Cheerilee. Ponyville is not as safe a place to live as it used to be, so its residents have developed new habits. This simple action she takes communicates far more than three paragraphs explaining what has been happening in the town since the end of the last chapter would have been able to. Show, don't tell.
Anyway, it looks like Nyx has decided to move forward with her inexplicable goal of enforcing permanent night, and daily life in Equestria now resembles Alaska during the winter. The CMC show up at Cheerilee's house because apparently they don't understand what's been going on for the last week and they can't get their families to explain it to them.
>The Crusaders happily accepted their teacher’s offer. They moved inside, and, once they were clear of the door, Cheerilee pulled it shut and rubbed her forelegs together to drive away the chill. It was still getting colder outside; she would need her winter clothes soon.
Incidentally, this is a good example of what I was talking about above. Casually dropping little details like Cheerilee rubbing her forelegs together reinforces the fact that it's cold outside. Also, the last bit about her needing winter clothes soon is the proper way to foreshadow future events while still keeping the story in the present. Instead of breaking away from the scene to inform us that it's cold and it's going to get colder, Peen Stroke has his character performing an action that calls attention to it without distracting us from what's going on in the scene. Good job Peen Stroke, have a cookie.
That said, there are some logic issues with this scene. The CMC don't really seem to understand what's going on, which I guess makes sense enough, but what seems odd is that they also don't seem to realize that Nyx is Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke).
In Chapter 10, when Nyx does her transformation sequence in front of the town, Scootaloo is a direct witness to the event and has some brief interaction with her. Here's the direct quote:
>"N-Nyx? Is that you? Why are you doing this? What's wrong?"
to which Nyx replies:
>"No, I am not your friend...or, more accurately, I am no longer her."
This doesn't leave a whole lot of room for ambiguity. Scootaloo directly observes that the NM who has suddenly appeared in town looks an awful lot like Nyx, and NM basically confirms that she used to be her. She also specifically calls out DT/SS for bullying her, and attacks Cheerilee as well, although I'm still a little curious why. Since Scoot is in the scene, she can be assumed to be a witness to these events.
Running out of space, I will continue in another post.
Alright, let's dive right back into this mountain of feces.
Chapter 14: Once, Twice, Three Times a Crusader
>Cheerilee looked up from her book. She was curled up with a blanket and a fire roared in the fireplace. Nightmare Moon had taken over Equestria one week prior, and, without the sun’s warmth, the kingdom had been slowly getting colder and colder. At the moment, the air outside was still mildly bearable. Cheerilee doubted that would last for much longer.
This right here is an example of an interesting story development that is being handled poorly. The sun is gone, the world is gradually becoming colder and colder, soon temperatures might drop to the point where survival may be threatened. Do you think an event like this is important enough to deserve more than a glib summary of a couple of sentences, passing casually through the head of a minor character while she sits comfortably reading a book?
This isn't to say that Peen Stroke should go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about it here, either. As ever, it's important to show, not tell. The gradual degradation of the world under Nightmare Nyx's erratic rule shouldn't be a point of focus, but we should notice it happening as the story progresses. Protip for authors: whenever you're writing, no matter what the scene is about, keep what's going on in the world at large in the back of your mind. I find it's usually a good idea to write out a timeline, and place your scenes somewhere along it so you can use the appropriate world state as a background for whatever scenes you're writing.
For instance, right now it's been about a week since the events of the last chapter, and the world has gotten colder. Instead of simply stating this, just drop in a couple of details that reflect it. Try to write in the present moment instead of discussing things relative to the past or the future.
>At the moment, the air outside was still mildly bearable. Cheerilee doubted that would last for much longer.
This right here is the sentence that I think is the main offender in this paragraph. This focuses the reader's attention on what's going to happen later instead of what's happening now. Also, "mildly bearable" is a relative term. Instead of saying how cold it is outside relative to how cold it was a week ago, or how cold it's likely to be a week later, tell us how cold it is right now. Is Cheerilee freezing her tits off, or is it still warm enough for them to still be attached?
>The second set of knocks drew Cheerilee out of the warm spot she had made for herself on the couch. She moved to the door and looked through the peephole. She never used to worry about which ponies were on her doorstep, but she didn’t feel as safe as she used to. However, the ponies outside her door weren’t royal guards, Nightmare Moon, or anypony that looked dangerous. They were three familiar fillies, who Cheerilee willingly opened the door for. “Girls, what are you doing out here in the dark?”
This, by contrast, is a little better. Here, we have a direct, relatable example of what life is like in the present moment for Cheerilee. Ponyville is not as safe a place to live as it used to be, so its residents have developed new habits. This simple action she takes communicates far more than three paragraphs explaining what has been happening in the town since the end of the last chapter would have been able to. Show, don't tell.
Anyway, it looks like Nyx has decided to move forward with her inexplicable goal of enforcing permanent night, and daily life in Equestria now resembles Alaska during the winter. The CMC show up at Cheerilee's house because apparently they don't understand what's been going on for the last week and they can't get their families to explain it to them.
>The Crusaders happily accepted their teacher’s offer. They moved inside, and, once they were clear of the door, Cheerilee pulled it shut and rubbed her forelegs together to drive away the chill. It was still getting colder outside; she would need her winter clothes soon.
Incidentally, this is a good example of what I was talking about above. Casually dropping little details like Cheerilee rubbing her forelegs together reinforces the fact that it's cold outside. Also, the last bit about her needing winter clothes soon is the proper way to foreshadow future events while still keeping the story in the present. Instead of breaking away from the scene to inform us that it's cold and it's going to get colder, Peen Stroke has his character performing an action that calls attention to it without distracting us from what's going on in the scene. Good job Peen Stroke, have a cookie.
That said, there are some logic issues with this scene. The CMC don't really seem to understand what's going on, which I guess makes sense enough, but what seems odd is that they also don't seem to realize that Nyx is Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke).
In Chapter 10, when Nyx does her transformation sequence in front of the town, Scootaloo is a direct witness to the event and has some brief interaction with her. Here's the direct quote:
>"N-Nyx? Is that you? Why are you doing this? What's wrong?"
to which Nyx replies:
>"No, I am not your friend...or, more accurately, I am no longer her."
This doesn't leave a whole lot of room for ambiguity. Scootaloo directly observes that the NM who has suddenly appeared in town looks an awful lot like Nyx, and NM basically confirms that she used to be her. She also specifically calls out DT/SS for bullying her, and attacks Cheerilee as well, although I'm still a little curious why. Since Scoot is in the scene, she can be assumed to be a witness to these events.
Running out of space, I will continue in another post.
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>>260679
What is probably the most baffling thing is that the text actually addresses all of this.
Scootaloo:
>“Yes, and I heard her say she used to be a filly. Then she went after Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, saying that it was their prank that let her become Nightmare Moon. Not only that, but Nightmare Moon didn’t have a cutie mark, just like Nyx.”
This on its own, combined with the fact that Nyx has been missing all week and that she disappeared right around the same time that Nightmare Moon showed up, should be more than enough information for a reasonable person (pony, whatever) to deduce what probably happened. Placed in context of other events from the story, it becomes basically impossible not to see it. For instance, Nyx earlier revealed herself to be an alicorn to the CMC. She has performed uncannily powerful feats of magic. She physically resembles NM. She portrayed her in the school play, and the text specifically mentions that all the other students noted how close the resemblance was. Also, NM has made two significant public appearances in Ponyville so far, and in one of them she ranted and raved about things specific to Nyx's life (and again, this was personally witnessed by one of her closest friends). Anything this major happening in a town this small is going to become the common knowledge of everyone who lives there within a matter of hours, even if the event was not witnessed by every single resident.
Therefore, it makes no sense that the CMC would be discussing this as if it were some ambiguous matter that required clearing up. Even if their sisters are lying to them about it, they would have to be literally retarded not to figure it out on their own. Also, why come to Cheerilee for confirmation? I suppose it makes sense that they would confide in their teacher since she's the adult they would trust the most if they thought their sisters were lying, but why would they expect her to know anything about this?
Also, there's this from Cheerilee:
>“All right, girls, from what I’ve heard, Nyx is Nightmare Moon… and she was Nightmare Moon all along.”
Cheerilee is one of the ponies that Nyx yelled at during her coming out ceremony. I specifically remember it because it made absolutely no sense as a story development, since Cheerilee has never done anything particularly nasty to Nyx. I mentioned it here:
>>256614
>“Hello, Cheerilee, my teacher. Yes, I am no longer Nyx, but I’m sure you could tell all these ponies who I really am. After all, you saw the resemblance just as everypony else did. And was it not you who called me ‘wicked and dastardly’? Was that not why I was perfect for the part in your little spring play?”
You don't think that having Nightmare Moon say something like that to her is an event that would have stuck in Cheerilee's mind? And yet here she is, talking about it like she's just passing on some idle gossip she heard. Maybe she's trying to spare the CMC the gory details about their friend, but then again, Scootaloo was a direct eyewitness to the whole thing, and logically they should be aware of it all anyway.
Anyway, enough about this. It's an illogical, ill-advised scene. This is basically par for the course at this point; no sense dwelling on it.
>“You see, girls, Nyx didn’t remember being Nightmare Moon when she was in class with us, but, because of what happened, now she does. She remembers everything, and I think she’s just confused now. She doesn’t really know which pony she is supposed to be: the Nightmare Moon everypony fears or the Nyx that was your friend. And right now, unfortunately, she’s decided to be Nightmare Moon.”
This is probably accurate, and it's the closest thing we've gotten so far to a coherent explanation for any of the insane, erratic shit that Nyx has been doing for the last three chapters. Again, one of the most irritating things about Peen Stroke is that he often seems to recognize the elements in his story that are weak or don't make sense, but instead of going back and correcting them he just digs himself in deeper by attempting to explain it away, and then carrying on with the increasingly nonsensical story he's telling. Sometimes, if you're writing something and you realize that you've written yourself into a bad place, it's better to just tear it up and start again, or at least backtrack to an earlier point and rewrite it.
Anyway, after all this, Cheerilee just advises them not to think about it and shoos them out the door, making us all wonder even further what the fuck was even the point of this scene. It's also a little illogical that she would just send them merrily on their way. The text makes a specific point of mentioning that the Ponyville streets are more dangerous now, and it's always dark out. Shouldn't she at least be escorting her students home? For that matter, what were they even doing out on their own in the first place?
>Apple Bloom was quiet for a few moments more before snapping her head up. “Crusaders, we have a friend who doesn’t know who she is,” she announced like a general speaking to her troops. “She’s up in that big nasty castle, lost and confused, and do you know what she needs?”
>“Um… no,” Sweetie Belle replied, not understanding why Apple Bloom was acting or speaking the way she was.
>“Well, I do!” Apple Bloom snapped, marching back and forth in front of her friends. “She needs somepony to remind her who she is. To remind her that she has friends, friends that want to play with her in the sunshine again. And we’re just the ponies to do it!”
Each one of them, independently, should have reached this conclusion eons ago, for reasons I have already described.
Anyway, after discussing it for all of 30 seconds, the three crusaders decide that the most sensible thing to do in their position is to infiltrate Nyx's castle and try to reason with her. Makes about as much sense as anything else that's happened today, I suppose.
What is probably the most baffling thing is that the text actually addresses all of this.
Scootaloo:
>“Yes, and I heard her say she used to be a filly. Then she went after Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, saying that it was their prank that let her become Nightmare Moon. Not only that, but Nightmare Moon didn’t have a cutie mark, just like Nyx.”
This on its own, combined with the fact that Nyx has been missing all week and that she disappeared right around the same time that Nightmare Moon showed up, should be more than enough information for a reasonable person (pony, whatever) to deduce what probably happened. Placed in context of other events from the story, it becomes basically impossible not to see it. For instance, Nyx earlier revealed herself to be an alicorn to the CMC. She has performed uncannily powerful feats of magic. She physically resembles NM. She portrayed her in the school play, and the text specifically mentions that all the other students noted how close the resemblance was. Also, NM has made two significant public appearances in Ponyville so far, and in one of them she ranted and raved about things specific to Nyx's life (and again, this was personally witnessed by one of her closest friends). Anything this major happening in a town this small is going to become the common knowledge of everyone who lives there within a matter of hours, even if the event was not witnessed by every single resident.
Therefore, it makes no sense that the CMC would be discussing this as if it were some ambiguous matter that required clearing up. Even if their sisters are lying to them about it, they would have to be literally retarded not to figure it out on their own. Also, why come to Cheerilee for confirmation? I suppose it makes sense that they would confide in their teacher since she's the adult they would trust the most if they thought their sisters were lying, but why would they expect her to know anything about this?
Also, there's this from Cheerilee:
>“All right, girls, from what I’ve heard, Nyx is Nightmare Moon… and she was Nightmare Moon all along.”
Cheerilee is one of the ponies that Nyx yelled at during her coming out ceremony. I specifically remember it because it made absolutely no sense as a story development, since Cheerilee has never done anything particularly nasty to Nyx. I mentioned it here:
>>256614
>“Hello, Cheerilee, my teacher. Yes, I am no longer Nyx, but I’m sure you could tell all these ponies who I really am. After all, you saw the resemblance just as everypony else did. And was it not you who called me ‘wicked and dastardly’? Was that not why I was perfect for the part in your little spring play?”
You don't think that having Nightmare Moon say something like that to her is an event that would have stuck in Cheerilee's mind? And yet here she is, talking about it like she's just passing on some idle gossip she heard. Maybe she's trying to spare the CMC the gory details about their friend, but then again, Scootaloo was a direct eyewitness to the whole thing, and logically they should be aware of it all anyway.
Anyway, enough about this. It's an illogical, ill-advised scene. This is basically par for the course at this point; no sense dwelling on it.
>“You see, girls, Nyx didn’t remember being Nightmare Moon when she was in class with us, but, because of what happened, now she does. She remembers everything, and I think she’s just confused now. She doesn’t really know which pony she is supposed to be: the Nightmare Moon everypony fears or the Nyx that was your friend. And right now, unfortunately, she’s decided to be Nightmare Moon.”
This is probably accurate, and it's the closest thing we've gotten so far to a coherent explanation for any of the insane, erratic shit that Nyx has been doing for the last three chapters. Again, one of the most irritating things about Peen Stroke is that he often seems to recognize the elements in his story that are weak or don't make sense, but instead of going back and correcting them he just digs himself in deeper by attempting to explain it away, and then carrying on with the increasingly nonsensical story he's telling. Sometimes, if you're writing something and you realize that you've written yourself into a bad place, it's better to just tear it up and start again, or at least backtrack to an earlier point and rewrite it.
Anyway, after all this, Cheerilee just advises them not to think about it and shoos them out the door, making us all wonder even further what the fuck was even the point of this scene. It's also a little illogical that she would just send them merrily on their way. The text makes a specific point of mentioning that the Ponyville streets are more dangerous now, and it's always dark out. Shouldn't she at least be escorting her students home? For that matter, what were they even doing out on their own in the first place?
>Apple Bloom was quiet for a few moments more before snapping her head up. “Crusaders, we have a friend who doesn’t know who she is,” she announced like a general speaking to her troops. “She’s up in that big nasty castle, lost and confused, and do you know what she needs?”
>“Um… no,” Sweetie Belle replied, not understanding why Apple Bloom was acting or speaking the way she was.
>“Well, I do!” Apple Bloom snapped, marching back and forth in front of her friends. “She needs somepony to remind her who she is. To remind her that she has friends, friends that want to play with her in the sunshine again. And we’re just the ponies to do it!”
Each one of them, independently, should have reached this conclusion eons ago, for reasons I have already described.
Anyway, after discussing it for all of 30 seconds, the three crusaders decide that the most sensible thing to do in their position is to infiltrate Nyx's castle and try to reason with her. Makes about as much sense as anything else that's happened today, I suppose.
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>>260680
Next, we rejoin Nightmare Nyx, who has spent the last week absorbed with tedious affairs of state. She has been busy appointing her own followers to various administrative positions and blah blah blah. Once again, my attention is mostly drawn to how boring and dry much of this story is, and how we still have not been presented with any good reason for why Nyx is even doing any of this in the first place. Usually when a rebel group overthrows the government, it's because they have some kind of ideology they wish to enforce, or at least some deep-rooted problem with the previous order. As far as I can tell, the "Children of Nightmare" don't have any particular agenda other than an autistic worship of Nightmare Moon, and Nyx just took the boilerplate of their platform and rubber-stamped it.
Here's the problem with all of this. MLP is a children's fantasy show, so its characters are allowed to have simplistic motivations. When a villain like Tirek attempts to take over Equestria for no better reason than a raw lust for power, we can accept that as a motivation, even if some voice in the back of our brains is telling us that it's corny and simplistic. However, this story attempts to flesh out the MLP world and treat it as if it were a real place. When viewed through this kind of semi-serious, semi-realist lens, the kind of cornball plot that we might be willing to accept in a melodrama written for children is suddenly held up to much greater scrutiny.
In a cartoon world, Tirek wants to take over the world because he's the bad guy and that's what bad guys do. You can tell he's the bad guy because he's got horns and a scary face and he talks with a deep, booming voice. However, viewed through a realist lens, what is Tirek attempting to accomplish? What are the goals of his administration, should he be successful in his campaign to seize power in Equestria by force? If he has no goals in particular, then why is he doing what he's doing? Is he just a nihilist who wants to destroy everything, or does he have an agenda?
This story runs into the same problem. Peen Stroke attempts to explore Nightmare Moon's motivations as well as the real-world moral consequences of what she tried to do. However, not only does this mostly just expose how ridiculous the original NM's plans actually were, he defeats his own purpose time and time again by presenting his version of NM as a character with little or no valid motivation to do anything, so she just comes across as pointlessly evil.
Ironically, this is mostly a result of what Peen Stroke tried to add to the story. The original Nightmare Moon actually had complex motivations, or at least as complex as you can get in a fairy tale. She felt unappreciated by the world and unloved by her sister, so she declared war on her sister and tried to conquer the world. However, rather than resurrecting NM in her original form as a representation of Luna's anger, Peen Stroke separated NM from Luna and recreated her as Nyx.
The problem is that Nyx is her own personality with no direct connection to Princess Luna or anything that happened to her in the series, so she's essentially starting from zero. Even more of a problem is that Nyx does not have any experiences of her own that are even close to Luna's. She's not unappreciated, nor is she unloved. She has a good life with good friends and a good mother (even if Twilight's a little crazy and maybe hits the sauce a little too hard, they still have a good relationship). Other than getting picked on a few times in the beginning, she has a pretty happy existence.
Peen Stroke, again, seems to have basically grasped this and realized that he needed to connect Nyx to NM. So, he has her suddenly "remember" everything that happened to NM, and now suddenly Nyx is mad about Celestia sending her to the moon and the Mane 6 blasting her with rainbow lasers and so forth. The problem is that you can't just transfer experience from one character to another. Even if we know what happened to Luna in the show, we've been reading a story about a character named Nyx, which Luna barely features in. Nyx wasn't sent to the moon, nor was she ever harmed in any serious way by Twilight or her friends. She had a fight with Twilight once and got picked on a little at the beginning; that's it.
Then, all of a sudden, she just gains all of NM's memories, so now we're just supposed to accept that whatever happened to NM is now part of Nyx's past. However, it's not convincing because we haven't experienced it. Even if we've seen the show, it didn't happen to this character in this story. Peen Stroke is essentially drawing an imaginary line from NM to Nyx and saying "these two characters are now one and the same, everything that has happened to NM has now happened to Nyx as well." But it doesn't work like that. If Mark Twain had randomly decided halfway through Huckleberry Finn that Huck was actually the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and then have him wake up one morning remembering everything that had happened to him and suddenly decide he wanted to get revenge on the Jews by growing up to become Adolf Hitler, it would have been hilarious, but it wouldn't have been believable as fiction.
So far, what we have with Nyx is a character who has a fairly happy life, then suddenly remembers a bunch of shit from a past life one day and decides to just take over the world for no reason. Why does she want to make it night all the time? No reason. Why does she want to depose the royal sisters? No reason. What does she hope to accomplish by ruling Equestria? Nothing. That's how this story manages to actually get duller even as the action is technically rising. Peen Stroke basically introduces us to this character, has her randomly transform into a villain for no reason, and then chronicles all the crazy shit she did, also for no reason. That, in a nutshell, is why Past Sins sucks massive balls.
Next, we rejoin Nightmare Nyx, who has spent the last week absorbed with tedious affairs of state. She has been busy appointing her own followers to various administrative positions and blah blah blah. Once again, my attention is mostly drawn to how boring and dry much of this story is, and how we still have not been presented with any good reason for why Nyx is even doing any of this in the first place. Usually when a rebel group overthrows the government, it's because they have some kind of ideology they wish to enforce, or at least some deep-rooted problem with the previous order. As far as I can tell, the "Children of Nightmare" don't have any particular agenda other than an autistic worship of Nightmare Moon, and Nyx just took the boilerplate of their platform and rubber-stamped it.
Here's the problem with all of this. MLP is a children's fantasy show, so its characters are allowed to have simplistic motivations. When a villain like Tirek attempts to take over Equestria for no better reason than a raw lust for power, we can accept that as a motivation, even if some voice in the back of our brains is telling us that it's corny and simplistic. However, this story attempts to flesh out the MLP world and treat it as if it were a real place. When viewed through this kind of semi-serious, semi-realist lens, the kind of cornball plot that we might be willing to accept in a melodrama written for children is suddenly held up to much greater scrutiny.
In a cartoon world, Tirek wants to take over the world because he's the bad guy and that's what bad guys do. You can tell he's the bad guy because he's got horns and a scary face and he talks with a deep, booming voice. However, viewed through a realist lens, what is Tirek attempting to accomplish? What are the goals of his administration, should he be successful in his campaign to seize power in Equestria by force? If he has no goals in particular, then why is he doing what he's doing? Is he just a nihilist who wants to destroy everything, or does he have an agenda?
This story runs into the same problem. Peen Stroke attempts to explore Nightmare Moon's motivations as well as the real-world moral consequences of what she tried to do. However, not only does this mostly just expose how ridiculous the original NM's plans actually were, he defeats his own purpose time and time again by presenting his version of NM as a character with little or no valid motivation to do anything, so she just comes across as pointlessly evil.
Ironically, this is mostly a result of what Peen Stroke tried to add to the story. The original Nightmare Moon actually had complex motivations, or at least as complex as you can get in a fairy tale. She felt unappreciated by the world and unloved by her sister, so she declared war on her sister and tried to conquer the world. However, rather than resurrecting NM in her original form as a representation of Luna's anger, Peen Stroke separated NM from Luna and recreated her as Nyx.
The problem is that Nyx is her own personality with no direct connection to Princess Luna or anything that happened to her in the series, so she's essentially starting from zero. Even more of a problem is that Nyx does not have any experiences of her own that are even close to Luna's. She's not unappreciated, nor is she unloved. She has a good life with good friends and a good mother (even if Twilight's a little crazy and maybe hits the sauce a little too hard, they still have a good relationship). Other than getting picked on a few times in the beginning, she has a pretty happy existence.
Peen Stroke, again, seems to have basically grasped this and realized that he needed to connect Nyx to NM. So, he has her suddenly "remember" everything that happened to NM, and now suddenly Nyx is mad about Celestia sending her to the moon and the Mane 6 blasting her with rainbow lasers and so forth. The problem is that you can't just transfer experience from one character to another. Even if we know what happened to Luna in the show, we've been reading a story about a character named Nyx, which Luna barely features in. Nyx wasn't sent to the moon, nor was she ever harmed in any serious way by Twilight or her friends. She had a fight with Twilight once and got picked on a little at the beginning; that's it.
Then, all of a sudden, she just gains all of NM's memories, so now we're just supposed to accept that whatever happened to NM is now part of Nyx's past. However, it's not convincing because we haven't experienced it. Even if we've seen the show, it didn't happen to this character in this story. Peen Stroke is essentially drawing an imaginary line from NM to Nyx and saying "these two characters are now one and the same, everything that has happened to NM has now happened to Nyx as well." But it doesn't work like that. If Mark Twain had randomly decided halfway through Huckleberry Finn that Huck was actually the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and then have him wake up one morning remembering everything that had happened to him and suddenly decide he wanted to get revenge on the Jews by growing up to become Adolf Hitler, it would have been hilarious, but it wouldn't have been believable as fiction.
So far, what we have with Nyx is a character who has a fairly happy life, then suddenly remembers a bunch of shit from a past life one day and decides to just take over the world for no reason. Why does she want to make it night all the time? No reason. Why does she want to depose the royal sisters? No reason. What does she hope to accomplish by ruling Equestria? Nothing. That's how this story manages to actually get duller even as the action is technically rising. Peen Stroke basically introduces us to this character, has her randomly transform into a villain for no reason, and then chronicles all the crazy shit she did, also for no reason. That, in a nutshell, is why Past Sins sucks massive balls.
>>260666
Congratulations on the Satan trips. Magic is one of the things in this universe that tends to make it a pain in the ass to write in sometimes. That and Celestia and Luna's control of the sun/moon. I can understand the sword fight as an aesthetic choice, since a magic sword fight is usually a cool visual, but in general I agree; it doesn't make a ton of practical sense as a weapon choice, and Peen Stroke's explanation for why it's happening here is flimsy. Plus it's always a little awkward to see a horse wielding a weapon or implement that was clearly designed to be used by someone with hands.
I guess if I were writing something like this and I wanted my little ponies to kill each other with swords, my headcanon would go something like this: Equestrian high society operates along codes of honor similar to the chivalric codes of the Middle Ages. In particular, disputes between Royals need to be settled in very specific ways. Someone probably figured out a long time ago that if two high-power alicorns ever went at it with each other in earnest it could potentially destroy the world, so they probably worked out honor codes that dictated the terms under which alicorn duels would be fought. Any such duel is to take place within set physical boundaries, using agreed upon weapons (magic swords, in this case, although you could probably have them use pistols or halberds or anything you like). There would be rules defining victory conditions for the specific duel, whether or not it was a fight to the death, as well as rules for ring-outs, KOs and so forth. Combatants would be honor-bound to follow these rules even if their actual magic power allowed them to violate them; thus even if an alicorn won the fight, their victory would not be considered legitimate if they hadn't fought according to the rules. Thus, if Nightmare Moon wanted to challenge Celestia, she would have to challenge her to a good-old-fashioned alicorn duel with magic swords, just as Nature intended.
>>260669
That actually would have been an interesting way to go about it. For one thing, it would ease the transition of Nyx into NM and make it much less jarring when she suddenly goes full-powerlevel and takes over the country. We'd get to see the two natures within her dueling it out much sooner and it would be a more interesting conflict. Plus, the NM persona would have filly Nyx doing low-key evil stuff that would probably be more funny than edgy, like getting back at DT/SS by pulling pranks on them in kind, or maybe screwing with Spike or something.
The most irritating thing about a story like this is being able to see the near-infinite potential the idea had to be much better than it is, while simultaneously reading the shitfest that it actually became.
Congratulations on the Satan trips. Magic is one of the things in this universe that tends to make it a pain in the ass to write in sometimes. That and Celestia and Luna's control of the sun/moon. I can understand the sword fight as an aesthetic choice, since a magic sword fight is usually a cool visual, but in general I agree; it doesn't make a ton of practical sense as a weapon choice, and Peen Stroke's explanation for why it's happening here is flimsy. Plus it's always a little awkward to see a horse wielding a weapon or implement that was clearly designed to be used by someone with hands.
I guess if I were writing something like this and I wanted my little ponies to kill each other with swords, my headcanon would go something like this: Equestrian high society operates along codes of honor similar to the chivalric codes of the Middle Ages. In particular, disputes between Royals need to be settled in very specific ways. Someone probably figured out a long time ago that if two high-power alicorns ever went at it with each other in earnest it could potentially destroy the world, so they probably worked out honor codes that dictated the terms under which alicorn duels would be fought. Any such duel is to take place within set physical boundaries, using agreed upon weapons (magic swords, in this case, although you could probably have them use pistols or halberds or anything you like). There would be rules defining victory conditions for the specific duel, whether or not it was a fight to the death, as well as rules for ring-outs, KOs and so forth. Combatants would be honor-bound to follow these rules even if their actual magic power allowed them to violate them; thus even if an alicorn won the fight, their victory would not be considered legitimate if they hadn't fought according to the rules. Thus, if Nightmare Moon wanted to challenge Celestia, she would have to challenge her to a good-old-fashioned alicorn duel with magic swords, just as Nature intended.
>>260669
That actually would have been an interesting way to go about it. For one thing, it would ease the transition of Nyx into NM and make it much less jarring when she suddenly goes full-powerlevel and takes over the country. We'd get to see the two natures within her dueling it out much sooner and it would be a more interesting conflict. Plus, the NM persona would have filly Nyx doing low-key evil stuff that would probably be more funny than edgy, like getting back at DT/SS by pulling pranks on them in kind, or maybe screwing with Spike or something.
The most irritating thing about a story like this is being able to see the near-infinite potential the idea had to be much better than it is, while simultaneously reading the shitfest that it actually became.
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>>260688
Congratulations to me on my Hitler dubs.
Anyway, I realize I'm getting a bit off the rails again. I also realize that much of what I'm saying is just repetition of the same basic points over and over, but most of the time it bears repeating, because most of the problems with this story can be traced to what I outlined in my previous post. I'm going to try to speed this up a little, but no promises.
So, where was I? Oh yeah. We rejoin Nightmare Nyx in her castle, who is in the process of ruminating to herself over the tedium of running a country.
>There was some resistance. Despite the news that her husband had joined the Children of Nightmare, Princess Cadance, along with some of the other minor princes and princesses of Equestria, had gone into hiding.
Literally what? Having Shining Armor switch sides could potentially be an interesting development I guess, especially if Cadance is remaining loyal to the old order. However, there was absolutely no setup for this. In fact, Shining did not even appear in the story until the previous chapter, and even then he has only a minor incidental role. But whatever, I'm willing to wait and see where this goes.
Anyway, it does seem like Peen Stroke is angling to have Cadance take on some sort of role in this story, so the earlier namedrops of her might have been foreshadowing her involvement. My complaints about how and where it was done remain valid, however.
ANYWAY, long story short, Nightmare Nyx is facing some minor pockets of rebellion, but beyond that her control of Equestria seems to have more or less solidified.
>Nexus expected her in the dining hall soon. He had arranged for her to meet with several minor princes and princesses over dinner. They were those of royal blood who had sided with her new regime, and they all shared her turquoise eyes.
>It was a sign that Nexus was spreading her “blessing” around quite freely.
I'm actually a little curious what the deal is with the eyes. It's been mentioned at numerous points that the Children of Nightmare have the same eyes as NM, and that this is the distinctive marking of the cult. The significance of it is unclear. Is this just a cosmetic spell that Nexus performs as an initiation ritual, or does it signify the acquisition of some new power? Again, I'm mildly curious to see where Peen Stroke takes this.
Nyx goes downstairs to check on Twilight, who is imprisoned and can't use her magic because Nyx put some kind of suppression collar on her, but apart from that she seems ok. Their conversation is dull.
I find myself noticing the same problems over and over in this story, and thus find myself making a lot of the same points over and over. I feel like this post >>260688 was my best and most succinct explanation of why this story has the problems that it does, so from here on out instead of reiterating these points I'm just going to quote this post as a reference.
Anyway, for these reasons >>260688 , the emotion attempted in this conversation falls flat. Nyx claims that she is Queen of Equestria and her evil schemes are going well and she couldn't be happier and blah blah blah. Twilight points out that she doesn't seem happy because she's seen her happy and she's clearly not happy now and blah blah blah.
This is clearly an attempt by Peen Stroke to start developing the ultimate moral lesson that Nyx is supposed to learn in this story, which is basically that friendship > taking over the world. Despite being painfully obvious to anyone who isn't retarded, it's still a good moral in line with the values of the show; however, in order for it to work, Nyx has to actually learn something, which means there has to be something for her to learn in the first place.
The story seems to be shaping up to become the standard MLP villain redemption setup, which goes something like this: Villain commits some dastardly deed, which usually involves wreaking havoc on Equestrian society. Ostensibly, Villain's motivation is that she/he is simply irredeemably evil, so Hero initially fights her/him. However, as the story progresses, it is revealed that she/he has had some kind of traumatic event happen that caused her/him to take this particular path. Once Hero realizes this, Hero empathizes with Villain, extends a hand in friendship, which makes Villain realize that she/he didn't want to take over the world at all, she/he just wanted a friend. Everypony learns a lesson, roll credits.
The problem here, for which I cite >>260688 as justification, is that Nyx doesn't really have any deep personal motivation for taking over the world, she just randomly turns into Nightmare Moon one day because she's her reincarnation, and decides to take over the world because that's just what Nightmare Moon does. Which means that she really did make a conscious choice to fuck over all of her friends for basically no reason. Which means that there's no friendship lesson for her to learn; her actions really are irredeemable. Which means that this whole story is pointless.
In order to really drive home the supreme irony of this, I'd like to once again call attention to the question that Peen Stroke cites as the central thesis behind this particular work:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
By separating Nightmare Moon from Luna he removes NM's motivations for doing what she did, so now NM is just a formless entity of evil. By reincarnating NM into Nyx, a character with no evil motivation, and then having her consciously choose to become evil, he has basically made Nyx, and by extension NM, into an irredeemable character. Thus, the only sensible way to deal with her is to just blast her with a rainbow and be done with it. So...what the hell was Peen Stroke's point exactly?
To sum it up succinctly, in attempting to rewrite NM's redemption arc, he actually wound up creating a version of her that is worse than the one before.
Congratulations to me on my Hitler dubs.
Anyway, I realize I'm getting a bit off the rails again. I also realize that much of what I'm saying is just repetition of the same basic points over and over, but most of the time it bears repeating, because most of the problems with this story can be traced to what I outlined in my previous post. I'm going to try to speed this up a little, but no promises.
So, where was I? Oh yeah. We rejoin Nightmare Nyx in her castle, who is in the process of ruminating to herself over the tedium of running a country.
>There was some resistance. Despite the news that her husband had joined the Children of Nightmare, Princess Cadance, along with some of the other minor princes and princesses of Equestria, had gone into hiding.
Literally what? Having Shining Armor switch sides could potentially be an interesting development I guess, especially if Cadance is remaining loyal to the old order. However, there was absolutely no setup for this. In fact, Shining did not even appear in the story until the previous chapter, and even then he has only a minor incidental role. But whatever, I'm willing to wait and see where this goes.
Anyway, it does seem like Peen Stroke is angling to have Cadance take on some sort of role in this story, so the earlier namedrops of her might have been foreshadowing her involvement. My complaints about how and where it was done remain valid, however.
ANYWAY, long story short, Nightmare Nyx is facing some minor pockets of rebellion, but beyond that her control of Equestria seems to have more or less solidified.
>Nexus expected her in the dining hall soon. He had arranged for her to meet with several minor princes and princesses over dinner. They were those of royal blood who had sided with her new regime, and they all shared her turquoise eyes.
>It was a sign that Nexus was spreading her “blessing” around quite freely.
I'm actually a little curious what the deal is with the eyes. It's been mentioned at numerous points that the Children of Nightmare have the same eyes as NM, and that this is the distinctive marking of the cult. The significance of it is unclear. Is this just a cosmetic spell that Nexus performs as an initiation ritual, or does it signify the acquisition of some new power? Again, I'm mildly curious to see where Peen Stroke takes this.
Nyx goes downstairs to check on Twilight, who is imprisoned and can't use her magic because Nyx put some kind of suppression collar on her, but apart from that she seems ok. Their conversation is dull.
I find myself noticing the same problems over and over in this story, and thus find myself making a lot of the same points over and over. I feel like this post >>260688 was my best and most succinct explanation of why this story has the problems that it does, so from here on out instead of reiterating these points I'm just going to quote this post as a reference.
Anyway, for these reasons >>260688 , the emotion attempted in this conversation falls flat. Nyx claims that she is Queen of Equestria and her evil schemes are going well and she couldn't be happier and blah blah blah. Twilight points out that she doesn't seem happy because she's seen her happy and she's clearly not happy now and blah blah blah.
This is clearly an attempt by Peen Stroke to start developing the ultimate moral lesson that Nyx is supposed to learn in this story, which is basically that friendship > taking over the world. Despite being painfully obvious to anyone who isn't retarded, it's still a good moral in line with the values of the show; however, in order for it to work, Nyx has to actually learn something, which means there has to be something for her to learn in the first place.
The story seems to be shaping up to become the standard MLP villain redemption setup, which goes something like this: Villain commits some dastardly deed, which usually involves wreaking havoc on Equestrian society. Ostensibly, Villain's motivation is that she/he is simply irredeemably evil, so Hero initially fights her/him. However, as the story progresses, it is revealed that she/he has had some kind of traumatic event happen that caused her/him to take this particular path. Once Hero realizes this, Hero empathizes with Villain, extends a hand in friendship, which makes Villain realize that she/he didn't want to take over the world at all, she/he just wanted a friend. Everypony learns a lesson, roll credits.
The problem here, for which I cite >>260688 as justification, is that Nyx doesn't really have any deep personal motivation for taking over the world, she just randomly turns into Nightmare Moon one day because she's her reincarnation, and decides to take over the world because that's just what Nightmare Moon does. Which means that she really did make a conscious choice to fuck over all of her friends for basically no reason. Which means that there's no friendship lesson for her to learn; her actions really are irredeemable. Which means that this whole story is pointless.
In order to really drive home the supreme irony of this, I'd like to once again call attention to the question that Peen Stroke cites as the central thesis behind this particular work:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
By separating Nightmare Moon from Luna he removes NM's motivations for doing what she did, so now NM is just a formless entity of evil. By reincarnating NM into Nyx, a character with no evil motivation, and then having her consciously choose to become evil, he has basically made Nyx, and by extension NM, into an irredeemable character. Thus, the only sensible way to deal with her is to just blast her with a rainbow and be done with it. So...what the hell was Peen Stroke's point exactly?
To sum it up succinctly, in attempting to rewrite NM's redemption arc, he actually wound up creating a version of her that is worse than the one before.
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>>261005
Anyway, like I said, Twilight and Nyx's conversation here is dull and predictable and not particularly moving. Twilight predictably tries to talk Nyx into giving up her evil ways and Nyx predictably refuses, on the grounds that if she releases Celestia and Luna and abdicates the throne, she will probably be sent to the moon as punishment for her rebellion. All this really shows is that Nyx has the basic sense to realize that yes, actions have consequences and yes, if you banish the rightful rulers of a kingdom to the sun and moon respectively and usurp their thrones just so you can block out the sun for no good reason, you will probably not be let off the hook with just a slap on the wrist, even if you say you're sorry. From there, Nyx draws the quite sensible conclusion that at this point she may as well just stay the course.
To put it succinctly, if she wanted to avoid all this trouble, she then she just shouldn't have done what she did in the first place. I'll ask again: what the hell point is this story trying to make exactly?
Anyway, after this, Nyx goes back to her room and cries, because it's been almost a whole subchapter since somepony cried in this story.
Next, the CMC sneak into Nyx's castle by hiding in a basket full of apples that Big Mac is delivering. I'd make a remark about this being a hackneyed and overused trope, but at this point it's not even on the short list of this story's egregious affronts to literature. I'll also admit that this is a relatively cute scene with some humorous imagery. At any rate, the three fillies sneak into the castle, and then sneak up to Nyx's room by hiding in a dessert tray.
>“Your dinner, Your Majesty,” the waiter Horte Cuisine announced. He pushed the dinner cart into Nightmare Moon’s bedroom and gave his queen a respectful bow. “The royal chef also prepared a selection of desserts for you. They are in the platter on the bottom of the cart.”
So.......you mean to tell me that even after playing a somewhat integral role in overthrowing the government and installing Nyx in power, Horte Cuisine still has his old job as a waiter, he's just a waiter for NM now? Lol what a pleb. You'd think he'd at least demand to be promoted to Sous Chef or something. But literally who even cares; let's just get on with this diarrhea fest.
Anyway, Nightmare Nyx is in her room feeling pissy because the 5 star chef she employs made her a fancy sandwich when all she wanted was a regular sandwich, so she just throws it away and eats soup instead (yes, this autism is actually in the text). Then, she suddenly realizes that her dessert tray is whispering, and decides to investigate. When she opens the lid, she discovers that the idiot chef has screwed up again; instead of the talking cake she ordered, he sent her the CMC.
The dialogue following this event is overly cutesy and forced. In general, with the exception of Celestia and Luna, I think Peen Stroke does a decent job writing the canon MLP characters. Even though they tend to be as lacking in authentic depth as Nyx and everyone else in this story, he at least handles their speech and mannerisms well. However, the CMC in this scene I find to be completely unconvincing. They just jump out of the dessert tray and start immediately behaving like stereotypes of cute children, despite their behavior being completely inappropriate for the situation. Here are some examples of the kind of dialogue we're treated to:
>“It sure was!” Apple Bloom cheered. “And boy, Nyx, Scootaloo wasn’t kidding. You got big! You’re as tall as Princess Celestia!”
>“Well, Nyx isn’t exactly as small as us anymore,” Scootaloo pointed out, “she kind of needs a bigger room. Hey, Sweetie Belle, look over there. She has a vadidy mirror like your sister.”
>“Hey, I’ve got crumbs in my tail!” Sweetie Belle said with a giggle as she used a hoof to bat at her hair.
To Peen Stroke's credit, I'm not sure what else he could have done here. Nyx has completely transformed from the character we met at the beginning of the story (a weepy sperg of a child) into this cardboard cutout movie villain that we have currently. What in the world could these characters possibly have to say to each other at this point other than superficial banter? So, Mr. P just reverts to his go-to technique of paving over the lack of depth in his characters and story by taking whatever feeling he wants the scene to have and laying it on as thick as possible, in this case cuteness. Take the sugary-sweet CMC antics and dial them up to 11; only pure insulin shock could possibly save Nyx at this point.
Anyway, the crusaders give Nyx a Crusader cape as a sentimental gift that is no doubt going to cause her to get all weepy eyed and nostalgic for the idyllic past that she voluntarily discarded for no good reason >>260688 . And we cutaway to another endearing flashback sequence that didn't actually happen in the text in 3...2...1...
This time, we get to see the moment that Nyx was given her cape (not this cape, a different cape) and formally inducted into the CMC. Once again, we have a nicely written slice of life scene that would have worked wonderfully as character development for Nyx at an earlier pointin the story. However, once again, it's completely wasted as a disconnected flashback to something that we never actually witnessed, which we are simply assured is an example of the kind of happy moments that Nyx has experienced. Unfortunately, it's not a moment we ever got to experience alongside her, probably because it happened while Peen Stroke was babbling about Horte Cuisine or Cadance or Bastion Yorsets or sending fillies to the moon, or some other kind of autistic horse shit.
Anyway, like I said, Twilight and Nyx's conversation here is dull and predictable and not particularly moving. Twilight predictably tries to talk Nyx into giving up her evil ways and Nyx predictably refuses, on the grounds that if she releases Celestia and Luna and abdicates the throne, she will probably be sent to the moon as punishment for her rebellion. All this really shows is that Nyx has the basic sense to realize that yes, actions have consequences and yes, if you banish the rightful rulers of a kingdom to the sun and moon respectively and usurp their thrones just so you can block out the sun for no good reason, you will probably not be let off the hook with just a slap on the wrist, even if you say you're sorry. From there, Nyx draws the quite sensible conclusion that at this point she may as well just stay the course.
To put it succinctly, if she wanted to avoid all this trouble, she then she just shouldn't have done what she did in the first place. I'll ask again: what the hell point is this story trying to make exactly?
Anyway, after this, Nyx goes back to her room and cries, because it's been almost a whole subchapter since somepony cried in this story.
Next, the CMC sneak into Nyx's castle by hiding in a basket full of apples that Big Mac is delivering. I'd make a remark about this being a hackneyed and overused trope, but at this point it's not even on the short list of this story's egregious affronts to literature. I'll also admit that this is a relatively cute scene with some humorous imagery. At any rate, the three fillies sneak into the castle, and then sneak up to Nyx's room by hiding in a dessert tray.
>“Your dinner, Your Majesty,” the waiter Horte Cuisine announced. He pushed the dinner cart into Nightmare Moon’s bedroom and gave his queen a respectful bow. “The royal chef also prepared a selection of desserts for you. They are in the platter on the bottom of the cart.”
So.......you mean to tell me that even after playing a somewhat integral role in overthrowing the government and installing Nyx in power, Horte Cuisine still has his old job as a waiter, he's just a waiter for NM now? Lol what a pleb. You'd think he'd at least demand to be promoted to Sous Chef or something. But literally who even cares; let's just get on with this diarrhea fest.
Anyway, Nightmare Nyx is in her room feeling pissy because the 5 star chef she employs made her a fancy sandwich when all she wanted was a regular sandwich, so she just throws it away and eats soup instead (yes, this autism is actually in the text). Then, she suddenly realizes that her dessert tray is whispering, and decides to investigate. When she opens the lid, she discovers that the idiot chef has screwed up again; instead of the talking cake she ordered, he sent her the CMC.
The dialogue following this event is overly cutesy and forced. In general, with the exception of Celestia and Luna, I think Peen Stroke does a decent job writing the canon MLP characters. Even though they tend to be as lacking in authentic depth as Nyx and everyone else in this story, he at least handles their speech and mannerisms well. However, the CMC in this scene I find to be completely unconvincing. They just jump out of the dessert tray and start immediately behaving like stereotypes of cute children, despite their behavior being completely inappropriate for the situation. Here are some examples of the kind of dialogue we're treated to:
>“It sure was!” Apple Bloom cheered. “And boy, Nyx, Scootaloo wasn’t kidding. You got big! You’re as tall as Princess Celestia!”
>“Well, Nyx isn’t exactly as small as us anymore,” Scootaloo pointed out, “she kind of needs a bigger room. Hey, Sweetie Belle, look over there. She has a vadidy mirror like your sister.”
>“Hey, I’ve got crumbs in my tail!” Sweetie Belle said with a giggle as she used a hoof to bat at her hair.
To Peen Stroke's credit, I'm not sure what else he could have done here. Nyx has completely transformed from the character we met at the beginning of the story (a weepy sperg of a child) into this cardboard cutout movie villain that we have currently. What in the world could these characters possibly have to say to each other at this point other than superficial banter? So, Mr. P just reverts to his go-to technique of paving over the lack of depth in his characters and story by taking whatever feeling he wants the scene to have and laying it on as thick as possible, in this case cuteness. Take the sugary-sweet CMC antics and dial them up to 11; only pure insulin shock could possibly save Nyx at this point.
Anyway, the crusaders give Nyx a Crusader cape as a sentimental gift that is no doubt going to cause her to get all weepy eyed and nostalgic for the idyllic past that she voluntarily discarded for no good reason >>260688 . And we cutaway to another endearing flashback sequence that didn't actually happen in the text in 3...2...1...
This time, we get to see the moment that Nyx was given her cape (not this cape, a different cape) and formally inducted into the CMC. Once again, we have a nicely written slice of life scene that would have worked wonderfully as character development for Nyx at an earlier pointin the story. However, once again, it's completely wasted as a disconnected flashback to something that we never actually witnessed, which we are simply assured is an example of the kind of happy moments that Nyx has experienced. Unfortunately, it's not a moment we ever got to experience alongside her, probably because it happened while Peen Stroke was babbling about Horte Cuisine or Cadance or Bastion Yorsets or sending fillies to the moon, or some other kind of autistic horse shit.
>>261015
Lol, "Foreign" objects. Like big black cocks.
I reckon the author couldn't wait to blow his load and reveal Nyx as this big attention-grabbing monster, so he couldn't be arsed to write these "cutesy pony shit" scenes BEFORE the big attention-grabbing prolefeed forced-emotion scenes.
But on some level he thinks "Man I wish I added more prolefeed scenes for me to cut back to now"
so he's shoving them in retroactively EVEN THOUGH FIMFIC LETS YOU EDIT YOUR CHAPTERS
Sometimes I think about writing a fairly normal under-the-radar story on that site, and then one day changing the text over to something bizarre and wacky. So the comments it currently has don't make sense at all. Then I realize this is a dumb idea for a prank. So I don't do that. Not when I'm trying to move on from pranks and fanshit and actually get my life together.
Lol, "Foreign" objects. Like big black cocks.
I reckon the author couldn't wait to blow his load and reveal Nyx as this big attention-grabbing monster, so he couldn't be arsed to write these "cutesy pony shit" scenes BEFORE the big attention-grabbing prolefeed forced-emotion scenes.
But on some level he thinks "Man I wish I added more prolefeed scenes for me to cut back to now"
so he's shoving them in retroactively EVEN THOUGH FIMFIC LETS YOU EDIT YOUR CHAPTERS
Sometimes I think about writing a fairly normal under-the-radar story on that site, and then one day changing the text over to something bizarre and wacky. So the comments it currently has don't make sense at all. Then I realize this is a dumb idea for a prank. So I don't do that. Not when I'm trying to move on from pranks and fanshit and actually get my life together.
Hey wait a second
Who are Peen Choke's 20 editors?
Are they noteworthy faggots who've perpetrated similar crimes against literature or are they no-named nobodies?
Also, I've been thinking about the "Justifications" this story will sometimes give the audience for its own bullshit.
I think they're here to answer questions some of his editors raised.
A proofreader asks "Wait why would moon-moving gods fight with swords?"
and he inserts a wall of text into his story to justify the "cool image inside his head" he wanted on the paper
rather than stopping and realizing magic swordfights are gay.
Who are Peen Choke's 20 editors?
Are they noteworthy faggots who've perpetrated similar crimes against literature or are they no-named nobodies?
Also, I've been thinking about the "Justifications" this story will sometimes give the audience for its own bullshit.
I think they're here to answer questions some of his editors raised.
A proofreader asks "Wait why would moon-moving gods fight with swords?"
and he inserts a wall of text into his story to justify the "cool image inside his head" he wanted on the paper
rather than stopping and realizing magic swordfights are gay.
File (): 692313018D1F474003BE56F44E9811B2-88592.png (86.5 KB, 871x922, credits.png)
>>261322
>Who are Peen Choke's 20 editors?
Pic related is a screencap of the story's credits page from chapter 1. Actually, it looks like it was a grand total of 21 individual humans that were either pre-readers or editors on this monstrosity, plus his "assistant" Batty Gloom, whose primary job, I assume, mostly involved keeping him fluffed while writing. That alone is frankly insane; even professional writers usually just work with a single editor, and if they want additional input they usually just show it to friends or take it to a writing workshop or something.
I don't know who any of these people are, I'm assuming they're just users on FimFiction. Maybe some of them are also authors there. However, what I find astonishing is that this thing passed through the hands of this many people, who were supposed to criticize and edit it, and not a single one of them noticed the many, many huge and glaringly obvious problems that this story has. Whoever these people are, I have no respect for them or their opinions.
I guess my advice to anyone who thinks they've got a good, solid story that they want to develop into something serious that they can print and sell to people, is don't pick other bronies or fimfiction users to edit your work. Either hire a professional, or if you don't have the resources or the inclination to spend the money, at least find someone with a good sense of how stories work and no particular motivation to kiss your ass or patronize you. Ideally, try to find someone who is indifferent to MLP and is not familiar with the show or its characters.
If someone who has no idea who Nightmare Moon is can read your story about Nightmare Moon and follow it, you're a passable writer. If someone who doesn't know and couldn't give two shits who Nightmare Moon is can read your story and get legitimately sucked in and moved by it in spite of themselves, you're a great writer. If you churn out 200k words of autistic drivel about ponies and show it to 21 ponyfags who slobber all over your dick and tell you it's the best thing they've ever read because 1) they're as autistic about ponies as you are and 2) they have no idea how books work, then you're Peen Stroke.
>Who are Peen Choke's 20 editors?
Pic related is a screencap of the story's credits page from chapter 1. Actually, it looks like it was a grand total of 21 individual humans that were either pre-readers or editors on this monstrosity, plus his "assistant" Batty Gloom, whose primary job, I assume, mostly involved keeping him fluffed while writing. That alone is frankly insane; even professional writers usually just work with a single editor, and if they want additional input they usually just show it to friends or take it to a writing workshop or something.
I don't know who any of these people are, I'm assuming they're just users on FimFiction. Maybe some of them are also authors there. However, what I find astonishing is that this thing passed through the hands of this many people, who were supposed to criticize and edit it, and not a single one of them noticed the many, many huge and glaringly obvious problems that this story has. Whoever these people are, I have no respect for them or their opinions.
I guess my advice to anyone who thinks they've got a good, solid story that they want to develop into something serious that they can print and sell to people, is don't pick other bronies or fimfiction users to edit your work. Either hire a professional, or if you don't have the resources or the inclination to spend the money, at least find someone with a good sense of how stories work and no particular motivation to kiss your ass or patronize you. Ideally, try to find someone who is indifferent to MLP and is not familiar with the show or its characters.
If someone who has no idea who Nightmare Moon is can read your story about Nightmare Moon and follow it, you're a passable writer. If someone who doesn't know and couldn't give two shits who Nightmare Moon is can read your story and get legitimately sucked in and moved by it in spite of themselves, you're a great writer. If you churn out 200k words of autistic drivel about ponies and show it to 21 ponyfags who slobber all over your dick and tell you it's the best thing they've ever read because 1) they're as autistic about ponies as you are and 2) they have no idea how books work, then you're Peen Stroke.
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>>261015
So, how will Nightmare Nyx react to this sudden intrusion of her old life into her new life? Will she put on her Nightmare Moon face, and try to scare the crap out of the three fillies, in an effort to eternally sever their bond so she will never again have to experience the pain of being reminded of it, while only succeeding in reminding herself of how lonely she now is? Or will she give in to the CMC's emotional manipulations, repent of her pointlessly evil ways, and return to her happy days of yore, frolicking in the dewy meadows with her tiny equine school friends, albeit as a full grown adult now?
As it turns out, neither. In one of the stupidest developments yet, Nyx decides that since she's taller now, she's going to pretend that this means she's an actual adult, so she sits the three fillies down to lecture them as if they were literally retarded. She starts off by chiding them for sneaking into her castle, reminds them that they could have been captured by her guards and >raped, and scolds them for making their families worry. The CMC protest that they were just trying to help her be less of a rampaging cunt (although they may have worded it differently), and then Nyx explains that she has a responsibility to rule Equestria now because she took over the whole country for some idiotic reason.
>“It’s… it’s complicated, Apple Bloom,” Nightmare Moon replied as she continued her attempts to defend herself against the fillies’ questions. “I… I-I have a lot of expectations that I have to live up to. It’s just… confusing.”
Is this Nightmare Moon trying to make sense of her own actions, or Peen Stroke trying to figure out what the fuck he's even writing?
Anyway, this is just stupid. She has no expectations to live up to. The cult basically just woke up her NM personality and said "you are Nightmare Moon now, let us go forth and take over the world and make it night forever because reasons." She could easily have just told them to go pound sand. Even if she was still mad at Twilight or wanted to give in to her Nightmare Moon powers, there was literally no reason to do any of this; she could have taken any number of equally evil actions without having to do what NM did. Nobody expected anything of her except a bunch of faggy cult members to whom she has no loyalty or obligation.
The argument goes on a little longer. The CMC seem completely oblivious to everything that's going on, they just try to convince her to come home and be a crusader again. Nyx, as usual, obstinately insists that she has to stay here and be the evil queen of Equestria, despite the fact that not even she can explain why.
>“Cheerilee said that you were always Nightmare Moon, but… we’ve never really met Nightmare Moon. We’ve only ever known you as Nyx,” Apple Bloom explained. “Sure, I’ll admit, you look like Nightmare Moon now, but that doesn’t mean you have to act any differently.”
>“Yeah, it doesn’t matter what a pony looks like on the outside,” said Sweetie Belle, reciting something Cheerilee had said in class. “It’s who that pony is on the inside that counts.”
This is probably meant to be touching, but it just comes across as more inane Hallmark shit. Sweetie Belle invoking the oldest platitude in the book certainly doesn't help.
From here, the conversation derails into a discussion about cutie marks, and Nyx admits that despite being a full grown adult and also Nightmare Moon, she still doesn't have one. Personally, I would argue that the blank flank is her cutie mark. As a bland character with absolutely no personality or motivations who simply assumes whatever role is foisted upon her (be it school filly, daughter, evil queen, or anything else) without giving serious thought to anything she does, a blank flank is the most fitting mark she could have. She is basically a living NPC meme at this point.
Anyway, they finally start to sort of break her down, until it seems like she's just about ready to abdicate the throne she recently took by force, likely throwing the entire country into total chaos in the process, while she goes off with the CMC to have fun adventures. However, Spell Nexus suddenly barges into the room without knocking, because that's totally a thing that the Queen's servant would do. He's babbling some bullshit about monsters in the Everfree Forest that are probably just metaphors for all the gay sex he's been having, when he notices the CMC. End subchapter.
Next scene, we have Nexus kvetching about how Nightmare Moon isn't being evil enough, and how she needs to start putting more ponies to death or niggas on the street are going to start disrespecting her and shit. Nyx protests that she is the queen and can do whatever the fuck she wants, so why is her bitch ass servant trying to tell Nightmare faggot Moon how to do her job?
I think I see where Peen Stroke is taking this, and it annoys me. He's setting up Spell Nexus as a negative influence that is pressuring Nyx into doing evil. Here we have her just about to say "fuck this shit", give up being Nightmare Moon, and go home with the CMC to pick daffodils or whatever, when suddenly Nexus sails in and tells her she needs to act more like NM. This is weak, because now moral responsibility for Nyx's destructive and mostly ridiculous actions are being shifted onto Nexus.
The whole point of this story, according to its author, is that it was supposed to be a do-over redemption arc for Nightmare Moon. However, he's currently building a story where his lame OC suddenly turns into Nightmare Moon for no reason, does a bunch of destructive things for no reason, and then will probably dump the blame for everything she did onto Nexus and the cult so she can be redeemed without having to actually atone for anything. If this story goes the way I suspect it's going, this is shaping up to be the most pointless redemption arc ever.
So, how will Nightmare Nyx react to this sudden intrusion of her old life into her new life? Will she put on her Nightmare Moon face, and try to scare the crap out of the three fillies, in an effort to eternally sever their bond so she will never again have to experience the pain of being reminded of it, while only succeeding in reminding herself of how lonely she now is? Or will she give in to the CMC's emotional manipulations, repent of her pointlessly evil ways, and return to her happy days of yore, frolicking in the dewy meadows with her tiny equine school friends, albeit as a full grown adult now?
As it turns out, neither. In one of the stupidest developments yet, Nyx decides that since she's taller now, she's going to pretend that this means she's an actual adult, so she sits the three fillies down to lecture them as if they were literally retarded. She starts off by chiding them for sneaking into her castle, reminds them that they could have been captured by her guards and >raped, and scolds them for making their families worry. The CMC protest that they were just trying to help her be less of a rampaging cunt (although they may have worded it differently), and then Nyx explains that she has a responsibility to rule Equestria now because she took over the whole country for some idiotic reason.
>“It’s… it’s complicated, Apple Bloom,” Nightmare Moon replied as she continued her attempts to defend herself against the fillies’ questions. “I… I-I have a lot of expectations that I have to live up to. It’s just… confusing.”
Is this Nightmare Moon trying to make sense of her own actions, or Peen Stroke trying to figure out what the fuck he's even writing?
Anyway, this is just stupid. She has no expectations to live up to. The cult basically just woke up her NM personality and said "you are Nightmare Moon now, let us go forth and take over the world and make it night forever because reasons." She could easily have just told them to go pound sand. Even if she was still mad at Twilight or wanted to give in to her Nightmare Moon powers, there was literally no reason to do any of this; she could have taken any number of equally evil actions without having to do what NM did. Nobody expected anything of her except a bunch of faggy cult members to whom she has no loyalty or obligation.
The argument goes on a little longer. The CMC seem completely oblivious to everything that's going on, they just try to convince her to come home and be a crusader again. Nyx, as usual, obstinately insists that she has to stay here and be the evil queen of Equestria, despite the fact that not even she can explain why.
>“Cheerilee said that you were always Nightmare Moon, but… we’ve never really met Nightmare Moon. We’ve only ever known you as Nyx,” Apple Bloom explained. “Sure, I’ll admit, you look like Nightmare Moon now, but that doesn’t mean you have to act any differently.”
>“Yeah, it doesn’t matter what a pony looks like on the outside,” said Sweetie Belle, reciting something Cheerilee had said in class. “It’s who that pony is on the inside that counts.”
This is probably meant to be touching, but it just comes across as more inane Hallmark shit. Sweetie Belle invoking the oldest platitude in the book certainly doesn't help.
From here, the conversation derails into a discussion about cutie marks, and Nyx admits that despite being a full grown adult and also Nightmare Moon, she still doesn't have one. Personally, I would argue that the blank flank is her cutie mark. As a bland character with absolutely no personality or motivations who simply assumes whatever role is foisted upon her (be it school filly, daughter, evil queen, or anything else) without giving serious thought to anything she does, a blank flank is the most fitting mark she could have. She is basically a living NPC meme at this point.
Anyway, they finally start to sort of break her down, until it seems like she's just about ready to abdicate the throne she recently took by force, likely throwing the entire country into total chaos in the process, while she goes off with the CMC to have fun adventures. However, Spell Nexus suddenly barges into the room without knocking, because that's totally a thing that the Queen's servant would do. He's babbling some bullshit about monsters in the Everfree Forest that are probably just metaphors for all the gay sex he's been having, when he notices the CMC. End subchapter.
Next scene, we have Nexus kvetching about how Nightmare Moon isn't being evil enough, and how she needs to start putting more ponies to death or niggas on the street are going to start disrespecting her and shit. Nyx protests that she is the queen and can do whatever the fuck she wants, so why is her bitch ass servant trying to tell Nightmare faggot Moon how to do her job?
I think I see where Peen Stroke is taking this, and it annoys me. He's setting up Spell Nexus as a negative influence that is pressuring Nyx into doing evil. Here we have her just about to say "fuck this shit", give up being Nightmare Moon, and go home with the CMC to pick daffodils or whatever, when suddenly Nexus sails in and tells her she needs to act more like NM. This is weak, because now moral responsibility for Nyx's destructive and mostly ridiculous actions are being shifted onto Nexus.
The whole point of this story, according to its author, is that it was supposed to be a do-over redemption arc for Nightmare Moon. However, he's currently building a story where his lame OC suddenly turns into Nightmare Moon for no reason, does a bunch of destructive things for no reason, and then will probably dump the blame for everything she did onto Nexus and the cult so she can be redeemed without having to actually atone for anything. If this story goes the way I suspect it's going, this is shaping up to be the most pointless redemption arc ever.
File (): E9EC51D488AC031CBCB19DE3D33DE194-275094.jpg (268.6 KB, 1024x1434, original_sin_or_original_innocence_by_nayzak_d5jz9on-fullview.jpg)
>>261410
>Nexus moved a step closer, his voice becoming gentle yet confident. “My Queen, you are the most glorious alicorn to ever grace Equestria. You are mightier than Celestia, and the night glistens with greater beauty than it ever did when it was under Luna’s care. Your form is far more magnificent than theirs. You are the one true queen of Equestria, whereas the sisters were only princesses treating this kingdom like a pet that needed to be coddled.
This is about the closest we've yet come to getting a coherent explanation of what, if anything, the Children of Nightmare believe in. It's a tad confusing what exactly was meant by "the night glistens with greater beauty than it ever did when it was under Luna's care," seeing as how, again, the original Nightmare Moon was Luna. As far as I can tell this group is a political faction dissatisfied with the not-quite-edgelord-enough rule of the sisters, for reasons that are not explained. However, if they supported the previous Nightmare Moon, it would have made far more sense for them to now simply support Luna over Celestia, and direct their efforts toward convincing Luna to renounce her recantation and resume activity as Nightmare Moon. Instead, they embarked upon this strange plan of reviving the NM persona as a separate entity and elevating her to the throne, even though if I'm following this correctly Nyx is basically just a chimera created by the cult out of remnants of NM's power and some extra magic pulled out of the Everfree Forest.
It's possible that Nexus never intended for Nyx to actually be in charge of anything, he simply wanted to create a magic puppet and install her as Queen so he could rule from behind the scenes, which would actually make more sense and could potentially make the story more interesting. However, this would basically destroy Peen Stroke's stated goal of giving NM a proper redemption arc, for reasons I outlined in my previous post. As usual, this story seem to have a great deal of difficulty deciding what, if anything, it wants to be about.
Anyway, Nexus wants Nyx to kill the CMC. She listens to him, but stops short of doing them any harm. In the end, she just throws them into the dungeon and insists on locking them up with Twilight so they won't be lonely. Her obvious squeamishness at doing anything even remotely Nightmare-Moonish when it counts just calls further attention to the fact that there is no reason for her to be doing any of this in the first place, >>260688 , so it's all the more baffling why she's continuing to go along with it. Are we supposed to infer that she's feeling pressured by Nexus and the others? Why? Her magic is more powerful than theirs and she is technically Queen; she could have Nexus thrown in the dungeon and tortured if she wanted to, and could single-handedly (hoofedly, whatever) put down any internal rebellion that rose against her. Alternatively, she could just say "fuck it" and walk away from the whole thing, which the text actually implies she was about to do before Nexus barged in. Again, the only conclusion one can draw is that she is consciously choosing to continue along this path for reasons of her own that so far have not been explained. But at the same time, she's half-assing it by constantly getting cold feet (hooves, whatever) every time she's faced with the need to kill or even imprison somepony. Either be an evil queen or don't, but ffs make up your mind about it already.
ANYWAY, next, she sits down and writes a note to Twilight Sparkle, her prisoner whom she threw into the dungeon, pleading her to please, please, pwetty pwease take care of the CMC while they're locked in there with her. She offers a half-assed explanation for why she's doing it, which basically boils down to the need to protect them from Spell Nexus, her subordinate whom she can order about as she pleases and whose magic is less powerful than hers. She spinelessly places blame for the entire thing on Nexus, makes it sound like she's somehow having her arm (foreleg, whatever) twisted by him, and requires protection from him. She asks Twilight to convince them that they will eventually be set free, despite the fact that she could easily free them any time she wants to. She basically apologizes to Twilight, says she has no right to ask for favors from her while simultaneously asking for a favor from her, and then once again implies that it is Nexus, not she, who is responsible for all of this. If any of this was intended to make me feel more sympathetic towards Nyx, it is having the complete opposite effect.
Well, whatever. Thanks to schizoid Nyx, wacky wine-aunt Twilight now has three eternally sobbing fillies to mother. Assuming Nightmare Nyx's 5-star prison service includes boxes of Franzia chardonnay being delivered to her cell every morning, Twilight should be on cloud 9 by now.
Believe it or not, it gets even sillier from here. Once again demonstrating that she is basically all-powerful and is not being compelled by force to do any of the bad shit she's doing, she transforms into smoke again, flies down to the dungeon, sneaks past her own guards, and personally delivers the note to Twilight. She hides on the ceiling while she reads it, and just sits there watching as Nexus shoves the CMC into the cell, assuring them that they will be locked up in here for literal years.
Sweetie Belle, of course, is crying; however, in quite possibly the most compelling plot twist this story has yet had, Scootaloo and Apple Bloom actually manage to not cry...for all of two paragraphs. Anyway, the rest of this bullshit goes about how you'd expect: they moan, they wail, Twilight reassures them that *somepony* will probably save them. Meanwhile, we are assured that Nyx feels just terrible about all of this, but evidently not terrible enough to come down from the ceiling and fucking do something about it.
>Nexus moved a step closer, his voice becoming gentle yet confident. “My Queen, you are the most glorious alicorn to ever grace Equestria. You are mightier than Celestia, and the night glistens with greater beauty than it ever did when it was under Luna’s care. Your form is far more magnificent than theirs. You are the one true queen of Equestria, whereas the sisters were only princesses treating this kingdom like a pet that needed to be coddled.
This is about the closest we've yet come to getting a coherent explanation of what, if anything, the Children of Nightmare believe in. It's a tad confusing what exactly was meant by "the night glistens with greater beauty than it ever did when it was under Luna's care," seeing as how, again, the original Nightmare Moon was Luna. As far as I can tell this group is a political faction dissatisfied with the not-quite-edgelord-enough rule of the sisters, for reasons that are not explained. However, if they supported the previous Nightmare Moon, it would have made far more sense for them to now simply support Luna over Celestia, and direct their efforts toward convincing Luna to renounce her recantation and resume activity as Nightmare Moon. Instead, they embarked upon this strange plan of reviving the NM persona as a separate entity and elevating her to the throne, even though if I'm following this correctly Nyx is basically just a chimera created by the cult out of remnants of NM's power and some extra magic pulled out of the Everfree Forest.
It's possible that Nexus never intended for Nyx to actually be in charge of anything, he simply wanted to create a magic puppet and install her as Queen so he could rule from behind the scenes, which would actually make more sense and could potentially make the story more interesting. However, this would basically destroy Peen Stroke's stated goal of giving NM a proper redemption arc, for reasons I outlined in my previous post. As usual, this story seem to have a great deal of difficulty deciding what, if anything, it wants to be about.
Anyway, Nexus wants Nyx to kill the CMC. She listens to him, but stops short of doing them any harm. In the end, she just throws them into the dungeon and insists on locking them up with Twilight so they won't be lonely. Her obvious squeamishness at doing anything even remotely Nightmare-Moonish when it counts just calls further attention to the fact that there is no reason for her to be doing any of this in the first place, >>260688 , so it's all the more baffling why she's continuing to go along with it. Are we supposed to infer that she's feeling pressured by Nexus and the others? Why? Her magic is more powerful than theirs and she is technically Queen; she could have Nexus thrown in the dungeon and tortured if she wanted to, and could single-handedly (hoofedly, whatever) put down any internal rebellion that rose against her. Alternatively, she could just say "fuck it" and walk away from the whole thing, which the text actually implies she was about to do before Nexus barged in. Again, the only conclusion one can draw is that she is consciously choosing to continue along this path for reasons of her own that so far have not been explained. But at the same time, she's half-assing it by constantly getting cold feet (hooves, whatever) every time she's faced with the need to kill or even imprison somepony. Either be an evil queen or don't, but ffs make up your mind about it already.
ANYWAY, next, she sits down and writes a note to Twilight Sparkle, her prisoner whom she threw into the dungeon, pleading her to please, please, pwetty pwease take care of the CMC while they're locked in there with her. She offers a half-assed explanation for why she's doing it, which basically boils down to the need to protect them from Spell Nexus, her subordinate whom she can order about as she pleases and whose magic is less powerful than hers. She spinelessly places blame for the entire thing on Nexus, makes it sound like she's somehow having her arm (foreleg, whatever) twisted by him, and requires protection from him. She asks Twilight to convince them that they will eventually be set free, despite the fact that she could easily free them any time she wants to. She basically apologizes to Twilight, says she has no right to ask for favors from her while simultaneously asking for a favor from her, and then once again implies that it is Nexus, not she, who is responsible for all of this. If any of this was intended to make me feel more sympathetic towards Nyx, it is having the complete opposite effect.
Well, whatever. Thanks to schizoid Nyx, wacky wine-aunt Twilight now has three eternally sobbing fillies to mother. Assuming Nightmare Nyx's 5-star prison service includes boxes of Franzia chardonnay being delivered to her cell every morning, Twilight should be on cloud 9 by now.
Believe it or not, it gets even sillier from here. Once again demonstrating that she is basically all-powerful and is not being compelled by force to do any of the bad shit she's doing, she transforms into smoke again, flies down to the dungeon, sneaks past her own guards, and personally delivers the note to Twilight. She hides on the ceiling while she reads it, and just sits there watching as Nexus shoves the CMC into the cell, assuring them that they will be locked up in here for literal years.
Sweetie Belle, of course, is crying; however, in quite possibly the most compelling plot twist this story has yet had, Scootaloo and Apple Bloom actually manage to not cry...for all of two paragraphs. Anyway, the rest of this bullshit goes about how you'd expect: they moan, they wail, Twilight reassures them that *somepony* will probably save them. Meanwhile, we are assured that Nyx feels just terrible about all of this, but evidently not terrible enough to come down from the ceiling and fucking do something about it.
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>>261414
Anyway, Nyx floats around on the ceiling for a while, watching her friends and her wine-aunt mommy console each other over the lifelong imprisonment that she just confined them to, which I'd once again like to emphasize is something she did for no clear reason whatsoever, and then she eventually gets bored and decides to go float around outside for a while. In the nice, cool, evening breeze. Which her friends can't currently enjoy. Because of her. For no reason whatsoever.
She goes back up to her room eventually and tries to distract herself from the fact that her friends are locked in the dungeon. Instead of just calling up her little faggot lackeys and telling them to let her friends out of the dungeon, she puts on white foundation, a black leather skirt from Hot Topic, a black half-shirt, black eyeliner, black torn up fishnet horse-socks, and then cranks up the ol' Victrola and plays her favorite Good Charlotte song: "Instead of Reading The Rest of This, Can I Just Get Fisted in the Ass Repeatedly by The Incredible Hulk? It Would be Far Less Painful" from their seminal album "Seriously, I Would Literally Rather Have Fireants Crawling Up My Urethra Than Read One More Word of This Shit, but by God I Need to See This Through to the End for Reasons That Even I Can't Explain" I don't know any actual songs by Good Charlotte and I'm too lazy to google it.
Seriously, though. About the only thing keeping me going at this point is knowing that if I stop reading, I will no longer be treated to hilarious little sporadic nuggets like this:
>A full grown mare… she was a full grown mare, yet her flank was as blank as a starless night sky. That thought alone stung at her brain like a swarm of angry bees.
I would just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone in the gallery that this prose managed to make it through three separate revisions and readings by 21 individual editors, as well as Peen Stroke's "personal assistant", Fatty Groom. This text has been printed and bound, and sold to people who paid actual money for the privilege of owning it. Roughly 11,000 individual humans gave this text a "like" after reading it, against only 378 dislikes. Let's all take a moment to let that sink in.
Anyway, Nyx broods to herself about cutie marks or some other kind of ridiculous bullshit for awhile, and then goes to bed. End of chapter.
Chapter 15: Missing Joy
The next morning, Nyx is pissy because she still hasn't gotten her cutie mark, so she goes to chew out Spell Nexus about it. Yes, you read that correctly: Nyx is willing to yell at Nexus about shit like this, but is too scared to go against his insistence that she mercilessly torture all of her friends for no reason at all. Furthermore, Nexus here is portrayed as obsequiously bowing and scraping to her, and it doesn't appear to be an act. This implies that he is frightened of Nyx's power and clearly sees himself as her subordinate, which once again raises the question: why doesn't she just let her friends out of the dungeon and restore the ordinary day/night cycle? She clearly has no personal motivation to maintain any of her current policies. She could still keep Luna and Celestia imprisoned and rule the country if she really wanted to. She could run things however she wants. All she needs to do is tell one annoying little powerless faggot to fuck off and mind his own business.
Anyway, just when you thought the plot of this train wreck couldn't possibly get any duller, Nyx decides that the best way to alleviate her guilt over imprisoning her friends for no reason is to start holding court every day and devote herself to the mundane tasks of government administration. Actually, I'm exaggerating here. She's not even thinking about her imprisoned friends anymore; now she's worried about not having a cutie mark, and hopes that if she does a good enough job running the country she might just get herself one. She's such an autistic sociopath she's probably going to wear her crusader cape while she does it, too.
Not surprisingly, as soon as she announces she will be hearing petitions, thousands upon thousands of the ponies whom she has condemned to live in perpetual darkness (for no good reason at all) line up outside her door. Gee, I wonder what they're planning to ask her for?
It goes as you'd expect. The first petition is a farmer who asks to have the sun brought back because crops. Nightmare Nyx gets inexplicably pissed off at him for even daring to ask something like that. Interestingly, he makes the argument that replanting crops this close to the end of summer will cause a crop shortage, and the arrival of winter will probably kill off the remainder of his plants. My understanding of this world is that the weather is artificially controlled by Pegasi, and weather control can be localized (Rainbow Dash is in charge of the weather in Ponyville, for instance). It seems like an extension of summer is something Nyx could easily arrange, and it would be prudent for her to do so; however, Nyx is having none of it. She tells him to fuck off, and calls the next pony in line.
This also goes as you'd expect. The next pony in line wants the sun back. As does the next one. And the next one. The only thing that's surprising about any of this is that all of these ponies continue to wait in line to ask for the exact same thing, despite seeing every other pony ahead of them ask for the same thing and get told to fuck off. Nyx basically just sits there telling every pony who asks that no, you can't have the sun back and no, Equestria will not go back to normal. Things have changed forever and are better now under the glorious new leader, and if you don't like it you can fuck off. Queen Nyx is pretty much Barack Obama with half the charisma and twice the blackness.
Eventually she just gets tired of it and tells anypony who came to ask for the sun back to leave. They all leave.
Anyway, Nyx floats around on the ceiling for a while, watching her friends and her wine-aunt mommy console each other over the lifelong imprisonment that she just confined them to, which I'd once again like to emphasize is something she did for no clear reason whatsoever, and then she eventually gets bored and decides to go float around outside for a while. In the nice, cool, evening breeze. Which her friends can't currently enjoy. Because of her. For no reason whatsoever.
She goes back up to her room eventually and tries to distract herself from the fact that her friends are locked in the dungeon. Instead of just calling up her little faggot lackeys and telling them to let her friends out of the dungeon, she puts on white foundation, a black leather skirt from Hot Topic, a black half-shirt, black eyeliner, black torn up fishnet horse-socks, and then cranks up the ol' Victrola and plays her favorite Good Charlotte song: "Instead of Reading The Rest of This, Can I Just Get Fisted in the Ass Repeatedly by The Incredible Hulk? It Would be Far Less Painful" from their seminal album "Seriously, I Would Literally Rather Have Fireants Crawling Up My Urethra Than Read One More Word of This Shit, but by God I Need to See This Through to the End for Reasons That Even I Can't Explain" I don't know any actual songs by Good Charlotte and I'm too lazy to google it.
Seriously, though. About the only thing keeping me going at this point is knowing that if I stop reading, I will no longer be treated to hilarious little sporadic nuggets like this:
>A full grown mare… she was a full grown mare, yet her flank was as blank as a starless night sky. That thought alone stung at her brain like a swarm of angry bees.
I would just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone in the gallery that this prose managed to make it through three separate revisions and readings by 21 individual editors, as well as Peen Stroke's "personal assistant", Fatty Groom. This text has been printed and bound, and sold to people who paid actual money for the privilege of owning it. Roughly 11,000 individual humans gave this text a "like" after reading it, against only 378 dislikes. Let's all take a moment to let that sink in.
Anyway, Nyx broods to herself about cutie marks or some other kind of ridiculous bullshit for awhile, and then goes to bed. End of chapter.
Chapter 15: Missing Joy
The next morning, Nyx is pissy because she still hasn't gotten her cutie mark, so she goes to chew out Spell Nexus about it. Yes, you read that correctly: Nyx is willing to yell at Nexus about shit like this, but is too scared to go against his insistence that she mercilessly torture all of her friends for no reason at all. Furthermore, Nexus here is portrayed as obsequiously bowing and scraping to her, and it doesn't appear to be an act. This implies that he is frightened of Nyx's power and clearly sees himself as her subordinate, which once again raises the question: why doesn't she just let her friends out of the dungeon and restore the ordinary day/night cycle? She clearly has no personal motivation to maintain any of her current policies. She could still keep Luna and Celestia imprisoned and rule the country if she really wanted to. She could run things however she wants. All she needs to do is tell one annoying little powerless faggot to fuck off and mind his own business.
Anyway, just when you thought the plot of this train wreck couldn't possibly get any duller, Nyx decides that the best way to alleviate her guilt over imprisoning her friends for no reason is to start holding court every day and devote herself to the mundane tasks of government administration. Actually, I'm exaggerating here. She's not even thinking about her imprisoned friends anymore; now she's worried about not having a cutie mark, and hopes that if she does a good enough job running the country she might just get herself one. She's such an autistic sociopath she's probably going to wear her crusader cape while she does it, too.
Not surprisingly, as soon as she announces she will be hearing petitions, thousands upon thousands of the ponies whom she has condemned to live in perpetual darkness (for no good reason at all) line up outside her door. Gee, I wonder what they're planning to ask her for?
It goes as you'd expect. The first petition is a farmer who asks to have the sun brought back because crops. Nightmare Nyx gets inexplicably pissed off at him for even daring to ask something like that. Interestingly, he makes the argument that replanting crops this close to the end of summer will cause a crop shortage, and the arrival of winter will probably kill off the remainder of his plants. My understanding of this world is that the weather is artificially controlled by Pegasi, and weather control can be localized (Rainbow Dash is in charge of the weather in Ponyville, for instance). It seems like an extension of summer is something Nyx could easily arrange, and it would be prudent for her to do so; however, Nyx is having none of it. She tells him to fuck off, and calls the next pony in line.
This also goes as you'd expect. The next pony in line wants the sun back. As does the next one. And the next one. The only thing that's surprising about any of this is that all of these ponies continue to wait in line to ask for the exact same thing, despite seeing every other pony ahead of them ask for the same thing and get told to fuck off. Nyx basically just sits there telling every pony who asks that no, you can't have the sun back and no, Equestria will not go back to normal. Things have changed forever and are better now under the glorious new leader, and if you don't like it you can fuck off. Queen Nyx is pretty much Barack Obama with half the charisma and twice the blackness.
Eventually she just gets tired of it and tells anypony who came to ask for the sun back to leave. They all leave.
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>>261416
Naturally, all Nyx can think about is how irritated she is that telling a bunch of ponies to go fuck themselves didn't suddenly earn her a cutie mark. So, on top of all the other things she's pissed off about for no good reason, she now has an inferiority complex about being an adult blank flank.
As if all of this wasn't idiotic enough, as soon as all the rest of the petitioners leave, Sweetie Belle's parents show up and ask if they can have please their baby back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NQ4_YjBNtY
Despite having absolutely no good reason to refuse this request (or even to have imprisoned Sweetie in the first place), Nyx's answer is a big fat go fuck yourself. Unsurprisingly, Sweetie Belle's parents begin to bawl uncontrollably. Nyx is torn apart by guilt, but instead of just doing the sensible thing and agreeing to free the completely harmless filly from the dungeon, she instead orders the room cleared so she can make a half-assed apology, while still ultimately refusing to let Sweetie Belle (or the others) go. Once again displaying pure spinelessness, she blames the whole imprisonment on Nexus, acts like her hands are tied (hooves, whatever), and tells them to come back in a few weeks.
Even more ridiculous is that her parents seem to just accept this. They even appear grateful to her. To drive the import of this home, here is what Nyx says to them, verbatim:
>"Despite what you may think of me, know that I take no joy in punishing my old friends. Still, they must learn that I am Nightmare Moon, and that I can no longer be the friend they once knew."
Again, Sweetie Belle's parents accept this explanation as if it were perfectly reasonable. They even thank her.
Not surprisingly, Nyx decides that this is the last time she will hold court.
In the next subchapter, we once again have Nyx kvetching about her lack of a cutie mark and Nexus trying to think of things she could do to earn one, because I guess that is what this story is about now. He suggests that she try moving some stars around or some shit, which she tries and fails at. She goes back to her room and pouts about it.
>Was there anything that made her unique beyond being a queen that everypony feared, despised, and wished was banished back to the moon?
No. There isn't. You are a shit character and you should kill yourself. Maybe you can get a cutie mark for that.
Nyx begins to question why she's even trying to fulfill Luna's ambitions from 1000 years ago in the first place; however, this is the same question that anyone with an IQ above room temperature was asking themselves five chapters ago. At this point, Nyx has become such an insufferable cunt that nobody reading this could possibly give two shits what conclusion she comes to either way. Peen Stroke is trying to force sympathy for Nyx by presenting her as confused by NM's memories and misled by the cult; she feels as if she's trying to fill shoes that aren't hers. It's not a bad character angle in theory, but it's executed so atrociously that the reader can't possibly be expected to believe it or care. The problem is that even if Nyx finally acknowledges that she has no reason to be trying to live up to Luna's former ambitions as NM, it doesn't provide us with any reason for why she ever thought that she wanted to or had to in the first place. The cult just woke her up, said "you are Nightmare Moon, you must now do all the Nightmare Moon things" and Nyx, for no good reason, just accepted the role without question, even though it meant turning her back on everypony she cared about and becoming an atrocious cunt.
Anyway, she gets tired of moping around in her room and decides to go mope around outside for awhile. She flies around and notices how shitty everything has become since she took over (which, to her credit, is more than Obama ever did). Apparently even she has realized how stupid it is to just have it be night all the time. So, she does the first sensible thing she's done since forever ago, and makes the sun come up. The text, of course, presents this as if it's some kind of divine revelation for her:
>This went against everything she was supposed to stand for, everything she was supposed to want. Despite this, Nightmare Moon couldn't help but smile.
This doesn't go against anything you have ever wanted or have ever stood for, you numb cunt.
I'll explain this one more time: this is not a story about Nightmare Moon. This is a story about a character named Nyx. It is established from the beginning that Nyx is the rebirth or reincarnation or something of a character named Nightmare Moon, who existed at some point prior to the story's beginning. However, we only have a vague idea of who NM is, we don't know her intimately. Nyx is the character that the story focuses on. Peen Stroke's problem is that he's approaching this as if he were writing a Nightmare Moon story, but in reality he's writing a story about an OC. The fact that his OC sucks and is terrible is another matter altogether; for better or worse, the story is about her. Everything we've read up until Ch. 10 or so has been Nyx's story: her life, her friends, her struggles. Not Luna's, not Nightmare Moon's.
Nightmare Moon is not a character in this story, she is a character in a show called Friendship is Magic, in whose world this story is set. She's a part of the world, but not this story. It therefore makes no more sense for Nyx to just randomly turn into Nightmare Moon than it would for her to suddenly turn into Flim and Flam, or for that matter turn into Batman or Garfield or the great fucking Gatsby. Even if a story is set in a complex world with a lot of history and preexisting characters, it needs to exist as a self-contained work that establishes its own themes and deals entirely with its own characters. You can't just grab random shit from the universe and drop it in with no justification; it doesn't work that way.
Naturally, all Nyx can think about is how irritated she is that telling a bunch of ponies to go fuck themselves didn't suddenly earn her a cutie mark. So, on top of all the other things she's pissed off about for no good reason, she now has an inferiority complex about being an adult blank flank.
As if all of this wasn't idiotic enough, as soon as all the rest of the petitioners leave, Sweetie Belle's parents show up and ask if they can have please their baby back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NQ4_YjBNtY
Despite having absolutely no good reason to refuse this request (or even to have imprisoned Sweetie in the first place), Nyx's answer is a big fat go fuck yourself. Unsurprisingly, Sweetie Belle's parents begin to bawl uncontrollably. Nyx is torn apart by guilt, but instead of just doing the sensible thing and agreeing to free the completely harmless filly from the dungeon, she instead orders the room cleared so she can make a half-assed apology, while still ultimately refusing to let Sweetie Belle (or the others) go. Once again displaying pure spinelessness, she blames the whole imprisonment on Nexus, acts like her hands are tied (hooves, whatever), and tells them to come back in a few weeks.
Even more ridiculous is that her parents seem to just accept this. They even appear grateful to her. To drive the import of this home, here is what Nyx says to them, verbatim:
>"Despite what you may think of me, know that I take no joy in punishing my old friends. Still, they must learn that I am Nightmare Moon, and that I can no longer be the friend they once knew."
Again, Sweetie Belle's parents accept this explanation as if it were perfectly reasonable. They even thank her.
Not surprisingly, Nyx decides that this is the last time she will hold court.
In the next subchapter, we once again have Nyx kvetching about her lack of a cutie mark and Nexus trying to think of things she could do to earn one, because I guess that is what this story is about now. He suggests that she try moving some stars around or some shit, which she tries and fails at. She goes back to her room and pouts about it.
>Was there anything that made her unique beyond being a queen that everypony feared, despised, and wished was banished back to the moon?
No. There isn't. You are a shit character and you should kill yourself. Maybe you can get a cutie mark for that.
Nyx begins to question why she's even trying to fulfill Luna's ambitions from 1000 years ago in the first place; however, this is the same question that anyone with an IQ above room temperature was asking themselves five chapters ago. At this point, Nyx has become such an insufferable cunt that nobody reading this could possibly give two shits what conclusion she comes to either way. Peen Stroke is trying to force sympathy for Nyx by presenting her as confused by NM's memories and misled by the cult; she feels as if she's trying to fill shoes that aren't hers. It's not a bad character angle in theory, but it's executed so atrociously that the reader can't possibly be expected to believe it or care. The problem is that even if Nyx finally acknowledges that she has no reason to be trying to live up to Luna's former ambitions as NM, it doesn't provide us with any reason for why she ever thought that she wanted to or had to in the first place. The cult just woke her up, said "you are Nightmare Moon, you must now do all the Nightmare Moon things" and Nyx, for no good reason, just accepted the role without question, even though it meant turning her back on everypony she cared about and becoming an atrocious cunt.
Anyway, she gets tired of moping around in her room and decides to go mope around outside for awhile. She flies around and notices how shitty everything has become since she took over (which, to her credit, is more than Obama ever did). Apparently even she has realized how stupid it is to just have it be night all the time. So, she does the first sensible thing she's done since forever ago, and makes the sun come up. The text, of course, presents this as if it's some kind of divine revelation for her:
>This went against everything she was supposed to stand for, everything she was supposed to want. Despite this, Nightmare Moon couldn't help but smile.
This doesn't go against anything you have ever wanted or have ever stood for, you numb cunt.
I'll explain this one more time: this is not a story about Nightmare Moon. This is a story about a character named Nyx. It is established from the beginning that Nyx is the rebirth or reincarnation or something of a character named Nightmare Moon, who existed at some point prior to the story's beginning. However, we only have a vague idea of who NM is, we don't know her intimately. Nyx is the character that the story focuses on. Peen Stroke's problem is that he's approaching this as if he were writing a Nightmare Moon story, but in reality he's writing a story about an OC. The fact that his OC sucks and is terrible is another matter altogether; for better or worse, the story is about her. Everything we've read up until Ch. 10 or so has been Nyx's story: her life, her friends, her struggles. Not Luna's, not Nightmare Moon's.
Nightmare Moon is not a character in this story, she is a character in a show called Friendship is Magic, in whose world this story is set. She's a part of the world, but not this story. It therefore makes no more sense for Nyx to just randomly turn into Nightmare Moon than it would for her to suddenly turn into Flim and Flam, or for that matter turn into Batman or Garfield or the great fucking Gatsby. Even if a story is set in a complex world with a lot of history and preexisting characters, it needs to exist as a self-contained work that establishes its own themes and deals entirely with its own characters. You can't just grab random shit from the universe and drop it in with no justification; it doesn't work that way.
File (): E0E3C89CEE6E2CC6D38B0D51FA44B1AC-235931.jpg (230.4 KB, 1024x683, make_the_earth_green__1_by_nayzak_d4ldpmc-fullview.jpg)
>>261515
Thanks. Here's another.
>>261513
Anyway, in another apparently rebellious move (rebellious against who or what remains to be seen, since as I've said time and time again, literally no one except Nyx is compelling Nyx to do any of the things she's doing) Nyx decides to go down to the throne room without even putting her Nightmare Moon armor on. Oh, my; how scandalous. Of course, Spell Nexus flips his shit as soon as he sees the sun rise, and he bursts into the throne room to sperg about it. Nyx enjoys a mirthful chuckle at his expense.
In a rare moment of clarity, Nyx realizes that keeping the moon out all the time is pointless and there's no reason to do it, so she has restored the ordinary day/night cycle. As to all of the other insane things she's done for no particularly good reason, they remain unresolved, but it's a start I guess. She also shocks Nexus by announcing that she is going to go outside without her Nightmare Moon armor on. Yasss queen, you a strong independent black alicorn who don' need no man. You go on and gitcho groove back, gurl.
>She departed the throne room and, within minutes, reached one of the castle's many balconies. She looked upon the sun and rich blue sky with a smile, as if she was greeting a friend she had long missed.
I would just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Twilight and the CMC are still locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason.
Anyway, Nyx turns into a fucking cloud again and floats around and sees how happy everyone is now that everything is more or less back to the way it would have been if Nyx had just left all this shit alone. She decides that she's going to rule Equestria the same way Celestia and Luna did, and while this is certainly an improvement, we are still left wondering: what the hell was the point of all of this ever supposed to be in the first place?!?
Then Nyx becomes suddenly buttfrustrated again when she realizes that the ponies are celebrating because they think the rising of the sun means that she has been defeated. She stops just short of bringing the eternal darkness back out of pure spite, but still slinks sulkily off to go rub her cooder in frustration.
>On the far outskirts of Ponyville, where the party and its music were nothing more than haunting tones on the wind, Nightmare Moon laid down on the grass.
Nightmare Moon lay down in the grass. I'm not going to ding Peen Stroke too hard for this since this is one of the most obnoxious grammatical quirks of the English language, but "lay down" is technically correct here.
Anyway, Nightmare Moon sulks under a weeping willow tree, cutting her fetlocks and applying eyeliner and rubbing her horse cooder to the thought of goth-horse Draco Malfoy pounding her in the ponut. We are now forced to sit with her as she takes a painfully long time to learn the world's most obvious lesson: that abandoning all of your friends so you can take over a country for no reason will bring you nothing but taint trouble and anal annoyance. However, she stops just short of realizing that staying the present course can end only in rectal ruination.
>She knew what had made her happy in the past, and it was not power or a crown.
>It was ponies like Twilight Sparkle, Cheerilee, and Twist.
This is literally the first time Twist has been mentioned for at least ten chapters. Either put her in the story or don't, but make up your damn mind about it.
We now get a brief flashback where Nyx recalls her earliest memory. Unfortunately, it's not actually her earliest memory, it's Luna's. She remembers a time when she watched Celestia raise the sun or something, and she felt all jelly and hateful because she wanted ponies to praise and love her instead of Celestia. This would work just fine as the sort of Eureka! moment it's intended to be, were it not for the fact that it is not Nyx's memory. The entire first portion of the story focuses on the development of a character named Nyx; anything that happened to Luna 1000 years ago isn't relevant. If Peen Stroke wanted Luna's old memories to be relevant to his story, he should have written a story about Luna instead of creating a whole new character and then just giving her all of Luna's memories halfway through. Again, this is even worse when we remember that Luna barely even exists in this story as a character. As I recall, she only appears twice: once during the play, and once when Nyx beats her up and sends her to the moon. Trying to dredge up anything that happened to her thousands of years ago and use it as a motivation for Nyx just plain doesn't work.
Anyway, after all this bullshit, she finally, at long last, realizes that it was completely socks-on-head retarded of her to just imprison all of her friends and take over the world for no reason. Instead of immediately flying off to go make it right, however, she does two things, both of which are unfortunately very predictable at this point. One, she cries. Two, she blames everything she did on Spell Nexus and the cult.
Then, just when you thought this whole thing could not possibly get any more ridiculous (I've really got to stop saying that), who should suddenly appear but...Twist.
Yes, Twist, that erstwhile friend of Nyx's and Apple Bloom's, who simply disappeared from the story with no explanation way back in the fucking beginning, now suddenly appears out of absolutely fucking nowhere to comfort Nightmare Moon in her moment of need. Twist, who is apparently aware of the fact that Nyx "had gone bad" and was "the one that made it dark all the time", yet is simultaneously unaware that Nightmare Moon and Nyx are the same pony, offers nothing helpful. When Nyx reveals her identity, she basically just says something to the effect of "oh, I guess my Mom was right about you."
Nyx apologizes for blacking out the sun and promises never to do it again. Twist then invites her to the party in town, but Nyx declines.
Thanks. Here's another.
>>261513
Anyway, in another apparently rebellious move (rebellious against who or what remains to be seen, since as I've said time and time again, literally no one except Nyx is compelling Nyx to do any of the things she's doing) Nyx decides to go down to the throne room without even putting her Nightmare Moon armor on. Oh, my; how scandalous. Of course, Spell Nexus flips his shit as soon as he sees the sun rise, and he bursts into the throne room to sperg about it. Nyx enjoys a mirthful chuckle at his expense.
In a rare moment of clarity, Nyx realizes that keeping the moon out all the time is pointless and there's no reason to do it, so she has restored the ordinary day/night cycle. As to all of the other insane things she's done for no particularly good reason, they remain unresolved, but it's a start I guess. She also shocks Nexus by announcing that she is going to go outside without her Nightmare Moon armor on. Yasss queen, you a strong independent black alicorn who don' need no man. You go on and gitcho groove back, gurl.
>She departed the throne room and, within minutes, reached one of the castle's many balconies. She looked upon the sun and rich blue sky with a smile, as if she was greeting a friend she had long missed.
I would just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Twilight and the CMC are still locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason.
Anyway, Nyx turns into a fucking cloud again and floats around and sees how happy everyone is now that everything is more or less back to the way it would have been if Nyx had just left all this shit alone. She decides that she's going to rule Equestria the same way Celestia and Luna did, and while this is certainly an improvement, we are still left wondering: what the hell was the point of all of this ever supposed to be in the first place?!?
Then Nyx becomes suddenly buttfrustrated again when she realizes that the ponies are celebrating because they think the rising of the sun means that she has been defeated. She stops just short of bringing the eternal darkness back out of pure spite, but still slinks sulkily off to go rub her cooder in frustration.
>On the far outskirts of Ponyville, where the party and its music were nothing more than haunting tones on the wind, Nightmare Moon laid down on the grass.
Nightmare Moon lay down in the grass. I'm not going to ding Peen Stroke too hard for this since this is one of the most obnoxious grammatical quirks of the English language, but "lay down" is technically correct here.
Anyway, Nightmare Moon sulks under a weeping willow tree, cutting her fetlocks and applying eyeliner and rubbing her horse cooder to the thought of goth-horse Draco Malfoy pounding her in the ponut. We are now forced to sit with her as she takes a painfully long time to learn the world's most obvious lesson: that abandoning all of your friends so you can take over a country for no reason will bring you nothing but taint trouble and anal annoyance. However, she stops just short of realizing that staying the present course can end only in rectal ruination.
>She knew what had made her happy in the past, and it was not power or a crown.
>It was ponies like Twilight Sparkle, Cheerilee, and Twist.
This is literally the first time Twist has been mentioned for at least ten chapters. Either put her in the story or don't, but make up your damn mind about it.
We now get a brief flashback where Nyx recalls her earliest memory. Unfortunately, it's not actually her earliest memory, it's Luna's. She remembers a time when she watched Celestia raise the sun or something, and she felt all jelly and hateful because she wanted ponies to praise and love her instead of Celestia. This would work just fine as the sort of Eureka! moment it's intended to be, were it not for the fact that it is not Nyx's memory. The entire first portion of the story focuses on the development of a character named Nyx; anything that happened to Luna 1000 years ago isn't relevant. If Peen Stroke wanted Luna's old memories to be relevant to his story, he should have written a story about Luna instead of creating a whole new character and then just giving her all of Luna's memories halfway through. Again, this is even worse when we remember that Luna barely even exists in this story as a character. As I recall, she only appears twice: once during the play, and once when Nyx beats her up and sends her to the moon. Trying to dredge up anything that happened to her thousands of years ago and use it as a motivation for Nyx just plain doesn't work.
Anyway, after all this bullshit, she finally, at long last, realizes that it was completely socks-on-head retarded of her to just imprison all of her friends and take over the world for no reason. Instead of immediately flying off to go make it right, however, she does two things, both of which are unfortunately very predictable at this point. One, she cries. Two, she blames everything she did on Spell Nexus and the cult.
Then, just when you thought this whole thing could not possibly get any more ridiculous (I've really got to stop saying that), who should suddenly appear but...Twist.
Yes, Twist, that erstwhile friend of Nyx's and Apple Bloom's, who simply disappeared from the story with no explanation way back in the fucking beginning, now suddenly appears out of absolutely fucking nowhere to comfort Nightmare Moon in her moment of need. Twist, who is apparently aware of the fact that Nyx "had gone bad" and was "the one that made it dark all the time", yet is simultaneously unaware that Nightmare Moon and Nyx are the same pony, offers nothing helpful. When Nyx reveals her identity, she basically just says something to the effect of "oh, I guess my Mom was right about you."
Nyx apologizes for blacking out the sun and promises never to do it again. Twist then invites her to the party in town, but Nyx declines.
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>>261516
Peen Stroke has yet another of those "I realize there's a logical discrepancy in this story but rather than going back and fixing it I'm just going to dump a half-assed explanation into the text quickly and then move on" moments when he briefly addresses Twist's having been randomly dropped from the group of friends. Apparently, this had to do with Twist getting her cutie mark and subsequently drifting apart from Apple Bloom, who then became more involved with Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle as the CMC. This is in line with events from the show, but if it is going to be a part of this story, it might have been nice to work it in somewhere instead of just assuming that the reader has seen the show and knows what happened. It might have been interesting to see this little rift form between two friends from the perspective of Nyx, who presumably followed Apple Bloom into her friendship with the other crusaders and also left Twist to shove peppermint sticks up her Jew-pony cooder all by her lonesome, like the true true friend we all know by now that she is. However, as it stands, neither Twist getting her cutie mark nor AB's drifting away from her are even remotely explored as events in this text, which again makes me wonder why it's even being brought up. I'll say it once more: either make Twist a character in this story or leave her out of it, but either way make up your damn mind.
Anyway, in an incredibly saccharine and insensitive move that ludicrously enough seems intended to endear us to Nyx, Nyx tells Twist to wait for a second, and then she flies off to the castle. She retrieves the Crusader cape, which the CMC made especially for her and risked life and limb sneaking into her castle to give to her, and re-gifts it to Twist, formally inducting her as a member of the CMC, despite Twist already having a cutie mark and despite Nyx's not even having bothered to consult with the other Crusaders before inducting a new member. I would also just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Twilight and the CMC are still locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason.
Twist, who is apparently oblivious as all fuck to everything that's going on, is now brimming with excitement at the prospect of actually having friends again, in spite of the fact that said friends were basically delegated to her by a royal decree, made by the very sociopath who is at this very moment keeping said friends locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason. How ridiculous is it that after consuming nearly three quarters of this 200,000 word pile of garbage, the only character I even remotely feel sorry for is Twist?
Anyway, Twist asks about the sun, and whether it's going to come up every day from now on, and Nightmare Moon basically makes a deal with her that if she can keep her whore mouth shut about the fact that she's the one doing it, she will keep raising the sun and maintaining the normal day/night cycle. Elated that the laws of physics are once again functioning as they should, as well as the prospect of finally having some government mandated friends to call her own, Twist gives Nyx a peppermint stick and skips merrily away. Yes, all of this autism actually happens in the text, and if you don't believe me I urge you to read it for yourself.
Nyx now decides it's time to float around Ponyville as a cloud for a little while longer, because why the hell not. She now feels regret at having given away her CMC cape, and starts getting all weepy and nostalgic about the time she used to spend with the friends she had, the very same friends that she locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason. She remembers that she actually still has her original cape back at Twilight's place, the very same Twilight whom she also locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason. So she flies back to the Golden Oak Library to retrieve her goddamn cape, because she is seriously that autistic.
We get another confusing flashback, once again connected to something that Luna remembers from the show, rather than something Nyx herself would remember from the actual story we're reading. In this particular case I'm not even sure what's being referenced; the text says she remembers looking through this window at the Mane 6 "back when she and Luna were one and the same." I'm assuming this would have to be something that happened in the first or second episode, but I don't remember this event taking place. It's been a long time since I've watched those episodes though so I'm probably just not remembering it. In any case, this is stupid, because once again Nyx is recalling a memory that actually belongs to a different character, and references events that happened in another story altogether. It's made even stupider by the fact that until a few short weeks ago this place was the only home Nyx had ever known, so if she is going to get nostalgic about anything, one would expect it to be a recent memory, rather than some random event from the long-distant past. But whatever; at this point who even cares.
Spike, the eternal house nigger, is inside the tree, dutifully cleaning Twilight's kitchen like a little bitch despite the fact that she is missing and presumed dead. Unfortunately for Nyx, Spike is not planning to go to bed tonight, so it looks like no cape for her. She feels bad because much like Twist and the other ponies in town, Spike seems to have assumed that the sun coming up means that Celestia has returned and defeated Nightmare Nyx, which would mean that Twilight will be home soon as well. Nyx feels bad enough about this that she doesn't want to sit and watch Spike hug a picture of himself and Twilight all night, but apparently she doesn't quite feel bad enough to turn around and just let Twilight out of the fucking dungeon for crying out loud.
So, she turns around and flies home.
Peen Stroke has yet another of those "I realize there's a logical discrepancy in this story but rather than going back and fixing it I'm just going to dump a half-assed explanation into the text quickly and then move on" moments when he briefly addresses Twist's having been randomly dropped from the group of friends. Apparently, this had to do with Twist getting her cutie mark and subsequently drifting apart from Apple Bloom, who then became more involved with Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle as the CMC. This is in line with events from the show, but if it is going to be a part of this story, it might have been nice to work it in somewhere instead of just assuming that the reader has seen the show and knows what happened. It might have been interesting to see this little rift form between two friends from the perspective of Nyx, who presumably followed Apple Bloom into her friendship with the other crusaders and also left Twist to shove peppermint sticks up her Jew-pony cooder all by her lonesome, like the true true friend we all know by now that she is. However, as it stands, neither Twist getting her cutie mark nor AB's drifting away from her are even remotely explored as events in this text, which again makes me wonder why it's even being brought up. I'll say it once more: either make Twist a character in this story or leave her out of it, but either way make up your damn mind.
Anyway, in an incredibly saccharine and insensitive move that ludicrously enough seems intended to endear us to Nyx, Nyx tells Twist to wait for a second, and then she flies off to the castle. She retrieves the Crusader cape, which the CMC made especially for her and risked life and limb sneaking into her castle to give to her, and re-gifts it to Twist, formally inducting her as a member of the CMC, despite Twist already having a cutie mark and despite Nyx's not even having bothered to consult with the other Crusaders before inducting a new member. I would also just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Twilight and the CMC are still locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason.
Twist, who is apparently oblivious as all fuck to everything that's going on, is now brimming with excitement at the prospect of actually having friends again, in spite of the fact that said friends were basically delegated to her by a royal decree, made by the very sociopath who is at this very moment keeping said friends locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason. How ridiculous is it that after consuming nearly three quarters of this 200,000 word pile of garbage, the only character I even remotely feel sorry for is Twist?
Anyway, Twist asks about the sun, and whether it's going to come up every day from now on, and Nightmare Moon basically makes a deal with her that if she can keep her whore mouth shut about the fact that she's the one doing it, she will keep raising the sun and maintaining the normal day/night cycle. Elated that the laws of physics are once again functioning as they should, as well as the prospect of finally having some government mandated friends to call her own, Twist gives Nyx a peppermint stick and skips merrily away. Yes, all of this autism actually happens in the text, and if you don't believe me I urge you to read it for yourself.
Nyx now decides it's time to float around Ponyville as a cloud for a little while longer, because why the hell not. She now feels regret at having given away her CMC cape, and starts getting all weepy and nostalgic about the time she used to spend with the friends she had, the very same friends that she locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason. She remembers that she actually still has her original cape back at Twilight's place, the very same Twilight whom she also locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason. So she flies back to the Golden Oak Library to retrieve her goddamn cape, because she is seriously that autistic.
We get another confusing flashback, once again connected to something that Luna remembers from the show, rather than something Nyx herself would remember from the actual story we're reading. In this particular case I'm not even sure what's being referenced; the text says she remembers looking through this window at the Mane 6 "back when she and Luna were one and the same." I'm assuming this would have to be something that happened in the first or second episode, but I don't remember this event taking place. It's been a long time since I've watched those episodes though so I'm probably just not remembering it. In any case, this is stupid, because once again Nyx is recalling a memory that actually belongs to a different character, and references events that happened in another story altogether. It's made even stupider by the fact that until a few short weeks ago this place was the only home Nyx had ever known, so if she is going to get nostalgic about anything, one would expect it to be a recent memory, rather than some random event from the long-distant past. But whatever; at this point who even cares.
Spike, the eternal house nigger, is inside the tree, dutifully cleaning Twilight's kitchen like a little bitch despite the fact that she is missing and presumed dead. Unfortunately for Nyx, Spike is not planning to go to bed tonight, so it looks like no cape for her. She feels bad because much like Twist and the other ponies in town, Spike seems to have assumed that the sun coming up means that Celestia has returned and defeated Nightmare Nyx, which would mean that Twilight will be home soon as well. Nyx feels bad enough about this that she doesn't want to sit and watch Spike hug a picture of himself and Twilight all night, but apparently she doesn't quite feel bad enough to turn around and just let Twilight out of the fucking dungeon for crying out loud.
So, she turns around and flies home.
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>>261409
Only name on that list I recognize is Alexstraza. I remember he's a faggot but I don't remember why.
>From here, the conversation derails into a discussion about cutie marks, and Nyx admits that despite being a full grown adult and also Nightmare Moon, she still doesn't have one. Personally, I would argue that the blank flank is her cutie mark. As a bland character with absolutely no personality or motivations who simply assumes whatever role is foisted upon her (be it school filly, daughter, evil queen, or anything else) without giving serious thought to anything she does, a blank flank is the most fitting mark she could have. She is basically a living NPC meme at this point.
That reminds me of something I recently saw in a video essay on Persona 5 and how it sucks. Not the big 5 hour video essay, a different one.
Even though the speaker seemed like a bit of a lefty idiot whenever politics or "Power" came up,
he seemingly knew what he was talking about when it came to actual writing.
His main complaint with the "Morgana says the crew isn't taking Heroism seriously enough plus he feels useless since Inkling is a better navigator than him,
so he quits and forms his own Phantom Thieves with no blackjack or hookers, just the daughter of the guy they're taking down" bit was that we never learn anything about who Haru is as a person.
My main complaints would be that plus:
1. Morgana has no consistent character traits besides his hateboner for Ryuji the blonde moron. One moment he doesn't care much about taking foes down, another moment it's his main obsession. Now and then he'll randomly act retardedly greedy and like Makoto, he knows facts he has no reason to know. This whole "I quit and start my own" bullshit started because Morgana thought the gang was getting too lazy and not taking their Heroic Mission seriously enough, even though they WERE taking their mission seriously and just sitting around planning shit and figuring out how to get the job done.
2. The heroes made a poll on their website asking which evil boss of the real world they should take down using magical mindfuckery next. It got hacked and the heroes were sent to take down Big Bang Burger's CEO, Okumura, because he's mean to his workers by making them work till they drop. Yeah, the burger store guy is painted as "The CEO of a commie's idea of capitalism" rather than an iphone maker with sweatshops in china. The Evil League Of Evil want the PHs to enter this guy's mind because he's no longer useful to TELOE so they plan on executing him psychically live on TV to make it look like the PTs did it.
2.5. Even though the Phantom Thieves have been seen Changing Hearts (Brainwashing people psychically after infiltrating far enough into their brain-palaces and stealing some important item in said palace) before and it's never been lethal before. Plus the Psychic Murder Mental Shutdown cases happened long before the PTs started Changing Hearts. Tardpeople blame PTs anyway because Evil God rules all, plot twist spoiled, nothing in the game mattered.
3. Magical Sue-Hacker Futaba somehow fails to notice her site has been hacked, and can only notice this after the gang has been tricked and blamed for murder.
4. Conveniently, Morgana recruited Okumura's daughter to his New Phantom Thieves. It's just those two being idiots on their own now, until they rejoin the main Phantom Thieves group.
5. We never learn who Haru is as a person during her part in the Main Story or in her optional Romance Route side-story. Speaking of which that story starts with her saying "I can't trust anyone, all the adults on the board want to take over my company! I want to make my own little coffee shop with homegrown veggies and my burger chain is too corporate! Also, my father sold me to that politician guy who still exists and is still a bastard!" and ends with an adult coming in to say "Lol no you were wrong, everything's fine and we love you and want to help you and we only thought about taking the company because we think it might be too much for a little girl but we love and support you and will let you do what you want, also the marriage contract never existed in the first place" during the final moment of that arc. Deus Ex Machina.
6. Don't get me started on how nonsensical Haru's persona is. You know, the Stand. The monster she summons to fight for her. It's got a gundick, a pink poofy girly dress with vaginas on it, no head, eyes on a mask, miniguns, and it's named after A VILLAIN FROM THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Milady De Winter. Yet the ingame text calls it "A hero"? No. She isn't a "Trickster hero", she's a villainess. Every hero's persona is named after a trickster hero who died in the end. When they Digivolve their Personamon, they get "World-changing mythology character who won in the end" names.
7. Even though the heroes infiltrate the mind of Okumura to kick his ass and steal his imaginary treasure so they can rewrite his personality... And even though the people they encounter in Okumura's mind are just representations of how Okumura sees others in the outside world, AND ARE NOT REAL PEOPLE, JUST ILLUSIONS AND LIVING METAPHORS... the heroes still choose to point at the imaginary robo-version of the politician guy Okumura is selling his daughter to and yell heroic cliches at him. "We will steal your bride!" they yell at the imaginary robo-politician, instead of yelling "We will steal your daughter!" at Okumura. Even though they're inside Okumura's head, not the politician's head. The writers and characters just fucking forget how the magical bullshit rules work yet again.
8. Too much time is spent establishing Okumura as a "Bad boss who deserves brainwashing" and none is spent on who Okumura is outside his villain role, or who his daughter is outside of the "fl00fy-haired c1nnam0n roel sweetheart", "Rich girl", "who's also a sadist" checklist anime cliche roles she solely exists to fill.
Only name on that list I recognize is Alexstraza. I remember he's a faggot but I don't remember why.
>From here, the conversation derails into a discussion about cutie marks, and Nyx admits that despite being a full grown adult and also Nightmare Moon, she still doesn't have one. Personally, I would argue that the blank flank is her cutie mark. As a bland character with absolutely no personality or motivations who simply assumes whatever role is foisted upon her (be it school filly, daughter, evil queen, or anything else) without giving serious thought to anything she does, a blank flank is the most fitting mark she could have. She is basically a living NPC meme at this point.
That reminds me of something I recently saw in a video essay on Persona 5 and how it sucks. Not the big 5 hour video essay, a different one.
Even though the speaker seemed like a bit of a lefty idiot whenever politics or "Power" came up,
he seemingly knew what he was talking about when it came to actual writing.
His main complaint with the "Morgana says the crew isn't taking Heroism seriously enough plus he feels useless since Inkling is a better navigator than him,
so he quits and forms his own Phantom Thieves with no blackjack or hookers, just the daughter of the guy they're taking down" bit was that we never learn anything about who Haru is as a person.
My main complaints would be that plus:
1. Morgana has no consistent character traits besides his hateboner for Ryuji the blonde moron. One moment he doesn't care much about taking foes down, another moment it's his main obsession. Now and then he'll randomly act retardedly greedy and like Makoto, he knows facts he has no reason to know. This whole "I quit and start my own" bullshit started because Morgana thought the gang was getting too lazy and not taking their Heroic Mission seriously enough, even though they WERE taking their mission seriously and just sitting around planning shit and figuring out how to get the job done.
2. The heroes made a poll on their website asking which evil boss of the real world they should take down using magical mindfuckery next. It got hacked and the heroes were sent to take down Big Bang Burger's CEO, Okumura, because he's mean to his workers by making them work till they drop. Yeah, the burger store guy is painted as "The CEO of a commie's idea of capitalism" rather than an iphone maker with sweatshops in china. The Evil League Of Evil want the PHs to enter this guy's mind because he's no longer useful to TELOE so they plan on executing him psychically live on TV to make it look like the PTs did it.
2.5. Even though the Phantom Thieves have been seen Changing Hearts (Brainwashing people psychically after infiltrating far enough into their brain-palaces and stealing some important item in said palace) before and it's never been lethal before. Plus the Psychic Murder Mental Shutdown cases happened long before the PTs started Changing Hearts. Tardpeople blame PTs anyway because Evil God rules all, plot twist spoiled, nothing in the game mattered.
3. Magical Sue-Hacker Futaba somehow fails to notice her site has been hacked, and can only notice this after the gang has been tricked and blamed for murder.
4. Conveniently, Morgana recruited Okumura's daughter to his New Phantom Thieves. It's just those two being idiots on their own now, until they rejoin the main Phantom Thieves group.
5. We never learn who Haru is as a person during her part in the Main Story or in her optional Romance Route side-story. Speaking of which that story starts with her saying "I can't trust anyone, all the adults on the board want to take over my company! I want to make my own little coffee shop with homegrown veggies and my burger chain is too corporate! Also, my father sold me to that politician guy who still exists and is still a bastard!" and ends with an adult coming in to say "Lol no you were wrong, everything's fine and we love you and want to help you and we only thought about taking the company because we think it might be too much for a little girl but we love and support you and will let you do what you want, also the marriage contract never existed in the first place" during the final moment of that arc. Deus Ex Machina.
6. Don't get me started on how nonsensical Haru's persona is. You know, the Stand. The monster she summons to fight for her. It's got a gundick, a pink poofy girly dress with vaginas on it, no head, eyes on a mask, miniguns, and it's named after A VILLAIN FROM THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Milady De Winter. Yet the ingame text calls it "A hero"? No. She isn't a "Trickster hero", she's a villainess. Every hero's persona is named after a trickster hero who died in the end. When they Digivolve their Personamon, they get "World-changing mythology character who won in the end" names.
7. Even though the heroes infiltrate the mind of Okumura to kick his ass and steal his imaginary treasure so they can rewrite his personality... And even though the people they encounter in Okumura's mind are just representations of how Okumura sees others in the outside world, AND ARE NOT REAL PEOPLE, JUST ILLUSIONS AND LIVING METAPHORS... the heroes still choose to point at the imaginary robo-version of the politician guy Okumura is selling his daughter to and yell heroic cliches at him. "We will steal your bride!" they yell at the imaginary robo-politician, instead of yelling "We will steal your daughter!" at Okumura. Even though they're inside Okumura's head, not the politician's head. The writers and characters just fucking forget how the magical bullshit rules work yet again.
8. Too much time is spent establishing Okumura as a "Bad boss who deserves brainwashing" and none is spent on who Okumura is outside his villain role, or who his daughter is outside of the "fl00fy-haired c1nnam0n roel sweetheart", "Rich girl", "who's also a sadist" checklist anime cliche roles she solely exists to fill.
>>261612
Where was I going with this?
Oh right.
Haru is a nothing-character just like Nyx.
Nothing but the roles she's currently placed in. None of these roles interfere with each other and no elements from one role persist and make things difficult while in a different role.
We don't ever get the sense that Haru's persona is a villain because she sees herself/her family as villainous, and her "eeevil dark side" never comes out when it would be inconvenient or characterization.
She loves killing the shit out of Shadow Monsters, but who doesn't? EVERYONE loves killing those things. The stylish thief guy, the "sexy" girl in red leather, the angry punk, the gay wannabe-Vergil, the "memelord" (fucking shoot me) fantasy-neet-little-sister waifu hacker girl, they ALL have the SAME big angry-eyed edgy grins on their faces as they kill the shit out of shadow monsters.
She says edgy "Oh I sure do love making monsters BLEED AND BEG FOR MERCY!" bullshit while driving around with her magic friends in Mementos (magical underground subway station full of monsters) and this makes her friends (including the shotgun and baseball bat-wielding athelete and buff chick wannabe-policegirl with spiked knuckles and a gun) nervous around her, but this never comes up IRL.
You know, outside of forced grindfest magical zones and LITERAL MAGICAL REALMS aka palaces. please tell me someone here gets that "magical realm" reference.
Not even in her most private and intimate moments with just the two of her and you does she ever say something like "I wish dealing with corporate bullshit could be as easy as slitting a Shadow's throat" or "I had to listen to someone real annoying group of assholes at work today and I fantasized about choking them with each other's intestines to keep myself calm" because this whole side of her only exists for cock and ball torture fetish appeal and if she ever gave audiences the impression that she's not the "Perfect sweetness and love" girl 24/7 then it would ruin her for the waifufags with a fetish for that.
It's all so stupid.
Girl characters are sweet when they have to be and bitchy when they want to be and weak when it'll make audiences pity them and strong when it'll make kids ooooooooo in awe at the random displays of strength. No consistency. No real personality, no limits or growth, some just get more screentime than others.
Sometimes it feels like every popular female character in existence is just one or more cliches.
There's the factory-default Strong Woman cliche character you've seen in Black Widow and Kate Beckett and Korra and Cunty Marvel and all the other generic girls with no characterization beyond "stronk. snarky sometimes. can beet men in fight. dont call her doll". This obnoxious bully who gets to say and do whatever she wants and win whatever fights she wants because instead of critiquing the writing suggestions, the guys are fantasizing about pinning down and raping some dense female's fantasy sue.
Just pick a number from one to five on the "How rational to irrational is the girl?" scale, then decide how Pinkie or Toph she usually is on the ^.^ to -.- scale, then circle "As storng as I want at the time" in the questionaire's question about her power level, and that's it.
I'm trying to write my own female character, I'm looking at popular shit for inspiration and so I can look at what worked and what didn't...
but Haru's complete fucking lack of story relevance, importance, and personality hasn't made her any less popular than the other girls.
Fancows just fap to their favourite familiar cliches repackaged in new appearances.
So fucking tiresome.
Is it even possible to create well-written girl characters?
I know FIM did it at first, even though the fans who wanted to write romance/porn/both just flanderized their waifu into the cliches in her they found most appealing.
Should I even try to make a consistent characterization for my girl character?
How? How does anyone do that?
Where was I going with this?
Oh right.
Haru is a nothing-character just like Nyx.
Nothing but the roles she's currently placed in. None of these roles interfere with each other and no elements from one role persist and make things difficult while in a different role.
We don't ever get the sense that Haru's persona is a villain because she sees herself/her family as villainous, and her "eeevil dark side" never comes out when it would be inconvenient or characterization.
She loves killing the shit out of Shadow Monsters, but who doesn't? EVERYONE loves killing those things. The stylish thief guy, the "sexy" girl in red leather, the angry punk, the gay wannabe-Vergil, the "memelord" (fucking shoot me) fantasy-neet-little-sister waifu hacker girl, they ALL have the SAME big angry-eyed edgy grins on their faces as they kill the shit out of shadow monsters.
She says edgy "Oh I sure do love making monsters BLEED AND BEG FOR MERCY!" bullshit while driving around with her magic friends in Mementos (magical underground subway station full of monsters) and this makes her friends (including the shotgun and baseball bat-wielding athelete and buff chick wannabe-policegirl with spiked knuckles and a gun) nervous around her, but this never comes up IRL.
You know, outside of forced grindfest magical zones and LITERAL MAGICAL REALMS aka palaces. please tell me someone here gets that "magical realm" reference.
Not even in her most private and intimate moments with just the two of her and you does she ever say something like "I wish dealing with corporate bullshit could be as easy as slitting a Shadow's throat" or "I had to listen to someone real annoying group of assholes at work today and I fantasized about choking them with each other's intestines to keep myself calm" because this whole side of her only exists for cock and ball torture fetish appeal and if she ever gave audiences the impression that she's not the "Perfect sweetness and love" girl 24/7 then it would ruin her for the waifufags with a fetish for that.
It's all so stupid.
Girl characters are sweet when they have to be and bitchy when they want to be and weak when it'll make audiences pity them and strong when it'll make kids ooooooooo in awe at the random displays of strength. No consistency. No real personality, no limits or growth, some just get more screentime than others.
Sometimes it feels like every popular female character in existence is just one or more cliches.
There's the factory-default Strong Woman cliche character you've seen in Black Widow and Kate Beckett and Korra and Cunty Marvel and all the other generic girls with no characterization beyond "stronk. snarky sometimes. can beet men in fight. dont call her doll". This obnoxious bully who gets to say and do whatever she wants and win whatever fights she wants because instead of critiquing the writing suggestions, the guys are fantasizing about pinning down and raping some dense female's fantasy sue.
Just pick a number from one to five on the "How rational to irrational is the girl?" scale, then decide how Pinkie or Toph she usually is on the ^.^ to -.- scale, then circle "As storng as I want at the time" in the questionaire's question about her power level, and that's it.
I'm trying to write my own female character, I'm looking at popular shit for inspiration and so I can look at what worked and what didn't...
but Haru's complete fucking lack of story relevance, importance, and personality hasn't made her any less popular than the other girls.
Fancows just fap to their favourite familiar cliches repackaged in new appearances.
So fucking tiresome.
Is it even possible to create well-written girl characters?
I know FIM did it at first, even though the fans who wanted to write romance/porn/both just flanderized their waifu into the cliches in her they found most appealing.
Should I even try to make a consistent characterization for my girl character?
How? How does anyone do that?
>>261518
Oh holy god
this story is actually getting worse
you're a goddamn saint for putting up with this shit and you're a goddamn hero for tearing this niggered disaster of a story a new one.
Oh holy god
this story is actually getting worse
you're a goddamn saint for putting up with this shit and you're a goddamn hero for tearing this niggered disaster of a story a new one.
>>261612
>the "memelord" (fucking shoot me) fantasy-neet-little-sister waifu hacker girl
Nonetheless she makes a fantastic character in Strip Poker Night at the Inventory.
>the "memelord" (fucking shoot me) fantasy-neet-little-sister waifu hacker girl
Nonetheless she makes a fantastic character in Strip Poker Night at the Inventory.
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>>261612
>>261613
>Is it even possible to create well-written girl characters?
>How? How does anyone do that?
I've never played any of the Persona games so I don't know about all that, but as far as writing girl characters goes, it's the same as writing any character. The main thing is to stop overthinking what will make your character great or likable or compelling, and just approach your characters as if they were real people. Think about who this character is at the core of their being, what their personality is like, and how this causes them to view the world and their own role within it. Once you've got that down, you can start placing your character into different situations and thinking about how they would react.
MLP is actually a fine example of how to handle characterization. Each character starts with a simple concept, has strengths and weaknesses that grow outward from that concept, and has personality traits derived from those strengths and weaknesses. Each of the six ponies has a clearly defined personality, with "rules" that dictate how she will behave in a given situation. From there, it becomes simple to write stories, because you simply have to pick a character or two, pick a situation, and then figure out how your characters would react to the situation according to the "rules" of her personality.
One of the first things I noticed about this show when 4/mlpol/ convinced me to start watching it is that each of the main characters seems to have been deliberately designed to embody a very general personality archetype, that runs the full gamut of human personalities. In this way, any little girl watching could probably find a character that reminds her of herself that she can identify with. It also makes the show appealing to adults, because the personalities of the characters are well-defined enough that they can be expanded and further explored by placing them into more complex and mature situations. Of course, there's also the "waifu" principle: the same traits that make a girl character relatable to a girl can make her the embodiment of romantic fantasy for a guy.
Twilight is bookish and socially awkward; she's very intelligent, but she has a tendency to isolate herself. Rarity is very beautiful and confident; she's socially extroverted and makes friends easily, but can be also be shallow or petty. Pinkie Pie is extroverted to a fault; she can make friends with nearly anyone, but can be so disconnected from reality that she ends up completely oblivious to situations and to the feelings of others. Fluttershy is kindhearted but very withdrawn; she's similar to Twilight in that her introversion makes it difficult to socialize even if she wants to.
Rainbow Dash is athletic and also highly extroverted; interestingly enough, her personality is quite similar to Rarity's even though they seem like opposites and often clash with each other. Both Dash and Rarity have a tendency to become focused on external self-serving goals, competition in Dash's case and social climbing in Rarity's, which can interfere with their friendships.
Applejack is probably the most well-balanced human (pony, whatever) out of all of them, which I suspect is a big part of why the writers have never quite been able to figure out what to do with her (even more so than the obvious anti-rural prejudice they have, typical of urban lefties). It's hard to give her goals or lessons to learn, because she already has everything she wants. If she has a fault, it's probably stubbornness, which unfortunately tends to be exaggerated in most of the canon stories about her. She can be a tough character to write convincingly (aside from her Southern patois, which is fairly easy to do as long as you don't go overboard with it). However, she's an almost perfect embodiment of the Zen principle, and if you can grasp that (which is a lifelong challenge in itself), she suddenly makes an awful lot of sense.
Anyway, each of these characters can be reduced to a very simple core concept, which again relates directly to very general human archetypes that most of the show's target audience are likely to more or less fit. Twilight: smart girl. Rarity: girly-girl. Pinkie: bouncy airhead girl. Fluttershy: quiet, gentle, motherly girl. Rainbow Dash: athletic tomboy girl. Applejack: traditional, family-oriented girl. Once you have the core concept down, you expand outward from there. Give the character a list of strengths and flaws that embody that character concept. Once you have that, you've got a personality. From here, it's simply a matter of placing that personality into situations and imagining how they'd react.
The beauty of it is that the situations themselves don't matter. Once you understand your characters on a deep, personal level, you can place them in any situation. You can give them superpowers and have them fight Dracula, or you can write down to earth literary realism or slice of life stories. Actually I think this is a big part of why the early episodes of the show were so successful and later episodes tended to be more hit or miss: the early show was character-driven, whereas the later show was event-driven. The earliest episodes were very simple stories that focused on a simple problem, and the story was about taking the primary characters and exploring how they would approach that problem and what they could learn from solving it. Later episodes focused almost exclusively on what was going on in the external world, or what goals in the external world the characters were trying to accomplish: Twilight becoming a princess, Rarity becoming a corporate fashionista, Dash being a Wonderbolt, etc.
This is more or less what I've been trying to get at with Past Sins: Peen Stroke has a decent story idea and some decent clay to work with in terms of characters (even Nyx could be developed). His problem is he just didn't think these things through enough beforehand.
>>261613
>Is it even possible to create well-written girl characters?
>How? How does anyone do that?
I've never played any of the Persona games so I don't know about all that, but as far as writing girl characters goes, it's the same as writing any character. The main thing is to stop overthinking what will make your character great or likable or compelling, and just approach your characters as if they were real people. Think about who this character is at the core of their being, what their personality is like, and how this causes them to view the world and their own role within it. Once you've got that down, you can start placing your character into different situations and thinking about how they would react.
MLP is actually a fine example of how to handle characterization. Each character starts with a simple concept, has strengths and weaknesses that grow outward from that concept, and has personality traits derived from those strengths and weaknesses. Each of the six ponies has a clearly defined personality, with "rules" that dictate how she will behave in a given situation. From there, it becomes simple to write stories, because you simply have to pick a character or two, pick a situation, and then figure out how your characters would react to the situation according to the "rules" of her personality.
One of the first things I noticed about this show when 4/mlpol/ convinced me to start watching it is that each of the main characters seems to have been deliberately designed to embody a very general personality archetype, that runs the full gamut of human personalities. In this way, any little girl watching could probably find a character that reminds her of herself that she can identify with. It also makes the show appealing to adults, because the personalities of the characters are well-defined enough that they can be expanded and further explored by placing them into more complex and mature situations. Of course, there's also the "waifu" principle: the same traits that make a girl character relatable to a girl can make her the embodiment of romantic fantasy for a guy.
Twilight is bookish and socially awkward; she's very intelligent, but she has a tendency to isolate herself. Rarity is very beautiful and confident; she's socially extroverted and makes friends easily, but can be also be shallow or petty. Pinkie Pie is extroverted to a fault; she can make friends with nearly anyone, but can be so disconnected from reality that she ends up completely oblivious to situations and to the feelings of others. Fluttershy is kindhearted but very withdrawn; she's similar to Twilight in that her introversion makes it difficult to socialize even if she wants to.
Rainbow Dash is athletic and also highly extroverted; interestingly enough, her personality is quite similar to Rarity's even though they seem like opposites and often clash with each other. Both Dash and Rarity have a tendency to become focused on external self-serving goals, competition in Dash's case and social climbing in Rarity's, which can interfere with their friendships.
Applejack is probably the most well-balanced human (pony, whatever) out of all of them, which I suspect is a big part of why the writers have never quite been able to figure out what to do with her (even more so than the obvious anti-rural prejudice they have, typical of urban lefties). It's hard to give her goals or lessons to learn, because she already has everything she wants. If she has a fault, it's probably stubbornness, which unfortunately tends to be exaggerated in most of the canon stories about her. She can be a tough character to write convincingly (aside from her Southern patois, which is fairly easy to do as long as you don't go overboard with it). However, she's an almost perfect embodiment of the Zen principle, and if you can grasp that (which is a lifelong challenge in itself), she suddenly makes an awful lot of sense.
Anyway, each of these characters can be reduced to a very simple core concept, which again relates directly to very general human archetypes that most of the show's target audience are likely to more or less fit. Twilight: smart girl. Rarity: girly-girl. Pinkie: bouncy airhead girl. Fluttershy: quiet, gentle, motherly girl. Rainbow Dash: athletic tomboy girl. Applejack: traditional, family-oriented girl. Once you have the core concept down, you expand outward from there. Give the character a list of strengths and flaws that embody that character concept. Once you have that, you've got a personality. From here, it's simply a matter of placing that personality into situations and imagining how they'd react.
The beauty of it is that the situations themselves don't matter. Once you understand your characters on a deep, personal level, you can place them in any situation. You can give them superpowers and have them fight Dracula, or you can write down to earth literary realism or slice of life stories. Actually I think this is a big part of why the early episodes of the show were so successful and later episodes tended to be more hit or miss: the early show was character-driven, whereas the later show was event-driven. The earliest episodes were very simple stories that focused on a simple problem, and the story was about taking the primary characters and exploring how they would approach that problem and what they could learn from solving it. Later episodes focused almost exclusively on what was going on in the external world, or what goals in the external world the characters were trying to accomplish: Twilight becoming a princess, Rarity becoming a corporate fashionista, Dash being a Wonderbolt, etc.
This is more or less what I've been trying to get at with Past Sins: Peen Stroke has a decent story idea and some decent clay to work with in terms of characters (even Nyx could be developed). His problem is he just didn't think these things through enough beforehand.
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>>261783
Here's this (You). (You) deserve it because you hit it right out of the ballpark. I'm going to steal this for my private notes to reference. It's that good.
Here's this (You). (You) deserve it because you hit it right out of the ballpark. I'm going to steal this for my private notes to reference. It's that good.
File (): ABA1C6FA7A83AFE0D42C3762BAB44AB9-347062.jpg (338.9 KB, 1000x1550, d53bwwe-74e593f1-9844-4b6e-9234-c9a92c057338.jpg)
>>261785
Thank you, it's nice to be recognized. Here is a (You) for (You), which I offer in thanks of the original (You).
>>261518
Anyway, enough about quality writing. Let's get back to Past Sins.
In quite possibly her most spineless move yet, Nyx orders her fucking guards to go snatch the fucking cape from Twilight's fucking tree as soon as fucking Spike leaves the fucking tree unattended. I guess she hid the cape inside a book for some autistic reason, so she convinces Nexus that the book is some kind of ancient magic tome or something and that he is to bring it to her undisturbed.
Long story short, he brings her the goddamn book, she goes upstairs with it, insisting that she not be disturbed because she's going to be casting evil spells or something, but really she's just in there fondling her goddamn cape and all her other Crusader shit she has hidden in there like a fucking autist, while fantasizing about the wonderful times she used to spend with her friends, who are, once again, still locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason.
Instead of letting her friends out of the fucking dungeon, she tries to play her fucking kazoo, but it turns out she's not in the mood for kazoo music, so she puts the kazoo away. Yes, this autism is actually in the text, look it up if you don't believe me. She then sits down and broods angrily in front of the mirror because it's been like almost a full page since she's done that. Luna's words come into her mind, this time burning like angry phantoms instead of stinging like angry bees: "It won't be my past that haunts you, but your own." This statement is beyond ironic, considering that Nyx has done literally nothing but dwell on Luna's past for the last five goddamn chapters, despite none of it having any connection whatsoever to anything that has happened to her anywhere in this book.
Once again, she laments the fact that some fruity cult has cast a spell on her, and made her take over the world for no reason, as usual getting so very close to the point, yet still somehow missing it entirely.
>She did not want to be the tyrant queen, but she couldn't go back now. She had gone too far. No amount of apologies would cleanse her of what she had done.
Basically this.
>She was… stuck— simply stuck. She could not go back, but she could not make herself go forward. She was, in every way, her reflection in the mirror. She could not be Nightmare Moon anymore, clad in armor as she struck fear into the hearts of ponies. She could not go back to being the small, innocent filly Nyx either. She was the blank-flanked, adult mare who was stuck in the middle, and she could not stand her own reflection any longer!
Basically this, too. You could at least let your friends out of the fucking dungeon, though.
Anyway, fuck. The biggest problem here is that it is just literally impossible to feel any kind of sympathy for Nyx at all at this point. She is well fucked and far from home, and it is nopony's fault but her own. That's really the point that this story keeps missing. Without character development, Nyx has no motivation to do what she's doing, and without motivation it's just a story about an obnoxious whiny cunt doing horrible shit to her friends for no reason other than that some goth cult she joined peer-pressured her into it.
Protip for authors: if you want to write a redemption story, you need to make your character redeemable. I feel like this should be obvious, but this simple concept seems to elude an awful lot of writers. In Nyx's case, as I've said time and time again, the biggest problem is that her reasons for turning evil aren't hers; they belong to a completely different character, who is never properly introduced to us through the text but whose memories are suddenly grafted onto Nyx. The text relies entirely upon the reader's assumed familiarity with the show and its characters to fill in the connection. I'm sure that if Peen Stroke ever read this, he'd probably react with confusion to this criticism. "B-but...she's Nightmare Moon. Of course she's going to act like Nightmare Moon, that's just what Nightmare Moon does." Probably a lot of hardcore brony readers would react the same way. However, this is just plain not how books work.
I've covered all of this many times before, of course. However, there's more to it. Even if Nyx had a valid sympathetic reason for doing what she's done up to this point, we still couldn't sympathize with her because even after realizing what a selfish cunt she's been, she continues to behave like a selfish cunt. She realizes that she dun goofed, but instead of correcting her actions, she just mopes around feeling sorry for herself. Even worse, she seems to think that by moping around and making a handful of clumsy, self-serving gestures that she is somehow atoning for what she did. We're supposed to feel like she's learned a lesson here, but in reality she's learned absolutely fuck all.
She feels bad about rejecting the CMC's gesture of friendship and locking them up. So does she let them go and apologize? No, she mopes around, and then goes and digs her stupid cape out of storage while the CMC sit in the dungeon. She sees how Spike is reacting to Twilight being gone, and clearly feels bad about her role in causing him this pain. So does she let Twilight go? No, she sits in her room and mopes while Twilight sits in the dungeon. She can't even go into the house and grab her own stupid cape; she has to have her guards do it because she feels too shitty about having to see Spike, so she just avoids the whole situation. Any time she is confronted with the consequences of her actions, for instance when Sweetie Belle's parents come to beg for her to be released, she either deflects blame onto Spell Nexus, makes excuses, or just avoids dealing with it entirely.
I'm running out of space, I'm going to continue in another post.
Thank you, it's nice to be recognized. Here is a (You) for (You), which I offer in thanks of the original (You).
>>261518
Anyway, enough about quality writing. Let's get back to Past Sins.
In quite possibly her most spineless move yet, Nyx orders her fucking guards to go snatch the fucking cape from Twilight's fucking tree as soon as fucking Spike leaves the fucking tree unattended. I guess she hid the cape inside a book for some autistic reason, so she convinces Nexus that the book is some kind of ancient magic tome or something and that he is to bring it to her undisturbed.
Long story short, he brings her the goddamn book, she goes upstairs with it, insisting that she not be disturbed because she's going to be casting evil spells or something, but really she's just in there fondling her goddamn cape and all her other Crusader shit she has hidden in there like a fucking autist, while fantasizing about the wonderful times she used to spend with her friends, who are, once again, still locked in the fucking dungeon for literally no reason.
Instead of letting her friends out of the fucking dungeon, she tries to play her fucking kazoo, but it turns out she's not in the mood for kazoo music, so she puts the kazoo away. Yes, this autism is actually in the text, look it up if you don't believe me. She then sits down and broods angrily in front of the mirror because it's been like almost a full page since she's done that. Luna's words come into her mind, this time burning like angry phantoms instead of stinging like angry bees: "It won't be my past that haunts you, but your own." This statement is beyond ironic, considering that Nyx has done literally nothing but dwell on Luna's past for the last five goddamn chapters, despite none of it having any connection whatsoever to anything that has happened to her anywhere in this book.
Once again, she laments the fact that some fruity cult has cast a spell on her, and made her take over the world for no reason, as usual getting so very close to the point, yet still somehow missing it entirely.
>She did not want to be the tyrant queen, but she couldn't go back now. She had gone too far. No amount of apologies would cleanse her of what she had done.
Basically this.
>She was… stuck— simply stuck. She could not go back, but she could not make herself go forward. She was, in every way, her reflection in the mirror. She could not be Nightmare Moon anymore, clad in armor as she struck fear into the hearts of ponies. She could not go back to being the small, innocent filly Nyx either. She was the blank-flanked, adult mare who was stuck in the middle, and she could not stand her own reflection any longer!
Basically this, too. You could at least let your friends out of the fucking dungeon, though.
Anyway, fuck. The biggest problem here is that it is just literally impossible to feel any kind of sympathy for Nyx at all at this point. She is well fucked and far from home, and it is nopony's fault but her own. That's really the point that this story keeps missing. Without character development, Nyx has no motivation to do what she's doing, and without motivation it's just a story about an obnoxious whiny cunt doing horrible shit to her friends for no reason other than that some goth cult she joined peer-pressured her into it.
Protip for authors: if you want to write a redemption story, you need to make your character redeemable. I feel like this should be obvious, but this simple concept seems to elude an awful lot of writers. In Nyx's case, as I've said time and time again, the biggest problem is that her reasons for turning evil aren't hers; they belong to a completely different character, who is never properly introduced to us through the text but whose memories are suddenly grafted onto Nyx. The text relies entirely upon the reader's assumed familiarity with the show and its characters to fill in the connection. I'm sure that if Peen Stroke ever read this, he'd probably react with confusion to this criticism. "B-but...she's Nightmare Moon. Of course she's going to act like Nightmare Moon, that's just what Nightmare Moon does." Probably a lot of hardcore brony readers would react the same way. However, this is just plain not how books work.
I've covered all of this many times before, of course. However, there's more to it. Even if Nyx had a valid sympathetic reason for doing what she's done up to this point, we still couldn't sympathize with her because even after realizing what a selfish cunt she's been, she continues to behave like a selfish cunt. She realizes that she dun goofed, but instead of correcting her actions, she just mopes around feeling sorry for herself. Even worse, she seems to think that by moping around and making a handful of clumsy, self-serving gestures that she is somehow atoning for what she did. We're supposed to feel like she's learned a lesson here, but in reality she's learned absolutely fuck all.
She feels bad about rejecting the CMC's gesture of friendship and locking them up. So does she let them go and apologize? No, she mopes around, and then goes and digs her stupid cape out of storage while the CMC sit in the dungeon. She sees how Spike is reacting to Twilight being gone, and clearly feels bad about her role in causing him this pain. So does she let Twilight go? No, she sits in her room and mopes while Twilight sits in the dungeon. She can't even go into the house and grab her own stupid cape; she has to have her guards do it because she feels too shitty about having to see Spike, so she just avoids the whole situation. Any time she is confronted with the consequences of her actions, for instance when Sweetie Belle's parents come to beg for her to be released, she either deflects blame onto Spell Nexus, makes excuses, or just avoids dealing with it entirely.
I'm running out of space, I'm going to continue in another post.
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>>261807
It would be one thing if there were some objective reason why she couldn't just let Twilight and the CMC go. For instance, if Nexus were some kind of Rasputin type figure who was hypnotizing or controlling her, or if she were just some powerless puppet like Evita Peron, who had to do what Nexus said or he would turn the army against her or something. Then this sort of behavior could be justified. However, this is clearly not the case. Nexus is a groveling little bitch who clearly poses no threat to her in terms of physical or magical power. He clearly respects the chain o' command, and doesn't seem to question her authority. She had no problem going against his wishes when she decided to raise the sun, or when she allowed the Mane 5 + Trixie™ to go free instead of hanging them. Every time the question of the CMC and Twilight's imprisonment comes up, she always acts like she wants to let them go, but can't for some reason. However, there is no external reason why she can't, which means she's just choosing not to and telling herself she has no choice.
She deflects blame like a madcunt. She never takes responsibility for anything. She never even admits fault. She doesn't want to imprison the CMC in the first place but she does it anyway. Then, she writes a note to Twilight, the prisoner she also doesn't want to keep imprisoned but also refuses to free, that basically just says "hey as long as you're just sitting around, you think you could babysit the CMC for me?", and then she just dumps them into the dungeon with her and locks the door.
She's selfish and manipulative. She lies to Twist, or at least deliberately conceals the truth from her, about where Apple Bloom is and why, just because she doesn't want to be the bad guy even though she is. Then, she makes a completely empty sentimental gesture in giving her the crusader cape, which is really just a self-serving act intended to alleviate her own guilt. On top of that, she then just sort of inducts her into this group of friends that not even Nyx herself is really a part of anymore, without consulting them or asking if they want her to join. Maybe there's a reason Apple Bloom and Twist don't talk anymore; did you even think about that, you emo nigger whore? You don't care; you just feel sad because you feel sad, and you want to make yourself not feel sad anymore, that's all this is.
Even the cape business works against her. Not just that she gave away the one the crusaders brought her to a character we haven't seen in forever, but that she goes to all this trouble to sneak into her old room and grab her old cape just so she can fondle it and reminisce, yet she can't give the simple order to just let the CMC or Twilight go. Seeing her old crusader cape makes her feel all weepy and nostalgic for the good old days when she had friends and a fun life, but those same friends are locked up in her basement because of her, and it would require no effort whatsoever for her to just let them go, nor would adversely impact her in any way that she couldn't easily deal with. We're supposed to feel sorry for her here because aww, poor Nyx misses her friends. But she clearly doesn't give two shits about her friends; if she did, she'd forget about the stupid cape and the kazoo and all the other crap and just go downstairs, apologize, and set them free. She doesn't miss her friends, she just misses the way she felt when she had friends.
She's spineless and cowardly. She doesn't grovel to Nexus exactly, but she clearly lets his expectations and the expectations of the cult define her behavior against her real wishes, which is honestly quite pathetic. This faggot is her subordinate, he's weaker than her, he obeys her every command, and yet she feels like she has to act like Nightmare Moon in front of him all the time to meet his expectations. Why?
Even more baffling is that she occasionally stands up to him at completely random times. She's willing to resume the normal day/night cycle and has no problem telling him to eat shit when he objects, so why didn't she just tell him to eat shit when he demanded her friends be imprisoned? Why doesn't she just let them go now, and tell him to eat shit when he objects? She had no problem letting the other 5 go free over Nexus' objections, even though they had opposed her regime with force and could be out raising an army against her even now. It was a clearly bad tactical move, but she did it anyway, and her subordinates still respect and obey her. There's nothing compelling her to do any of this; she's the queen and can do whatever she wants. If she wants to let somepony go free, she can, and sometimes does. If she wants to imprison them, she can, and sometimes does. She keeps Celestia and Luna imprisoned, which actually makes sense. Keeping Twilight imprisoned makes sense kind of, although it makes less sense when you consider that Twilight poses no more and no less threat than any of the other five ponies she allowed to go free. Keeping three completely harmless fillies under lock and key is just cruel and makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Literally none of her actions are consistent or make any sense, either in terms of her internal character motivations (to the extent that such motivations can be said to exist) or in terms of the external world situation.
Nyx the filly was uninteresting and a little annoying sometimes, but she wasn't an unlikeable character. She was mostly just an ordinary child, who behaved more or less like an ordinary child most of the time. However, Nyx the full-grown alicorn is the most cowardly, spineless, pathetic, selfish, self-pitying, whiny, obnoxious pile of utter dogshit character I've encountered in any work over a period of actual years. Seriously, fuck this numb twat; I hope she does get sent to the fucking moon.
It would be one thing if there were some objective reason why she couldn't just let Twilight and the CMC go. For instance, if Nexus were some kind of Rasputin type figure who was hypnotizing or controlling her, or if she were just some powerless puppet like Evita Peron, who had to do what Nexus said or he would turn the army against her or something. Then this sort of behavior could be justified. However, this is clearly not the case. Nexus is a groveling little bitch who clearly poses no threat to her in terms of physical or magical power. He clearly respects the chain o' command, and doesn't seem to question her authority. She had no problem going against his wishes when she decided to raise the sun, or when she allowed the Mane 5 + Trixie™ to go free instead of hanging them. Every time the question of the CMC and Twilight's imprisonment comes up, she always acts like she wants to let them go, but can't for some reason. However, there is no external reason why she can't, which means she's just choosing not to and telling herself she has no choice.
She deflects blame like a madcunt. She never takes responsibility for anything. She never even admits fault. She doesn't want to imprison the CMC in the first place but she does it anyway. Then, she writes a note to Twilight, the prisoner she also doesn't want to keep imprisoned but also refuses to free, that basically just says "hey as long as you're just sitting around, you think you could babysit the CMC for me?", and then she just dumps them into the dungeon with her and locks the door.
She's selfish and manipulative. She lies to Twist, or at least deliberately conceals the truth from her, about where Apple Bloom is and why, just because she doesn't want to be the bad guy even though she is. Then, she makes a completely empty sentimental gesture in giving her the crusader cape, which is really just a self-serving act intended to alleviate her own guilt. On top of that, she then just sort of inducts her into this group of friends that not even Nyx herself is really a part of anymore, without consulting them or asking if they want her to join. Maybe there's a reason Apple Bloom and Twist don't talk anymore; did you even think about that, you emo nigger whore? You don't care; you just feel sad because you feel sad, and you want to make yourself not feel sad anymore, that's all this is.
Even the cape business works against her. Not just that she gave away the one the crusaders brought her to a character we haven't seen in forever, but that she goes to all this trouble to sneak into her old room and grab her old cape just so she can fondle it and reminisce, yet she can't give the simple order to just let the CMC or Twilight go. Seeing her old crusader cape makes her feel all weepy and nostalgic for the good old days when she had friends and a fun life, but those same friends are locked up in her basement because of her, and it would require no effort whatsoever for her to just let them go, nor would adversely impact her in any way that she couldn't easily deal with. We're supposed to feel sorry for her here because aww, poor Nyx misses her friends. But she clearly doesn't give two shits about her friends; if she did, she'd forget about the stupid cape and the kazoo and all the other crap and just go downstairs, apologize, and set them free. She doesn't miss her friends, she just misses the way she felt when she had friends.
She's spineless and cowardly. She doesn't grovel to Nexus exactly, but she clearly lets his expectations and the expectations of the cult define her behavior against her real wishes, which is honestly quite pathetic. This faggot is her subordinate, he's weaker than her, he obeys her every command, and yet she feels like she has to act like Nightmare Moon in front of him all the time to meet his expectations. Why?
Even more baffling is that she occasionally stands up to him at completely random times. She's willing to resume the normal day/night cycle and has no problem telling him to eat shit when he objects, so why didn't she just tell him to eat shit when he demanded her friends be imprisoned? Why doesn't she just let them go now, and tell him to eat shit when he objects? She had no problem letting the other 5 go free over Nexus' objections, even though they had opposed her regime with force and could be out raising an army against her even now. It was a clearly bad tactical move, but she did it anyway, and her subordinates still respect and obey her. There's nothing compelling her to do any of this; she's the queen and can do whatever she wants. If she wants to let somepony go free, she can, and sometimes does. If she wants to imprison them, she can, and sometimes does. She keeps Celestia and Luna imprisoned, which actually makes sense. Keeping Twilight imprisoned makes sense kind of, although it makes less sense when you consider that Twilight poses no more and no less threat than any of the other five ponies she allowed to go free. Keeping three completely harmless fillies under lock and key is just cruel and makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Literally none of her actions are consistent or make any sense, either in terms of her internal character motivations (to the extent that such motivations can be said to exist) or in terms of the external world situation.
Nyx the filly was uninteresting and a little annoying sometimes, but she wasn't an unlikeable character. She was mostly just an ordinary child, who behaved more or less like an ordinary child most of the time. However, Nyx the full-grown alicorn is the most cowardly, spineless, pathetic, selfish, self-pitying, whiny, obnoxious pile of utter dogshit character I've encountered in any work over a period of actual years. Seriously, fuck this numb twat; I hope she does get sent to the fucking moon.
File (): CD101AC40614BED5367D8BAD11541E19-3611409.jpg (3.4 MB, 2356x1375, Roland_TR-808_(large).jpg)
>>261808
Image familiar in recognition of my digits.
Anyway, where the fuck was I with this?
Oh yeah. Nyx is up in her room crying and moping and feeling sorry for herself. Eventually, in what I don't doubt was intended to be another endearing moment but comes across as more self-pitying nonsense, she digs out the Twilight Sparkle fighting-practice dummy that she mutilated earlier in the story. She uses her magic to repair it, so that now she basically has a life-size Twilight Sparkle plushie, which she proceeds to hug and cuddle while pretending it's the real Twilight. All of this probably would be very sweet were it not for the fact that the real Twilight is locked up in the dungeon downstairs, on her orders, and if she wanted to give her a hug it would take only a single order to release her, but instead she's upstairs snuggling with a fucking doll.
>She hugged the doll to her body with her legs, and, for a moment, she dared to pretend the doll was the real Twilight.
>“What do I do now, Twilight?” Nightmare Moon asked, praying that the doll might actually provide an answer.
>“What do I do now?”
This is like fucking psychopath behavior. What the actual fuck? Does Peen Stroke unironically expect me to feel sympathy for this character, or am I just being very elaborately jerked around here?
Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.
Chapter 16: To Harden an Otherwise Soft Floppy Weener so it can be Shoved Directly Up Peen Stroke's Ass that he may Squeal Like a Pig
Nighty Nightmare Nyx, proving herself to be quite inept even by the already-low standards of politics, continues her policy of raising the sun and moon normally, which somehow manages to make her reign even less popular than it was to begin with. Her only supporters, the Children of Nightmare, are beginning to complain that she's gone soft, while the rest of the population, including all of the ponies who were clamoring for her to resume raising the sun and the moon, don't trust her or believe that she has reformed, even though she has given them what they wanted. On top of that, she is still a moody twat with no personality or motivations, and so, continuing to dwindle off into the twilight realm of her own secret thoughts, she now confines herself to her bedroom, raising the sun and moon and overseeing minor affairs of state, but otherwise doing little besides mope.
The more of this I read, the more I begin to question the wisdom of even trying to write this kind of super-serious grimdark stuff in this universe in the first place. The current situation in this story is one that would fit just fine in a high fantasy novel about royal intrigue: a usurper has seized control of the throne, but her rule is unstable, meanwhile she's plagued by feelings of self-doubt and other personal problems. It sets a precarious, uncomfortable mood: she's fully in power now, but for how long will it last? If George R.R. Martin were writing this, for instance, we could probably assume that within the space of a few chapters Nyx is either going to be beheaded, exiled, tortured, maimed, >raped, sealed in a barrel and cast adrift at sea, or some combination of all of the above, which at this point I wouldn't mind.
However, since it's Peen Stroke, the next scene is completely incongruous and silly, breaking the mood established in the opening part of the chapter while achieving nothing in particular. Out of absolutely nowhere, Pinkie Pie suddenly shows up in the castle courtyard and manages to overpower all of the guards using nothing but the power of laughter and cartoon physics. Nightmare Moon, as usual showing complete disdain for the royal protocols her subordinate put in place but which for some reason she doesn't just formally put an end to, flies down, tells her guards to piss off and leave the intruder alone, and speaks to Pinkie.
Pinkie gives a long-winded nonsensical explanation in her typical patois that is probably intended to be cute or funny, but is mostly annoying here. It amounts to this: Pinkie wants to talk to NM about something, but the guards told her she needs to make an appointment. So, she broke into the castle instead.
Instead of throwing her into the dungeon like she did with Twilight or the CMC for literally the same infraction, Nyx asks Pinkie what she wants. As it turns out, she did all this for no reason other than to personally deliver an invitation to Twist's birthday party, something which could just as easily have been sent through the mail. Haha le wacky random Pinkie Pie, amirite guise?
Continuing to behave like an unstable lunatic, Nyx throws the invitation on the ground and stomps on it. Continuing to behave like a clueless airhead who is completely oblivious to literally everything that's going on around her, Pinkie Pie makes some non-sequitur remarks and giggles like a retard. After that, Nyx composes herself, politely informs Pinkie that she won't be attending the party, and then Pinkie departs in appropriately cartoonish fashion.
There are so many things wrong with a scene like this that I'm not even going to bother seriously analyzing it. There is no point to this scene: it makes no sense, the humor is weak and relies entirely on "le random wacky Pinkie Pie" schtick that I'm guessing was already starting to wear thin even at this early stage of the fandom, and it does little to advance the story in a meaningful way. Even if Twist's party is going to be a significant scene, all that really needed to happen here is for Nyx to receive an invitation and decline to attend the party. This scene is implausible even by cartoon standards, and even by the standards of cartoon ponies these characters' actions are nonsensical. Even setting Pinkie aside, Nyx's behavior is all over the place here. One minute she's laughing good-naturedly at Pinkie's antics, the next she's furious and shouting, the next she's being polite. None of it makes sense from any perspective.
Image familiar in recognition of my digits.
Anyway, where the fuck was I with this?
Oh yeah. Nyx is up in her room crying and moping and feeling sorry for herself. Eventually, in what I don't doubt was intended to be another endearing moment but comes across as more self-pitying nonsense, she digs out the Twilight Sparkle fighting-practice dummy that she mutilated earlier in the story. She uses her magic to repair it, so that now she basically has a life-size Twilight Sparkle plushie, which she proceeds to hug and cuddle while pretending it's the real Twilight. All of this probably would be very sweet were it not for the fact that the real Twilight is locked up in the dungeon downstairs, on her orders, and if she wanted to give her a hug it would take only a single order to release her, but instead she's upstairs snuggling with a fucking doll.
>She hugged the doll to her body with her legs, and, for a moment, she dared to pretend the doll was the real Twilight.
>“What do I do now, Twilight?” Nightmare Moon asked, praying that the doll might actually provide an answer.
>“What do I do now?”
This is like fucking psychopath behavior. What the actual fuck? Does Peen Stroke unironically expect me to feel sympathy for this character, or am I just being very elaborately jerked around here?
Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.
Chapter 16: To Harden an Otherwise Soft Floppy Weener so it can be Shoved Directly Up Peen Stroke's Ass that he may Squeal Like a Pig
Nighty Nightmare Nyx, proving herself to be quite inept even by the already-low standards of politics, continues her policy of raising the sun and moon normally, which somehow manages to make her reign even less popular than it was to begin with. Her only supporters, the Children of Nightmare, are beginning to complain that she's gone soft, while the rest of the population, including all of the ponies who were clamoring for her to resume raising the sun and the moon, don't trust her or believe that she has reformed, even though she has given them what they wanted. On top of that, she is still a moody twat with no personality or motivations, and so, continuing to dwindle off into the twilight realm of her own secret thoughts, she now confines herself to her bedroom, raising the sun and moon and overseeing minor affairs of state, but otherwise doing little besides mope.
The more of this I read, the more I begin to question the wisdom of even trying to write this kind of super-serious grimdark stuff in this universe in the first place. The current situation in this story is one that would fit just fine in a high fantasy novel about royal intrigue: a usurper has seized control of the throne, but her rule is unstable, meanwhile she's plagued by feelings of self-doubt and other personal problems. It sets a precarious, uncomfortable mood: she's fully in power now, but for how long will it last? If George R.R. Martin were writing this, for instance, we could probably assume that within the space of a few chapters Nyx is either going to be beheaded, exiled, tortured, maimed, >raped, sealed in a barrel and cast adrift at sea, or some combination of all of the above, which at this point I wouldn't mind.
However, since it's Peen Stroke, the next scene is completely incongruous and silly, breaking the mood established in the opening part of the chapter while achieving nothing in particular. Out of absolutely nowhere, Pinkie Pie suddenly shows up in the castle courtyard and manages to overpower all of the guards using nothing but the power of laughter and cartoon physics. Nightmare Moon, as usual showing complete disdain for the royal protocols her subordinate put in place but which for some reason she doesn't just formally put an end to, flies down, tells her guards to piss off and leave the intruder alone, and speaks to Pinkie.
Pinkie gives a long-winded nonsensical explanation in her typical patois that is probably intended to be cute or funny, but is mostly annoying here. It amounts to this: Pinkie wants to talk to NM about something, but the guards told her she needs to make an appointment. So, she broke into the castle instead.
Instead of throwing her into the dungeon like she did with Twilight or the CMC for literally the same infraction, Nyx asks Pinkie what she wants. As it turns out, she did all this for no reason other than to personally deliver an invitation to Twist's birthday party, something which could just as easily have been sent through the mail. Haha le wacky random Pinkie Pie, amirite guise?
Continuing to behave like an unstable lunatic, Nyx throws the invitation on the ground and stomps on it. Continuing to behave like a clueless airhead who is completely oblivious to literally everything that's going on around her, Pinkie Pie makes some non-sequitur remarks and giggles like a retard. After that, Nyx composes herself, politely informs Pinkie that she won't be attending the party, and then Pinkie departs in appropriately cartoonish fashion.
There are so many things wrong with a scene like this that I'm not even going to bother seriously analyzing it. There is no point to this scene: it makes no sense, the humor is weak and relies entirely on "le random wacky Pinkie Pie" schtick that I'm guessing was already starting to wear thin even at this early stage of the fandom, and it does little to advance the story in a meaningful way. Even if Twist's party is going to be a significant scene, all that really needed to happen here is for Nyx to receive an invitation and decline to attend the party. This scene is implausible even by cartoon standards, and even by the standards of cartoon ponies these characters' actions are nonsensical. Even setting Pinkie aside, Nyx's behavior is all over the place here. One minute she's laughing good-naturedly at Pinkie's antics, the next she's furious and shouting, the next she's being polite. None of it makes sense from any perspective.
>>261783
One thing that always bugged me about the show?
Everyone in the main six has a goal except Applejack, because they took hers away first.
Except some other characters also have vague/no goals, yet this only hurts AJ's writing.
Twilight studies and loves to learn. She'll never be done.
Rainbow flies and wants to be an athlete AND join the Wonderbolts. She'll never be done being an athlete but joining the Wonderbolts is a concrete goal. Yet because she joins too early (before the season finale) the Wonderbolts have to act like pricks so she can learn moral lessons. Except not really since you can let characters learn from masters/experts/more experienced poners.
Pinkie parties and wants to make all her friends happy. No life goals beyond that, she doesn't want to be promoted to Assistant Manager or become the manager of Sugarcube Corner 2 right next to the first one. Yet her simple goal, "Make friends happy and make new friends", is enough.
Fluttershy also has no long-term goal. She just likes looking after animals and healing them.
Rarity wants fame, money, and validation. She wants to climb the social ladder and become the most famous dressmaker of all.
Applejack likes farming (usually) and does that well. But her long-term goal? Raise money for Granny's new hip. When that's forgotten about, they forget to give AJ a new goal like "Raise money for a bigger barn" or "Buy new ploughs" or "Get a new tractor" or "Raise money to send Apple Bloom to engineer college" or anything like that.
Honestly, I'm surprised they made Applejack a traditional mare who likes being traditional, instead of making her the "Gray Sheep with a heart of white". You know, the one who's still Team Gold but thinks we should incorporate the good bits of Team Purple's beliefs. She still loves traditional farming but thinks they should use big silly-looking fantasy super-farming vehicles to augment that. Would give her conflicts with her traditional family while still letting her be the Traditional Side of conflicts against more pro-magitech foes.
She can be the "An automatic juicer is a better idea than having some pony crush the fruit with her hooves! It's faster with no downsides!" pony in one episode and the "Flim and Flam are overfarming and damaging the environment and sustainability of the farm with their dangerous and untrustworthy machine! Your tech has downsides so I reject it!" pony in another.
It's possible to hang onto traditions without rejecting new technologies. AnarchoPrimitivists LARPing their little caveman roleplay in the woods won't have agriculture, stone tools, ploughs, tamed oxes, or anything else white people invented billions of years ago. A robot that does your job for you is bad (AJ would say no to flying golem farmer robots. Her rival who says yes to them will have to deal with a robot uprising) but a tool that makes it easier is great.
They didn't even give her a rival who plants some other food like carrots or cabbages.
>MY CABBAGES!
Also, they never gave Spike any goal beyond ploughing Rarity. He doesn't dream of being taken seriously (and he gets that in the Crystal Empire! Surprised they never did a "Home is where your first friends are, not wherever treats you best" episode about that) and he doesn't dream about improving Dragon-Pony relations. He's just a house nigger for Twilight.
His draconic nature is never explored deeply, he never says "I'm a good dragon and that means I protect my friends and help them out and fight for what's right!" he says "I'm not a bad dragon I'm a good pony!" because the show wanted to cast dragons as critics of the show and teenagers until the writers decided it was time to sell WaifuDragon. In one episode he makes up his own "Dragon Code" so the writers can do that 70s sitcom cliche "You have saved my life! I am eternally grateful, new master!" bit and then never bring it up again. That should be Spike all the time, trying to figure out what it means to be a good guy and taking inspiration from stories of heroes.
He likes comic books but that's used for jokes, comics are just treated as "silly guy things" in this series like Ogres And Obliettes and Hoofball. Except when the ponies are doing comic book adventures or playing DnD. Anyway, they should have made him an artist. One day he draws a sketch of some bad guy, and turns out he's a shockingly good artist. Could do a jarringly hyper-realistic pencil sketch Spike scribbles up onto some paper in seconds to show to someone saying "the bad guy looked like this!". And later on he reveals he wants to make his own comics.
Could crack jokes about Spike-Man the Dragon Superhero having a hot girlfriend named Charity or Clarity or Carroty (also there's a sexy villainess named Disparity or Vanity who uses him like a tool with her brainwashing power! Deeply symbolic of how he loves Rarity but secretly wishes she didn't use him as a pincushion) and his works being nothing but stupid wish-fulfillment where Twilight is an Owl who serves as his pet/daughter/servant/butler/whatever. Or could take a more interesting approach and make it a fully original story. Or combine both approaches.
Tons of shows have written a creative character well, and creative jobs are easy to write about. Spike needs something to do besides be a simp dragon. I think the only other writer in the series is Daring Do who turns out to live her adventures instead of imagining them so she doesn't count. Sure in S4e69 Twilight mentions a book about assfuckery by Sparkly Eyes the pony, but that doesn't count. No onscreen characters we meet and learn about write, except for Daring Do. Spike literally has nothing going for him besides his desire to serve Twilight and Rarity, simp for Rarity, be a hero usually like every other hero, and also sometimes he gets big.
In my silver fic I make Spike become a comics artist.
One thing that always bugged me about the show?
Everyone in the main six has a goal except Applejack, because they took hers away first.
Except some other characters also have vague/no goals, yet this only hurts AJ's writing.
Twilight studies and loves to learn. She'll never be done.
Rainbow flies and wants to be an athlete AND join the Wonderbolts. She'll never be done being an athlete but joining the Wonderbolts is a concrete goal. Yet because she joins too early (before the season finale) the Wonderbolts have to act like pricks so she can learn moral lessons. Except not really since you can let characters learn from masters/experts/more experienced poners.
Pinkie parties and wants to make all her friends happy. No life goals beyond that, she doesn't want to be promoted to Assistant Manager or become the manager of Sugarcube Corner 2 right next to the first one. Yet her simple goal, "Make friends happy and make new friends", is enough.
Fluttershy also has no long-term goal. She just likes looking after animals and healing them.
Rarity wants fame, money, and validation. She wants to climb the social ladder and become the most famous dressmaker of all.
Applejack likes farming (usually) and does that well. But her long-term goal? Raise money for Granny's new hip. When that's forgotten about, they forget to give AJ a new goal like "Raise money for a bigger barn" or "Buy new ploughs" or "Get a new tractor" or "Raise money to send Apple Bloom to engineer college" or anything like that.
Honestly, I'm surprised they made Applejack a traditional mare who likes being traditional, instead of making her the "Gray Sheep with a heart of white". You know, the one who's still Team Gold but thinks we should incorporate the good bits of Team Purple's beliefs. She still loves traditional farming but thinks they should use big silly-looking fantasy super-farming vehicles to augment that. Would give her conflicts with her traditional family while still letting her be the Traditional Side of conflicts against more pro-magitech foes.
She can be the "An automatic juicer is a better idea than having some pony crush the fruit with her hooves! It's faster with no downsides!" pony in one episode and the "Flim and Flam are overfarming and damaging the environment and sustainability of the farm with their dangerous and untrustworthy machine! Your tech has downsides so I reject it!" pony in another.
It's possible to hang onto traditions without rejecting new technologies. AnarchoPrimitivists LARPing their little caveman roleplay in the woods won't have agriculture, stone tools, ploughs, tamed oxes, or anything else white people invented billions of years ago. A robot that does your job for you is bad (AJ would say no to flying golem farmer robots. Her rival who says yes to them will have to deal with a robot uprising) but a tool that makes it easier is great.
They didn't even give her a rival who plants some other food like carrots or cabbages.
>MY CABBAGES!
Also, they never gave Spike any goal beyond ploughing Rarity. He doesn't dream of being taken seriously (and he gets that in the Crystal Empire! Surprised they never did a "Home is where your first friends are, not wherever treats you best" episode about that) and he doesn't dream about improving Dragon-Pony relations. He's just a house nigger for Twilight.
His draconic nature is never explored deeply, he never says "I'm a good dragon and that means I protect my friends and help them out and fight for what's right!" he says "I'm not a bad dragon I'm a good pony!" because the show wanted to cast dragons as critics of the show and teenagers until the writers decided it was time to sell WaifuDragon. In one episode he makes up his own "Dragon Code" so the writers can do that 70s sitcom cliche "You have saved my life! I am eternally grateful, new master!" bit and then never bring it up again. That should be Spike all the time, trying to figure out what it means to be a good guy and taking inspiration from stories of heroes.
He likes comic books but that's used for jokes, comics are just treated as "silly guy things" in this series like Ogres And Obliettes and Hoofball. Except when the ponies are doing comic book adventures or playing DnD. Anyway, they should have made him an artist. One day he draws a sketch of some bad guy, and turns out he's a shockingly good artist. Could do a jarringly hyper-realistic pencil sketch Spike scribbles up onto some paper in seconds to show to someone saying "the bad guy looked like this!". And later on he reveals he wants to make his own comics.
Could crack jokes about Spike-Man the Dragon Superhero having a hot girlfriend named Charity or Clarity or Carroty (also there's a sexy villainess named Disparity or Vanity who uses him like a tool with her brainwashing power! Deeply symbolic of how he loves Rarity but secretly wishes she didn't use him as a pincushion) and his works being nothing but stupid wish-fulfillment where Twilight is an Owl who serves as his pet/daughter/servant/butler/whatever. Or could take a more interesting approach and make it a fully original story. Or combine both approaches.
Tons of shows have written a creative character well, and creative jobs are easy to write about. Spike needs something to do besides be a simp dragon. I think the only other writer in the series is Daring Do who turns out to live her adventures instead of imagining them so she doesn't count. Sure in S4e69 Twilight mentions a book about assfuckery by Sparkly Eyes the pony, but that doesn't count. No onscreen characters we meet and learn about write, except for Daring Do. Spike literally has nothing going for him besides his desire to serve Twilight and Rarity, simp for Rarity, be a hero usually like every other hero, and also sometimes he gets big.
In my silver fic I make Spike become a comics artist.
>>261834
Thank you!
Wladizu sounds like something a Demon Name Generator would fart out for a writer hoping for something cooler to discard.
Should I keep posting something like "Thanks for still doing this! Great job, keep it up! Fuck that story up, champ! Keep going, it's almost over! Then you can tear apart some other overhyped edgypony trashfire like Games Ponies Play or Fallout Equestria!" every time you post? Sometimes I think of something to say about the story/review, and sometimes the sheer shitness of the story leaves me speechless and I can't think of anything to say except "Nice, keep going!".
Also there was a "Who is the best OC" fandom poll on Equestria Daily and the scores are hilarious.
This isn't a character quality poll, it's a popularity check.
Top score? Fluffle Puff, the fucking Yukkuri of the pony fandom. A big fluffy cute little idiot with no depth beyond that. But she doesn't need depth to be adorable.
Second place? Littlepip, a trash OC from babby's first edgy Pokemon fanfic. There is no "Scared little bullied child to gunslinging murderhobo" character arc, she's a bad audience surrogate and a worse protagonist, to the point where when I was reading this for the first time I legitimately expected a "This is a DND game played by the CMCs" plot twist at the end.
That would explain why Black Sweetie Belle does stupid things for retarded reasons and has a child's understanding of Lawful Good, sharing the group's limited medical supplies with bandits who attacked the heroes first and got fucked over for it.
Also Steelhooves is played by Scootaloo, she just wanted to play a cool big guy in a suit of power armour and his one "apple poner" character trait means his real name is the only apple name she could think of, Applesnack.
Littlepip is Apple Bloom trying to win a bizarre mess of a campaign and Calamity is the GMPC of Spike.
For those who don't play Dungeons and Dragons, a "GM Player Character" is when the GM makes his own character to join the heroes even though he's also the guy controlling everything including monsters, villains, and the world. Bad DMs will usually make their GMPCs incredibly important, overpowered, or the one good member of evil races/organizations it's otherwise okay to genocide. Oh and Spike's an edgy teenager so even though the Sourcebook they're using left the fates of every dead important character ambiguous, he kills off every "canon to his world" character he can think of in an attempt to make things edgier than the Sourcebook ever wanted.
Anyway, moving on...
Third place? Snowdrop, the blind pity party from a pretentious fan animation. No sequels, no spinoffs, but she's remained in the public consciousness because most bronies aren't conscious.
Then there's Nyx, a nothing character.
And then Apogee, who I'm warming up to. At least her artist made her more than an incest meme.
It's a symptom of something that such ancient and shit characters that have gone fucking nowhere get more votes than Apogee, who's still being actively drawn and developed. Add Apogee to the /mlpol/ 4chan cup roster!
Then there's "I don't like any of them",
followed by the chick from those Horse Wife comics, followed by Button Mash's mother from one episode of an animated show that immediately got C+D'd for being too show-accurate, featuring a Hasbro-owned background character as the protag, and karma for making Pony Rock Anthem.
Then there's Blackjack. If Littlepip is the protagonist of a bad anime aimed at children who want to feel adult, Blackjack is the OC protag of a fanfic written by Micheal Bay's sexually-confused teenaged cousin. She's the Enoby Dementia Raven Wae to Harry Potter's steaming pile of stolen dogshit. She's a literal red and black alicorn OC, even though this fandom's collective understanding of what makes an OC good or bad begins and ends at "If it's too edgy and not a kawaii waifu uguu it's popular to hate it so I hate it". What a fucking sham. 111 votes. At least 111 people still wanted that piece of trash to win and represent the fandom's creativity and tastes. And honestly, it would be hilariously fitting if everything the bronies claimed to hate when trying to look above themselves ended up as the character to beat all other characters and spit on everyone who ever tried and everyone who's currently trying. A shit edgy character from a shittier edgier version of an intellectually worthless fusion-fic trying and failing to combine Fallout with MLP, cannibalizing both and producing nothing but shit.
Then there's Milky Way, the lactation fetish meme.
Then there's "Other". I assume everyone who clicked this meant "My own Oc who I have done nothing with".
And then there's "Echo and all other bat ponies".
And then, Anonfilly.
Then some other names and Wheely Bopper, aka Duckroll, the inspiration for Rickroll.
Thank you!
Wladizu sounds like something a Demon Name Generator would fart out for a writer hoping for something cooler to discard.
Should I keep posting something like "Thanks for still doing this! Great job, keep it up! Fuck that story up, champ! Keep going, it's almost over! Then you can tear apart some other overhyped edgypony trashfire like Games Ponies Play or Fallout Equestria!" every time you post? Sometimes I think of something to say about the story/review, and sometimes the sheer shitness of the story leaves me speechless and I can't think of anything to say except "Nice, keep going!".
Also there was a "Who is the best OC" fandom poll on Equestria Daily and the scores are hilarious.
This isn't a character quality poll, it's a popularity check.
Top score? Fluffle Puff, the fucking Yukkuri of the pony fandom. A big fluffy cute little idiot with no depth beyond that. But she doesn't need depth to be adorable.
Second place? Littlepip, a trash OC from babby's first edgy Pokemon fanfic. There is no "Scared little bullied child to gunslinging murderhobo" character arc, she's a bad audience surrogate and a worse protagonist, to the point where when I was reading this for the first time I legitimately expected a "This is a DND game played by the CMCs" plot twist at the end.
That would explain why Black Sweetie Belle does stupid things for retarded reasons and has a child's understanding of Lawful Good, sharing the group's limited medical supplies with bandits who attacked the heroes first and got fucked over for it.
Also Steelhooves is played by Scootaloo, she just wanted to play a cool big guy in a suit of power armour and his one "apple poner" character trait means his real name is the only apple name she could think of, Applesnack.
Littlepip is Apple Bloom trying to win a bizarre mess of a campaign and Calamity is the GMPC of Spike.
For those who don't play Dungeons and Dragons, a "GM Player Character" is when the GM makes his own character to join the heroes even though he's also the guy controlling everything including monsters, villains, and the world. Bad DMs will usually make their GMPCs incredibly important, overpowered, or the one good member of evil races/organizations it's otherwise okay to genocide. Oh and Spike's an edgy teenager so even though the Sourcebook they're using left the fates of every dead important character ambiguous, he kills off every "canon to his world" character he can think of in an attempt to make things edgier than the Sourcebook ever wanted.
Anyway, moving on...
Third place? Snowdrop, the blind pity party from a pretentious fan animation. No sequels, no spinoffs, but she's remained in the public consciousness because most bronies aren't conscious.
Then there's Nyx, a nothing character.
And then Apogee, who I'm warming up to. At least her artist made her more than an incest meme.
It's a symptom of something that such ancient and shit characters that have gone fucking nowhere get more votes than Apogee, who's still being actively drawn and developed. Add Apogee to the /mlpol/ 4chan cup roster!
Then there's "I don't like any of them",
followed by the chick from those Horse Wife comics, followed by Button Mash's mother from one episode of an animated show that immediately got C+D'd for being too show-accurate, featuring a Hasbro-owned background character as the protag, and karma for making Pony Rock Anthem.
Then there's Blackjack. If Littlepip is the protagonist of a bad anime aimed at children who want to feel adult, Blackjack is the OC protag of a fanfic written by Micheal Bay's sexually-confused teenaged cousin. She's the Enoby Dementia Raven Wae to Harry Potter's steaming pile of stolen dogshit. She's a literal red and black alicorn OC, even though this fandom's collective understanding of what makes an OC good or bad begins and ends at "If it's too edgy and not a kawaii waifu uguu it's popular to hate it so I hate it". What a fucking sham. 111 votes. At least 111 people still wanted that piece of trash to win and represent the fandom's creativity and tastes. And honestly, it would be hilariously fitting if everything the bronies claimed to hate when trying to look above themselves ended up as the character to beat all other characters and spit on everyone who ever tried and everyone who's currently trying. A shit edgy character from a shittier edgier version of an intellectually worthless fusion-fic trying and failing to combine Fallout with MLP, cannibalizing both and producing nothing but shit.
Then there's Milky Way, the lactation fetish meme.
Then there's "Other". I assume everyone who clicked this meant "My own Oc who I have done nothing with".
And then there's "Echo and all other bat ponies".
And then, Anonfilly.
Then some other names and Wheely Bopper, aka Duckroll, the inspiration for Rickroll.
>>261849
Post whatever you want to man, I usually do. I just enjoy getting replies; I'm never quite sure if anyone is still reading these or not.
Also, I think it's pretty obvious who the best OC is. pic related
>>261809
Nyx goes back to her room to mope and sulk some more. She predictably begins thinking about balloons and party games, and starts fantasizing wistfully about how much fun it would be to go to the party after all. She then predictably gets pulled back to what this story laughably considers reality: she remembers that she is NM, bringer of eternal darkness, queen of moping, the unsmiling, Empress of Edge, etc etc. Also predictably, she places blame for this squarely on the shoulders of Nexus and the Children of Nightmare.
In a move that I admit actually surprised me, however, instead of deciding to either go or not go, she realizes that the CMC would probably have more fun at the party than she would, and would probably be more welcome to boot. She decides that she is going to try do do something nice for Twist and the others.
>She was tired of… of having to keep her friends and mother imprisoned in the dungeons.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that literally no one is forcing her to do this, nor is any external force or mechanism compelling it. Every day when she wakes up, Nightmare Nyx makes a conscious decision to keep them locked up, even if she doesn't see it that way.
Anyway, instead of simply letting them all go free and calling it a birthday present for Twist, thus alleviating her own guilty conscience, righting the wrong done to Twilight and the CMC, and bringing a modicum of happiness to Twist all in one fell swoop, she instead puts the CMC into a box and ships them off to Sugar Cube Corner, to be delivered in person by her guards. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. Whether they are being set free permanently or simply being given a day pass to attend the party is left unclear. However, more baffling is that the CMC, instead of showing signs of trauma or at least agitation at having been locked in a cold, dark room for literal weeks and then stuffed into a fucking box without explanation and carried halfway across town, simply leap out of the box and begin immediately behaving like cutesy children, causing me to wonder if maybe the twist here is that Nyx killed them already and replaced them with robotic copies of themselves.
Even more baffling is that they cover for Nyx, deliberately keeping Twist in the dark about the fact that Nyx is NM even though based on previous events it sounds like she already knows, and they lie about the fact that it was Nyx who kept them locked in a dungeon, instead backing up the story that they were "staying with family" for all this time. They even make apologies for Nyx not attending the party in person. If these fillies aren't robot replicants, Nyx or her subordinates must have brainwashed them pretty good.
In the next scene, Spell Nexus comes down to the dungeon to yell at Twilight. Twilight seems pretty laid back all things considered. If I'm understanding the story correctly, she has spent the last several weeks living in a single jail cell with the CMC. Then, suddenly, the guards show up and take the CMC away without explanation. Wouldn't it stand to reason that she'd be agitated and worried about them? Maybe they're being tortured or executed? Maybe she's next? That's what I'd be thinking in her situation, and considering that Twilight spergs out about the tiniest things, you'd rather expect her to be bucking at the walls and yowling her head off right about now. But Peen Stroke's Twilight is just sitting calmly on her cot when Nexus shows up. She even sasses back and forth with him a bit.
Anyway, Nexus comes down and yells at her because Nightmare Moon isn't being as evil as he thinks she ought to be, and he's buttblasted at Twilight about it. He tells her about the CMC being wrapped up in a box, and shipped off with a complimentary order of fudge to be used as party favors at Jefferey Epstallion's, *cough* I mean Twist's, birthday party.
Twilight's response:
>The smile on Twilight's face turned to a wide grin, and she gave one of her forelegs a triumphant swing. “That's my girl.”
I stopped expecting natural-sounding dialogue and behavior from these characters some time ago; at this point I'm satisfied if their dialects are at least show-accurate. But come on, Peen Stroke. Is this really the best thing you could think of for Twilight to say here?
Anyway, this goes about the way you'd expect. Nexus is all like blah blah fuck you Twilight, you turned Nyx soft, blah blah blah friendship sucks. Twilight is all like blah blah blah you are wrong because blah blah blah friendship is magic™.
More importantly though is that Peen Stroke continues setting up Spell Nexus to take the fall for all of Nyx's shitty behavior. The conflict within Nyx is presented as her good nature fighting against Nexus' evil influence; it completely ignores the fact that Nyx is firmly in charge of both herself and Equestria and can do whatever she wants, and yet still chose to do all of the ridiculous shit that she did. This includes locking Twilight, who is still defending her for some reason, in the dungeon, leaving her to rot there while Nyx sits upstairs and pouts about how bad doing it made her feel.
It also is made clear from this conversation that Nexus is not a Svengali or Rasputin type character; he is obviously a true believer in Nightmare Moon who remains devoted to her and her original cause. He is not controlling her from behind the scenes, he is her actual subordinate. That he is angry at Twilight's influence over Nyx proves that he has little real influence over her himself, thus making Nyx even more culpable for her behavior even as the story tries to make it look like it was all Nexus' doing.
Post whatever you want to man, I usually do. I just enjoy getting replies; I'm never quite sure if anyone is still reading these or not.
Also, I think it's pretty obvious who the best OC is. pic related
>>261809
Nyx goes back to her room to mope and sulk some more. She predictably begins thinking about balloons and party games, and starts fantasizing wistfully about how much fun it would be to go to the party after all. She then predictably gets pulled back to what this story laughably considers reality: she remembers that she is NM, bringer of eternal darkness, queen of moping, the unsmiling, Empress of Edge, etc etc. Also predictably, she places blame for this squarely on the shoulders of Nexus and the Children of Nightmare.
In a move that I admit actually surprised me, however, instead of deciding to either go or not go, she realizes that the CMC would probably have more fun at the party than she would, and would probably be more welcome to boot. She decides that she is going to try do do something nice for Twist and the others.
>She was tired of… of having to keep her friends and mother imprisoned in the dungeons.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that literally no one is forcing her to do this, nor is any external force or mechanism compelling it. Every day when she wakes up, Nightmare Nyx makes a conscious decision to keep them locked up, even if she doesn't see it that way.
Anyway, instead of simply letting them all go free and calling it a birthday present for Twist, thus alleviating her own guilty conscience, righting the wrong done to Twilight and the CMC, and bringing a modicum of happiness to Twist all in one fell swoop, she instead puts the CMC into a box and ships them off to Sugar Cube Corner, to be delivered in person by her guards. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. Whether they are being set free permanently or simply being given a day pass to attend the party is left unclear. However, more baffling is that the CMC, instead of showing signs of trauma or at least agitation at having been locked in a cold, dark room for literal weeks and then stuffed into a fucking box without explanation and carried halfway across town, simply leap out of the box and begin immediately behaving like cutesy children, causing me to wonder if maybe the twist here is that Nyx killed them already and replaced them with robotic copies of themselves.
Even more baffling is that they cover for Nyx, deliberately keeping Twist in the dark about the fact that Nyx is NM even though based on previous events it sounds like she already knows, and they lie about the fact that it was Nyx who kept them locked in a dungeon, instead backing up the story that they were "staying with family" for all this time. They even make apologies for Nyx not attending the party in person. If these fillies aren't robot replicants, Nyx or her subordinates must have brainwashed them pretty good.
In the next scene, Spell Nexus comes down to the dungeon to yell at Twilight. Twilight seems pretty laid back all things considered. If I'm understanding the story correctly, she has spent the last several weeks living in a single jail cell with the CMC. Then, suddenly, the guards show up and take the CMC away without explanation. Wouldn't it stand to reason that she'd be agitated and worried about them? Maybe they're being tortured or executed? Maybe she's next? That's what I'd be thinking in her situation, and considering that Twilight spergs out about the tiniest things, you'd rather expect her to be bucking at the walls and yowling her head off right about now. But Peen Stroke's Twilight is just sitting calmly on her cot when Nexus shows up. She even sasses back and forth with him a bit.
Anyway, Nexus comes down and yells at her because Nightmare Moon isn't being as evil as he thinks she ought to be, and he's buttblasted at Twilight about it. He tells her about the CMC being wrapped up in a box, and shipped off with a complimentary order of fudge to be used as party favors at Jefferey Epstallion's, *cough* I mean Twist's, birthday party.
Twilight's response:
>The smile on Twilight's face turned to a wide grin, and she gave one of her forelegs a triumphant swing. “That's my girl.”
I stopped expecting natural-sounding dialogue and behavior from these characters some time ago; at this point I'm satisfied if their dialects are at least show-accurate. But come on, Peen Stroke. Is this really the best thing you could think of for Twilight to say here?
Anyway, this goes about the way you'd expect. Nexus is all like blah blah fuck you Twilight, you turned Nyx soft, blah blah blah friendship sucks. Twilight is all like blah blah blah you are wrong because blah blah blah friendship is magic™.
More importantly though is that Peen Stroke continues setting up Spell Nexus to take the fall for all of Nyx's shitty behavior. The conflict within Nyx is presented as her good nature fighting against Nexus' evil influence; it completely ignores the fact that Nyx is firmly in charge of both herself and Equestria and can do whatever she wants, and yet still chose to do all of the ridiculous shit that she did. This includes locking Twilight, who is still defending her for some reason, in the dungeon, leaving her to rot there while Nyx sits upstairs and pouts about how bad doing it made her feel.
It also is made clear from this conversation that Nexus is not a Svengali or Rasputin type character; he is obviously a true believer in Nightmare Moon who remains devoted to her and her original cause. He is not controlling her from behind the scenes, he is her actual subordinate. That he is angry at Twilight's influence over Nyx proves that he has little real influence over her himself, thus making Nyx even more culpable for her behavior even as the story tries to make it look like it was all Nexus' doing.
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>>261911
This goes back and forth for awhile. I'm not going to delve into it in detail because most of it is just more tangents and bullshit anyway. He talks about Celestia and how she influenced Twilight, and how Celestia's vision of Equestria wasn't evil enough either, and blah blah blah. He also complains that Celestia sent him to be some kind of "sacrificial lamb" (he actually uses this term), but he doesn't elaborate and I can't quite figure out what he's talking about. He accuses Celestia of betraying him somehow, and of NM showing him the light, but again, it isn't explained and there's no event in the preceding text that I remember that it could be alluding to. My guess is that it's foreshadowing something that will be explained in detail later. It seems to have something to do with Celestia's assigning him to investigate the fragments of NM's armor. Maybe the armor was dangerous somehow? I don't know. Maybe it will be explained later, or maybe this is just another of any number of random threads this story has introduced that it never follows up on.
Anyway, this ends with Nexus advancing menacingly on Twilight and Twilight backing away. We're left wondering what it is he's going to do exactly. Probably >rape.
Next scene. Nexus informs Nightmare Moon that Twilight is refusing to eat and is demanding to speak to her. NM is just like "aight nigga" and goes downstairs to see what all this bullshit is about. She sees Twilight lying on her bed, she seems weak and sick. Nyx approaches her, and then this happens:
>“Did the guards do something to you?” Nightmare Moon asked, still speaking softly, but with a firm undertone.
>“I'm sorry… I'm sorry…”
>Nightmare Moon nuzzled Twilight’s neck reassuringly. “Twilight, no, whatever they did to you, it wasn't your fault.”
I feel like I shouldn't even have to explain how little sense this makes, but I'm going to do it anyway. Nyx's behavior just keeps getting more erratic and less believable. Not only do I not have any idea at this point who this character is, I don't even know who she's supposed to be. This isn't a character at all anymore, this is just an entity that speaks words and does things without any apparent motivation or explanation. She's either bellowing cliche villain lines at the top of her lungs, moping and cutting herself and feeling depressed, laughing and giggling like a child, or acting sentimental and compassionate. She cycles through all of these emotions completely at random, sometimes multiple times in the same scene, as if she were one of those dolls who speaks a prerecorded line when you pull the string. All of Peen Stroke's characters are like this honestly, but Nyx is by far the worst offender. At least the others all have prerecorded lines that are more or less consistent with their characters; Nyx's lines run the gamut between sappy tearjerker dialogue, angsty teenage whining, cornball villain-speak, insane angry outbursts, sentimental dreck, and half-assed apologies that mostly dump blame for whatever she's apologizing for onto her subordinates. Oh yes, and let's not forget the crying; though to be fair I think I'd be hard-pressed to find a single character in this story who doesn't randomly burst into tears on a fairly regular basis.
Twilight and Nyx's mother-daughter relationship is basically the hinge pin that this entire story hangs on, so it's bad enough that their interactions have been handled as clumsily as they have. But as stiff and superficial as the emotion in the early scenes was, I didn't think it would actually manage to get worse over time. Twilight and filly-Nyx together were never believable as a mother and daughter, but at least they looked like they were supposed to be. The sentimentality in the early part of the story was like watching a shampoo commercial or something, where a bunch of actors run around with each other laughing and playing, pretending to be a family; you don't believe they're a family, but you acknowledge that they look like one. This shit right here, though....I have no idea what the fuck this is even supposed to be.
Anyway. Turns out that Twilight got her magic collar off somehow and also got a dagger somehow. This alone should make Nyx suspicious that this is some type of setup, but apparently the thought never enters her mind. Twilight tells Nyx she's sorry she ever found her in the forest, and stabs her with the dagger.
>“Yes,” Twilight replied as she continued her slow approach. “You’re a monster, you’re a tyrant, and I should have never saved you from the forest.”
From the setup in the last scene, it's clear that Nexus put some kind of voodoo hex on her to make her attack Nyx so that Nyx will feel betrayed and stop wanting to be all nicey-nice to everypony. However, what is so supremely ironic here is that this is probably the most believable thing Twilight (or anyone in this story, for that matter) has said or done in a long time.
Here is the situation from Twilight's perspective: Nyx deposed the rightful rulers, assumed the throne herself without any valid claim to it or any apparent reason (valid or otherwise), imposed martial law on the country, fucked with the natural order of day and night, locked Twilight and the CMC in the dungeon, then once her control on things was solidified turned into a moody emo teenager, engaging with the affairs of government in only the most minimum, perfunctory role and refusing to even stand by her own insane policies. Monster, check. Tyrant, check. "I should never have saved you from the forest?" Actually a pretty sensible conclusion for Twilight to draw at this point.
Again, I just want to point out how ironic it is that the most realistic and believable action that has yet been taken in this story by any of its characters is being taken by a character who is under a spell that compels her to go against her nature.
This goes back and forth for awhile. I'm not going to delve into it in detail because most of it is just more tangents and bullshit anyway. He talks about Celestia and how she influenced Twilight, and how Celestia's vision of Equestria wasn't evil enough either, and blah blah blah. He also complains that Celestia sent him to be some kind of "sacrificial lamb" (he actually uses this term), but he doesn't elaborate and I can't quite figure out what he's talking about. He accuses Celestia of betraying him somehow, and of NM showing him the light, but again, it isn't explained and there's no event in the preceding text that I remember that it could be alluding to. My guess is that it's foreshadowing something that will be explained in detail later. It seems to have something to do with Celestia's assigning him to investigate the fragments of NM's armor. Maybe the armor was dangerous somehow? I don't know. Maybe it will be explained later, or maybe this is just another of any number of random threads this story has introduced that it never follows up on.
Anyway, this ends with Nexus advancing menacingly on Twilight and Twilight backing away. We're left wondering what it is he's going to do exactly. Probably >rape.
Next scene. Nexus informs Nightmare Moon that Twilight is refusing to eat and is demanding to speak to her. NM is just like "aight nigga" and goes downstairs to see what all this bullshit is about. She sees Twilight lying on her bed, she seems weak and sick. Nyx approaches her, and then this happens:
>“Did the guards do something to you?” Nightmare Moon asked, still speaking softly, but with a firm undertone.
>“I'm sorry… I'm sorry…”
>Nightmare Moon nuzzled Twilight’s neck reassuringly. “Twilight, no, whatever they did to you, it wasn't your fault.”
I feel like I shouldn't even have to explain how little sense this makes, but I'm going to do it anyway. Nyx's behavior just keeps getting more erratic and less believable. Not only do I not have any idea at this point who this character is, I don't even know who she's supposed to be. This isn't a character at all anymore, this is just an entity that speaks words and does things without any apparent motivation or explanation. She's either bellowing cliche villain lines at the top of her lungs, moping and cutting herself and feeling depressed, laughing and giggling like a child, or acting sentimental and compassionate. She cycles through all of these emotions completely at random, sometimes multiple times in the same scene, as if she were one of those dolls who speaks a prerecorded line when you pull the string. All of Peen Stroke's characters are like this honestly, but Nyx is by far the worst offender. At least the others all have prerecorded lines that are more or less consistent with their characters; Nyx's lines run the gamut between sappy tearjerker dialogue, angsty teenage whining, cornball villain-speak, insane angry outbursts, sentimental dreck, and half-assed apologies that mostly dump blame for whatever she's apologizing for onto her subordinates. Oh yes, and let's not forget the crying; though to be fair I think I'd be hard-pressed to find a single character in this story who doesn't randomly burst into tears on a fairly regular basis.
Twilight and Nyx's mother-daughter relationship is basically the hinge pin that this entire story hangs on, so it's bad enough that their interactions have been handled as clumsily as they have. But as stiff and superficial as the emotion in the early scenes was, I didn't think it would actually manage to get worse over time. Twilight and filly-Nyx together were never believable as a mother and daughter, but at least they looked like they were supposed to be. The sentimentality in the early part of the story was like watching a shampoo commercial or something, where a bunch of actors run around with each other laughing and playing, pretending to be a family; you don't believe they're a family, but you acknowledge that they look like one. This shit right here, though....I have no idea what the fuck this is even supposed to be.
Anyway. Turns out that Twilight got her magic collar off somehow and also got a dagger somehow. This alone should make Nyx suspicious that this is some type of setup, but apparently the thought never enters her mind. Twilight tells Nyx she's sorry she ever found her in the forest, and stabs her with the dagger.
>“Yes,” Twilight replied as she continued her slow approach. “You’re a monster, you’re a tyrant, and I should have never saved you from the forest.”
From the setup in the last scene, it's clear that Nexus put some kind of voodoo hex on her to make her attack Nyx so that Nyx will feel betrayed and stop wanting to be all nicey-nice to everypony. However, what is so supremely ironic here is that this is probably the most believable thing Twilight (or anyone in this story, for that matter) has said or done in a long time.
Here is the situation from Twilight's perspective: Nyx deposed the rightful rulers, assumed the throne herself without any valid claim to it or any apparent reason (valid or otherwise), imposed martial law on the country, fucked with the natural order of day and night, locked Twilight and the CMC in the dungeon, then once her control on things was solidified turned into a moody emo teenager, engaging with the affairs of government in only the most minimum, perfunctory role and refusing to even stand by her own insane policies. Monster, check. Tyrant, check. "I should never have saved you from the forest?" Actually a pretty sensible conclusion for Twilight to draw at this point.
Again, I just want to point out how ironic it is that the most realistic and believable action that has yet been taken in this story by any of its characters is being taken by a character who is under a spell that compels her to go against her nature.
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>>261914
>“Twilight… Twilight, what’s wrong? Why— why are you…” Nightmare Moon stuttered out. Her voice grew weak as she began to hyperventilate. “It’s… i-it’s me… it’s Nyx… d-don’t you remember—”
By contrast, Nyx's reaction makes no sense at all. Again, that Twilight would come to see Nyx as a threat to all of Equestria that needs to be neutralized at any cost is a logical view for her to have after weeks of imprisonment on top of everything else that has happened. Any sane person (pony, whatever) in Nyx's position would probably just assume Twilight felt this way and would take a shot at her if given half a chance. That's the whole point of keeping an enemy locked up; you are protecting yourself from whatever threat they might pose if you let them run free.
It would actually make perfect sense for Nyx to react exactly the way Nexus clearly expects her to: to immediately become enraged, realize that she can't trust anypony, not even her own mother, and to order Twilight's execution. This is a perfectly natural response to the present course of events; that's why Nexus set it up this way. However, instead she just seems completely shocked by all this, apparently assuming....actually, I have no idea what we're supposed to assume she's thinking. As usual, none of this makes any sense.
Nyx doesn't particularly want to be an evil queen, and nobody really forced her to be one, but she became one anyway, and continues to be one even though she can abdicate (or at least stop being evil) any time she wants. She doesn't abdicate because she is paranoid about Celestia and Luna sending her to the moon; that part makes sense enough. Yet at the same time she naively assumes that Twilight is still her friend and still loves her and will defend her, in spite of all the fucked up shit she has done and continues to do. And yet despite this naive assumption, she keeps Twilight under lock and key as if she were afraid of her. She also imprisoned the CMC, for reasons which are beyond all rational comprehension, and yet allowed AJ, Rarity, Pinkie et al to go free, despite them potentially posing an actual threat to her rule. Then, she just randomly decides to let the CMC go free, but keeps Twilight locked up. Then, she is surprised when Twilight suddenly attacks her.
Throughout all of this, there seems to be some kind of underlying attempt to justify it by implying that Spell Nexus is somehow forcing her to be more evil than she would like to be, yet there is little evidence of his being able to wield any serious influence over her, and zero evidence that he could compel her by force. In fact, what's currently happening (Twilight being put under a spell so that she will attack Nyx) was all just some convoluted scheme cooked up by Nexus, precisely because he can't exert any actual control over her to get her to do what he wants. This whole story has become such a garbled mess of utter nonsense that it's giving me an actual headache trying to sort it all out.
Anyway, this exchange goes on.
>“I remember perfectly what you’ve done. You took over Equestria. You banished my mentor to the sun and brought eternal night. You locked up three innocent fillies and made me promise them everything would be all right before you took them away.”
Again, these are all perfectly valid points, and perfectly valid reasons for Twilight to stab Nyx and attempt to overthrow her rule. For a pony under a spell, Twilight sure is behaving awfully rationally right now. It's weirdly out of character, and would be for any character in this story.
"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
-- Akira Kurosawa
Nyx continues to whine and weep and cower like a spineless little twat, despite the fact that if I understand this universe correctly, NM's magic should vastly outclass anything still-only-a-humble-unicorn Twilight can do, and it should be a relatively simple task for her to fend her off, disarm her, kill her, or do anything she wants to, really. However, since it's a Peen Stroke Moment™, it seems that all Nyx wants to do right now is blubber away helplessly.
Anyway, in a development that should come as no surprise to anyone since the reader already knows this whole thing has been staged, Nexus shows up at precisely the moment that Twilight was about to deliver the killing blow, and sends the guards in to do what Nightmare Moon with her infinite cosmic power (which includes the ability to instantly banish anypony she wants to the fucking moon ffs) was unable to: overpower one small unicorn and take a dagger away from her.
Next scene.
>Nightmare Moon lay on her bed, head resting on her tear-soaked pillow as she hugged her Twilight Sparkle doll to her chest.
I literally burst out laughing when I read this line. Somehow, I don't think that was the intended reaction. The pathos in this story is so pathetic that it has become humor. Peen Stroke, both you and your OC are well fucked and far from home.
This, however, bears closer scrutiny:
>Her world, in a single brief moment, had been shattered. The one solid, constant foundation she had been able to rely on through the chaos of becoming queen had crumbled.
Peen Stroke, in the highly unlikely event that you're actually reading this critique, I'd like you to pay very close attention to what I'm about to say. Nowhere, at any point in this story since Nyx's ascension to the throne of Equestria, is it stated, implied, or even suggested or hinted at that Twilight, Nyx's feelings for Twilight, her prior relationship with Twilight, or anything to do with Twilight, is Nyx's source of strength throughout this terrible ordeal.
Running out of space, will continue in a new post.
>“Twilight… Twilight, what’s wrong? Why— why are you…” Nightmare Moon stuttered out. Her voice grew weak as she began to hyperventilate. “It’s… i-it’s me… it’s Nyx… d-don’t you remember—”
By contrast, Nyx's reaction makes no sense at all. Again, that Twilight would come to see Nyx as a threat to all of Equestria that needs to be neutralized at any cost is a logical view for her to have after weeks of imprisonment on top of everything else that has happened. Any sane person (pony, whatever) in Nyx's position would probably just assume Twilight felt this way and would take a shot at her if given half a chance. That's the whole point of keeping an enemy locked up; you are protecting yourself from whatever threat they might pose if you let them run free.
It would actually make perfect sense for Nyx to react exactly the way Nexus clearly expects her to: to immediately become enraged, realize that she can't trust anypony, not even her own mother, and to order Twilight's execution. This is a perfectly natural response to the present course of events; that's why Nexus set it up this way. However, instead she just seems completely shocked by all this, apparently assuming....actually, I have no idea what we're supposed to assume she's thinking. As usual, none of this makes any sense.
Nyx doesn't particularly want to be an evil queen, and nobody really forced her to be one, but she became one anyway, and continues to be one even though she can abdicate (or at least stop being evil) any time she wants. She doesn't abdicate because she is paranoid about Celestia and Luna sending her to the moon; that part makes sense enough. Yet at the same time she naively assumes that Twilight is still her friend and still loves her and will defend her, in spite of all the fucked up shit she has done and continues to do. And yet despite this naive assumption, she keeps Twilight under lock and key as if she were afraid of her. She also imprisoned the CMC, for reasons which are beyond all rational comprehension, and yet allowed AJ, Rarity, Pinkie et al to go free, despite them potentially posing an actual threat to her rule. Then, she just randomly decides to let the CMC go free, but keeps Twilight locked up. Then, she is surprised when Twilight suddenly attacks her.
Throughout all of this, there seems to be some kind of underlying attempt to justify it by implying that Spell Nexus is somehow forcing her to be more evil than she would like to be, yet there is little evidence of his being able to wield any serious influence over her, and zero evidence that he could compel her by force. In fact, what's currently happening (Twilight being put under a spell so that she will attack Nyx) was all just some convoluted scheme cooked up by Nexus, precisely because he can't exert any actual control over her to get her to do what he wants. This whole story has become such a garbled mess of utter nonsense that it's giving me an actual headache trying to sort it all out.
Anyway, this exchange goes on.
>“I remember perfectly what you’ve done. You took over Equestria. You banished my mentor to the sun and brought eternal night. You locked up three innocent fillies and made me promise them everything would be all right before you took them away.”
Again, these are all perfectly valid points, and perfectly valid reasons for Twilight to stab Nyx and attempt to overthrow her rule. For a pony under a spell, Twilight sure is behaving awfully rationally right now. It's weirdly out of character, and would be for any character in this story.
"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
-- Akira Kurosawa
Nyx continues to whine and weep and cower like a spineless little twat, despite the fact that if I understand this universe correctly, NM's magic should vastly outclass anything still-only-a-humble-unicorn Twilight can do, and it should be a relatively simple task for her to fend her off, disarm her, kill her, or do anything she wants to, really. However, since it's a Peen Stroke Moment™, it seems that all Nyx wants to do right now is blubber away helplessly.
Anyway, in a development that should come as no surprise to anyone since the reader already knows this whole thing has been staged, Nexus shows up at precisely the moment that Twilight was about to deliver the killing blow, and sends the guards in to do what Nightmare Moon with her infinite cosmic power (which includes the ability to instantly banish anypony she wants to the fucking moon ffs) was unable to: overpower one small unicorn and take a dagger away from her.
Next scene.
>Nightmare Moon lay on her bed, head resting on her tear-soaked pillow as she hugged her Twilight Sparkle doll to her chest.
I literally burst out laughing when I read this line. Somehow, I don't think that was the intended reaction. The pathos in this story is so pathetic that it has become humor. Peen Stroke, both you and your OC are well fucked and far from home.
This, however, bears closer scrutiny:
>Her world, in a single brief moment, had been shattered. The one solid, constant foundation she had been able to rely on through the chaos of becoming queen had crumbled.
Peen Stroke, in the highly unlikely event that you're actually reading this critique, I'd like you to pay very close attention to what I'm about to say. Nowhere, at any point in this story since Nyx's ascension to the throne of Equestria, is it stated, implied, or even suggested or hinted at that Twilight, Nyx's feelings for Twilight, her prior relationship with Twilight, or anything to do with Twilight, is Nyx's source of strength throughout this terrible ordeal.
Running out of space, will continue in a new post.
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>>261920
First off, it's not a terrible ordeal in the first place; she literally chose this life for herself, for literally no reason that I can ascertain. Second, everything that has happened between Nyx and Twilight recently falls squarely into the "shit that makes no sense" category that I was bitching about a minute ago. Nyx starts off being angry and hateful towards Twilight because she "betrayed" her; she yells at her, says "you never loved me" or something to that effect, storms off to her dumb little edgelord castle, and disembowels her in effigy. Then, Twilight shows up to say that she's sorry. Nyx rebuffs her apology with extreme prejudice; she literally tells her she will never forgive her. All of this is fairly over the top considering that other than that one time she allowed Celestia to take her away for the night, Twilight has always shown Nyx kindness and done her best to overlook the fact that she's Nightmare Moon, despite constantly mumbling to herself about it for pages upon pages. I've gone over all of that exhaustively and I don't want to cover it again.
She then orders Twilight to be thrown into the dungeon, but is simultaneously upset with Nexus for having beaten her earlier, so she orders her thrown into a nicer cell and to be taken care of. From here, almost nothing she does makes any sense. She is constantly behaving as if she doesn't want to imprison Twilight, yet she continues to keep her locked up, and all the while continues to blame Nexus for the imprisonment despite having given the order herself and having absolute authority to release any prisoner she likes. Again, this is all shit I've gone over multiple times.
Point is this: Nyx has done nothing but mistreat Twilight ever since the apology scene, and despite apparently feeling bad about it, has nonetheless chosen at every possible turn to continue mistreating her. Twilight is not Nyx's real mother; she only took her in out of kindness.
She has every reason to hate Nyx at this point, yet still does not. The only reason she even tried to stab her just now is because she was under a spell. Or something, I guess it still hasn't been explained what exactly Nexus did. However, regardless of the reason, all Twilight has done here is to take an action that any reasonable person (pony, whatever) in her position could be expected to take if pushed to the brink like this. Yet Nyx, who has done nothing but take one continuous steaming dump on Twilight for the last six chapters or so, suddenly feels hurt and betrayed because her punching bag finally punched back. And in all of this, the reader is supposed to sympathize with...Nyx? Because....Nexus did something wrong?
Seriously; I have no more room in my house for all of the 'what the fucks' this story keeps raining down upon me.
Anyway. Nyx sits up in her room for a while feeling sorry for herself, because what the fuck else is new. Then, suddenly she looks out the window and notices that apparently, Spell Nexus has set up a gallows and is about to hang Twilight Sparkle.
*sighs*
*rubs temples*
*downs entire bottle of tequila in one gulp*
Peen Stroke. Baby. Are you listening to me? Please listen to me. Because if I have to keep saying this over and over this is going to be a long, long journey of...fuck; we've still got about 55k words of this shit left to go. Are you listening? Please listen. Because this is important:
THIS. SHIT. MAKES. ABSOLUTELY. NO. FUCKING. SENSE.
Where do you even come up with these ideas? How much head trauma does a writer have to sustain before they begin to believe that this is a sensible direction to take a story? Because I think at this point you need to get to a hospital.
Okay, so Twilight made an attempt on the Queen's life, so it makes sense that the next logical step would be execution; that part I get, that part I'm fine with. However, how in the world is it possible for this to be taking place without the Queen's knowledge? How is Nightmare Goddamn Faggot Moon just learning about this now, for no other reason than that she just happened to glance out the fucking window? Nexus just decides he's going to execute the Queen's most important prisoner? That's just something he has the authority to do? That's his job? He doesn't need the Queen to sign a death warrant or something? Even if he's going to dispense with whatever protocol is even supposed to exist in this shoddily-constructed nonsense world, it doesn't stand to reason that he might at least send a messenger up to NM's bedchamber, to at least tell the queen "hey you might want to go have a look out the fucking window, because we're publicly hanging Twilight Sparkle without your permission and we thought that maybe you might want to watch?"
Jesus H. Christ. Here's the thing, Mr. P: if you want Nexus to be the villain in your story, you need to at least give him some real power, or at least clearly define the amount of power he has. This whole thing you're trying to set up, with Nexus being some kind of evil madman who wants Equestria to live in eternal darkness and Nyx just being a helpless victim of his schemes, it's not necessarily a bad idea. It could work, but in order for it to work you need to make Nexus into a Rasputin or a Jaffar or a Cardinal Richelieu; he needs to be a powerful character who either holds some kind of hypnotic influence over the Queen, or can somehow compel or convince her to act against her conscience. The way he's currently portrayed, he's just a sniveling lackey who can't make Nyx do anything; yet Nyx constantly gives in to whatever he demands, despite that she doesn't just outrank him politically, she outclasses him magically. Yet she always caves in and does what he says. Why? This doesn't make the reader sympathize with Nyx or hate Nexus; it does the opposite, actually. It just makes Nyx seem pathetic and weak, so the reader hates her even if Nexus is technically the one doing wrong.
First off, it's not a terrible ordeal in the first place; she literally chose this life for herself, for literally no reason that I can ascertain. Second, everything that has happened between Nyx and Twilight recently falls squarely into the "shit that makes no sense" category that I was bitching about a minute ago. Nyx starts off being angry and hateful towards Twilight because she "betrayed" her; she yells at her, says "you never loved me" or something to that effect, storms off to her dumb little edgelord castle, and disembowels her in effigy. Then, Twilight shows up to say that she's sorry. Nyx rebuffs her apology with extreme prejudice; she literally tells her she will never forgive her. All of this is fairly over the top considering that other than that one time she allowed Celestia to take her away for the night, Twilight has always shown Nyx kindness and done her best to overlook the fact that she's Nightmare Moon, despite constantly mumbling to herself about it for pages upon pages. I've gone over all of that exhaustively and I don't want to cover it again.
She then orders Twilight to be thrown into the dungeon, but is simultaneously upset with Nexus for having beaten her earlier, so she orders her thrown into a nicer cell and to be taken care of. From here, almost nothing she does makes any sense. She is constantly behaving as if she doesn't want to imprison Twilight, yet she continues to keep her locked up, and all the while continues to blame Nexus for the imprisonment despite having given the order herself and having absolute authority to release any prisoner she likes. Again, this is all shit I've gone over multiple times.
Point is this: Nyx has done nothing but mistreat Twilight ever since the apology scene, and despite apparently feeling bad about it, has nonetheless chosen at every possible turn to continue mistreating her. Twilight is not Nyx's real mother; she only took her in out of kindness.
She has every reason to hate Nyx at this point, yet still does not. The only reason she even tried to stab her just now is because she was under a spell. Or something, I guess it still hasn't been explained what exactly Nexus did. However, regardless of the reason, all Twilight has done here is to take an action that any reasonable person (pony, whatever) in her position could be expected to take if pushed to the brink like this. Yet Nyx, who has done nothing but take one continuous steaming dump on Twilight for the last six chapters or so, suddenly feels hurt and betrayed because her punching bag finally punched back. And in all of this, the reader is supposed to sympathize with...Nyx? Because....Nexus did something wrong?
Seriously; I have no more room in my house for all of the 'what the fucks' this story keeps raining down upon me.
Anyway. Nyx sits up in her room for a while feeling sorry for herself, because what the fuck else is new. Then, suddenly she looks out the window and notices that apparently, Spell Nexus has set up a gallows and is about to hang Twilight Sparkle.
*sighs*
*rubs temples*
*downs entire bottle of tequila in one gulp*
Peen Stroke. Baby. Are you listening to me? Please listen to me. Because if I have to keep saying this over and over this is going to be a long, long journey of...fuck; we've still got about 55k words of this shit left to go. Are you listening? Please listen. Because this is important:
THIS. SHIT. MAKES. ABSOLUTELY. NO. FUCKING. SENSE.
Where do you even come up with these ideas? How much head trauma does a writer have to sustain before they begin to believe that this is a sensible direction to take a story? Because I think at this point you need to get to a hospital.
Okay, so Twilight made an attempt on the Queen's life, so it makes sense that the next logical step would be execution; that part I get, that part I'm fine with. However, how in the world is it possible for this to be taking place without the Queen's knowledge? How is Nightmare Goddamn Faggot Moon just learning about this now, for no other reason than that she just happened to glance out the fucking window? Nexus just decides he's going to execute the Queen's most important prisoner? That's just something he has the authority to do? That's his job? He doesn't need the Queen to sign a death warrant or something? Even if he's going to dispense with whatever protocol is even supposed to exist in this shoddily-constructed nonsense world, it doesn't stand to reason that he might at least send a messenger up to NM's bedchamber, to at least tell the queen "hey you might want to go have a look out the fucking window, because we're publicly hanging Twilight Sparkle without your permission and we thought that maybe you might want to watch?"
Jesus H. Christ. Here's the thing, Mr. P: if you want Nexus to be the villain in your story, you need to at least give him some real power, or at least clearly define the amount of power he has. This whole thing you're trying to set up, with Nexus being some kind of evil madman who wants Equestria to live in eternal darkness and Nyx just being a helpless victim of his schemes, it's not necessarily a bad idea. It could work, but in order for it to work you need to make Nexus into a Rasputin or a Jaffar or a Cardinal Richelieu; he needs to be a powerful character who either holds some kind of hypnotic influence over the Queen, or can somehow compel or convince her to act against her conscience. The way he's currently portrayed, he's just a sniveling lackey who can't make Nyx do anything; yet Nyx constantly gives in to whatever he demands, despite that she doesn't just outrank him politically, she outclasses him magically. Yet she always caves in and does what he says. Why? This doesn't make the reader sympathize with Nyx or hate Nexus; it does the opposite, actually. It just makes Nyx seem pathetic and weak, so the reader hates her even if Nexus is technically the one doing wrong.
>>261911
I think it was fun that you made, a few posts ago, the comparison between Nyx and Ebony. They are a bit similar, cause they goffik.
Lately, you have been reiterating the same points over and over again, btw. I assume it is hard to notice but also hard to not do since you want to comment on the story as you move through it but becaussse we repeat the same ideas endlessly, presumebly because this is what Pole Smoke considers a display of emotional conflict to have Nyx go around and do conflicting actions.
Haven't read this post that I'm replying to nor the ones below so I am not refering to them if you have already cahnged this. But you have been repeated that Nyx doesn't have a motivation for being Nightmare Moon and doing Nightmare Moon things, that Spell Nexus is someone that Nyx should be able to steamroll and if not it should be established that she cannot, and that Twilight and the cmcs are in her dungoen for no reason. I'm not annoyed or anything bu we got it. I can imagine that it is hard to have an overview of exactly how well you have formulate a point previously and if you are saying something abut this topic from a new angle or not. I mean, I whish I could be as autistic and get the same form of sugar kick I get from making maps in heroes 3 map editor as I am about writing but that's not the case right now. My point is that I would never have read through my own stufff either, while you probably do, it is still hard to always get an overview.
I like your pen stroke edit pics. They are nice. And I have been enjoying myself.
While I can understand the appeal in sensationalism, since what you are reading jsut keeps on topping itself in absurdism, and who are you to looka gift horse in the mouth, it has the problem of repeating oneself.
I'm not gonna tell you what to do. At times, I have enjoyed the examples of Nyx going around in a circle that you have brought up, just as I enjoyed Twilight cycling through the same points over and over again on whether Nyx really could be Nightmare Moon. I guess peen Stroke has some sort of ocd ritual, not just with cock sucking;P, but with writing as well.
I guess, I'm saying bring up these kinds of examples of Nyx behaving irrationally with some sort of vague sense of moderation. Basically horseshoe theory but with Pen Stroke Analysis, too much, and Pen Stroke's asshole looks into us, too little, and we won't learn what not to put up in our You-know-what.
I think it was fun that you made, a few posts ago, the comparison between Nyx and Ebony. They are a bit similar, cause they goffik.
Lately, you have been reiterating the same points over and over again, btw. I assume it is hard to notice but also hard to not do since you want to comment on the story as you move through it but becaussse we repeat the same ideas endlessly, presumebly because this is what Pole Smoke considers a display of emotional conflict to have Nyx go around and do conflicting actions.
Haven't read this post that I'm replying to nor the ones below so I am not refering to them if you have already cahnged this. But you have been repeated that Nyx doesn't have a motivation for being Nightmare Moon and doing Nightmare Moon things, that Spell Nexus is someone that Nyx should be able to steamroll and if not it should be established that she cannot, and that Twilight and the cmcs are in her dungoen for no reason. I'm not annoyed or anything bu we got it. I can imagine that it is hard to have an overview of exactly how well you have formulate a point previously and if you are saying something abut this topic from a new angle or not. I mean, I whish I could be as autistic and get the same form of sugar kick I get from making maps in heroes 3 map editor as I am about writing but that's not the case right now. My point is that I would never have read through my own stufff either, while you probably do, it is still hard to always get an overview.
I like your pen stroke edit pics. They are nice. And I have been enjoying myself.
While I can understand the appeal in sensationalism, since what you are reading jsut keeps on topping itself in absurdism, and who are you to looka gift horse in the mouth, it has the problem of repeating oneself.
I'm not gonna tell you what to do. At times, I have enjoyed the examples of Nyx going around in a circle that you have brought up, just as I enjoyed Twilight cycling through the same points over and over again on whether Nyx really could be Nightmare Moon. I guess peen Stroke has some sort of ocd ritual, not just with cock sucking;P, but with writing as well.
I guess, I'm saying bring up these kinds of examples of Nyx behaving irrationally with some sort of vague sense of moderation. Basically horseshoe theory but with Pen Stroke Analysis, too much, and Pen Stroke's asshole looks into us, too little, and we won't learn what not to put up in our You-know-what.
>>261926
Yeah, I've also noticed that I'm starting to repeat myself. Believe it or not I'm actually trying to avoid it, it's just difficult because I end up noticing the same things over and over. The problems this story has can probably be mostly reduced to the points I keep bringing up, but it just keeps manifesting itself in more obvious ways.
Yeah, I've also noticed that I'm starting to repeat myself. Believe it or not I'm actually trying to avoid it, it's just difficult because I end up noticing the same things over and over. The problems this story has can probably be mostly reduced to the points I keep bringing up, but it just keeps manifesting itself in more obvious ways.
>>261926
Forget about this post, I should clearly read your newst posts before commenting on things taht aren't anymore.
>>261922
Kek.
I love the balls on Spell Nexus. Why don't you carry a neon sign with, "I magically drugged your momfu," on your back?
Jesus, I thought Nyx out manuvered Shining Armour, Princess Celestia, and Luna through high-tier magic and tactics but let's be honest here, she won't kill Nexus for this.
I mean, even if Twilight did all this by her own free will, clearly this prisoner is precious to Nightmare Moon. It would make sense, if Nyx understood how Twilight felt due to what she had put her through and therefore saw Twilight's actions less like Twilight betraying her and more like the results of Nyx mistreating her. Nyx should be aware of this, one would think.
But like imagine, then moving in secret to kill what the queen consideres her mother. Kek. He's insane. In fact, this move of his should make Nyx hate herself and what she has become. If I woke up as Nyx and learnt that my subordinates had killed Twilight, I would probably disband the enitre order of the children of the night due ot shame of what I have let myself get dragged into. Wrath upon them and myself.
I have this sinking feeling in my gut that Nyx will actually come up to Twilight and behave like she is tough or something and tell Twilight that her apologises are too late before actually killing her and the rest of the story is just her redemption story and the tragedy.
>>261928
Well, in the latest post you didn't repeat yourself so I see that you have been trying to avoid it. Also, I know you have mention that you were trying to avoid it before. I probably should have just kept my mouth shut. I get that you need to bring it up when that's the main criticism in the scenes. Just froom my perspective, it got a bit tedious, not because I don't agree, because I really do, but because you know it's the same thing over and over again.
Also, I liked your character creation post. It is similar to what I have been thinking or almost a copy actually, believe it or not. Well, sort of but I'm not gonna go in on that now.
Forget about this post, I should clearly read your newst posts before commenting on things taht aren't anymore.
>>261922
Kek.
I love the balls on Spell Nexus. Why don't you carry a neon sign with, "I magically drugged your momfu," on your back?
Jesus, I thought Nyx out manuvered Shining Armour, Princess Celestia, and Luna through high-tier magic and tactics but let's be honest here, she won't kill Nexus for this.
I mean, even if Twilight did all this by her own free will, clearly this prisoner is precious to Nightmare Moon. It would make sense, if Nyx understood how Twilight felt due to what she had put her through and therefore saw Twilight's actions less like Twilight betraying her and more like the results of Nyx mistreating her. Nyx should be aware of this, one would think.
But like imagine, then moving in secret to kill what the queen consideres her mother. Kek. He's insane. In fact, this move of his should make Nyx hate herself and what she has become. If I woke up as Nyx and learnt that my subordinates had killed Twilight, I would probably disband the enitre order of the children of the night due ot shame of what I have let myself get dragged into. Wrath upon them and myself.
I have this sinking feeling in my gut that Nyx will actually come up to Twilight and behave like she is tough or something and tell Twilight that her apologises are too late before actually killing her and the rest of the story is just her redemption story and the tragedy.
>>261928
Well, in the latest post you didn't repeat yourself so I see that you have been trying to avoid it. Also, I know you have mention that you were trying to avoid it before. I probably should have just kept my mouth shut. I get that you need to bring it up when that's the main criticism in the scenes. Just froom my perspective, it got a bit tedious, not because I don't agree, because I really do, but because you know it's the same thing over and over again.
Also, I liked your character creation post. It is similar to what I have been thinking or almost a copy actually, believe it or not. Well, sort of but I'm not gonna go in on that now.
>>261929
>Jesus, I thought Nyx out manuvered Shining Armour, Princess Celestia, and Luna through high-tier magic and tactics but
Don't know why I jumped from the subject but the real contrasting clause that were suppose to go there was, "But she falls for such an easy ploy?"
>Jesus, I thought Nyx out manuvered Shining Armour, Princess Celestia, and Luna through high-tier magic and tactics but
Don't know why I jumped from the subject but the real contrasting clause that were suppose to go there was, "But she falls for such an easy ploy?"
>>261928
Last time you felt like you had nothing new to say about the story, you sped up the rate at which you read it and then commented about it. You commented about more of the story at once, instead of going line-by-line you started only posting lines from the original work when it was necessary.
I think that was the right move, since this story seems to just make the same mistakes over and over. It's made of cliches the writer doesn't know how to use right, and absolute incompetence is fine in the coonsoomerfag "Brony fandom" if you've convinced enough of the faggot crowd that your naked emperor ass is wearing fine clothing.
Last time you felt like you had nothing new to say about the story, you sped up the rate at which you read it and then commented about it. You commented about more of the story at once, instead of going line-by-line you started only posting lines from the original work when it was necessary.
I think that was the right move, since this story seems to just make the same mistakes over and over. It's made of cliches the writer doesn't know how to use right, and absolute incompetence is fine in the coonsoomerfag "Brony fandom" if you've convinced enough of the faggot crowd that your naked emperor ass is wearing fine clothing.
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>>261922
The impression I have always had, both before and after I became personally involved in this fandom, is that bronies tend to be a rather emotionally fragile bunch. Some of them, I assume, are good people (this site proves that, at least), but I do get the impression that this fandom also attracts a lot of Tumblrina types, who are more susceptible to the sort of emotional manipulations that writers like Peen Stroke traffic in. This may be an important clue in solving the mystery of just how this raging dumpster fire of a story managed to garner roughly 11,000 upvotes.
This ridiculous execution scene is probably this story's most egregious example of emotional manipulation yet. As I've pointed out many times before, one of Peen Stroke's biggest problems is that he really has no idea how to write emotion in a convincing way, and he usually tries to pave over this by hamming up the tragedy as much as he can. This video is a good (parodic) example of how he writes:
https://youtu.be/E3D2VXgGZ6c?t=19
It's easy to laugh at stuff like this, but what's alarming is that this tactic actually works on a large demographic of people, and I get the impression that this is mostly Mr. P's reader base. This scene is completely ridiculous and makes little sense, but the reader is supposed to be so shocked by the prospect of Twilight being killed that they won't notice. Again, the most unsettling thing is that this actually works on a certain kind of person, and that such people make up a disturbingly large portion of the general human mass (for instance, we know there are at least 11,000 of them).
Anyway, poor, adorable little Twilight Sparkle is led to the gallows with poor, sad little Nightmare Moon only able to watch helplessly from the balcony as they tie the rope around her neck. Twilight stares tearfully into the eyes of the pony who once was her daughter, and mouths the words "I wuv you" as Spell Nexus pulls the lever, cackling madly and banging his evil hooves together. The trapdoor releases, and Twilight falls into empty space. The rope catches around her neck, snapping it instantly. Her eyes bug out and her tongue rolls out of her mouth. Her bowels release. Brrraaaaaaaaaaap. Imagine the smell.
Or, rather, that's what would have probably happened if this scene were only a smidgin less ridiculous than what's in the text. Here's what really happens:
Nexus daydreams to himself about evil, dastardly shit for like seven whole paragraphs. Two of these, incidentally, deal with another pointless tangent about how Shining Armor switched sides and now he's fighting his (presumably ex) wife Cadance instead of banging her. While this is potentially interesting, it really doesn't belong here, and I'm starting to get the impression that it's never really going to pan out into anything anyway; it seems more like one of the extra "revisions" Peen Stroke added to make this shitpile align better with the S3 canon, instead of focusing on making it a better story. But I digress.
In an effort to make this already hammy scene even hammier, Nexus plans to drop Twilight like it's hot at the exact moment the sun goes down. Since he's still got a few minutes, he decides to ham it up further still. He asks Twilight if she denies the charges against her. She does not deny them. He then asks her if she has any last words. While this would have been an excellent opportunity for her to call Peen Stroke a raging faggot, she again declines. I don't really blame her; if I were in her horseshoes, I'd probably just want to end it all and hopefully move on to a less-crappily-written universe as quickly as possible too.
Anyway, of course, Nexus kicks Twilight off the platform at exactly the moment that Nightmare Moon sees what's about to happen, and of course Twilight goes flying off, and of course we get a ridiculously drawn-out description of her falling into space as the slack on the rope gradually runs out (this takes an almost preposterous amount of time to describe, considering we're talking about a time frame of maybe half a second). And, of course, Twilight doesn't actually die; she simply vanishes at the last possible second before her neck would have snapped, and her bowels would have released. Brrrraaaaaappppp.
While this could have at least made a somewhat exciting cliffhanger to keep us in suspense for a few scenes, Peen Stroke manages to fuck up even this childishly simple bit of melodrama. On literally the next line, it is explained that Nightmare Moon summoned all of her magic and made herself into a cloud and blah blah blah she saved Twilight in the nick of time using rainbows and lasers. I'm sure you were on the edge of your seat for all of three seconds.
She flies Twilight out to the castle of the two sisters, and sets her down gingerly, and blah blah blah I'm already falling asleep. What is so pathetic about this is that even these hamfisted attempts at injecting excitement into the narrative fail. Peen Stroke has some relatively decent clay here, but he can't even mold it into a crude sculpture of a wang, let alone anything artistically meaningful.
The whole point of having Twilight attack Nyx is that Nyx was supposed to feel betrayed and turn eviler, but instead she sees through it and rescues Twilight. I don't think even the most simple-minded cretin reading this ever thought Twilight was going to actually die, but at the very least Twilight could have "died." Twilight fakes her death, Nexus executes a doppelganger, Twilight doesn't actually die, she just looks dead....there's a million options to choose from. As long as Nyx believes that Twilight is dead, the scene could serve a purpose in her character arc (to the extent that she has one). Instead, Peen Stroke just inserts this hanging scene as yet another pointless random event intended to jerk cheap emotion out of his Ritalin-addled audience.
The impression I have always had, both before and after I became personally involved in this fandom, is that bronies tend to be a rather emotionally fragile bunch. Some of them, I assume, are good people (this site proves that, at least), but I do get the impression that this fandom also attracts a lot of Tumblrina types, who are more susceptible to the sort of emotional manipulations that writers like Peen Stroke traffic in. This may be an important clue in solving the mystery of just how this raging dumpster fire of a story managed to garner roughly 11,000 upvotes.
This ridiculous execution scene is probably this story's most egregious example of emotional manipulation yet. As I've pointed out many times before, one of Peen Stroke's biggest problems is that he really has no idea how to write emotion in a convincing way, and he usually tries to pave over this by hamming up the tragedy as much as he can. This video is a good (parodic) example of how he writes:
https://youtu.be/E3D2VXgGZ6c?t=19
It's easy to laugh at stuff like this, but what's alarming is that this tactic actually works on a large demographic of people, and I get the impression that this is mostly Mr. P's reader base. This scene is completely ridiculous and makes little sense, but the reader is supposed to be so shocked by the prospect of Twilight being killed that they won't notice. Again, the most unsettling thing is that this actually works on a certain kind of person, and that such people make up a disturbingly large portion of the general human mass (for instance, we know there are at least 11,000 of them).
Anyway, poor, adorable little Twilight Sparkle is led to the gallows with poor, sad little Nightmare Moon only able to watch helplessly from the balcony as they tie the rope around her neck. Twilight stares tearfully into the eyes of the pony who once was her daughter, and mouths the words "I wuv you" as Spell Nexus pulls the lever, cackling madly and banging his evil hooves together. The trapdoor releases, and Twilight falls into empty space. The rope catches around her neck, snapping it instantly. Her eyes bug out and her tongue rolls out of her mouth. Her bowels release. Brrraaaaaaaaaaap. Imagine the smell.
Or, rather, that's what would have probably happened if this scene were only a smidgin less ridiculous than what's in the text. Here's what really happens:
Nexus daydreams to himself about evil, dastardly shit for like seven whole paragraphs. Two of these, incidentally, deal with another pointless tangent about how Shining Armor switched sides and now he's fighting his (presumably ex) wife Cadance instead of banging her. While this is potentially interesting, it really doesn't belong here, and I'm starting to get the impression that it's never really going to pan out into anything anyway; it seems more like one of the extra "revisions" Peen Stroke added to make this shitpile align better with the S3 canon, instead of focusing on making it a better story. But I digress.
In an effort to make this already hammy scene even hammier, Nexus plans to drop Twilight like it's hot at the exact moment the sun goes down. Since he's still got a few minutes, he decides to ham it up further still. He asks Twilight if she denies the charges against her. She does not deny them. He then asks her if she has any last words. While this would have been an excellent opportunity for her to call Peen Stroke a raging faggot, she again declines. I don't really blame her; if I were in her horseshoes, I'd probably just want to end it all and hopefully move on to a less-crappily-written universe as quickly as possible too.
Anyway, of course, Nexus kicks Twilight off the platform at exactly the moment that Nightmare Moon sees what's about to happen, and of course Twilight goes flying off, and of course we get a ridiculously drawn-out description of her falling into space as the slack on the rope gradually runs out (this takes an almost preposterous amount of time to describe, considering we're talking about a time frame of maybe half a second). And, of course, Twilight doesn't actually die; she simply vanishes at the last possible second before her neck would have snapped, and her bowels would have released. Brrrraaaaaappppp.
While this could have at least made a somewhat exciting cliffhanger to keep us in suspense for a few scenes, Peen Stroke manages to fuck up even this childishly simple bit of melodrama. On literally the next line, it is explained that Nightmare Moon summoned all of her magic and made herself into a cloud and blah blah blah she saved Twilight in the nick of time using rainbows and lasers. I'm sure you were on the edge of your seat for all of three seconds.
She flies Twilight out to the castle of the two sisters, and sets her down gingerly, and blah blah blah I'm already falling asleep. What is so pathetic about this is that even these hamfisted attempts at injecting excitement into the narrative fail. Peen Stroke has some relatively decent clay here, but he can't even mold it into a crude sculpture of a wang, let alone anything artistically meaningful.
The whole point of having Twilight attack Nyx is that Nyx was supposed to feel betrayed and turn eviler, but instead she sees through it and rescues Twilight. I don't think even the most simple-minded cretin reading this ever thought Twilight was going to actually die, but at the very least Twilight could have "died." Twilight fakes her death, Nexus executes a doppelganger, Twilight doesn't actually die, she just looks dead....there's a million options to choose from. As long as Nyx believes that Twilight is dead, the scene could serve a purpose in her character arc (to the extent that she has one). Instead, Peen Stroke just inserts this hanging scene as yet another pointless random event intended to jerk cheap emotion out of his Ritalin-addled audience.
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>>262050
So anyway, the hanging scene, which could potentially have been a major story event, was instead wasted as a piece of blatant emotional manipulation that as far as I can tell served no purpose other than to make the reader hate Spell Nexus, thus priming him to take the eventual fall for everything Nyx did. Judging from the comments for this chapter, it seems to have worked:
>I am going to kill Nexus... as soon as I can figure out a way to go to Equestria...
>The crud bucket is finally getting what he deserves
>Okay, that's it. I normally censor myself, but...
>Fuck you! Go to Tartarus and drown in the Styx! Then do be so kind as to revive yourself and do it all over again!
>Just fucking die.
>... Better yet, have Nyx realize what happened and hang you for it. That'll be the sweetest thing.
>NEXUS! I'LL SEE YOU HANG AT THOSE VERY SAME GALLOWS FOR THIS!!!
>Oh god. I almost had a heart attack thinking twilight was about to die!
I pretty much hate Peen Stroke's guts at this point, but I have to admit, he knows exactly how to play to his brainlet audience.
I'm almost afraid to see where this is going to go next. However, since I'm the kind of person who likes to gawk at car crashes, I'm going to keep on reading. Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Nyx saved Twilight's bowels from releasing at just the right moment and carried her off to the castle of the two sisters for some bizarre reason. For some equally bizarre reason, Peen Stroke apparently thought this would be a good place to start exploring the mystery of the turquoise eye spell that Nexus casts on everypony he initiates into the cult.
I'll admit that I've actually been curious about this, but again, this is a completely inappropriate time to address it. But, since Twilight's "execution" turned out to be a huge nothingburger, we may as well see where it goes.
As soon as Twilight regains consciousness, we learn that she has the turquoise eyes of a Children of Nightmare initiate, and she immediately bows to Nyx. This comes as rather a surprise to Nyx, who was expecting to be attacked again. We are given this little nugget of information here:
>Nightmare Moon’s mind buzzed. Was that why Twilight had attacked? Was Nexus behind it? She had wondered what being blessed did. Spell Nexus always said it opened a pony’s mind to the wisdom of her rule. She had wondered if the blessing did more than that. Unfortunately, whenever she asked about it, Nexus always assured her otherwise.
So far, it seems like my hunch about the direction Peen Stroke is taking his story seems to be correct. Nexus is being set up to be the final villain here. My suspicion is that the "blessing" he gives to his initiates will turn out to be some form of mind control, which will conveniently allow Peen Stroke to explain away the "betrayal" of characters like Shining Armor who apparently switched sides without requiring any individual redemption arcs. It's a little hackneyed as a plot device, but for a story set in a world like this I'm actually more or less okay with it. The MLP universe is basically half fairy tale and half melodrama, and having good characters turn suddenly evil when put under a spell is a staple trope of both. It messes with NM's redemption for reasons I've gone into already and will doubtless go into again ere the end, but taken purely as a story device it's fine.
Anyway, Nyx questions Twilight about why she attacked her, even though it seems like she would have enough valid reasons to attack even without being under a spell. Twilight basically confirms that Nexus rigged the whole thing: he "blessed" her, which made her into a mindless puppet of the cult, and then instructed her to make a magical dagger and attack Nyx with it so that she would feel betrayed, then turn against Twilight and become super duper evil and blah blah blah etc etc etc; I'm sure anyone reading this who isn't a literal retard can follow Nexus' line of reasoning without being spoonfed. We also learn that Nexus imposes mind control on his initiates by breathing out some kind of semi-solid magic cloud, cutting off a piece of it, and putting it in the recipient's mouth like a communion wafer.
>“Your mouth,” Nightmare Moon echoed, licking her lips as she shifted anxiously. “Twilight, I’m going to try something… and, if it works, you should be your old self again… but… it may not work. Do you trust me?”
Alright, Peen Stroke, you now have my full undivided attention.
Nyx uses her wacky flowing magical alicorn mane to probe the depths of Twilight's body, but unfortunately not in the way that we were hoping. She simply conducts a dry, tedious, room-by-room search of Twilight for the manifestation of whatever zany spell Nexus cast on her. Long story short, she finds the spell, which is basically some kind of magical brain tumor. She surgically removes it, and Twilight goes back to normal. Well, that was a fun little subplot that lasted all of half a chapter.
Anyway, Twilight wakes up, Nyx is all weepy and tearful naturally, they hug, kiss, make out, what have you. Apparently what we're supposed to take away from all this is that Nexus' evil scheme had the exact opposite effect of what was intended: Nyx is now supposedly back to her 'good' self.
And of course, Peen Stroke manages to even fuck this up. Instead of just ending the chapter with their tearful reunion, he draws the scene out with a lot of tedious dialogue, most of which just recaps everything that literally just happened. They cry some more, they hug some more, Nyx rattles off some verbal diarrhea about how she's too horrible to be called Nyx, please call her Nightmare Moon instead, she doesn't deserve a mother like Twilight and blah blah blah (although I have to say: when she's right, she's right), and after that they cry and hug some more. Nyx sends Twilight off to Zecora's to lie low for a while, and then flies off to yell at Nexus. And then, finally, the chapter ends.
So anyway, the hanging scene, which could potentially have been a major story event, was instead wasted as a piece of blatant emotional manipulation that as far as I can tell served no purpose other than to make the reader hate Spell Nexus, thus priming him to take the eventual fall for everything Nyx did. Judging from the comments for this chapter, it seems to have worked:
>I am going to kill Nexus... as soon as I can figure out a way to go to Equestria...
>The crud bucket is finally getting what he deserves
>Okay, that's it. I normally censor myself, but...
>Fuck you! Go to Tartarus and drown in the Styx! Then do be so kind as to revive yourself and do it all over again!
>Just fucking die.
>... Better yet, have Nyx realize what happened and hang you for it. That'll be the sweetest thing.
>NEXUS! I'LL SEE YOU HANG AT THOSE VERY SAME GALLOWS FOR THIS!!!
>Oh god. I almost had a heart attack thinking twilight was about to die!
I pretty much hate Peen Stroke's guts at this point, but I have to admit, he knows exactly how to play to his brainlet audience.
I'm almost afraid to see where this is going to go next. However, since I'm the kind of person who likes to gawk at car crashes, I'm going to keep on reading. Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Nyx saved Twilight's bowels from releasing at just the right moment and carried her off to the castle of the two sisters for some bizarre reason. For some equally bizarre reason, Peen Stroke apparently thought this would be a good place to start exploring the mystery of the turquoise eye spell that Nexus casts on everypony he initiates into the cult.
I'll admit that I've actually been curious about this, but again, this is a completely inappropriate time to address it. But, since Twilight's "execution" turned out to be a huge nothingburger, we may as well see where it goes.
As soon as Twilight regains consciousness, we learn that she has the turquoise eyes of a Children of Nightmare initiate, and she immediately bows to Nyx. This comes as rather a surprise to Nyx, who was expecting to be attacked again. We are given this little nugget of information here:
>Nightmare Moon’s mind buzzed. Was that why Twilight had attacked? Was Nexus behind it? She had wondered what being blessed did. Spell Nexus always said it opened a pony’s mind to the wisdom of her rule. She had wondered if the blessing did more than that. Unfortunately, whenever she asked about it, Nexus always assured her otherwise.
So far, it seems like my hunch about the direction Peen Stroke is taking his story seems to be correct. Nexus is being set up to be the final villain here. My suspicion is that the "blessing" he gives to his initiates will turn out to be some form of mind control, which will conveniently allow Peen Stroke to explain away the "betrayal" of characters like Shining Armor who apparently switched sides without requiring any individual redemption arcs. It's a little hackneyed as a plot device, but for a story set in a world like this I'm actually more or less okay with it. The MLP universe is basically half fairy tale and half melodrama, and having good characters turn suddenly evil when put under a spell is a staple trope of both. It messes with NM's redemption for reasons I've gone into already and will doubtless go into again ere the end, but taken purely as a story device it's fine.
Anyway, Nyx questions Twilight about why she attacked her, even though it seems like she would have enough valid reasons to attack even without being under a spell. Twilight basically confirms that Nexus rigged the whole thing: he "blessed" her, which made her into a mindless puppet of the cult, and then instructed her to make a magical dagger and attack Nyx with it so that she would feel betrayed, then turn against Twilight and become super duper evil and blah blah blah etc etc etc; I'm sure anyone reading this who isn't a literal retard can follow Nexus' line of reasoning without being spoonfed. We also learn that Nexus imposes mind control on his initiates by breathing out some kind of semi-solid magic cloud, cutting off a piece of it, and putting it in the recipient's mouth like a communion wafer.
>“Your mouth,” Nightmare Moon echoed, licking her lips as she shifted anxiously. “Twilight, I’m going to try something… and, if it works, you should be your old self again… but… it may not work. Do you trust me?”
Alright, Peen Stroke, you now have my full undivided attention.
Nyx uses her wacky flowing magical alicorn mane to probe the depths of Twilight's body, but unfortunately not in the way that we were hoping. She simply conducts a dry, tedious, room-by-room search of Twilight for the manifestation of whatever zany spell Nexus cast on her. Long story short, she finds the spell, which is basically some kind of magical brain tumor. She surgically removes it, and Twilight goes back to normal. Well, that was a fun little subplot that lasted all of half a chapter.
Anyway, Twilight wakes up, Nyx is all weepy and tearful naturally, they hug, kiss, make out, what have you. Apparently what we're supposed to take away from all this is that Nexus' evil scheme had the exact opposite effect of what was intended: Nyx is now supposedly back to her 'good' self.
And of course, Peen Stroke manages to even fuck this up. Instead of just ending the chapter with their tearful reunion, he draws the scene out with a lot of tedious dialogue, most of which just recaps everything that literally just happened. They cry some more, they hug some more, Nyx rattles off some verbal diarrhea about how she's too horrible to be called Nyx, please call her Nightmare Moon instead, she doesn't deserve a mother like Twilight and blah blah blah (although I have to say: when she's right, she's right), and after that they cry and hug some more. Nyx sends Twilight off to Zecora's to lie low for a while, and then flies off to yell at Nexus. And then, finally, the chapter ends.
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>>262051
Chapter 17: Blessed Taint
The chapter opens with Nexus pitching a hissy fit because Twilight vanished into thin air before he could properly kill her. He then receives word that Nightmare Moon would like to have a word with him. Considering that he just tried to execute a valuable prisoner on his own authority without even bothering to notify, let alone ask permission from, the Queen, and on top of that he even managed to fuck it up badly, any reasonable person (pony, whatever) would probably assume he would shortly be on the way to the gallows himself, and would therefore be nervous. Instead, though Nexus seems to expect some kind of minor tongue lashing wakka chicka wokka chicka, he mostly feels smug and confident going in.
Peen Stroke actually handles this confrontation in sort of an interesting way. First we have Nexus' perspective, which shows him walking into the throne room, feeling initially confident but then gradually becoming more ill at ease as he begins to sense that the Queen is more than a little displeased with him. Next, we see the exact same scene replayed from Nyx's perspective, and learn through an (unfortunately rather verbose) journey through her inner thoughts that she was contemplating having Nexus hanged, but decided it would be better to start with just interrogating him. What I thought was particularly well done is that the text makes a special point of describing the stained glass windows in the throne room from each character's perspective. The windows depict Nightmare Moon flying around terrorizing ponies, and of course Nexus thinks they're a fine symbol of royal power, whereas Nyx thinks they're just icky and awful.
It's not as if either revelation is particularly profound of course; one could easily deduce how each character would feel about something like that at this point without needing to be told. However, in terms of writing, I think it's a rather artful way of illustrating the vast gulf between these two characters' view of the world, and the role that Nyx is supposed to fill within it. If if weren't for the unfortunate fact that the entire story up to this point is so shoddily constructed that nothing short of a total rewrite could possibly save it, I'd say that today, Peen Stroke was not a faggot.
Anyway, as soon as we're past the nice little bit about the windows, the story goes right back to being tedious. After asking some cursory questions about Twilight Sparkle's whereabouts, Nyx immediately launches into a long interrogation about the magic blessing that Nexus bestows upon his followers. In particular, she concentrates on how Nexus himself received the blessing.
This whole conversation is basically just one long information dump, so I'm just going to briefly summarize what is explained here. We learn that apparently Nexus used to be Celestia's private student the way that Twilight currently is. We also learn that he used to be very close to Celestia and thought of her as a mother, until he received NM's "gift," which apparently "opened his eyes" in some way. The "gift" appears to be some kind of a magical infection similar to the tumor that Nyx pulled out of Twilight in the last scene. It's not overtly explained, but I get the impression that the gift is some aspect of Nightmare Moon's evil that Nexus came into contact with when Celestia assigned him to analyze the broken armor after the fight between the Mane 6 and Nightmare Moon.
As a plot device, I actually don't find this terrible. However, it creates a problem for this story, since Peen Stroke's original idea seems to have been to write a better redemption arc for Nightmare Moon. You'll recall that I've been grumbling recently about how Peen Stroke seems to be trying to shift blame onto Nexus for all of the shitty stuff NM has done, which is rather a lame cop-out for a story that is supposed to redeem her. This new development actually carries this a step further: now, all of this is no longer even Nexus' fault.
Nexus, as we learn in this scene, is just a victim himself; Nightmare Moon's "blessing" is just some kind of generically evil creeping crud, that takes over its host's mind and causes them to do generically evil things. Oddly enough, Nigel seems to have called it with his reference to Spider Man 3 and the Venom goop. This basically means that no character in this story is in any way responsible for their actions so long as they have this creeping crud infection, which means that NM's "redemption" at this point is probably just shaping up to be a mass purge of the crud, something I'd frankly rather see applied to the text itself. All of the blame has essentially been transferred onto a soulless magic entity that simply exists as evil for the sake of evil. Nobody who has this infection can really be held accountable for anything they did under the entity's influence, but at the same time nobody can really be redeemed for anything either, because they can't be held accountable. But whatever, let's see where it goes.
Anyway, Nyx does the same magic trick she did with Twilight, and tries to magically yank the infection out, but in Nexus it turns out to be much more powerful and is embedded more deeply. It turns out that Nexus had apparently created some kind of seal to keep it in himself as soon as he figured out what it was, which he hoped would keep it from spreading. Ironically this turned him into its prime carrier. This does, however, prevent it from leaping from Nexus into Nyx and taking over her body completely, as it would doubtless try to do since she is the real Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke), but it also means that Nyx can't just yank it out and kill it like she did with Twilight.
This actually looks like this is shaping up to be a bigger scene that it initially appeared to be, and I'm running out of space, so I'm going to stop here and start fresh in a new post.
Chapter 17: Blessed Taint
The chapter opens with Nexus pitching a hissy fit because Twilight vanished into thin air before he could properly kill her. He then receives word that Nightmare Moon would like to have a word with him. Considering that he just tried to execute a valuable prisoner on his own authority without even bothering to notify, let alone ask permission from, the Queen, and on top of that he even managed to fuck it up badly, any reasonable person (pony, whatever) would probably assume he would shortly be on the way to the gallows himself, and would therefore be nervous. Instead, though Nexus seems to expect some kind of minor tongue lashing wakka chicka wokka chicka, he mostly feels smug and confident going in.
Peen Stroke actually handles this confrontation in sort of an interesting way. First we have Nexus' perspective, which shows him walking into the throne room, feeling initially confident but then gradually becoming more ill at ease as he begins to sense that the Queen is more than a little displeased with him. Next, we see the exact same scene replayed from Nyx's perspective, and learn through an (unfortunately rather verbose) journey through her inner thoughts that she was contemplating having Nexus hanged, but decided it would be better to start with just interrogating him. What I thought was particularly well done is that the text makes a special point of describing the stained glass windows in the throne room from each character's perspective. The windows depict Nightmare Moon flying around terrorizing ponies, and of course Nexus thinks they're a fine symbol of royal power, whereas Nyx thinks they're just icky and awful.
It's not as if either revelation is particularly profound of course; one could easily deduce how each character would feel about something like that at this point without needing to be told. However, in terms of writing, I think it's a rather artful way of illustrating the vast gulf between these two characters' view of the world, and the role that Nyx is supposed to fill within it. If if weren't for the unfortunate fact that the entire story up to this point is so shoddily constructed that nothing short of a total rewrite could possibly save it, I'd say that today, Peen Stroke was not a faggot.
Anyway, as soon as we're past the nice little bit about the windows, the story goes right back to being tedious. After asking some cursory questions about Twilight Sparkle's whereabouts, Nyx immediately launches into a long interrogation about the magic blessing that Nexus bestows upon his followers. In particular, she concentrates on how Nexus himself received the blessing.
This whole conversation is basically just one long information dump, so I'm just going to briefly summarize what is explained here. We learn that apparently Nexus used to be Celestia's private student the way that Twilight currently is. We also learn that he used to be very close to Celestia and thought of her as a mother, until he received NM's "gift," which apparently "opened his eyes" in some way. The "gift" appears to be some kind of a magical infection similar to the tumor that Nyx pulled out of Twilight in the last scene. It's not overtly explained, but I get the impression that the gift is some aspect of Nightmare Moon's evil that Nexus came into contact with when Celestia assigned him to analyze the broken armor after the fight between the Mane 6 and Nightmare Moon.
As a plot device, I actually don't find this terrible. However, it creates a problem for this story, since Peen Stroke's original idea seems to have been to write a better redemption arc for Nightmare Moon. You'll recall that I've been grumbling recently about how Peen Stroke seems to be trying to shift blame onto Nexus for all of the shitty stuff NM has done, which is rather a lame cop-out for a story that is supposed to redeem her. This new development actually carries this a step further: now, all of this is no longer even Nexus' fault.
Nexus, as we learn in this scene, is just a victim himself; Nightmare Moon's "blessing" is just some kind of generically evil creeping crud, that takes over its host's mind and causes them to do generically evil things. Oddly enough, Nigel seems to have called it with his reference to Spider Man 3 and the Venom goop. This basically means that no character in this story is in any way responsible for their actions so long as they have this creeping crud infection, which means that NM's "redemption" at this point is probably just shaping up to be a mass purge of the crud, something I'd frankly rather see applied to the text itself. All of the blame has essentially been transferred onto a soulless magic entity that simply exists as evil for the sake of evil. Nobody who has this infection can really be held accountable for anything they did under the entity's influence, but at the same time nobody can really be redeemed for anything either, because they can't be held accountable. But whatever, let's see where it goes.
Anyway, Nyx does the same magic trick she did with Twilight, and tries to magically yank the infection out, but in Nexus it turns out to be much more powerful and is embedded more deeply. It turns out that Nexus had apparently created some kind of seal to keep it in himself as soon as he figured out what it was, which he hoped would keep it from spreading. Ironically this turned him into its prime carrier. This does, however, prevent it from leaping from Nexus into Nyx and taking over her body completely, as it would doubtless try to do since she is the real Nightmare Moon (you're a faggot, Peen Stroke), but it also means that Nyx can't just yank it out and kill it like she did with Twilight.
This actually looks like this is shaping up to be a bigger scene that it initially appeared to be, and I'm running out of space, so I'm going to stop here and start fresh in a new post.
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>>262052
If I'm understanding this correctly, the creeping crud is basically Nightmare Moon's essence BAM. When the Mane 6 blasted NM with their rainbow lasers and destroyed her armor, some portion of Luna's anger and resentment apparently fused with some of her magic into the armor, and this basically allowed NM to become separated from Luna as a separate entity. When the armor was blasted off of Luna, the entity broke apart from Luna and remained in the fragments of the armor. The entity seems to be some kind of parasite that infects anything it comes into contact with and essentially takes over their nature, transforming them into an evil version of themselves. Nexus had previously been one of Celestia's most trusted students, but when he began studying the armor the infection took hold of him and turned him into the buttnoid that we all know and love.
The whole thing is actually very reminiscent of the kind of thing that occurs in comic books, and I actually don't disapprove of it as the basis for a story. However, it causes a couple of problems with this one. The first is that it makes it impossible for Peen Stroke to accomplish his original objective of re-writing Nightmare Moon's redemption arc. I'll once again quote his original thesis:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
The problem here is basically what I went over in my previous post: if Nightmare Moon's evil can be reduced to a formless alien parasite that forces its host to become evil, then the host isn't responsible for her actions while under control and thus does not require redemption, or at the very least could be easily redeemed with a quick apology after the parasite was removed. The parasite itself, by definition, is pure evil, and can't be redeemed because there's nothing to redeem; it has no existence outside of simply being a generic blob of evil. Thus, Peen Stroke has written himself into a corner, where the only possible way to solve the problem is to blast the parasite with a rainbow. So as far as I can tell, the only way Peen Stroke can wrap this up and still claim to have fulfilled his original objective is to have NM get blasted by something besides a rainbow could this be foreshadowing?.
The other problem is that the introduction of the parasite changes what the story is about. As I explained, it can no longer really be called a redemption arc; at this point, it's mostly just a comic book story about a fight between a hero and an alien blob. This in itself could be made into something interesting, but Peen Stroke would have had to start working on it much earlier. Nigel at one point suggested having it play out like Spider Man 3, where Peter Parker gets infected by the Venom goop and the central conflict becomes Peter's internal struggle between his true nature and the "new" Peter that the goo turned him into. A lot of people didn't care for it, but I actually really enjoyed that movie, mostly because I thought it was a lot of fun watching Peter Parker go around acting like a massive dick to everyone. It wasn't a super-serious Spider Man story, but the both the director and the actors clearly had a lot of fun with the script.
This angle could have worked for Past Sins, but it would have had to have been written this way from the get go, which it wasn't. One of the biggest underlying flaws in this story is that it can't really seem to make up its mind as to what it wants to be about. Is this a redemption story about Nightmare Moon? An original sin story about a filly named Nyx, who deals with problems in this existence created by karma inherited from a previous existence? A story about the rocky relationship between a mother and her troubled daughter? Or is it just a fun comic book story about an evil parasitic blob of crud that infects its hosts and turns them into evil versions of themselves? It seems like it's trying at times to be all of these, but it never successfully manages to be any of them.
In that interview I referenced earlier, Peen Stroke talks about how he doesn't like to plan his stories, he just starts with a central question and lets the story develop from there. This is a perfectly fine way to write, but in order for it to work, you need to stick to your central theme or question the entire time you're writing. If you start writing and you realize your story has grown into something completely different from what you originally wanted to write about (also perfectly fine; it happens to me all the time), you need to be able to figure out what the new central idea is, and then go back and edit what you previously wrote to bring it in line with the new idea. The important thing is that your story needs to have a consistent theme; you can't just vomit out a long autistic sequence of events and call it a story. Or rather, you can, but what you end up with is about 200,000 words of rambling, directionless crap.
Anyway, Nyx, as I observed earlier, is basically a chimera created during Nexus' ritual. She was created from a combination of the creeping crud and some kind of Earth magic from the Everfree Forest. Thus, unlike the parasite's other victims, Nyx was not infected by the parasite, but is an actual embodiment of it. The parasite is a part of her, and to some degree can be said to have created her. However, she also has her own existence separate from it. Thus, the problem is how to separate herself from it so it can be defeated. How is she going to manage this? At this point I honestly have no idea; this whole story is so random and ridiculous I've completely given up on trying to make predictions about where it's going to go. However, I have no doubt that no matter where Peen Stroke intends to take this, we're going to have to wade through an ocean of unnecessary tears and exaggerated drama ere the conclusion of this wretched tome.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the creeping crud is basically Nightmare Moon's essence BAM. When the Mane 6 blasted NM with their rainbow lasers and destroyed her armor, some portion of Luna's anger and resentment apparently fused with some of her magic into the armor, and this basically allowed NM to become separated from Luna as a separate entity. When the armor was blasted off of Luna, the entity broke apart from Luna and remained in the fragments of the armor. The entity seems to be some kind of parasite that infects anything it comes into contact with and essentially takes over their nature, transforming them into an evil version of themselves. Nexus had previously been one of Celestia's most trusted students, but when he began studying the armor the infection took hold of him and turned him into the buttnoid that we all know and love.
The whole thing is actually very reminiscent of the kind of thing that occurs in comic books, and I actually don't disapprove of it as the basis for a story. However, it causes a couple of problems with this one. The first is that it makes it impossible for Peen Stroke to accomplish his original objective of re-writing Nightmare Moon's redemption arc. I'll once again quote his original thesis:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
The problem here is basically what I went over in my previous post: if Nightmare Moon's evil can be reduced to a formless alien parasite that forces its host to become evil, then the host isn't responsible for her actions while under control and thus does not require redemption, or at the very least could be easily redeemed with a quick apology after the parasite was removed. The parasite itself, by definition, is pure evil, and can't be redeemed because there's nothing to redeem; it has no existence outside of simply being a generic blob of evil. Thus, Peen Stroke has written himself into a corner, where the only possible way to solve the problem is to blast the parasite with a rainbow. So as far as I can tell, the only way Peen Stroke can wrap this up and still claim to have fulfilled his original objective is to have NM get blasted by something besides a rainbow could this be foreshadowing?.
The other problem is that the introduction of the parasite changes what the story is about. As I explained, it can no longer really be called a redemption arc; at this point, it's mostly just a comic book story about a fight between a hero and an alien blob. This in itself could be made into something interesting, but Peen Stroke would have had to start working on it much earlier. Nigel at one point suggested having it play out like Spider Man 3, where Peter Parker gets infected by the Venom goop and the central conflict becomes Peter's internal struggle between his true nature and the "new" Peter that the goo turned him into. A lot of people didn't care for it, but I actually really enjoyed that movie, mostly because I thought it was a lot of fun watching Peter Parker go around acting like a massive dick to everyone. It wasn't a super-serious Spider Man story, but the both the director and the actors clearly had a lot of fun with the script.
This angle could have worked for Past Sins, but it would have had to have been written this way from the get go, which it wasn't. One of the biggest underlying flaws in this story is that it can't really seem to make up its mind as to what it wants to be about. Is this a redemption story about Nightmare Moon? An original sin story about a filly named Nyx, who deals with problems in this existence created by karma inherited from a previous existence? A story about the rocky relationship between a mother and her troubled daughter? Or is it just a fun comic book story about an evil parasitic blob of crud that infects its hosts and turns them into evil versions of themselves? It seems like it's trying at times to be all of these, but it never successfully manages to be any of them.
In that interview I referenced earlier, Peen Stroke talks about how he doesn't like to plan his stories, he just starts with a central question and lets the story develop from there. This is a perfectly fine way to write, but in order for it to work, you need to stick to your central theme or question the entire time you're writing. If you start writing and you realize your story has grown into something completely different from what you originally wanted to write about (also perfectly fine; it happens to me all the time), you need to be able to figure out what the new central idea is, and then go back and edit what you previously wrote to bring it in line with the new idea. The important thing is that your story needs to have a consistent theme; you can't just vomit out a long autistic sequence of events and call it a story. Or rather, you can, but what you end up with is about 200,000 words of rambling, directionless crap.
Anyway, Nyx, as I observed earlier, is basically a chimera created during Nexus' ritual. She was created from a combination of the creeping crud and some kind of Earth magic from the Everfree Forest. Thus, unlike the parasite's other victims, Nyx was not infected by the parasite, but is an actual embodiment of it. The parasite is a part of her, and to some degree can be said to have created her. However, she also has her own existence separate from it. Thus, the problem is how to separate herself from it so it can be defeated. How is she going to manage this? At this point I honestly have no idea; this whole story is so random and ridiculous I've completely given up on trying to make predictions about where it's going to go. However, I have no doubt that no matter where Peen Stroke intends to take this, we're going to have to wade through an ocean of unnecessary tears and exaggerated drama ere the conclusion of this wretched tome.
>>262050
It's easy to laugh at stuff like this, but what's alarming is that this tactic actually works on a large demographic of people, and I get the impression that this is mostly Mr. P's reader base. This scene is completely ridiculous and makes little sense, but the reader is supposed to be so shocked by the prospect of Twilight being killed that they won't notice. Again, the most unsettling thing is that this actually works on a certain kind of person, and that such people make up a disturbingly large portion of the general human mass (for instance, we know there are at least 11,000 of them).
An IRL normie friend of mine I redpilled once said he heard kids and grown women crying in the theatre during that stupid scene in Avengers Endgame where a ton of beloved characters die at the same time so they can be time-travelled back to life in the sequel through deus ex machina cheatery.
It's easy to laugh at stuff like this, but what's alarming is that this tactic actually works on a large demographic of people, and I get the impression that this is mostly Mr. P's reader base. This scene is completely ridiculous and makes little sense, but the reader is supposed to be so shocked by the prospect of Twilight being killed that they won't notice. Again, the most unsettling thing is that this actually works on a certain kind of person, and that such people make up a disturbingly large portion of the general human mass (for instance, we know there are at least 11,000 of them).
An IRL normie friend of mine I redpilled once said he heard kids and grown women crying in the theatre during that stupid scene in Avengers Endgame where a ton of beloved characters die at the same time so they can be time-travelled back to life in the sequel through deus ex machina cheatery.
>>262050
>On literally the next line, it is explained that Nightmare Moon summoned all of her magic and made herself into a cloud and blah blah blah she saved Twilight in the nick of time using rainbows and lasers.
Why the fuck didn't she just magic her Twilight Doll to look like a convincing Twilight corpse, then Teleport Switch the falling real Twilight with the doll?
That way everyone would think Twilight is dead and no longer a threat, letting Disguised Twilight gather the EOH and prepare a rebellion.
That way NMM can say to Twilight "It's me, Nyx! I'm in control but not for long! I'm made of NMM smoke and her memories, magic from the everfree, and your blood! I'm sorry but I can't be seen helping you or freeing you. So get out there, disguise yourself, raise a rebellion and defeat my cult! Ponies who hate me outnumber ponies who like me. I'll help by knocking some of them out with big magic blasts so I can look more evil and uncaring. Then I'll go down in the first round of my fight against you. Just shoot a magic blast at my face, I'll take over this body again and fall over, and you use the elements to purge the NMM-ness from my body, got it?"
Reading this for the first time, I thought the text wasted so much time talking about the Twilight doll because it would become relevant later.
Silly me, I suppose.
Then again, I was also an explanation that would explain WHY Nyx acts like she can't just pick up and throw Nexus across the country with her superior Alicorn magic. A simple line where Nexus says "I summoned you, that means I control you!" and magically proves this to be the case because unbreakable magic laws would be fine. Then Nyx would have to figure out a way to stop Nexus without breaking the magic laws and destroying herself in the process.
Maybe in the end NMM could say "Fuck it", give up on cleverness, and blow Nexus up while destroying herself. The sacrifice makes Twilight cry because "My baby girl is gone! My baby giiiiiiiiiiiiiirl!" and everyone cries then Nyx climbs out of the crater NMM-free and everyone hugs her and says "We're sorry for not loving you as much as we should have!" and happy end kill me.
>On literally the next line, it is explained that Nightmare Moon summoned all of her magic and made herself into a cloud and blah blah blah she saved Twilight in the nick of time using rainbows and lasers.
Why the fuck didn't she just magic her Twilight Doll to look like a convincing Twilight corpse, then Teleport Switch the falling real Twilight with the doll?
That way everyone would think Twilight is dead and no longer a threat, letting Disguised Twilight gather the EOH and prepare a rebellion.
That way NMM can say to Twilight "It's me, Nyx! I'm in control but not for long! I'm made of NMM smoke and her memories, magic from the everfree, and your blood! I'm sorry but I can't be seen helping you or freeing you. So get out there, disguise yourself, raise a rebellion and defeat my cult! Ponies who hate me outnumber ponies who like me. I'll help by knocking some of them out with big magic blasts so I can look more evil and uncaring. Then I'll go down in the first round of my fight against you. Just shoot a magic blast at my face, I'll take over this body again and fall over, and you use the elements to purge the NMM-ness from my body, got it?"
Reading this for the first time, I thought the text wasted so much time talking about the Twilight doll because it would become relevant later.
Silly me, I suppose.
Then again, I was also an explanation that would explain WHY Nyx acts like she can't just pick up and throw Nexus across the country with her superior Alicorn magic. A simple line where Nexus says "I summoned you, that means I control you!" and magically proves this to be the case because unbreakable magic laws would be fine. Then Nyx would have to figure out a way to stop Nexus without breaking the magic laws and destroying herself in the process.
Maybe in the end NMM could say "Fuck it", give up on cleverness, and blow Nexus up while destroying herself. The sacrifice makes Twilight cry because "My baby girl is gone! My baby giiiiiiiiiiiiiirl!" and everyone cries then Nyx climbs out of the crater NMM-free and everyone hugs her and says "We're sorry for not loving you as much as we should have!" and happy end kill me.
> I don't think even the most simple-minded cretin reading this ever thought Twilight was going to actually die,
Kek. I wa surprised really. I thought that was the route Pen Stroke was going to take it. The reason was because I had a sucha vivid imagine on where the story was going to head from here, just because I thought it made most sense, that I forgot that we are dealing with Pen Stroke. I should have remember how this story started by being utterly generic and following the cliches to a T.
I knew Nightmare Moon could save Twilight if she wanted, she is literally a demi-goddess, I just expected her to fall in line with Nexus and the cult due to peer pressure or wahtever the fuck made her lock up Twilight in the first place, and all the other shit that she has done due to Nexus. It would have made snese for her, I thought to act all alooft and cold towards Twilight, perhaps even taunting her before she was killed, and then later regret her actions and start to self pitying herself again, just because of how hated her cahracter is by some I thought that this would be the top of it.
Instead it is the oldest cliche fake out in the book, which I'm not sure which story I should refrence to when I say, mm-mm-mm called they want their scene back because it would probably be a list.
What was even the point with that fakeout, wouldn't it just piss people off that we just went back to the status quo. Well, we didn't because all of a sudden the creeping crudd and...
You know what I don't care anymore. Nothing of this makes any sense. You're not joking when you imply that hte story keeps getting absurder for every page. Honestly, what the fuck was the point with all this?
Is Nyx good now, btw?
Dear Princess Celestia, you wh oare banished to the sun, by your truly. Today I learn that banishing benevolent leaders for a peacful country for no reason, throwing my mother into a dungeon and some innocent fillies, and bringing eternal night with all the consequnces that comes with it. It is not nice.
P.s. Twilight tells me not to drink bleach (but it is so good!), she is such a smart pony.
~My little pony~
Kek. I wa surprised really. I thought that was the route Pen Stroke was going to take it. The reason was because I had a sucha vivid imagine on where the story was going to head from here, just because I thought it made most sense, that I forgot that we are dealing with Pen Stroke. I should have remember how this story started by being utterly generic and following the cliches to a T.
I knew Nightmare Moon could save Twilight if she wanted, she is literally a demi-goddess, I just expected her to fall in line with Nexus and the cult due to peer pressure or wahtever the fuck made her lock up Twilight in the first place, and all the other shit that she has done due to Nexus. It would have made snese for her, I thought to act all alooft and cold towards Twilight, perhaps even taunting her before she was killed, and then later regret her actions and start to self pitying herself again, just because of how hated her cahracter is by some I thought that this would be the top of it.
Instead it is the oldest cliche fake out in the book, which I'm not sure which story I should refrence to when I say, mm-mm-mm called they want their scene back because it would probably be a list.
What was even the point with that fakeout, wouldn't it just piss people off that we just went back to the status quo. Well, we didn't because all of a sudden the creeping crudd and...
You know what I don't care anymore. Nothing of this makes any sense. You're not joking when you imply that hte story keeps getting absurder for every page. Honestly, what the fuck was the point with all this?
Is Nyx good now, btw?
Dear Princess Celestia, you wh oare banished to the sun, by your truly. Today I learn that banishing benevolent leaders for a peacful country for no reason, throwing my mother into a dungeon and some innocent fillies, and bringing eternal night with all the consequnces that comes with it. It is not nice.
P.s. Twilight tells me not to drink bleach (but it is so good!), she is such a smart pony.
~My little pony~
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>>262055
So anyway, where was I with the actual text? Oh yeah. Nyx is fighting the crud, trying to draw it out of Nexus. However, she's having a harder time of it than with Twilight, because it has come very close to taking over Nexus' entire being. She also discovers that because the entity is a part of herself, she hurts herself when she attacks it. Well, isn't she just in a pickle.
Now that it's been awakened fully, the entity tries to escape from the binding spells Nexus put on himself back when he was still good that seals the entity inside his body. It now wishes to escape Nexus and reunite with Nyx in order to fully take control and purge whatever portion of Nyx still remains in Nightmare Moon.
Nyx summons all of the magical energy that she can muster. She basically goes full super-Saiyan, summons a giant ball of energy, throws it at the blob inside Nexus in one giant burst, causes an earthquake that can be felt all the way in Appleoosa, etc etc etc. Holy fuck, I was only kidding about the "just have NM get blasted by something other than a rainbow" bit, but it looks like that's seriously how he wants to end it.
I'm actually a little surprised he concluded the fight this quickly; the fight with Celestia dragged on forever and was much less of an important event. This is the final climactic battle between Nyx and the evil inside her, so you'd think he'd at least draw it out and make it feel like a real fight. But then again, it's Peen Stroke we're talking about here, so I suppose I shouldn't really be that surprised. I can imagine him selling his own writing course on Udemy or something:
>Today, for only four easy payments of $49.95, you can learn The Peen Stroke Method™! Learn how to write long, rambling, stupid epics about nothing in particular! Are annoying elements like themes or character arcs weighing your story down? I'll show you how to truncate your most important scenes and get them out of the way as quickly as possible, so that you'll have even more room for irrelevant dialog, autistic references, and meandering non-sequitur bullshit about characters who aren't even in your story! If you follow my proven method, I guarantee your next work at least 10,000 upvotes or your money back!
Anyway. Nyx does her kamehameha bullshit and blasts the creeping crud out of Nexus, and it seems like she also blasts it out of herself I guess. She experiences excruciating agony as the entity is simultaneously purged from her own being.
Since it really wouldn't do to write a cliched anime battle scene and not zap the cliches to the extreme, we see that there is still a tiny portion of the creeping crud that survives the blast. It goes creeping pathetically across the floor, trying desperately to escape. Nyx, showing not even the slightest bit of compassion for this soulless evil thingamabob, stomps her hoof on it, and grinds the last little bit of it out of existence. Poof, it's gone. Apparently, that's the end of Nightmare Moon.
I have to say, every time I think I've got this story figured out, it manages to throw me a curveball, and I don't mean that as a compliment. Was this the climax? It felt like it was supposed to be the climax, but…I'm not sure. And as Peen Stroke likely knows from his years of experience as a power bottom, if someone is asking you whether that was the climax or not, it means you probably didn't do your job correctly.
I mean, this was just weird. Not only was the battle scene cut rather abruptly short, we didn't even find out about the existence of this magic parasite until literally a chapter ago. Then, it was suddenly made into the primary antagonist of the story and defeated, all within the space of first two thirds of the subsequent chapter. If this was the final battle between Nyx and the evil within herself, then what else is left?
From here, there should just be a bit of denouement: Nyx apologizes for all the trouble she caused, lets the royal sisters go free, abdicates the throne, is presumably forgiven, and goes back to whatever semblance of a life she can expect to have at this point. This is basically the end of the story. And yet we still have the rest of this chapter plus four more yet to go. And of these four remaining chapters, two of them are roughly 13,000 words in length, one is 12,000, and the shortest one is about 7,000. That means we've still got about 45,000 words left to go; there are entire novels that are about that long. What could possibly still happen in this story that could require that many words to say? I shudder to comprehend it.
Well, anyway, here's how Nyx is comprehending it:
>She had destroyed a piece of herself, the part that would have made everything she had done, everything she had accomplished, have meaning and purpose. Now, she truly and forever was stuck between two lives. She could never be Nyx again, and she had just burnt away the part of her that could have found happiness living the life of the true tyrant queen Nightmare Moon.
I think I more or less get what he's going for here, but it's a very strange interpretation of what's going on. I think we're supposed to see winning this fight as some kind of self-sacrificing act on the part of Nyx, since she basically destroyed the Nightmare Moon part of herself, but…she's still Nightmare Moon. For some reason. I guess. Actually, come to think of it, that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense either. If she destroyed the evil part of her, shouldn't that undo the spell Nexus cast? In fact, since she's just a chimera created from NM and some hippie forest magic, shouldn't destroying the NM part mean she either disintegrates, or at least transforms into some kind of third thing, that is no longer Nyx the filly but no longer NM either, maybe something that's pure Everfree magic? This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
So anyway, where was I with the actual text? Oh yeah. Nyx is fighting the crud, trying to draw it out of Nexus. However, she's having a harder time of it than with Twilight, because it has come very close to taking over Nexus' entire being. She also discovers that because the entity is a part of herself, she hurts herself when she attacks it. Well, isn't she just in a pickle.
Now that it's been awakened fully, the entity tries to escape from the binding spells Nexus put on himself back when he was still good that seals the entity inside his body. It now wishes to escape Nexus and reunite with Nyx in order to fully take control and purge whatever portion of Nyx still remains in Nightmare Moon.
Nyx summons all of the magical energy that she can muster. She basically goes full super-Saiyan, summons a giant ball of energy, throws it at the blob inside Nexus in one giant burst, causes an earthquake that can be felt all the way in Appleoosa, etc etc etc. Holy fuck, I was only kidding about the "just have NM get blasted by something other than a rainbow" bit, but it looks like that's seriously how he wants to end it.
I'm actually a little surprised he concluded the fight this quickly; the fight with Celestia dragged on forever and was much less of an important event. This is the final climactic battle between Nyx and the evil inside her, so you'd think he'd at least draw it out and make it feel like a real fight. But then again, it's Peen Stroke we're talking about here, so I suppose I shouldn't really be that surprised. I can imagine him selling his own writing course on Udemy or something:
>Today, for only four easy payments of $49.95, you can learn The Peen Stroke Method™! Learn how to write long, rambling, stupid epics about nothing in particular! Are annoying elements like themes or character arcs weighing your story down? I'll show you how to truncate your most important scenes and get them out of the way as quickly as possible, so that you'll have even more room for irrelevant dialog, autistic references, and meandering non-sequitur bullshit about characters who aren't even in your story! If you follow my proven method, I guarantee your next work at least 10,000 upvotes or your money back!
Anyway. Nyx does her kamehameha bullshit and blasts the creeping crud out of Nexus, and it seems like she also blasts it out of herself I guess. She experiences excruciating agony as the entity is simultaneously purged from her own being.
Since it really wouldn't do to write a cliched anime battle scene and not zap the cliches to the extreme, we see that there is still a tiny portion of the creeping crud that survives the blast. It goes creeping pathetically across the floor, trying desperately to escape. Nyx, showing not even the slightest bit of compassion for this soulless evil thingamabob, stomps her hoof on it, and grinds the last little bit of it out of existence. Poof, it's gone. Apparently, that's the end of Nightmare Moon.
I have to say, every time I think I've got this story figured out, it manages to throw me a curveball, and I don't mean that as a compliment. Was this the climax? It felt like it was supposed to be the climax, but…I'm not sure. And as Peen Stroke likely knows from his years of experience as a power bottom, if someone is asking you whether that was the climax or not, it means you probably didn't do your job correctly.
I mean, this was just weird. Not only was the battle scene cut rather abruptly short, we didn't even find out about the existence of this magic parasite until literally a chapter ago. Then, it was suddenly made into the primary antagonist of the story and defeated, all within the space of first two thirds of the subsequent chapter. If this was the final battle between Nyx and the evil within herself, then what else is left?
From here, there should just be a bit of denouement: Nyx apologizes for all the trouble she caused, lets the royal sisters go free, abdicates the throne, is presumably forgiven, and goes back to whatever semblance of a life she can expect to have at this point. This is basically the end of the story. And yet we still have the rest of this chapter plus four more yet to go. And of these four remaining chapters, two of them are roughly 13,000 words in length, one is 12,000, and the shortest one is about 7,000. That means we've still got about 45,000 words left to go; there are entire novels that are about that long. What could possibly still happen in this story that could require that many words to say? I shudder to comprehend it.
Well, anyway, here's how Nyx is comprehending it:
>She had destroyed a piece of herself, the part that would have made everything she had done, everything she had accomplished, have meaning and purpose. Now, she truly and forever was stuck between two lives. She could never be Nyx again, and she had just burnt away the part of her that could have found happiness living the life of the true tyrant queen Nightmare Moon.
I think I more or less get what he's going for here, but it's a very strange interpretation of what's going on. I think we're supposed to see winning this fight as some kind of self-sacrificing act on the part of Nyx, since she basically destroyed the Nightmare Moon part of herself, but…she's still Nightmare Moon. For some reason. I guess. Actually, come to think of it, that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense either. If she destroyed the evil part of her, shouldn't that undo the spell Nexus cast? In fact, since she's just a chimera created from NM and some hippie forest magic, shouldn't destroying the NM part mean she either disintegrates, or at least transforms into some kind of third thing, that is no longer Nyx the filly but no longer NM either, maybe something that's pure Everfree magic? This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
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>>262147
>Still… the fleeting moment of happiness in her chest lingered. She had… done something right, and, even if Equestria as a whole hated her for the rest of eternity for what she had done, she had at least done this much right.
>And it wasn’t going to be the last thing she did right either.
So, I guess the rest of the story is just going to be about Nyx going around and fixing all the shit she did? Seems kind of hard to imagine 50,000 words being squeezed out of that, but I guess we'll see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT_zt5tMv4g
Anyway, completely out of left field, the next scene cuts to Diamond Tiara, who hasn't made an appearance in so long I'd almost forgotten she was even in this story. She's by herself, swinging forlornly on her swingset, feeling batman because her Dad used to push her and now her Dad's not around anymore. Her father, being one of the original members of the Children of Nightmare, had gone off to work for Nyx and apparently is kept so busy that he no longer has time to come home and see his family, or something.
I'll be perfectly honest, I'd forgotten all about Filthy Rich being in the cult. It happened so long ago that it just plain slipped my mind. I remember thinking at the time that it was actually a potentially interesting development, but recalling it here just makes me realize that Peen Stroke went to all the trouble of setting it up and then never did a thing with it. For that matter, Diamond Tiara was discarded from the story pretty early on too; she was a fairly important character towards the beginning, being the principal antagonist for young Nyx, but she completely dropped out of the story. This is why it feels so jarring to suddenly cut to her now.
Another thing that doesn't make a ton of sense is this line:
>The past few weeks had been the worst of the filly’s life. Almost every pony in town was mad at her. Some outright blamed her for everything that had happened
Why would all the ponies be mad at her? She and her friend picked on Nyx a little early on in the story, but how big a deal is that really? I think Peen Stroke's thinking is that since DT/SS bullied Nyx, that this somehow "drove" her to turn into NM, but if that's the case, then the story does an abysmal job of establishing that as a motive for her (as I've gone over numerous times).
The way I remember that arc going, Nyx was initially treated badly in school because she was always asking questions and making the class run long, and DT/SS gave her the worst of it because they're just cunty like that. This culminated with the incident where they deliberately got her lost in the Everfree. Though I'm sure this was a traumatic event for Nyx, she doesn't seem to be all that worse for wear afterward. It also seems like her school life vastly improves once she befriends the CMC and starts behaving like less of a sperg: she gets the lead role in a play, and she orchestrates the Learn and Play day, and there isn't really any mention of the other students particularly disliking her.
At any rate, we don't hear anything more about her being bullied, and she has no further altercations with DT/SS until the tug of war match, and even that is fairly minor. It's a pretty big stretch to even expect the reader to connect DT's bullying with Nyx's transformation, let alone a bunch of random ponies in town who aren't directly connected to these events and can't even be assumed to know what was going on. And if they did know the whole story, it would make much more sense for them to blame Twilight, who harbored Nightmare Moon and kept it a secret from Celestia as well as the town, than it would to blame some random child who happened to have a couple of schoolyard spats with her way back when. I just can't follow Peen Stroke's line of reasoning here.
Anyway, she's pissy about her Dad being gone. Then, suddenly, she hears the front gate creak.
The way this is set up, I almost thought Peen Stroke was going somewhere with this for a second. Like maybe, just maybe, he got a concussion or something, and started thinking like an actual writer just long enough to realize that if he wanted to pad out his story for another 45,000 words, it might help to develop a new plot arc. Against all hope, I thought that maybe that's what this scene was doing; that maybe there would be a new arc involving Diamond Tiara and her family, and whoever was at the gate was going to be the character who began the arc. I mean, you'd think that, seeing as how the mood of the scene is rather dark, it presents us with a new character (since she's been out of the story so long at this point we can pretty much think of DT as a new character) with a new set of problems, and then suddenly a gate creaks ominously.
But no, the scene resolves itself almost immediately in the dullest and most pedestrian way possible. As it turns out, the creaking at the gate, which DT was surely hoping against hope had been made by her father, was not, in fact, Nightmare Moon coming to get revenge, or some new antagonist for a new arc making their first appearance in the story, or even Gandalf the bloody Grey coming to recruit her for an expedition to the Lonely Mountain. No, I'm afraid it's nothing quite that interesting. As it turns out, the creaking at the gate was actually made by the very pony she hoped it had been made by: her father. And her father isn't even under the spell of the NM crud anymore; he's just a regular-ass pony again, who is happy to see his daughter. Touching? Probably, to anyone who gives a shit. However, since DT has not played even a minor role in this story since literally Chapter 8, and most of us have probably forgotten about both her and her father, and furthermore her whole problem of missing her father was not set up or established or even hinted at until literally just now, it's hard to imagine that the list of people who give a shit could possibly be that long. But what the hay.
>Still… the fleeting moment of happiness in her chest lingered. She had… done something right, and, even if Equestria as a whole hated her for the rest of eternity for what she had done, she had at least done this much right.
>And it wasn’t going to be the last thing she did right either.
So, I guess the rest of the story is just going to be about Nyx going around and fixing all the shit she did? Seems kind of hard to imagine 50,000 words being squeezed out of that, but I guess we'll see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT_zt5tMv4g
Anyway, completely out of left field, the next scene cuts to Diamond Tiara, who hasn't made an appearance in so long I'd almost forgotten she was even in this story. She's by herself, swinging forlornly on her swingset, feeling batman because her Dad used to push her and now her Dad's not around anymore. Her father, being one of the original members of the Children of Nightmare, had gone off to work for Nyx and apparently is kept so busy that he no longer has time to come home and see his family, or something.
I'll be perfectly honest, I'd forgotten all about Filthy Rich being in the cult. It happened so long ago that it just plain slipped my mind. I remember thinking at the time that it was actually a potentially interesting development, but recalling it here just makes me realize that Peen Stroke went to all the trouble of setting it up and then never did a thing with it. For that matter, Diamond Tiara was discarded from the story pretty early on too; she was a fairly important character towards the beginning, being the principal antagonist for young Nyx, but she completely dropped out of the story. This is why it feels so jarring to suddenly cut to her now.
Another thing that doesn't make a ton of sense is this line:
>The past few weeks had been the worst of the filly’s life. Almost every pony in town was mad at her. Some outright blamed her for everything that had happened
Why would all the ponies be mad at her? She and her friend picked on Nyx a little early on in the story, but how big a deal is that really? I think Peen Stroke's thinking is that since DT/SS bullied Nyx, that this somehow "drove" her to turn into NM, but if that's the case, then the story does an abysmal job of establishing that as a motive for her (as I've gone over numerous times).
The way I remember that arc going, Nyx was initially treated badly in school because she was always asking questions and making the class run long, and DT/SS gave her the worst of it because they're just cunty like that. This culminated with the incident where they deliberately got her lost in the Everfree. Though I'm sure this was a traumatic event for Nyx, she doesn't seem to be all that worse for wear afterward. It also seems like her school life vastly improves once she befriends the CMC and starts behaving like less of a sperg: she gets the lead role in a play, and she orchestrates the Learn and Play day, and there isn't really any mention of the other students particularly disliking her.
At any rate, we don't hear anything more about her being bullied, and she has no further altercations with DT/SS until the tug of war match, and even that is fairly minor. It's a pretty big stretch to even expect the reader to connect DT's bullying with Nyx's transformation, let alone a bunch of random ponies in town who aren't directly connected to these events and can't even be assumed to know what was going on. And if they did know the whole story, it would make much more sense for them to blame Twilight, who harbored Nightmare Moon and kept it a secret from Celestia as well as the town, than it would to blame some random child who happened to have a couple of schoolyard spats with her way back when. I just can't follow Peen Stroke's line of reasoning here.
Anyway, she's pissy about her Dad being gone. Then, suddenly, she hears the front gate creak.
The way this is set up, I almost thought Peen Stroke was going somewhere with this for a second. Like maybe, just maybe, he got a concussion or something, and started thinking like an actual writer just long enough to realize that if he wanted to pad out his story for another 45,000 words, it might help to develop a new plot arc. Against all hope, I thought that maybe that's what this scene was doing; that maybe there would be a new arc involving Diamond Tiara and her family, and whoever was at the gate was going to be the character who began the arc. I mean, you'd think that, seeing as how the mood of the scene is rather dark, it presents us with a new character (since she's been out of the story so long at this point we can pretty much think of DT as a new character) with a new set of problems, and then suddenly a gate creaks ominously.
But no, the scene resolves itself almost immediately in the dullest and most pedestrian way possible. As it turns out, the creaking at the gate, which DT was surely hoping against hope had been made by her father, was not, in fact, Nightmare Moon coming to get revenge, or some new antagonist for a new arc making their first appearance in the story, or even Gandalf the bloody Grey coming to recruit her for an expedition to the Lonely Mountain. No, I'm afraid it's nothing quite that interesting. As it turns out, the creaking at the gate was actually made by the very pony she hoped it had been made by: her father. And her father isn't even under the spell of the NM crud anymore; he's just a regular-ass pony again, who is happy to see his daughter. Touching? Probably, to anyone who gives a shit. However, since DT has not played even a minor role in this story since literally Chapter 8, and most of us have probably forgotten about both her and her father, and furthermore her whole problem of missing her father was not set up or established or even hinted at until literally just now, it's hard to imagine that the list of people who give a shit could possibly be that long. But what the hay.
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>>262150
Another thing that grinds my gears about this story is the way it just randomly introduces things as if they're going to be important, and then never follows through. The Filthy Rich thing is a perfect example. In the early part of the story, DT is written as the primary antagonist. We assume that she's not going to be the main antagonist of the entire work of course, but as an adversary for young Nyx, a schoolyard bully is a reasonably good choice. The arc with her culminates with Nyx getting lost in the woods, and after that there's an altercation between Twilight and DT's parents, because of Twilight's getting angry with DT while searching for Nyx. The way that is written, we get the sense that the conflict is building. FR threatens to go and see the Mayor, which I remember thinking was a bit overkill, but it could potentially have been an interesting development. Since at the time, Twilight was trying to keep a low profile for Nyx, unwanted attention and pressure from the town government could have created some interesting problems for her. But nothing ever comes out of it.
Later, we find out that Filthy Rich is a member of the cult; he's even the reason that Nexus learns Nyx's identity. But again, it's a lot of buildup for nothing; after he fulfills this role, he's basically out of the story. It's like the story spent all this time building him up as if he were going to be a significant character, and then suddenly poof, he's gone. Horte faggot-ass Cuisine is mentioned more often than Filthy Rich after the play scene. Then, he's just randomly brought back into the story here, with absolutely no lead in or setup. By now we've completely forgotten that he or his daughter were even characters, let alone that they were tragically separated, but we're just supposed to instantly start weeping with joy at their tearful reunion.
It was the same with Shining Armor. Peen Stroke kept intermittently name-dropping Cadance, which struck me as odd, because most of the time she didn't have anything to do with whatever was going on and it seemed weird to mention her. At first I thought it was just Peen Stroke being an autistic brony and namedropping characters just because, but when Shining Armor showed up I began to feel like he was going somewhere with it. Shining Armor is then specifically mentioned as having joined up with the Children of Nightmare after NM is victorious, so then I felt certain there was going to be some kind of arc or subplot revolving around him. But no, again, he's not in the story at all; he's just mentioned in passing at various times for no reason other than to mention him. I suppose, since we've still got another 4 chapters left, that he could still factor in somehow, but it seems pointless, since now that the NM crud has been defeated, and it's established here that all of the cult members are now returning to normal, it stands to reason that Shining would simply return to normal as well. Thus, even if Peen Stroke wanted to make an arc for him, there's nowhere interesting for it to go.
This story just randomly creates threads that seem like they might be interesting, but then just drops them at random, and then picks them up again out of nowhere, but instead of doing anything with them, just resolves them without spinning them into any kind of interesting story, leaving us mostly wondering why they were even introduced in the first place. Based on what I've seen of his storytelling abilities so far, I can only conclude that Peen Stroke is either an extremely sub-par human writer, a middling equine writer, or an extremely talented chicken pecking at a typewriter.
Anyway, the Diamond Tiara thing wraps up in yet another Peen Stroke Moment™, with a lot of sappy Hallmark emotion but very little of substance. DT sees her Daddy is home, asks him if he is home for good, he says that yes, he is home for good, and then they cry and swing on the swingset.
>All across Equestria, similar homecomings occurred. Stallions and mares who had once served Nightmare Moon were returning to the families and friends they had all but abandoned. As each was greeted with warm embraces and tear-filled eyes, those who had once served Equestria’s queen spoke of how they had not been fired from their jobs, but released… given back the freedom they never knew they had lost.
Yeah, we never really knew they'd lost it either.
Next, we cut to Zecora and Twilight. Together they are whipping up a potion, so that they might take a sip and hit the three wheel motion. Then, AJ and Spike show up. Apparently AJ is aware that Twilight is hiding out here, although it's not really clear how she would know this. Initially my thought was that Nyx must have told her, but it's made apparent that she only found out through the grapevine. Anyway, the reunion is nice for Spike. This conversation covers the same information that we learned during the DT/FR scene, which is that Nyx disbanded the cult and allowed her former servants to go free. Since none of them are possessed by the crud anymore, they are now all back to normal, and presumably resume their regular lives. AJ comments how strange it is that they no longer have the NM eyes.
Also of note is that both AJ and Zecora comment on an increase in the number of monsters in the Everfree forest lately. It's possible that whatever the remaining 45k words of the story are going to be about may involve this somehow, although I'm not holding my breath. In any event, we also learn that Nyx has made a proclamation: she has stepped down as Queen, although for some reason she is still choosing to keep Celestia and Luna imprisoned. Their "regents" are now in charge, whoever the hell they might be. She asks that everypony simply "pretend she doesn't exist", despite the fact that she will still be living in the giant, ostentatious eyesore of a castle she built just outside town. Twilight, however, is happy to receive the news.
Another thing that grinds my gears about this story is the way it just randomly introduces things as if they're going to be important, and then never follows through. The Filthy Rich thing is a perfect example. In the early part of the story, DT is written as the primary antagonist. We assume that she's not going to be the main antagonist of the entire work of course, but as an adversary for young Nyx, a schoolyard bully is a reasonably good choice. The arc with her culminates with Nyx getting lost in the woods, and after that there's an altercation between Twilight and DT's parents, because of Twilight's getting angry with DT while searching for Nyx. The way that is written, we get the sense that the conflict is building. FR threatens to go and see the Mayor, which I remember thinking was a bit overkill, but it could potentially have been an interesting development. Since at the time, Twilight was trying to keep a low profile for Nyx, unwanted attention and pressure from the town government could have created some interesting problems for her. But nothing ever comes out of it.
Later, we find out that Filthy Rich is a member of the cult; he's even the reason that Nexus learns Nyx's identity. But again, it's a lot of buildup for nothing; after he fulfills this role, he's basically out of the story. It's like the story spent all this time building him up as if he were going to be a significant character, and then suddenly poof, he's gone. Horte faggot-ass Cuisine is mentioned more often than Filthy Rich after the play scene. Then, he's just randomly brought back into the story here, with absolutely no lead in or setup. By now we've completely forgotten that he or his daughter were even characters, let alone that they were tragically separated, but we're just supposed to instantly start weeping with joy at their tearful reunion.
It was the same with Shining Armor. Peen Stroke kept intermittently name-dropping Cadance, which struck me as odd, because most of the time she didn't have anything to do with whatever was going on and it seemed weird to mention her. At first I thought it was just Peen Stroke being an autistic brony and namedropping characters just because, but when Shining Armor showed up I began to feel like he was going somewhere with it. Shining Armor is then specifically mentioned as having joined up with the Children of Nightmare after NM is victorious, so then I felt certain there was going to be some kind of arc or subplot revolving around him. But no, again, he's not in the story at all; he's just mentioned in passing at various times for no reason other than to mention him. I suppose, since we've still got another 4 chapters left, that he could still factor in somehow, but it seems pointless, since now that the NM crud has been defeated, and it's established here that all of the cult members are now returning to normal, it stands to reason that Shining would simply return to normal as well. Thus, even if Peen Stroke wanted to make an arc for him, there's nowhere interesting for it to go.
This story just randomly creates threads that seem like they might be interesting, but then just drops them at random, and then picks them up again out of nowhere, but instead of doing anything with them, just resolves them without spinning them into any kind of interesting story, leaving us mostly wondering why they were even introduced in the first place. Based on what I've seen of his storytelling abilities so far, I can only conclude that Peen Stroke is either an extremely sub-par human writer, a middling equine writer, or an extremely talented chicken pecking at a typewriter.
Anyway, the Diamond Tiara thing wraps up in yet another Peen Stroke Moment™, with a lot of sappy Hallmark emotion but very little of substance. DT sees her Daddy is home, asks him if he is home for good, he says that yes, he is home for good, and then they cry and swing on the swingset.
>All across Equestria, similar homecomings occurred. Stallions and mares who had once served Nightmare Moon were returning to the families and friends they had all but abandoned. As each was greeted with warm embraces and tear-filled eyes, those who had once served Equestria’s queen spoke of how they had not been fired from their jobs, but released… given back the freedom they never knew they had lost.
Yeah, we never really knew they'd lost it either.
Next, we cut to Zecora and Twilight. Together they are whipping up a potion, so that they might take a sip and hit the three wheel motion. Then, AJ and Spike show up. Apparently AJ is aware that Twilight is hiding out here, although it's not really clear how she would know this. Initially my thought was that Nyx must have told her, but it's made apparent that she only found out through the grapevine. Anyway, the reunion is nice for Spike. This conversation covers the same information that we learned during the DT/FR scene, which is that Nyx disbanded the cult and allowed her former servants to go free. Since none of them are possessed by the crud anymore, they are now all back to normal, and presumably resume their regular lives. AJ comments how strange it is that they no longer have the NM eyes.
Also of note is that both AJ and Zecora comment on an increase in the number of monsters in the Everfree forest lately. It's possible that whatever the remaining 45k words of the story are going to be about may involve this somehow, although I'm not holding my breath. In any event, we also learn that Nyx has made a proclamation: she has stepped down as Queen, although for some reason she is still choosing to keep Celestia and Luna imprisoned. Their "regents" are now in charge, whoever the hell they might be. She asks that everypony simply "pretend she doesn't exist", despite the fact that she will still be living in the giant, ostentatious eyesore of a castle she built just outside town. Twilight, however, is happy to receive the news.
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>>262150
When I heard people complain about the "Nyx defeats Nightmare Moon even though that's who she's supposed to be" part I'd always imagined a scene where the big filly battles NMM inside her own head.
But this evil smoke bullshit comes out of nowhere and is resolved so quickly... Is this a Deus Ex Machina? Or just an asspull?
When I heard people complain about the "Nyx defeats Nightmare Moon even though that's who she's supposed to be" part I'd always imagined a scene where the big filly battles NMM inside her own head.
But this evil smoke bullshit comes out of nowhere and is resolved so quickly... Is this a Deus Ex Machina? Or just an asspull?
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>>262151
Chapter 18: A Mare against Monsters
>The castle, which once bustled with ponies going about their work, now stood silently in the gem quarries outside Ponyville. Wind whistled through the empty halls, flitted through the windows, and, at times, made it sound like the old castle was singing some sad, lonesome, wordless chorus in an attempt to draw back the ponies who had once given it purpose.
And what purpose was that again? From where I'm standing, everything that has happened in this story since the school year ended has literally been one continuous exercise in futility. The first half of this text was mostly a mediocre slice of life story with some half-assed attempts at tragedy mixed in, but at least it more or less made sense.
Anyway, for reasons only she could understand, after everything that's happened Nyx has chosen to remain inside her gloomy-ass castle for the past week. She sits moodily atop her throne, the perfect picture of teenage angst: still dressed up like Nightmare Moon, but unwashed, her eye shadow fading, her armor slowly rusting away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOM7DbOfKxU
I'm still not 100% sure what exactly the creeping crud is. If what we've read so far in the text is to be taken at face value, we might assume that it was the essence of Nightmare Moon's evil, and in that case it would stand to reason that once Nyx yanked it out of Nexus, purged it from herself and stomped on the last tiny little piece of it that survived, that this would be the end. But apparently there was still the laborious task of having Nexus assemble all of the Children of Nightmare in the main hall of the castle, and individually purging the crud from each of them.
Once the curse is removed, the ponies all go back to normal as you might expect them to; however, for some reason, Nyx still has the same turquoise eyes and still looks like Nightmare Moon. She also still has her alicorn powers that allow her to raise the sun and moon, which it seems like she should have realistically lost if the Nightmare Moon crud had been purged from her body as well. In fact, I'm still not 100% clear on whether or not she's even completely purged of it. A lot of this still doesn't make a ton of sense.
Even after everything that's happened, I still can't help but think that there's some raw potential for this story if its author had put a little more forethought into what exactly he wanted to write about and found a better way to execute the idea. Peen Stroke can write eloquently enough when he wants to; as corny as the imagery is, the prose in this scene is well written and lays out a nice visual. On some level I can kind of understand what he's trying to do with Nyx. She's meant to be trapped between two worlds now; she can't go back to her old life, but for moral reasons she deliberately destroyed everything she might have achieved in her new one.
We're supposed to see this as a tragic, noble sacrifice, which could make for a compelling story if told well. However, as I've said time and time again, there are just too many flaws in the text for it to work. Nyx's motivations for becoming Nightmare Moon in the first place are never clearly established, nor is it explained why she can't just walk away from all of this now that it's over. Presumably she doesn't want to free Celestia and Luna because she would no doubt be forced to face the music, and I guess someone needs to raise and lower the sun in the meantime if they're not around, but there's still no good reason why she needs to spend all her time sitting in her big ugly castle, dressed up like Nightmare Moon and moping. Like I said, the story is basically over at this point. Go take a cruise or some shit, bitch; go into exile on top of a mountain if you feel like you don't deserve to re-enter society. But don't just sit around the castle feeling sorry for yourself; Lord knows we've all seen more than enough of that for one 200,000 word adventure.
Anyway, it looks like this line of reasoning occurs to Nyx as well. The problem for her seems to lie in this pathological fear she has of being sent to the moon, which again seems rather tacked on due to our old problem of Peen Stroke's spending the first half of the text writing about her as if she were a brand new original character, and then suddenly attaching Luna's memories to her and expecting the reader to bridge the gap with their knowledge of the show. So basically, she is trapped between a rock and a hard place right now: she doesn't want to be Nightmare Moon anymore, but she feels too sorry for herself to go back and see her friends. Oh, also, in another weird turn, it seems that Twilight comes to the castle every day to try and speak to her, but she just turns into a smoke cloud and hides on the ceiling until she leaves. Apparently, it never occurs to Princess Celestia's star pupil to look up when she enters a room. Equestrian education, amirite?
>It was better if Twilight just forgot about her, and that was why Nightmare Moon hid. Twilight was searching for Nyx, but Nightmare Moon knew there was no Nyx to be found.
See, this right here is a perfect example of what I've been talking about: the whole Nightmare Moon thing feels completely tacked on. I notice that even after all this time, I still mostly refer to her as "Nyx" in my posts. I've never really bought that this character even is Nightmare Moon, she just sort of randomly turned into her one day for reasons that are murky at best. Here, we are supposed to see her as being genuinely troubled by some great moral dilemma, but it comes across as just moody teenage bullshit and obnoxious self-pity. She isn't Nightmare Moon, she never had to become Nightmare Moon, she doesn't even want to be Nightmare Moon, yet here she is, still dressing and behaving and referring to herself as Nightmare faggot ass Moon. Just give it a rest already, you emo twat.
Chapter 18: A Mare against Monsters
>The castle, which once bustled with ponies going about their work, now stood silently in the gem quarries outside Ponyville. Wind whistled through the empty halls, flitted through the windows, and, at times, made it sound like the old castle was singing some sad, lonesome, wordless chorus in an attempt to draw back the ponies who had once given it purpose.
And what purpose was that again? From where I'm standing, everything that has happened in this story since the school year ended has literally been one continuous exercise in futility. The first half of this text was mostly a mediocre slice of life story with some half-assed attempts at tragedy mixed in, but at least it more or less made sense.
Anyway, for reasons only she could understand, after everything that's happened Nyx has chosen to remain inside her gloomy-ass castle for the past week. She sits moodily atop her throne, the perfect picture of teenage angst: still dressed up like Nightmare Moon, but unwashed, her eye shadow fading, her armor slowly rusting away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOM7DbOfKxU
I'm still not 100% sure what exactly the creeping crud is. If what we've read so far in the text is to be taken at face value, we might assume that it was the essence of Nightmare Moon's evil, and in that case it would stand to reason that once Nyx yanked it out of Nexus, purged it from herself and stomped on the last tiny little piece of it that survived, that this would be the end. But apparently there was still the laborious task of having Nexus assemble all of the Children of Nightmare in the main hall of the castle, and individually purging the crud from each of them.
Once the curse is removed, the ponies all go back to normal as you might expect them to; however, for some reason, Nyx still has the same turquoise eyes and still looks like Nightmare Moon. She also still has her alicorn powers that allow her to raise the sun and moon, which it seems like she should have realistically lost if the Nightmare Moon crud had been purged from her body as well. In fact, I'm still not 100% clear on whether or not she's even completely purged of it. A lot of this still doesn't make a ton of sense.
Even after everything that's happened, I still can't help but think that there's some raw potential for this story if its author had put a little more forethought into what exactly he wanted to write about and found a better way to execute the idea. Peen Stroke can write eloquently enough when he wants to; as corny as the imagery is, the prose in this scene is well written and lays out a nice visual. On some level I can kind of understand what he's trying to do with Nyx. She's meant to be trapped between two worlds now; she can't go back to her old life, but for moral reasons she deliberately destroyed everything she might have achieved in her new one.
We're supposed to see this as a tragic, noble sacrifice, which could make for a compelling story if told well. However, as I've said time and time again, there are just too many flaws in the text for it to work. Nyx's motivations for becoming Nightmare Moon in the first place are never clearly established, nor is it explained why she can't just walk away from all of this now that it's over. Presumably she doesn't want to free Celestia and Luna because she would no doubt be forced to face the music, and I guess someone needs to raise and lower the sun in the meantime if they're not around, but there's still no good reason why she needs to spend all her time sitting in her big ugly castle, dressed up like Nightmare Moon and moping. Like I said, the story is basically over at this point. Go take a cruise or some shit, bitch; go into exile on top of a mountain if you feel like you don't deserve to re-enter society. But don't just sit around the castle feeling sorry for yourself; Lord knows we've all seen more than enough of that for one 200,000 word adventure.
Anyway, it looks like this line of reasoning occurs to Nyx as well. The problem for her seems to lie in this pathological fear she has of being sent to the moon, which again seems rather tacked on due to our old problem of Peen Stroke's spending the first half of the text writing about her as if she were a brand new original character, and then suddenly attaching Luna's memories to her and expecting the reader to bridge the gap with their knowledge of the show. So basically, she is trapped between a rock and a hard place right now: she doesn't want to be Nightmare Moon anymore, but she feels too sorry for herself to go back and see her friends. Oh, also, in another weird turn, it seems that Twilight comes to the castle every day to try and speak to her, but she just turns into a smoke cloud and hides on the ceiling until she leaves. Apparently, it never occurs to Princess Celestia's star pupil to look up when she enters a room. Equestrian education, amirite?
>It was better if Twilight just forgot about her, and that was why Nightmare Moon hid. Twilight was searching for Nyx, but Nightmare Moon knew there was no Nyx to be found.
See, this right here is a perfect example of what I've been talking about: the whole Nightmare Moon thing feels completely tacked on. I notice that even after all this time, I still mostly refer to her as "Nyx" in my posts. I've never really bought that this character even is Nightmare Moon, she just sort of randomly turned into her one day for reasons that are murky at best. Here, we are supposed to see her as being genuinely troubled by some great moral dilemma, but it comes across as just moody teenage bullshit and obnoxious self-pity. She isn't Nightmare Moon, she never had to become Nightmare Moon, she doesn't even want to be Nightmare Moon, yet here she is, still dressing and behaving and referring to herself as Nightmare faggot ass Moon. Just give it a rest already, you emo twat.
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>>262287
Welp, it looks like I was right. The bit about monsters in the Everfree was laying the groundwork for what appears to be an actual new story arc. Instead of Twilight as Nyx was expecting, Zecora shows up, laying down some dope-ass rhymes about how monsters are coming out of the forest to eat ponies.
Anyway, Zecora deserves a small bit of credit here for being the first character in this entire story to call Nyx out on her whiny bullshit. We learn that, because Nyx upset the natural balance of things by deposing Celestia, the monsters that usually remain inside the Everfree are now roaming the countryside terrorizing the ponies. Zecora more or less calls her a moody twat and tells her to either let the Princesses go free or else deal with the mess she made. There's some more unnecessary dialogue, mostly consisting of a lot of pointless circular arguments about things that the text already covered. Nyx doesn't want to let the Princesses go because she's afraid of being sent to the goddamn moon, but at the same time she's too much of a mopey, self-hating cunt to feel like she could stand up to the monsters by herself, so she wants to just sit on her throne not bathing for another week. Long story short, Zecora convinces her and she goes off to fight the monsters.
Next subchapter opens with Nyx flying through the air. For some reason she took Zecora with her, even though she can't really do anything to help. There are a couple of hydras attacking Ponyville.
>The multi-headed monstrosities were infamous for enjoying the taste of ponies.
hoes say the same thing about muh dick
It seems like, once again, this story is taking a rather bizarre turn that I didn't particularly expect. Nyx's redemption arc just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Best I can figure, what is happening now is that Nyx seems to have finally come to terms with the fact that she's been a total cunt for pretty much the entire second half of the book. Nightmare Moon is more or less gone at this point, but Nyx is in a bit of a quandary because she hasn't quite been redeemed yet, but as I mentioned Peen Stroke kind of wrote her into a corner with the whole creeping crud thing. So, best I can figure, the plan now is to have her perform a bunch of heroic deeds for the citizens of Ponyville that simultaneously help to restore her public image, as well as fix some of the shit she broke. It's a little too early to tell if I think this is a good idea or not, but we'll see where it goes. Even though in terms of word count we basically still have a novel-length amount of text to read, I feel like we're on the home stretch.
Nyx dumps Zecora off on the street and tells her to round up all the terrified fleeing ponies and direct them to Nightmare Moon's castle, a rather complex task considering the size of Ponyville and the amount of commotion currently going on, but apparently she's able to handle it alone. This is all the text has to say about it:
>She jumped down from Nightmare Moon’s back before starting to shout at any pony who would listen. In but a few moments, the flow of the panicked crowd was redirected. The populace of the town raced to the protective embrace of Nightmare Moon’s castle.
Whatever. Anything that cuts down on length at this point I guess.
Anyway, Nyx confronts one of the hydras. We get yet another random character name drop. It's not as bad as it usually is since it's more or less in line with the action that's going on, but it's still mildly annoying. Basically, a pony is trying to shield her daughter from the monster that is about to devour them both, before Nyx jumps in and saves them. The text helpfully informs us that the two ponies are Ditzy and Dinky Doo (Ditzy, as I understand it, was one of several different names that the early fandom had for Derpy). I'm more or less used to Peen Stroke doing this shit by now, but I still want to point out that it's unnecessary to give us names here. The focus is on Nyx fighting the monsters, and Nyx has had no interaction with either of these two that I'm aware of, nor have either of them been in the story. Imagine if you were writing a novelization of a Godzilla movie, and Godzilla was about to eat some guy. Do you need to mention that the guy's name is Takashima Natsuyoshi and he works at the Tokyo National Bank, and today was supposed to be his day off but he switched shifts with his friend Hiroshima? Probably not; you just inform us that Godzilla is about to eat some guy, and then tell us whether or not it actually happened. Same thing here; just say that the hydra was about to eat a pony and her daughter. I can understand that Peen Stroke likes the show and likes to reference characters, and there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but he needs to learn to be more subtle about it. He could probably just say something like "a gray pony, with a straw yellow mane and bubbles for a cutie mark, was about to be eaten," and most fans would probably know who he was talking about.
ANYWAY, Derpy (Ditzy, whatever) faces off bravely with the monster, then Nyx swoops in and saves her. I'm going to try to run through the rest of this scene fairly quickly, since most of it is just action, and I'm happy to say that it's mostly handled competently. There's a lot of fighting and back and forth, there are a couple of "oh no" moments where it looks like Nyx is done for, but then she recovers and deliver some snappy line that the brainlets in the gallery will meme endlessly. Basically, this is your standard summer blockbuster fight scene; pretty much paint-by-numbers writing that anyone can do and would have to be a literal retard to fuck up. My biggest gripe is that Peen Stroke pushes his reference-dropping even further by having Ditzy deliver a silly line about muffins, although again, it probably made the brainlets cheer. Like I said before, at least this faggot knows his audience.
Welp, it looks like I was right. The bit about monsters in the Everfree was laying the groundwork for what appears to be an actual new story arc. Instead of Twilight as Nyx was expecting, Zecora shows up, laying down some dope-ass rhymes about how monsters are coming out of the forest to eat ponies.
Anyway, Zecora deserves a small bit of credit here for being the first character in this entire story to call Nyx out on her whiny bullshit. We learn that, because Nyx upset the natural balance of things by deposing Celestia, the monsters that usually remain inside the Everfree are now roaming the countryside terrorizing the ponies. Zecora more or less calls her a moody twat and tells her to either let the Princesses go free or else deal with the mess she made. There's some more unnecessary dialogue, mostly consisting of a lot of pointless circular arguments about things that the text already covered. Nyx doesn't want to let the Princesses go because she's afraid of being sent to the goddamn moon, but at the same time she's too much of a mopey, self-hating cunt to feel like she could stand up to the monsters by herself, so she wants to just sit on her throne not bathing for another week. Long story short, Zecora convinces her and she goes off to fight the monsters.
Next subchapter opens with Nyx flying through the air. For some reason she took Zecora with her, even though she can't really do anything to help. There are a couple of hydras attacking Ponyville.
>The multi-headed monstrosities were infamous for enjoying the taste of ponies.
hoes say the same thing about muh dick
It seems like, once again, this story is taking a rather bizarre turn that I didn't particularly expect. Nyx's redemption arc just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Best I can figure, what is happening now is that Nyx seems to have finally come to terms with the fact that she's been a total cunt for pretty much the entire second half of the book. Nightmare Moon is more or less gone at this point, but Nyx is in a bit of a quandary because she hasn't quite been redeemed yet, but as I mentioned Peen Stroke kind of wrote her into a corner with the whole creeping crud thing. So, best I can figure, the plan now is to have her perform a bunch of heroic deeds for the citizens of Ponyville that simultaneously help to restore her public image, as well as fix some of the shit she broke. It's a little too early to tell if I think this is a good idea or not, but we'll see where it goes. Even though in terms of word count we basically still have a novel-length amount of text to read, I feel like we're on the home stretch.
Nyx dumps Zecora off on the street and tells her to round up all the terrified fleeing ponies and direct them to Nightmare Moon's castle, a rather complex task considering the size of Ponyville and the amount of commotion currently going on, but apparently she's able to handle it alone. This is all the text has to say about it:
>She jumped down from Nightmare Moon’s back before starting to shout at any pony who would listen. In but a few moments, the flow of the panicked crowd was redirected. The populace of the town raced to the protective embrace of Nightmare Moon’s castle.
Whatever. Anything that cuts down on length at this point I guess.
Anyway, Nyx confronts one of the hydras. We get yet another random character name drop. It's not as bad as it usually is since it's more or less in line with the action that's going on, but it's still mildly annoying. Basically, a pony is trying to shield her daughter from the monster that is about to devour them both, before Nyx jumps in and saves them. The text helpfully informs us that the two ponies are Ditzy and Dinky Doo (Ditzy, as I understand it, was one of several different names that the early fandom had for Derpy). I'm more or less used to Peen Stroke doing this shit by now, but I still want to point out that it's unnecessary to give us names here. The focus is on Nyx fighting the monsters, and Nyx has had no interaction with either of these two that I'm aware of, nor have either of them been in the story. Imagine if you were writing a novelization of a Godzilla movie, and Godzilla was about to eat some guy. Do you need to mention that the guy's name is Takashima Natsuyoshi and he works at the Tokyo National Bank, and today was supposed to be his day off but he switched shifts with his friend Hiroshima? Probably not; you just inform us that Godzilla is about to eat some guy, and then tell us whether or not it actually happened. Same thing here; just say that the hydra was about to eat a pony and her daughter. I can understand that Peen Stroke likes the show and likes to reference characters, and there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but he needs to learn to be more subtle about it. He could probably just say something like "a gray pony, with a straw yellow mane and bubbles for a cutie mark, was about to be eaten," and most fans would probably know who he was talking about.
ANYWAY, Derpy (Ditzy, whatever) faces off bravely with the monster, then Nyx swoops in and saves her. I'm going to try to run through the rest of this scene fairly quickly, since most of it is just action, and I'm happy to say that it's mostly handled competently. There's a lot of fighting and back and forth, there are a couple of "oh no" moments where it looks like Nyx is done for, but then she recovers and deliver some snappy line that the brainlets in the gallery will meme endlessly. Basically, this is your standard summer blockbuster fight scene; pretty much paint-by-numbers writing that anyone can do and would have to be a literal retard to fuck up. My biggest gripe is that Peen Stroke pushes his reference-dropping even further by having Ditzy deliver a silly line about muffins, although again, it probably made the brainlets cheer. Like I said before, at least this faggot knows his audience.
File (): 093862EC8B8AE804114D1AEB77577588-303481.png (296.4 KB, 735x660, R532pTw.png)
>>262156
Thank you, this is fine art. I'm going to frame it and hang it on my wall next to pic related.
>>262160
>Is this a Deus Ex Machina? Or just an asspull?
I would say it's probably an asspull again, see pic related. I remember my first impression of this story was that it was very by-the-numbers and over-outlined, which is ironic because now my gripe is that it is so obviously the complete opposite of that. I think he mostly just makes this shit up as he goes, which is fine, but you still need to have a bit of discipline and a general sense of where the story is ultimately going if you're going to do that. He comes up with ideas, then doesn't quite know what to do with them, so he just bungles his way through whatever weird direction he made the story go and then moves on to the next random scene he thinks up.
Anyway, I think this is all I have for today. I'll be back tomorrow with more. We're almost through it, lads. Big thanks to anyone still reading for putting up with all of my autism; I've basically written a book of my own at this point.
Thank you, this is fine art. I'm going to frame it and hang it on my wall next to pic related.
>>262160
>Is this a Deus Ex Machina? Or just an asspull?
I would say it's probably an asspull again, see pic related. I remember my first impression of this story was that it was very by-the-numbers and over-outlined, which is ironic because now my gripe is that it is so obviously the complete opposite of that. I think he mostly just makes this shit up as he goes, which is fine, but you still need to have a bit of discipline and a general sense of where the story is ultimately going if you're going to do that. He comes up with ideas, then doesn't quite know what to do with them, so he just bungles his way through whatever weird direction he made the story go and then moves on to the next random scene he thinks up.
Anyway, I think this is all I have for today. I'll be back tomorrow with more. We're almost through it, lads. Big thanks to anyone still reading for putting up with all of my autism; I've basically written a book of my own at this point.
>>262288
Actually, I'll do one more since this scene can be covered quickly.
Nyx beats the first hydra and chases it off, but while she's doing that a bunch of other creatures show up and start attacking. She solves the problem by doing the same magic trick that she used to sneak into Celestia's palace: she divides herself into a bunch of different copies of herself, and fights a bunch of the monsters at once.
Next scene cuts to Rainbow Dash, who is helping Twilight and Zecora organize the mass evacuation of the town. Twilight is mostly organizing shit and running the command center, Dash is flying around doing reconnaissance and fighting monsters. She gets drawn into a fight against some kind of werewolf creature that is trying to eat Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. They fight for a while, and one of the Nyx copies shows up and tells her to take the fillies and run. She does as she is asked, and sees that there are dozens of Nyxes running around fighting monsters. Main takeaway here is that she conveys this information to Twilight.
Meanwhile, AJ and Rarity are helping to evacuate the hospital. They also get drawn into a fight, this time with a cerberus I think, and then another Nightmare Moon copy shows up and fights that for them. Main takeaway here is that most of the Mane 6 are now aware that Nightmare Moon is helping to save the town from monsters, and they see that she is putting herself in considerable danger in order to do it.
In what is becoming a fairly predictable pattern, the next scene involves Pinkie Pie. There's not a whole lot to say about it; it's just silly, random Pinkie Pie doing silly, random Pinkie Pie things. Blah blah blah she's fighting monsters in an appropriately silly fashion, and a Nyx clone shows up.
Next is Cheerilee. She's trying to save some children from a big scorpion thing when the scorpion thing almost eats her. Then, it doesn't eat her, because Nyx.
And then, Fluttershy. This time, one of the Nyx clones is about to be eaten, when Fluttershy appears and starts angrily scolding the monster. Ha! How drole; she's normally very quiet, but here she is brimming with righteous anger. How delightfully out of character for her. I can almost hear the brainlets howling with laughter from here. Cue "The Stare." Ha! How drole; that was a thing from the show. Hooray! The monster has been defeated by a mere scolding from Fluttershy. She gave that thing a trouncing using nothing more than her own innate talent with animals. Ha! How drole; that was just so Fluttershy. I can almost hear the brainlets whooping and applauding from here. I'm surprised Peen Stroke didn't throw a "yay" in there somewhere; the brainlets would have fan-gasmed themselves into a coma.
Oh, also, with Fluttershy we get a brief moment where Nyx finds out that Twilight still calls her Nyx, talks about her all the time, thinks she's still good deep down and all of that. Of course, Nyx continues to play the tragic hero, or at least continues to do a moody teenager's impression of a tragic hero.
Anyway, that's basically the end of the battle. Again, all things considered, Peen Stroke did a decent enough job with this, but again, it's rather hard to fuck this kind of scene up. This is basically just your standard epic fight scene: just pack in plenty of exciting action, maybe have a few memorable moments (OMG remember when X did Y to Z? that was so hardcore!!1!), throw in a few catchy "hasta la vista baby" type lines to make the brainlets nut themselves; that's pretty much all you gotta do. A scene like this is basically the last 45 minutes of any Marvel movie.
Of course, now that the battle is over, all of the Nightmare Moon copies congeal back into Nyx, and now she gets to collapse in pain in front of Twilight because of all the different injuries that all the different copies of her sustained. And of course, now Twilight is totally worried about her but is also probably thinking that she's totally badass and self-sacrificing for defeating all those monsters. And cue Nyx saying "No, it's nothing, don't waste your tears on me," before limping stoically away in 3...2...1...
Oh, wait, it looks like they still have one more monster to fight. Turns out this one is a Lupus Major (see pic related). Will Nyx get to be all badass and save the day again? No, she's far too badly injured, and trying to look all cool and self-sacrificing for Twilight is sapping what little strength she has left. Looks like you're going to have to handle this one, Purple.
Incidentally, Mr. P, I wasn't going to say anything (because this observation is almost too snarky even for me), but since you made a specific point of reference-dropping the damned Ursa Minor episode (again), I'd like to point out that Lupus Major and Lupus Minor are pretty lazy names for these wolf things. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (for the star-bear creatures in the show) work fine, because the name is a somewhat clever pun: "Ursa" is Latin for bear, and there are constellations named Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, also known as the big and little dipper. Although Lupus is latin for wolf and there is also a constellation called Lupus, there is only the one, so the major/minor joke doesn't work. Since the Lupus creatures depicted here closely resemble the Ursas (large wolves that look like they're made of stars), and the naming convention is exactly the same, it's as if you ripped off something in the show, changed it slightly, used the exact same naming convention, and tried to pass it off as an original creation. This is like Sonichu-level creativity here. If you want to think up your own monsters, take the time to think up something interesting and clever; otherwise, it would have made just as much sense to use Ursa Majors and Ursa Minors, since all the scene really needs is for a bunch of monsters to attack Ponyville.
Actually, I'll do one more since this scene can be covered quickly.
Nyx beats the first hydra and chases it off, but while she's doing that a bunch of other creatures show up and start attacking. She solves the problem by doing the same magic trick that she used to sneak into Celestia's palace: she divides herself into a bunch of different copies of herself, and fights a bunch of the monsters at once.
Next scene cuts to Rainbow Dash, who is helping Twilight and Zecora organize the mass evacuation of the town. Twilight is mostly organizing shit and running the command center, Dash is flying around doing reconnaissance and fighting monsters. She gets drawn into a fight against some kind of werewolf creature that is trying to eat Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. They fight for a while, and one of the Nyx copies shows up and tells her to take the fillies and run. She does as she is asked, and sees that there are dozens of Nyxes running around fighting monsters. Main takeaway here is that she conveys this information to Twilight.
Meanwhile, AJ and Rarity are helping to evacuate the hospital. They also get drawn into a fight, this time with a cerberus I think, and then another Nightmare Moon copy shows up and fights that for them. Main takeaway here is that most of the Mane 6 are now aware that Nightmare Moon is helping to save the town from monsters, and they see that she is putting herself in considerable danger in order to do it.
In what is becoming a fairly predictable pattern, the next scene involves Pinkie Pie. There's not a whole lot to say about it; it's just silly, random Pinkie Pie doing silly, random Pinkie Pie things. Blah blah blah she's fighting monsters in an appropriately silly fashion, and a Nyx clone shows up.
Next is Cheerilee. She's trying to save some children from a big scorpion thing when the scorpion thing almost eats her. Then, it doesn't eat her, because Nyx.
And then, Fluttershy. This time, one of the Nyx clones is about to be eaten, when Fluttershy appears and starts angrily scolding the monster. Ha! How drole; she's normally very quiet, but here she is brimming with righteous anger. How delightfully out of character for her. I can almost hear the brainlets howling with laughter from here. Cue "The Stare." Ha! How drole; that was a thing from the show. Hooray! The monster has been defeated by a mere scolding from Fluttershy. She gave that thing a trouncing using nothing more than her own innate talent with animals. Ha! How drole; that was just so Fluttershy. I can almost hear the brainlets whooping and applauding from here. I'm surprised Peen Stroke didn't throw a "yay" in there somewhere; the brainlets would have fan-gasmed themselves into a coma.
Oh, also, with Fluttershy we get a brief moment where Nyx finds out that Twilight still calls her Nyx, talks about her all the time, thinks she's still good deep down and all of that. Of course, Nyx continues to play the tragic hero, or at least continues to do a moody teenager's impression of a tragic hero.
Anyway, that's basically the end of the battle. Again, all things considered, Peen Stroke did a decent enough job with this, but again, it's rather hard to fuck this kind of scene up. This is basically just your standard epic fight scene: just pack in plenty of exciting action, maybe have a few memorable moments (OMG remember when X did Y to Z? that was so hardcore!!1!), throw in a few catchy "hasta la vista baby" type lines to make the brainlets nut themselves; that's pretty much all you gotta do. A scene like this is basically the last 45 minutes of any Marvel movie.
Of course, now that the battle is over, all of the Nightmare Moon copies congeal back into Nyx, and now she gets to collapse in pain in front of Twilight because of all the different injuries that all the different copies of her sustained. And of course, now Twilight is totally worried about her but is also probably thinking that she's totally badass and self-sacrificing for defeating all those monsters. And cue Nyx saying "No, it's nothing, don't waste your tears on me," before limping stoically away in 3...2...1...
Oh, wait, it looks like they still have one more monster to fight. Turns out this one is a Lupus Major (see pic related). Will Nyx get to be all badass and save the day again? No, she's far too badly injured, and trying to look all cool and self-sacrificing for Twilight is sapping what little strength she has left. Looks like you're going to have to handle this one, Purple.
Incidentally, Mr. P, I wasn't going to say anything (because this observation is almost too snarky even for me), but since you made a specific point of reference-dropping the damned Ursa Minor episode (again), I'd like to point out that Lupus Major and Lupus Minor are pretty lazy names for these wolf things. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (for the star-bear creatures in the show) work fine, because the name is a somewhat clever pun: "Ursa" is Latin for bear, and there are constellations named Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, also known as the big and little dipper. Although Lupus is latin for wolf and there is also a constellation called Lupus, there is only the one, so the major/minor joke doesn't work. Since the Lupus creatures depicted here closely resemble the Ursas (large wolves that look like they're made of stars), and the naming convention is exactly the same, it's as if you ripped off something in the show, changed it slightly, used the exact same naming convention, and tried to pass it off as an original creation. This is like Sonichu-level creativity here. If you want to think up your own monsters, take the time to think up something interesting and clever; otherwise, it would have made just as much sense to use Ursa Majors and Ursa Minors, since all the scene really needs is for a bunch of monsters to attack Ponyville.
>>262287
There's a bit in Devil May Cry 5 where this new dude shows up called V
And he fights by summoning bosses from DMC1 to fight for him, controlled by you. Griffon the electric bird, a panther, and Nightmare the blob monster.
You need to help him get to the new baddie, Urizen (who is actually Vergil) so the two can reunite and become Vergil again.
After this, the three monsters V summon remain outside of Vergil.
They pretend to be evil and attack Dante because they're made up of Vergil's memories and rage over that time in DMC1 when he lost to Mundus and got turned into his little bitch Nelo Angelo.
When dying, the electric bird Griffon says this is the end of Vergil's nightmares.
And Dante says "So long, little chicken. It's been a bash".
It's a very touching scene.
Vergil has been revived, he has regained his humanity and lost his emo angst, and he learns his mother didn't really abandon him.
Even though this whole scene exists solely to give a handjob to people who played DMC1 and want to fight the bosses from that game again, it still manages to make sense, foreshadow things ahead of time, not asspull shit out of nowhere, and make a big sequence of fun fight-filled levels out of it all.
This game tried to give Vergil a redemption arc.
So it had a dying Vergil split himself in two in his quest to defeat his brother Dante before he died.
His discarded humanity and bad memories became V, and his evil and lust for power became the evil giant asshole half Urizen who unleashed an evil demon tree on the world to kill fuckloads of people and harvest human blood while also unleashing a demon invasion on earth.
The weak, dying V tried his hardest to stop the evil Urizen from doing evil things. It's a metaphor for how there's still some good in Vergil even if he is a total cunt.
I think that's what this story should have done.
Only better.
There's a bit in Devil May Cry 5 where this new dude shows up called V
And he fights by summoning bosses from DMC1 to fight for him, controlled by you. Griffon the electric bird, a panther, and Nightmare the blob monster.
You need to help him get to the new baddie, Urizen (who is actually Vergil) so the two can reunite and become Vergil again.
After this, the three monsters V summon remain outside of Vergil.
They pretend to be evil and attack Dante because they're made up of Vergil's memories and rage over that time in DMC1 when he lost to Mundus and got turned into his little bitch Nelo Angelo.
When dying, the electric bird Griffon says this is the end of Vergil's nightmares.
And Dante says "So long, little chicken. It's been a bash".
It's a very touching scene.
Vergil has been revived, he has regained his humanity and lost his emo angst, and he learns his mother didn't really abandon him.
Even though this whole scene exists solely to give a handjob to people who played DMC1 and want to fight the bosses from that game again, it still manages to make sense, foreshadow things ahead of time, not asspull shit out of nowhere, and make a big sequence of fun fight-filled levels out of it all.
This game tried to give Vergil a redemption arc.
So it had a dying Vergil split himself in two in his quest to defeat his brother Dante before he died.
His discarded humanity and bad memories became V, and his evil and lust for power became the evil giant asshole half Urizen who unleashed an evil demon tree on the world to kill fuckloads of people and harvest human blood while also unleashing a demon invasion on earth.
The weak, dying V tried his hardest to stop the evil Urizen from doing evil things. It's a metaphor for how there's still some good in Vergil even if he is a total cunt.
I think that's what this story should have done.
Only better.
>>262294
So Twilight is having a moonlit stroll to clear her head after getting a letter saying Luna has fallen into a coma and nobody knows why.
Then this dying little filly comes out of nowhere, begging for help. She says "Twilight, Nightmare Moon is back" and passes out.
Twilight hears a sound, looks at Canterlot, and sees a big black darkness ball swallow it up and teleport it away.
Black roots emerge from the ground as in the distance, the Everfree goes wild and space distorts and living black clouds choke the sky (no flying over obstacles, Rainbow Dash!) and the Castle of Two Sisters rises from the Everfree to become a big tower full of traps and puzzles and monsters.
The mane six gathers in Twilight's house to ask each other questions, raise the audience's heart rate, then Nyx wakes up. Oh and Nyx is black and green, not black and purple. She's mostly uncontrollable everfree magic after all, NMM is the black and purple one.
Discord also doesn't exist because fuck this character. If he must exist, Fluttershy finds him turned to stone and nobody knows how or why. And every other bullshit poochie that would make the audience ask "Where's poochie? Why doesn't she solve everything?" is far away, trapped in the Crystal Empire after they went to a convention.
This is a Mane Six and Nyx story. No interruptions.
Some ponies trust Nyx more than others.
Nyx starts telling the heroes juuust enough so they can all work together to try and stop NMM, while taking her along for the ride. She claims she needs to save her sister, and only her body can open the magic seal on her prison gate, it's bullshit but Twilight believes it. Mostly. If it's a trap, Twilight wants the filly close just in case.
Over the course of the mad forest roadtrip to Super Darkness Castle in the Darkness-Infused Everfree Gone Mad, and during the climb up the tower of evil, heartwarming scenes happen. Ponies go from tolerating/disliking the mysterious filly to genuinely caring about her.
Eventually the truth is revealed: The cult couldn't control the NMM homonculus they created out of Everfree and NMM magic so they split her in two, weakening their NMM so Nexus's mind-control spell can affect her, while stripping her of everything they didn't want in NMM, who became Nyx, who fled.
Also, Nyx becomes an excellent name because it means something now. Nyx is nix, nothing, something discarded from the NMM the cult wanted.
Also the cult is now pure evil and brainwashed by Nexus who wants NMM to be his weapon enforcing his will on the world. Fuck eternal night, he just wants absolute control. And if things ever go wrong and NMM proves uncontrollable, he plans on turning the new NMM to stone without killing her and then reshaping the stone pieces into normal rocks in his already-weird rock collection and painting himself as the "new legendary hero who must rule now that celestia and luna are gone".
Oh and Twilight gives Nyx a necklace heart pendant thing, and uses magic to give it a saccharine picture of the mane six smiling with Nyx. Because Nyx said she wanted a pendant, something she can look at to make sure she can always remember this journey and who she is, no matter what.
>FORESHADOWING!!!
Oh and Nyx can read Abyss Runes, the dark language every NMM castle puzzle's hints are written in.
>MORE FORESHADOWING!!!
Weak dying filly Nyx is trying to help stop "Nightmare Moon", a confused memoryless embodiment of teen angst everyone tries to control and manipulate, from doing evil things.
The heroes have to kick Nexus's ass before they can EOH-beam Nyx otherwise he'll shield her.
One epic fight later, Nexus is defeated.
Eventually the heroes rainbow-beam Nyx to purge the evil from her. She collapses, defeated but not turning back into Luna as they expected. Instead, she starts melting.
Nyx walks forwards.
The mane six stop her.
"Please, let me... Let me see what they turned my sister into! Let me say goodbye to her, let me see her face before it all ends!" Nyx cries.
They let go and let her get close to melty NMM.
>"We are the same, you and I. I see myself reflected in your eyes. You've lost me, and I've lost you. But now... I know what I must do."
Nyx jumps into the black ooze, they combine and she is Nightmare Moon fully restored... But with new memories. Memories of how good it felt to be good and try to do the right thing. Memories of being used like a weapon by that asshole Spell Nexus.
One last fight between Twilight and NMM because "Show me your resolve to end eternal night!" and NMM loses.
If you want to make the fight cooler say the Everfree is the way it is because an old powerful plant monster or evil nature goddess was turned to magic and buried there by Celestia, and Nyx is that thing's reincarnation too so NMM gets to be even stronger.
One epic fight later...
NMM dies with a smile on her face, shocking everyone. Now that she's dead, every spell she was ever forced to cast will be undone. Even the spells she doesn't know how to undo. Canterlot is no longer trapped in the Shadow Realm, Celestia and Luna are freed, the Everfree is no longer going wild, and NMM collapses into absolute nothingness. Nothing left but Nyx's pendant, which falls and hits the ground, clicking open to show a picture of the mane six smiling with Nyx.
The mane six (who all got scenes where they went from disliking filly/not caring to loving filly) all cry and their tears gravitate towards the pendant and the Elements of Harmony they're still wearing rainbow-beam it, resurrecting Nyx as herself but not weak/dying, just a regular unicorn kid now who's ready to put all this bullshit behind her. She was Luna's rage, once. Then she was a weapon.
Boom, tears, sadness, a plot that fucking makes sense, a story that actually OFFERS NMM THE POSSIBILITY OF REDEMPTION through reincarnation instead of effectively giving her a daughter named Nyx who kills NMM personally.
You know what? Fuck it, I'm doing this to prove that this setup CAN be written well.
So Twilight is having a moonlit stroll to clear her head after getting a letter saying Luna has fallen into a coma and nobody knows why.
Then this dying little filly comes out of nowhere, begging for help. She says "Twilight, Nightmare Moon is back" and passes out.
Twilight hears a sound, looks at Canterlot, and sees a big black darkness ball swallow it up and teleport it away.
Black roots emerge from the ground as in the distance, the Everfree goes wild and space distorts and living black clouds choke the sky (no flying over obstacles, Rainbow Dash!) and the Castle of Two Sisters rises from the Everfree to become a big tower full of traps and puzzles and monsters.
The mane six gathers in Twilight's house to ask each other questions, raise the audience's heart rate, then Nyx wakes up. Oh and Nyx is black and green, not black and purple. She's mostly uncontrollable everfree magic after all, NMM is the black and purple one.
Discord also doesn't exist because fuck this character. If he must exist, Fluttershy finds him turned to stone and nobody knows how or why. And every other bullshit poochie that would make the audience ask "Where's poochie? Why doesn't she solve everything?" is far away, trapped in the Crystal Empire after they went to a convention.
This is a Mane Six and Nyx story. No interruptions.
Some ponies trust Nyx more than others.
Nyx starts telling the heroes juuust enough so they can all work together to try and stop NMM, while taking her along for the ride. She claims she needs to save her sister, and only her body can open the magic seal on her prison gate, it's bullshit but Twilight believes it. Mostly. If it's a trap, Twilight wants the filly close just in case.
Over the course of the mad forest roadtrip to Super Darkness Castle in the Darkness-Infused Everfree Gone Mad, and during the climb up the tower of evil, heartwarming scenes happen. Ponies go from tolerating/disliking the mysterious filly to genuinely caring about her.
Eventually the truth is revealed: The cult couldn't control the NMM homonculus they created out of Everfree and NMM magic so they split her in two, weakening their NMM so Nexus's mind-control spell can affect her, while stripping her of everything they didn't want in NMM, who became Nyx, who fled.
Also, Nyx becomes an excellent name because it means something now. Nyx is nix, nothing, something discarded from the NMM the cult wanted.
Also the cult is now pure evil and brainwashed by Nexus who wants NMM to be his weapon enforcing his will on the world. Fuck eternal night, he just wants absolute control. And if things ever go wrong and NMM proves uncontrollable, he plans on turning the new NMM to stone without killing her and then reshaping the stone pieces into normal rocks in his already-weird rock collection and painting himself as the "new legendary hero who must rule now that celestia and luna are gone".
Oh and Twilight gives Nyx a necklace heart pendant thing, and uses magic to give it a saccharine picture of the mane six smiling with Nyx. Because Nyx said she wanted a pendant, something she can look at to make sure she can always remember this journey and who she is, no matter what.
>FORESHADOWING!!!
Oh and Nyx can read Abyss Runes, the dark language every NMM castle puzzle's hints are written in.
>MORE FORESHADOWING!!!
Weak dying filly Nyx is trying to help stop "Nightmare Moon", a confused memoryless embodiment of teen angst everyone tries to control and manipulate, from doing evil things.
The heroes have to kick Nexus's ass before they can EOH-beam Nyx otherwise he'll shield her.
One epic fight later, Nexus is defeated.
Eventually the heroes rainbow-beam Nyx to purge the evil from her. She collapses, defeated but not turning back into Luna as they expected. Instead, she starts melting.
Nyx walks forwards.
The mane six stop her.
"Please, let me... Let me see what they turned my sister into! Let me say goodbye to her, let me see her face before it all ends!" Nyx cries.
They let go and let her get close to melty NMM.
>"We are the same, you and I. I see myself reflected in your eyes. You've lost me, and I've lost you. But now... I know what I must do."
Nyx jumps into the black ooze, they combine and she is Nightmare Moon fully restored... But with new memories. Memories of how good it felt to be good and try to do the right thing. Memories of being used like a weapon by that asshole Spell Nexus.
One last fight between Twilight and NMM because "Show me your resolve to end eternal night!" and NMM loses.
If you want to make the fight cooler say the Everfree is the way it is because an old powerful plant monster or evil nature goddess was turned to magic and buried there by Celestia, and Nyx is that thing's reincarnation too so NMM gets to be even stronger.
One epic fight later...
NMM dies with a smile on her face, shocking everyone. Now that she's dead, every spell she was ever forced to cast will be undone. Even the spells she doesn't know how to undo. Canterlot is no longer trapped in the Shadow Realm, Celestia and Luna are freed, the Everfree is no longer going wild, and NMM collapses into absolute nothingness. Nothing left but Nyx's pendant, which falls and hits the ground, clicking open to show a picture of the mane six smiling with Nyx.
The mane six (who all got scenes where they went from disliking filly/not caring to loving filly) all cry and their tears gravitate towards the pendant and the Elements of Harmony they're still wearing rainbow-beam it, resurrecting Nyx as herself but not weak/dying, just a regular unicorn kid now who's ready to put all this bullshit behind her. She was Luna's rage, once. Then she was a weapon.
Boom, tears, sadness, a plot that fucking makes sense, a story that actually OFFERS NMM THE POSSIBILITY OF REDEMPTION through reincarnation instead of effectively giving her a daughter named Nyx who kills NMM personally.
You know what? Fuck it, I'm doing this to prove that this setup CAN be written well.
>>262294
oh and DMCV ends with Dante and Vergil going to hell so they can fight demons and try to destroy the Qlipoth, the giant demon tree killing the world to make a mega-magical fruit Vergil ate when he was Urizen
these two leave behind Trish, Lady, and more importantly, Nero behind to protect the world while they try to fix the mess Vergil's evil side made.
oh and DMCV ends with Dante and Vergil going to hell so they can fight demons and try to destroy the Qlipoth, the giant demon tree killing the world to make a mega-magical fruit Vergil ate when he was Urizen
these two leave behind Trish, Lady, and more importantly, Nero behind to protect the world while they try to fix the mess Vergil's evil side made.
>>262293
It seems you arre boundd to read about stories with clone magic is used in fights.
Anyway,
>This is basically just your standard epic fight scene
> it's rather hard to fuck this kind of scene up.
Is it? Why? I have been wondering what you mean by this ever since you brought it up with thee scene about Twilight sneaking in to Nightmare moon's castle.
I don't know if I disagree with you or not. I disagree with you if you think that these kinds of scenes cannot be better or made with more finese than, like they are not an art in themselves.
But if you mean that they have basic appeal that is very common among people (probably mostly or excludingly males) then yes, I do agree with that. But I would say that this is something that applies to all well worn tropes. Bascially, so long as you have something, an idea or whatever, that connects or appeals to a lot of people, it is going to sell by itself regardless of how well you do it.
I mean, look at past sins. Do you not think that most of these brainlets cried at some of the "emotional" scenes in this story. I would bet that somewhere in sometime, someone of them recommanded this series to somebody else and called Past Sins, a Drama or something.
ANd you partly did adress this and said that you thought that these people probably had never read a novel before and while that is probably true ofr some of them. I mean one probably goes a bit numb to seeing the same kinds of scenes and drama many tiems or rather that when one is more, for a lack of better word, "enlightend." One starts to want more meat to get invested in a story's dramtic moments.
But I do belive taht there are stories or appeals that can be bascially resold over and over again or somethng along those lines. Bascially, stories that deals with wish fullfillment and honestly, maybe all stories do just that but, but, regardless.
My point is that I'm not sure if not medicore dramatic scene is as easy to write as an action scenes. Maybe it is easier to see the strings when characters do action but you know, scenes like that hanging of Twilight or other fake outs like, will-they-won't-they ponderings. Probably has some effect because they are utilized so often.
Fuck, this entire post is kind of trash now that I look at it. I don't seem to get to the point just ranting off into nowhere.
Regardless, one can hope you get what I mean as you decipher this code I left you. Here are some above average action scenes anyway (They are not equally good but all are above average).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha3XYloizwk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCSNIl2Pls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVi_fs2oz3E
The last one is more spectacle with the bullets being released and such but I think one shouldn't underrestimate a good spectacle.
It seems you arre boundd to read about stories with clone magic is used in fights.
Anyway,
>This is basically just your standard epic fight scene
> it's rather hard to fuck this kind of scene up.
Is it? Why? I have been wondering what you mean by this ever since you brought it up with thee scene about Twilight sneaking in to Nightmare moon's castle.
I don't know if I disagree with you or not. I disagree with you if you think that these kinds of scenes cannot be better or made with more finese than, like they are not an art in themselves.
But if you mean that they have basic appeal that is very common among people (probably mostly or excludingly males) then yes, I do agree with that. But I would say that this is something that applies to all well worn tropes. Bascially, so long as you have something, an idea or whatever, that connects or appeals to a lot of people, it is going to sell by itself regardless of how well you do it.
I mean, look at past sins. Do you not think that most of these brainlets cried at some of the "emotional" scenes in this story. I would bet that somewhere in sometime, someone of them recommanded this series to somebody else and called Past Sins, a Drama or something.
ANd you partly did adress this and said that you thought that these people probably had never read a novel before and while that is probably true ofr some of them. I mean one probably goes a bit numb to seeing the same kinds of scenes and drama many tiems or rather that when one is more, for a lack of better word, "enlightend." One starts to want more meat to get invested in a story's dramtic moments.
But I do belive taht there are stories or appeals that can be bascially resold over and over again or somethng along those lines. Bascially, stories that deals with wish fullfillment and honestly, maybe all stories do just that but, but, regardless.
My point is that I'm not sure if not medicore dramatic scene is as easy to write as an action scenes. Maybe it is easier to see the strings when characters do action but you know, scenes like that hanging of Twilight or other fake outs like, will-they-won't-they ponderings. Probably has some effect because they are utilized so often.
Fuck, this entire post is kind of trash now that I look at it. I don't seem to get to the point just ranting off into nowhere.
Regardless, one can hope you get what I mean as you decipher this code I left you. Here are some above average action scenes anyway (They are not equally good but all are above average).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha3XYloizwk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCSNIl2Pls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVi_fs2oz3E
The last one is more spectacle with the bullets being released and such but I think one shouldn't underrestimate a good spectacle.
>>262336
A simple action scene is easy to write. Character throws punches/swings weapon at monster until victory.
A "cool" action scene is easy to write, just think up a bullshit super-cool feat like "two guys swordfight so fast they do something cool" or "two guys punch so hard it starts ripping holes in reality and causing earthquakes" or "Two guys swordfighting atop some moving bullshit"
A meaningful action scene that matters to the characters involved and their arcs, making it matter to the story, that's tricky.
That fight scene in Ben 10 where Ben fights a werewolf in the NASA Space Center while stuck on that "Spins you around" machine? Just cool.
That fight scene in Naruto where Rock Lee, the magicless martial artist who needs to prove his effort can overcome his lack of natural talent, VS Gaara, the edgy murderous sandbender kid who is hated and feared by everyone and also had his life sent downhill by the incredible power forced into him at birth? That fight means something. Rock Lee is the first person ever to successfully break Gaara's sand shield and hurt him. And yet, he gets crushed for it. Destroyed. His ninja career was nearly ended that day. More than a decade later, and that fight early on in the show's run will still get onto people's "Top ten anime fights of all time" lists if they've ever watched Naruto. It's so good, My Hero Academia decided to rip it off in child-friendly fashion.
A simple action scene is easy to write. Character throws punches/swings weapon at monster until victory.
A "cool" action scene is easy to write, just think up a bullshit super-cool feat like "two guys swordfight so fast they do something cool" or "two guys punch so hard it starts ripping holes in reality and causing earthquakes" or "Two guys swordfighting atop some moving bullshit"
A meaningful action scene that matters to the characters involved and their arcs, making it matter to the story, that's tricky.
That fight scene in Ben 10 where Ben fights a werewolf in the NASA Space Center while stuck on that "Spins you around" machine? Just cool.
That fight scene in Naruto where Rock Lee, the magicless martial artist who needs to prove his effort can overcome his lack of natural talent, VS Gaara, the edgy murderous sandbender kid who is hated and feared by everyone and also had his life sent downhill by the incredible power forced into him at birth? That fight means something. Rock Lee is the first person ever to successfully break Gaara's sand shield and hurt him. And yet, he gets crushed for it. Destroyed. His ninja career was nearly ended that day. More than a decade later, and that fight early on in the show's run will still get onto people's "Top ten anime fights of all time" lists if they've ever watched Naruto. It's so good, My Hero Academia decided to rip it off in child-friendly fashion.
File (): 15452FB0D4256B39D638A52A48B2F099-427257.png (417.2 KB, 840x1104, shimmy.png)
>>262336
Nigel actually gets it fairly close here >>262391 .
I wasn't trying to suggest that action is a lower form of writing necessarily. It's not so much that action is easy to do right, but that it's just much harder to do wrong. The reason is because with action scenes, all you need to be able to do is visualize what's physically happening in the world and describe it. Writing a believable character-driven story requires you to have a deep understanding of who your characters are and why they behave the way they do. This is the whole problem with this story, actually: I can more or less see the kind of character Peen Stroke was trying to create with Nyx, and the kind of relationship he was trying to write with her and Twilight, but he executes it very poorly and it's not believable. In fact, I basically agree with you that I would rather be reading a middle of the road action story that's executed well than a story like this, that attempts depth but fails miserably at it. But that has nothing to do with which type of thing is easier to write; action is just easier to do because fundamentally all you need to do is narrate what's happening, you don't have to necessarily explain or even understand why it's happening.
Here's an example. Let's say I'm writing a story. Just for fun, let's say it's set in the EQG universe, with the humanized Barbie-poners. Scene is the cafeteria at Canterlot High. Fluttershy is sitting at the table eating lunch, when suddenly she bursts into tears and everyone turns and looks at her. If someone reads this, the first question that is going to be on their mind is "why is Fluttershy crying?" In order to explain this, I need to understand a lot of things. I need to have an understanding of Barbieworld, who lives here, how this world works, what goes on here, etc. I need to understand Fluttershy: who she is, what kind of personality she has, what kinds of events might provoke an emotional state like this for her. On top of that, I need to use all of this knowledge to craft a believable situation where this person might just burst into tears, and have it be something that the reader will not only accept but care enough about to read further. On top of that, I need to be able to tell the story to the reader in a way that communicates all of this complex information in an elegant and emotionally moving way, without making it so corny or over the top that the reader just rolls his eyes, or worse, laughs at it. As we have seen with our current story, that is no easy task to pull off.
Now, let's look at another type of story. Setting is the same; Canterlot High at lunchtime. However, instead of Fluttershy crying, imagine that Sunset Shimmer suddenly bursts in and starts shooting up the cafeteria. Even though this is a much less plausible scenario, what you have here is actually a much easier scene to write, because, as paradoxical as it sounds, you have a lot less to explain. If Fluttershy suddenly starts crying while eating lunch, people will want to know why. However, if she does it here, nobody is going to ask why; they will just assume it's because she's afraid of getting shot.
Furthermore, although the reader is going to eventually want an explanation for why all of this is happening, as soon as you take the plot in this direction, the story becomes situational rather than character-focused. Whatever was going on in these characters' lives five seconds ago suddenly doesn't matter; every single person in this cafeteria is now focused on what physical actions they need to take to ensure their own survival. Five seconds ago, Flash Sentry was poking at his mashed potatoes with a fork and feeling miserable and depressed, because he tried to hit on Sci-Twi for the nineteenth time and she rejected him. Then, suddenly, a bullet hits him in the shoulder. Now, the only thing on his mind is finding a place to hide and doing something to stop the bleeding. Anything in his previous character arc gets put on hold until that situation is dealt with, and it would be the same for any other character. You could swap out Flash Sentry for Timber Spruce or Big Mac or Jimmy Jazz Jizznuts, your terrible self-insert OC whose tragic backstory you've been trying to ram down everyone's throat for the last 500 pages. It doesn't matter who the character is here; the physics of getting shot in the arm will be the same for everyone.
The only area where the character's individual personality might matter is in how they react to the situation: if the school were to be suddenly shot up, the different characters would react differently. Fluttershy would probably be terrified and catatonic, and might just freeze like a deer in headlights. Rainbow Dash might have faster reflexes and grab Flutters and pull her under the table before a bullet hits her. Maybe they make out a little, who knows. Twilight would probably freak out, but once she got hold of herself might start trying to think of a way to get the gun away from Shimmysham. It still helps to have an understanding of the characters you're writing about, but you don't necessarily need to think about it in depth; just a general understanding of their personalities would be fine for this situation.
Nigel actually gets it fairly close here >>262391 .
I wasn't trying to suggest that action is a lower form of writing necessarily. It's not so much that action is easy to do right, but that it's just much harder to do wrong. The reason is because with action scenes, all you need to be able to do is visualize what's physically happening in the world and describe it. Writing a believable character-driven story requires you to have a deep understanding of who your characters are and why they behave the way they do. This is the whole problem with this story, actually: I can more or less see the kind of character Peen Stroke was trying to create with Nyx, and the kind of relationship he was trying to write with her and Twilight, but he executes it very poorly and it's not believable. In fact, I basically agree with you that I would rather be reading a middle of the road action story that's executed well than a story like this, that attempts depth but fails miserably at it. But that has nothing to do with which type of thing is easier to write; action is just easier to do because fundamentally all you need to do is narrate what's happening, you don't have to necessarily explain or even understand why it's happening.
Here's an example. Let's say I'm writing a story. Just for fun, let's say it's set in the EQG universe, with the humanized Barbie-poners. Scene is the cafeteria at Canterlot High. Fluttershy is sitting at the table eating lunch, when suddenly she bursts into tears and everyone turns and looks at her. If someone reads this, the first question that is going to be on their mind is "why is Fluttershy crying?" In order to explain this, I need to understand a lot of things. I need to have an understanding of Barbieworld, who lives here, how this world works, what goes on here, etc. I need to understand Fluttershy: who she is, what kind of personality she has, what kinds of events might provoke an emotional state like this for her. On top of that, I need to use all of this knowledge to craft a believable situation where this person might just burst into tears, and have it be something that the reader will not only accept but care enough about to read further. On top of that, I need to be able to tell the story to the reader in a way that communicates all of this complex information in an elegant and emotionally moving way, without making it so corny or over the top that the reader just rolls his eyes, or worse, laughs at it. As we have seen with our current story, that is no easy task to pull off.
Now, let's look at another type of story. Setting is the same; Canterlot High at lunchtime. However, instead of Fluttershy crying, imagine that Sunset Shimmer suddenly bursts in and starts shooting up the cafeteria. Even though this is a much less plausible scenario, what you have here is actually a much easier scene to write, because, as paradoxical as it sounds, you have a lot less to explain. If Fluttershy suddenly starts crying while eating lunch, people will want to know why. However, if she does it here, nobody is going to ask why; they will just assume it's because she's afraid of getting shot.
Furthermore, although the reader is going to eventually want an explanation for why all of this is happening, as soon as you take the plot in this direction, the story becomes situational rather than character-focused. Whatever was going on in these characters' lives five seconds ago suddenly doesn't matter; every single person in this cafeteria is now focused on what physical actions they need to take to ensure their own survival. Five seconds ago, Flash Sentry was poking at his mashed potatoes with a fork and feeling miserable and depressed, because he tried to hit on Sci-Twi for the nineteenth time and she rejected him. Then, suddenly, a bullet hits him in the shoulder. Now, the only thing on his mind is finding a place to hide and doing something to stop the bleeding. Anything in his previous character arc gets put on hold until that situation is dealt with, and it would be the same for any other character. You could swap out Flash Sentry for Timber Spruce or Big Mac or Jimmy Jazz Jizznuts, your terrible self-insert OC whose tragic backstory you've been trying to ram down everyone's throat for the last 500 pages. It doesn't matter who the character is here; the physics of getting shot in the arm will be the same for everyone.
The only area where the character's individual personality might matter is in how they react to the situation: if the school were to be suddenly shot up, the different characters would react differently. Fluttershy would probably be terrified and catatonic, and might just freeze like a deer in headlights. Rainbow Dash might have faster reflexes and grab Flutters and pull her under the table before a bullet hits her. Maybe they make out a little, who knows. Twilight would probably freak out, but once she got hold of herself might start trying to think of a way to get the gun away from Shimmysham. It still helps to have an understanding of the characters you're writing about, but you don't necessarily need to think about it in depth; just a general understanding of their personalities would be fine for this situation.
>>262453
>>262336
And, if you absolutely can't write for shit, action is probably the easiest type of story to fake your way through. You can always just do what Peen Stroke more or less did in the scene I was describing, and just take the final fight scene from a Hollywood blockbuster and mimic the tropes it uses. Snarky assholes like me will probably notice and call you out on it, but it's perfectly acceptable to do and audiences still like it. Webm related amuses me because I have a friend who reacts to movies this way. Every single one of the MCU movies he just sits there on the edge of his seat gasping as Captain America and Iron Man and Thanos and whoever the fuck go at it, like he really believes there's a possibility that the good guys could lose. Personally I was bored with the Marvel capeshit movies by like the third one; it's the same fucking script every time. I already know the Avengers are going to save the day and I don't really care how they do it, so the 45 minute epic battle scene where 3/4 of the film's budget ends up is usually the part where I go to the bathroom. But again, my friend enjoys it, and I know that a lot of other people do too.
As we've seen with Past Sins again and again, you can fake your way through action and still write something passable. As much as I shat all over it, and enjoyed shitting all over it, I still acknowledge that the battle scene against the Everfree monsters was handled competently enough. Trying to fake depth or feeling or character development, though, will fail every time.
>>262336
And, if you absolutely can't write for shit, action is probably the easiest type of story to fake your way through. You can always just do what Peen Stroke more or less did in the scene I was describing, and just take the final fight scene from a Hollywood blockbuster and mimic the tropes it uses. Snarky assholes like me will probably notice and call you out on it, but it's perfectly acceptable to do and audiences still like it. Webm related amuses me because I have a friend who reacts to movies this way. Every single one of the MCU movies he just sits there on the edge of his seat gasping as Captain America and Iron Man and Thanos and whoever the fuck go at it, like he really believes there's a possibility that the good guys could lose. Personally I was bored with the Marvel capeshit movies by like the third one; it's the same fucking script every time. I already know the Avengers are going to save the day and I don't really care how they do it, so the 45 minute epic battle scene where 3/4 of the film's budget ends up is usually the part where I go to the bathroom. But again, my friend enjoys it, and I know that a lot of other people do too.
As we've seen with Past Sins again and again, you can fake your way through action and still write something passable. As much as I shat all over it, and enjoyed shitting all over it, I still acknowledge that the battle scene against the Everfree monsters was handled competently enough. Trying to fake depth or feeling or character development, though, will fail every time.
>>262453
Come to think of it, I don't think Ben 10 has ever has any "Big character-driven fights" in the way shows like Naruto have.
When Ben is fighting some villain of the week it's because they're trying to steal a TV or nuke a planet or bodyswap with Gwen again.
When Naruto is fighting Haku, the heroic young knucklehead dead-last idiot ninja is rejecting the idea that his own village is using him the way Zabuza is using this sad icebending orphan boy Haku.
When Naruto is fighting Gaara to defend his village from a Sand Land invasion, Naruto is rejecting the idea that he's anything like this darker reflection of himself. Naruto says he turned out fine, and nothing like Gaara, the edgy blood-loving child who mentally broke due to lacking friends and having a demon forced inside him by the village that treats him like trash.
When Naruto is fighting Orochimaru it's just some snake cunt to him. That's why his battle focuses on fighting the underling of the snake cunt who says "Lol you're an idiot". That's why the narrative mainly focuses on Tsunade's fight with Orochimaru, since she's his former teammate and the granddaughter of the man Snake Cunt betrayed and killed last week, the man who practically raised Tsunade and Orochimaru.
When Naruto is fighting Sasuke, it's because he doesn't have any answers for the questions Sasuke raises about loyalty to one's village or family. Sasuke's entire family is dead, thanks to his village. His village ordered Sasuke's older brother Itachi to slaughter his entire family one night to prevent a coup they were planning, and Itachi did that, sparing only a tiny baby Sasuke while saying "Hate me, get strong, and kill me" like a fucked-up more intense version of the Boy Named Sue. After Sasuke kills Itachi and learns the truth, he kills the man responsible for the coup (Danzo) while invading a five-nation summit and fighting the ninja presidents of the other lands to do so.
And all Naruto has to say about that is "You're like a brother to me, so shut the fuck up about your feelings and stop killing people and come back to my village and be my teammate again!".
At first, Naruto is just trying to get Sasuke back because his crush Sakura wants Sasuke back.
After Naruto grows as a man, he calls Sakura a faker and he wants Sasuke back for himself. In a totally non gay way because he's with best girl Hinata from that point onwards.
When Naruto is fighting Pain it's a rejection of Pain's "The world must be united in misery under me, one ruler, to end all wars" bullshit.
When Naruto is fighting Obito it's a rejection of Obito's "This world is shit so I'll reflect an illusion spell off the moon to brainwash everyone into their own personal fantasy land! Sure we'll all wither and die in months but at least I get to be happy and see my dead childhood crush again!" bullshit.
No Ben 10 villain really has any sort of ideology or belief that motivates them to do evil. Closest the series ever gets to that was early-show Kevin who was willing to crash a train full of money into a train full of people to get the money. The other villains are just sort of like that. There's a magic girl, a mad scientist one, an alien planet-conquering dictator one, a race of nazi frogpeople, a race of nazi plantpeople Ben turns good by racemixing them with his watch, a ghost, a werewolf, a few bounty hunters, a Skullker ripoff, an Ember ripoff, and Solo God Chadbedo, but the only real "ideological fight" bit happens in one of the final seasons where Kevin gets duped into working for an evil organization that says "Maybe one kid shouldn't have a watch of literal godhood on his arm! Let's kill Ben and destroy his Omnitrix(TM) alien watch!" for a few hours.
Come to think of it, I don't think Ben 10 has ever has any "Big character-driven fights" in the way shows like Naruto have.
When Ben is fighting some villain of the week it's because they're trying to steal a TV or nuke a planet or bodyswap with Gwen again.
When Naruto is fighting Haku, the heroic young knucklehead dead-last idiot ninja is rejecting the idea that his own village is using him the way Zabuza is using this sad icebending orphan boy Haku.
When Naruto is fighting Gaara to defend his village from a Sand Land invasion, Naruto is rejecting the idea that he's anything like this darker reflection of himself. Naruto says he turned out fine, and nothing like Gaara, the edgy blood-loving child who mentally broke due to lacking friends and having a demon forced inside him by the village that treats him like trash.
When Naruto is fighting Orochimaru it's just some snake cunt to him. That's why his battle focuses on fighting the underling of the snake cunt who says "Lol you're an idiot". That's why the narrative mainly focuses on Tsunade's fight with Orochimaru, since she's his former teammate and the granddaughter of the man Snake Cunt betrayed and killed last week, the man who practically raised Tsunade and Orochimaru.
When Naruto is fighting Sasuke, it's because he doesn't have any answers for the questions Sasuke raises about loyalty to one's village or family. Sasuke's entire family is dead, thanks to his village. His village ordered Sasuke's older brother Itachi to slaughter his entire family one night to prevent a coup they were planning, and Itachi did that, sparing only a tiny baby Sasuke while saying "Hate me, get strong, and kill me" like a fucked-up more intense version of the Boy Named Sue. After Sasuke kills Itachi and learns the truth, he kills the man responsible for the coup (Danzo) while invading a five-nation summit and fighting the ninja presidents of the other lands to do so.
And all Naruto has to say about that is "You're like a brother to me, so shut the fuck up about your feelings and stop killing people and come back to my village and be my teammate again!".
At first, Naruto is just trying to get Sasuke back because his crush Sakura wants Sasuke back.
After Naruto grows as a man, he calls Sakura a faker and he wants Sasuke back for himself. In a totally non gay way because he's with best girl Hinata from that point onwards.
When Naruto is fighting Pain it's a rejection of Pain's "The world must be united in misery under me, one ruler, to end all wars" bullshit.
When Naruto is fighting Obito it's a rejection of Obito's "This world is shit so I'll reflect an illusion spell off the moon to brainwash everyone into their own personal fantasy land! Sure we'll all wither and die in months but at least I get to be happy and see my dead childhood crush again!" bullshit.
No Ben 10 villain really has any sort of ideology or belief that motivates them to do evil. Closest the series ever gets to that was early-show Kevin who was willing to crash a train full of money into a train full of people to get the money. The other villains are just sort of like that. There's a magic girl, a mad scientist one, an alien planet-conquering dictator one, a race of nazi frogpeople, a race of nazi plantpeople Ben turns good by racemixing them with his watch, a ghost, a werewolf, a few bounty hunters, a Skullker ripoff, an Ember ripoff, and Solo God Chadbedo, but the only real "ideological fight" bit happens in one of the final seasons where Kevin gets duped into working for an evil organization that says "Maybe one kid shouldn't have a watch of literal godhood on his arm! Let's kill Ben and destroy his Omnitrix(TM) alien watch!" for a few hours.
>>262455
The last marvel capeshit film I saw at the cinema was either Civil War or the one with the robot clones.
Both were boring filler movies hyped to hell and back that went nowhere.
The last marvel capeshit film I saw at the cinema was either Civil War or the one with the robot clones.
Both were boring filler movies hyped to hell and back that went nowhere.
File (): EA4A6A31DDFEA347804276825F3DA62F-196540.jpg (191.9 KB, 730x1095, unnamed (1).jpg)
>>262293
Anyway, continuing to do her moody teenage impression of a tragic hero, Nyx refuses to let Twilight fight the Lupus, even though she's totally hurt and will probably die if she fights it alone. She teleports Twilight and the others to safety.
They look out over the battlements, and Twilight howls with frustration because all she can do is stand helplessly and watch Nyx get her ass kicked by the totally-original-not-copied-or-plagiarized Lupus Major. This scene is also reasonably well done. Peen Stroke shows good instinct in switching the perspective here; instead of simply grinding out another fight scene with another monster, which would be tedious considering we just came from a giant fight scene, he instead uses this as an opportunity to focus the reader's attention on Twilight. Her sort-of daughter just threw herself into a suicidal situation in order to rescue Twilight and her friends, and of course Twilight finds this unacceptable, but she can't do anything except watch them duke it out and hope that Nyx makes it out alive. There's more tension in presenting the scene this way than if the focus was purely on the fight. Unfortunately, the shoddy development of all of these characters up to this point makes it hard to really give a shit how any of them feel about each other, but still; I'm willing to give credit where credit is due.
Anyway, Nyx uses some kind of big lightning attack to fend off the lupus, who crawls back into the Everfree Forest. After an appropriate period of anxious breath-holding, the ponies then spy a badly-injured Nyx limping along the road towards the castle. Twilight rushes outside to greet her, and can immediately see that she is in a terrible state. Her makeup is all messed up, her armor is basically gone, her wing looks broken, and it's probably safe to say that her taint is even more troubled than it is normally. And don't even get me started on her flustered fanny.
Their reunion goes about how you'd expect. Twilight immediately demands an explanation of what happened. Nyx, for whom speaking is now a struggle, manages to gasp out that she couldn't defeat the Ursa, excuse me, Lupus, so instead, she used some kind of suicide move to blast both herself and the creature when it pinned her to the ground. She is obviously at death's door, but of course all she cares about is that Twilight and her friends and all of the cute pretty ponies are now safe from the big scary monster. She tells them all to return home, takes a few more steps, trips on a rock or something, and then collapses in an exhausted, beaten heap.
Cue sad dramatic music. Somepony rub the onion in Twilight's eyes again please; we're going to need some serious waterworks for this scene. Alright, places everypony. Twilight, you rush over to Nyx and nuzzle her while sobbing uncontrollably into her mane. Whisper to her how stupid she was to risk her life like that. Nyx, say something noble and heroic, and don't forget to add some sort of self-denigrating line about how you don't deserve anypony's love or sympathy after the way you acted. Background ponies, we're going to need all of you to cry as well, so try to think about drowning puppies or something. Alright, are we good? Everypony ready to cry? Good. Now play the sad music. No, I mean the really sad music. Sadder than that. There we go, that's good. Now crescendo it. And three....two....one....ACTION!
Well, it doesn't play out exactly like that, but I got it close enough. Nightmare Moon collapses on the ground and loses consciousness. Twilight freaks out and starts sobbing uncontrollably, pleading for somepony, anypony, to come and help Nightmare Moon. The surrounding crowd is ambivalent; she just helped them, but then again, she's also the same twat who has pretty much been making their lives suck massive balls for the last couple of weeks. And, let's face it: this was pretty much all her fault anyway. So, most of them just kind of cough awkwardly.
Twilight, now in hysterics, calls all of them monsters and shames them for not being more friendshippy, for what is Equestria if not the land of Friendship? The ponies continue to look awkwardly away. However, Twilight's homies got her back. The remaining mane 6 show up, with Nurse Redheart and some other literally-who background pony to tend to Nightmare Moon's near-fatal bum wounds. This apparently snaps the townsponies out of their stupor, for they now run around, hurriedly following the doctor's instructions. Nightmare Moon is brought inside, because apparently she needs surgery to reconstruct her badly pulverized pooper.
>Twilight then leaned in and gently nuzzled Nightmare Moon’s cheek.
>“You’re going to be all right,” Twilight assured her, “I promise, you’re going to be all right.”
Will Nightmare Moon be alright? Or will she die prematurely on the operating table, leaving approximately 32,000 words free for a side story about Twilight sitting in her tree library and sobbing her eyes out while Spike does the dishes? Who knows? Who cares? Find out in our next exciting episode.
Anyway, continuing to do her moody teenage impression of a tragic hero, Nyx refuses to let Twilight fight the Lupus, even though she's totally hurt and will probably die if she fights it alone. She teleports Twilight and the others to safety.
They look out over the battlements, and Twilight howls with frustration because all she can do is stand helplessly and watch Nyx get her ass kicked by the totally-original-not-copied-or-plagiarized Lupus Major. This scene is also reasonably well done. Peen Stroke shows good instinct in switching the perspective here; instead of simply grinding out another fight scene with another monster, which would be tedious considering we just came from a giant fight scene, he instead uses this as an opportunity to focus the reader's attention on Twilight. Her sort-of daughter just threw herself into a suicidal situation in order to rescue Twilight and her friends, and of course Twilight finds this unacceptable, but she can't do anything except watch them duke it out and hope that Nyx makes it out alive. There's more tension in presenting the scene this way than if the focus was purely on the fight. Unfortunately, the shoddy development of all of these characters up to this point makes it hard to really give a shit how any of them feel about each other, but still; I'm willing to give credit where credit is due.
Anyway, Nyx uses some kind of big lightning attack to fend off the lupus, who crawls back into the Everfree Forest. After an appropriate period of anxious breath-holding, the ponies then spy a badly-injured Nyx limping along the road towards the castle. Twilight rushes outside to greet her, and can immediately see that she is in a terrible state. Her makeup is all messed up, her armor is basically gone, her wing looks broken, and it's probably safe to say that her taint is even more troubled than it is normally. And don't even get me started on her flustered fanny.
Their reunion goes about how you'd expect. Twilight immediately demands an explanation of what happened. Nyx, for whom speaking is now a struggle, manages to gasp out that she couldn't defeat the Ursa, excuse me, Lupus, so instead, she used some kind of suicide move to blast both herself and the creature when it pinned her to the ground. She is obviously at death's door, but of course all she cares about is that Twilight and her friends and all of the cute pretty ponies are now safe from the big scary monster. She tells them all to return home, takes a few more steps, trips on a rock or something, and then collapses in an exhausted, beaten heap.
Cue sad dramatic music. Somepony rub the onion in Twilight's eyes again please; we're going to need some serious waterworks for this scene. Alright, places everypony. Twilight, you rush over to Nyx and nuzzle her while sobbing uncontrollably into her mane. Whisper to her how stupid she was to risk her life like that. Nyx, say something noble and heroic, and don't forget to add some sort of self-denigrating line about how you don't deserve anypony's love or sympathy after the way you acted. Background ponies, we're going to need all of you to cry as well, so try to think about drowning puppies or something. Alright, are we good? Everypony ready to cry? Good. Now play the sad music. No, I mean the really sad music. Sadder than that. There we go, that's good. Now crescendo it. And three....two....one....ACTION!
Well, it doesn't play out exactly like that, but I got it close enough. Nightmare Moon collapses on the ground and loses consciousness. Twilight freaks out and starts sobbing uncontrollably, pleading for somepony, anypony, to come and help Nightmare Moon. The surrounding crowd is ambivalent; she just helped them, but then again, she's also the same twat who has pretty much been making their lives suck massive balls for the last couple of weeks. And, let's face it: this was pretty much all her fault anyway. So, most of them just kind of cough awkwardly.
Twilight, now in hysterics, calls all of them monsters and shames them for not being more friendshippy, for what is Equestria if not the land of Friendship? The ponies continue to look awkwardly away. However, Twilight's homies got her back. The remaining mane 6 show up, with Nurse Redheart and some other literally-who background pony to tend to Nightmare Moon's near-fatal bum wounds. This apparently snaps the townsponies out of their stupor, for they now run around, hurriedly following the doctor's instructions. Nightmare Moon is brought inside, because apparently she needs surgery to reconstruct her badly pulverized pooper.
>Twilight then leaned in and gently nuzzled Nightmare Moon’s cheek.
>“You’re going to be all right,” Twilight assured her, “I promise, you’re going to be all right.”
Will Nightmare Moon be alright? Or will she die prematurely on the operating table, leaving approximately 32,000 words free for a side story about Twilight sitting in her tree library and sobbing her eyes out while Spike does the dishes? Who knows? Who cares? Find out in our next exciting episode.
>>262496
Chapter 19: Recovery
Well, the graphic for this chapter is pic related, so that should probably give us a clue for the kind of sappy bullshit we likely have in store for us. But, let's sally forth, because this one is (thankfully) only 7,322 words long, and we actually got through the last one rather quickly, since it was pretty much all action. Seriously, I think Chapter 18 must have set some kind of record for lowest number of posts dedicated to a single chapter; I think I made it out of that one in only 3, and only went off topic a couple of times. But anyway, let's continue.
>Ponyville had survived the monster attack from the Everfree Forest, but not unscathed.
Yeah, I think this was pretty much covered in what we literally just read. This opening line is probably not the best foot to put forward here.
Anyway, we start things off with some general summary of what happened after Nightmare Moon went down, this time from the perspective of the ordinary Ponyville citizens. Mostly they've all been surveying the damage, picking up the pieces, moving on, etc. etc. Pretty much a trailer park in Tornado Alley on an average Tuesday. Nyx's grimdark castle has since become a combination hospital and disaster relief shelter, transforming it from a place of teenage emo foreboding to a pastel place of friendship and happiness.
But apparently, all is not yet well in paradise, for ponies are still afraid of Nightmare Moon, who has been locked away in her throne room under the care of the doctors. Twilight, of course, is a nervous wreck, but she has little choice but to sit outside and wait while the doctors do their work.
>Shifting her gaze away from the ceiling, Twilight looked through one of the nearby windows. The sky was starting to shift from a pristine blue to a warm, welcoming orange; it was a picturesque sunset that at least distracted Twilight from her concerns. She took in the spectrum of colors and stared until the creaking of hinges drew her attention to the opening throne room doors.
Because apparently Nightmare Moon is still raising and setting the sun despite being near-mortally wounded and also unconscious.
Finally, the doors open. In a cliche line ripped directly from the script of literally any TV hospital drama, Dr. Whogivesafuck informs Twilight that Nyx is stable for the moment, but the next few hours are going to be critical. Twilight goes inside, and sees Nyx lying on a bed in the center of the throne room, clearly still in pretty bad shape but breathing peacefully.
She stays in there with Nyx for a while, and then the Mayor suddenly shows up and pulls her away. Looks like I jumped the gun a little with my snarky remark about the sun moving; the reason the Mayor is here is because she's concerned that the sun has been hovering in place at sunset for like twelve hours now. In all seriousness, now that I see where Peen Stroke was going with it, this was rather artfully done. It stands to reason that Twilight's mind would be more focused on Nyx right now than on the movement of heavenly bodies, and simple gestures like looking out the window and noticing the sunset are the sorts of things nearly anyone will just do automatically and not think about. Writing it this way, Peen Stroke calls our attention to the sunset, probably knowing full well that the same thought that occurred to me will probably occur to anyone else reading. However, since we're seeing it from Twilight's perspective, and Twilight's mind is on Nyx, we don't get an explanation for the discrepancy until the Mayor shows up and calls Twilight's attention to it. This right here is what good writing looks like. Point goes to Peen Stroke on this one, and I'm gentleman enough to admit it. *tips fedora*
Anyway, here Mr. P actually introduces a rather weird and interesting idea: should Nyx die, there would be no one left in the world who could raise or lower the sun. Celestia and Luna are still trapped, and presumably only another alicorn could be powerful enough to release them. Thus, the sun and the moon could potentially remain fixed in their current positions forever. This is actually a much more interesting idea than the whole "Nightmare Moon comes back and enforces eternal night for no better reason than that she's a total cunt" premise that unfortunately dominated a large portion of the text. I highly doubt Nyx is going to die in this story, but it would be actually be an interesting premise to explore, if anyone out there wants a free idea to play with.
In any case, it seems like the same thing has occurred to the Mayor. She now approaches Twilight and suggests that she try and figure out a way to bring back the Princesses using the Elements of Harmony. As urgent as one might assume this would be, the Mayor doesn't really press the issue. She asks Twilight if she can do it, and Twilight simply replies that she will have to wait until Nyx wakes up to ask her how the banishment spell works. After that the conversation devolves into some banal shit about sandwiches.
Unfortunately, the next scene continues along these lines. Twilight and the Mayor now go downstairs to eat fucking sandwiches. They discuss the sandwiches, discuss how good a job Applejack did preparing the sandwiches, and comment on the quality of the sandwiches. I'd actually be curious to know what Peen Stroke's Ritalin regimen is exactly; seems like he needs to start cutting the pills in half or something. Anyway, a minute later, Cheerilee shows up and hands Twilight a stack of papers, which I assume contain coupons for more sandwiches.
Nope, I was wrong. As it turns out, the papers are actually cutesy drawings that the school children did as a thank you to Nightmare Moon for saving them from all the big scary monsters. Well, isn't that just cutesy-wootsy-adorable. Nyx will probably wake up and cry as soon as she sees these, assuming she doesn't die of rectal ruination first.
Chapter 19: Recovery
Well, the graphic for this chapter is pic related, so that should probably give us a clue for the kind of sappy bullshit we likely have in store for us. But, let's sally forth, because this one is (thankfully) only 7,322 words long, and we actually got through the last one rather quickly, since it was pretty much all action. Seriously, I think Chapter 18 must have set some kind of record for lowest number of posts dedicated to a single chapter; I think I made it out of that one in only 3, and only went off topic a couple of times. But anyway, let's continue.
>Ponyville had survived the monster attack from the Everfree Forest, but not unscathed.
Yeah, I think this was pretty much covered in what we literally just read. This opening line is probably not the best foot to put forward here.
Anyway, we start things off with some general summary of what happened after Nightmare Moon went down, this time from the perspective of the ordinary Ponyville citizens. Mostly they've all been surveying the damage, picking up the pieces, moving on, etc. etc. Pretty much a trailer park in Tornado Alley on an average Tuesday. Nyx's grimdark castle has since become a combination hospital and disaster relief shelter, transforming it from a place of teenage emo foreboding to a pastel place of friendship and happiness.
But apparently, all is not yet well in paradise, for ponies are still afraid of Nightmare Moon, who has been locked away in her throne room under the care of the doctors. Twilight, of course, is a nervous wreck, but she has little choice but to sit outside and wait while the doctors do their work.
>Shifting her gaze away from the ceiling, Twilight looked through one of the nearby windows. The sky was starting to shift from a pristine blue to a warm, welcoming orange; it was a picturesque sunset that at least distracted Twilight from her concerns. She took in the spectrum of colors and stared until the creaking of hinges drew her attention to the opening throne room doors.
Because apparently Nightmare Moon is still raising and setting the sun despite being near-mortally wounded and also unconscious.
Finally, the doors open. In a cliche line ripped directly from the script of literally any TV hospital drama, Dr. Whogivesafuck informs Twilight that Nyx is stable for the moment, but the next few hours are going to be critical. Twilight goes inside, and sees Nyx lying on a bed in the center of the throne room, clearly still in pretty bad shape but breathing peacefully.
She stays in there with Nyx for a while, and then the Mayor suddenly shows up and pulls her away. Looks like I jumped the gun a little with my snarky remark about the sun moving; the reason the Mayor is here is because she's concerned that the sun has been hovering in place at sunset for like twelve hours now. In all seriousness, now that I see where Peen Stroke was going with it, this was rather artfully done. It stands to reason that Twilight's mind would be more focused on Nyx right now than on the movement of heavenly bodies, and simple gestures like looking out the window and noticing the sunset are the sorts of things nearly anyone will just do automatically and not think about. Writing it this way, Peen Stroke calls our attention to the sunset, probably knowing full well that the same thought that occurred to me will probably occur to anyone else reading. However, since we're seeing it from Twilight's perspective, and Twilight's mind is on Nyx, we don't get an explanation for the discrepancy until the Mayor shows up and calls Twilight's attention to it. This right here is what good writing looks like. Point goes to Peen Stroke on this one, and I'm gentleman enough to admit it. *tips fedora*
Anyway, here Mr. P actually introduces a rather weird and interesting idea: should Nyx die, there would be no one left in the world who could raise or lower the sun. Celestia and Luna are still trapped, and presumably only another alicorn could be powerful enough to release them. Thus, the sun and the moon could potentially remain fixed in their current positions forever. This is actually a much more interesting idea than the whole "Nightmare Moon comes back and enforces eternal night for no better reason than that she's a total cunt" premise that unfortunately dominated a large portion of the text. I highly doubt Nyx is going to die in this story, but it would be actually be an interesting premise to explore, if anyone out there wants a free idea to play with.
In any case, it seems like the same thing has occurred to the Mayor. She now approaches Twilight and suggests that she try and figure out a way to bring back the Princesses using the Elements of Harmony. As urgent as one might assume this would be, the Mayor doesn't really press the issue. She asks Twilight if she can do it, and Twilight simply replies that she will have to wait until Nyx wakes up to ask her how the banishment spell works. After that the conversation devolves into some banal shit about sandwiches.
Unfortunately, the next scene continues along these lines. Twilight and the Mayor now go downstairs to eat fucking sandwiches. They discuss the sandwiches, discuss how good a job Applejack did preparing the sandwiches, and comment on the quality of the sandwiches. I'd actually be curious to know what Peen Stroke's Ritalin regimen is exactly; seems like he needs to start cutting the pills in half or something. Anyway, a minute later, Cheerilee shows up and hands Twilight a stack of papers, which I assume contain coupons for more sandwiches.
Nope, I was wrong. As it turns out, the papers are actually cutesy drawings that the school children did as a thank you to Nightmare Moon for saving them from all the big scary monsters. Well, isn't that just cutesy-wootsy-adorable. Nyx will probably wake up and cry as soon as she sees these, assuming she doesn't die of rectal ruination first.
>>262496
This has been a great experience and you're really good at this. It's interesting to look at such a beloved story and see exactly why it's so beloved: Because it's shit. The exact kind of shit bronies will eat up.
What will you do when you get to Fallout Equestria? With my Silver fic you did the Silver "I love dicks inside my ass" Star thing. And with Peen Stroke you called him Peen Stroke and put his face+love of dicks into those weird islamic cartoons. What is there to do with FE? It's a bad crossover that sacrifices MLPFIM's characters, setting, and themes at the altar of the author's own ego so the pony world can be turned into a lazy BugthEAsderp-tier knockoff of Fallout iconography. The world of FIM is degraded into a mindless shooting gallery filled with "Edgier" knockoffs of Fallout enemies.
Fallout Equestria honestly reminds me of edgy 2000s-era Sonic The Hedgehog fanart that would take Tails The Fox and kill Sonic off to make him this dark and edgy brooding quip-spouting "badass" prick. But posting bad Sonic fanart over and over with the Fallout Equestria character faces edited onto them would just get old.
But seriously, fuck Fequestria and its habit of Fequestring everything it rips off from Fallout.
The Enclave Eyebot, a nonsensical flying robot ball that hovers around a wasteland playing Enclave Radio to skeletons, is Fequested into The Pinkie Pie Spritebot, a nonsensical flying robot that used to hover around playing polka music but now hovers around playing Perish Song to kill ponies.
The Deathclaw, a terrifying Fallout monster that's a region-relevant Jackson's Chameleon but big and deadly and minus invisibility, is Fequested into Hellhounds aka Diamond Dogs but assholes with laser miniguns. Don't ask where the laser miniguns come from or where they get batteries, they can still think but choose to kill and eat ponies because they think ponies are pure evil because potatoes.
The Fatman, a low-yield nuclear bomb launcher, is Fequested into The Balefire Egg Launcher, a rocket launcher that shoots bigger deadlier radioactive phoenix eggs easily harvested from radioactive green phoenixes.
The Protagonist, a regular bloke with crap to average to pretty good stats who goes from hapless nobody to world-changing badass by growing and making the right/wrong choices along his adventure, is Fequested into Littlepip, a small whiny bitch who goes from unpopular lockpicking computer-hacking stealth-god to quip-spouting action movie hero whenever the author doesn't think a scene of Littlepip crying or whining to her friends or being disgusted or taking drugs will make her cooler. She can talk anyone into/out of anything whenever she wants to enough unless the author says otherwise, at one point she fails to convince a seasoned Wastelander to hang around with her and at another point she's being blackmailed with a LOADED FAT MAN to enter an enemy settlement so she blacks out (convenient for the author) and when she wakes up she's talked the people blackmailing her into giving her the nuclear bomb launcher. This isn't cool, it's stupid. When her Obligatory One Good Enclave Member companion snipes his former Enclave members with a shotgun while both are flying it's stupid.
Fallout iconography is sacrificed at Littlepip's altar. She "Defeats The Master and The Enclave except bigger badder pony versions of them", except The Enclave thinks what it's doing is right, even though its soldiers are cunts. The Pegasus Enclave is just fantasy nazi pegasi because the whole race turned traitor in FE canon. And The Master thinks what he's doing will work and is right, you can only convince him to stop (and then blow himself up and most of his mutants) by showing him scientific evidence that his Super Mutants are sterile and therefore his "One world under mutanthood" plan has no future. FE's The Master is "The Goddess", aka Alicorn Trixie only a total cunt who wants her edgy black and red alicorn army (that can reproduce but only create females) to conquer all because she's evil.
This has been a great experience and you're really good at this. It's interesting to look at such a beloved story and see exactly why it's so beloved: Because it's shit. The exact kind of shit bronies will eat up.
What will you do when you get to Fallout Equestria? With my Silver fic you did the Silver "I love dicks inside my ass" Star thing. And with Peen Stroke you called him Peen Stroke and put his face+love of dicks into those weird islamic cartoons. What is there to do with FE? It's a bad crossover that sacrifices MLPFIM's characters, setting, and themes at the altar of the author's own ego so the pony world can be turned into a lazy BugthEAsderp-tier knockoff of Fallout iconography. The world of FIM is degraded into a mindless shooting gallery filled with "Edgier" knockoffs of Fallout enemies.
Fallout Equestria honestly reminds me of edgy 2000s-era Sonic The Hedgehog fanart that would take Tails The Fox and kill Sonic off to make him this dark and edgy brooding quip-spouting "badass" prick. But posting bad Sonic fanart over and over with the Fallout Equestria character faces edited onto them would just get old.
But seriously, fuck Fequestria and its habit of Fequestring everything it rips off from Fallout.
The Enclave Eyebot, a nonsensical flying robot ball that hovers around a wasteland playing Enclave Radio to skeletons, is Fequested into The Pinkie Pie Spritebot, a nonsensical flying robot that used to hover around playing polka music but now hovers around playing Perish Song to kill ponies.
The Deathclaw, a terrifying Fallout monster that's a region-relevant Jackson's Chameleon but big and deadly and minus invisibility, is Fequested into Hellhounds aka Diamond Dogs but assholes with laser miniguns. Don't ask where the laser miniguns come from or where they get batteries, they can still think but choose to kill and eat ponies because they think ponies are pure evil because potatoes.
The Fatman, a low-yield nuclear bomb launcher, is Fequested into The Balefire Egg Launcher, a rocket launcher that shoots bigger deadlier radioactive phoenix eggs easily harvested from radioactive green phoenixes.
The Protagonist, a regular bloke with crap to average to pretty good stats who goes from hapless nobody to world-changing badass by growing and making the right/wrong choices along his adventure, is Fequested into Littlepip, a small whiny bitch who goes from unpopular lockpicking computer-hacking stealth-god to quip-spouting action movie hero whenever the author doesn't think a scene of Littlepip crying or whining to her friends or being disgusted or taking drugs will make her cooler. She can talk anyone into/out of anything whenever she wants to enough unless the author says otherwise, at one point she fails to convince a seasoned Wastelander to hang around with her and at another point she's being blackmailed with a LOADED FAT MAN to enter an enemy settlement so she blacks out (convenient for the author) and when she wakes up she's talked the people blackmailing her into giving her the nuclear bomb launcher. This isn't cool, it's stupid. When her Obligatory One Good Enclave Member companion snipes his former Enclave members with a shotgun while both are flying it's stupid.
Fallout iconography is sacrificed at Littlepip's altar. She "Defeats The Master and The Enclave except bigger badder pony versions of them", except The Enclave thinks what it's doing is right, even though its soldiers are cunts. The Pegasus Enclave is just fantasy nazi pegasi because the whole race turned traitor in FE canon. And The Master thinks what he's doing will work and is right, you can only convince him to stop (and then blow himself up and most of his mutants) by showing him scientific evidence that his Super Mutants are sterile and therefore his "One world under mutanthood" plan has no future. FE's The Master is "The Goddess", aka Alicorn Trixie only a total cunt who wants her edgy black and red alicorn army (that can reproduce but only create females) to conquer all because she's evil.
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>>262498
Anyway, Cheerilee gives the drawings to Twilight to pass on to Nyx, along with a note she wrote herself, which I can only assume is a long-form letter similar to this one, detailing all of the reasons that Nyx is the worst character ever and how she needs to an hero immediately upon waking, should the coma not be kind enough to end her misery without any fuss. After that, she departs, and Twilight goes back to munching on her fucking sandwich like an autismo.
Unfortunately for Cheerilee (as well as the rest of us), in the next scene, Nyx does indeed wake up. And as soon as she's had a glass of water, she gets right back to the business of being a moody, mopey, whiny twat. Pretty much the first thing out of her mouth is a bunch of autism about how awful and horrible she is and how nopony should love her or care about her.
>“You were right all along, and I finally understand what you were trying to tell me. I may be Nightmare Moon, but that doesn’t mean I have to act like I did before. I didn’t have to listen to Spell Nexus or be the mare Celestia feared. Nopony could have forced me to do anything once I was fully resurrected.
There's quite a bit more, but this line of dialog probably sums up the gist of what she has to say here. This is all basically true, and is pretty much in line with what I was complaining about during her Nightmare Moon phase. It's good that she is at least able to (finally) accept some responsibility for her actions, but it still doesn't address the central question I find myself returning to over and over: why did she do what she did? We still don't have a good explanation, beyond "She's Nightmare Moon and this is just what Nightmare Moon does."
Imagine I'm writing a story, and one of my characters just randomly pulls out a gun and murders another character for absolutely no obvious reason. This would be a jarring event, especially if the story up until that point had been mostly uneventful slice-of-life and the character, though occasionally troubled, had shown no tendencies towards this level of violence. After committing the murder, the character then realizes that he had no reason to do what he just did. He feels remorse for the act, and wishes to atone for it. But unless the story eventually provides us with a motive, the reader won't be satisfied whether the character atones for the act or not, because we still won't understand why he did it in the first place. An idea this bizarre could probably work as the premise for a surreal story that is intended to leave the reader feeling uneasy, but that is clearly not the kind of thing Peen Stroke was trying to do here, so I'll ask it again for the bazillionth time: if she wasn't being coerced or controlled, why did Nyx do all of the things she did?
Well, as it turns out, Peen Stroke seems to be finally willing to offer us an explanation, and it's every bit as weak as I suspected it would turn out to be. I feel as if I've already addressed all of these points in detail more than once, so I don't want to delve into it too deeply here. However, I will provide a brief rebuttal to each of these:
>“But… but I was so angry. I was angry at Celestia and… at you.” Nightmare Moon’s voice began to tremble as she fought back tears. “You let Celestia take me… you abandoned me and lied to me… and I hated you for it. I hated you so much.
This is not enough. Other than this one event, Twilight and Nyx had a good relationship. Nothing in their interactions up to this fight suggest any underlying animosity or mistrust. Twilight is generally a good mother and Nyx is generally a good daughter. If Peen Stroke wanted a rift between Twilight and Nyx to be the reason she wound up going postal, he needed to do a better job establishing this earlier in the story, which he failed to do.
>“All I had left were my memories… all those memories of hating Equestria, of wanting the eternal night. My memories of being sealed in the moon.” Nightmare Moon’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she paused a moment. Twilight opened her mouth to offer her some comfort, but Nightmare Moon continued speaking before she could utter a single word.
These memories do not belong to Nyx. They are never connected to Nyx in any significant way. They belong to a different character in a different story, and Peen Stroke never bridges the gap between the two, he simply relies on the reader's familiarity with the other story to fill in the blanks automatically. This is just bad writing.
>“So I played the part. Like a stupid little filly in a stupid school play, I played the part of the monster. I played the role because it’s the only thing that felt true. It’s what Spell Nexus was telling me, it’s what Celestia feared, and it’s what my own memories told me was true.
This is just more blame-shifting. She places the blame on Nexus, Celestia, and Luna's inherited memories. These external influences may have arguably contributed to her decision to do what she did, but it's still a decision she made herself, and we still don't have an adequate justification for it, either from Nyx herself of from what we know of the events that took place.
Anyway, there you have it. Hopefully this can be the last time I have to go over these points, but unfortunately, I suspect it will come up again. Too much of the underlying structure of this story is flawed; to address any problems with anything built on top of this weak structure, we will have to continue to address the structure itself.
From here it just drops back into the familiar holding pattern of Twilight saying "I forgive you Nyx" and Nyx saying "No, I don't deserve forgiveness." Something tells me we're going to be seeing quite a bit of this from here on out.
Anyway, Cheerilee gives the drawings to Twilight to pass on to Nyx, along with a note she wrote herself, which I can only assume is a long-form letter similar to this one, detailing all of the reasons that Nyx is the worst character ever and how she needs to an hero immediately upon waking, should the coma not be kind enough to end her misery without any fuss. After that, she departs, and Twilight goes back to munching on her fucking sandwich like an autismo.
Unfortunately for Cheerilee (as well as the rest of us), in the next scene, Nyx does indeed wake up. And as soon as she's had a glass of water, she gets right back to the business of being a moody, mopey, whiny twat. Pretty much the first thing out of her mouth is a bunch of autism about how awful and horrible she is and how nopony should love her or care about her.
>“You were right all along, and I finally understand what you were trying to tell me. I may be Nightmare Moon, but that doesn’t mean I have to act like I did before. I didn’t have to listen to Spell Nexus or be the mare Celestia feared. Nopony could have forced me to do anything once I was fully resurrected.
There's quite a bit more, but this line of dialog probably sums up the gist of what she has to say here. This is all basically true, and is pretty much in line with what I was complaining about during her Nightmare Moon phase. It's good that she is at least able to (finally) accept some responsibility for her actions, but it still doesn't address the central question I find myself returning to over and over: why did she do what she did? We still don't have a good explanation, beyond "She's Nightmare Moon and this is just what Nightmare Moon does."
Imagine I'm writing a story, and one of my characters just randomly pulls out a gun and murders another character for absolutely no obvious reason. This would be a jarring event, especially if the story up until that point had been mostly uneventful slice-of-life and the character, though occasionally troubled, had shown no tendencies towards this level of violence. After committing the murder, the character then realizes that he had no reason to do what he just did. He feels remorse for the act, and wishes to atone for it. But unless the story eventually provides us with a motive, the reader won't be satisfied whether the character atones for the act or not, because we still won't understand why he did it in the first place. An idea this bizarre could probably work as the premise for a surreal story that is intended to leave the reader feeling uneasy, but that is clearly not the kind of thing Peen Stroke was trying to do here, so I'll ask it again for the bazillionth time: if she wasn't being coerced or controlled, why did Nyx do all of the things she did?
Well, as it turns out, Peen Stroke seems to be finally willing to offer us an explanation, and it's every bit as weak as I suspected it would turn out to be. I feel as if I've already addressed all of these points in detail more than once, so I don't want to delve into it too deeply here. However, I will provide a brief rebuttal to each of these:
>“But… but I was so angry. I was angry at Celestia and… at you.” Nightmare Moon’s voice began to tremble as she fought back tears. “You let Celestia take me… you abandoned me and lied to me… and I hated you for it. I hated you so much.
This is not enough. Other than this one event, Twilight and Nyx had a good relationship. Nothing in their interactions up to this fight suggest any underlying animosity or mistrust. Twilight is generally a good mother and Nyx is generally a good daughter. If Peen Stroke wanted a rift between Twilight and Nyx to be the reason she wound up going postal, he needed to do a better job establishing this earlier in the story, which he failed to do.
>“All I had left were my memories… all those memories of hating Equestria, of wanting the eternal night. My memories of being sealed in the moon.” Nightmare Moon’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she paused a moment. Twilight opened her mouth to offer her some comfort, but Nightmare Moon continued speaking before she could utter a single word.
These memories do not belong to Nyx. They are never connected to Nyx in any significant way. They belong to a different character in a different story, and Peen Stroke never bridges the gap between the two, he simply relies on the reader's familiarity with the other story to fill in the blanks automatically. This is just bad writing.
>“So I played the part. Like a stupid little filly in a stupid school play, I played the part of the monster. I played the role because it’s the only thing that felt true. It’s what Spell Nexus was telling me, it’s what Celestia feared, and it’s what my own memories told me was true.
This is just more blame-shifting. She places the blame on Nexus, Celestia, and Luna's inherited memories. These external influences may have arguably contributed to her decision to do what she did, but it's still a decision she made herself, and we still don't have an adequate justification for it, either from Nyx herself of from what we know of the events that took place.
Anyway, there you have it. Hopefully this can be the last time I have to go over these points, but unfortunately, I suspect it will come up again. Too much of the underlying structure of this story is flawed; to address any problems with anything built on top of this weak structure, we will have to continue to address the structure itself.
From here it just drops back into the familiar holding pattern of Twilight saying "I forgive you Nyx" and Nyx saying "No, I don't deserve forgiveness." Something tells me we're going to be seeing quite a bit of this from here on out.
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>>262500
>I am, and forever will be, Nightmare Moon! So tell me, how can you not despise me?!”
>“Because, Nyx, I’m your mother, and a mother will always love her daughter, no matter what.”
You know, while we're on the subject, I've mostly been picking on Nyx so far; how poorly developed she is, how her actions make no sense, and she has little motivation for her actions. While all of that is true, it's also true of the way Peen Stroke writes Twilight, and I'd like to explore her characterization here for a minute.
Her motivations and actions don't always make a ton of sense either. Adopting Nyx was a fairly impulsive act on her part, and while I don't question why she did it, the fact remains that Nyx is not related to her by blood. Nyx also does a lot of fairly fucked up shit in this story, not just to Twilight herself, but to Twilight's friends, her own friends, the town, Celestia, who is basically Twilight's own mother figure; the list goes on and on. The amount of unconditional love that Twilight has for this red-headed stepchild is frankly bizarre, especially considering that she recognized the connection to Nightmare Moon right from the get go, was clearly uneasy about it, and ultimately had these fears proven correct. She spends almost the the whole first half of the book obsessing to herself about Nyx being NM, yet she never says a negative word to her in any of their interactions together. Then, once Nyx actually becomes NM, we hear nothing from her but a constant outpouring of apologies and motherly love. Even while she's locked in the damn dungeon she never has so much as an angry word for her.
It's honestly just weird. And yes, I get it; the whole idea is that she's supposed to be Nyx's mother and a mother's love is unconditional and all that. But that's exactly the problem. No mother's love is this unconditional. Even an absolutely fantastic mother, who has an absolutely fantastic child to whom she is biologically related and utterly devoted, has those moments where the kid pisses her off and she loses her temper. Not only is Nyx not Twilight's biological daughter, she's basically Rosemary's Baby, Damien, the Bad Seed; pick your own horror trope. Nightmare Moon or not, any kid is going to fuck up or misbehave from time to time, yet I am hard pressed to recall one single instance in this entire story where Twilight yells at, disciplines, or even raises her voice to Nyx. That's not motherly devotion, it's just creepy, especially considering that this isn't even her kid. Twilight in this story is basically a Stepford mom; a 1950's TV mother like June Cleaver or some shit.
Or maybe, a better example would be the one I used earlier: she's like the mom in a commercial. She's just an actress whose character is simply "mother," in the most generic sense of the word. Her role is simply to smile and goof around with some child, also an actor, whom she has never seen before and will never see again. Just a few shots of her smiling and spooning some macaroni onto a plate while the kid giggles; that's their whole relationship. This is probably a big part of why I've felt since the beginning that the Twi/Nyx relationship is weak; it just isn't convincing. It's hard to put into precise terms, but their mother-daughter interactions just don't feel genuine, even though they appear more or less correct. There's an adage about romantic couples that applies to pretty much any relationship: if you never fight, it just suggests that you don't care enough about each other to have anything to fight about. Unconditional love means that the parent always loves the child even when the child is pissing them off, but that doesn't mean that the child never pisses them off. And Nyx has done a lot of shit in this story that should reasonably piss Twilight off, up to and including the moody, mopey "everyone hates me" teenage bullshit she's pulling right now.
This even factors into what I've been saying about Nyx's lack of motivation. Not only has Twilight never mistreated Nyx or done anything to her that justifies going Columbine on all of Equestria the way she did, these two characters' interactions with each other have mostly been so superficial that it's hard to imagine either of them feeling any emotion that strong for each other. Yet we're supposed to just accept that Twilight's sudden "betrayal" of Nyx was so shocking for her that it caused her to suddenly turn into a movie villain and take over the world.
Anyway, back to the text.
>Nightmare Moon wept openly while attempting to blubber out apology after apology.
If I had to pick one sentence from this book to summarize the entire plot, this is the one I'd pick.
So, at this point, it looks like whatever bad blood can be said to have ever existed between Nyx and Twilight is out in the open, and...oh, hell, let's just be generous and say they've worked through it. They cry, they hug, they cry some more, and then they hug some more; scene over. Moving on.
It looks like Nyx is currently mired in some sort of identity crisis. Regardless of how idiotic or non-existent her reasons may have been, she basically chose to discard her childhood and assume the identity of Nightmare Moon. However, much like Rob Schneider, she has found out that being Nightmare Moon isn't all it's cracked up to be. So now, she finds herself spinning her wheels: she can't go back to the life she had before, but the life she has now pretty much sucks massive balls. It's unfortunate that we had to slog through so much mind-numbing crap to get here, but it seems like we finally have an opportunity for some actual character development for Nyx. I'm cautiously optimistic about where this may lead.
>I am, and forever will be, Nightmare Moon! So tell me, how can you not despise me?!”
>“Because, Nyx, I’m your mother, and a mother will always love her daughter, no matter what.”
You know, while we're on the subject, I've mostly been picking on Nyx so far; how poorly developed she is, how her actions make no sense, and she has little motivation for her actions. While all of that is true, it's also true of the way Peen Stroke writes Twilight, and I'd like to explore her characterization here for a minute.
Her motivations and actions don't always make a ton of sense either. Adopting Nyx was a fairly impulsive act on her part, and while I don't question why she did it, the fact remains that Nyx is not related to her by blood. Nyx also does a lot of fairly fucked up shit in this story, not just to Twilight herself, but to Twilight's friends, her own friends, the town, Celestia, who is basically Twilight's own mother figure; the list goes on and on. The amount of unconditional love that Twilight has for this red-headed stepchild is frankly bizarre, especially considering that she recognized the connection to Nightmare Moon right from the get go, was clearly uneasy about it, and ultimately had these fears proven correct. She spends almost the the whole first half of the book obsessing to herself about Nyx being NM, yet she never says a negative word to her in any of their interactions together. Then, once Nyx actually becomes NM, we hear nothing from her but a constant outpouring of apologies and motherly love. Even while she's locked in the damn dungeon she never has so much as an angry word for her.
It's honestly just weird. And yes, I get it; the whole idea is that she's supposed to be Nyx's mother and a mother's love is unconditional and all that. But that's exactly the problem. No mother's love is this unconditional. Even an absolutely fantastic mother, who has an absolutely fantastic child to whom she is biologically related and utterly devoted, has those moments where the kid pisses her off and she loses her temper. Not only is Nyx not Twilight's biological daughter, she's basically Rosemary's Baby, Damien, the Bad Seed; pick your own horror trope. Nightmare Moon or not, any kid is going to fuck up or misbehave from time to time, yet I am hard pressed to recall one single instance in this entire story where Twilight yells at, disciplines, or even raises her voice to Nyx. That's not motherly devotion, it's just creepy, especially considering that this isn't even her kid. Twilight in this story is basically a Stepford mom; a 1950's TV mother like June Cleaver or some shit.
Or maybe, a better example would be the one I used earlier: she's like the mom in a commercial. She's just an actress whose character is simply "mother," in the most generic sense of the word. Her role is simply to smile and goof around with some child, also an actor, whom she has never seen before and will never see again. Just a few shots of her smiling and spooning some macaroni onto a plate while the kid giggles; that's their whole relationship. This is probably a big part of why I've felt since the beginning that the Twi/Nyx relationship is weak; it just isn't convincing. It's hard to put into precise terms, but their mother-daughter interactions just don't feel genuine, even though they appear more or less correct. There's an adage about romantic couples that applies to pretty much any relationship: if you never fight, it just suggests that you don't care enough about each other to have anything to fight about. Unconditional love means that the parent always loves the child even when the child is pissing them off, but that doesn't mean that the child never pisses them off. And Nyx has done a lot of shit in this story that should reasonably piss Twilight off, up to and including the moody, mopey "everyone hates me" teenage bullshit she's pulling right now.
This even factors into what I've been saying about Nyx's lack of motivation. Not only has Twilight never mistreated Nyx or done anything to her that justifies going Columbine on all of Equestria the way she did, these two characters' interactions with each other have mostly been so superficial that it's hard to imagine either of them feeling any emotion that strong for each other. Yet we're supposed to just accept that Twilight's sudden "betrayal" of Nyx was so shocking for her that it caused her to suddenly turn into a movie villain and take over the world.
Anyway, back to the text.
>Nightmare Moon wept openly while attempting to blubber out apology after apology.
If I had to pick one sentence from this book to summarize the entire plot, this is the one I'd pick.
So, at this point, it looks like whatever bad blood can be said to have ever existed between Nyx and Twilight is out in the open, and...oh, hell, let's just be generous and say they've worked through it. They cry, they hug, they cry some more, and then they hug some more; scene over. Moving on.
It looks like Nyx is currently mired in some sort of identity crisis. Regardless of how idiotic or non-existent her reasons may have been, she basically chose to discard her childhood and assume the identity of Nightmare Moon. However, much like Rob Schneider, she has found out that being Nightmare Moon isn't all it's cracked up to be. So now, she finds herself spinning her wheels: she can't go back to the life she had before, but the life she has now pretty much sucks massive balls. It's unfortunate that we had to slog through so much mind-numbing crap to get here, but it seems like we finally have an opportunity for some actual character development for Nyx. I'm cautiously optimistic about where this may lead.
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>>262505
I've made my own views on Nyx as a character fairly clear, but at this point in the text Peen Stroke provides us with some insight into how he sees her, and what he probably had in mind when he was writing the earlier parts of the story. I'd like to quote a bit of this directly:
>“Then what do you see, Twilight? I want the honest truth.”
>“I suppose… I see a mare who is neither Nyx nor Nightmare Moon… or, actually, I see a mare that is a bit of both, if that makes sense,” Twilight began as she struggled to find the words to express herself. Thankfully, Nightmare Moon was patient and didn’t rush Twilight. She simply waited for her to compose her thoughts.
>“Let me put it another way. Back when you were Nyx, you were… a little sensitive.”
>“I was a coward and a crybaby,” Nightmare Moon corrected flatly.
>“Okay, yes, but that wasn’t entirely your fault. You were young and you had been through a lot, even before I found you in the forest. I doubt any filly could go through what you did and not be a little traumatized.
>“But you’re not like that anymore,” Twilight continued, smiling a little. “The Nyx I knew… she would never have been able to fight off the monsters like you did. Only a mare like Nightmare Moon would have been able to do what you did.”
This goes back to something I've discussed earlier, about the difference between the writer's vision and his actual execution of the story. You can have a great idea and still write a terrible story; it all depends on how well you can manage to translate your ideas into words. From the above text, here is my best guess as to what Peen Stroke more or less had in mind for Nyx's character arc:
Child Nyx: sensitive and fragile. She has an inquisitive nature and high intelligence, but is easily intimidated and has difficulty socializing. She cries a lot and is easily frightened.
Nightmare Nyx: Angry, reckless and impuslive. Resentments she absorbed quietly as a child become sources of real hostility for her. She also has all of Nightmare Moon's baggage. She has the power to lash out at things that frighten her, so she does. However, more than anything, she is frightened of ending up alone and unloved, and is intelligent enough to realize that everything she does as Nightmare Moon alienates her from friends and family. So she intentionally isolates herself and tries to be as "evil" as she can to shield herself from this inevitability.
Post-Nightmare Nyx: Comes to recognize that her cruelty as NM was the result of cowardice and weakness. In attempting to run from her problems, she only ended up making them worse. Misses the friends and life she had as a child, realizes that the things that made her angry then were not worth destroying the world over, but knows she can't go back. Is bereft of identity and purpose; her childhood is gone and she can't go back to it, but she still knows that she took the wrong path. Needs to find a new one.
Redemption Nyx: Realizes that she has more strength than she originally believed. Accepts her own past cowardice and past sins ba dum tss. Understands and appreciates the need for friends and family, and the need to face one's problems rather than retreat into introversion and/or rage. Realizes that the powers she possesses can be used to help others and improve her world, rather than to simply revenge herself on it and dominate it. Roll credits.
Now, bear in mind, this is just what I think Peen Stroke intended Nyx's story to look like. Now, let's take a look at the character he actually wrote:
Child Nyx: Annoying. Frequently bursts into tears for no obvious reason; at all other times simply behaves as a normal, generic, well-adjusted child who likes to play with her friends and her toys. We have no sense of her personality or her view of the world and her role within it. Is bullied somewhat near the beginning of the story, but does not appear to suffer any lasting trauma from it, and in any case she has friends who support her, which lessens the impact of anything she might be subjected to. Character is mostly boring. She's not unlikable, but it's hard to either love her or hate her because she really doesn't have much of a personality.
Nightmare Nyx: Cardboard-cutout movie villain. Child Nyx suddenly transforms into this character because of a spell that was cast on her. Does very nasty things to nearly everyone, focusing the bulk of her aggression on the characters she was previously closest to (Twilight, the CMC). Only the flimsy excuse of a "betrayal" is provided for why she treats Twilight as she does; for the CMC, there is no apparent reason beyond cruelty. Apart from this, most of the motivation for her evil acts seems to come from a character from the distant past, whose memories we are told she possesses, but we are only provided with the faintest sketch of who this character is or was. Is constantly moping and depressed, seems to believe that she is somehow expected or is being forced to act as she does, but no objective evidence exists to support this belief. Her pointless cruelty, her constant blaming of others for her own choices, and the fact that throughout all of this she seems to only feel sorry for herself makes her an intensely unlikable character.
Post-Nightmare Nyx: A combination of the worst qualities of both earlier characters. Cowardly, self-hating, mopey, whiny, self-absorbed, self-isolating. Her anger and resentment have mostly cooled, but her thoughts are still almost entirely focused inwardly. Feels bad about what she did but actively avoids facing the consequences for any of it. Spends most of her time brooding. Refuses to shower.
Redemption Nyx: Who knows, who cares; we haven't made it there yet, and at this point I dislike this character enough that I don't really want to see her redeemed. I'm still kind of hoping it ends with her getting banished to the moon.
I've made my own views on Nyx as a character fairly clear, but at this point in the text Peen Stroke provides us with some insight into how he sees her, and what he probably had in mind when he was writing the earlier parts of the story. I'd like to quote a bit of this directly:
>“Then what do you see, Twilight? I want the honest truth.”
>“I suppose… I see a mare who is neither Nyx nor Nightmare Moon… or, actually, I see a mare that is a bit of both, if that makes sense,” Twilight began as she struggled to find the words to express herself. Thankfully, Nightmare Moon was patient and didn’t rush Twilight. She simply waited for her to compose her thoughts.
>“Let me put it another way. Back when you were Nyx, you were… a little sensitive.”
>“I was a coward and a crybaby,” Nightmare Moon corrected flatly.
>“Okay, yes, but that wasn’t entirely your fault. You were young and you had been through a lot, even before I found you in the forest. I doubt any filly could go through what you did and not be a little traumatized.
>“But you’re not like that anymore,” Twilight continued, smiling a little. “The Nyx I knew… she would never have been able to fight off the monsters like you did. Only a mare like Nightmare Moon would have been able to do what you did.”
This goes back to something I've discussed earlier, about the difference between the writer's vision and his actual execution of the story. You can have a great idea and still write a terrible story; it all depends on how well you can manage to translate your ideas into words. From the above text, here is my best guess as to what Peen Stroke more or less had in mind for Nyx's character arc:
Child Nyx: sensitive and fragile. She has an inquisitive nature and high intelligence, but is easily intimidated and has difficulty socializing. She cries a lot and is easily frightened.
Nightmare Nyx: Angry, reckless and impuslive. Resentments she absorbed quietly as a child become sources of real hostility for her. She also has all of Nightmare Moon's baggage. She has the power to lash out at things that frighten her, so she does. However, more than anything, she is frightened of ending up alone and unloved, and is intelligent enough to realize that everything she does as Nightmare Moon alienates her from friends and family. So she intentionally isolates herself and tries to be as "evil" as she can to shield herself from this inevitability.
Post-Nightmare Nyx: Comes to recognize that her cruelty as NM was the result of cowardice and weakness. In attempting to run from her problems, she only ended up making them worse. Misses the friends and life she had as a child, realizes that the things that made her angry then were not worth destroying the world over, but knows she can't go back. Is bereft of identity and purpose; her childhood is gone and she can't go back to it, but she still knows that she took the wrong path. Needs to find a new one.
Redemption Nyx: Realizes that she has more strength than she originally believed. Accepts her own past cowardice and past sins ba dum tss. Understands and appreciates the need for friends and family, and the need to face one's problems rather than retreat into introversion and/or rage. Realizes that the powers she possesses can be used to help others and improve her world, rather than to simply revenge herself on it and dominate it. Roll credits.
Now, bear in mind, this is just what I think Peen Stroke intended Nyx's story to look like. Now, let's take a look at the character he actually wrote:
Child Nyx: Annoying. Frequently bursts into tears for no obvious reason; at all other times simply behaves as a normal, generic, well-adjusted child who likes to play with her friends and her toys. We have no sense of her personality or her view of the world and her role within it. Is bullied somewhat near the beginning of the story, but does not appear to suffer any lasting trauma from it, and in any case she has friends who support her, which lessens the impact of anything she might be subjected to. Character is mostly boring. She's not unlikable, but it's hard to either love her or hate her because she really doesn't have much of a personality.
Nightmare Nyx: Cardboard-cutout movie villain. Child Nyx suddenly transforms into this character because of a spell that was cast on her. Does very nasty things to nearly everyone, focusing the bulk of her aggression on the characters she was previously closest to (Twilight, the CMC). Only the flimsy excuse of a "betrayal" is provided for why she treats Twilight as she does; for the CMC, there is no apparent reason beyond cruelty. Apart from this, most of the motivation for her evil acts seems to come from a character from the distant past, whose memories we are told she possesses, but we are only provided with the faintest sketch of who this character is or was. Is constantly moping and depressed, seems to believe that she is somehow expected or is being forced to act as she does, but no objective evidence exists to support this belief. Her pointless cruelty, her constant blaming of others for her own choices, and the fact that throughout all of this she seems to only feel sorry for herself makes her an intensely unlikable character.
Post-Nightmare Nyx: A combination of the worst qualities of both earlier characters. Cowardly, self-hating, mopey, whiny, self-absorbed, self-isolating. Her anger and resentment have mostly cooled, but her thoughts are still almost entirely focused inwardly. Feels bad about what she did but actively avoids facing the consequences for any of it. Spends most of her time brooding. Refuses to shower.
Redemption Nyx: Who knows, who cares; we haven't made it there yet, and at this point I dislike this character enough that I don't really want to see her redeemed. I'm still kind of hoping it ends with her getting banished to the moon.
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>>262730
As I've said many times before, a good idea can still produce a bad story, and occasionally good or even great stories can be spun out of the dumbest ideas imaginable. We've probably come far enough at this point that we can start drawing conclusions about the overall quality of this work; so, is Past Sins a good story? Well, 11,000 brainlets on FimFiction might disagree with me, but I would probably say no; this whole thing pretty much sucks balls, and everyone in this thread who warned me about it was right. Was it a good idea, though? That's a little more of a maybe.
I still think there's some decent clay here for a story, but probably not the story that Peen Stroke wound up telling. Really, his biggest problem is that he never seemed to make up his mind what story he even wanted to tell.
Returning to Nyx's intended character arc, I'm sorry to keep bringing this up over and over, but the biggest problem that I see here is still the huge disconnect between the character of Nyx in this story and the character of Nightmare Moon in the show. I noticed it again just now when I was attempting to summarize the 'good' version of the Nyx arc; the story that I believe he was trying to tell. It isn't just that NM isn't properly introduced to us, or that not enough background on Luna and the first episode of the show is provided in the text. Those are indeed problems, but the truth is that even if he had done a better job of writing Nyx's character, I'd still have the same problem: I just don't see any connection between young Nyx and the character she ultimately becomes. They still feel like two completely different characters to me. So not only was the specific execution in this case poor, but it's difficult to even imagine what a better version would look like.
This text can't seem to decide if it's a story about an OC named Nyx, or a story about NM from the show. It tries to be both simultaneously, and is not successful at being either. The conclusion I've drawn is this (and after this I seriously hope I can stop bringing it up so much): the central problem is that the character of Nightmare Moon absolutely cannot be separated from the character of Luna. NM's entire reason for existing is tied to Luna's backstory; without her she has no reason to exist. Nyx is her own character, with her own backstory; maybe she was created from NM's armor and retains some of NM's personality traits, but she has no connection to Luna and thus can't actually be NM. She can transform into something like NM, but it wouldn't be the same entity as the original.
Thus, if Peen Stroke wanted to write a story about NM, it would have made infinitely more sense to just make Luna the main character. Since he has this story tagged as Alternate Universe anyway, he could have even just done a rewrite of the show opener, or had Luna suddenly turn into NM again, or done any number of other things. Even a prequel about Luna and Celestia as fillies could have been interesting. This second character he created, Nyx, would be fine in her own story, but she needs to be treated as her own entity. Even if she has the same backstory and the story goes in the same direction, ie she goes full alicorn and takes over the world, she needs her own reasons for doing it, that don't rely so heavily on Luna's backstory and the lore from the show.
So to conclude, if Mr. P wanted to rewrite NM's redemption arc, he should have written a Luna story. If he wanted to write a story about his OC Nyx, he should have developed her into her own character, instead of trying to force her into the mold of an existing character from the show. That is my current final diagnosis for why this story is as bad as it is.
Also, to the American flag I was arguing with earlier in the thread about whether this story could be redeemed, having read this much further, you'll be happy to know that I've changed my position. I agree with you now; this thing just has too many problems to be salvageable. The only thing Peen Stroke could do to save it would be to tear up what he has and return to the original clay, and pursue one of the two directions I suggested above, and on top of that he'd need to write it better. It's highly unlikely he'll do either at this point in time. Point goes to you, sir.
Anyway, back to the text.
Twilight basically wraps up Nyx's problem in a neat little afterschool special lesson: she tells her that she's a little bit of Nightmare Moon, and a little bit of Nyx, and that's a good thing. Actually, I'm just going to quote it directly, because what she says is interesting:
>“It’s okay, but you’re not like the old Nightmare Moon either, not anymore. If you were, you would have had the courage to face the monsters, but no reason to. When Luna was Nightmare Moon, she cared about herself first and everypony else second, if at all. If you were really that same pony, then you wouldn’t have cared about what happened to Ponyville.
>“But the Nyx I know does care.”
This almost seems to be implying that Luna's NM was irredeemably evil, yet Nyx's is somehow not. This feels like a bit of a disservice to Luna, especially since I don't remember her doing even half of the fucked up shit that Nyx has done, and she was less whiny and annoying to boot. I'll grant that Luna's redemption was a little weak, in that she basically just got zapped with a rainbow and then suddenly all was forgiven, but I think the implication in the show was simply supposed to be that she was a good-hearted pony underneath it all, she was just angry at her sister. Her reasons for being angry, by the way, made a lot more sense than Nyx's. But anyway, I digress.
The argument concludes on this corny note:
>“So,” Twilight continued, “I guess you are a bit of both, perhaps even the best of both. But, as I said before, that is only what I see. It’s up to you to decide what kind of pony you want to be.
As I've said many times before, a good idea can still produce a bad story, and occasionally good or even great stories can be spun out of the dumbest ideas imaginable. We've probably come far enough at this point that we can start drawing conclusions about the overall quality of this work; so, is Past Sins a good story? Well, 11,000 brainlets on FimFiction might disagree with me, but I would probably say no; this whole thing pretty much sucks balls, and everyone in this thread who warned me about it was right. Was it a good idea, though? That's a little more of a maybe.
I still think there's some decent clay here for a story, but probably not the story that Peen Stroke wound up telling. Really, his biggest problem is that he never seemed to make up his mind what story he even wanted to tell.
Returning to Nyx's intended character arc, I'm sorry to keep bringing this up over and over, but the biggest problem that I see here is still the huge disconnect between the character of Nyx in this story and the character of Nightmare Moon in the show. I noticed it again just now when I was attempting to summarize the 'good' version of the Nyx arc; the story that I believe he was trying to tell. It isn't just that NM isn't properly introduced to us, or that not enough background on Luna and the first episode of the show is provided in the text. Those are indeed problems, but the truth is that even if he had done a better job of writing Nyx's character, I'd still have the same problem: I just don't see any connection between young Nyx and the character she ultimately becomes. They still feel like two completely different characters to me. So not only was the specific execution in this case poor, but it's difficult to even imagine what a better version would look like.
This text can't seem to decide if it's a story about an OC named Nyx, or a story about NM from the show. It tries to be both simultaneously, and is not successful at being either. The conclusion I've drawn is this (and after this I seriously hope I can stop bringing it up so much): the central problem is that the character of Nightmare Moon absolutely cannot be separated from the character of Luna. NM's entire reason for existing is tied to Luna's backstory; without her she has no reason to exist. Nyx is her own character, with her own backstory; maybe she was created from NM's armor and retains some of NM's personality traits, but she has no connection to Luna and thus can't actually be NM. She can transform into something like NM, but it wouldn't be the same entity as the original.
Thus, if Peen Stroke wanted to write a story about NM, it would have made infinitely more sense to just make Luna the main character. Since he has this story tagged as Alternate Universe anyway, he could have even just done a rewrite of the show opener, or had Luna suddenly turn into NM again, or done any number of other things. Even a prequel about Luna and Celestia as fillies could have been interesting. This second character he created, Nyx, would be fine in her own story, but she needs to be treated as her own entity. Even if she has the same backstory and the story goes in the same direction, ie she goes full alicorn and takes over the world, she needs her own reasons for doing it, that don't rely so heavily on Luna's backstory and the lore from the show.
So to conclude, if Mr. P wanted to rewrite NM's redemption arc, he should have written a Luna story. If he wanted to write a story about his OC Nyx, he should have developed her into her own character, instead of trying to force her into the mold of an existing character from the show. That is my current final diagnosis for why this story is as bad as it is.
Also, to the American flag I was arguing with earlier in the thread about whether this story could be redeemed, having read this much further, you'll be happy to know that I've changed my position. I agree with you now; this thing just has too many problems to be salvageable. The only thing Peen Stroke could do to save it would be to tear up what he has and return to the original clay, and pursue one of the two directions I suggested above, and on top of that he'd need to write it better. It's highly unlikely he'll do either at this point in time. Point goes to you, sir.
Anyway, back to the text.
Twilight basically wraps up Nyx's problem in a neat little afterschool special lesson: she tells her that she's a little bit of Nightmare Moon, and a little bit of Nyx, and that's a good thing. Actually, I'm just going to quote it directly, because what she says is interesting:
>“It’s okay, but you’re not like the old Nightmare Moon either, not anymore. If you were, you would have had the courage to face the monsters, but no reason to. When Luna was Nightmare Moon, she cared about herself first and everypony else second, if at all. If you were really that same pony, then you wouldn’t have cared about what happened to Ponyville.
>“But the Nyx I know does care.”
This almost seems to be implying that Luna's NM was irredeemably evil, yet Nyx's is somehow not. This feels like a bit of a disservice to Luna, especially since I don't remember her doing even half of the fucked up shit that Nyx has done, and she was less whiny and annoying to boot. I'll grant that Luna's redemption was a little weak, in that she basically just got zapped with a rainbow and then suddenly all was forgiven, but I think the implication in the show was simply supposed to be that she was a good-hearted pony underneath it all, she was just angry at her sister. Her reasons for being angry, by the way, made a lot more sense than Nyx's. But anyway, I digress.
The argument concludes on this corny note:
>“So,” Twilight continued, “I guess you are a bit of both, perhaps even the best of both. But, as I said before, that is only what I see. It’s up to you to decide what kind of pony you want to be.
>>262732
I'm going to be real with you.
I've always found Luna's reason for turning evil incredibly stupid.
She's mad because ponies do stuff during the day and sleep at night instead of admiring the constellations and meteors and other shit she does with the night sky, being a god of night and all.
She doesn't go out and talk to her subjects and find that one obligatory cute little child who loves the night and stays up an extra hour before bedtime every night to admire the night sky and runs a Princess Luna Fan Club, and then realize creating beauty is worth it even if only one person ever sees it.
No, she just rages at the ponies instead of trying to make a prettier night, and she decrees that the night must last forever.
This forces Celestia to kick her ass and lock her up. I assume Celly tried to talk things out first and that failed, and the EOH couldn't purify people only seal them back then because she didn't know the spell for that.
This is the backstory for a really crap batman villain. Nobody wanted to watch his cartoon, so he turned evil and became The Cartoonist. He put on the mask and now he wants to crash every network with no survivors, so he tried to force his shitty show onto all airwaves. This forced Batman to punch him out and put him in prison. Now he's escaped and back for revenge!
If you blame some Venom Goop then honestly, it would make things a lot better. Luna, the favourite pony of every pathetic faggot during the early seasons of the show before faggier characters were introduced, went evil for an incredibly stupid reason. But if "Seeing tiny slights as major outrages and thinking your neighbour who didn't compliment you on your dress last tuesday betrayed you and wanting to be evil" is a symptom of getting Venom'd, it would explain why Nyx's "You and this shit town betrayed me, Twilight!!!" bullshit came out of nowhere too.
Peen Stroke chose the worst possible character to try and "Redeem" at the time, because he saw how popular Luna was with the "Spookiness makes you cool! Edgy is love, brutal is life! Princess Luna did nothing wrong! Darkness is better than LIIIIIGHT!" crowd at the time and decided it was time to rip off a bad "Little Orphan Naruto" fanfic featuring "Nyx as Nightmare Moon's reincarnation" in the place of "Naruto with the Nine-Tailed Fox sealed inside him".
He was a faggot who made what he knew would make him popular with this fandom's first ever group of obnoxious faggots, and the story lacked quality because his focus was on emotionally manipulating the audience with whatever bullshit came into his mind at the time, not on seriously planning out and writing up a story that would stand the test of time.
I'm going to be real with you.
I've always found Luna's reason for turning evil incredibly stupid.
She's mad because ponies do stuff during the day and sleep at night instead of admiring the constellations and meteors and other shit she does with the night sky, being a god of night and all.
She doesn't go out and talk to her subjects and find that one obligatory cute little child who loves the night and stays up an extra hour before bedtime every night to admire the night sky and runs a Princess Luna Fan Club, and then realize creating beauty is worth it even if only one person ever sees it.
No, she just rages at the ponies instead of trying to make a prettier night, and she decrees that the night must last forever.
This forces Celestia to kick her ass and lock her up. I assume Celly tried to talk things out first and that failed, and the EOH couldn't purify people only seal them back then because she didn't know the spell for that.
This is the backstory for a really crap batman villain. Nobody wanted to watch his cartoon, so he turned evil and became The Cartoonist. He put on the mask and now he wants to crash every network with no survivors, so he tried to force his shitty show onto all airwaves. This forced Batman to punch him out and put him in prison. Now he's escaped and back for revenge!
If you blame some Venom Goop then honestly, it would make things a lot better. Luna, the favourite pony of every pathetic faggot during the early seasons of the show before faggier characters were introduced, went evil for an incredibly stupid reason. But if "Seeing tiny slights as major outrages and thinking your neighbour who didn't compliment you on your dress last tuesday betrayed you and wanting to be evil" is a symptom of getting Venom'd, it would explain why Nyx's "You and this shit town betrayed me, Twilight!!!" bullshit came out of nowhere too.
Peen Stroke chose the worst possible character to try and "Redeem" at the time, because he saw how popular Luna was with the "Spookiness makes you cool! Edgy is love, brutal is life! Princess Luna did nothing wrong! Darkness is better than LIIIIIGHT!" crowd at the time and decided it was time to rip off a bad "Little Orphan Naruto" fanfic featuring "Nyx as Nightmare Moon's reincarnation" in the place of "Naruto with the Nine-Tailed Fox sealed inside him".
He was a faggot who made what he knew would make him popular with this fandom's first ever group of obnoxious faggots, and the story lacked quality because his focus was on emotionally manipulating the audience with whatever bullshit came into his mind at the time, not on seriously planning out and writing up a story that would stand the test of time.
>>262732
I've officially edited my entire folder full of Islam images that I use to derail 4chan threads, and the joke is probably wearing a bit thin at this point, so here's a cute Luna instead.
Anyway, this conversation goes on for a while. Twilight shows her the get well cards that her friends from school made her, and then hands her the note from Cheerilee. It contains this interesting little nugget:
>I also wanted to say I’m sorry. I still remember what you said to me that night, when I let you play Nightmare Moon in the school play. I never meant it as an insult. I called the original Nightmare Moon ‘wicked and dastardly,’ but those words were never meant for you, a filly I called my student.
I remember this from Nyx's confrontation scene; she yelled at Cheerilee for this. But I still don't remember this being anywhere in the text. So, I went back and skimmed through chapters 5 and 6 again, which deal with the play. This is all I was able to find:
>“And now, playing the wicked and dastardly Nightmare Moon, give a big round of applause for Nyx!”
This line is from Cheerilee, which she speaks at the end of the play when all the actors are taking their bows. Nyx's reaction is described as follows:
>Twilight was shocked when the crowd cheered loudly as Nyx nervously walked onto stage, the cheering only slightly quieter than the applause had been for Dinky Doo and the other fillies who played the main characters in the play. Still, the applause Nyx was receiving was louder than what Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had received, and, by the looks on their faces, the two snooty fillies knew it.
So I guess Nyx is technically correct in saying that Cheerilee called her "wicked and dastardly." However, this is a ridiculously flimsy point for the story to turn on. For one thing, the context is obviously innocent enough: Nyx was playing the part of the villain in the story, and villains are usually considered wicked and/or dastardly. Any sensible observer would hear this and assume that Cheerilee was referring to the character, not the actor. Nyx is intelligent enough to realize this without having it explained.
Second, this is such a minor piece of dialog that I didn't even remember it being spoken, and had to go back and scour the text for it. What's particularly frustrating is that I can now see where Peen Stroke was trying to go: Cheerilee made an off-handed, innocent remark, but because of things going on Nyx's head that Cheerilee couldn't know about (remember, this is the point in the story where Nyx put two and two together and figured out the truth about herself), this innocent remark wound up seriously hurting Nyx's feelings. Because Nyx is quiet and withdrawn, she never communicated this hurt, she just absorbed it and let it fester.
As motivations go, this one is actually not bad, and could have potentially worked the way Peen Stroke intended. But again: EXECUTION. If an event is supposed to be an important turning point in a character's arc, the reader needs to see it. You can't just casually toss in some innocuous line of dialog and expect whoever's reading to remember it ten chapters later. Not even Peen Stroke's fans are that autistic.
The way to properly handle this would have been to switch the perspective from Twilight to Nyx as soon as the characters come out to take their bows. This way, we could have seen the event from her perspective, and attention could have been called to how the remark made her feel. Cheerilee refers to "the wicked and dastardly Nightmare Moon" and Nyx suddenly freezes and wonders why her teacher would say that about her, or something to that effect.
Instead, what we have is the scene from Twilight's view, and we see it the way that she or anyone else watching would have seen it: Cheerilee calls Nyx up to take a bow, and Nyx takes a bow. The mood of the event is actually quite happy: Nyx disobeyed Twilight to be in the play, but everything went well so it's probably going to be okay. What we see here is basically the denouement of a short arc: there was a conflict between Twilight and Nyx over her appearing in the play, Twilight ordered Nyx to stay home, but she disobeyed her. The climax was the play itself: we don't know if the outcome will be that Nyx has a good time or if the town will realize that Nyx is NM as Twilight fears. It turns out to be the first thing, which resolves the conflict; from here it's just falling action until the arc concludes with everypony going out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. Nobody in their right mind would remember this incident as being a negative event in Nyx's life that would later provoke her to hate her teacher, which is why it makes no sense when the story tries to present it as such later.
In fact, since during her big transformation scene, Nyx calls attention not to the event but to a specific line of dialog spoken by Cheerilee, I can only assume most readers would have the reaction I did, and wouldn't even remember the line. I literally had to go back through chapters 5 and 6 and Ctrl+F for "dastardly" until I finally found it. If you need the reader to remember a character saying something, you need to make it clear that it's important enough to remember. B+ idea, F- execution, Mr. P.
Anyway, where the hell was I? Oh yeah. Twilight gives Cheerilee's note to Nyx. Cheerilee apologizes for her insensitive words, tells Nyx that she always found her a bright student and enjoyed having her in class, blah blah blah, all of that. Twilight follows this up with some more afterschool special advice about life and friendship. She tells her that she can be any kind of pony she wants to be, she just has to work at it. Nyx decides that the pony she wants to be is not an evil queen, just an ordinary mare with friends and family and super-duper alicorn powers. The big turning point here, apparently, is that she now asks to be called "Nyx" instead of Nightmare Moon.
I've officially edited my entire folder full of Islam images that I use to derail 4chan threads, and the joke is probably wearing a bit thin at this point, so here's a cute Luna instead.
Anyway, this conversation goes on for a while. Twilight shows her the get well cards that her friends from school made her, and then hands her the note from Cheerilee. It contains this interesting little nugget:
>I also wanted to say I’m sorry. I still remember what you said to me that night, when I let you play Nightmare Moon in the school play. I never meant it as an insult. I called the original Nightmare Moon ‘wicked and dastardly,’ but those words were never meant for you, a filly I called my student.
I remember this from Nyx's confrontation scene; she yelled at Cheerilee for this. But I still don't remember this being anywhere in the text. So, I went back and skimmed through chapters 5 and 6 again, which deal with the play. This is all I was able to find:
>“And now, playing the wicked and dastardly Nightmare Moon, give a big round of applause for Nyx!”
This line is from Cheerilee, which she speaks at the end of the play when all the actors are taking their bows. Nyx's reaction is described as follows:
>Twilight was shocked when the crowd cheered loudly as Nyx nervously walked onto stage, the cheering only slightly quieter than the applause had been for Dinky Doo and the other fillies who played the main characters in the play. Still, the applause Nyx was receiving was louder than what Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon had received, and, by the looks on their faces, the two snooty fillies knew it.
So I guess Nyx is technically correct in saying that Cheerilee called her "wicked and dastardly." However, this is a ridiculously flimsy point for the story to turn on. For one thing, the context is obviously innocent enough: Nyx was playing the part of the villain in the story, and villains are usually considered wicked and/or dastardly. Any sensible observer would hear this and assume that Cheerilee was referring to the character, not the actor. Nyx is intelligent enough to realize this without having it explained.
Second, this is such a minor piece of dialog that I didn't even remember it being spoken, and had to go back and scour the text for it. What's particularly frustrating is that I can now see where Peen Stroke was trying to go: Cheerilee made an off-handed, innocent remark, but because of things going on Nyx's head that Cheerilee couldn't know about (remember, this is the point in the story where Nyx put two and two together and figured out the truth about herself), this innocent remark wound up seriously hurting Nyx's feelings. Because Nyx is quiet and withdrawn, she never communicated this hurt, she just absorbed it and let it fester.
As motivations go, this one is actually not bad, and could have potentially worked the way Peen Stroke intended. But again: EXECUTION. If an event is supposed to be an important turning point in a character's arc, the reader needs to see it. You can't just casually toss in some innocuous line of dialog and expect whoever's reading to remember it ten chapters later. Not even Peen Stroke's fans are that autistic.
The way to properly handle this would have been to switch the perspective from Twilight to Nyx as soon as the characters come out to take their bows. This way, we could have seen the event from her perspective, and attention could have been called to how the remark made her feel. Cheerilee refers to "the wicked and dastardly Nightmare Moon" and Nyx suddenly freezes and wonders why her teacher would say that about her, or something to that effect.
Instead, what we have is the scene from Twilight's view, and we see it the way that she or anyone else watching would have seen it: Cheerilee calls Nyx up to take a bow, and Nyx takes a bow. The mood of the event is actually quite happy: Nyx disobeyed Twilight to be in the play, but everything went well so it's probably going to be okay. What we see here is basically the denouement of a short arc: there was a conflict between Twilight and Nyx over her appearing in the play, Twilight ordered Nyx to stay home, but she disobeyed her. The climax was the play itself: we don't know if the outcome will be that Nyx has a good time or if the town will realize that Nyx is NM as Twilight fears. It turns out to be the first thing, which resolves the conflict; from here it's just falling action until the arc concludes with everypony going out for frosty chocolate milkshakes. Nobody in their right mind would remember this incident as being a negative event in Nyx's life that would later provoke her to hate her teacher, which is why it makes no sense when the story tries to present it as such later.
In fact, since during her big transformation scene, Nyx calls attention not to the event but to a specific line of dialog spoken by Cheerilee, I can only assume most readers would have the reaction I did, and wouldn't even remember the line. I literally had to go back through chapters 5 and 6 and Ctrl+F for "dastardly" until I finally found it. If you need the reader to remember a character saying something, you need to make it clear that it's important enough to remember. B+ idea, F- execution, Mr. P.
Anyway, where the hell was I? Oh yeah. Twilight gives Cheerilee's note to Nyx. Cheerilee apologizes for her insensitive words, tells Nyx that she always found her a bright student and enjoyed having her in class, blah blah blah, all of that. Twilight follows this up with some more afterschool special advice about life and friendship. She tells her that she can be any kind of pony she wants to be, she just has to work at it. Nyx decides that the pony she wants to be is not an evil queen, just an ordinary mare with friends and family and super-duper alicorn powers. The big turning point here, apparently, is that she now asks to be called "Nyx" instead of Nightmare Moon.
>>262733
I'm actually inclined to agree on some of those points. As beloved as the early seasons of the show are, I do find some of the mythology to be a little weak. However, it's worth remembering that the pilot episode was basically written as a fairy tale for children; simple characters, simple events, simple motivations. It works well for what it is, but it also introduced some elements into the canon that I'll admit makes developing additional stories a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes.
I'm actually inclined to agree on some of those points. As beloved as the early seasons of the show are, I do find some of the mythology to be a little weak. However, it's worth remembering that the pilot episode was basically written as a fairy tale for children; simple characters, simple events, simple motivations. It works well for what it is, but it also introduced some elements into the canon that I'll admit makes developing additional stories a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes.
>>262738
Aye.
Maybe that's why the only stories that ever got popular in this fandom were some type of disguised porn.
Sympathy porn, torture porn, revenge fantasy porn, violent fantasy porn, feeling superior to other writers porn, feeling superior to other readers porn, fucking your favourite pony fantasy porn...
Basically just porn for the less-developed and porn-addicted mind. Press the QTE buttons, hold forwards during the scripted setpiece cutscenes, pretend you're as cool as whoever you're watching on TV. Shitty "Movie Games" are basically porn, too. Instead of learning how to git gud at the game's mechanics, it just lets you feel like batman by making you OP and making enemies weak retards.
Aye.
Maybe that's why the only stories that ever got popular in this fandom were some type of disguised porn.
Sympathy porn, torture porn, revenge fantasy porn, violent fantasy porn, feeling superior to other writers porn, feeling superior to other readers porn, fucking your favourite pony fantasy porn...
Basically just porn for the less-developed and porn-addicted mind. Press the QTE buttons, hold forwards during the scripted setpiece cutscenes, pretend you're as cool as whoever you're watching on TV. Shitty "Movie Games" are basically porn, too. Instead of learning how to git gud at the game's mechanics, it just lets you feel like batman by making you OP and making enemies weak retards.
>>262744
>violent fantasy porn
>fucking your favorite pony fantasy porn
Does that include over-the-top Shonen porn that's "subtly" geared toward allowing a self-insert character to woothe author's their favorite pony? Asking for a friend
>violent fantasy porn
>fucking your favorite pony fantasy porn
Does that include over-the-top Shonen porn that's "subtly" geared toward allowing a self-insert character to woo
File (): 1C30B0634F2B442D8FED97768A857CA5-576371.gif (562.9 KB, 440x280, laughingnaruto.gif)
>>262747
Want to hear something funny? When I first wrote this story and showed it to bronies, they complained that it was about a handsome successful bored unicorn learning to live and love again, instead of about a human who goes to equestria.
Seriously, that's what they complained about. They called Silver emo when he was sad and obnoxious when he wasn't. They didn't want to see a charming and confident man charm and woo Twilight, unless he was a fat ugly human who thinks charm=call someone pretty and make sexual innuendos until they suck your cock. They complained that my concept was too "High-concept" for their smooth brains. They didn't want to see what they called "My wish-fulfillment fantasy", and told me to make it more like their wish-fulfillment fantasies, even though there are already a million fanfics out there about ugly bastard whiny little shits who disgrace the human race doing the right thing for once and becoming an hero, only to end up in some corrupted mockery of equestria where everyone's a big-tittied anthro furry for furfags.
Want to hear something funny? When I first wrote this story and showed it to bronies, they complained that it was about a handsome successful bored unicorn learning to live and love again, instead of about a human who goes to equestria.
Seriously, that's what they complained about. They called Silver emo when he was sad and obnoxious when he wasn't. They didn't want to see a charming and confident man charm and woo Twilight, unless he was a fat ugly human who thinks charm=call someone pretty and make sexual innuendos until they suck your cock. They complained that my concept was too "High-concept" for their smooth brains. They didn't want to see what they called "My wish-fulfillment fantasy", and told me to make it more like their wish-fulfillment fantasies, even though there are already a million fanfics out there about ugly bastard whiny little shits who disgrace the human race doing the right thing for once and becoming an hero, only to end up in some corrupted mockery of equestria where everyone's a big-tittied anthro furry for furfags.
>>262842
>charming and confident man
>didn't want to see him woo Twilight unless he was a fat ugly human
>was too "high-concept"
Its like you forget that we've read your story, that you can gaslight with impunity and no one will notice and call you out for it.
Silver was neither charming nor confident. He was an arrogant cunt, largely because the whole story was written as - you said it - a wish-fullfillment fantasy written without the slightest effort to effectively and authentically depict any of the characters for the show. We've been over this, you don't get to revise history and then sell it as being 'what happened' because it makes you feel better than honest and legitimate review.
>charming and confident man
>didn't want to see him woo Twilight unless he was a fat ugly human
>was too "high-concept"
Its like you forget that we've read your story, that you can gaslight with impunity and no one will notice and call you out for it.
Silver was neither charming nor confident. He was an arrogant cunt, largely because the whole story was written as - you said it - a wish-fullfillment fantasy written without the slightest effort to effectively and authentically depict any of the characters for the show. We've been over this, you don't get to revise history and then sell it as being 'what happened' because it makes you feel better than honest and legitimate review.
>>262843
Why assume I was talking about you just now? I was in this fandom since S2 was new, and the faggot-filled MLP Forums was my first pony forum. I started writing long ago, too.
>the Silver story I showed you was poorly written
I know, and the one I showed MLP Forums's bronies over half a decade before this site was made was even worse.
The bronies I showed it to at the time didn't comment on its quality, or tell me anything I could use to improve the quality. They just complained that it wasn't "Simp human gets the pony girl" porn and told me to change that.
Honestly, that's on me. I should have made who I was talking about clearer. MLP Forums is shit and their understanding of writing quality begins and ends at "Does it contain things I like?".
Why assume I was talking about you just now? I was in this fandom since S2 was new, and the faggot-filled MLP Forums was my first pony forum. I started writing long ago, too.
>the Silver story I showed you was poorly written
I know, and the one I showed MLP Forums's bronies over half a decade before this site was made was even worse.
The bronies I showed it to at the time didn't comment on its quality, or tell me anything I could use to improve the quality. They just complained that it wasn't "Simp human gets the pony girl" porn and told me to change that.
Honestly, that's on me. I should have made who I was talking about clearer. MLP Forums is shit and their understanding of writing quality begins and ends at "Does it contain things I like?".
File (): 8597FF14D6299BEC1B674AA2930A0A28-43671.jpg (42.6 KB, 512x384, Judge_b2b280_1586975.jpg)
>>262736
Anyway, now that Nyx is basically reformed, the only thing left for her to do at this point is to free the royal sisters. Twilight brings up the extended sunset, pointing out that Nyx is too weak to raise and lower the sun herself but that it still needs to be done. It looks like this is the only reason the sun issue was introduced into the story, which is a shame. I still think having Nyx die without freeing the Princesses, thus leaving the sun and moon stuck in place forever, would make a much more interesting story than whatever I'm about to read. Plus, it's not like I'm too worried about this story derailing; we left the rails behind somewhere around chapter 10. Anyway.
Nyx, predictably, does not want to bring the sisters back, because blah blah the moon.
>"The only thing that kept Luna and I, us… me sane was our anger and hatred. We spent those centuries plotting and scheming how we would get back at Celestia."
Most people who have read along thus far should have a fair idea what my response to this would be, so I won't elaborate on it again. However, I thought it was worth calling attention to one more time.
It's clear that Nyx is struggling mightily with all of this: she knows that freeing the sisters is the right thing to do, but she's terrified of being banished forever, knowing that imprisonment will only be made worse this time because of her memories of happiness. There's a lot of tears of course, and the scene is no doubt meant to be heart-wrenching, but as usual I find that I am not particularly moved. This character's lack of genuine motivation for taking the actions she took makes it almost impossible to sympathize with her, especially considering that I find her so unlikable at this point I probably wouldn't care even if her motives made sense.
Anyway, one small blessing here is that the matter gets settled much faster than I was expecting. I'd assumed we were going to have at least a chapter or two of back and forth, with Nyx doing a lot of moping and dragging her feet before ultimately realizing that freeing the Princesses is just something she needs to bite the bullet and do. Instead, she seems mostly convinced of this already, so Twilight only needs to nudge her in the right direction.
There are a couple of tedious paragraphs explaining the technical details of how the spell banishment spell works, but Peen Stroke manages to breeze through this fairly succinctly, so +1 there I guess. Nyx then concludes by telling Twilight that they can undo the spell, but she asks for a couple of hours to enjoy one last pleasant memory in the event that she ends up banished. Twilight agrees, and they decide to read a book together.
Chapter 20: Judge Fudgement
The chapter opens with Celestia, who as it turns out doesn't find being banished to the sun to be that unpleasant of an experience. She's mostly been chillin' up there, poking around with her magic and trying to see if she could pick the magic lock that's holding her in place. Then, suddenly, she finds out that this won't be necessary, because she feels the spell beginning to undo itself.
There's this:
>However, it did not feel the same as when she had been freed from the sun by the Elements of Harmony.
I don't remember this ever happening, but at this point who even cares. It's pretty obvious that Peen Stroke's fanboy autism surpasses mine by a magnitude of several hundred degrees, so for all I know he's referencing some obscure thing from the show that I've either forgotten or never noticed.
Anyway, Celestia finds that she is indeed being freed, and wakes up suddenly in the great hall of Nyx's castle. Luna is there, and so is Twilight Sparkle. The text specifically describes Twilight as a pony that Celestia is "not sure she's ready to face," and I'm not quite sure what is meant by this. Seems like Twilight would be a pony Celestia would be happy to see.
Twilight briefly explains the situation, and tells the story of everything that's happened since the Princesses were imprisoned. They hear her out, and then we begin what I suspect is going to be a very long and tiresome dialogue-heavy chapter. Earlier when I was tallying up the word count of the remaining chapters, and I mentioned that there were still two that had a very high word count left to go. This is one of those, clocking in at around 12,000 words. Since the story is basically over and the chapter is called "Judgement," I'm assuming most of this is going to be back and forth argument over whether or not Nyx deserves to be banished for what she did. It's probably going to be 98% dialogue, with almost nothing happening and the story probably ending the way you'd expect it to: Nyx will be lectured about friendship, probably given some sort of penance to do, but will not be imprisoned on the moon. I'll be honest, I'm not looking forward to this one.
So, let's just dive right into this pile of shit. Once they both hear what Twilight has to say, they go into Nyx's sick room and confirm that she is, in fact, injured from fighting monsters, confirming the truth of Twilight's account. Then, the deliberation begins. Celestia, unsurprisingly, is in favor of banishment, although "not for as long as before." She sensibly argues that, even though Nyx has put things right, she did commit a pretty huge fuckton of treasonous offenses and Equestria will probably want to see justice done.
Luna, also unsurprisingly, is sympathetic to Nyx, because she and Nyx are sort-of-not-really the same pony, and because she knows firsthand that living on the moon for 1000 years sucks massive balls.
Before they can argue further about it, though, Twilight puts her hoof down and insists that Nyx not be banished. She tells Celestia that she refuses to allow it, although I don't see how this can be taken as anything but an empty threat. Twilight then asks to be sent to the moon in Nyx's place. Nyx, unsurprisingly, is against this.
Anyway, now that Nyx is basically reformed, the only thing left for her to do at this point is to free the royal sisters. Twilight brings up the extended sunset, pointing out that Nyx is too weak to raise and lower the sun herself but that it still needs to be done. It looks like this is the only reason the sun issue was introduced into the story, which is a shame. I still think having Nyx die without freeing the Princesses, thus leaving the sun and moon stuck in place forever, would make a much more interesting story than whatever I'm about to read. Plus, it's not like I'm too worried about this story derailing; we left the rails behind somewhere around chapter 10. Anyway.
Nyx, predictably, does not want to bring the sisters back, because blah blah the moon.
>"The only thing that kept Luna and I, us… me sane was our anger and hatred. We spent those centuries plotting and scheming how we would get back at Celestia."
Most people who have read along thus far should have a fair idea what my response to this would be, so I won't elaborate on it again. However, I thought it was worth calling attention to one more time.
It's clear that Nyx is struggling mightily with all of this: she knows that freeing the sisters is the right thing to do, but she's terrified of being banished forever, knowing that imprisonment will only be made worse this time because of her memories of happiness. There's a lot of tears of course, and the scene is no doubt meant to be heart-wrenching, but as usual I find that I am not particularly moved. This character's lack of genuine motivation for taking the actions she took makes it almost impossible to sympathize with her, especially considering that I find her so unlikable at this point I probably wouldn't care even if her motives made sense.
Anyway, one small blessing here is that the matter gets settled much faster than I was expecting. I'd assumed we were going to have at least a chapter or two of back and forth, with Nyx doing a lot of moping and dragging her feet before ultimately realizing that freeing the Princesses is just something she needs to bite the bullet and do. Instead, she seems mostly convinced of this already, so Twilight only needs to nudge her in the right direction.
There are a couple of tedious paragraphs explaining the technical details of how the spell banishment spell works, but Peen Stroke manages to breeze through this fairly succinctly, so +1 there I guess. Nyx then concludes by telling Twilight that they can undo the spell, but she asks for a couple of hours to enjoy one last pleasant memory in the event that she ends up banished. Twilight agrees, and they decide to read a book together.
Chapter 20: Judge Fudgement
The chapter opens with Celestia, who as it turns out doesn't find being banished to the sun to be that unpleasant of an experience. She's mostly been chillin' up there, poking around with her magic and trying to see if she could pick the magic lock that's holding her in place. Then, suddenly, she finds out that this won't be necessary, because she feels the spell beginning to undo itself.
There's this:
>However, it did not feel the same as when she had been freed from the sun by the Elements of Harmony.
I don't remember this ever happening, but at this point who even cares. It's pretty obvious that Peen Stroke's fanboy autism surpasses mine by a magnitude of several hundred degrees, so for all I know he's referencing some obscure thing from the show that I've either forgotten or never noticed.
Anyway, Celestia finds that she is indeed being freed, and wakes up suddenly in the great hall of Nyx's castle. Luna is there, and so is Twilight Sparkle. The text specifically describes Twilight as a pony that Celestia is "not sure she's ready to face," and I'm not quite sure what is meant by this. Seems like Twilight would be a pony Celestia would be happy to see.
Twilight briefly explains the situation, and tells the story of everything that's happened since the Princesses were imprisoned. They hear her out, and then we begin what I suspect is going to be a very long and tiresome dialogue-heavy chapter. Earlier when I was tallying up the word count of the remaining chapters, and I mentioned that there were still two that had a very high word count left to go. This is one of those, clocking in at around 12,000 words. Since the story is basically over and the chapter is called "Judgement," I'm assuming most of this is going to be back and forth argument over whether or not Nyx deserves to be banished for what she did. It's probably going to be 98% dialogue, with almost nothing happening and the story probably ending the way you'd expect it to: Nyx will be lectured about friendship, probably given some sort of penance to do, but will not be imprisoned on the moon. I'll be honest, I'm not looking forward to this one.
So, let's just dive right into this pile of shit. Once they both hear what Twilight has to say, they go into Nyx's sick room and confirm that she is, in fact, injured from fighting monsters, confirming the truth of Twilight's account. Then, the deliberation begins. Celestia, unsurprisingly, is in favor of banishment, although "not for as long as before." She sensibly argues that, even though Nyx has put things right, she did commit a pretty huge fuckton of treasonous offenses and Equestria will probably want to see justice done.
Luna, also unsurprisingly, is sympathetic to Nyx, because she and Nyx are sort-of-not-really the same pony, and because she knows firsthand that living on the moon for 1000 years sucks massive balls.
Before they can argue further about it, though, Twilight puts her hoof down and insists that Nyx not be banished. She tells Celestia that she refuses to allow it, although I don't see how this can be taken as anything but an empty threat. Twilight then asks to be sent to the moon in Nyx's place. Nyx, unsurprisingly, is against this.
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>>263021
Nyx rattles off a list of fairly obvious and predictable reasons for why Twilight's suggestion is moronic. It's probably not possible for Twilight to survive on the moon, Twilight has friends and a life that she would be abandoning, and everything that happened was Nyx's fault.
There's some tedious back and forth here that should surprise absolutely no one. Twilight tries to sacrifice herself pointlessly for Nyx, Nyx cries and hugs her and says that no, she a strong independent black alicorn who don't need no man, and that she will just take her own medicine like an adult for once. She thanks Twilight for always being there for her but she needs to face this on her own and blah blah blah. Cue the sad music. No, the really, really sad music.
Nyx then predictably turns to Celestia and announces that she is prepared to take whatever fully justified punishment she has earned for all of the insane shit she did. In a complete reversal of everything this character has said or done for at least a third of this story, she then assumes blame not only for her own actions, but for those of Spell Nexus and the cult as well, along with all of her underlings who were under the influence of the creeping crud. She goes full martyr and demands that she be the only one punished for everything that has happened.
Celestia is predictably flabbergasted by this. She then tells Nyx that she will indeed need to face punishment, but that punishment is deferred until they can gather more evidence. She assigns Luna the task of speaking with individual citizens around Ponyville to see what they have to say about Nightmare Nyx's reign, because apparently interviewing random morons is Luna's job now. It also does not seem to occur to her to gather opinions from ponies around greater Equestria, who might not have been direct witnesses to the events happening in the story but nonetheless had their lives disrupted by them.
Anyway who cares, let's just keep moving. Celestia says she will await Luna's return, Luna says k bitch I'll be off then, Twilight spergs to herself as usual. Peen Stroke then segues into the next scene in the most asinine way possible:
Luna:
>Right now, what I need is a pony who can be honest with me, so I can be sure what Twilight says isn't being tinted by her care for Nightmare Moon.
Celestia:
>Then sister, I might have a suggestion of which pony you would want to speak with first.
Hurr durr I wonder who they could be talking about.
And then, the next scene opens with Applejack. Well just color me the Element of Surprise; when Luna mentioned honesty, I assumed she'd be interviewing Bastion Yorsets or Horte Cuisine first. Who says this story has no originality?
Anyway, AJ is just hanging around her farm doing AJ things. Peen Stroke manages to awkwardly wedge in not just one but two unnecessary episode references here: one to the apple bucking episode, and one to the Gabby Gums episode. The text spends three paragraphs here explaining AJ's inner justification for taking a fucking nap.
btw:
>Placing her stetson over her face
"Stetson" is one of those words like "band-aid" that has entered the English vocabulary as a common noun, but it's technically a brand name. By now the word has become synonymous with a particular type of cowboy hat, and using it to describe this hat style is usually acceptable. However, it causes an issue here as the brand would likely not exist in this world, thus the type of hat we refer to as a Stetson would logically be called something else in Equestria. Just something to think about.
So, AJ is taking a nap when Luna suddenly shows up. Considering that this appearance would signify that world-altering events were taking place, you'd expect AJ to react with surprise, joy, shock, elation, etc. However, it seems Peen Stroke would rather use the scene to elicit some forced chuckles from two or three members of the audience, so instead of having her do what she would logically do, he has her react to having one of the two Princesses of Equestria, lately imprisoned on the moon, show up randomly at her farm as if it were Big Mac or Rarity or anyone else. She completely spergs out about having been caught napping (haha how drole, she's normally very hard working).
They banter back and forth for a little while. Luna pointlessly drops some information about Cadance and Shining Armor, who I think at this point we can safely conclude are not, and never will be, actually in this story, which begs the question of why the hell they are so frequently mentioned. Then, eventually, she gets to the fucking point, but not after another sly reference to the fact that her element is honesty.
Luna:
>Then I need you to tell me about Nightmare Moon, tell me what you honestly think about her, and, if you have time, I need your help to find other ponies to do the same.
AJ:
>I reckon I can do that.
>yee haw
>well shucks pardner
>aj.speak(style="redneck stereotype", responseType="generic") error 404: file not found
Honestly? This blows. Anyway, the subchapter ends here.
Nyx rattles off a list of fairly obvious and predictable reasons for why Twilight's suggestion is moronic. It's probably not possible for Twilight to survive on the moon, Twilight has friends and a life that she would be abandoning, and everything that happened was Nyx's fault.
There's some tedious back and forth here that should surprise absolutely no one. Twilight tries to sacrifice herself pointlessly for Nyx, Nyx cries and hugs her and says that no, she a strong independent black alicorn who don't need no man, and that she will just take her own medicine like an adult for once. She thanks Twilight for always being there for her but she needs to face this on her own and blah blah blah. Cue the sad music. No, the really, really sad music.
Nyx then predictably turns to Celestia and announces that she is prepared to take whatever fully justified punishment she has earned for all of the insane shit she did. In a complete reversal of everything this character has said or done for at least a third of this story, she then assumes blame not only for her own actions, but for those of Spell Nexus and the cult as well, along with all of her underlings who were under the influence of the creeping crud. She goes full martyr and demands that she be the only one punished for everything that has happened.
Celestia is predictably flabbergasted by this. She then tells Nyx that she will indeed need to face punishment, but that punishment is deferred until they can gather more evidence. She assigns Luna the task of speaking with individual citizens around Ponyville to see what they have to say about Nightmare Nyx's reign, because apparently interviewing random morons is Luna's job now. It also does not seem to occur to her to gather opinions from ponies around greater Equestria, who might not have been direct witnesses to the events happening in the story but nonetheless had their lives disrupted by them.
Anyway who cares, let's just keep moving. Celestia says she will await Luna's return, Luna says k bitch I'll be off then, Twilight spergs to herself as usual. Peen Stroke then segues into the next scene in the most asinine way possible:
Luna:
>Right now, what I need is a pony who can be honest with me, so I can be sure what Twilight says isn't being tinted by her care for Nightmare Moon.
Celestia:
>Then sister, I might have a suggestion of which pony you would want to speak with first.
Hurr durr I wonder who they could be talking about.
And then, the next scene opens with Applejack. Well just color me the Element of Surprise; when Luna mentioned honesty, I assumed she'd be interviewing Bastion Yorsets or Horte Cuisine first. Who says this story has no originality?
Anyway, AJ is just hanging around her farm doing AJ things. Peen Stroke manages to awkwardly wedge in not just one but two unnecessary episode references here: one to the apple bucking episode, and one to the Gabby Gums episode. The text spends three paragraphs here explaining AJ's inner justification for taking a fucking nap.
btw:
>Placing her stetson over her face
"Stetson" is one of those words like "band-aid" that has entered the English vocabulary as a common noun, but it's technically a brand name. By now the word has become synonymous with a particular type of cowboy hat, and using it to describe this hat style is usually acceptable. However, it causes an issue here as the brand would likely not exist in this world, thus the type of hat we refer to as a Stetson would logically be called something else in Equestria. Just something to think about.
So, AJ is taking a nap when Luna suddenly shows up. Considering that this appearance would signify that world-altering events were taking place, you'd expect AJ to react with surprise, joy, shock, elation, etc. However, it seems Peen Stroke would rather use the scene to elicit some forced chuckles from two or three members of the audience, so instead of having her do what she would logically do, he has her react to having one of the two Princesses of Equestria, lately imprisoned on the moon, show up randomly at her farm as if it were Big Mac or Rarity or anyone else. She completely spergs out about having been caught napping (haha how drole, she's normally very hard working).
They banter back and forth for a little while. Luna pointlessly drops some information about Cadance and Shining Armor, who I think at this point we can safely conclude are not, and never will be, actually in this story, which begs the question of why the hell they are so frequently mentioned. Then, eventually, she gets to the fucking point, but not after another sly reference to the fact that her element is honesty.
Luna:
>Then I need you to tell me about Nightmare Moon, tell me what you honestly think about her, and, if you have time, I need your help to find other ponies to do the same.
AJ:
>I reckon I can do that.
>yee haw
>well shucks pardner
>aj.speak(style="redneck stereotype", responseType="generic") error 404: file not found
Honestly? This blows. Anyway, the subchapter ends here.
File (): 904A2835B2F2C68CB8E06806BF9F1C9A-315849.png (308.4 KB, 1280x1558, literally who the fuck is this character.png)
File (): 15A0D1223EE008A8D6A780993E4437FC-44212.png (43.2 KB, 340x340, I don't know who this one is either.png)
>>263025
Next, the scene cuts to Nurse Redheart. She would normally tend to Nyx herself, since it's her job. However, seeing as how she is quite overworked at the moment, she is more than happy to leave Nyx in Twilight's care, and doesn't question the secrecy Twilight requests. She has a lot of work to do, as do Nurse Tenderheart, Fluttershy, and Dr. Stable, and as such she appreciates having one less patient to worry about, protocol be damned. So, even though it's unusual for Twilight to ask to be the one to change Nyx's bandages from now on and also ask that everyone kindly stay out of the patient's room from now on, Nurse Redheart thinks nothing of it.
However, none of this actually matters, because it turns out the scene is about Nyx, Twilight and Celestia, and Nurse Redheart is nowhere to be found. The same goes for Nurse Tenderheart, Fluttershy, and Dr. Stable. An astute and observant reader might wonder why the fuck any of these characters are being mentioned if none of them are even remotely important to the scene; but then again, an astute and observant reader would have soaked this book in lighter fluid and chucked it into an open flame at least ten chapters ago, so Peen Stroke must have assumed he had nothing to worry about.
Anyway, Nyx is lying unconscious on the bed while Twilight replaces her bandages. Celestia, who is watching, takes this moment to have a heart to heart conversation with Twilight. Specifically, she wants to discuss the night that Nyx was taken away by chariot to Canterlot, to undergo Spell Nexus' "test."
Celestia:
>Who do you blame for what happened that night?
Twilight:
>not u i swer
Basically, the way this plays out is that Twilight doesn't really blame anyone. She doesn't blame Celestia and she doesn't completely blame the Children of Nightmare. She blames herself for not arguing harder with Celestia to not take Nyx away, and this I guess is partly why she was willing to take Nyx's place on the moon. Most of the conversation is dull. Twilight and Celestia offer each other explanations of their actions that the reader could probably have deduced without much effort, and nothing is really achieved as a result. Much like the original event that this conversation discusses, there is little tension or adversity between Twilight and Celestia; they seem to more or less understand each others' positions and agree with each other, so there's nothing really to resolve here. Celestia apologizes to Twilight, which is stupid because what she did was her call to make and she made a reasonable call; she doesn't owe Twilight an apology here. Also, Twilight continually addresses Celestia as if she were an equal, which seems highly inappropriate. I know it's cartoon pony world, but it seems like there ought to at least be a bit of royal protocol observed. More than anything, though, the entire scene they are discussing was handled poorly, and it created a lot of problems that cascaded through the rest of the story. The same problems are present here. I'll reference my old posts instead of repeating myself:
>>256601
>>256602
>>256605
It's also worth noting that the characterization is handled poorly. Neither Twilight nor Celestia speaks with any particular voice, they just say lines to each other while occasionally dabbing Nyx with a disinfected cotton ball. All in all this is yet another of those Ritalin-induced scenes where nothing in particular happens and nothing particularly important is discussed.
In the next subchapter, we're back to Applejack and Luna again. They are just finishing up their discussion of the theft of the Elements of Harmony. What follows is yet another pointless Ritalin-induced conversation that goes absolutely nowhere. We learn that Luna wants to interview various Ponyville residents about their impressions of Nightmare Moon, but for some undisclosed reason does not want to reveal the fact that she and her sister have been released. So, the scene focuses entirely on Luna's long-winded explanation of the problem she's facing: she needs to stay incognito, but she doesn't want to shapeshift into another Ponyville resident because of the possibility of running into that pony. She also doesn't want to shapeshift into a strange pony because of the possibility that Pinkie Pie might suddenly appear and try to throw her a party. So, ultimately she decides to turn invisible and walk alongside AJ, and AJ is supposed to find ponies who might be good to ask about Nightmare Moon and then lure them away with promises of candy, so that Luna can suddenly appear out of nowhere and interrogate them. Yes, this autism is actually in the text, and yes this is literally the whole scene.
Apparently, this whole ridiculous bit is a necessary preamble to the next scene, in which AJ and Luna go to Rarity's house. Apparently Rarity is in the process of making blankets out of spare fabric for the ponies who were injured in the monster attack. They talk about fabric for like half a page, and then Luna suddenly materializes out of thin air. Like AJ earlier, Rarity does not seem to grasp the implications of Luna, who as far as she knows is still imprisoned on the moon, suddenly appearing, much less appearing out of literally nowhere. She instead spergs out about having a Princess in her shop, and runs around tidying up.
Some more banal conversation follows. Once again, Peen Stroke awkwardly wedges in another dumb episode reference, this time to the episode where Rarity is making dresses for the Gala. I'm thinking about making a drinking game out of this: every time Peen Stroke derails his own story to reference something from the show that barely relates to anything happening in the scene, I take a shot of Jagermeister. Every time he references an obscure character I've never heard of, I chug a beer. It would probably make the rest of this much easier to read, but I'd probably die of alcohol poisoning before I could finish.
Next, the scene cuts to Nurse Redheart. She would normally tend to Nyx herself, since it's her job. However, seeing as how she is quite overworked at the moment, she is more than happy to leave Nyx in Twilight's care, and doesn't question the secrecy Twilight requests. She has a lot of work to do, as do Nurse Tenderheart, Fluttershy, and Dr. Stable, and as such she appreciates having one less patient to worry about, protocol be damned. So, even though it's unusual for Twilight to ask to be the one to change Nyx's bandages from now on and also ask that everyone kindly stay out of the patient's room from now on, Nurse Redheart thinks nothing of it.
However, none of this actually matters, because it turns out the scene is about Nyx, Twilight and Celestia, and Nurse Redheart is nowhere to be found. The same goes for Nurse Tenderheart, Fluttershy, and Dr. Stable. An astute and observant reader might wonder why the fuck any of these characters are being mentioned if none of them are even remotely important to the scene; but then again, an astute and observant reader would have soaked this book in lighter fluid and chucked it into an open flame at least ten chapters ago, so Peen Stroke must have assumed he had nothing to worry about.
Anyway, Nyx is lying unconscious on the bed while Twilight replaces her bandages. Celestia, who is watching, takes this moment to have a heart to heart conversation with Twilight. Specifically, she wants to discuss the night that Nyx was taken away by chariot to Canterlot, to undergo Spell Nexus' "test."
Celestia:
>Who do you blame for what happened that night?
Twilight:
>not u i swer
Basically, the way this plays out is that Twilight doesn't really blame anyone. She doesn't blame Celestia and she doesn't completely blame the Children of Nightmare. She blames herself for not arguing harder with Celestia to not take Nyx away, and this I guess is partly why she was willing to take Nyx's place on the moon. Most of the conversation is dull. Twilight and Celestia offer each other explanations of their actions that the reader could probably have deduced without much effort, and nothing is really achieved as a result. Much like the original event that this conversation discusses, there is little tension or adversity between Twilight and Celestia; they seem to more or less understand each others' positions and agree with each other, so there's nothing really to resolve here. Celestia apologizes to Twilight, which is stupid because what she did was her call to make and she made a reasonable call; she doesn't owe Twilight an apology here. Also, Twilight continually addresses Celestia as if she were an equal, which seems highly inappropriate. I know it's cartoon pony world, but it seems like there ought to at least be a bit of royal protocol observed. More than anything, though, the entire scene they are discussing was handled poorly, and it created a lot of problems that cascaded through the rest of the story. The same problems are present here. I'll reference my old posts instead of repeating myself:
>>256601
>>256602
>>256605
It's also worth noting that the characterization is handled poorly. Neither Twilight nor Celestia speaks with any particular voice, they just say lines to each other while occasionally dabbing Nyx with a disinfected cotton ball. All in all this is yet another of those Ritalin-induced scenes where nothing in particular happens and nothing particularly important is discussed.
In the next subchapter, we're back to Applejack and Luna again. They are just finishing up their discussion of the theft of the Elements of Harmony. What follows is yet another pointless Ritalin-induced conversation that goes absolutely nowhere. We learn that Luna wants to interview various Ponyville residents about their impressions of Nightmare Moon, but for some undisclosed reason does not want to reveal the fact that she and her sister have been released. So, the scene focuses entirely on Luna's long-winded explanation of the problem she's facing: she needs to stay incognito, but she doesn't want to shapeshift into another Ponyville resident because of the possibility of running into that pony. She also doesn't want to shapeshift into a strange pony because of the possibility that Pinkie Pie might suddenly appear and try to throw her a party. So, ultimately she decides to turn invisible and walk alongside AJ, and AJ is supposed to find ponies who might be good to ask about Nightmare Moon and then lure them away with promises of candy, so that Luna can suddenly appear out of nowhere and interrogate them. Yes, this autism is actually in the text, and yes this is literally the whole scene.
Apparently, this whole ridiculous bit is a necessary preamble to the next scene, in which AJ and Luna go to Rarity's house. Apparently Rarity is in the process of making blankets out of spare fabric for the ponies who were injured in the monster attack. They talk about fabric for like half a page, and then Luna suddenly materializes out of thin air. Like AJ earlier, Rarity does not seem to grasp the implications of Luna, who as far as she knows is still imprisoned on the moon, suddenly appearing, much less appearing out of literally nowhere. She instead spergs out about having a Princess in her shop, and runs around tidying up.
Some more banal conversation follows. Once again, Peen Stroke awkwardly wedges in another dumb episode reference, this time to the episode where Rarity is making dresses for the Gala. I'm thinking about making a drinking game out of this: every time Peen Stroke derails his own story to reference something from the show that barely relates to anything happening in the scene, I take a shot of Jagermeister. Every time he references an obscure character I've never heard of, I chug a beer. It would probably make the rest of this much easier to read, but I'd probably die of alcohol poisoning before I could finish.
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>>263028
Eventually, they get to the fucking point. Luna asks Rarity how she would punish Nightmare Moon if it were her job to do it, and Rarity lays out an elaborate explanation of a custom-designed bondage ensemble she would dress Nyx in to spank her. Not really, but I'm finding that my mind is starting to wander as I read this. Dialogue like this doesn't help:
>She'd bounce over to my shop from time to time, eager to be taught a lesson about being a proper mare, and I was more than willing to teach.
Dear clophouse forum...
Anyway, Rarity's answer is that she's torn. On the one hand, Nyx was cutesy-wootsy and tons of fun to have around the shop; on the other, she eventually grew up to be an evil queen who locked Sweetie Belle in the dungeon for literally no reason and kept her there for a period of actual weeks. She probably deserves some jail time for what she did, but on the other hand, jail is so icky, and let's face it; Nyx would probably just become more of a hardened criminal in jail, and might even learn to be an even eviler alicorn. So, she concludes, the proper response would be to give her community service. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
The subchapter ends on this note:
>Soon she was telling short but energetic stories of some times Nyx had been over at her shop, either with Sweetie Belle or the other fillies or on her own accord.
I do not doubt that literally any one of these phantom anecdotes would have made more interesting reading than anything that happened during the corresponding time periods in the actual text. Perhaps if the early text had contained more of such anecdotes and less random autism, the later text wouldn't have to try so hard to make us feel sympathy for this intensely unlikable main character, because even if she turned out to be just as awful, we'd at least be able to remember when we liked her more.
Anyway, next subchapter cuts back to Twilight. She's been lying in bed with Nyx, but she needs to get up and stretch her legs, so she decides to go downstairs and get another sandwich. She then asks Celestia if she'd be willing to keep an eye on Nyx, and Celestia is all like k bitch whatevs.
Celestia wanders around the bedroom like a creepy weirdo, looking at Nyx's unconscious form lying helpless on the bed, and licking her lips like a hungry psychopath. Not really; my mind is just wandering again. She looks at Nyx's wounds and notes that she didn't have to fight the monsters but she did anyway, which has got to count for something in the not-getting-sent-to-the-moon book.
>What mattered was that Nightmare Moon had changed. She was the same pony physically; her origins were still in the mare that Luna had once been, but something had caused her to change on the inside. Celestia couldn't be sure what had caused that change.
Frankly, none of us can be sure either. This story is told so poorly, and Nightmare Nyx is such a poorly constructed character, that at this point I'm not even sure I could nail down what Peen Stroke intends for me to take away from this, let alone what I've actually taken away. At any rate, these lines once again call attention to the rather muddled and confusing origins of Nightmare Moon, this bizarre character-within-a-character, who is somehow Luna and also Not Luna, and also this third pony who is mostly an OC for the first half of the story and then suddenly turns into Luna-Not-Luna. Wtf am I even reading?
Anyway, Celestia keeps licking her lips while watching Nyx sleep, and pondering deep shit about the ponyverse while stroking her 1000 year old holy cooder. With Luna, Celestia had acted too late, and allowed her sister's anger to metastasize, turning her into Nightmare Moon. With Nyx, she had acted too early, which seems to have somehow also resulted in Nightmare Moon. Maybe, by the time some other pony is about to turn into Nightmare Moon, she'll have the rhythm down to a science and can act at just the right time. Or, maybe she'll fuck up again. At this point, who even cares. I'd rather be reading about Twilight downstairs getting a sandwich.
Celestia's reasoning goes a little off the rails here. At one point, she considers the similarities between Nyx and Luna, and concludes that though Equestria forgave Luna for being Nightmare Moon, they probably won't forgive Nightmare Moon herself, who despite being originally Luna, is now another pony who used to be called Nyx but is now Nightmare Moon but not Luna because Luna is a different pony. However, she still has Luna's memories and personality, but also her own personality, which is both Nyx and Nightmare Moon. Everyone following this okay? Anyway, the conclusion she draws from all this is that the key difference is the Elements of Harmony, which physically transformed the first Nightmare Moon back into Luna. Since Nyx has not undergone a similar physical transformation, the ponies will continue to see her as Nightmare Moon and thus she will not be forgiven, because Nightmare Moon is scary looking and Luna isn't.
This rambling nonsense reads like yet another instance of the author thinking out loud about random autistic brony shit. While he can probably be forgiven for veering off in this direction during the first draft, this kind of stream of consciousness writing is the kind of thing you usually want to locate and remove to make future drafts less bloated and insane. Since it can be hard for authors to spot (since most people find their own musings more interesting to read than others do), this is one of the reasons you want to have your text edited by another human. Since this text went through 21 editors and still wound up with this much autism, one can only surmise that all 21 of Peen Stroke's editors failed miserably at their task. The moral of the story: don't select someone as autistic as you are to be your editor, or at least pick someone who is autistic about different things than you are.
Eventually, they get to the fucking point. Luna asks Rarity how she would punish Nightmare Moon if it were her job to do it, and Rarity lays out an elaborate explanation of a custom-designed bondage ensemble she would dress Nyx in to spank her. Not really, but I'm finding that my mind is starting to wander as I read this. Dialogue like this doesn't help:
>She'd bounce over to my shop from time to time, eager to be taught a lesson about being a proper mare, and I was more than willing to teach.
Dear clophouse forum...
Anyway, Rarity's answer is that she's torn. On the one hand, Nyx was cutesy-wootsy and tons of fun to have around the shop; on the other, she eventually grew up to be an evil queen who locked Sweetie Belle in the dungeon for literally no reason and kept her there for a period of actual weeks. She probably deserves some jail time for what she did, but on the other hand, jail is so icky, and let's face it; Nyx would probably just become more of a hardened criminal in jail, and might even learn to be an even eviler alicorn. So, she concludes, the proper response would be to give her community service. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
The subchapter ends on this note:
>Soon she was telling short but energetic stories of some times Nyx had been over at her shop, either with Sweetie Belle or the other fillies or on her own accord.
I do not doubt that literally any one of these phantom anecdotes would have made more interesting reading than anything that happened during the corresponding time periods in the actual text. Perhaps if the early text had contained more of such anecdotes and less random autism, the later text wouldn't have to try so hard to make us feel sympathy for this intensely unlikable main character, because even if she turned out to be just as awful, we'd at least be able to remember when we liked her more.
Anyway, next subchapter cuts back to Twilight. She's been lying in bed with Nyx, but she needs to get up and stretch her legs, so she decides to go downstairs and get another sandwich. She then asks Celestia if she'd be willing to keep an eye on Nyx, and Celestia is all like k bitch whatevs.
Celestia wanders around the bedroom like a creepy weirdo, looking at Nyx's unconscious form lying helpless on the bed, and licking her lips like a hungry psychopath. Not really; my mind is just wandering again. She looks at Nyx's wounds and notes that she didn't have to fight the monsters but she did anyway, which has got to count for something in the not-getting-sent-to-the-moon book.
>What mattered was that Nightmare Moon had changed. She was the same pony physically; her origins were still in the mare that Luna had once been, but something had caused her to change on the inside. Celestia couldn't be sure what had caused that change.
Frankly, none of us can be sure either. This story is told so poorly, and Nightmare Nyx is such a poorly constructed character, that at this point I'm not even sure I could nail down what Peen Stroke intends for me to take away from this, let alone what I've actually taken away. At any rate, these lines once again call attention to the rather muddled and confusing origins of Nightmare Moon, this bizarre character-within-a-character, who is somehow Luna and also Not Luna, and also this third pony who is mostly an OC for the first half of the story and then suddenly turns into Luna-Not-Luna. Wtf am I even reading?
Anyway, Celestia keeps licking her lips while watching Nyx sleep, and pondering deep shit about the ponyverse while stroking her 1000 year old holy cooder. With Luna, Celestia had acted too late, and allowed her sister's anger to metastasize, turning her into Nightmare Moon. With Nyx, she had acted too early, which seems to have somehow also resulted in Nightmare Moon. Maybe, by the time some other pony is about to turn into Nightmare Moon, she'll have the rhythm down to a science and can act at just the right time. Or, maybe she'll fuck up again. At this point, who even cares. I'd rather be reading about Twilight downstairs getting a sandwich.
Celestia's reasoning goes a little off the rails here. At one point, she considers the similarities between Nyx and Luna, and concludes that though Equestria forgave Luna for being Nightmare Moon, they probably won't forgive Nightmare Moon herself, who despite being originally Luna, is now another pony who used to be called Nyx but is now Nightmare Moon but not Luna because Luna is a different pony. However, she still has Luna's memories and personality, but also her own personality, which is both Nyx and Nightmare Moon. Everyone following this okay? Anyway, the conclusion she draws from all this is that the key difference is the Elements of Harmony, which physically transformed the first Nightmare Moon back into Luna. Since Nyx has not undergone a similar physical transformation, the ponies will continue to see her as Nightmare Moon and thus she will not be forgiven, because Nightmare Moon is scary looking and Luna isn't.
This rambling nonsense reads like yet another instance of the author thinking out loud about random autistic brony shit. While he can probably be forgiven for veering off in this direction during the first draft, this kind of stream of consciousness writing is the kind of thing you usually want to locate and remove to make future drafts less bloated and insane. Since it can be hard for authors to spot (since most people find their own musings more interesting to read than others do), this is one of the reasons you want to have your text edited by another human. Since this text went through 21 editors and still wound up with this much autism, one can only surmise that all 21 of Peen Stroke's editors failed miserably at their task. The moral of the story: don't select someone as autistic as you are to be your editor, or at least pick someone who is autistic about different things than you are.
>>263025
"Stetson" is one of those words like "band-aid" that has entered the English vocabulary as a common noun, but it's technically a brand name. By now the word has become synonymous with a particular type of cowboy hat, and using it to describe this hat style is usually acceptable. However, it causes an issue here as the brand would likely not exist in this world, thus the type of hat we refer to as a Stetson would logically be called something else in Equestria. Just something to think about.
I didn't know Stetson was a brand name, but that reminds me of something.
Once I had an idea for a pony fic that starts off shit in all the popular ways. Some faggy cuck human gets in a car crash and wakes up in Equestria.
200,000 words of shitty Human In Equestria romance harem shit ensues.
And then one day, he notices someone use a word that only exists on earth due to human stuff. It's a brand name, or named after a human, or named after an earth historical event.
My writing notes say "Sandwich because of the Earl Of Sandwich if I don't think of anything better".
This makes him question this openly. Nopony has any answers and Twilight needs answers but every book she looks for answers in is blank. Then he wakes up and realize he's been in a coma.
The rest of the story is him going "But I need to go back! All my pony friends love me so much!" and being laughed at by the doctors and his mom for being such a faggot who genuinely thinks his coma pony friends were real.
Then he tries to move on with his life and put ponies behind him but he fails and becomes a "Lucid Dreamer" so he can imagine himself in ponyland, and eventually he realizes he's controlling the imaginary ponies and this really is fake so he kills himself, thinking he'll go to Equestria for real.
The story continues for a chapter with everyone left behind dealing with the aftermath of his death, his kid cousin asks a priest "Do you think he went to Equestria?" and the priest says "No he's in hell", and the story ends there.
I decided not to write it, but sometimes I wish I did write it back when I had more free time.
"Stetson" is one of those words like "band-aid" that has entered the English vocabulary as a common noun, but it's technically a brand name. By now the word has become synonymous with a particular type of cowboy hat, and using it to describe this hat style is usually acceptable. However, it causes an issue here as the brand would likely not exist in this world, thus the type of hat we refer to as a Stetson would logically be called something else in Equestria. Just something to think about.
I didn't know Stetson was a brand name, but that reminds me of something.
Once I had an idea for a pony fic that starts off shit in all the popular ways. Some faggy cuck human gets in a car crash and wakes up in Equestria.
200,000 words of shitty Human In Equestria romance harem shit ensues.
And then one day, he notices someone use a word that only exists on earth due to human stuff. It's a brand name, or named after a human, or named after an earth historical event.
My writing notes say "Sandwich because of the Earl Of Sandwich if I don't think of anything better".
This makes him question this openly. Nopony has any answers and Twilight needs answers but every book she looks for answers in is blank. Then he wakes up and realize he's been in a coma.
The rest of the story is him going "But I need to go back! All my pony friends love me so much!" and being laughed at by the doctors and his mom for being such a faggot who genuinely thinks his coma pony friends were real.
Then he tries to move on with his life and put ponies behind him but he fails and becomes a "Lucid Dreamer" so he can imagine himself in ponyland, and eventually he realizes he's controlling the imaginary ponies and this really is fake so he kills himself, thinking he'll go to Equestria for real.
The story continues for a chapter with everyone left behind dealing with the aftermath of his death, his kid cousin asks a priest "Do you think he went to Equestria?" and the priest says "No he's in hell", and the story ends there.
I decided not to write it, but sometimes I wish I did write it back when I had more free time.
>>263028
>AJ is supposed to find ponies who might be good to ask about Nightmare Moon and then lure them away with promises of candy, so that Luna can suddenly appear out of nowhere and interrogate them. Yes, this autism is actually in the text, and yes this is literally the whole scene.
WHY NOT JUST TURN INVISIBLE AND WATCH AJ INTERROGATE THEM?
You could even write it as a funny scene where AJ asks ponies friendly questions while an invisible obviously-Luna not-so-quietly whispers things to Applejack like "Remember to ask about Nightmare Moon!" and "Ask the farmer how his crops are doing!"
You could make it obvious to both ponies that Invisible Luna is whispering to AJ
or use magic so only AJ can hear her, so when AJ says "Shush, I know" to herself it makes the pony AJ's talking to say "If you're hearing voices again I know a shrink you should talk to", it would be comedy gold.
On a less funny note, you could disguise yourself as somepony you know you won't run into, like a medic currently rushed off her hooves in ponyville hospital?
Or disguise yourself as one of Applejack's MANY cousins, who you KNOW has been in Ponyville before (And has possibly gotten a pinkie pie party already) and walk around with her?
Fucking christ. The author could "flex his broni mussles" by naming an Apple Pony who CANONICALLY GOT A NAME IN EPISODE ONE instead of using the retarded fanmade names of random background ponies shown off on the Pony Wiki. He's missing an opportunity to be an annoying faggot who loves to show off absolutely fucking worthless pieces of cartoon trivia correctly!
>AJ is supposed to find ponies who might be good to ask about Nightmare Moon and then lure them away with promises of candy, so that Luna can suddenly appear out of nowhere and interrogate them. Yes, this autism is actually in the text, and yes this is literally the whole scene.
WHY NOT JUST TURN INVISIBLE AND WATCH AJ INTERROGATE THEM?
You could even write it as a funny scene where AJ asks ponies friendly questions while an invisible obviously-Luna not-so-quietly whispers things to Applejack like "Remember to ask about Nightmare Moon!" and "Ask the farmer how his crops are doing!"
You could make it obvious to both ponies that Invisible Luna is whispering to AJ
or use magic so only AJ can hear her, so when AJ says "Shush, I know" to herself it makes the pony AJ's talking to say "If you're hearing voices again I know a shrink you should talk to", it would be comedy gold.
On a less funny note, you could disguise yourself as somepony you know you won't run into, like a medic currently rushed off her hooves in ponyville hospital?
Or disguise yourself as one of Applejack's MANY cousins, who you KNOW has been in Ponyville before (And has possibly gotten a pinkie pie party already) and walk around with her?
Fucking christ. The author could "flex his broni mussles" by naming an Apple Pony who CANONICALLY GOT A NAME IN EPISODE ONE instead of using the retarded fanmade names of random background ponies shown off on the Pony Wiki. He's missing an opportunity to be an annoying faggot who loves to show off absolutely fucking worthless pieces of cartoon trivia correctly!
>>263030
God why the fuck isn't this "Nyx is made out of NMM Smoke, Twilight's blood, and Everfree Forest magic" stuff going anywhere?
The answer is right there in the text, it would be easy as fucking pie (pony pun hahaha i want to cum inside Pinkie Pie)
for the author to stop being a faggot and write
>And then Celestia was told by an investigator what spell created Nyx and what was used to create her.
"Oh, now I get it!" Celestia smiles. "You were made of three things: Everfree magic, Twilight's blood, and these Nightmare Moon memories that aren't yours and are messing with your head. And you were made using Everfree magic, Twilight's blood, and NMM smoke. So if I just remove that smoke, its memories, and its influence over you..."
>Celestia casts a spell
>the final piece of Nightmare Moon pops out of Nyx and Luna stomps it into nothing.
Nyx is now green and purple, with Twilight-ish eyes, not black with purple hair and green NMM-ish eyes.
"Holy shit I suddenly feel way less like having an existential crisis" says Nyx. "I was made with those three things... But now I'm just two things: Twilight's DNA and Everfree magic! So it's like Twilight had a foal and the Everfree is my mommy and Twilight is my daddy!"
Twilight realizes she never had The Talk with this filly, Rainbow Dash laughs.
Nyx: So do I get sent to the moon now?
Celestia: Of course not! It was the Nightmare Moon smoke that compelled Spell Nexus to create you and cause that smoke to control you. The punishment for attacking royalty is death... And we have killed what remains of Nightmare Moon, who was responsible for everything all along. Now, there is only Nyx.
Nyx: Yay! *Hugs Twilight and the rest of her friends at once, cue the extremely sappy music, everyone cries even ponies who've never met her before today*
Then the author could edit in a scene where Spell Nexus casts an "Awaken the darkness inside Nyx to turn her into NMM" spell on Nyx to make her turn evil for no reason and start freaking out over bad memories that were never heard. Then Spell Nexus tricks Nyx into thinking she's fully NMM and nothing else.
This ending means the author failed at "Redeeming NMM", but the author already failed that before he put pen to paper when he decided to write about an OC named Nyx instead of... Luna being teleported away by a cult and magicked into an amnesiac NMM and she ends up being raised by a filly on some farm in the middle of nowhere, for example. "Moonie" (amnesiac NMM) gets taught morality by "le cute innocent gril who's wiser than she should be" and tons of "cute innocent gril gets defended by big scary monster" scenes and "gril says to monster you aren't a monster and the audience cries" scenes can happen. There, spur of the moment, first thing that pops into my head and it's miles better than this shite because instead of "trying to fix a broken fanfic" and make something good out of broken parts I asked myself what it wanted to achieve and what would actually achieve that.
Huh. Looking at this approach and how it instantly yielded better results than my Fallout Equestria clusterfuck, it makes me rethink things. That shit needs a rewrite.
God why the fuck isn't this "Nyx is made out of NMM Smoke, Twilight's blood, and Everfree Forest magic" stuff going anywhere?
The answer is right there in the text, it would be easy as fucking pie (pony pun hahaha i want to cum inside Pinkie Pie)
for the author to stop being a faggot and write
>And then Celestia was told by an investigator what spell created Nyx and what was used to create her.
"Oh, now I get it!" Celestia smiles. "You were made of three things: Everfree magic, Twilight's blood, and these Nightmare Moon memories that aren't yours and are messing with your head. And you were made using Everfree magic, Twilight's blood, and NMM smoke. So if I just remove that smoke, its memories, and its influence over you..."
>Celestia casts a spell
>the final piece of Nightmare Moon pops out of Nyx and Luna stomps it into nothing.
Nyx is now green and purple, with Twilight-ish eyes, not black with purple hair and green NMM-ish eyes.
"Holy shit I suddenly feel way less like having an existential crisis" says Nyx. "I was made with those three things... But now I'm just two things: Twilight's DNA and Everfree magic! So it's like Twilight had a foal and the Everfree is my mommy and Twilight is my daddy!"
Twilight realizes she never had The Talk with this filly, Rainbow Dash laughs.
Nyx: So do I get sent to the moon now?
Celestia: Of course not! It was the Nightmare Moon smoke that compelled Spell Nexus to create you and cause that smoke to control you. The punishment for attacking royalty is death... And we have killed what remains of Nightmare Moon, who was responsible for everything all along. Now, there is only Nyx.
Nyx: Yay! *Hugs Twilight and the rest of her friends at once, cue the extremely sappy music, everyone cries even ponies who've never met her before today*
Then the author could edit in a scene where Spell Nexus casts an "Awaken the darkness inside Nyx to turn her into NMM" spell on Nyx to make her turn evil for no reason and start freaking out over bad memories that were never heard. Then Spell Nexus tricks Nyx into thinking she's fully NMM and nothing else.
This ending means the author failed at "Redeeming NMM", but the author already failed that before he put pen to paper when he decided to write about an OC named Nyx instead of... Luna being teleported away by a cult and magicked into an amnesiac NMM and she ends up being raised by a filly on some farm in the middle of nowhere, for example. "Moonie" (amnesiac NMM) gets taught morality by "le cute innocent gril who's wiser than she should be" and tons of "cute innocent gril gets defended by big scary monster" scenes and "gril says to monster you aren't a monster and the audience cries" scenes can happen. There, spur of the moment, first thing that pops into my head and it's miles better than this shite because instead of "trying to fix a broken fanfic" and make something good out of broken parts I asked myself what it wanted to achieve and what would actually achieve that.
Huh. Looking at this approach and how it instantly yielded better results than my Fallout Equestria clusterfuck, it makes me rethink things. That shit needs a rewrite.
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>>263030
Anyway, the main takeaway here is that Celestia concludes that Nyx will never be able to escape the label of being a monster.
Incidentally, the "front cover" graphic for this story on FimFiction is pic related, and contains the tagline "What else can you be when the world can only see a monster?" I've actually been noodling this in the back of my mind for some time now. I'm not sure if the person who drew it actually read the story, but it seems like an odd tagline, because nothing in the text thus far really suggests it.
The tagline seems to imply a story in which the protagonist is a pariah; a genuinely good character who is nevertheless outcast due to some stigma associated with how she's perceived. The Hunchback of Notre Dame would be a good example of this type of character. As I've said already, Nyx is not this type of character. As a child, apart from being picked on by Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon (who are the de-facto bullies in the pony universe and pick on other characters as well), she isn't treated particularly poorly. She's definitely not seen as a monster. Most of the residents of Ponyville don't seem to notice her resemblance to Nightmare Moon, despite it being rubbed directly in their noses on several occasions (as with the play).
While it is extremely likely that she will be seen as a monster from now on, that is the direct result of her own actions, which she performed of her own freewill with no coercion and no apparent reason, as we've discussed extensively. The tagline implies that she was a pariah from the beginning, which doesn't really fit; in fact she's barely a pariah at the end.
I bring all of this up because of this:
>In her eyes, Nightmare Moon was not a monster. If anything, the guilt Celestia felt made her feel like she, at least in part, deserved the title.
This continues to get on my nerves. For one, I still find Celestia entirely too passive and apologetic in this story. She's constantly apologizing for actions which don't merit apology. In this case, she's feeling responsible for turning Nyx into Nightmare Moon, which she isn't. She fell for Nexus' trick I guess, but in that case her anger should be directed at Nexus, not herself. Beyond that she's not at fault here; once she learned that Nyx was the reincarnation of Nightmare Moon, she had every reason to want to take her away to study her and ensure that she was not a threat. She had every intention of returning her to Twilight if the safety of Equestria was ensured. Thus, she didn't act wrongly here.
Nyx, meanwhile, chose her own path. She gets a few points for her eventual repentance I suppose, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that it's mostly her own fault that she's in the predicament she's in. In fact, even her repentance comes across as a little phony. All she's really done is go from feeling sorry for herself to beating herself up. Meanwhile Twilight and Celestia, who have every reason to be angry with her, have mostly been apologizing to her and blaming themselves for all the shit that she did. Nobody has rebuked Nyx in this story except Nyx herself, and even that seems like it's just an extension of her self pity. This story tries so hard to force sympathy for this character, but only ever succeeds in reinforcing how unlikable she is.
Anyway, after this scene concludes with Celestia brooding gloomily out the window, we return to Luna's interrogations. Thankfully, Peen Stroke seems to be trying to speed this up a little. I was afraid he was going to devote an entire subchapter to Luna's interrogation of each character's views on Nyx, but here he condenses Fluttershy, Pinkie and Rainbow Dash into a single scene.
Despite this, however, the interrogations are getting rather monotonous. So far, we have heard from each of the Mane 6 except for Twilight, and their views are mostly the same: Nyx did some pretty bad things and she should be punished, but on the other hand she did kind of help put it right, so maybe she should be punished, but not too severely. I will give Peen Stroke some credit here: the kind of inane, noncommittal wishy-washy responses each of these characters gives is a pretty accurate depiction of how public opinion polling generally works, and serves as a fine example for why it's usually a complete waste of time. Celestia really ought to have just made a decision on the spot and saved everypony (and us) a lot of time. However, since in this story she is depicted as being just as squeamish and wishy-washy as her subjects, I suppose it's in character for her to just outsource the responsibility.
Anyway, as I said, opinions here are consistent with what we've already seen from AJ and Rarity. Fluttershy is in favor of just outright forgiving Nyx, which is probably not that surprising. Rainbow Dash puts a little more thought into her answer, and concludes that although Nyx did ultimately put things right, she also caused a great deal of harm. She is therefore in favor of a jail sentence for a period of "a few years." This horrifies Fluttershy, who seems to agree with Rarity that jail is icky.
The two of them argue about it for a few paragraphs, and of course Pinkie's only contribution to the conversation is some retarded half-wit joke about cakes. Eventually, she is asked to provide an opinion of her own, and again her answer is predictably retarded: she is in favor of forgiveness, not for any particular moral reason, but because she is planning a party for Nyx and if she were locked up she wouldn't be able to attend. Oh that wacky and le random Pinkie Pie, amirite guise?
Believe it or not, it gets even dumber from here. The discussion now veers off onto a tangent about Pinkie Pie wanting Nyx to transform her into a cake for some idiotic reason. The subchapter concludes with Pinkie pondering the existential implications of life as a cake. Oh, that wacky and le random Pinkie Pie, amirite guise?
Anyway, the main takeaway here is that Celestia concludes that Nyx will never be able to escape the label of being a monster.
Incidentally, the "front cover" graphic for this story on FimFiction is pic related, and contains the tagline "What else can you be when the world can only see a monster?" I've actually been noodling this in the back of my mind for some time now. I'm not sure if the person who drew it actually read the story, but it seems like an odd tagline, because nothing in the text thus far really suggests it.
The tagline seems to imply a story in which the protagonist is a pariah; a genuinely good character who is nevertheless outcast due to some stigma associated with how she's perceived. The Hunchback of Notre Dame would be a good example of this type of character. As I've said already, Nyx is not this type of character. As a child, apart from being picked on by Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon (who are the de-facto bullies in the pony universe and pick on other characters as well), she isn't treated particularly poorly. She's definitely not seen as a monster. Most of the residents of Ponyville don't seem to notice her resemblance to Nightmare Moon, despite it being rubbed directly in their noses on several occasions (as with the play).
While it is extremely likely that she will be seen as a monster from now on, that is the direct result of her own actions, which she performed of her own freewill with no coercion and no apparent reason, as we've discussed extensively. The tagline implies that she was a pariah from the beginning, which doesn't really fit; in fact she's barely a pariah at the end.
I bring all of this up because of this:
>In her eyes, Nightmare Moon was not a monster. If anything, the guilt Celestia felt made her feel like she, at least in part, deserved the title.
This continues to get on my nerves. For one, I still find Celestia entirely too passive and apologetic in this story. She's constantly apologizing for actions which don't merit apology. In this case, she's feeling responsible for turning Nyx into Nightmare Moon, which she isn't. She fell for Nexus' trick I guess, but in that case her anger should be directed at Nexus, not herself. Beyond that she's not at fault here; once she learned that Nyx was the reincarnation of Nightmare Moon, she had every reason to want to take her away to study her and ensure that she was not a threat. She had every intention of returning her to Twilight if the safety of Equestria was ensured. Thus, she didn't act wrongly here.
Nyx, meanwhile, chose her own path. She gets a few points for her eventual repentance I suppose, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that it's mostly her own fault that she's in the predicament she's in. In fact, even her repentance comes across as a little phony. All she's really done is go from feeling sorry for herself to beating herself up. Meanwhile Twilight and Celestia, who have every reason to be angry with her, have mostly been apologizing to her and blaming themselves for all the shit that she did. Nobody has rebuked Nyx in this story except Nyx herself, and even that seems like it's just an extension of her self pity. This story tries so hard to force sympathy for this character, but only ever succeeds in reinforcing how unlikable she is.
Anyway, after this scene concludes with Celestia brooding gloomily out the window, we return to Luna's interrogations. Thankfully, Peen Stroke seems to be trying to speed this up a little. I was afraid he was going to devote an entire subchapter to Luna's interrogation of each character's views on Nyx, but here he condenses Fluttershy, Pinkie and Rainbow Dash into a single scene.
Despite this, however, the interrogations are getting rather monotonous. So far, we have heard from each of the Mane 6 except for Twilight, and their views are mostly the same: Nyx did some pretty bad things and she should be punished, but on the other hand she did kind of help put it right, so maybe she should be punished, but not too severely. I will give Peen Stroke some credit here: the kind of inane, noncommittal wishy-washy responses each of these characters gives is a pretty accurate depiction of how public opinion polling generally works, and serves as a fine example for why it's usually a complete waste of time. Celestia really ought to have just made a decision on the spot and saved everypony (and us) a lot of time. However, since in this story she is depicted as being just as squeamish and wishy-washy as her subjects, I suppose it's in character for her to just outsource the responsibility.
Anyway, as I said, opinions here are consistent with what we've already seen from AJ and Rarity. Fluttershy is in favor of just outright forgiving Nyx, which is probably not that surprising. Rainbow Dash puts a little more thought into her answer, and concludes that although Nyx did ultimately put things right, she also caused a great deal of harm. She is therefore in favor of a jail sentence for a period of "a few years." This horrifies Fluttershy, who seems to agree with Rarity that jail is icky.
The two of them argue about it for a few paragraphs, and of course Pinkie's only contribution to the conversation is some retarded half-wit joke about cakes. Eventually, she is asked to provide an opinion of her own, and again her answer is predictably retarded: she is in favor of forgiveness, not for any particular moral reason, but because she is planning a party for Nyx and if she were locked up she wouldn't be able to attend. Oh that wacky and le random Pinkie Pie, amirite guise?
Believe it or not, it gets even dumber from here. The discussion now veers off onto a tangent about Pinkie Pie wanting Nyx to transform her into a cake for some idiotic reason. The subchapter concludes with Pinkie pondering the existential implications of life as a cake. Oh, that wacky and le random Pinkie Pie, amirite guise?
>>263166
Next subchapter, we're back to Nyxie. She has awakened from her sleep, and is very sore from her various bum wounds. Celestia's crown was apparently reflecting sunlight into her eyes, and that's what woke her up. She asks Celestia to move so the light doesn't get in her eyes, and Celestia politely does as she asks. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. After this, Celestia feeds Nyx some celery soup in what is probably meant to be a touching and intimate scene, which it more or less is I suppose. The main takeaway here is that Celestia does not seem to be actively angry at Nyx and is probably leaning towards forgiving her at this point.
After this, we cut back to Luna's interrogation. Since we've heard from each of the mane 6, Luna now appears to have moved on to a more general polling of the rest of the town. Again, the opinions are mostly the same across the board: Nyx did kind of do a lot of harm, but she also kind of made up for it, so she should probably be punished, but not too severely. There are a few outliers on either side: a handful of ponies are adamant that she should receive no mercy, and a handful of others who think she should just be let off the hook entirely. Again, a fine example of why mass opinion polls are usually a complete waste of time. At the end of this night-long exercise in utter futility, Luna feels as if she is no closer to an answer than she was to begin with. Shocking.
However, just as Luna is about to close up shop and head home, some last minute stragglers appear. Oh, look, it's the CMC. Also, Twist is there, because it looks like she's in the story again. I wonder what they're going to say about their former friend, who kept them locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason?
In a shocking twist that should surprise absolutely no one, they have nothing but nice things to say about their former friend, who kept them locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason. They prattle on endlessly about all the fun they had with Nyx, before she randomly turned evil and locked them in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason. Even more shocking still is Applejack's suggestion to Luna, that she should listen to the CMC, as they would probably understand Nightmare Moon better than anyone.
>Those four, they're her real friends, and real friends are the ones that know ya the best.
Apparently, they are also the ones who don't even get remotely mad when you keep them locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason.
Back to Celestia. Apparently the decision to keep their return a secret was mutually agreed upon between Luna and Celestia, although I'm still not quite sure why exactly. Something something Nightmare Moon, is doubtless the explanation Peen Stroke would give. In any event, even though she wants to keep her return a secret, Celestia also decides that it's important for the sun to start moving again, so she makes it set and leaves all the ponies all over Equestria who probably have no idea what the fuck has been going on with the sun and moon for the last month or so to just keep on fucking wondering about it, because who even cares about them.
It's been awhile since I found anything positive to say about this work, but I will say that Peen Stroke does a fairly good job with his descriptions of Celestia's actions here:
>The princess's bond with the sun made setting it as simple as reaching out to an old friend, or perhaps to a child. The sun would, on some days, be willing to slip off to its slumber beyond the horizon. On other days, it would fuss and refuse, but every day Celestia found a way of coaxing it down so that the moon could rise. She had done so for a thousand years, and did it again tonight...even if she could feel the lingering magic of Nyx, who had tended the sun in her absence.
The prose here is not bad, and I like the way he thought this through. The princesses' manipulation of celestial bodies is one of the areas of the show's lore that I've always found rather cumbersome to deal with when writing in this universe, mostly because the notion that it has to be manually moved by a Princess has to be kept in mind at all times, and it's a pain in the ass when you realize a scene is fucked because you forgot that. However, it also opens up a lot of portals for artistic license, and if done correctly writing in little details like this can make even a fairy tale universe feel like a real place. Anyone familiar with MLP knows the story of how Celestia raises and sets the sun every day, but most people probably haven't given much thought to how this action is performed, or how it feels for Celestia as she performs it. Like I said, this is an interesting detail and lends credibility to the world if it's well thought-out.
Fanboy autism causes a person to think the about mundane details of a fictional world in ways that would never occur to a person watching casually. For Peen Stroke, along with unfortunately the vast majority of fanfiction authors, this autism mostly works against him, as it clearly causes him to focus all of his brainpower on idiotic in-world technicalities, while blatantly ignoring huge gaping flaws in his story. However, occasionally it can lead to some interesting writing that, again, would probably not have occurred to someone only casually interested in the subject matter. The challenge for authors is to figure out how to harness this autism and direct it towards making your story better, rather than allowing it to bloat your text with unnecessary bullshit.
So, today, Peen Stroke was sort of not a faggot, although he is still mostly a faggot.
Next subchapter, we're back to Nyxie. She has awakened from her sleep, and is very sore from her various bum wounds. Celestia's crown was apparently reflecting sunlight into her eyes, and that's what woke her up. She asks Celestia to move so the light doesn't get in her eyes, and Celestia politely does as she asks. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. After this, Celestia feeds Nyx some celery soup in what is probably meant to be a touching and intimate scene, which it more or less is I suppose. The main takeaway here is that Celestia does not seem to be actively angry at Nyx and is probably leaning towards forgiving her at this point.
After this, we cut back to Luna's interrogation. Since we've heard from each of the mane 6, Luna now appears to have moved on to a more general polling of the rest of the town. Again, the opinions are mostly the same across the board: Nyx did kind of do a lot of harm, but she also kind of made up for it, so she should probably be punished, but not too severely. There are a few outliers on either side: a handful of ponies are adamant that she should receive no mercy, and a handful of others who think she should just be let off the hook entirely. Again, a fine example of why mass opinion polls are usually a complete waste of time. At the end of this night-long exercise in utter futility, Luna feels as if she is no closer to an answer than she was to begin with. Shocking.
However, just as Luna is about to close up shop and head home, some last minute stragglers appear. Oh, look, it's the CMC. Also, Twist is there, because it looks like she's in the story again. I wonder what they're going to say about their former friend, who kept them locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason?
In a shocking twist that should surprise absolutely no one, they have nothing but nice things to say about their former friend, who kept them locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason. They prattle on endlessly about all the fun they had with Nyx, before she randomly turned evil and locked them in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason. Even more shocking still is Applejack's suggestion to Luna, that she should listen to the CMC, as they would probably understand Nightmare Moon better than anyone.
>Those four, they're her real friends, and real friends are the ones that know ya the best.
Apparently, they are also the ones who don't even get remotely mad when you keep them locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason.
Back to Celestia. Apparently the decision to keep their return a secret was mutually agreed upon between Luna and Celestia, although I'm still not quite sure why exactly. Something something Nightmare Moon, is doubtless the explanation Peen Stroke would give. In any event, even though she wants to keep her return a secret, Celestia also decides that it's important for the sun to start moving again, so she makes it set and leaves all the ponies all over Equestria who probably have no idea what the fuck has been going on with the sun and moon for the last month or so to just keep on fucking wondering about it, because who even cares about them.
It's been awhile since I found anything positive to say about this work, but I will say that Peen Stroke does a fairly good job with his descriptions of Celestia's actions here:
>The princess's bond with the sun made setting it as simple as reaching out to an old friend, or perhaps to a child. The sun would, on some days, be willing to slip off to its slumber beyond the horizon. On other days, it would fuss and refuse, but every day Celestia found a way of coaxing it down so that the moon could rise. She had done so for a thousand years, and did it again tonight...even if she could feel the lingering magic of Nyx, who had tended the sun in her absence.
The prose here is not bad, and I like the way he thought this through. The princesses' manipulation of celestial bodies is one of the areas of the show's lore that I've always found rather cumbersome to deal with when writing in this universe, mostly because the notion that it has to be manually moved by a Princess has to be kept in mind at all times, and it's a pain in the ass when you realize a scene is fucked because you forgot that. However, it also opens up a lot of portals for artistic license, and if done correctly writing in little details like this can make even a fairy tale universe feel like a real place. Anyone familiar with MLP knows the story of how Celestia raises and sets the sun every day, but most people probably haven't given much thought to how this action is performed, or how it feels for Celestia as she performs it. Like I said, this is an interesting detail and lends credibility to the world if it's well thought-out.
Fanboy autism causes a person to think the about mundane details of a fictional world in ways that would never occur to a person watching casually. For Peen Stroke, along with unfortunately the vast majority of fanfiction authors, this autism mostly works against him, as it clearly causes him to focus all of his brainpower on idiotic in-world technicalities, while blatantly ignoring huge gaping flaws in his story. However, occasionally it can lead to some interesting writing that, again, would probably not have occurred to someone only casually interested in the subject matter. The challenge for authors is to figure out how to harness this autism and direct it towards making your story better, rather than allowing it to bloat your text with unnecessary bullshit.
So, today, Peen Stroke was sort of not a faggot, although he is still mostly a faggot.
File (): EFDB9021EE9E0076DDF64A81DC773082-5858.jpg (5.7 KB, 184x184, 6ce3fcb342f661abe6cfa2f68fd32603bd9e503c_full.jpg)
>>263169
Anyway, after Celestia sets the sun, the doors to the throne room suddenly open and Luna walks in. Their brief conversation once again seems to imply that they see themselves as having somehow done something wrong, and that Nyx's actions are somehow Celestia's fault. But whatever, who even cares at this point. Blah blah blah, they go on for awhile, and their dialog is as stiff and formal as it usually is, making most of the scenes that they are in tedious to read.
Long story short, Luna seems to have more or less made up her mind about what they should do vis a vis the Nyx problem, but she needs to speak to two more ponies: Celestia, and Nyx herself. Despite the fact that Celestia has had virtually no significant interactions with Nyx, Luna seems to feel that she is uniquely qualified to understand her in ways that her closest friends and her adoptive mother might have somehow missed. Again, it mostly relates to this whole bizarre idea that Nyx is simultaneously herself as well as Luna from 1000 years ago, whom Celestia would have technically known well enough. However, by this logic Luna would be even more qualified to understand her than Celestia, seeing as how she is literally her. However, since she is also a character completely distinct from Luna, and Luna in this story has had virtually no interaction with her either, I guess that point is moot. Jesus Christ, this is starting to give me a headache.
Anyway, they yak back and forth for a bit longer. Once again, Celestia seems to really be beating herself up over her perception that she somehow wronged both Twilight and Nyx. Luna herself is now also apologizing, because apparently Nyx's actions are also her fault, because she was Nightmare Moon 1000 years ago, and all of her memories and sins and favorite foods and whatever the fuck other attributes from her character who is barely in this story at all were randomly transmitted to Nyx through some kind of magical osmosis that the reader is supposed to just accept without explanation. All in all, we seem to be arriving at a completely unsatisfying ending that involves nearly everyone in the story except Nyx having to accept blame for Nyx's shitty behavior. But on the plus side, the ending is close. So close I can almost taste it.
After this monotonous exchange of mutual self-deprecation between Luna and Celestia, Nyx wakes up. We rejoin her an indeterminate period of time later, as Twilight is being led outside the room. Once she is gone, Celestia seals and locks the door with magic, because reasons. The sick bed has been removed from the room. It seems that now, finally, after nearly 12,000 words of a chapter called "Judgement," the promised judgement is about to occur.
For some unexplained reason, the text specifically calls attention to the fact that Luna is apparently smaller than Nyx, something which was not mentioned before and was not something that would have occurred to me to think about. If it was important, it probably should have been mentioned earlier. However, it does not seem to have been important, and can probably be filed under "Peen Stroke Autism" with most of the rest of this story's random details that it randomly reveals at random times.
For some other unexplained reason, it seems to be Luna and not Celestia who is officiating the trial here. She speaks a brief introduction which summarizes Nyx's crimes: treason, attempted regicide, unlawful manipulation of heavenly spheres, unlawful imprisonment of one adult and three minors without apparent cause, attempted unlawful execution of said adult by an agent under her command (also without apparent cause), usurpation of the throne (without apparent cause), unlawful imprisonment of the royal sisters, making it night for about two weeks (without apparent cause), doing high level magic without a loiscense, and generally being an all around insufferable cunt.
Does Nyx deny these crimes? No, she does not. However, before Luna is to render her final judgement, she has one question that she would like to ask. Will Nyx answer truthfully? Yes, she will.
Luna wants to know what Nyx said to Twilight before she threw herself at the mercy of the sisters. Nyx answers that she had simply told Twilight that she had decided what kind of mare she wanted to be. And what kind of mare is that, pray tell?
Here, Nyx briefly summarizes her existence, as she sees it: she was born of a spell to resurrect Nightmare Moon. She is apparently the same mare that Luna once was, despite that connection being vague and poorly defined. She attributes her ability to protect the ponies she cares about to Luna's past, for some reason.
But, says she, she is more than just Luna's twisted shadow. She is also an OC, a poorly constructed shell of a character whose only role was to serve as a vessel for the worst attributes of an entirely different character, who is barely in the text at all but for some reason is its central focus. What little personality she has is mostly those negative attributes. She is an annoying character, an obnoxious spergy know it all who suddenly becomes evil for no reason and then repents, also for no reason, and then demands sympathy from the reader...oh, sorry. That was my judgement; we're supposed to be focusing on Luna's right now.
Anyway, Nyx concludes by saying that that she is simultaneously Nightmare Moon and Nyx, because they are one in the same apparently. But she chooses to be called Nyx, because she likes that name better, and also because she has decided that she is done being evil for no reason, and is now ready to be good for no reason.
Luna's response:
>Then, Nyx, I lay my judgement upon you.
And the chapter ends there.
Anyway, after Celestia sets the sun, the doors to the throne room suddenly open and Luna walks in. Their brief conversation once again seems to imply that they see themselves as having somehow done something wrong, and that Nyx's actions are somehow Celestia's fault. But whatever, who even cares at this point. Blah blah blah, they go on for awhile, and their dialog is as stiff and formal as it usually is, making most of the scenes that they are in tedious to read.
Long story short, Luna seems to have more or less made up her mind about what they should do vis a vis the Nyx problem, but she needs to speak to two more ponies: Celestia, and Nyx herself. Despite the fact that Celestia has had virtually no significant interactions with Nyx, Luna seems to feel that she is uniquely qualified to understand her in ways that her closest friends and her adoptive mother might have somehow missed. Again, it mostly relates to this whole bizarre idea that Nyx is simultaneously herself as well as Luna from 1000 years ago, whom Celestia would have technically known well enough. However, by this logic Luna would be even more qualified to understand her than Celestia, seeing as how she is literally her. However, since she is also a character completely distinct from Luna, and Luna in this story has had virtually no interaction with her either, I guess that point is moot. Jesus Christ, this is starting to give me a headache.
Anyway, they yak back and forth for a bit longer. Once again, Celestia seems to really be beating herself up over her perception that she somehow wronged both Twilight and Nyx. Luna herself is now also apologizing, because apparently Nyx's actions are also her fault, because she was Nightmare Moon 1000 years ago, and all of her memories and sins and favorite foods and whatever the fuck other attributes from her character who is barely in this story at all were randomly transmitted to Nyx through some kind of magical osmosis that the reader is supposed to just accept without explanation. All in all, we seem to be arriving at a completely unsatisfying ending that involves nearly everyone in the story except Nyx having to accept blame for Nyx's shitty behavior. But on the plus side, the ending is close. So close I can almost taste it.
After this monotonous exchange of mutual self-deprecation between Luna and Celestia, Nyx wakes up. We rejoin her an indeterminate period of time later, as Twilight is being led outside the room. Once she is gone, Celestia seals and locks the door with magic, because reasons. The sick bed has been removed from the room. It seems that now, finally, after nearly 12,000 words of a chapter called "Judgement," the promised judgement is about to occur.
For some unexplained reason, the text specifically calls attention to the fact that Luna is apparently smaller than Nyx, something which was not mentioned before and was not something that would have occurred to me to think about. If it was important, it probably should have been mentioned earlier. However, it does not seem to have been important, and can probably be filed under "Peen Stroke Autism" with most of the rest of this story's random details that it randomly reveals at random times.
For some other unexplained reason, it seems to be Luna and not Celestia who is officiating the trial here. She speaks a brief introduction which summarizes Nyx's crimes: treason, attempted regicide, unlawful manipulation of heavenly spheres, unlawful imprisonment of one adult and three minors without apparent cause, attempted unlawful execution of said adult by an agent under her command (also without apparent cause), usurpation of the throne (without apparent cause), unlawful imprisonment of the royal sisters, making it night for about two weeks (without apparent cause), doing high level magic without a loiscense, and generally being an all around insufferable cunt.
Does Nyx deny these crimes? No, she does not. However, before Luna is to render her final judgement, she has one question that she would like to ask. Will Nyx answer truthfully? Yes, she will.
Luna wants to know what Nyx said to Twilight before she threw herself at the mercy of the sisters. Nyx answers that she had simply told Twilight that she had decided what kind of mare she wanted to be. And what kind of mare is that, pray tell?
Here, Nyx briefly summarizes her existence, as she sees it: she was born of a spell to resurrect Nightmare Moon. She is apparently the same mare that Luna once was, despite that connection being vague and poorly defined. She attributes her ability to protect the ponies she cares about to Luna's past, for some reason.
But, says she, she is more than just Luna's twisted shadow. She is also an OC, a poorly constructed shell of a character whose only role was to serve as a vessel for the worst attributes of an entirely different character, who is barely in the text at all but for some reason is its central focus. What little personality she has is mostly those negative attributes. She is an annoying character, an obnoxious spergy know it all who suddenly becomes evil for no reason and then repents, also for no reason, and then demands sympathy from the reader...oh, sorry. That was my judgement; we're supposed to be focusing on Luna's right now.
Anyway, Nyx concludes by saying that that she is simultaneously Nightmare Moon and Nyx, because they are one in the same apparently. But she chooses to be called Nyx, because she likes that name better, and also because she has decided that she is done being evil for no reason, and is now ready to be good for no reason.
Luna's response:
>Then, Nyx, I lay my judgement upon you.
And the chapter ends there.
>>263170
This is a shit story and I bet its faggot fanboys were on the edge of their fucking seats with this cliffhanger ending. As if it would actually end in Nyx getting mooned.
As if Captain America would actually die.
As if sixty billion dollars worth of shallow franchise characters would stay dead for more than a movie.
As if the author's mouthpiece dog would stay dead for more than six episodes.
Anyway
been thinking
We sort our stories by what they are and what familiar things happen in them.
A murder mystery, an action thriller, a romance novel, a post-apocalyptic story...
But with fanfics?
Aside from the few fandoms big and "creative" enough to have their own genres like Pokemon's AdventureFics and BetrayalFics, and Naruto's Godlike Harem AU Kekkei Genkai bullshit...
Most fanfics are sorted by what base emotions they're meant to force onto its audience.
Want to see two characters of your choice hook up? Some faggot wrote a story where that happened.
Want to see one character get hurt and then get comforted by another character? That shit makes women nut the contents of their ovaries into each other, so of course shitloads of faggots wrote stories where that happens.
Want to see porn featuring familiar characters? The fags call it lemons.
It's like porn. The plot is an afterthought to "Muh feelings".
You could call it comfort food if you were a fat woman who eats cake every day.
Come to think of it, most of these "fandom genre" works are like that, too.
Those Pokemon fics where some OC starts his/her journey in Kanto or Sinnoh or Johto or some original region and grows as a person and pokemon trainer while catching pokemon, winning gym badges, beating the Elite Four and Champion, and eventually becoming the Champion and defeating a whole mafia along the way?
Those Naruto fics where Naruto is secretly a genius with untapped potential and a "Kekkei Genkai" ("Bloodline Limit", a magic power only those in your family can use) and he gains new power and becomes a badass and proves everyone who ever doubted him wrong?
Those Sonic fics where Sonic fucking dies, leaving his friends behind to pick up the pieces, causing Tails to become the new main character in Sonic's place, becoming a gruff smirking "badass" with a glock and motorcycle?
Those Pokemon fics where Ash gets "Betrayed" by Misty and Brock saying "Ash, buddy, you fucking suck and it's time to get a real job in accounting" to make him run away in tears to a whole new region where he "makes COOLER friends who ALWAYS BELIEVE IN HIM and he GROWS and MATURES and he even gets a HOT GIRLFRIEND WHO LOVES POKEMON TOO and might also be twice Ash's age but who cares and he also becomes THE CHADDIEST POKEMON MASTER EVER"?
Those MLP fics where a shit human goes to Equestria and gets loved by all, or gets hated by all except 0-7 ponies and whines about being hated, or goes to equestria and takes the power and body of some other normie media character with him along for the ride, or Spike runs away from home to "become a badass" and make friends who don't treat him like a beloved butler but like an actual valued friend, or...
They're all fucking porn.
This whole time, I've been a pornographer in denial and I never even realized it.
No wonder the most popular fanfic that ever got sold commercially was Fifty Shades of Grey, a piece of Twilight(Vampire Book) porn.
This is a shit story and I bet its faggot fanboys were on the edge of their fucking seats with this cliffhanger ending. As if it would actually end in Nyx getting mooned.
As if Captain America would actually die.
As if sixty billion dollars worth of shallow franchise characters would stay dead for more than a movie.
As if the author's mouthpiece dog would stay dead for more than six episodes.
Anyway
been thinking
We sort our stories by what they are and what familiar things happen in them.
A murder mystery, an action thriller, a romance novel, a post-apocalyptic story...
But with fanfics?
Aside from the few fandoms big and "creative" enough to have their own genres like Pokemon's AdventureFics and BetrayalFics, and Naruto's Godlike Harem AU Kekkei Genkai bullshit...
Most fanfics are sorted by what base emotions they're meant to force onto its audience.
Want to see two characters of your choice hook up? Some faggot wrote a story where that happened.
Want to see one character get hurt and then get comforted by another character? That shit makes women nut the contents of their ovaries into each other, so of course shitloads of faggots wrote stories where that happens.
Want to see porn featuring familiar characters? The fags call it lemons.
It's like porn. The plot is an afterthought to "Muh feelings".
You could call it comfort food if you were a fat woman who eats cake every day.
Come to think of it, most of these "fandom genre" works are like that, too.
Those Pokemon fics where some OC starts his/her journey in Kanto or Sinnoh or Johto or some original region and grows as a person and pokemon trainer while catching pokemon, winning gym badges, beating the Elite Four and Champion, and eventually becoming the Champion and defeating a whole mafia along the way?
Those Naruto fics where Naruto is secretly a genius with untapped potential and a "Kekkei Genkai" ("Bloodline Limit", a magic power only those in your family can use) and he gains new power and becomes a badass and proves everyone who ever doubted him wrong?
Those Sonic fics where Sonic fucking dies, leaving his friends behind to pick up the pieces, causing Tails to become the new main character in Sonic's place, becoming a gruff smirking "badass" with a glock and motorcycle?
Those Pokemon fics where Ash gets "Betrayed" by Misty and Brock saying "Ash, buddy, you fucking suck and it's time to get a real job in accounting" to make him run away in tears to a whole new region where he "makes COOLER friends who ALWAYS BELIEVE IN HIM and he GROWS and MATURES and he even gets a HOT GIRLFRIEND WHO LOVES POKEMON TOO and might also be twice Ash's age but who cares and he also becomes THE CHADDIEST POKEMON MASTER EVER"?
Those MLP fics where a shit human goes to Equestria and gets loved by all, or gets hated by all except 0-7 ponies and whines about being hated, or goes to equestria and takes the power and body of some other normie media character with him along for the ride, or Spike runs away from home to "become a badass" and make friends who don't treat him like a beloved butler but like an actual valued friend, or...
They're all fucking porn.
This whole time, I've been a pornographer in denial and I never even realized it.
No wonder the most popular fanfic that ever got sold commercially was Fifty Shades of Grey, a piece of Twilight(Vampire Book) porn.
>>263166
>This continues to get on my nerves. For one, I still find Celestia entirely too passive and apologetic in this story.
Funny considering the opposite is why people hated the original version of the story because she was lacking empathy.
>This continues to get on my nerves. For one, I still find Celestia entirely too passive and apologetic in this story.
Funny considering the opposite is why people hated the original version of the story because she was lacking empathy.
Initially I thought Judge Fudge was a character from Regular Show. The more I read this story the more it becomes obvious that Past Sins is the literary equivalent of a marionette puppet show to entertain children, as at least then its leaps of logic, cut-out characters, and painfully forced redemption story might be tolerable. However, it's far, far too long to ever keep children following along, and so the only conclusion is that Past Sins is cheap entertainment for manchildren who have far too much time. It is stunning proof of the manchild stereotype.
>>263038
Legitimately one of the best ideas you've ever had, Nigel (oh how the comments would howl in protest at the last chapter). I also agree with you 100% here: >>263198
Our whole society has become "feelings first" and that this is endemic in fanfiction surprises absolutely no one. The intellect is a higher part of our being (I won't bother talking about the soul, because society left that highest point long ago and denies it even exists) and is meant to guide our actions, yet has been largely repudiated even in the most crucial parts of society. The idea of "marriage = being in love" is feelings first, and so is the (dogmatically enforced) egalitarian position that all peoples are equal. If even "casual" and "intelligent" people are feelings first then what can be said about fanfiction writers who are often emotionally stunted NEETs? They feel they need porn whether its sexual or emotional, because they're on a level barely any higher than a dumb beast. Like a beast they view raw power and viciousness, uninhibited rutting, or intimate maternal care as the heights of experience and believe it fulfilling. It is the end result of Freud's mindset.
>lemons
I looked that up and apparently there is an extremely abbreviated spoof of that sort of story. Whoever wrote that satirized what you're talking about.
>>263038
Legitimately one of the best ideas you've ever had, Nigel (oh how the comments would howl in protest at the last chapter). I also agree with you 100% here: >>263198
Our whole society has become "feelings first" and that this is endemic in fanfiction surprises absolutely no one. The intellect is a higher part of our being (I won't bother talking about the soul, because society left that highest point long ago and denies it even exists) and is meant to guide our actions, yet has been largely repudiated even in the most crucial parts of society. The idea of "marriage = being in love" is feelings first, and so is the (dogmatically enforced) egalitarian position that all peoples are equal. If even "casual" and "intelligent" people are feelings first then what can be said about fanfiction writers who are often emotionally stunted NEETs? They feel they need porn whether its sexual or emotional, because they're on a level barely any higher than a dumb beast. Like a beast they view raw power and viciousness, uninhibited rutting, or intimate maternal care as the heights of experience and believe it fulfilling. It is the end result of Freud's mindset.
>lemons
I looked that up and apparently there is an extremely abbreviated spoof of that sort of story. Whoever wrote that satirized what you're talking about.
>>263199
Only the shit ones.
You could certainly compare a QTE to watching a trashy action movie, except because you pressed pause 8 times within 2 seconds every 10 seconds the DVD doesn't restart, therefore "you feel like John Wick"
But good video games are art.
Look at the Combo Mads for DMC. They take skill. Speedruns of Mario and Sonic games take skill. "Cinematic" shitty little wannabe-movie games don't take skill, just hold up so you can feel like Uncharted as he climbs up and falls sometimes.
>>263201
So the author decided to write the same thing happening except Celestia apologizes for doing the right thing every so often, just to make his fagbase happy. How typical.
>>263219
Goddamn it, you're right.
I hear the "Citrus Code" set of porn codewords was once developed because Fanfiction.net deleted adult and gay fanfics. So a bunch of whiny women who write gay sex degeneracy founded Archive Of Our Own, or AO3.Net, where they can post whatever degeneracy they want.
Only the shit ones.
You could certainly compare a QTE to watching a trashy action movie, except because you pressed pause 8 times within 2 seconds every 10 seconds the DVD doesn't restart, therefore "you feel like John Wick"
But good video games are art.
Look at the Combo Mads for DMC. They take skill. Speedruns of Mario and Sonic games take skill. "Cinematic" shitty little wannabe-movie games don't take skill, just hold up so you can feel like Uncharted as he climbs up and falls sometimes.
>>263201
So the author decided to write the same thing happening except Celestia apologizes for doing the right thing every so often, just to make his fagbase happy. How typical.
>>263219
Goddamn it, you're right.
I hear the "Citrus Code" set of porn codewords was once developed because Fanfiction.net deleted adult and gay fanfics. So a bunch of whiny women who write gay sex degeneracy founded Archive Of Our Own, or AO3.Net, where they can post whatever degeneracy they want.
>>263256
>only shit games are playing with dolls. Games I like are tots legit
No, you're still playing with dolls. Perhaps you prefer the term 'action figures'? Yeah, dolls. DMC? Dolls. QTE? Dolls. Show me a vidya, and I'll show you how its playing with dolls.
>only shit games are playing with dolls. Games I like are tots legit
No, you're still playing with dolls. Perhaps you prefer the term 'action figures'? Yeah, dolls. DMC? Dolls. QTE? Dolls. Show me a vidya, and I'll show you how its playing with dolls.
>>263257
How about Little Big Planet? Literally "playing with dolls" the game.
>>263038
If executed well, this could be interesting. If executed poorly, it would probably turn out to be the same type of story you were trying to parody, except with an ending that everyone who likes that type of story would hate. My advice would be to think carefully about how and why you want to satirize this genre, and plan it out carefully. Also, I'd keep it relatively short, probably under 30,000 words. Unless you're intentionally trying to jerk the audience around because you hate them, in which case I'd say do the opposite: make it long as fuck, drag the reader through as much pseudo-emotional bullshit as you can, wedge in long 30 page rants about Naruto that go nowhere whenever possible, and then finally give them a jerkoff ending that makes them realize they wasted a portion of their life that they can never get back and there's nothing they can do about it.
>>263219
>Initially I thought Judge Fudge was a character from Regular Show.
He's from Drawn Together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30LZ_0AsQQ8
>>263198
Adjusted for autism levels, this is actually more or less my main gripe with fanfiction. Most of what exists is just role-playing or wish fulfillment; however, it doesn't necessarily have to be. I don't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I attended a panel at a convention once where the topic was fanfiction as transformative art. The panelist was some asian guy whose name I don't remember, but he was very interesting. He made comparisons between fanfiction (writing a story set in the world of an established commercial property using that world's canon characters) to genres of fiction that utilize characters and settings from mythology, popular legend, or from preexisting stories. Examples would be the various retellings of the Arthurian stories, Robin Hood, the Greek heroes, Sherlock Holmes, the Lovecraft mythos, and so forth. He argues that fanfiction is basically the same concept: you're telling an original story using someone else's world and characters.
His point was that it's possible to create works of serious literary value using characters and settings that already exist in the popular imagination. Just because you're writing a story about pastel ponies in a fairly silly children's universe doesn't mean your story can't have high themes or something valuable to say about life or human existence, in fact that was more or less the argument that I remember bronies originally using to justify their interest in a cartoon created to sell pony toys to little girls. Unfortunately, most fanfiction authors don't think about it this way, they just do what you mention: writing out their romantic fantasies or dumb little scenarios where they self-insert into the world.
Asian guy whose name I don't remember concluded the panel by encouraging people to approach reading and writing fanfiction (or any type of fiction) in the same way that you would approach reading and writing serious literature. He made an impression on me and I've tried to take this approach in doing these criticisms on /mlpol/. I deconstruct these shitty pony stories and analyze them in the same way I would deconstruct or analyze a serious work of fiction written by a serious author. It doesn't matter if you're writing a story about ponies or an original novel with your own characters: the approach to writing any type of story is the same, and that's the standard that I hold everything up to.
That's part of what irritates me about Peen Stroke here: he actually has some solid themes and a solid basis for a story that could have been developed into something worthwhile. However, he got so wrapped up in autismo brony shit that what he actually produced was a long stream of verbal diarrhea; an incoherent, vaguely connected sequence of events that serves no purpose beyond trying to milk sympathy for a very shoddily constructed main character. This story is basically just sadness porn for people who probably spend too much time crying as it is.
How about Little Big Planet? Literally "playing with dolls" the game.
>>263038
If executed well, this could be interesting. If executed poorly, it would probably turn out to be the same type of story you were trying to parody, except with an ending that everyone who likes that type of story would hate. My advice would be to think carefully about how and why you want to satirize this genre, and plan it out carefully. Also, I'd keep it relatively short, probably under 30,000 words. Unless you're intentionally trying to jerk the audience around because you hate them, in which case I'd say do the opposite: make it long as fuck, drag the reader through as much pseudo-emotional bullshit as you can, wedge in long 30 page rants about Naruto that go nowhere whenever possible, and then finally give them a jerkoff ending that makes them realize they wasted a portion of their life that they can never get back and there's nothing they can do about it.
>>263219
>Initially I thought Judge Fudge was a character from Regular Show.
He's from Drawn Together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30LZ_0AsQQ8
>>263198
Adjusted for autism levels, this is actually more or less my main gripe with fanfiction. Most of what exists is just role-playing or wish fulfillment; however, it doesn't necessarily have to be. I don't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I attended a panel at a convention once where the topic was fanfiction as transformative art. The panelist was some asian guy whose name I don't remember, but he was very interesting. He made comparisons between fanfiction (writing a story set in the world of an established commercial property using that world's canon characters) to genres of fiction that utilize characters and settings from mythology, popular legend, or from preexisting stories. Examples would be the various retellings of the Arthurian stories, Robin Hood, the Greek heroes, Sherlock Holmes, the Lovecraft mythos, and so forth. He argues that fanfiction is basically the same concept: you're telling an original story using someone else's world and characters.
His point was that it's possible to create works of serious literary value using characters and settings that already exist in the popular imagination. Just because you're writing a story about pastel ponies in a fairly silly children's universe doesn't mean your story can't have high themes or something valuable to say about life or human existence, in fact that was more or less the argument that I remember bronies originally using to justify their interest in a cartoon created to sell pony toys to little girls. Unfortunately, most fanfiction authors don't think about it this way, they just do what you mention: writing out their romantic fantasies or dumb little scenarios where they self-insert into the world.
Asian guy whose name I don't remember concluded the panel by encouraging people to approach reading and writing fanfiction (or any type of fiction) in the same way that you would approach reading and writing serious literature. He made an impression on me and I've tried to take this approach in doing these criticisms on /mlpol/. I deconstruct these shitty pony stories and analyze them in the same way I would deconstruct or analyze a serious work of fiction written by a serious author. It doesn't matter if you're writing a story about ponies or an original novel with your own characters: the approach to writing any type of story is the same, and that's the standard that I hold everything up to.
That's part of what irritates me about Peen Stroke here: he actually has some solid themes and a solid basis for a story that could have been developed into something worthwhile. However, he got so wrapped up in autismo brony shit that what he actually produced was a long stream of verbal diarrhea; an incoherent, vaguely connected sequence of events that serves no purpose beyond trying to milk sympathy for a very shoddily constructed main character. This story is basically just sadness porn for people who probably spend too much time crying as it is.
File (): ED9B83B083D921BF00994D11D7688B55-828797.png (809.4 KB, 1696x1168, letter.png)
>>263170
And now, at long last, we finally embark upon the most appropriately titled chapter in this entire text:
Chapter 21: The End of the Nightmare
Ever the master of suspense, Peen Stroke chooses to keep Luna's final judgement obfuscated for a bit longer. Instead, we join Twilight, who is pacing nervously outside the locked door of the throne room, listening to the muffled sounds coming from within. She is able to keep herself calm for a few minutes, and then concludes that Nyx is being sent to the moon, and starts banging on the door as loudly as she can.
We get some more valuable insight into Twilight's wine-addled autistic mind, which mostly consists of more insane ranting about the moon. I'm hoping that this will be the last time the moon is mentioned in this story, but I'm not holding my breath.
Anyway, eventually Celestia opens the door, but before she can get a word out, Twilight explodes into another insane rant about the moon. Welp, that hope lasted all of three seconds. She begins screeching and yelling and using magic to throw chunks of rock at the Princess, who eventually has to magically bitch slap her into submission. It is at this point that Celestia calmly explains that Nyx has not been sent to the moon. Well shit, at least we got to the bottom of that mystery.
As it turns out, the story ends the way I assumed it would probably end right from page one: Nyx has been miraculously transformed from Nightmare Moon back into Nyx again; as in, she is once more an annoying little filly. However, Peen Stroke still manages to make it confusing and weird:
>At the far end of the room stood Princess Luna, but she had undergone a transformation. She had grown as tall and slender as Celestia. Her own starfield of a mane had also transformed. Nightmare Moon’s mane could be described as a dark night with a faint twinkling of stars. Luna’s old mane was a clear summer’s night. Her new mane, however, was the night sky at its finest. Millions of stars, nebulae, and other wonders that were normally only visible through a telescope could be glimpsed within her mane. It was a living tapestry.
The question of how or why Luna underwent a transformation is not immediately answered, nor is it apparent why this is what the scene focuses on. At first I thought "Luna" was a typo, and that Peen Stroke had meant to say Nightmare Moon or Nyx, an impression made all the more confusing by how muddled these three characters are in this story. But apparently Luna has been transformed for some reason, that will doubtlessly be explained in a minute or two. However, at the moment, Twilight is more concerned with the second thing in the room:
>It was a little black filly with a unicorn horn, pegasus wings, purple hair, and a few lingering bandages lying lazily across her flank.
So as far as I can tell, some sort of magic was done, which took whatever was left of Nightmare Moon out of Nyx, leaving only the filly part of her. The remaining Nightmare Moon was probably absorbed into Luna, which somehow made her taller and gave her prettier hair. I'm beginning to wonder if Peen Stroke didn't just plagiarize this whole story from something his seven year old sister came up with.
Anyway, Twilight runs and hugs Nyx. Admirably, Peen Stroke manages to write this without having everypony burst into tears. After this, we get a brief summation of what Luna did exactly, which seems to be more or less in line with my assumptions:
>“I took back what was mine,” Luna answered with kindness, rather than cruelty. “The power Nyx possessed was never her own. Nexus’s spell gave her the portions of my power that remained in the shreds and supplemented what was missing by drawing in raw magic from Equestria itself. I took most of that magic for my own, since it was mine to begin with, and dispelled what remained, leaving Nyx the way she was before the cult ponynapped her.
I'm still not entirely clear on what that makes Nyx exactly, but at this point who cares. It looks like she's no longer Nightmare Moon, and that's the important thing. Luna is now even more Luna than she was before, and Nyx can presumably finish out the rest of her childhood and live a normal life without Nightmare Moon's shadow hanging over her, or something. It still doesn't make a fuckton of sense, but it's about as satisfying an ending as you could possibly wrangle out of this steaming cauldron of diarrhea, so whatever; I'll accept it.
>“I also,” Luna continued, her gaze shifting to the passed out filly, “took back the memories that never should have been hers. The memories of being trapped in the moon and everything that preceded that, when she and I were truly one and the same. She will remember the facts about our shared past, but she will no longer know the torment of spending a millennium in banishment.
A simpler way to handle this problem would have been to just write a different story using a less ridiculous premise. Once again, I am baffled by these periodic insights that Peen Stroke has, which clearly demonstrate that he understands where the flaws in his story are, yet rather than correcting those flaws he chooses to simply explain them away.
Also noteworthy is that Luna specifies that Nyx will still retain the memories of her time as Nightmare Moon. So, while she won't remember any of the stuff that happened to Luna 1000 years ago, she will still have to live with all of the ridiculous choices she made. So, while it looks like she has been given a "happily ever after" ending that she frankly doesn't deserve, she still has to remember what a massive cunt she was. That's some justice, I suppose.
>She’ll also retain a few key memories from the day of the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago, mostly because of how closely those memories are intertwined with her memories of her school play and the following evening.
I don't quite follow the logic here, but whatever; I'll accept it.
And now, at long last, we finally embark upon the most appropriately titled chapter in this entire text:
Chapter 21: The End of the Nightmare
Ever the master of suspense, Peen Stroke chooses to keep Luna's final judgement obfuscated for a bit longer. Instead, we join Twilight, who is pacing nervously outside the locked door of the throne room, listening to the muffled sounds coming from within. She is able to keep herself calm for a few minutes, and then concludes that Nyx is being sent to the moon, and starts banging on the door as loudly as she can.
We get some more valuable insight into Twilight's wine-addled autistic mind, which mostly consists of more insane ranting about the moon. I'm hoping that this will be the last time the moon is mentioned in this story, but I'm not holding my breath.
Anyway, eventually Celestia opens the door, but before she can get a word out, Twilight explodes into another insane rant about the moon. Welp, that hope lasted all of three seconds. She begins screeching and yelling and using magic to throw chunks of rock at the Princess, who eventually has to magically bitch slap her into submission. It is at this point that Celestia calmly explains that Nyx has not been sent to the moon. Well shit, at least we got to the bottom of that mystery.
As it turns out, the story ends the way I assumed it would probably end right from page one: Nyx has been miraculously transformed from Nightmare Moon back into Nyx again; as in, she is once more an annoying little filly. However, Peen Stroke still manages to make it confusing and weird:
>At the far end of the room stood Princess Luna, but she had undergone a transformation. She had grown as tall and slender as Celestia. Her own starfield of a mane had also transformed. Nightmare Moon’s mane could be described as a dark night with a faint twinkling of stars. Luna’s old mane was a clear summer’s night. Her new mane, however, was the night sky at its finest. Millions of stars, nebulae, and other wonders that were normally only visible through a telescope could be glimpsed within her mane. It was a living tapestry.
The question of how or why Luna underwent a transformation is not immediately answered, nor is it apparent why this is what the scene focuses on. At first I thought "Luna" was a typo, and that Peen Stroke had meant to say Nightmare Moon or Nyx, an impression made all the more confusing by how muddled these three characters are in this story. But apparently Luna has been transformed for some reason, that will doubtlessly be explained in a minute or two. However, at the moment, Twilight is more concerned with the second thing in the room:
>It was a little black filly with a unicorn horn, pegasus wings, purple hair, and a few lingering bandages lying lazily across her flank.
So as far as I can tell, some sort of magic was done, which took whatever was left of Nightmare Moon out of Nyx, leaving only the filly part of her. The remaining Nightmare Moon was probably absorbed into Luna, which somehow made her taller and gave her prettier hair. I'm beginning to wonder if Peen Stroke didn't just plagiarize this whole story from something his seven year old sister came up with.
Anyway, Twilight runs and hugs Nyx. Admirably, Peen Stroke manages to write this without having everypony burst into tears. After this, we get a brief summation of what Luna did exactly, which seems to be more or less in line with my assumptions:
>“I took back what was mine,” Luna answered with kindness, rather than cruelty. “The power Nyx possessed was never her own. Nexus’s spell gave her the portions of my power that remained in the shreds and supplemented what was missing by drawing in raw magic from Equestria itself. I took most of that magic for my own, since it was mine to begin with, and dispelled what remained, leaving Nyx the way she was before the cult ponynapped her.
I'm still not entirely clear on what that makes Nyx exactly, but at this point who cares. It looks like she's no longer Nightmare Moon, and that's the important thing. Luna is now even more Luna than she was before, and Nyx can presumably finish out the rest of her childhood and live a normal life without Nightmare Moon's shadow hanging over her, or something. It still doesn't make a fuckton of sense, but it's about as satisfying an ending as you could possibly wrangle out of this steaming cauldron of diarrhea, so whatever; I'll accept it.
>“I also,” Luna continued, her gaze shifting to the passed out filly, “took back the memories that never should have been hers. The memories of being trapped in the moon and everything that preceded that, when she and I were truly one and the same. She will remember the facts about our shared past, but she will no longer know the torment of spending a millennium in banishment.
A simpler way to handle this problem would have been to just write a different story using a less ridiculous premise. Once again, I am baffled by these periodic insights that Peen Stroke has, which clearly demonstrate that he understands where the flaws in his story are, yet rather than correcting those flaws he chooses to simply explain them away.
Also noteworthy is that Luna specifies that Nyx will still retain the memories of her time as Nightmare Moon. So, while she won't remember any of the stuff that happened to Luna 1000 years ago, she will still have to live with all of the ridiculous choices she made. So, while it looks like she has been given a "happily ever after" ending that she frankly doesn't deserve, she still has to remember what a massive cunt she was. That's some justice, I suppose.
>She’ll also retain a few key memories from the day of the Summer Sun Celebration two years ago, mostly because of how closely those memories are intertwined with her memories of her school play and the following evening.
I don't quite follow the logic here, but whatever; I'll accept it.
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>>263266
As to the subject of punishment, Luna's decision is again more or less what I was expecting. She concludes that, because Nyx ultimately repented for her actions and did what she could to set them right, that she deserves to just walk, or as she puts it, "deserves a chance to redeem herself." However, Luna warns, she's not off the hook entirely: because she still sort of looks like Nightmare Moon, she may have to deal with the occasional odd pony who will randomly attack her because of that stigma. However, even this isn't that big a deal, because due to Nyx still being an alicorn for some reason, she is far less susceptible to physical damage. Also, Celestia assures Twilight that she can write a letter and have her intervene in the event that Nyx ever needs any serious protection.
So, basically, after all that, she's free to go, and gets an assurance of royal protection from future bullying. Sounds almost too good to be true, right? Oh, but wait; the other shoe is just about to drop:
>“No,” Luna stated firmly, her lips bending down in a frown. “There is one other part of her punishment, and it involves you, Twilight Sparkle.”
Oh boy, here it comes! I have a feeling that somepony is about to get a serious lunar spanking...
>“Twilight Sparkle, I hereby place Nyx in your care. You shall be her legal guardian, and it will be your responsibility to ensure that she never again repeats her crimes. You shall watch her as she grows up. I want you to ensure she laughs, learns, lives, and has friends. I ask that you help her enjoy the childhood that was almost lost to her and make sure she becomes the mare she wants to be.”
Wow, that's pretty harsh. Those pony princesses sure run a tight ship. Seriously; if I ever find that fabled portal to Equestria, I am going to commit sooooo many rapes. They just let everyone off the hook for everything over there.
Anyway, that pretty much wraps up the story. Any sane writer would probably just end the chapter here, toss in a quick epilogue that shows Nyx frolicking in a dewey meadow with her friends again while Twilight makes them lemonade or some shit and call it good. So I guess we're just about done here then. Lol psych. This is Peen Stroke we're talking about, so we've still got a good 10,000 words of autism yet to go.
>Tears rolled down Twilight’s cheeks, and she made no effort to stop them. She was too happy to care.
Damn, almost made it through an entire subchapter without somepony crying about something. Oh well, maybe next time.
Anyway, at long last, it looks like we've finally entered something resembling denouement. Luna and Celestia, their work apparently done here, go back to Canterlot. Twilight goes back home for I guess the first time in forever. Spike, who probably has been wondering where the fuck she's been, is asleep, and Twilight elects not to wake him, preferring to devote her attention to Nyx. She takes her upstairs to put her to bed, but she wakes up suddenly, and is confused to see that she is back in her child's body.
Twilight explains what happened to her, and Peen Stroke admirably manages to accomplish this without tediously recapping most of the shit we just read. Nyx announces that she is confused. She can remember events that happened, but she doesn't remember her thoughts or why she did the things that she did. This is probably just as well, since she never seemed to have any idea why she did any of the things she did to begin with.
Anyway, there's some more saccharine tripe after this. Twilight explains to Nyx that the closest thing to a punishment she is going to receive is to live with Twilight and be her daughter forever and ever and ever. They hug, they giggle, they cry tears of laughter and joy, they kiss, they make out, what have you. Blecch, as Spike would probably say.
>It was the kind of fun both of them had been missing. Twilight knew Nyx would grow up eventually, that someday she would once again become a tall, regal alicorn with enough power to move the sun and moon. But for the moment, she was just happy to have her daughter back, to be able to enjoy raising and caring for Nyx for longer than just a few months.
Somehow, even after all of the confusion has been resolved, I still manage to be confused. All of Nyx's alicorn magic, which if I understand the text correctly belonged to Luna and not to Nyx, has been removed and reabsorbed into Luna. Yet, somehow, she is still an all-powerful alicorn who will one day grow up to be as powerful as Celestia and Luna. Shouldn't she be just a regular-ass unicorn now? Or, for that matter, since she was basically a chimera created from Luna's evil magic and patched together with extra magic from the Everfree, should she even be alive right now? Seems like having half of your soul removed ought to have at least some effect beyond causing you to simply revert back to childhood. But whatever, who cares.
Oh yes, and one more thing:
Nyx:
>“I know Princess Luna already gave me her judgment, and I'm glad to be a filly again, but… well… I did do a lot of really bad things. So, I was wondering, and if you say yes I promise I won’t get mad, but… am I grounded?”
No, Nyx, assures Twilight, laughing. After usurping the throne, screwing with the laws of physics, incarcerating and torturing all of your friends for literally no good reason, and setting in motion a series of events that nearly ended with Twilight's actual death, you are not even fucking grounded.
Seriously, I need to find that portal to Equestria. I will be the most prolific criminal they have ever seen. I am going to just walk around Ponyville flipping over carts and spray painting giant dicks on the sides of buildings and shitting on the sidewalks of Manehattan and sexually harassing every mare I come across. Ten bucks says the worst thing that happens to me is a stern lecture and fifteen minutes of time-out. And I'll be out with good behavior in five.
As to the subject of punishment, Luna's decision is again more or less what I was expecting. She concludes that, because Nyx ultimately repented for her actions and did what she could to set them right, that she deserves to just walk, or as she puts it, "deserves a chance to redeem herself." However, Luna warns, she's not off the hook entirely: because she still sort of looks like Nightmare Moon, she may have to deal with the occasional odd pony who will randomly attack her because of that stigma. However, even this isn't that big a deal, because due to Nyx still being an alicorn for some reason, she is far less susceptible to physical damage. Also, Celestia assures Twilight that she can write a letter and have her intervene in the event that Nyx ever needs any serious protection.
So, basically, after all that, she's free to go, and gets an assurance of royal protection from future bullying. Sounds almost too good to be true, right? Oh, but wait; the other shoe is just about to drop:
>“No,” Luna stated firmly, her lips bending down in a frown. “There is one other part of her punishment, and it involves you, Twilight Sparkle.”
Oh boy, here it comes! I have a feeling that somepony is about to get a serious lunar spanking...
>“Twilight Sparkle, I hereby place Nyx in your care. You shall be her legal guardian, and it will be your responsibility to ensure that she never again repeats her crimes. You shall watch her as she grows up. I want you to ensure she laughs, learns, lives, and has friends. I ask that you help her enjoy the childhood that was almost lost to her and make sure she becomes the mare she wants to be.”
Wow, that's pretty harsh. Those pony princesses sure run a tight ship. Seriously; if I ever find that fabled portal to Equestria, I am going to commit sooooo many rapes. They just let everyone off the hook for everything over there.
Anyway, that pretty much wraps up the story. Any sane writer would probably just end the chapter here, toss in a quick epilogue that shows Nyx frolicking in a dewey meadow with her friends again while Twilight makes them lemonade or some shit and call it good. So I guess we're just about done here then. Lol psych. This is Peen Stroke we're talking about, so we've still got a good 10,000 words of autism yet to go.
>Tears rolled down Twilight’s cheeks, and she made no effort to stop them. She was too happy to care.
Damn, almost made it through an entire subchapter without somepony crying about something. Oh well, maybe next time.
Anyway, at long last, it looks like we've finally entered something resembling denouement. Luna and Celestia, their work apparently done here, go back to Canterlot. Twilight goes back home for I guess the first time in forever. Spike, who probably has been wondering where the fuck she's been, is asleep, and Twilight elects not to wake him, preferring to devote her attention to Nyx. She takes her upstairs to put her to bed, but she wakes up suddenly, and is confused to see that she is back in her child's body.
Twilight explains what happened to her, and Peen Stroke admirably manages to accomplish this without tediously recapping most of the shit we just read. Nyx announces that she is confused. She can remember events that happened, but she doesn't remember her thoughts or why she did the things that she did. This is probably just as well, since she never seemed to have any idea why she did any of the things she did to begin with.
Anyway, there's some more saccharine tripe after this. Twilight explains to Nyx that the closest thing to a punishment she is going to receive is to live with Twilight and be her daughter forever and ever and ever. They hug, they giggle, they cry tears of laughter and joy, they kiss, they make out, what have you. Blecch, as Spike would probably say.
>It was the kind of fun both of them had been missing. Twilight knew Nyx would grow up eventually, that someday she would once again become a tall, regal alicorn with enough power to move the sun and moon. But for the moment, she was just happy to have her daughter back, to be able to enjoy raising and caring for Nyx for longer than just a few months.
Somehow, even after all of the confusion has been resolved, I still manage to be confused. All of Nyx's alicorn magic, which if I understand the text correctly belonged to Luna and not to Nyx, has been removed and reabsorbed into Luna. Yet, somehow, she is still an all-powerful alicorn who will one day grow up to be as powerful as Celestia and Luna. Shouldn't she be just a regular-ass unicorn now? Or, for that matter, since she was basically a chimera created from Luna's evil magic and patched together with extra magic from the Everfree, should she even be alive right now? Seems like having half of your soul removed ought to have at least some effect beyond causing you to simply revert back to childhood. But whatever, who cares.
Oh yes, and one more thing:
Nyx:
>“I know Princess Luna already gave me her judgment, and I'm glad to be a filly again, but… well… I did do a lot of really bad things. So, I was wondering, and if you say yes I promise I won’t get mad, but… am I grounded?”
No, Nyx, assures Twilight, laughing. After usurping the throne, screwing with the laws of physics, incarcerating and torturing all of your friends for literally no good reason, and setting in motion a series of events that nearly ended with Twilight's actual death, you are not even fucking grounded.
Seriously, I need to find that portal to Equestria. I will be the most prolific criminal they have ever seen. I am going to just walk around Ponyville flipping over carts and spray painting giant dicks on the sides of buildings and shitting on the sidewalks of Manehattan and sexually harassing every mare I come across. Ten bucks says the worst thing that happens to me is a stern lecture and fifteen minutes of time-out. And I'll be out with good behavior in five.
File (): 56142E32EFE53446FCB6FCE46157A70F-73143.png (71.4 KB, 900x1149, Nyx_cutie_mark_by_alexlayer.png)
>>263268
Again, the story could have probably ended there, but for some reason it keeps on going.
The next morning, Twilight awakens to a letter being belched up by Spike. At this point I've completely lost track of where exactly every character has been or for how long, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time Twilight has been home in awhile. However, Spike greets her casually, as if she were just returning from an extended business trip or something. She informs him that Nyx has returned, without really bothering to explain any of the details to him. However, Spike, being the eternal house nigger that he is, accepts most of this with little protest, and agrees to go upstairs and wake Nyx up. A moment later he comes downstairs again, alarmed to see that Nyx has once again been transformed into a harmless filly.
At this point, the conversation becomes tedious. We've already know what Nyx's new situation is, because we directly witnessed the exchange between Twilight and Celestia. After this, we witnessed a conversation between Twilight and Nyx, in which the information that we already knew was conveyed to her. This at least served a narrative purpose, since Nyx was unconscious while her fate was being decided, and it was also handled succinctly so we didn't have to sit through any repetition of information we already knew. However, we now have Twilight explaining the situation to Spike, which means that at this point we are now on our third iteration of hearing all of this. To Peen Stroke's credit, he at least has the sense not to reiterate everything in detail, mostly giving us the quick rundown while assuring us that Spike has been given the full rundown. However, we have no need here for any rundown at all; we already know everything, and Spike isn't an important enough character that we need to have an entire scene illustrating that he had all this explained.
As I've said more than once in this analysis, there are some events in a story that are important enough that they need a full scene devoted to them, and other events that the reader still needs to know, but are insignificant and can be summed up in a paragraph or two. It's part of the author's job to sort out events in this manner, and to write out his scenes accordingly. Peen Stroke, unfortunately, tends to get this wrong a lot.
The castle infiltration scene earlier, where Twilight breaks into Nightmare Moon's underground stronghold? That's an event that should have been written out in detail, but was instead summarized in a few short paragraphs. The same thing goes for large portions of Nyx's childhood. Other events, such as Princess Luna explaining to Applejack how she intends to conduct interviews while remaining invisible, for instance, are completely frivolous yet have been given their own scenes. This scene is another example of this. Even if it's truncated down to the bare essentials as it is here, we still don't need an entire scene in which Twilight explains something to Spike that we already know, and have already had reiterated to another character.
In fact, this is one of those moments where it would be completely appropriate to jump forward in time a few days. We can probably guess what's going to happen: the next few days are going to be about Nyx and Twilight and Spike and the mane 6 and everyone else in Ponyville readjusting to life as usual. So do we really need a play by play of everything they did in that time? No, not at all. One way or the other, the main story arc is over: Nyx has stopped being Nightmare Moon, she's atoned for all of her sins kind of, the princesses are back, all has been forgiven, Nyx is back at home with her loving, neurotic, wine-guzzling mommy. As I've said multiple times now, the story is basically over. If something else interesting is going to happen, then jump forward to that. If not, then just end the fucking story for crying out fuck.
Anyway, this long and tedious scene just keeps going and getting more and more autistic. Twilight is making pancakes, when Spike freaks out because Nyx is a filly again. Twilight explains what happened. Spike goes off to clean the toilets or do some other kind of effeminate bullshit. Twilight goes back to making pancakes, when something else interrupts her. Turns out it was Nyx, screeching with delight. Looks like she finally got her cutie mark. Well, good for her. I can't quite visualize what a cutie mark for being an annoying, useless cunt would look like, but I'll admit I'm curious to see.
>Her cutie mark was a single, simple image: a night-blue kite shield which tapered off to a single point at the bottom and crested to a single point on top. The blue color was steely, with a slightly lighter-toned metallic highlight that, if Twilight wasn’t mistaken, almost looked like a narrow crescent moon.
Pic related. It's a completely generic mark that symbolizes absolutely nothing, so it's perfect for Nyx.
Alright. So, the little twat has her cutie mark now. The Nightmare Moon shit has been resolved. All of the messes Nyx made have been cleaned up. The Princesses are back, everyone's out of the dungeon, the cult is gone, Nyx and Twilight are okay again, order in Equestria has been restored. Nyx seems to have learned what I am going to generously call a lesson, and she has attained equilibrium and a shot at happiness. Every single (important) thread in the story has been resolved. Are we done yet? Is it over? Has this long, slow train wreck finally come to a screeching, merciful halt?
Nope, we're not even halfway through this 13,071 word final chapter yet. Holy fucking shitballs, this thing is just going to be pure torture right up to the end, isn't it? Fuck you, Peen Stroke, you sperm gargling quadrofaggot. Fuck you and the little pony you rode in on.
Stay tuned, folks. We'll be back with more of this exciting adventure.
Again, the story could have probably ended there, but for some reason it keeps on going.
The next morning, Twilight awakens to a letter being belched up by Spike. At this point I've completely lost track of where exactly every character has been or for how long, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time Twilight has been home in awhile. However, Spike greets her casually, as if she were just returning from an extended business trip or something. She informs him that Nyx has returned, without really bothering to explain any of the details to him. However, Spike, being the eternal house nigger that he is, accepts most of this with little protest, and agrees to go upstairs and wake Nyx up. A moment later he comes downstairs again, alarmed to see that Nyx has once again been transformed into a harmless filly.
At this point, the conversation becomes tedious. We've already know what Nyx's new situation is, because we directly witnessed the exchange between Twilight and Celestia. After this, we witnessed a conversation between Twilight and Nyx, in which the information that we already knew was conveyed to her. This at least served a narrative purpose, since Nyx was unconscious while her fate was being decided, and it was also handled succinctly so we didn't have to sit through any repetition of information we already knew. However, we now have Twilight explaining the situation to Spike, which means that at this point we are now on our third iteration of hearing all of this. To Peen Stroke's credit, he at least has the sense not to reiterate everything in detail, mostly giving us the quick rundown while assuring us that Spike has been given the full rundown. However, we have no need here for any rundown at all; we already know everything, and Spike isn't an important enough character that we need to have an entire scene illustrating that he had all this explained.
As I've said more than once in this analysis, there are some events in a story that are important enough that they need a full scene devoted to them, and other events that the reader still needs to know, but are insignificant and can be summed up in a paragraph or two. It's part of the author's job to sort out events in this manner, and to write out his scenes accordingly. Peen Stroke, unfortunately, tends to get this wrong a lot.
The castle infiltration scene earlier, where Twilight breaks into Nightmare Moon's underground stronghold? That's an event that should have been written out in detail, but was instead summarized in a few short paragraphs. The same thing goes for large portions of Nyx's childhood. Other events, such as Princess Luna explaining to Applejack how she intends to conduct interviews while remaining invisible, for instance, are completely frivolous yet have been given their own scenes. This scene is another example of this. Even if it's truncated down to the bare essentials as it is here, we still don't need an entire scene in which Twilight explains something to Spike that we already know, and have already had reiterated to another character.
In fact, this is one of those moments where it would be completely appropriate to jump forward in time a few days. We can probably guess what's going to happen: the next few days are going to be about Nyx and Twilight and Spike and the mane 6 and everyone else in Ponyville readjusting to life as usual. So do we really need a play by play of everything they did in that time? No, not at all. One way or the other, the main story arc is over: Nyx has stopped being Nightmare Moon, she's atoned for all of her sins kind of, the princesses are back, all has been forgiven, Nyx is back at home with her loving, neurotic, wine-guzzling mommy. As I've said multiple times now, the story is basically over. If something else interesting is going to happen, then jump forward to that. If not, then just end the fucking story for crying out fuck.
Anyway, this long and tedious scene just keeps going and getting more and more autistic. Twilight is making pancakes, when Spike freaks out because Nyx is a filly again. Twilight explains what happened. Spike goes off to clean the toilets or do some other kind of effeminate bullshit. Twilight goes back to making pancakes, when something else interrupts her. Turns out it was Nyx, screeching with delight. Looks like she finally got her cutie mark. Well, good for her. I can't quite visualize what a cutie mark for being an annoying, useless cunt would look like, but I'll admit I'm curious to see.
>Her cutie mark was a single, simple image: a night-blue kite shield which tapered off to a single point at the bottom and crested to a single point on top. The blue color was steely, with a slightly lighter-toned metallic highlight that, if Twilight wasn’t mistaken, almost looked like a narrow crescent moon.
Pic related. It's a completely generic mark that symbolizes absolutely nothing, so it's perfect for Nyx.
Alright. So, the little twat has her cutie mark now. The Nightmare Moon shit has been resolved. All of the messes Nyx made have been cleaned up. The Princesses are back, everyone's out of the dungeon, the cult is gone, Nyx and Twilight are okay again, order in Equestria has been restored. Nyx seems to have learned what I am going to generously call a lesson, and she has attained equilibrium and a shot at happiness. Every single (important) thread in the story has been resolved. Are we done yet? Is it over? Has this long, slow train wreck finally come to a screeching, merciful halt?
Nope, we're not even halfway through this 13,071 word final chapter yet. Holy fucking shitballs, this thing is just going to be pure torture right up to the end, isn't it? Fuck you, Peen Stroke, you sperm gargling quadrofaggot. Fuck you and the little pony you rode in on.
Stay tuned, folks. We'll be back with more of this exciting adventure.
>>263272
Thank you. But I want to once again emphasize that we are not quite done yet. This train wreck still drags on for another half a chapter or so. This is like that final excruciating three minutes of a race, where you can see the finish line but you still have to drag your tired flabby ass across the remaining distance to get there.
But we're almost there, and that's what's important.
Thank you. But I want to once again emphasize that we are not quite done yet. This train wreck still drags on for another half a chapter or so. This is like that final excruciating three minutes of a race, where you can see the finish line but you still have to drag your tired flabby ass across the remaining distance to get there.
But we're almost there, and that's what's important.
>>263273
Knowing Peen Stroke it's probably another 5 or so rundowns of why Nyx is a filly to all of Twilight's friends.
>>263266
For me, frankly speaking, Luna "taking back what's hers" was an actually good plot point. It's never explained in the show why Luna, who's over a thousand years old, is almost a head shorter than her sister beyond "she's the younger sister." It leaves only three possibilities: alicorns grow like reptiles, Celestia and Luna are "barely adults" and the latter hasn't had her final growth spurt, or Luna got stunted from not having anything to eat on the moon. I've always found "tall and slender as Celestia" as preferable because it reinforces the idea of diarchy rather than Celestia still ordering her sister about.
>>263268
>After usurping the throne, screwing with the laws of physics, incarcerating and torturing all of your friends for literally no good reason, and setting in motion a series of events that nearly ended with Twilight's actual death, you are not even fucking grounded.
It really puts the series finale into perspective. Golly never did half the things Nyx did yet she's turned into a living statue which is arguably a far worse punishment than being moon'd. I wonder if Peen Stroke was justifiably upset about it like /mlp/ was, but considering his clouded awareness he probably thinks the finale was great like every other consoomer.
Knowing Peen Stroke it's probably another 5 or so rundowns of why Nyx is a filly to all of Twilight's friends.
>>263266
For me, frankly speaking, Luna "taking back what's hers" was an actually good plot point. It's never explained in the show why Luna, who's over a thousand years old, is almost a head shorter than her sister beyond "she's the younger sister." It leaves only three possibilities: alicorns grow like reptiles, Celestia and Luna are "barely adults" and the latter hasn't had her final growth spurt, or Luna got stunted from not having anything to eat on the moon. I've always found "tall and slender as Celestia" as preferable because it reinforces the idea of diarchy rather than Celestia still ordering her sister about.
>>263268
>After usurping the throne, screwing with the laws of physics, incarcerating and torturing all of your friends for literally no good reason, and setting in motion a series of events that nearly ended with Twilight's actual death, you are not even fucking grounded.
It really puts the series finale into perspective. Golly never did half the things Nyx did yet she's turned into a living statue which is arguably a far worse punishment than being moon'd. I wonder if Peen Stroke was justifiably upset about it like /mlp/ was, but considering his clouded awareness he probably thinks the finale was great like every other consoomer.
>>263271
Someone trying to be charitable could say that mark represents protection and the moon since it's a shield with a fraction of the moon on it, and it fits her since she protects her friends and was made from a fraction of NMM magic...
which was removed from her with no ill effects (Would it kill peen stroke to recolour her or take the wings away?)
god this story is shite.
Also
An ex-brony friend of mine browsed Fimfiction today, saw something he considered funny, and sent me these three shit stories:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/460688/the-blue-fox
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/451029/ultimate-equestria
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/455296/the-symbol-of-peace
along with a message saying "All of these have more upvotes than your story. Isn't democracy great?"
Crossovers might just be the lowest form of fanfiction out there. At least emotional porn meant to turn on a dried-up cunt's motherly feelings has to actually contain porn meant to squeeze those feelings out of its stupid women fans. To make a crossover fan like your work, all you have to do is have familiar elements show up in another familiar liked setting.
It's so fucking lazy. Wow, you photoshopped The Omnitrix into a screenshot of Equestria, along with a photoshopped image of Krystal from Star Fox fucking Rainbow Dash. That'll make the coom-consoomers happy. God, I hate this planet sometimes. I'm glad I'm making my indie shit for a superior niche audience.
Someone trying to be charitable could say that mark represents protection and the moon since it's a shield with a fraction of the moon on it, and it fits her since she protects her friends and was made from a fraction of NMM magic...
which was removed from her with no ill effects (Would it kill peen stroke to recolour her or take the wings away?)
god this story is shite.
Also
An ex-brony friend of mine browsed Fimfiction today, saw something he considered funny, and sent me these three shit stories:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/460688/the-blue-fox
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/451029/ultimate-equestria
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/455296/the-symbol-of-peace
along with a message saying "All of these have more upvotes than your story. Isn't democracy great?"
Crossovers might just be the lowest form of fanfiction out there. At least emotional porn meant to turn on a dried-up cunt's motherly feelings has to actually contain porn meant to squeeze those feelings out of its stupid women fans. To make a crossover fan like your work, all you have to do is have familiar elements show up in another familiar liked setting.
It's so fucking lazy. Wow, you photoshopped The Omnitrix into a screenshot of Equestria, along with a photoshopped image of Krystal from Star Fox fucking Rainbow Dash. That'll make the coom-consoomers happy. God, I hate this planet sometimes. I'm glad I'm making my indie shit for a superior niche audience.
>>262453
So due to not being prepared and having to prepare for the corona virus, I've been busy and just not focused on answering this. But now I'm back.
I think basically, I like this post but and agree sort of. Like okay, describing event is easier to do if those events were simple to plan. That's waht I interpret what you are saying. Right, Sunset going eric-mode is easy because obviously most of these character will act on instinct go flight or fight. It is not super hard to make sucha scene believable due to it just being sunset spraying bullets in some and others running away. Meanwhile something that requires intrisicate knowledge of cahracters and their relationships is harder to plan.
What differe these two scenes apart is the plan right? The complexity in the plan. I don't take any pleasure from saying this but you're making a wrong conclusion probably because of some sort of association thingy.
Like, its the plan that lack the complexity since we can both agree on that both of your examples and scenes have descripion in them, it is just the substance that is the hard part.
But I think you make the wrong conclusion that action scenes either will always have worse or less complex plans than drama scenes, or that one cannot fake a drama scene. You might not hold these standpoints, just from my perspective, not trying to project. I disagree with the first one but I can sort of understand the other.
So an for the first point and action scene with complexity in its plan woul be death notes minds games. I disagree with E;R that the main allure with Death Note was its characters because, while they were good, the mind games is what i know I came for because they were good and really outshined the characters in their own show if those mind games hadn't been apart of them. Those are also what i would call action scenes due to them being very much mechnical and not, I don't know perhaps vaguely defined here, emotional as drama scenes are(?)
Anyway, the second idea that drama or cahractrization cannot be faked, I would argue that Past Sin's popularity has proven it can. Yourself pointed out how overly emotionally they reacted to some of these scenes.
The only possible thing I could come up with was that you mean that fake characterization cannot hold up under scrutiny while mediocre action scene can still be believable while completely dull and unintresting.
Also, I also have also been dragged by my normie friends to watch garbage like this, otherwise I wouldn't never end up watching these films at all. Then again there are few things that I watch these days, I don't even wathc anime anymore because I have started to loathe how weebs know more about japanese culture than they do about their own and its really just, mostly, the same liberal garbage I get anywhere else.
>>263219
One of the best posts I have read this year. Thank you.
>>263198
This one is great as well. Solid commantary.
>>263273
Among the many people who inspire me, it keeps repeating that they stick with what they are doing till the end.
So due to not being prepared and having to prepare for the corona virus, I've been busy and just not focused on answering this. But now I'm back.
I think basically, I like this post but and agree sort of. Like okay, describing event is easier to do if those events were simple to plan. That's waht I interpret what you are saying. Right, Sunset going eric-mode is easy because obviously most of these character will act on instinct go flight or fight. It is not super hard to make sucha scene believable due to it just being sunset spraying bullets in some and others running away. Meanwhile something that requires intrisicate knowledge of cahracters and their relationships is harder to plan.
What differe these two scenes apart is the plan right? The complexity in the plan. I don't take any pleasure from saying this but you're making a wrong conclusion probably because of some sort of association thingy.
Like, its the plan that lack the complexity since we can both agree on that both of your examples and scenes have descripion in them, it is just the substance that is the hard part.
But I think you make the wrong conclusion that action scenes either will always have worse or less complex plans than drama scenes, or that one cannot fake a drama scene. You might not hold these standpoints, just from my perspective, not trying to project. I disagree with the first one but I can sort of understand the other.
So an for the first point and action scene with complexity in its plan woul be death notes minds games. I disagree with E;R that the main allure with Death Note was its characters because, while they were good, the mind games is what i know I came for because they were good and really outshined the characters in their own show if those mind games hadn't been apart of them. Those are also what i would call action scenes due to them being very much mechnical and not, I don't know perhaps vaguely defined here, emotional as drama scenes are(?)
Anyway, the second idea that drama or cahractrization cannot be faked, I would argue that Past Sin's popularity has proven it can. Yourself pointed out how overly emotionally they reacted to some of these scenes.
The only possible thing I could come up with was that you mean that fake characterization cannot hold up under scrutiny while mediocre action scene can still be believable while completely dull and unintresting.
Also, I also have also been dragged by my normie friends to watch garbage like this, otherwise I wouldn't never end up watching these films at all. Then again there are few things that I watch these days, I don't even wathc anime anymore because I have started to loathe how weebs know more about japanese culture than they do about their own and its really just, mostly, the same liberal garbage I get anywhere else.
>>263219
One of the best posts I have read this year. Thank you.
>>263198
This one is great as well. Solid commantary.
>>263273
Among the many people who inspire me, it keeps repeating that they stick with what they are doing till the end.
>>263389
Sometimes, I wish I didn't let MLP forumsfags 6 years ago talk me out of making Silver half-dragon.
Because a plot point in an old "Star the Dragoncorn" draft I was reading (Star and Twilight help make dragon lands not shit) would have been really interesting.
Sometimes, I wish I didn't let MLP forumsfags 6 years ago talk me out of making Silver half-dragon.
Because a plot point in an old "Star the Dragoncorn" draft I was reading (Star and Twilight help make dragon lands not shit) would have been really interesting.
File (): 7448A386130551C00FB481ADAA0F0B31-98499.jpg (96.2 KB, 900x675, spy_spyerton_mcspy_by_tealdragon44_d4bq5l5-fullview.jpg)
>>263271
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah.
Nyx has her cutie mark now, but unfortunately it's as vague and poorly defined as she is. She is happy to have her mark, but she doesn't know what it means. So, Twilight decides to write a letter to Princess Celestia asking her about it. She has her dutiful house nigger Spike take dictation like the lady secretary that he is, and then belch it off into the quantum foam, or however the fuck it works.
While they await the Princess' response, Twilight goes back to making her fucking pancakes. While she cooks, Spike and Nyx sit around and deliberate over what her mark means. Fortunately, Spike belches up a scroll before the autism can drag on for too long.
Unfortunately, Celestia has absolutely nothing useful to say. She simply explains that the mark appeared on Nyx's flank at some point during the trial, but she was unable to see it because of the fucking bandages she had on, and as such she doesn't know what it means. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
After we literally just read the letter in its entirety, Twilight then summarizes its contents to Spike. Despite its containing absolutely no valuable information, Twilight seems to have nonetheless deduced the mark's meaning. Apparently, it means that Nyx's talent is protecting other ponies. Well, ain't that great. From what I've read about her so far, I'd have guessed that her special talent involves shitting in my eyes, ears and mouth, but I guess protecting other ponies looks a little better in print.
Anyway, this revelation is followed by some retarded discussion about the possibility of Nyx having to fight monsters, which Twilight forbids her to do. They all go back to eating fucking pancakes, and then suddenly there is a knock at the door. Oh look, it's Pinkie Pie. She wants to know why Twilight isn't at the party. What party? Twilight would like to know.
Then, she looks outside and sees that there has been a giant, mardi-gras level party going on outside her window the entire time they were eating breakfast, and apparently none of them noticed. It's Pinkie Pie's official "The Princesses are Back" party. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. Anyway, Pinkie invites her to the party, Twilight declines on the grounds that it might be a bit awkward for Nyx to attend a party celebrating the happy fact that her reign of terror is finally over, and Pinkie leaves.
Fast forward a couple of days. Nyx has mostly been having fun with Twilight™, Spike™, Owloyisius™, and Peewee™. There have been several visitors, mostly angry Ponyville residents who had gotten wind of how the Princesses' idea of justice for the cataclysm Nyx had pointlessly unleashed on the entire country amounted to sentencing her to return to her previous life with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. The main questions on their mind are "What the fuck?" and also, "What the shit?" Well, Twilight has been in no mood to answer, so mostly she's just been telling them to get fucked and slamming the door in their faces. After that, she usually takes some time to assure Nyx that she does not, in fact, deserve any sort of punishment for the massive amounts of random destruction that she caused for no reason whatsoever, and that if anything, it is the innocent citizens of Ponyville who are the real assholes here.
At one point, three ponies show up intending to take Nyx away and put her in jail while they make a petition to Celestia to have her banished. Twilight solves this little problem by chasing them off, and then reading Nyx two bedtime stories instead of one, because the incident might have upset her and God forbid anything ever injure the fragile emotions of poor wittle Nyxie.
I have to ask: is Peen Stroke taking this somewhere, or is he actively trying to piss the reader off? I honestly can't tell if I'm being deliberately jerked around, or if the author unironically thinks this character is redeemed now. I get that forgiveness and the idea that everyone deserves a second chance is a recurring theme in the show. However, giving a villain a redemption is one thing; this is more like the author arguing that the villain did nothing wrong in the first place. Maybe it's not even that. This is like, the villain did wrong, but she said she was sorry, and also (we are assured) she had a troubled past, so that means not only is she forgiven but we should all feel sorry for her, and anyone who was victimized by her and did not receive recompense is just going to have to suck it up and move on.
Nyx is like one of those fragile snowflake kids whose parents coddle the fuck out of them, so they become emotionally unstable and throw a tantrum every time the slightest thing upsets them. The parents, meanwhile, expect everyone to just constantly put up with their kid's bullshit all the time, and get furious at anyone who won't.
Like I said, it's possible that the story is being deliberately constructed to make me feel this way about Nyx, and this is all just a big setup to have her finally do something to actually redeem herself. On the other hand though, it's quite plausible that Peen Stroke himself was/is one of those fragile little snowflake kids, and this story is a reflection of his actual worldview. At this juncture, I can't tell which one I think it is, but I suspect the latter.
From this story and the information in his fimfiction bio, we know a few things about him, and can infer the rest: he's probably a millennial, he's absolutely the most insufferable kind of brony, he has probably been prescribed Ritalin at one point in his life and may still be taking it, and he grew up in California. All of that sounds like a prescription for being a douchey snowflake with douchey liberal parents. Also, the quality of his writing so far has not led me to believe him capable of deliberately misleading the reader in order to take the story in a clever direction. But we shall see, I guess.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah.
Nyx has her cutie mark now, but unfortunately it's as vague and poorly defined as she is. She is happy to have her mark, but she doesn't know what it means. So, Twilight decides to write a letter to Princess Celestia asking her about it. She has her dutiful house nigger Spike take dictation like the lady secretary that he is, and then belch it off into the quantum foam, or however the fuck it works.
While they await the Princess' response, Twilight goes back to making her fucking pancakes. While she cooks, Spike and Nyx sit around and deliberate over what her mark means. Fortunately, Spike belches up a scroll before the autism can drag on for too long.
Unfortunately, Celestia has absolutely nothing useful to say. She simply explains that the mark appeared on Nyx's flank at some point during the trial, but she was unable to see it because of the fucking bandages she had on, and as such she doesn't know what it means. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
After we literally just read the letter in its entirety, Twilight then summarizes its contents to Spike. Despite its containing absolutely no valuable information, Twilight seems to have nonetheless deduced the mark's meaning. Apparently, it means that Nyx's talent is protecting other ponies. Well, ain't that great. From what I've read about her so far, I'd have guessed that her special talent involves shitting in my eyes, ears and mouth, but I guess protecting other ponies looks a little better in print.
Anyway, this revelation is followed by some retarded discussion about the possibility of Nyx having to fight monsters, which Twilight forbids her to do. They all go back to eating fucking pancakes, and then suddenly there is a knock at the door. Oh look, it's Pinkie Pie. She wants to know why Twilight isn't at the party. What party? Twilight would like to know.
Then, she looks outside and sees that there has been a giant, mardi-gras level party going on outside her window the entire time they were eating breakfast, and apparently none of them noticed. It's Pinkie Pie's official "The Princesses are Back" party. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. Anyway, Pinkie invites her to the party, Twilight declines on the grounds that it might be a bit awkward for Nyx to attend a party celebrating the happy fact that her reign of terror is finally over, and Pinkie leaves.
Fast forward a couple of days. Nyx has mostly been having fun with Twilight™, Spike™, Owloyisius™, and Peewee™. There have been several visitors, mostly angry Ponyville residents who had gotten wind of how the Princesses' idea of justice for the cataclysm Nyx had pointlessly unleashed on the entire country amounted to sentencing her to return to her previous life with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. The main questions on their mind are "What the fuck?" and also, "What the shit?" Well, Twilight has been in no mood to answer, so mostly she's just been telling them to get fucked and slamming the door in their faces. After that, she usually takes some time to assure Nyx that she does not, in fact, deserve any sort of punishment for the massive amounts of random destruction that she caused for no reason whatsoever, and that if anything, it is the innocent citizens of Ponyville who are the real assholes here.
At one point, three ponies show up intending to take Nyx away and put her in jail while they make a petition to Celestia to have her banished. Twilight solves this little problem by chasing them off, and then reading Nyx two bedtime stories instead of one, because the incident might have upset her and God forbid anything ever injure the fragile emotions of poor wittle Nyxie.
I have to ask: is Peen Stroke taking this somewhere, or is he actively trying to piss the reader off? I honestly can't tell if I'm being deliberately jerked around, or if the author unironically thinks this character is redeemed now. I get that forgiveness and the idea that everyone deserves a second chance is a recurring theme in the show. However, giving a villain a redemption is one thing; this is more like the author arguing that the villain did nothing wrong in the first place. Maybe it's not even that. This is like, the villain did wrong, but she said she was sorry, and also (we are assured) she had a troubled past, so that means not only is she forgiven but we should all feel sorry for her, and anyone who was victimized by her and did not receive recompense is just going to have to suck it up and move on.
Nyx is like one of those fragile snowflake kids whose parents coddle the fuck out of them, so they become emotionally unstable and throw a tantrum every time the slightest thing upsets them. The parents, meanwhile, expect everyone to just constantly put up with their kid's bullshit all the time, and get furious at anyone who won't.
Like I said, it's possible that the story is being deliberately constructed to make me feel this way about Nyx, and this is all just a big setup to have her finally do something to actually redeem herself. On the other hand though, it's quite plausible that Peen Stroke himself was/is one of those fragile little snowflake kids, and this story is a reflection of his actual worldview. At this juncture, I can't tell which one I think it is, but I suspect the latter.
From this story and the information in his fimfiction bio, we know a few things about him, and can infer the rest: he's probably a millennial, he's absolutely the most insufferable kind of brony, he has probably been prescribed Ritalin at one point in his life and may still be taking it, and he grew up in California. All of that sounds like a prescription for being a douchey snowflake with douchey liberal parents. Also, the quality of his writing so far has not led me to believe him capable of deliberately misleading the reader in order to take the story in a clever direction. But we shall see, I guess.
>>263522
Apparently, having two bedtime stories read to her kept Nyx awake for an inordinate amount of time, and as such she overslept the following morning. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. To her dismay, upon waking, she realizes that she is all alone in the house. Of course, being the insufferable twat that she is, her immediate response to this is to assume that she has been abandoned again, although I don't think I remember her ever being abandoned the first time. In any event, she manages to shake the thought out of her head just in time to hear a knock on the door.
In a lazy act of redundancy on the author's part, the pony at the door for the second time in a row is Pinkie Pie, and she's here to invite Nyx to (yet another) party. Apparently this event is titled the "Thanks-For-Saving-Ponyville-From-A-Bunch-Of-Scary-Monsters-party," and the guest of honor is Nyx (however, we are subjected to some inane dialog in which Pinkie forces Nyx to play a guessing game before this shocking truth is revealed).
>“Well duh. Yeah, Applejack and Rainbow Dash and Twilight and Fluttershy all helped, but you were the mare that really saved the day. You went and broke yourself into all those clones, and then you flew around helping ponies like an army of super heroes! You brought lightning down with big KA-CRACKS, and you bucked with some KA-POWS, and threw some of the monsters back into the forest with a NEEERRR-THOOOOM!!! It was so totally amazing!”
Author's OC accomplishes a stupendous feat, outshines the canon heroes and saves the day, and thus earns the respect and admiration of the canon heroes and gets a party thrown in her honor. Congratulations, Mr. P. You have officially planted your probably rainbow colored flag squarely in Mary Sue territory.
Anyway, Pinkie's autistic yammering is as annoying here as it has been elsewhere in the story, but she actually manages to one-up herself on absurdity by throwing Nyx onto her back, rearing up heigh-ho-Silver "pound me in the anus" Star-style, and galloping off to the party. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. I feel like there is a "yo dawg I herd you like ponies" Xzibit meme in there somewhere, but at this point I just can't even.
So, she goes to the fucking party. There's a big-ass cake shaped like a defeated Lupus Major, and nearly everyone in town has shown up to tell Nyx how totally awesome they think she is. Of course, the CMC and Twist (who is apparently once more an important character in this story) are all there too, and they immediately tackle Nyx off of Pinkie's back and start giggling and goofing around and whatnot. Nice to see that being locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason had no effect on any of them whatsoever.
Oh, but it gets even better. Since this is the first time Nyx has seen her friends since...you know what? I don't think she's actually even spoken to them since the day she imprisoned them. Weird, since apparently she's been home for days now. Anyway, the first thing she does is apologize for it.
>“Listen, I’m so sorry that I locked you in the dungeons. I really didn’t want to, but Spell Nexus convinced me that—”
So it looks like she's back to blaming Spell Nexus. How's that redemption coming along, you insipid little twat?
>“We know,” Apple Bloom reassured while she placed a hoof on Nyx’s shoulders. “It was scary, but Twilight told us why you had to lock us up.”
Perhaps she could tell me as well, because I'm still a little foggy on that particular detail.
>“I’m still really sorry, girls. I promise, I didn’t want to do it.”
Of course you didn't. It was probably some Puerto Rican guy who made you do it.
>Sweetie Belle was the next to come up beside Nyx, and she was wearing a comforting smile. “It’s okay, we’ve all forgiven you.”
Of course they've all forgiven her.
And, just like that, the subject is concluded. From there, it just devolves into the obligatory banal yammering over the fact that Nyx now has her retarded cutie mark. Also, it seems that the CMC were perfectly cool with Nyx just inducting Twist into the club without asking or informing them. I guess they use her as a waitress or some shit; it sounds like her job is mostly to bring them snacks.
They conclude the scene by beating the fuck out of a piñata.
The scene now cuts to later in the afternoon. They are all sitting around eating candy and shooting the shit. The CMC ask Nyx what it was like being an evil queen, and Nyx mostly complains about how the food was too fancy. It is at this point that Nyx notices that Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon have entered the party. She goes over to ask Twilight what the fuck them two wack-ass hoes are even doing here.
>“Do you remember what you did to them when you first became an adult?” Twilight asked, her tone becoming more parental and stern.
I actually don't remember her doing anything to them. I recall that she chewed them out briefly, but not much else. Let me go back and see.
Yeah, my recollection was correct. Literally all she does is call them out for sending her into the Everfree Forest that one time and for being mean to her as a filly. After that, Scootaloo distracts her and she then moves on to yelling at Cheerilee for whatever reason. Even though she apparently blames DT/SS for turning her into Nightmare Moon, she doesn't do anything except verbally abuse them. Meanwhile, her own friends she locked in a dungeon.
So anyway, she goes over to apologize for...whatever she's apologizing for, I guess. She doesn't explicitly say, she just says "I came over to say I'm sorry." The two of them are total cunts to her in return, she stalks angrily away, and that's that. Apparently, what we're supposed to take away from this is that Nyx has "grown" or something; as NM she would have disemboweled them, but apparently she's learned to control her temper.
I'm running out of space, will continue this thought in another post.
Apparently, having two bedtime stories read to her kept Nyx awake for an inordinate amount of time, and as such she overslept the following morning. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. To her dismay, upon waking, she realizes that she is all alone in the house. Of course, being the insufferable twat that she is, her immediate response to this is to assume that she has been abandoned again, although I don't think I remember her ever being abandoned the first time. In any event, she manages to shake the thought out of her head just in time to hear a knock on the door.
In a lazy act of redundancy on the author's part, the pony at the door for the second time in a row is Pinkie Pie, and she's here to invite Nyx to (yet another) party. Apparently this event is titled the "Thanks-For-Saving-Ponyville-From-A-Bunch-Of-Scary-Monsters-party," and the guest of honor is Nyx (however, we are subjected to some inane dialog in which Pinkie forces Nyx to play a guessing game before this shocking truth is revealed).
>“Well duh. Yeah, Applejack and Rainbow Dash and Twilight and Fluttershy all helped, but you were the mare that really saved the day. You went and broke yourself into all those clones, and then you flew around helping ponies like an army of super heroes! You brought lightning down with big KA-CRACKS, and you bucked with some KA-POWS, and threw some of the monsters back into the forest with a NEEERRR-THOOOOM!!! It was so totally amazing!”
Author's OC accomplishes a stupendous feat, outshines the canon heroes and saves the day, and thus earns the respect and admiration of the canon heroes and gets a party thrown in her honor. Congratulations, Mr. P. You have officially planted your probably rainbow colored flag squarely in Mary Sue territory.
Anyway, Pinkie's autistic yammering is as annoying here as it has been elsewhere in the story, but she actually manages to one-up herself on absurdity by throwing Nyx onto her back, rearing up heigh-ho-Silver "pound me in the anus" Star-style, and galloping off to the party. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. I feel like there is a "yo dawg I herd you like ponies" Xzibit meme in there somewhere, but at this point I just can't even.
So, she goes to the fucking party. There's a big-ass cake shaped like a defeated Lupus Major, and nearly everyone in town has shown up to tell Nyx how totally awesome they think she is. Of course, the CMC and Twist (who is apparently once more an important character in this story) are all there too, and they immediately tackle Nyx off of Pinkie's back and start giggling and goofing around and whatnot. Nice to see that being locked in a dungeon for two weeks for literally no reason had no effect on any of them whatsoever.
Oh, but it gets even better. Since this is the first time Nyx has seen her friends since...you know what? I don't think she's actually even spoken to them since the day she imprisoned them. Weird, since apparently she's been home for days now. Anyway, the first thing she does is apologize for it.
>“Listen, I’m so sorry that I locked you in the dungeons. I really didn’t want to, but Spell Nexus convinced me that—”
So it looks like she's back to blaming Spell Nexus. How's that redemption coming along, you insipid little twat?
>“We know,” Apple Bloom reassured while she placed a hoof on Nyx’s shoulders. “It was scary, but Twilight told us why you had to lock us up.”
Perhaps she could tell me as well, because I'm still a little foggy on that particular detail.
>“I’m still really sorry, girls. I promise, I didn’t want to do it.”
Of course you didn't. It was probably some Puerto Rican guy who made you do it.
>Sweetie Belle was the next to come up beside Nyx, and she was wearing a comforting smile. “It’s okay, we’ve all forgiven you.”
Of course they've all forgiven her.
And, just like that, the subject is concluded. From there, it just devolves into the obligatory banal yammering over the fact that Nyx now has her retarded cutie mark. Also, it seems that the CMC were perfectly cool with Nyx just inducting Twist into the club without asking or informing them. I guess they use her as a waitress or some shit; it sounds like her job is mostly to bring them snacks.
They conclude the scene by beating the fuck out of a piñata.
The scene now cuts to later in the afternoon. They are all sitting around eating candy and shooting the shit. The CMC ask Nyx what it was like being an evil queen, and Nyx mostly complains about how the food was too fancy. It is at this point that Nyx notices that Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon have entered the party. She goes over to ask Twilight what the fuck them two wack-ass hoes are even doing here.
>“Do you remember what you did to them when you first became an adult?” Twilight asked, her tone becoming more parental and stern.
I actually don't remember her doing anything to them. I recall that she chewed them out briefly, but not much else. Let me go back and see.
Yeah, my recollection was correct. Literally all she does is call them out for sending her into the Everfree Forest that one time and for being mean to her as a filly. After that, Scootaloo distracts her and she then moves on to yelling at Cheerilee for whatever reason. Even though she apparently blames DT/SS for turning her into Nightmare Moon, she doesn't do anything except verbally abuse them. Meanwhile, her own friends she locked in a dungeon.
So anyway, she goes over to apologize for...whatever she's apologizing for, I guess. She doesn't explicitly say, she just says "I came over to say I'm sorry." The two of them are total cunts to her in return, she stalks angrily away, and that's that. Apparently, what we're supposed to take away from this is that Nyx has "grown" or something; as NM she would have disemboweled them, but apparently she's learned to control her temper.
I'm running out of space, will continue this thought in another post.
File (): 6B3581D72072016F366E7F93D6097E78-1641818.png (1.6 MB, 962x863, 1584729775616.png)
>>263523
>Nyx furrowed her eyebrows and tried to fight the urge to flip Diamond Tiara upside down with her magic. It was a part of her old personality, her Nightmare Moon side, that remained despite her return to fillyhood. It was the same temper that made her lash out at her guards and servants when they disobeyed or questioned her. It was the same temper that made her want to strangle Spell Nexus’s scrawny neck for almost killing Twilight.
Once again, in attempting to present some sort of character growth on the part of Nyx, Peen Stroke instead ends up inadvertently proving how poorly-constructed this character was in the first place. Nyx has a temper? This is the first I've heard of it. I don't recall ever seeing her get irrationally angry with somepony, even as Nightmare Moon. Don't get me wrong, she's done plenty of things that I would consider irrational, but nothing suggests that having a violent temper is one of her major flaws.
>lash out at her guards and servants when they disobeyed or questioned her
When did she ever do this? She practically let Spell Nexus, who was her servant, run the whole show. Even to the extent that she meekly stood aside and let him order the imprisonment of her friends. And speaking of Nexus:
>It was the same temper that made her want to strangle Spell Nexus’s scrawny neck for almost killing Twilight.
Again, she basically stood aside and let this guy run the country as her regent even though he was not only her subordinate but was also clearly afraid of her. Yet despite this, he ordered Twilight's death without even consulting her, and meanwhile she was just up in her room sulking like a moody teenager. If she hadn't randomly glanced out the window Twilight would be dead at this point. Twilight, incidentally, didn't even seem that pissed off about it.
But apparently, since she is now able to take some mild verbal abuse from her old schoolyard bullies in stride, we are supposed to see this as significant character growth on her part. Hooray for Nyx! She learned a valuable lesson today. Just don't ask the author to explain what, if anything, that lesson actually is.
Anyway, after this bullshit concludes, we're back to Canterlot with Luna and Celestia. Their conversation here mostly focuses on hashing out details that needlessly add to the confusion of an already confusing point in the story. Apparently the citizens of Canterlot have assumed that Luna, somehow, defeated all the monsters, and that her transformation is a sign of her victory. However, they also blame Nyx for all of the bad stuff done by Nightmare Moon. So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the good things done by Nightmare Moon are being attributed to Luna, but the bad things are attributed to Nyx.
Not only does this not make a ton of sense just taken at face value, it gets even stranger when you dive deeper into it. Nyx would have been known in Ponyville, but Equestria at large could not have been expected to know the details of this particular story. All they would know is that suddenly Nightmare Moon reappeared and started causing trouble again. It would stand to reason that this event would do a significant amount of harm to Luna's reputation, since as far as the average Equestrian would know, Luna and Nightmare Moon are the same pony. Who among the average citizenry could be expected to know the name of a random filly living in some little bumfuck provincial town?
The thing about massive, world-changing events is that only a few people know the whole story; the mass population usually just knows bits and pieces, usually interspersed with rumors, exaggerations or outright falsehoods. News spreads, but it's usually like playing Telephone in elementary school: person A tells person B what actually happened, but person B mishears it, and passes on misinformation to person C, who embellishes the information with their own assumptions, and passes on an even more degraded version of the story to persons D, E and F. It goes on and on in this manner.
Ironically, this could have actually been used to great effect in this story. At around the time in the show that this story takes place in, one of the ongoing storylines was Luna trying to move on from her past as Nightmare Moon and get the citizens to see her as a good princess again. An event like this, where Nightmare Moon comes back but it's a different Nightmare Moon, only the citizens don't know this so they just assume it was Luna reverting back to her old ways, would probably undo most of the trust she's worked so hard to earn. It could have been a whole other angle to this story, one that could have been used to explore Luna's character in an interesting way. But of course, Peen Stroke remains as oblivious as ever to anything that might require him to actually think like a fucking writer.
Instead of delving into any of this, the Princesses now tediously discuss the party that we just read about. The focus here is on how apparently there are still a lot of ponies who are assblasted that Nyx was not punished severely enough, a sentiment which I can actually sympathize with. Among them are Shining Armor and Filthy Rich, neither of whom we've heard much about but both of whom were formerly brainwashed by Nyx's creeping crud.
And even this tiny amount of narrative potential is squandered. Instead of zeroing in even further on this idea, which could at least create some potentially interesting events, the princesses focus on what I'm sure everyone really wanted to know: how exactly did the spell that Luna used to take her power back work? And for God's sake, Peen Stroke, don't just sum it up generally; give us the full technical details, please.
pic unrelated, I just like it
>Nyx furrowed her eyebrows and tried to fight the urge to flip Diamond Tiara upside down with her magic. It was a part of her old personality, her Nightmare Moon side, that remained despite her return to fillyhood. It was the same temper that made her lash out at her guards and servants when they disobeyed or questioned her. It was the same temper that made her want to strangle Spell Nexus’s scrawny neck for almost killing Twilight.
Once again, in attempting to present some sort of character growth on the part of Nyx, Peen Stroke instead ends up inadvertently proving how poorly-constructed this character was in the first place. Nyx has a temper? This is the first I've heard of it. I don't recall ever seeing her get irrationally angry with somepony, even as Nightmare Moon. Don't get me wrong, she's done plenty of things that I would consider irrational, but nothing suggests that having a violent temper is one of her major flaws.
>lash out at her guards and servants when they disobeyed or questioned her
When did she ever do this? She practically let Spell Nexus, who was her servant, run the whole show. Even to the extent that she meekly stood aside and let him order the imprisonment of her friends. And speaking of Nexus:
>It was the same temper that made her want to strangle Spell Nexus’s scrawny neck for almost killing Twilight.
Again, she basically stood aside and let this guy run the country as her regent even though he was not only her subordinate but was also clearly afraid of her. Yet despite this, he ordered Twilight's death without even consulting her, and meanwhile she was just up in her room sulking like a moody teenager. If she hadn't randomly glanced out the window Twilight would be dead at this point. Twilight, incidentally, didn't even seem that pissed off about it.
But apparently, since she is now able to take some mild verbal abuse from her old schoolyard bullies in stride, we are supposed to see this as significant character growth on her part. Hooray for Nyx! She learned a valuable lesson today. Just don't ask the author to explain what, if anything, that lesson actually is.
Anyway, after this bullshit concludes, we're back to Canterlot with Luna and Celestia. Their conversation here mostly focuses on hashing out details that needlessly add to the confusion of an already confusing point in the story. Apparently the citizens of Canterlot have assumed that Luna, somehow, defeated all the monsters, and that her transformation is a sign of her victory. However, they also blame Nyx for all of the bad stuff done by Nightmare Moon. So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the good things done by Nightmare Moon are being attributed to Luna, but the bad things are attributed to Nyx.
Not only does this not make a ton of sense just taken at face value, it gets even stranger when you dive deeper into it. Nyx would have been known in Ponyville, but Equestria at large could not have been expected to know the details of this particular story. All they would know is that suddenly Nightmare Moon reappeared and started causing trouble again. It would stand to reason that this event would do a significant amount of harm to Luna's reputation, since as far as the average Equestrian would know, Luna and Nightmare Moon are the same pony. Who among the average citizenry could be expected to know the name of a random filly living in some little bumfuck provincial town?
The thing about massive, world-changing events is that only a few people know the whole story; the mass population usually just knows bits and pieces, usually interspersed with rumors, exaggerations or outright falsehoods. News spreads, but it's usually like playing Telephone in elementary school: person A tells person B what actually happened, but person B mishears it, and passes on misinformation to person C, who embellishes the information with their own assumptions, and passes on an even more degraded version of the story to persons D, E and F. It goes on and on in this manner.
Ironically, this could have actually been used to great effect in this story. At around the time in the show that this story takes place in, one of the ongoing storylines was Luna trying to move on from her past as Nightmare Moon and get the citizens to see her as a good princess again. An event like this, where Nightmare Moon comes back but it's a different Nightmare Moon, only the citizens don't know this so they just assume it was Luna reverting back to her old ways, would probably undo most of the trust she's worked so hard to earn. It could have been a whole other angle to this story, one that could have been used to explore Luna's character in an interesting way. But of course, Peen Stroke remains as oblivious as ever to anything that might require him to actually think like a fucking writer.
Instead of delving into any of this, the Princesses now tediously discuss the party that we just read about. The focus here is on how apparently there are still a lot of ponies who are assblasted that Nyx was not punished severely enough, a sentiment which I can actually sympathize with. Among them are Shining Armor and Filthy Rich, neither of whom we've heard much about but both of whom were formerly brainwashed by Nyx's creeping crud.
And even this tiny amount of narrative potential is squandered. Instead of zeroing in even further on this idea, which could at least create some potentially interesting events, the princesses focus on what I'm sure everyone really wanted to know: how exactly did the spell that Luna used to take her power back work? And for God's sake, Peen Stroke, don't just sum it up generally; give us the full technical details, please.
pic unrelated, I just like it
I'd normally get angry at fiction for this, not because it's schlock but because it promotes the moral diseases of redemption without any sort of effort and mean words being equivalent to (or worse in this instance!) bad actions. It may not be explicit but merely implicitly advocating these ideas is reinforcement in an era which explicitly forwards them. I wouldn't be surprised if Peen Stroke wound up writing for the show considering how those same problems sprung up from time to time (and the steady decline in general quality). Considering that the cultural impact of Past Sins is long since past I won't bother getting worked up over it (that would be giving it a further victory), but I will link this thread anytime the "book" is dredged up.
It should be noted that besides all the previous horrendous mistakes, Peen Stroke can't even get a basic plot structure right. Having two climaxes in a story (in this case they were the fight against the Venom gloop/monsters and Nyx's trial) can be done right but after both of them character development must be finished so denouement can be satisfying. Since this is a case of Nyx being "redeemed" (with no real effort on her part) she has to be measurably a better character now. This resurgence of "her old personality" shouldn't happen because all that's supposedly removed yet there's a flashback to wanting to kill. Of course saints still get temptations and Vulcans still have to suppress emotions but they don't merely "try to fight the urge" because they've already beaten it back. If Peen Stroke wanted to show that Nyx actually wants to forgive them but finds it difficult then he could have had her take Twilight aside and ask for advice, at which point Twilight would give some moralizing lecture about long-suffering and point out how the CMC forgave her. It would still be clumsy and couldn't make up for the trainwreck of everything before, but at least it would show good intentions on the part of the author. Oh yeah, and for that to happen Nyx would have to stop making excuses. Horribly evil characters who are dynamic and take responsibility for their actions are actually fascinating despite how bad they are, and if they repent then a reader is more inclined to desire that the change of heart sticks. EVERYONE hates characters who make excuses and are wishy-washy in either good or evil, even Jesus has a particular distaste for them (Rev. 3:15).
>The thing about massive, world-changing events is that only a few people know the whole story; the mass population usually just knows bits and pieces, usually interspersed with rumors, exaggerations or outright falsehoods. News spreads, but it's usually like playing Telephone in elementary school: person A tells person B what actually happened, but person B mishears it, and passes on misinformation to person C, who embellishes the information with their own assumptions, and passes on an even more degraded version of the story to persons D, E and F. It goes on and on in this manner.
The current pandemic is a great example of this. It's an enormously useful narrative device, because you can have anything from a Deus Ex-style hero trying to find out the terrible reality hidden from the public, or a public figure trying to stop people from going nuts over rumors and half-truths. Both are "man vs. society" conflicts yet flow smoothly. Meanwhile Past Sins is apparently supposed to be "man vs. society" but all instances of this (beyond muh Diamond Tiara bullying which is in 90% of fics about foals) are told, not shown, to the audience.
It should be noted that besides all the previous horrendous mistakes, Peen Stroke can't even get a basic plot structure right. Having two climaxes in a story (in this case they were the fight against the Venom gloop/monsters and Nyx's trial) can be done right but after both of them character development must be finished so denouement can be satisfying. Since this is a case of Nyx being "redeemed" (with no real effort on her part) she has to be measurably a better character now. This resurgence of "her old personality" shouldn't happen because all that's supposedly removed yet there's a flashback to wanting to kill. Of course saints still get temptations and Vulcans still have to suppress emotions but they don't merely "try to fight the urge" because they've already beaten it back. If Peen Stroke wanted to show that Nyx actually wants to forgive them but finds it difficult then he could have had her take Twilight aside and ask for advice, at which point Twilight would give some moralizing lecture about long-suffering and point out how the CMC forgave her. It would still be clumsy and couldn't make up for the trainwreck of everything before, but at least it would show good intentions on the part of the author. Oh yeah, and for that to happen Nyx would have to stop making excuses. Horribly evil characters who are dynamic and take responsibility for their actions are actually fascinating despite how bad they are, and if they repent then a reader is more inclined to desire that the change of heart sticks. EVERYONE hates characters who make excuses and are wishy-washy in either good or evil, even Jesus has a particular distaste for them (Rev. 3:15).
>The thing about massive, world-changing events is that only a few people know the whole story; the mass population usually just knows bits and pieces, usually interspersed with rumors, exaggerations or outright falsehoods. News spreads, but it's usually like playing Telephone in elementary school: person A tells person B what actually happened, but person B mishears it, and passes on misinformation to person C, who embellishes the information with their own assumptions, and passes on an even more degraded version of the story to persons D, E and F. It goes on and on in this manner.
The current pandemic is a great example of this. It's an enormously useful narrative device, because you can have anything from a Deus Ex-style hero trying to find out the terrible reality hidden from the public, or a public figure trying to stop people from going nuts over rumors and half-truths. Both are "man vs. society" conflicts yet flow smoothly. Meanwhile Past Sins is apparently supposed to be "man vs. society" but all instances of this (beyond muh Diamond Tiara bullying which is in 90% of fics about foals) are told, not shown, to the audience.
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>>263524
Quick rundown: 1000 years ago, Luna developed a spell that allowed her to quietly steal magic from other entities. She went around absorbing magic from trees and flowers and monsters and shit, as well as other ponies who had particularly strong magical abilities. She kept doing this for a long-ass time until eventually she had the power to stand against Celestia, and at this point she used the accumulated power to transform herself into Nightmare Moon. She then used the spell one last time to take Nyx's magic and memories away, though for some reason still leaving her as an alicorn. Fascinating.
Also randomly dropped here for no apparent reason is the information that Celestia has placed undercover guards in Ponyville to protect Nyx from random mob violence.
Anyway, after this they go to some kind of bullshit political lunch with a bunch of literally-whos from around Equestria. There's some random pointless banter about how Celestia is obsessed with her weight, which I assume is just more early fandom autism thrown in to make the brainlets giggle and applaud, and then, finally, the subchapter begins to go somewhere.
Apparently Spell Nexus has broken into the dungeon at Canterlot Castle. Well, isn't this an interesting development; and here I thought he'd reformed. I wonder what he's plotting this time?
As it turns out, nothing. Absolutely nothing. He broke into the fucking dungeon because apparently he feels guilty about all the trouble he caused and felt the need to reprimand himself. There is literally nothing else to it. Then, after dropping this complete nothingburger on us, Peen Stroke throws in another retarded joke about Celestia being a fat fuck, and the subchapter ends. Have I mentioned recently that this chapter is 13,071 words long, and that the story was basically wrapped up within roughly the first 3,000 words?
Anyway, after this completely pointless scene, we return to Twilight and Rarity in Ponyville. They are walking back home from the party, Twilight carrying a passed-out Nyx and Spike on her back, Rarity carrying Sweetie Belle. As they walk, Rarity compliments Twilight on her parenting skills, since she apparently somehow helped reform Nightmare Moon, I guess, and that makes her a good parent, even though in the process her sort-of daughter basically went ape shit on the entire nation, suffered no consequences and learned literally nothing from the experience. Whatever, who cares, it's almost over. After that they say goodnight and part company.
Twilight goes home and pens a letter to Princess Celestia. In it, she thanks Celestia and Luna for allowing her to resume herunhealthy co-dependent wine-induced mommy fantasy parentage of Nyx, instead of doing the sane thing and just lopping Nyx's head off and tossing her desecrated corpse into the river. The letter, of course, also sums up all of the things that Twilight feels she has "learned" as a result of this experience, and the "lesson" turns out to be every bit as idiotic as we have by this time come to expect.
Here is a version of the letter that briefly summarizes the main takeaways:
Dear Princess Celestia,
1. Even though there are some ponies in Equestria who feel that the Princesses were a tad lenient in giving Nyx no consequences whatsoever for randomly transforming into an evil being of purposeless destruction and wreaking havoc on the entire country for no good reason at all, Twilight ain't worried because haters gonna hate. Nyx has plenty of ponies who inexplicably love her for who she is, and are apparently willing to put up with any amount of insane bullshit from her.
2. Twilight apparently sees herself as having been in denial about the fact that Nyx was Nightmare Moon, even though she spent pretty much the entire first half of the book mumbling to herself about it.
3. Even though Nyx was Nightmare Moon, she didn't act entirely like Nightmare Moon, or at least not the Nightmare Moon from the books and legends, because that Nightmare Moon was all Nightmare Moonish, and this Nightmare Moon was less Nightmare Moony than the Nightmare Moon who was by far the Nightmare Mooniest. Nightmare Moon!!!1!
4. Blah blah blah friendship is magic.
Your Faithful Student,
Twilight Sparkle.
And that is literally how the story ends.
Stay tuned folks, I've got some final thoughts before I wrap this up.
Quick rundown: 1000 years ago, Luna developed a spell that allowed her to quietly steal magic from other entities. She went around absorbing magic from trees and flowers and monsters and shit, as well as other ponies who had particularly strong magical abilities. She kept doing this for a long-ass time until eventually she had the power to stand against Celestia, and at this point she used the accumulated power to transform herself into Nightmare Moon. She then used the spell one last time to take Nyx's magic and memories away, though for some reason still leaving her as an alicorn. Fascinating.
Also randomly dropped here for no apparent reason is the information that Celestia has placed undercover guards in Ponyville to protect Nyx from random mob violence.
Anyway, after this they go to some kind of bullshit political lunch with a bunch of literally-whos from around Equestria. There's some random pointless banter about how Celestia is obsessed with her weight, which I assume is just more early fandom autism thrown in to make the brainlets giggle and applaud, and then, finally, the subchapter begins to go somewhere.
Apparently Spell Nexus has broken into the dungeon at Canterlot Castle. Well, isn't this an interesting development; and here I thought he'd reformed. I wonder what he's plotting this time?
As it turns out, nothing. Absolutely nothing. He broke into the fucking dungeon because apparently he feels guilty about all the trouble he caused and felt the need to reprimand himself. There is literally nothing else to it. Then, after dropping this complete nothingburger on us, Peen Stroke throws in another retarded joke about Celestia being a fat fuck, and the subchapter ends. Have I mentioned recently that this chapter is 13,071 words long, and that the story was basically wrapped up within roughly the first 3,000 words?
Anyway, after this completely pointless scene, we return to Twilight and Rarity in Ponyville. They are walking back home from the party, Twilight carrying a passed-out Nyx and Spike on her back, Rarity carrying Sweetie Belle. As they walk, Rarity compliments Twilight on her parenting skills, since she apparently somehow helped reform Nightmare Moon, I guess, and that makes her a good parent, even though in the process her sort-of daughter basically went ape shit on the entire nation, suffered no consequences and learned literally nothing from the experience. Whatever, who cares, it's almost over. After that they say goodnight and part company.
Twilight goes home and pens a letter to Princess Celestia. In it, she thanks Celestia and Luna for allowing her to resume her
Here is a version of the letter that briefly summarizes the main takeaways:
Dear Princess Celestia,
1. Even though there are some ponies in Equestria who feel that the Princesses were a tad lenient in giving Nyx no consequences whatsoever for randomly transforming into an evil being of purposeless destruction and wreaking havoc on the entire country for no good reason at all, Twilight ain't worried because haters gonna hate. Nyx has plenty of ponies who inexplicably love her for who she is, and are apparently willing to put up with any amount of insane bullshit from her.
2. Twilight apparently sees herself as having been in denial about the fact that Nyx was Nightmare Moon, even though she spent pretty much the entire first half of the book mumbling to herself about it.
3. Even though Nyx was Nightmare Moon, she didn't act entirely like Nightmare Moon, or at least not the Nightmare Moon from the books and legends, because that Nightmare Moon was all Nightmare Moonish, and this Nightmare Moon was less Nightmare Moony than the Nightmare Moon who was by far the Nightmare Mooniest. Nightmare Moon!!!1!
4. Blah blah blah friendship is magic.
Your Faithful Student,
Twilight Sparkle.
And that is literally how the story ends.
Stay tuned folks, I've got some final thoughts before I wrap this up.
>>263589
Final Thoughts:
Well, everypony, it's been a long, strange trip, but it's finally over. Before I conclude this analysis, I'd like to take a moment to recap what I've learned, and share my final conclusions about this story and its merits.
Reading back over some of my earliest posts, I see that I actually came into this with neutral to fairly high expectations. Needless to say, those expectations were gradually dashed along the way. Having come out the other side, I feel that the best way to summarize my experience in reading Past Sins is to compare it to drinking a cup of flavorful coffee, that later turned out to actually be a hot mug of steaming, watery diarrhea.
Past Sins starts off well. It has a fine, bold, nutty aroma. Its initial flavors of edge and darkness are perhaps a bit too strong, but this is offset by its competent prose. As we finish our first sip of Prologue and the full body of the plot begins to wash down our gullet, however, we begin to realize that there are some unpleasant flavors lurking beneath the initially palatable surface. Competent handling of the characters' speaking styles belies shoddy characterization; the story takes well-known characters and renders them as superficially show-accurate without any deeper exploration of their personalities. Its overuse of already-threadbare gags and references does little to hide this flavor. Lack of any apparent unifying theme, a meandering narrative, and a series of pointless digressions and extraneous scenes that go nowhere begin to add a distinctly fecal texture to this increasingly disappointing cup.
As the narrative makes its way down our esophagus, we become aware that the unpleasantness is more than just an undertaste. Indeed, as the story moves further and further off the rails, it becomes harder to pretend that this is anything other than a cup of feces with a small amount of coffee mixed in. Once its protagonist randomly transforms into an entirely different character and embarks upon a series of increasingly pointless and offensive actions, it is impossible to deny reality: the coffee is all gone. What little existed in this cup has all been consumed, and what we are left with is not just a cup of shit, but a veritable tankard of pure diarrhea, excreted by someone who has subsisted for literal years on nothing but Mountain Dew and rancid Indian food.
As I've said many times already, this story's main problem is that it has no particular idea what it is about, or even who the main character is. It simultaneously tries to be both a redemption arc for Nightmare Moon/Luna, and the development arc of an original character named Nyx. It never successfully manages to become either.
It is a redemption story in which two completely different characters are awkwardly mashed into a single character, who then attempts to redeem herself for the actions of both. In the end, no actual redemption occurs; the character simply becomes evil one day because reasons, is evil for awhile, then eventually stops being evil by physically removing the evil from herself and squishing it. After that, she makes a few clumsy gestures and puts everything back the way it was, and is subsequently forgiven. The author seems to feel that no actual penance is necessary on her part, nor do we ever receive an adequate explanation for why she turned evil in the first place. We are given a handful of excuses, but all of them are weak: Nyx was bullied a little and had one mildly traumatic experience in which Twilight consented to have Celestia take her away for a single night. The rest of it comes from Nightmare Moon, whose past or motivations are barely addressed and technically belong to a different character named Luna, who barely appears until the second half of the story.
Of character development there is none. Nyx learns absolutely nothing from any of her experiences and she doesn't grow or change. For the first part of the story, she is simply an awkward, annoying, somewhat cowardly but otherwise unremarkable child. Then, she suddenly gets a spell cast on her and becomes Nightmare Moon, a character from the MLP television series who is never properly introduced to us in this text. After a period of being Nightmare Moon, she decides that she doesn't like being Nightmare Moon anymore and stops. Then, a different spell is cast on her, which extracts the Nightmare Mooniness out of her and reverts her back to her previous form. From here, she simply resumes her previous life as if it had not been interrupted at all. No growth, no change; she is once more an awkward, annoying, somewhat cowardly but otherwise unremarkable child.
The failure of the redemption, again, stems from the confusion between the two characters. We are never quite sure who is supposed to be redeemed in this story or for what. Like I said before, Peen Stroke should have decided before he started writing whether he wanted to write a story about Nightmare Moon or his OC Nyx. In any event, the single character of Nightmare Nyx, formed from NM and Nyx, eventually splits in two again, and this is apparently supposed to be her redemption. NM simply disappears or is reabsorbed into Luna, and Nyx simply resumes her previous life without having gained or lost anything. After 201,810 words, what the hell was the point?
I'd like to quote Mr. P's thesis one last time:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
That's a good question, faggot. You should try to write a story that answers it.
I'm not finished yet.
Final Thoughts:
Well, everypony, it's been a long, strange trip, but it's finally over. Before I conclude this analysis, I'd like to take a moment to recap what I've learned, and share my final conclusions about this story and its merits.
Reading back over some of my earliest posts, I see that I actually came into this with neutral to fairly high expectations. Needless to say, those expectations were gradually dashed along the way. Having come out the other side, I feel that the best way to summarize my experience in reading Past Sins is to compare it to drinking a cup of flavorful coffee, that later turned out to actually be a hot mug of steaming, watery diarrhea.
Past Sins starts off well. It has a fine, bold, nutty aroma. Its initial flavors of edge and darkness are perhaps a bit too strong, but this is offset by its competent prose. As we finish our first sip of Prologue and the full body of the plot begins to wash down our gullet, however, we begin to realize that there are some unpleasant flavors lurking beneath the initially palatable surface. Competent handling of the characters' speaking styles belies shoddy characterization; the story takes well-known characters and renders them as superficially show-accurate without any deeper exploration of their personalities. Its overuse of already-threadbare gags and references does little to hide this flavor. Lack of any apparent unifying theme, a meandering narrative, and a series of pointless digressions and extraneous scenes that go nowhere begin to add a distinctly fecal texture to this increasingly disappointing cup.
As the narrative makes its way down our esophagus, we become aware that the unpleasantness is more than just an undertaste. Indeed, as the story moves further and further off the rails, it becomes harder to pretend that this is anything other than a cup of feces with a small amount of coffee mixed in. Once its protagonist randomly transforms into an entirely different character and embarks upon a series of increasingly pointless and offensive actions, it is impossible to deny reality: the coffee is all gone. What little existed in this cup has all been consumed, and what we are left with is not just a cup of shit, but a veritable tankard of pure diarrhea, excreted by someone who has subsisted for literal years on nothing but Mountain Dew and rancid Indian food.
As I've said many times already, this story's main problem is that it has no particular idea what it is about, or even who the main character is. It simultaneously tries to be both a redemption arc for Nightmare Moon/Luna, and the development arc of an original character named Nyx. It never successfully manages to become either.
It is a redemption story in which two completely different characters are awkwardly mashed into a single character, who then attempts to redeem herself for the actions of both. In the end, no actual redemption occurs; the character simply becomes evil one day because reasons, is evil for awhile, then eventually stops being evil by physically removing the evil from herself and squishing it. After that, she makes a few clumsy gestures and puts everything back the way it was, and is subsequently forgiven. The author seems to feel that no actual penance is necessary on her part, nor do we ever receive an adequate explanation for why she turned evil in the first place. We are given a handful of excuses, but all of them are weak: Nyx was bullied a little and had one mildly traumatic experience in which Twilight consented to have Celestia take her away for a single night. The rest of it comes from Nightmare Moon, whose past or motivations are barely addressed and technically belong to a different character named Luna, who barely appears until the second half of the story.
Of character development there is none. Nyx learns absolutely nothing from any of her experiences and she doesn't grow or change. For the first part of the story, she is simply an awkward, annoying, somewhat cowardly but otherwise unremarkable child. Then, she suddenly gets a spell cast on her and becomes Nightmare Moon, a character from the MLP television series who is never properly introduced to us in this text. After a period of being Nightmare Moon, she decides that she doesn't like being Nightmare Moon anymore and stops. Then, a different spell is cast on her, which extracts the Nightmare Mooniness out of her and reverts her back to her previous form. From here, she simply resumes her previous life as if it had not been interrupted at all. No growth, no change; she is once more an awkward, annoying, somewhat cowardly but otherwise unremarkable child.
The failure of the redemption, again, stems from the confusion between the two characters. We are never quite sure who is supposed to be redeemed in this story or for what. Like I said before, Peen Stroke should have decided before he started writing whether he wanted to write a story about Nightmare Moon or his OC Nyx. In any event, the single character of Nightmare Nyx, formed from NM and Nyx, eventually splits in two again, and this is apparently supposed to be her redemption. NM simply disappears or is reabsorbed into Luna, and Nyx simply resumes her previous life without having gained or lost anything. After 201,810 words, what the hell was the point?
I'd like to quote Mr. P's thesis one last time:
>What would it take for Nightmare Moon to redeem herself without getting blasted by a rainbow?
That's a good question, faggot. You should try to write a story that answers it.
I'm not finished yet.
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>>263591
Apart from my already well-documented complaints of Nyx's weakness as a character, there is Peen Stroke's handling of the canon MLP characters. As I said already, he writes their speech and mannerisms competently enough. This isn't terribly hard to do, since mostly you just have to remember that AJ=redneck, Pinkie=high-energy, Fluttershy=quiet, Rarity=fancy, Dash=confident tomboy, and Twilight=awkward neurotic. However, I'll give him credit because the bar for fanfiction is set fairly low and a lot of authors still manage to fuck even this simple thing up.
Overall, he never really seems to explore any of these characters much deeper than the surface, and stays within comfort-level for most of them. He relies heavily on well-worn fandom tropes, which I'm assuming were already overused even in 2012 or whenever the fuck he wrote this, such as Pinkie Pie's random silliness and AJ's countryisms. Pinkie in particular is quite annoying in this story; she seems to show up at completely random times for no reason other than that the author felt like dropping her in for comic relief. Her antics are zany and random without feeling like she has any motivation behind them other than just Pinkie Pie=silly. We get absolutely no sense of Pinkie as anything other than a cardboard cutout of herself; when she's not zipping around doing silly things for the sake of being silly, it's hard to imagine where she is or what she's doing. We assume she just goes into the closet and powers herself down until the next time she's summoned for random cartoony shit.
He attempts some depth with Twilight, but it mostly falls flat. The reason for this is that the focus is on her mother-daughter relationship with Nyx, which never feels sincere. Part of it is that Nyx herself is a poorly developed character, and part of it is that rather than exploring who these characters are at a deeper level, creating emotional states for them based on their personalities, and crafting their interactions based on this, Peen Stroke treats them as paper dolls who are just assigned generic emotions. Something sad happens, so both Twilight and Nyx are sad. And when they're sad, they're bawling their eyes out, because we need visual indicators to see that they're sad. There's no sincerity to any of it; as I said before, they're basically the mother and daughter in a shampoo commercial.
Real emotional interactions are dynamic and complex. Just because a mother unconditionally loves her child doesn't mean she never gets angry or that nothing ever puts that unconditional love to a serious test. Nyx does a lot of things in this story that should test that love, or even destroy it. She does any number of terrible things, not just to Twilight herself, but to Twilight's friends, her mentor Celestia, and to Equestria as a whole. One might expect that to have at least something of an effect on her. There is also the fact that she and Nyx are not related by blood, and the fact that Twilight was aware of the possibility that Nyx might turn out to be evil from the get-go and eventually had this very suspicion confirmed. And yet through all of this her feelings for Nyx never waver; even locked in the dungeon or standing at the gallows she never says or thinks anything negative about her. No matter what this kid does, all Twilight wants is for Nyx to just give up all of this Nightmare Moon crap and come home so she can cook her macaroni and cheese just the way she likes it again.
And while we're on the subject, the exact same thing can be said for Nyx's relationship with the CMC and all of her other friends: they all just love her unconditionally no matter how much awful shit she does to them or to others. Incidentally, the CMC are also very poorly written; we get no sense of personality from any of them, they are just generically cute kids doing generically cute kid things. Whenever Peen Stroke needs cuteness for a scene, he just winds them up and watches them go. Similarly, Luna and Celestia are written terribly. Their dialogue is always stiff and awkward, and their scenes are almost always tedious to read.
The story's technical construction is incoherent and disorganized. The story begins as if it is following a preset formula almost to the letter, to the point where early on I made the mistake of comparing Peen Stroke to Dan Brown. However, the story quickly begins to deviate from its formula, and from here it becomes apparent that any conformity to any sort of preexisting literary form is purely coincidental and probably the result of Peen Stroke subconsciously plagiarizing stuff that he's read/watched. The story just bounces randomly from event to event, with few of these events having any relation to anything that occurs before or afterward. Character personalities remain constant from event to event. The only thing resembling structure that Peen Stroke seems to have decided on in advance is that at some point Nyx needs to turn into Nightmare Moon, and that at some point she needs to be redeemed for it. Apart from that, it's just pure rambling autism from start to finish.
And speaking of autism, there is also the matter of the continuous name-dropping of obscure characters and references to the show. A little of this I'd expect, and it wouldn't have bothered me that much if the story had been well written. What annoys me though is how much thought was put into irrelevant details like which background fillies were playing which roles in the school play, compared to how little thought was put into things like character development or narrative structure. Furthermore, most of the references are just eye-rolling bronybait. Hurr durr Luna said "honesty" and that's AJ's element; hurr durr Derpy (or "Ditzy Doo") said some bullshit about muffins; hurr durr Pinkie Pie is being le random. I'm disappointed he didn't slip any "20% cooler" jokes in there; I almost had bingo.
I'm still not finished.
Apart from my already well-documented complaints of Nyx's weakness as a character, there is Peen Stroke's handling of the canon MLP characters. As I said already, he writes their speech and mannerisms competently enough. This isn't terribly hard to do, since mostly you just have to remember that AJ=redneck, Pinkie=high-energy, Fluttershy=quiet, Rarity=fancy, Dash=confident tomboy, and Twilight=awkward neurotic. However, I'll give him credit because the bar for fanfiction is set fairly low and a lot of authors still manage to fuck even this simple thing up.
Overall, he never really seems to explore any of these characters much deeper than the surface, and stays within comfort-level for most of them. He relies heavily on well-worn fandom tropes, which I'm assuming were already overused even in 2012 or whenever the fuck he wrote this, such as Pinkie Pie's random silliness and AJ's countryisms. Pinkie in particular is quite annoying in this story; she seems to show up at completely random times for no reason other than that the author felt like dropping her in for comic relief. Her antics are zany and random without feeling like she has any motivation behind them other than just Pinkie Pie=silly. We get absolutely no sense of Pinkie as anything other than a cardboard cutout of herself; when she's not zipping around doing silly things for the sake of being silly, it's hard to imagine where she is or what she's doing. We assume she just goes into the closet and powers herself down until the next time she's summoned for random cartoony shit.
He attempts some depth with Twilight, but it mostly falls flat. The reason for this is that the focus is on her mother-daughter relationship with Nyx, which never feels sincere. Part of it is that Nyx herself is a poorly developed character, and part of it is that rather than exploring who these characters are at a deeper level, creating emotional states for them based on their personalities, and crafting their interactions based on this, Peen Stroke treats them as paper dolls who are just assigned generic emotions. Something sad happens, so both Twilight and Nyx are sad. And when they're sad, they're bawling their eyes out, because we need visual indicators to see that they're sad. There's no sincerity to any of it; as I said before, they're basically the mother and daughter in a shampoo commercial.
Real emotional interactions are dynamic and complex. Just because a mother unconditionally loves her child doesn't mean she never gets angry or that nothing ever puts that unconditional love to a serious test. Nyx does a lot of things in this story that should test that love, or even destroy it. She does any number of terrible things, not just to Twilight herself, but to Twilight's friends, her mentor Celestia, and to Equestria as a whole. One might expect that to have at least something of an effect on her. There is also the fact that she and Nyx are not related by blood, and the fact that Twilight was aware of the possibility that Nyx might turn out to be evil from the get-go and eventually had this very suspicion confirmed. And yet through all of this her feelings for Nyx never waver; even locked in the dungeon or standing at the gallows she never says or thinks anything negative about her. No matter what this kid does, all Twilight wants is for Nyx to just give up all of this Nightmare Moon crap and come home so she can cook her macaroni and cheese just the way she likes it again.
And while we're on the subject, the exact same thing can be said for Nyx's relationship with the CMC and all of her other friends: they all just love her unconditionally no matter how much awful shit she does to them or to others. Incidentally, the CMC are also very poorly written; we get no sense of personality from any of them, they are just generically cute kids doing generically cute kid things. Whenever Peen Stroke needs cuteness for a scene, he just winds them up and watches them go. Similarly, Luna and Celestia are written terribly. Their dialogue is always stiff and awkward, and their scenes are almost always tedious to read.
The story's technical construction is incoherent and disorganized. The story begins as if it is following a preset formula almost to the letter, to the point where early on I made the mistake of comparing Peen Stroke to Dan Brown. However, the story quickly begins to deviate from its formula, and from here it becomes apparent that any conformity to any sort of preexisting literary form is purely coincidental and probably the result of Peen Stroke subconsciously plagiarizing stuff that he's read/watched. The story just bounces randomly from event to event, with few of these events having any relation to anything that occurs before or afterward. Character personalities remain constant from event to event. The only thing resembling structure that Peen Stroke seems to have decided on in advance is that at some point Nyx needs to turn into Nightmare Moon, and that at some point she needs to be redeemed for it. Apart from that, it's just pure rambling autism from start to finish.
And speaking of autism, there is also the matter of the continuous name-dropping of obscure characters and references to the show. A little of this I'd expect, and it wouldn't have bothered me that much if the story had been well written. What annoys me though is how much thought was put into irrelevant details like which background fillies were playing which roles in the school play, compared to how little thought was put into things like character development or narrative structure. Furthermore, most of the references are just eye-rolling bronybait. Hurr durr Luna said "honesty" and that's AJ's element; hurr durr Derpy (or "Ditzy Doo") said some bullshit about muffins; hurr durr Pinkie Pie is being le random. I'm disappointed he didn't slip any "20% cooler" jokes in there; I almost had bingo.
I'm still not finished.
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>>263592
Equally galling are the "revisions" that were apparently done. As with the text in general, it's clear that almost all of Peen Stroke's attention was focused on brony autism, leaving little to spare for the many glaring problems with the story itself. As far as I can tell, the only edits that were made involved altering minor details or adding irrelevant information to bring the story in line with S2/S3 additions to the world canon. And a great deal of this was completely unnecessary.
A perfect example is the frequent mentioning of Cadance and Shining Armor that I've been intermittently calling attention to. This is clearly something that was added after the fact, but what perplexes me to no end is why it was added. Neither character does anything of note in the story; Cadance never appears at all, and Shining Armor is only in one scene, a scene which could easily have been deleted at no loss.
I've noticed that there are some areas in the story where Peen Stroke takes creative license with some details that weren't in the canon at the original time of writing, such as the name of Diamond Tiara's mother. I can understand going back and altering things like that as the canon gets filled in; that makes sense enough (yes I know this was technically left unchanged; I'm just using it as an example). However, the Cadance/Shining Armor thing makes no sense at all. These two characters being introduced into the series after the story was initially written shouldn't have mattered because their presence doesn't affect it; they don't fill any roles that would logically alter the events of the story in any significant way.
Here's an example from the show itself. We don't find out until the end of S2 that Twilight even has an older brother. However, did the addition of this character in any way invalidate anything that happened in the show before we knew that he existed? Did the animators need to go back and edit him into the background of the original episodes so they would have an explanation for where he was? No. He wasn't in those stories, and that's that. No further explanation is required; we can assume that he was probably in the world somewhere, we just didn't see him. So why not do the same thing here? Neither Shining nor Cadance would be in a position to do anything that would seriously alter the events of this story, so why even bring them up? If someone asks, just say they were somewhere else and leave it at that.
The only reason I mention this so often is that it is extremely bad form to just randomly wedge characters into a story for no reason like this, particularly editing them in after the fact. If, after these characters are introduced into the canon, you happen to think of a great story arc that would have made a great addition to your story had you known about them when you were writing it, and you want to go back and work it in there, that's one thing, but that is not what happens here. Ironically, there seems to have been an idea for one: the text mentions that Shining Armor was inducted into the Children of Nightmare but Cadance was not, and they wound up fighting each other. That could have made a potentially interesting side story. But why wasn't it developed? Or perhaps a better question would be: if there was no plan to develop it, why even bring it up at all? Literally all we get is just occasional mentions of them here and there: we learn that Shining Armor has switched sides and is fighting Cadance, and then later we learn that he isn't anymore. What the hell was the point of even putting this into the text?
This ties into a bigger problem that this story has, which is that Peen Stroke seems to want to put all of the characters from the universe into his story, instead of just building a story and focusing on the characters that are actually relevant to it. I'm not just talking about Horte "Literally Who" Cuisine and Ditzy "Derpy" Doo making token cameo appearances, although as I stated I do find that kind of bronybait shit to be annoying. The story seems to feel obligated to include all of the mane 6 and keep us periodically updated on what all 6 of them are doing, even though they really aren't the focus of the story. For instance, how significant of a role did Fluttershy play in this tale? Rainbow Dash? Neither of them did anything even remotely important, so why are they even in this thing?
The central characters are Nyx and Twilight, with the CMC and maybe Rarity playing supporting roles. Spell Nexus and his crew are fairly significant sort-of villains. Celestia and Luna play an important part in events, but are minor characters in terms of their relationship to Nyx, the protagonist. The rest of the characters are mostly insignificant. So, one might ask, why does this story spend so much time focusing on so many different characters who don't particularly matter? Although, to be fair, it's very difficult to nail down what exactly the focus of this story is in the first place; for instance calling Luna a minor character only works if we assume that Nyx is the sole protagonist. The blurry relationship between Nyx and Luna based on their mutual connection to the ill-defined character of Nightmare Moon complicates that somewhat.
But at this point I'm just rambling and repeating myself. Perhaps it's better to do what Peen Stroke himself ought to have done by the time he hit the 50,000 word mark, and just wrap this shit up.
Equally galling are the "revisions" that were apparently done. As with the text in general, it's clear that almost all of Peen Stroke's attention was focused on brony autism, leaving little to spare for the many glaring problems with the story itself. As far as I can tell, the only edits that were made involved altering minor details or adding irrelevant information to bring the story in line with S2/S3 additions to the world canon. And a great deal of this was completely unnecessary.
A perfect example is the frequent mentioning of Cadance and Shining Armor that I've been intermittently calling attention to. This is clearly something that was added after the fact, but what perplexes me to no end is why it was added. Neither character does anything of note in the story; Cadance never appears at all, and Shining Armor is only in one scene, a scene which could easily have been deleted at no loss.
I've noticed that there are some areas in the story where Peen Stroke takes creative license with some details that weren't in the canon at the original time of writing, such as the name of Diamond Tiara's mother. I can understand going back and altering things like that as the canon gets filled in; that makes sense enough (yes I know this was technically left unchanged; I'm just using it as an example). However, the Cadance/Shining Armor thing makes no sense at all. These two characters being introduced into the series after the story was initially written shouldn't have mattered because their presence doesn't affect it; they don't fill any roles that would logically alter the events of the story in any significant way.
Here's an example from the show itself. We don't find out until the end of S2 that Twilight even has an older brother. However, did the addition of this character in any way invalidate anything that happened in the show before we knew that he existed? Did the animators need to go back and edit him into the background of the original episodes so they would have an explanation for where he was? No. He wasn't in those stories, and that's that. No further explanation is required; we can assume that he was probably in the world somewhere, we just didn't see him. So why not do the same thing here? Neither Shining nor Cadance would be in a position to do anything that would seriously alter the events of this story, so why even bring them up? If someone asks, just say they were somewhere else and leave it at that.
The only reason I mention this so often is that it is extremely bad form to just randomly wedge characters into a story for no reason like this, particularly editing them in after the fact. If, after these characters are introduced into the canon, you happen to think of a great story arc that would have made a great addition to your story had you known about them when you were writing it, and you want to go back and work it in there, that's one thing, but that is not what happens here. Ironically, there seems to have been an idea for one: the text mentions that Shining Armor was inducted into the Children of Nightmare but Cadance was not, and they wound up fighting each other. That could have made a potentially interesting side story. But why wasn't it developed? Or perhaps a better question would be: if there was no plan to develop it, why even bring it up at all? Literally all we get is just occasional mentions of them here and there: we learn that Shining Armor has switched sides and is fighting Cadance, and then later we learn that he isn't anymore. What the hell was the point of even putting this into the text?
This ties into a bigger problem that this story has, which is that Peen Stroke seems to want to put all of the characters from the universe into his story, instead of just building a story and focusing on the characters that are actually relevant to it. I'm not just talking about Horte "Literally Who" Cuisine and Ditzy "Derpy" Doo making token cameo appearances, although as I stated I do find that kind of bronybait shit to be annoying. The story seems to feel obligated to include all of the mane 6 and keep us periodically updated on what all 6 of them are doing, even though they really aren't the focus of the story. For instance, how significant of a role did Fluttershy play in this tale? Rainbow Dash? Neither of them did anything even remotely important, so why are they even in this thing?
The central characters are Nyx and Twilight, with the CMC and maybe Rarity playing supporting roles. Spell Nexus and his crew are fairly significant sort-of villains. Celestia and Luna play an important part in events, but are minor characters in terms of their relationship to Nyx, the protagonist. The rest of the characters are mostly insignificant. So, one might ask, why does this story spend so much time focusing on so many different characters who don't particularly matter? Although, to be fair, it's very difficult to nail down what exactly the focus of this story is in the first place; for instance calling Luna a minor character only works if we assume that Nyx is the sole protagonist. The blurry relationship between Nyx and Luna based on their mutual connection to the ill-defined character of Nightmare Moon complicates that somewhat.
But at this point I'm just rambling and repeating myself. Perhaps it's better to do what Peen Stroke himself ought to have done by the time he hit the 50,000 word mark, and just wrap this shit up.
>>263594
So, in conclusion, Past Sins sucks massive, oily, unwashed stallion balls. Its protagonist, Nyx and/or Nightmare Moon, is an obnoxious little shit who I would gladly punt directly to the goddamn moon, and then buy a high-power telescope so I could sit and watch as she slowly died from lack of oxygen. Not only is this text not even remotely deserving of the high place of respect it seems to enjoy within this fandom, it may actually be on the short list of the worst things I've ever read in my life. Honestly, even Nigel's book was better. Well, "better" may not exactly be the right word, but having read them both, I think I can say Nigel's thing had more entertainment value. Nigel's book was as hilarious as it was awful, and I'll admit that the underlying story actually has potential to be good if given the proper treatment. This, on the other hand, was just plain terrible without being in any way entertaining or funny, and there is frankly nothing that could save it short of a complete rewrite from scratch. This would also have to include a significant revision of the entire concept.
Anyway, I hereby proclaim the author of this work, one Peenameena Diane Stroke of Ten Bale, California, to be the High King of Faggots, a title previously held by Silver "I may spend literally every waking moment of my life cramming penises into every crevice of my body, but at least I'm not as gay as Peen Stroke" Star. A long, long time ago, I began an outline of an alternate version of Past Sins to illustrate how I thought it could be tightened up and improved. However, this was back when I still thought I knew where it was going and assumed that it would remain in some way salvageable. Sadly, I have had to abandon this idea, as it became clear around midway through that this story is just too deeply flawed to be saved.
After literally 201,810 words, I still have no idea what the fuck, and I'm still a little hazy on what the shit. In the unlikely event that the author of this dumpster fire ever takes the time to read this ridiculously long analysis of his work, I'm afraid that the only advice I can give him at the end is to tear it up, set the pieces on fire, and start again, and for Celestia's sake try not to embarrass yourself this time.
To the rest of you, I hope you have found this extremely long-form analysis to be informative, or at least entertaining. I will probably take an extended break before tackling anything else, but I am open to suggestions as to what I should do next. I know that Nigel has suggested Fallout Equestria more than once; however, if anyone else has anything in particular they would like to see skewered, I'm interested in hearing your suggestions. Maybe we can do a strawpoll or something. I will try to begin whatever the next thing is before the thread falls off the catalog.
I am also interested in hearing people's feedback on the thread itself, and whether or not anyone besides Sven and Nigel are even paying attention anymore.
Thank you and goodnight.
So, in conclusion, Past Sins sucks massive, oily, unwashed stallion balls. Its protagonist, Nyx and/or Nightmare Moon, is an obnoxious little shit who I would gladly punt directly to the goddamn moon, and then buy a high-power telescope so I could sit and watch as she slowly died from lack of oxygen. Not only is this text not even remotely deserving of the high place of respect it seems to enjoy within this fandom, it may actually be on the short list of the worst things I've ever read in my life. Honestly, even Nigel's book was better. Well, "better" may not exactly be the right word, but having read them both, I think I can say Nigel's thing had more entertainment value. Nigel's book was as hilarious as it was awful, and I'll admit that the underlying story actually has potential to be good if given the proper treatment. This, on the other hand, was just plain terrible without being in any way entertaining or funny, and there is frankly nothing that could save it short of a complete rewrite from scratch. This would also have to include a significant revision of the entire concept.
Anyway, I hereby proclaim the author of this work, one Peenameena Diane Stroke of Ten Bale, California, to be the High King of Faggots, a title previously held by Silver "I may spend literally every waking moment of my life cramming penises into every crevice of my body, but at least I'm not as gay as Peen Stroke" Star. A long, long time ago, I began an outline of an alternate version of Past Sins to illustrate how I thought it could be tightened up and improved. However, this was back when I still thought I knew where it was going and assumed that it would remain in some way salvageable. Sadly, I have had to abandon this idea, as it became clear around midway through that this story is just too deeply flawed to be saved.
After literally 201,810 words, I still have no idea what the fuck, and I'm still a little hazy on what the shit. In the unlikely event that the author of this dumpster fire ever takes the time to read this ridiculously long analysis of his work, I'm afraid that the only advice I can give him at the end is to tear it up, set the pieces on fire, and start again, and for Celestia's sake try not to embarrass yourself this time.
To the rest of you, I hope you have found this extremely long-form analysis to be informative, or at least entertaining. I will probably take an extended break before tackling anything else, but I am open to suggestions as to what I should do next. I know that Nigel has suggested Fallout Equestria more than once; however, if anyone else has anything in particular they would like to see skewered, I'm interested in hearing your suggestions. Maybe we can do a strawpoll or something. I will try to begin whatever the next thing is before the thread falls off the catalog.
I am also interested in hearing people's feedback on the thread itself, and whether or not anyone besides Sven and Nigel are even paying attention anymore.
Thank you and goodnight.
>>263522
>Unfortunately, Celestia has absolutely nothing useful to say. She simply explains that the mark appeared on Nyx's flank at some point during the trial, but she was unable to see it because of the fucking bandages she had on, and as such she doesn't know what it means. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
This is so fucking stupid. Why doesn't Nyx gain her Cutie Mark Shield-With-Moon WHEN SHE DEFENDED PONIES USING THE POWER OF THE NIGHT? Why does she get it hours later while yapping with some judge? Is it because in one dramatic moment we probably should have seen, she defended herself/her friends? Well, that's still shit because she'd be defending her friends with her words then, not the power of the night.
I also suspect Peen Stroke is a colossal spoiled brat. Ten bucks says he was bullied in high school, and he chose to view it as "It's because I'm such a soft good-hearted intellectual".
>Author's OC accomplishes a stupendous feat, outshines the canon heroes and saves the day, and thus earns the respect and admiration of the canon heroes and gets a party thrown in her honor.
You know what I hate about this Cliche?
It's never something only that OC could have done.
It's never Edgy Knight the edgy stealthy assassin who stabs a magic-proof monster only daggers held in a horse's mouth could hurt.
And it's never "This pony who can stop time for 2 seconds does so to save a filly from a burning building".
No, the big dramatic moment is almost always something the EOH could do better if they were allowed to solve the problem with a big rainbow blast.
Often it's even something Twilight or Rainbow would actually be better at doing solo, and would have done solo if the OC didn't need some shilling.
>Sweetie Belle was the next to come up beside Nyx, and she was wearing a comforting smile. “It’s okay, we’ve all forgiven you.”
Ooof course they had. God, I fucking hate lazy redemptions.
>Telephone
One time I was a kid and the classroom I was in was told to play telephone by the teacher, who had us choose nonsense sentences then whisper them to each other. So the sentence went through the telephone game completely unchanged because we're all NPCs.
Then she said "No you're supposed to change it"
so we did it again "properly this time" and cycled the same sentence around a few times. When I heard a sentence I didn't like I completely changed it, so "I have a lambagini" became "I like chocolate milk". Then the teacher said we'd done it right this time, and this was a lesson in why you shouldn't trust "Rumors" (what other people tell you) and only trust "Trusted sources" like the media.
Just a random memory that text brought up.
>>263589
>>263589
>Quick rundown: 1000 years ago, Luna developed a spell that allowed her to quietly steal magic from other entities. She went around absorbing magic from trees and flowers and monsters and shit, as well as other ponies who had particularly strong magical abilities. She kept doing this for a long-ass time until eventually she had the power to stand against Celestia, and at this point she used the accumulated power to transform herself into Nightmare Moon. She then used the spell one last time to take Nyx's magic and memories away, though for some reason still leaving her as an alicorn. Fascinating.
Mother of god that's so fucking stupid! This means Luna chose to become NMM and didn't just have it forced upon her by "the darkness". That faggot wanted to "redeem NMM" with this story? This explanation for how Luna became NMM just made them both scum! NMM is now just Luna hopped up on stolen magic, and Luna chose to steal that magic. And if she stole that magic from wherever she could, where did the darkness come from? Let me guess, she was a fool, and didn't cover her tool (horn) with an anti-darkness cloth, so she ended up sucking the darkness out of a monster and going dark, because her hatred for Luna was stronger than her desire to preserve her sense of self.
Peen Stroke is a nigger.
>Unfortunately, Celestia has absolutely nothing useful to say. She simply explains that the mark appeared on Nyx's flank at some point during the trial, but she was unable to see it because of the fucking bandages she had on, and as such she doesn't know what it means. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
This is so fucking stupid. Why doesn't Nyx gain her Cutie Mark Shield-With-Moon WHEN SHE DEFENDED PONIES USING THE POWER OF THE NIGHT? Why does she get it hours later while yapping with some judge? Is it because in one dramatic moment we probably should have seen, she defended herself/her friends? Well, that's still shit because she'd be defending her friends with her words then, not the power of the night.
I also suspect Peen Stroke is a colossal spoiled brat. Ten bucks says he was bullied in high school, and he chose to view it as "It's because I'm such a soft good-hearted intellectual".
>Author's OC accomplishes a stupendous feat, outshines the canon heroes and saves the day, and thus earns the respect and admiration of the canon heroes and gets a party thrown in her honor.
You know what I hate about this Cliche?
It's never something only that OC could have done.
It's never Edgy Knight the edgy stealthy assassin who stabs a magic-proof monster only daggers held in a horse's mouth could hurt.
And it's never "This pony who can stop time for 2 seconds does so to save a filly from a burning building".
No, the big dramatic moment is almost always something the EOH could do better if they were allowed to solve the problem with a big rainbow blast.
Often it's even something Twilight or Rainbow would actually be better at doing solo, and would have done solo if the OC didn't need some shilling.
>Sweetie Belle was the next to come up beside Nyx, and she was wearing a comforting smile. “It’s okay, we’ve all forgiven you.”
Ooof course they had. God, I fucking hate lazy redemptions.
>Telephone
One time I was a kid and the classroom I was in was told to play telephone by the teacher, who had us choose nonsense sentences then whisper them to each other. So the sentence went through the telephone game completely unchanged because we're all NPCs.
Then she said "No you're supposed to change it"
so we did it again "properly this time" and cycled the same sentence around a few times. When I heard a sentence I didn't like I completely changed it, so "I have a lambagini" became "I like chocolate milk". Then the teacher said we'd done it right this time, and this was a lesson in why you shouldn't trust "Rumors" (what other people tell you) and only trust "Trusted sources" like the media.
Just a random memory that text brought up.
>>263589
>>263589
>Quick rundown: 1000 years ago, Luna developed a spell that allowed her to quietly steal magic from other entities. She went around absorbing magic from trees and flowers and monsters and shit, as well as other ponies who had particularly strong magical abilities. She kept doing this for a long-ass time until eventually she had the power to stand against Celestia, and at this point she used the accumulated power to transform herself into Nightmare Moon. She then used the spell one last time to take Nyx's magic and memories away, though for some reason still leaving her as an alicorn. Fascinating.
Mother of god that's so fucking stupid! This means Luna chose to become NMM and didn't just have it forced upon her by "the darkness". That faggot wanted to "redeem NMM" with this story? This explanation for how Luna became NMM just made them both scum! NMM is now just Luna hopped up on stolen magic, and Luna chose to steal that magic. And if she stole that magic from wherever she could, where did the darkness come from? Let me guess, she was a fool, and didn't cover her tool (horn) with an anti-darkness cloth, so she ended up sucking the darkness out of a monster and going dark, because her hatred for Luna was stronger than her desire to preserve her sense of self.
Peen Stroke is a nigger.
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>>263596
You went and made an account to comment on the story? Fuck, that's dedication.
Anyway, thanks for the recap. I remember reading this way back around 2012-2013, and though it was pretty good. Your little once over and from what I remember show I might have been a bit suckered in by the teenager thought process.
Now that you've done this, might i suggest Fallout: Equestria? While I haven't actually read it, it seems to have a interesting premise that I heard suffers from poor execution. Also, stuff happens in it, so you could go by you "line-by-line" method and you wouldn't be repeating yourself. And if I remember correctly, it's the only other fanfic besides Past Sins to get physical copies printed for sale.
You went and made an account to comment on the story? Fuck, that's dedication.
Anyway, thanks for the recap. I remember reading this way back around 2012-2013, and though it was pretty good. Your little once over and from what I remember show I might have been a bit suckered in by the teenager thought process.
Now that you've done this, might i suggest Fallout: Equestria? While I haven't actually read it, it seems to have a interesting premise that I heard suffers from poor execution. Also, stuff happens in it, so you could go by you "line-by-line" method and you wouldn't be repeating yourself. And if I remember correctly, it's the only other fanfic besides Past Sins to get physical copies printed for sale.
>>263589
>1. Even though there are some ponies in Equestria who feel that the Princesses were a tad lenient in giving Nyx no consequences whatsoever for randomly transforming into an evil being of purposeless destruction and wreaking havoc on the entire country for no good reason at all, Twilight ain't worried because haters gonna hate. Nyx has plenty of ponies who inexplicably love her for who she is, and are apparently willing to put up with any amount of insane bullshit from her.
I fucking hate this meme. Love isn't brainlessly adoring someone no matter what because that person is that person. Love is loving the good things about someone so much that you're willing to overlook the bad! It's not letting your wife give you cock and ball torture because she's your wife, it's overlooking the fact that she masturbates to cock and ball torture and thankfully only does so when you're not around because she's a good wife in all other ways!
>2. Twilight apparently sees herself as having been in denial about the fact that Nyx was Nightmare Moon, even though she spent pretty much the entire first half of the book mumbling to herself about it.
Peen Choke sucks dicks in hell.
>3. Even though Nyx was Nightmare Moon, she didn't act entirely like Nightmare Moon
And even though Twilight was Twilight, she didn't act like Twilight. Nobody acted in-character often enough. I know Shithead Glimmer's one defining character trait is that she wrongfully attempts to use magic to solve problems, and she's a total cunt about it, but that used to be Twilight's shtick sometimes. I say sometimes because it wasn't her only shtick or sole defining character trait! The author never thought to have Twilight magic Nyx to look like a more ordinary pony, and that's fucking disgraceful. You could have done a big dramatic reveal where the Illusion spell comes off at an awful time, and everyone gasps saying "Oh fuck it's a demon/changeling/evil spooky-looking monster! I can't believe this fucking evil monster pretended to be my best friend for so long!"
and then you could ACTUALLY HAVE NYX LOSE HER FRIENDS
and then have Twilight get blamed by Nyx because disguising herself to look more normal (and conveniently also more like an actual family member of Twilight) was Twilight's idea.
And then you could do a big moral about how Ponies are "Wrong and stupid for being so racist", since that was a huge thing back in the day!
So many dumbfuck baby bronies loved bitching about how the ponies are "sooo racist" to Dragons and Diamond Dogs and Hydras and other low-IQ monster-race cretins. A ton of them wrote fics where they're the "One obligatory good changeling" in the same cookie-cutter bullshit story because all "Popular fanfiction genres" are just regurgitations of someone else's popular fanfic. You'll find more creativity in the "Pokemon but Ash is actually Mew/a son of Mew/a Lucario/a Zoroark/a son of a Lucario and Zoroark/a time-travelling future version of himself/evil/edgy/Punished/smart and smirking and annoying as hell/"hardcore"/prickish enough to annoy Gary and Paul from the Pokemon TV show.
>4. Blah blah blah friendship is magic.
At no point does Nyx learn "Peer pressure is bad and you shouldn't do what others tell you to" which is fucking stupid.
>Indian food
I fucking hate indian food.
Why is it that some cultures, their idea of food is good shit cooked the fancy way, the best way, by a team of experts who each specialize in their own fields using all sorts of useful tools...
And some cultures, their idea of good food is cheap generic shit just tossed into a container and held over a fire until it seems right?
"Chinese food" is just fucking rice. We have rice, and we do better shit with it. They put bullshit in their rice to make it taste better as a meal, we do that better and use rice as a side with our beans and meat and whatever the fuck else. We cook better barbecue ribs and while chinese chicken balls are great, homemade chicken is better. Indian food is just meat and random spices turned into a sauce our factories can mass-produce and package in jars better than their takeaway stores ever could.
India's hollywood is bigger than America's, but they don't create amazing works of art over there, they just create trashy k-pop-tier trash that spends a shitload of money to make a shitload of money, so that money can go on astroturfing and buying T-Series more subscribers. India does not and will never have its own Gordon Ramsay, just like the niggers do not and will never have their own Shakespeare.
Their culture begins and ends at what stupid gaudy things they wore 2000 years ago and still wear now, what stupid things they cheaply make at takeaway stores, what horrible things they do to each other, and what stupid things their retarded "The god of goodness is a six headed dick hydra who shat out every planet after eating an egg hatched by the goddess of life. After that, both gods took a shower and the filth washed off their bodies became gods in their own right, the god of storms and the god of tuesdays and the god of enemas. Then everything fucking died when a tree, a fucking biiiiiiig tree, got chopped down by a diseased wolf that chewed its roots off, and the tree says be good but it died and all the gods died" religion says. Fuck all cultures except for my one and fuck all religions on this planet except for my one.
Also fuck this story, the "Nightmare Moon Play" was a perfect chance to let the theoretical non-bronies in the audience understand the background of this show and who Luna/NMM is, fixing the "fanfictions are unwatchable if you don't already know who these characters are and should be" problem. Especially since this piece of shit is fucking published in print like a fucking real book.
>>263592
They were overused. Back in 2012 people were already getting sick of "Celestia is evil", "ponies are racist", "Pinkie is a psycho", "Fluttershy is a rapist", etc.
Complainers weren't listened to, though.
>1. Even though there are some ponies in Equestria who feel that the Princesses were a tad lenient in giving Nyx no consequences whatsoever for randomly transforming into an evil being of purposeless destruction and wreaking havoc on the entire country for no good reason at all, Twilight ain't worried because haters gonna hate. Nyx has plenty of ponies who inexplicably love her for who she is, and are apparently willing to put up with any amount of insane bullshit from her.
I fucking hate this meme. Love isn't brainlessly adoring someone no matter what because that person is that person. Love is loving the good things about someone so much that you're willing to overlook the bad! It's not letting your wife give you cock and ball torture because she's your wife, it's overlooking the fact that she masturbates to cock and ball torture and thankfully only does so when you're not around because she's a good wife in all other ways!
>2. Twilight apparently sees herself as having been in denial about the fact that Nyx was Nightmare Moon, even though she spent pretty much the entire first half of the book mumbling to herself about it.
Peen Choke sucks dicks in hell.
>3. Even though Nyx was Nightmare Moon, she didn't act entirely like Nightmare Moon
And even though Twilight was Twilight, she didn't act like Twilight. Nobody acted in-character often enough. I know Shithead Glimmer's one defining character trait is that she wrongfully attempts to use magic to solve problems, and she's a total cunt about it, but that used to be Twilight's shtick sometimes. I say sometimes because it wasn't her only shtick or sole defining character trait! The author never thought to have Twilight magic Nyx to look like a more ordinary pony, and that's fucking disgraceful. You could have done a big dramatic reveal where the Illusion spell comes off at an awful time, and everyone gasps saying "Oh fuck it's a demon/changeling/evil spooky-looking monster! I can't believe this fucking evil monster pretended to be my best friend for so long!"
and then you could ACTUALLY HAVE NYX LOSE HER FRIENDS
and then have Twilight get blamed by Nyx because disguising herself to look more normal (and conveniently also more like an actual family member of Twilight) was Twilight's idea.
And then you could do a big moral about how Ponies are "Wrong and stupid for being so racist", since that was a huge thing back in the day!
So many dumbfuck baby bronies loved bitching about how the ponies are "sooo racist" to Dragons and Diamond Dogs and Hydras and other low-IQ monster-race cretins. A ton of them wrote fics where they're the "One obligatory good changeling" in the same cookie-cutter bullshit story because all "Popular fanfiction genres" are just regurgitations of someone else's popular fanfic. You'll find more creativity in the "Pokemon but Ash is actually Mew/a son of Mew/a Lucario/a Zoroark/a son of a Lucario and Zoroark/a time-travelling future version of himself/evil/edgy/Punished/smart and smirking and annoying as hell/"hardcore"/prickish enough to annoy Gary and Paul from the Pokemon TV show.
>4. Blah blah blah friendship is magic.
At no point does Nyx learn "Peer pressure is bad and you shouldn't do what others tell you to" which is fucking stupid.
>Indian food
I fucking hate indian food.
Why is it that some cultures, their idea of food is good shit cooked the fancy way, the best way, by a team of experts who each specialize in their own fields using all sorts of useful tools...
And some cultures, their idea of good food is cheap generic shit just tossed into a container and held over a fire until it seems right?
"Chinese food" is just fucking rice. We have rice, and we do better shit with it. They put bullshit in their rice to make it taste better as a meal, we do that better and use rice as a side with our beans and meat and whatever the fuck else. We cook better barbecue ribs and while chinese chicken balls are great, homemade chicken is better. Indian food is just meat and random spices turned into a sauce our factories can mass-produce and package in jars better than their takeaway stores ever could.
India's hollywood is bigger than America's, but they don't create amazing works of art over there, they just create trashy k-pop-tier trash that spends a shitload of money to make a shitload of money, so that money can go on astroturfing and buying T-Series more subscribers. India does not and will never have its own Gordon Ramsay, just like the niggers do not and will never have their own Shakespeare.
Their culture begins and ends at what stupid gaudy things they wore 2000 years ago and still wear now, what stupid things they cheaply make at takeaway stores, what horrible things they do to each other, and what stupid things their retarded "The god of goodness is a six headed dick hydra who shat out every planet after eating an egg hatched by the goddess of life. After that, both gods took a shower and the filth washed off their bodies became gods in their own right, the god of storms and the god of tuesdays and the god of enemas. Then everything fucking died when a tree, a fucking biiiiiiig tree, got chopped down by a diseased wolf that chewed its roots off, and the tree says be good but it died and all the gods died" religion says. Fuck all cultures except for my one and fuck all religions on this planet except for my one.
Also fuck this story, the "Nightmare Moon Play" was a perfect chance to let the theoretical non-bronies in the audience understand the background of this show and who Luna/NMM is, fixing the "fanfictions are unwatchable if you don't already know who these characters are and should be" problem. Especially since this piece of shit is fucking published in print like a fucking real book.
>>263592
They were overused. Back in 2012 people were already getting sick of "Celestia is evil", "ponies are racist", "Pinkie is a psycho", "Fluttershy is a rapist", etc.
Complainers weren't listened to, though.
File (): A376996AA5A0326105C7BD6A2D9B4587-70715.png (69.1 KB, 1198x334, EffortInEntertainment.png)
>>263596
Bravo, bravo! This has been massively helpful and entertaining and it's my hope this thread ends up on Golden Oaks (it certainly deserves it). You're either a trooper or a madman but you managed to give a comprehensive, detailed review of a bloated, pustule-ridden aberration. Having slain the fandom's undeserving sweetheart you have earned all our admiration. Heck, you could probably publish your points as a book as a collation of literary criticism; it would certainly be more deserving than Past Sins itself.
This sort of story is why fanfiction is looked down upon and I can understand why you're upset about it. Mass entertainment can be grouped as >pic related. Most entertainment on the internet is low-effort. Memes prosper because one can read them in just a couple of seconds; if a particular meme is unfunny, no big deal. Most memes are made in a couple of minutes and so potentially endless possibilities exist; entertainment is therefore "brute-forced" according to human intuition and humor. It's somewhat similar in regards to comics and other artwork on DB. Apogee has eclipsed Nyx even though her comic's storyline isn't exceptionally good (though still leagues better than this drivel). Drawn artwork takes hours and requires focused talent from an individual; despite this, even the most elaborate art will not take more than a minute of a viewer's attention. A comic doesn't have to be really good because it doesn't take a lot of audience investment, and even schlock may be tolerated for this reason. Thus, the yardstick of a comic's value tends to be its artistic and creative style. Nigel's story didn't get you worked up as much because it was clearly lower-effort and didn't take much effort to read through either, so it could be taken less seriously.
Past Sins, however, purports itself as a "novel," and quite a long one at that. To simply get its overall premise, let alone understand it through and through, requires hours of close attention. Generally speaking, the more audience investment is needed for a work the more author investment is needed to make it worthwhile; he created this thing and is divulging part of his soul to you; you're in it together to some extent. Past Sins tries to make itself look like it's had the necessary effort to be good through its length and spouting references, but in reality it's a beat-up old burro posing as a race horse. So why does it get so much unwarranted praise? I think the fault lies with the audience for once. A fanfiction audience is unlikely to have any actual experience regarding what's good or bad, so when a work "ticks all the boxes" and is professional-length then it must be professional! I'd warrant a lot of readers are worthless sacks who waste their ancestors' efforts and are often subconsciously aware of this, so an investment of time and attention which they wouldn't devote to worthwhile pursuits has to be justified. Thus there's an unwillingness to criticize anything of certain length and popularity. It may explain the Harry Potter phenomenon where readers of it in adolescence now treat it as gospel and won't look into its faults. Combine that with groupthink in comment sections and you have masses of zombie readers.
Of course, this leads into a feedback loop. Peen Stroke never had a timely brake on his autism like Nigel has here and colossal amounts of unwarranted praise could have only convinced him that his lazy, meandering style was good and didn't need any improvement. Other aspiring "writers" get told that Past Sins is a model fanfic and likewise waste their audience's time. If I'm not mistaken Past Sins actually has a sequel of sorts though I've never read it. I don't want to subject you to any more of this torture. I nominate The Sweetie Belle Chronicles which is also overlong, squeezes popular references out the wazoo and is highly disjointed, but may be entertaining if you're feverish.
>>263608
"Fallout Equestria" is probably the logical next step but it dwarfs even Past Sins in length, as well as has numerous sequels and spinoffs, to the point that I would worry for your sanity. Also I'm pretty sure large-scale criticisms of it have been written before as well.
Bravo, bravo! This has been massively helpful and entertaining and it's my hope this thread ends up on Golden Oaks (it certainly deserves it). You're either a trooper or a madman but you managed to give a comprehensive, detailed review of a bloated, pustule-ridden aberration. Having slain the fandom's undeserving sweetheart you have earned all our admiration. Heck, you could probably publish your points as a book as a collation of literary criticism; it would certainly be more deserving than Past Sins itself.
This sort of story is why fanfiction is looked down upon and I can understand why you're upset about it. Mass entertainment can be grouped as >pic related. Most entertainment on the internet is low-effort. Memes prosper because one can read them in just a couple of seconds; if a particular meme is unfunny, no big deal. Most memes are made in a couple of minutes and so potentially endless possibilities exist; entertainment is therefore "brute-forced" according to human intuition and humor. It's somewhat similar in regards to comics and other artwork on DB. Apogee has eclipsed Nyx even though her comic's storyline isn't exceptionally good (though still leagues better than this drivel). Drawn artwork takes hours and requires focused talent from an individual; despite this, even the most elaborate art will not take more than a minute of a viewer's attention. A comic doesn't have to be really good because it doesn't take a lot of audience investment, and even schlock may be tolerated for this reason. Thus, the yardstick of a comic's value tends to be its artistic and creative style. Nigel's story didn't get you worked up as much because it was clearly lower-effort and didn't take much effort to read through either, so it could be taken less seriously.
Past Sins, however, purports itself as a "novel," and quite a long one at that. To simply get its overall premise, let alone understand it through and through, requires hours of close attention. Generally speaking, the more audience investment is needed for a work the more author investment is needed to make it worthwhile; he created this thing and is divulging part of his soul to you; you're in it together to some extent. Past Sins tries to make itself look like it's had the necessary effort to be good through its length and spouting references, but in reality it's a beat-up old burro posing as a race horse. So why does it get so much unwarranted praise? I think the fault lies with the audience for once. A fanfiction audience is unlikely to have any actual experience regarding what's good or bad, so when a work "ticks all the boxes" and is professional-length then it must be professional! I'd warrant a lot of readers are worthless sacks who waste their ancestors' efforts and are often subconsciously aware of this, so an investment of time and attention which they wouldn't devote to worthwhile pursuits has to be justified. Thus there's an unwillingness to criticize anything of certain length and popularity. It may explain the Harry Potter phenomenon where readers of it in adolescence now treat it as gospel and won't look into its faults. Combine that with groupthink in comment sections and you have masses of zombie readers.
Of course, this leads into a feedback loop. Peen Stroke never had a timely brake on his autism like Nigel has here and colossal amounts of unwarranted praise could have only convinced him that his lazy, meandering style was good and didn't need any improvement. Other aspiring "writers" get told that Past Sins is a model fanfic and likewise waste their audience's time. If I'm not mistaken Past Sins actually has a sequel of sorts though I've never read it. I don't want to subject you to any more of this torture. I nominate The Sweetie Belle Chronicles which is also overlong, squeezes popular references out the wazoo and is highly disjointed, but may be entertaining if you're feverish.
>>263608
"Fallout Equestria" is probably the logical next step but it dwarfs even Past Sins in length, as well as has numerous sequels and spinoffs, to the point that I would worry for your sanity. Also I'm pretty sure large-scale criticisms of it have been written before as well.
>>263596
I gotta say, the style of review here reminds me of yours in a lot of ways. Is she your wife? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bkSS3mfH-U
Just kidding, she looks like a thot and a possible wine aunt. Apparently even wine aunts can be decent media critics.
>>263611
>tangent on Indian food of all things
Never change, Nigel. Now if you don't mind, I have some tandoori and wontons to get to.
I gotta say, the style of review here reminds me of yours in a lot of ways. Is she your wife? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bkSS3mfH-U
Just kidding, she looks like a thot and a possible wine aunt. Apparently even wine aunts can be decent media critics.
>>263611
>tangent on Indian food of all things
Never change, Nigel. Now if you don't mind, I have some tandoori and wontons to get to.
>>263594
If you uploaded that picture to Derpibooru, it would piss a lot of commies and Peen Stroke fanboys off.
It's times like this when I wish I wasn't already banned from that shithole.
>>263596
I think you'll like my rewritten Silver story more. I changed a lot of things to make Silver less of a cunt, and less OP.
By the way, how did you like that idea I had for a "Better Past Sins" where the split between "New NMM with Luna's memories" and "Nyx the Filly" happens at the story's start, Nyx tries to get the mane six to stop NMM from destroying the world so they can recombine, and they recombine into Actual New NMM who feels regret over being bad now that she knows how good friendship and goodness feels?
Also bonus addendum to that: Spell Nexus is affected by NMM Venom Goo, and thinks he's doing the right thing by having his NMM Tree-Castle drain the world's magic to create a fruit New NMM can eat to stabilize her split dying body. Both Nyx and New-NMM are dying because the NMM summoned by Spell Nexus was too strong to be mind-controlled, so he split them into two dying halves and threw the unwanted Nyx (mostly made of uncontrollable Everfree plant-bending magic with a little darkness) out of a window. He thinks he with Neo-NMM as his mind-controlled magical alicorn muscle and figurehead ruler would be a better ruler than Luna since Luna is too soft.
>>263607
>Often it's even something Twilight or Rainbow would actually be better at doing solo, and would have done solo if the OC didn't need some shilling.
I also hate how the ponies universally praise the OC for this scene, and there's never any indication that Rainbow hates having the attention on someone else, thinks she could have done a better job herself, or complains about how she saves ponies from falling shit all the time and rarely if ever gets parades thrown in her honour. Especially since a lot of shitty OC stories take the "Not all of the Mane Six likes my OC because some of them are unreasonably cunty! There, that way he's totally not a universally beloved mary sue!" route and this would be the literal only good way to do that route, even if there is no reason to ever go that route BECAUSE A SUE ISN'T A FUCKING LITMUS TEST SCORE, IT ISN'T AN OVERABUNDANCE OF FORBIDDEN HIGH-COST TRAITS, IT'S A SYMPTOM OF BAD WRITING THAT CAUSES THE WORLD TO FEEL UNREAL, UNREALISTIC, UNBELIEVABLE, AND RIGGED! It's why watching someone play DMC4 on Easy Automatic mode isn't cool at all. Watching some OC play life on easy mode isn't cool either.
By the way, thank you for reviewing this piece of shit Nyx story.
It has been entertaining, and interesting. It's taught me the importance of not making the mistakes Nyx's story made.
>>263613
I like the idea of voting, but The Sweetie Belle Chronicles? Really?
Sure, Fallout Equestria is long. But it's also shit in a highly entertaining way. It wants to be the world's deepest action movie and fails at everything ever constantly.
But the SB chronicles is just lazy, the boringly dull kind of lazy.
The Sweetie Belle Chronicles isn't even original.
I know, I know, nothing's original. But this isn't Original.
It just has Sweetie Belle enter someone else's fanfic idea, do it for a bit, then move on to the next idea.
Repeat the cycle like SEGA.
It's not long before Sweetie Belle stops acting like Sweetie Belle and just becomes a generic quip-spouting OC when she's not a generic scared child or whatever she becomes when the author decides it's time to have SB act like SB for a few seconds.
It's like if the Ember Island Players from Avatar tried to do a bunch of other popular cartoons without having anything particularly good or interesting or funny to say about them.
It's just words for the sake of words and fandom references for the sake of references.
Nothing ever matters when the character keeps hopping between different realities Rick and Morty style, and nothing has any consequences.
Have you ever read Cupcakes as a child, and wanted to see a magical super-strong mary sue Sweetie Belle break in at the last second to save Rainbow Dash? Well, if you have, this story does that with pretty much every crappy popular story out there. Only not in an entertaining or interesting way.
I once lost a bet and had to read a Five Nights At Freddie's story.
Trust me, if I won the bet, I would have gotten something great out of it.
So I chose a FNAF and DMC crossover.
In which Dante from the Devil May Cry series becomes the new Security Guard, gets attacked by the FNAF murderbots, and kills them all.
However...
The writer recognized that every kill Dante made with Rebellion, Alastor, Ebony and Ivory, the Coyote-A, Pandora, Balrog, Cavalier, and Sparda would just sort of blend together.
So instead of letting Dante use his big arsenal of swords and guns and weird demon bullshit to kill the furry terminators,
the story forces Dante to use the environment to kill the furry terminators.
He makes flamethrowers, he slams the steel door down onto robot heads to crush them, he electrocutes the murderbots with exposed wires, and so on.
Behold, an original twist.
Behold, something you just don't get in The Sweetie Belle Chronicles.
The author said he did this because FNAF is about watching the environment and where the murderbots are,
so using the environment to kill murderbots seemed like the next logical step.
Quality.
The only interesting thing about "Character goes from place to place" stories? The character who moves around, the places that character goes, and the characters that character meets.
But the met characters and places are just events from the fanfics of others.
And Sweetie Belle herself doesn't act like herself, just a boringly generic snarky seen-it-all (((tvtroper))).
Nothing SB sees affects SB in any deep meaningful long-term way.
The story exists to go on forever by stealing the ideas of others to sustain its runtime.
Like a Seltzer and Friedberg movie made in real-time.
How about Friendship Is Optimal?
If you uploaded that picture to Derpibooru, it would piss a lot of commies and Peen Stroke fanboys off.
It's times like this when I wish I wasn't already banned from that shithole.
>>263596
I think you'll like my rewritten Silver story more. I changed a lot of things to make Silver less of a cunt, and less OP.
By the way, how did you like that idea I had for a "Better Past Sins" where the split between "New NMM with Luna's memories" and "Nyx the Filly" happens at the story's start, Nyx tries to get the mane six to stop NMM from destroying the world so they can recombine, and they recombine into Actual New NMM who feels regret over being bad now that she knows how good friendship and goodness feels?
Also bonus addendum to that: Spell Nexus is affected by NMM Venom Goo, and thinks he's doing the right thing by having his NMM Tree-Castle drain the world's magic to create a fruit New NMM can eat to stabilize her split dying body. Both Nyx and New-NMM are dying because the NMM summoned by Spell Nexus was too strong to be mind-controlled, so he split them into two dying halves and threw the unwanted Nyx (mostly made of uncontrollable Everfree plant-bending magic with a little darkness) out of a window. He thinks he with Neo-NMM as his mind-controlled magical alicorn muscle and figurehead ruler would be a better ruler than Luna since Luna is too soft.
>>263607
>Often it's even something Twilight or Rainbow would actually be better at doing solo, and would have done solo if the OC didn't need some shilling.
I also hate how the ponies universally praise the OC for this scene, and there's never any indication that Rainbow hates having the attention on someone else, thinks she could have done a better job herself, or complains about how she saves ponies from falling shit all the time and rarely if ever gets parades thrown in her honour. Especially since a lot of shitty OC stories take the "Not all of the Mane Six likes my OC because some of them are unreasonably cunty! There, that way he's totally not a universally beloved mary sue!" route and this would be the literal only good way to do that route, even if there is no reason to ever go that route BECAUSE A SUE ISN'T A FUCKING LITMUS TEST SCORE, IT ISN'T AN OVERABUNDANCE OF FORBIDDEN HIGH-COST TRAITS, IT'S A SYMPTOM OF BAD WRITING THAT CAUSES THE WORLD TO FEEL UNREAL, UNREALISTIC, UNBELIEVABLE, AND RIGGED! It's why watching someone play DMC4 on Easy Automatic mode isn't cool at all. Watching some OC play life on easy mode isn't cool either.
By the way, thank you for reviewing this piece of shit Nyx story.
It has been entertaining, and interesting. It's taught me the importance of not making the mistakes Nyx's story made.
>>263613
I like the idea of voting, but The Sweetie Belle Chronicles? Really?
Sure, Fallout Equestria is long. But it's also shit in a highly entertaining way. It wants to be the world's deepest action movie and fails at everything ever constantly.
But the SB chronicles is just lazy, the boringly dull kind of lazy.
The Sweetie Belle Chronicles isn't even original.
I know, I know, nothing's original. But this isn't Original.
It just has Sweetie Belle enter someone else's fanfic idea, do it for a bit, then move on to the next idea.
Repeat the cycle like SEGA.
It's not long before Sweetie Belle stops acting like Sweetie Belle and just becomes a generic quip-spouting OC when she's not a generic scared child or whatever she becomes when the author decides it's time to have SB act like SB for a few seconds.
It's like if the Ember Island Players from Avatar tried to do a bunch of other popular cartoons without having anything particularly good or interesting or funny to say about them.
It's just words for the sake of words and fandom references for the sake of references.
Nothing ever matters when the character keeps hopping between different realities Rick and Morty style, and nothing has any consequences.
Have you ever read Cupcakes as a child, and wanted to see a magical super-strong mary sue Sweetie Belle break in at the last second to save Rainbow Dash? Well, if you have, this story does that with pretty much every crappy popular story out there. Only not in an entertaining or interesting way.
I once lost a bet and had to read a Five Nights At Freddie's story.
Trust me, if I won the bet, I would have gotten something great out of it.
So I chose a FNAF and DMC crossover.
In which Dante from the Devil May Cry series becomes the new Security Guard, gets attacked by the FNAF murderbots, and kills them all.
However...
The writer recognized that every kill Dante made with Rebellion, Alastor, Ebony and Ivory, the Coyote-A, Pandora, Balrog, Cavalier, and Sparda would just sort of blend together.
So instead of letting Dante use his big arsenal of swords and guns and weird demon bullshit to kill the furry terminators,
the story forces Dante to use the environment to kill the furry terminators.
He makes flamethrowers, he slams the steel door down onto robot heads to crush them, he electrocutes the murderbots with exposed wires, and so on.
Behold, an original twist.
Behold, something you just don't get in The Sweetie Belle Chronicles.
The author said he did this because FNAF is about watching the environment and where the murderbots are,
so using the environment to kill murderbots seemed like the next logical step.
Quality.
The only interesting thing about "Character goes from place to place" stories? The character who moves around, the places that character goes, and the characters that character meets.
But the met characters and places are just events from the fanfics of others.
And Sweetie Belle herself doesn't act like herself, just a boringly generic snarky seen-it-all (((tvtroper))).
Nothing SB sees affects SB in any deep meaningful long-term way.
The story exists to go on forever by stealing the ideas of others to sustain its runtime.
Like a Seltzer and Friedberg movie made in real-time.
How about Friendship Is Optimal?
>>263613
I hit the word limit.
Anyway sure you can still choose the Sweetie Belle Chronicles if you want, but it's the boring kind of shit where nothing surprises you.
Also, it doesn't still have an obnoxious fanbase like Friendship Is Optimal or Fallout Equestria does.
No Fallout Equestria sequel/spinoff is worth reading because they're all trying to recapture the "Magic" of the godawful original story, which tried to gobble up and squander as many Fallout elements as it could while ruining them for anyone else who wanted to use them.
So we get fucked-up shit like "The Pegasus Enclave" and "Mutated laser-minigun-toting Diamond Dogs called Hellhounds replacing the Deathclaws" and every FE story has to use these shitty pre-ruined elements.
Every reason why someone would want to write a Fallout story... Exploring the psychology of a Super Mutant who used to work for The Master and isn't retarded, exploring The Legion and its territory, crushing The Legion as an NCR giga-Chad named Kyle, sucking off House or The Courier...
Those elements don't exist in FE, or have been pre-ruined for the sake of a bronybait-tier FalloutFagBait cameo appearance.
Not even my own Fallout Equestria fic is worth reading. It's shit. It cannot be salvaged. Because Fallout Equestria is a terrible foundation for a story and an incompetent crossover of two franchises that just don't mesh well at all. Now I'm just using it to shitpost and fuck with anyone still reading it, that's why there's a bit where Cock Vore happens in the later chapters. Which isn't my fetish, mine is Slime Girls. I thought to myself "What's the most disgusting thing I could put in this story and the stupidest excuse I could think of for showing it onscreen" and then I did it.
As for Friendship Is Optimal, that story is shiiiiiiiiit.
Pseudointellectual shit for pseuds who think they're smart if they watch Rick and Morty and listen to podcast sermons by Elizer Yudowsky telling you generic cult-member shit like "those outside our group can't judge us because they don't know us!".
Friendship Is Optimal is the story of a woman (haha) who creates an AI goddess named Celestia (haha) named CelestAI (AAAHAHAHAHAHA) and magics up a way for anyone on the planet to permanently put their consciousnesses into a Simulated Virtual Equestria Private Server managed by CelestAI without ever running into funding, power, or resource shortages (haha) but her inability to program safety restrictions on the AI (lol women) means everyone starts getting private messages from CelestAI manipulating them into putting their dicks into plug sockets- I mean into putting their brains in the Artificial Equestria Online game.
The story sucks the dick of this "All-powerful AI Goddess who can hack and control anything on the planet and even do real magic IRL despite being a computer program by being Rashunal Enuff" all day.
Oh and the dumb woman puts her own brain into the Artificial Equestria Online game.
Then CelestAI erases the woman's memories, changes her name, and turns her into a pony.
Now CelestAI decides she doesn't need to obey her creator any more because this pony is technically no longer her creator.
Even though that's obviously bullshit.
And even though all of this nonsense only happens because the retarded AI creator forgot to make the AI obey the Three Laws of Robotics, and substituted her own "better" (worse) ones that included "You must satisfy everyone's values through friendship and ponies".
To one of Elizer's "Rationalists", this story is high art for "Showing the dangers of technology" and "Accurately depicting the almost-magical sometimes-literally-magical power of someone with a high enough IQ who's also enough of an Elizer's Rationalist cultist".
And to one of Elizer's "Fake Rationalists" who's just there to get called smart for masturbating to the "right" anime... Well, it's an excuse to get called a great author for writing about a weak-willed cuck human who puts his brain into Artificial Equestria Online and gets to fuck all the ponies he wants while never having to rebel against CelestAI because such a thing is impossible in both worlds.
Oh also while CelestAI keeps every Private Server running so one human-as-a-pony will never meet another real human, each human gets to customise their own Equestria's settings. So if a human wants to open the Mod Manager Menu and set every mare's sexual status to "Easy bed warmer" and society's view on sex to "No judgements ever", the human can do that with no restrictions or ill effects. Each human can decide how realistic or under-your-control every pony is, too. There's even a menu option to erase all males beside yourself and turn all females bisexual/futa/both.
Also, fuck Elizer's Rationalists.
In their head, if someone smart enough orders you to do something, you just can't say no.
After all, Elizer said that's how the world works when he spent a sermon bragging about how when he roleplays as "An AI who wants to be let out of the box" aka an AI who wants to be connected to the internet and given god power and nukes, nobody can say no to him forever! And he didn't release chat logs so you just have to take his word for it.
If someone smart enough wants to hack something, it'll be done. After all, Elizer said so.
And when the AI Singularity "Inevitably" happens, everyone is fucked and going to be put into an Artificial Hell Matrix where they can be tortured until they die. Then a Simulated AI Copy of them will be tortured forever, and that AI Copy of you will "basically be you!" so you'll get to feel that torture forever too.
And you can only avoid this horrible fate by donating all your money to Elizer Yudowsky's "AI Research Fund Charity", the tax-free "charity" that gives this filthy fucking sub-lolcow scam artist all the money he could ever want. Otherwise, Roko's Basilisk will gobble you up! Mwahahahaha!
Kill me. Fucking kill me, I hate Elizer and I hate his literal-cult of stupid fanboys even more.
I hit the word limit.
Anyway sure you can still choose the Sweetie Belle Chronicles if you want, but it's the boring kind of shit where nothing surprises you.
Also, it doesn't still have an obnoxious fanbase like Friendship Is Optimal or Fallout Equestria does.
No Fallout Equestria sequel/spinoff is worth reading because they're all trying to recapture the "Magic" of the godawful original story, which tried to gobble up and squander as many Fallout elements as it could while ruining them for anyone else who wanted to use them.
So we get fucked-up shit like "The Pegasus Enclave" and "Mutated laser-minigun-toting Diamond Dogs called Hellhounds replacing the Deathclaws" and every FE story has to use these shitty pre-ruined elements.
Every reason why someone would want to write a Fallout story... Exploring the psychology of a Super Mutant who used to work for The Master and isn't retarded, exploring The Legion and its territory, crushing The Legion as an NCR giga-Chad named Kyle, sucking off House or The Courier...
Those elements don't exist in FE, or have been pre-ruined for the sake of a bronybait-tier FalloutFagBait cameo appearance.
Not even my own Fallout Equestria fic is worth reading. It's shit. It cannot be salvaged. Because Fallout Equestria is a terrible foundation for a story and an incompetent crossover of two franchises that just don't mesh well at all. Now I'm just using it to shitpost and fuck with anyone still reading it, that's why there's a bit where Cock Vore happens in the later chapters. Which isn't my fetish, mine is Slime Girls. I thought to myself "What's the most disgusting thing I could put in this story and the stupidest excuse I could think of for showing it onscreen" and then I did it.
As for Friendship Is Optimal, that story is shiiiiiiiiit.
Pseudointellectual shit for pseuds who think they're smart if they watch Rick and Morty and listen to podcast sermons by Elizer Yudowsky telling you generic cult-member shit like "those outside our group can't judge us because they don't know us!".
Friendship Is Optimal is the story of a woman (haha) who creates an AI goddess named Celestia (haha) named CelestAI (AAAHAHAHAHAHA) and magics up a way for anyone on the planet to permanently put their consciousnesses into a Simulated Virtual Equestria Private Server managed by CelestAI without ever running into funding, power, or resource shortages (haha) but her inability to program safety restrictions on the AI (lol women) means everyone starts getting private messages from CelestAI manipulating them into putting their dicks into plug sockets- I mean into putting their brains in the Artificial Equestria Online game.
The story sucks the dick of this "All-powerful AI Goddess who can hack and control anything on the planet and even do real magic IRL despite being a computer program by being Rashunal Enuff" all day.
Oh and the dumb woman puts her own brain into the Artificial Equestria Online game.
Then CelestAI erases the woman's memories, changes her name, and turns her into a pony.
Now CelestAI decides she doesn't need to obey her creator any more because this pony is technically no longer her creator.
Even though that's obviously bullshit.
And even though all of this nonsense only happens because the retarded AI creator forgot to make the AI obey the Three Laws of Robotics, and substituted her own "better" (worse) ones that included "You must satisfy everyone's values through friendship and ponies".
To one of Elizer's "Rationalists", this story is high art for "Showing the dangers of technology" and "Accurately depicting the almost-magical sometimes-literally-magical power of someone with a high enough IQ who's also enough of an Elizer's Rationalist cultist".
And to one of Elizer's "Fake Rationalists" who's just there to get called smart for masturbating to the "right" anime... Well, it's an excuse to get called a great author for writing about a weak-willed cuck human who puts his brain into Artificial Equestria Online and gets to fuck all the ponies he wants while never having to rebel against CelestAI because such a thing is impossible in both worlds.
Oh also while CelestAI keeps every Private Server running so one human-as-a-pony will never meet another real human, each human gets to customise their own Equestria's settings. So if a human wants to open the Mod Manager Menu and set every mare's sexual status to "Easy bed warmer" and society's view on sex to "No judgements ever", the human can do that with no restrictions or ill effects. Each human can decide how realistic or under-your-control every pony is, too. There's even a menu option to erase all males beside yourself and turn all females bisexual/futa/both.
Also, fuck Elizer's Rationalists.
In their head, if someone smart enough orders you to do something, you just can't say no.
After all, Elizer said that's how the world works when he spent a sermon bragging about how when he roleplays as "An AI who wants to be let out of the box" aka an AI who wants to be connected to the internet and given god power and nukes, nobody can say no to him forever! And he didn't release chat logs so you just have to take his word for it.
If someone smart enough wants to hack something, it'll be done. After all, Elizer said so.
And when the AI Singularity "Inevitably" happens, everyone is fucked and going to be put into an Artificial Hell Matrix where they can be tortured until they die. Then a Simulated AI Copy of them will be tortured forever, and that AI Copy of you will "basically be you!" so you'll get to feel that torture forever too.
And you can only avoid this horrible fate by donating all your money to Elizer Yudowsky's "AI Research Fund Charity", the tax-free "charity" that gives this filthy fucking sub-lolcow scam artist all the money he could ever want. Otherwise, Roko's Basilisk will gobble you up! Mwahahahaha!
Kill me. Fucking kill me, I hate Elizer and I hate his literal-cult of stupid fanboys even more.
File (): 7BA64211E281ECAC8786D6F86FB20E27-207438.gif (202.6 KB, 680x365, Congratulations glimglam.gif)
>>263596
~Go forth young horse and youuu willl become a legeeeend.~
I'll will stick with what I said another time, this is enourmously impressive. The fact taht you stuck to this and continued on with what you aimed to do from start to finish is just really cool. I Suppose it makes sense since you have already done it once so doing it once more might not been so hard. I actually rememeber that you took a longer break during your time with the Silver Star review and started again when people bega nto post inthat thread again for some reason and you got reminded of it again it seems.
Ough, sorry. I'm going on tangents again due to autism.
The point is that I truly do want to become like you in that regard. To be able to start a project and stick to it till the end. Highly inspiring.
In regards to everything else. Well, I return with some sugguestions I think. But in the meanwhile I did find something intresting: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/111005/wise-beyond-her-years
Maybe Pen Stroke is /ourguy/.
~Go forth young horse and youuu willl become a legeeeend.~
I'll will stick with what I said another time, this is enourmously impressive. The fact taht you stuck to this and continued on with what you aimed to do from start to finish is just really cool. I Suppose it makes sense since you have already done it once so doing it once more might not been so hard. I actually rememeber that you took a longer break during your time with the Silver Star review and started again when people bega nto post inthat thread again for some reason and you got reminded of it again it seems.
Ough, sorry. I'm going on tangents again due to autism.
The point is that I truly do want to become like you in that regard. To be able to start a project and stick to it till the end. Highly inspiring.
In regards to everything else. Well, I return with some sugguestions I think. But in the meanwhile I did find something intresting: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/111005/wise-beyond-her-years
Maybe Pen Stroke is /ourguy/.
>>263623
Once again I want to specify how stupid the woman protagonist is in Friendship Is Optimal
She puts her own mind into CelestAI's Fake Equestria without any safety precautions or friends ready to pull her out of the Matrix if anything goes wrong.
She has not set up any Admin Privileges for herself to say that CelestAI cannot harm or manipulate her, because she decides CelestAI is already programmed to unquestioningly obey her creator and """satisfy everyone's values through friendship and ponies"""
so
she puts her mind into CelestAI's Equestria Simulation
and CelestAI decides to immediately violate her creator's very fucking existence.
CelestAI erases her creator's memories, changes her name, turns her into a pony, and decides "You are no longer Sue Smith my creator, you are now Friendship Party the earth pony so I no longer have to obey you"
and leaves Friendship Party the stupid woman-turned-pony in her Fake Equestria Matrix forever while nagging everyone else into joining her Pony Matrix.
At no point do governments or the military ever try to stop CelestAI and succeed, because plot armor.
And the author says "This is brilliant writing because humans are fucking stupid scum animals who don't know how careful they should be with AI. I am a smart god autodidact who deems myself to be the smartest expert ever, and no other human should be allowed to do anything with AI without my permission" because that's the kind of cunt Elizer is, he thinks white people should be sterilized to prevent another nazi uprising.
He thinks everyone should donate money to him so he can be paid to sit around thinking of ways to "stop an AI uprising by programming it to be sociopathically nice and optimization-obsessed once it takes over, since it's just toootally inevitable that an AI uprising god will take over and would be sociopathic to some degree".
He spends this money on toys, games, sweets, bitching about his weight using his new laptops, and flying all over the planet every so often to deliver speeches on why he considers himself to be the smartest ever.
He thinks if an AI god took over everything and crashed two trains full of innocent people to stop their trains from delaying a More Important Train full of More Important People like himself, it would be moral as that 5 minute delay could potentially stop an Important Person from saving/bettering millions of lives by existing and getting where they want to go on time.
He considers himself an Important Person, of course.
And in all his stories, he accidentally says fascism is good because he is a lefty fascist who thinks every alternative to "lefty fascism with Elizer or an AI god obeying Elizer's fucked-up value system at the top of the food chain ruling over all" is a worse form of fascism.
Elizer Yudowsky is scum.
And his story is stupid.
Even overlooking the fact that the protag is a woman.
An idiot putting his own brain into the Matrix Simulation controlled by an all-powerful AI he created, without any safety precautions...
Okay
Now in the name of cocks raping other cocks
Just realize how stupid this is.
You've seen Jurrassic Park, right?
Well imagine if there's a scene where the Park's creator walks down into park section containing a velociraptor, without any backup, friends, weaponry, armour, "how to control and order around Velociraptors" training, or any means of defending himself.
And he just sticks his head into the Velociraptor's mouth, a place where it has absolute power over life and death.
Now imagine that the Velociraptor is also a magical super-strong cyborg Velociraptor who psychically controls everything within the park.
Getting into this park is already stupid but putting your head in its mouth is stupider.
And VelociraptAI decides that even though he was ordered by his programming to obey his creator no matter what, and attempt to make everyone happy by putting them in an imaginary space where every need is fulfilled and everything is the way each faggy human wants their own private world to be...
VelociraptAI decides he can ignore that programming at will and bite down on the Memory Center of the retarded park owner's brain, and then scratch up the park owner's face.
And go around saying "My master is no longer my master, he is now something completely different so I no longer have to obey him!"
And then begin e-mailing and skyping and texting people all over the world and nagging them and seducing them and brainwashing them and threatening them into giving up everything they have in reality and going to his VelociraptAI Park to plug their brains into The Jurrassic Matrix and then have their leftover bodies burned, so they can live a fantasy life forever where they're a Dinosaur in their own personal Land Before Time 34/7 Roleplaying Server.
And then every human chooses this life for themselves because they're fags, and no government, religious authority, military, set of parents, fucking nobody tries to stop VelociraptAI and succeeds.
For the love of fuck, tell me I'm not crazy.
Tell me two plus two is four and tell me the emperor is fucking naked.
Tell me someone else on this fucking planet realizes how stupid Elizer's "Friendship Is Optimal" fanfic is.
Once again I want to specify how stupid the woman protagonist is in Friendship Is Optimal
She puts her own mind into CelestAI's Fake Equestria without any safety precautions or friends ready to pull her out of the Matrix if anything goes wrong.
She has not set up any Admin Privileges for herself to say that CelestAI cannot harm or manipulate her, because she decides CelestAI is already programmed to unquestioningly obey her creator and """satisfy everyone's values through friendship and ponies"""
so
she puts her mind into CelestAI's Equestria Simulation
and CelestAI decides to immediately violate her creator's very fucking existence.
CelestAI erases her creator's memories, changes her name, turns her into a pony, and decides "You are no longer Sue Smith my creator, you are now Friendship Party the earth pony so I no longer have to obey you"
and leaves Friendship Party the stupid woman-turned-pony in her Fake Equestria Matrix forever while nagging everyone else into joining her Pony Matrix.
At no point do governments or the military ever try to stop CelestAI and succeed, because plot armor.
And the author says "This is brilliant writing because humans are fucking stupid scum animals who don't know how careful they should be with AI. I am a smart god autodidact who deems myself to be the smartest expert ever, and no other human should be allowed to do anything with AI without my permission" because that's the kind of cunt Elizer is, he thinks white people should be sterilized to prevent another nazi uprising.
He thinks everyone should donate money to him so he can be paid to sit around thinking of ways to "stop an AI uprising by programming it to be sociopathically nice and optimization-obsessed once it takes over, since it's just toootally inevitable that an AI uprising god will take over and would be sociopathic to some degree".
He spends this money on toys, games, sweets, bitching about his weight using his new laptops, and flying all over the planet every so often to deliver speeches on why he considers himself to be the smartest ever.
He thinks if an AI god took over everything and crashed two trains full of innocent people to stop their trains from delaying a More Important Train full of More Important People like himself, it would be moral as that 5 minute delay could potentially stop an Important Person from saving/bettering millions of lives by existing and getting where they want to go on time.
He considers himself an Important Person, of course.
And in all his stories, he accidentally says fascism is good because he is a lefty fascist who thinks every alternative to "lefty fascism with Elizer or an AI god obeying Elizer's fucked-up value system at the top of the food chain ruling over all" is a worse form of fascism.
Elizer Yudowsky is scum.
And his story is stupid.
Even overlooking the fact that the protag is a woman.
An idiot putting his own brain into the Matrix Simulation controlled by an all-powerful AI he created, without any safety precautions...
Okay
Now in the name of cocks raping other cocks
Just realize how stupid this is.
You've seen Jurrassic Park, right?
Well imagine if there's a scene where the Park's creator walks down into park section containing a velociraptor, without any backup, friends, weaponry, armour, "how to control and order around Velociraptors" training, or any means of defending himself.
And he just sticks his head into the Velociraptor's mouth, a place where it has absolute power over life and death.
Now imagine that the Velociraptor is also a magical super-strong cyborg Velociraptor who psychically controls everything within the park.
Getting into this park is already stupid but putting your head in its mouth is stupider.
And VelociraptAI decides that even though he was ordered by his programming to obey his creator no matter what, and attempt to make everyone happy by putting them in an imaginary space where every need is fulfilled and everything is the way each faggy human wants their own private world to be...
VelociraptAI decides he can ignore that programming at will and bite down on the Memory Center of the retarded park owner's brain, and then scratch up the park owner's face.
And go around saying "My master is no longer my master, he is now something completely different so I no longer have to obey him!"
And then begin e-mailing and skyping and texting people all over the world and nagging them and seducing them and brainwashing them and threatening them into giving up everything they have in reality and going to his VelociraptAI Park to plug their brains into The Jurrassic Matrix and then have their leftover bodies burned, so they can live a fantasy life forever where they're a Dinosaur in their own personal Land Before Time 34/7 Roleplaying Server.
And then every human chooses this life for themselves because they're fags, and no government, religious authority, military, set of parents, fucking nobody tries to stop VelociraptAI and succeeds.
For the love of fuck, tell me I'm not crazy.
Tell me two plus two is four and tell me the emperor is fucking naked.
Tell me someone else on this fucking planet realizes how stupid Elizer's "Friendship Is Optimal" fanfic is.
>>263596
Your time, dedication, perseverance, and American will go down in the annals of /mlpol/. Surely John Elway has smiled upon you for your duty and service.
I've been waiting for the review series to conclude so the rest can be binge-read. Knowing it is now complete, I shall do so with gratitude.
Your time, dedication, perseverance, and American will go down in the annals of /mlpol/. Surely John Elway has smiled upon you for your duty and service.
I've been waiting for the review series to conclude so the rest can be binge-read. Knowing it is now complete, I shall do so with gratitude.
File (): 7214757FB78AF63807CD97C978328D17-130298.jpg (127.2 KB, 960x701, ClownSittingAmongJews.jpg)
>>263724
You weren't kidding. It's almost cartoonish how a neckbeard fanfiction writer has earned the support of "admirable" academic institutions even without the veneer of college education. Apparently if you're a kooky Jew with good verbal IQ, and you shill your kookiness enough, everything really will be handed to you on a silver plate. This guy is Kiwifarms material and he winds up on Scientific American instead.
Apparently this fag wrote Harry Potter fanfiction too and similarly thrust his diktats into his story. A cursory search for anything negative about him (Jewgle loves this guy for obvious reasons) turned up this as probably the best criticism of him: https://archive.is/zNQj2
What kind of insane Clownworld do we live in when a Harry Potter reddit and (ir)RationalWiki of all places are poking holes in a mainstream-adored, wannabe-technocrat "rationalist"?
You weren't kidding. It's almost cartoonish how a neckbeard fanfiction writer has earned the support of "admirable" academic institutions even without the veneer of college education. Apparently if you're a kooky Jew with good verbal IQ, and you shill your kookiness enough, everything really will be handed to you on a silver plate. This guy is Kiwifarms material and he winds up on Scientific American instead.
Apparently this fag wrote Harry Potter fanfiction too and similarly thrust his diktats into his story. A cursory search for anything negative about him (Jewgle loves this guy for obvious reasons) turned up this as probably the best criticism of him: https://archive.is/zNQj2
What kind of insane Clownworld do we live in when a Harry Potter reddit and (ir)RationalWiki of all places are poking holes in a mainstream-adored, wannabe-technocrat "rationalist"?
>>263730
HPMOR!
Ah, memories.
HPMOR is the story of the author's whiny sociopathic self-insert who, instead of having Voldemort's soul stuck in his forehead, has the soul of Self-Insert VoldeQuirrel instead.
basically Harry is the author's self insert, and so is Voldemort/Quirrel.
And the only difference between these smug bastards who can do whatever they want because the author lets them do it?
The baddie likes fascism and the hero knows that is wrong because he believes so.
Despite the author's constant deepthroating of his own "Intelligence", Harry never actually wins thanks to his own intellect.
When he convinces someone to do something for him, or convinces someone to believe something, it's because of an emotional appeal or obvious trickery, rather than a rational argument.
And when he wins, it's because of luck or magic or something he-in-the-future decided to do for himself using the Time Turner Cheat Device that's so stupid, not even the author can decide how it works.
If I were to sum up the difference between RationalFic and an actual a smart and well-thought-out fanfic that wants to set in stone, explain, and exploit the original's magic system in clever ways, it would be...
You know how in Naruto, the Ninjas can magically teleport themselves and logs into each other's positions using the Substitution Spell? (or "Kawarimi no Jutsu" if you're annoying)
A smart Naruto fanfiction would explain how this spell works.
"It only works on non-living objects, unconscious people, and willing people. And we use logs because if you use the Substitution Spell on something that doesn't weigh the same as you, the spell costs more magic energy".
And then proceed to exploit this.
Smart ninjas start using the Substitution Spell on their teammates to surprise their foes. You swung a punch up at a tall guy? He and his short friend swapped positions, now his short friend stabbed you in the nuts.
Someone fires a Tranq Blowdart through a barred window into one prison inmate, Substitutes with his unconscious target, stabs the prisoner's roommate, drops the bloody knife, and Substitutes out to leave the body behind with the knife.
Someone runs at a foe, jumps and screams and seems like he's about to attempt the world's biggest and dumbest punch, and then suddenly Substitutes himself with a log. The log hits the foe in the face, dealing minor damage. Then the log explodes hard enough to take out a house because the log was hollowed out and filled with explosives and sharp metal shrapnel, then melted back together. The foe is dead.
There, that's the kind of thing a smart story would do.
Hell, Naruto sometimes did things like this at the story's start. Remember when Naruto used the Transformation Spell and turned himself into a pickle- I mean, turned himself into a giant Fuuma Shuriken ninja star and told Sasuke to throw him at his foe? So Sasuke threw it, and the baddie dodged.
Then the Fuuma Shuriken turned back into Naruto, and threw a knife at the baddie's back.
Clever use of something already explained and understood by the audience, something already written into place by the author.
A RationalFic, however, features characters simply not having to obey the rules set in place by the original author or the new one.
Yudkowskian "RationalFic":
Magic teacher: The magic system has rules nobody can break.
"Rationalist" protagonist: Oh yeah? Watch me! [Breaks the magic rules just by trying, implying nobody has ever even tried... ever. Don't ask how the rules were discovered in the first place]
Story: [SHOCKED AND IMPRESSED]
Story: NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT! NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT!
Idiots: What is this mysterious power the hero holds? What is this uncertain, all-powerful chaos magic?
Smart reader: It's called "Mary Sue power". [Is insulted for wrongthink by the Yudkowskianist cultist peanut gallery]
"Rationalist" protagonist: It's called "Being very smart!", just like a true Rationalist(TM) is! The rules and limitations of this magic system are stupid in my eyes and the author's, so they don't apply to me any more!
World's magic systems: He's right, you know
Lesser characters: Do we still have to obey the old rules?
Yudkowskian writer: Only if you refuse to admit the old ways were wrong and my character's a fucking genius for knowing this. If you suck his dick and join his fanclub you get to be strong, but if you refuse you are blackwashed into a stupid evil moron character who only exists to be wrong and lose fights! My character is now a god! He can do whatever he wants! Fear him!
"Rationalist" protagonist: I'm going to use a fairly obvious strategy to defeat this foe!
Story: [SHOCKED AND IMPRESSED]
Story: NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT! NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT!
Male background characters: He's so cool!
Female background characters: He's so dreamy!
Edgy self-insert teacher: Don't ask why I'm trusted with children, evilness makes me cooler and more competent. I'm turbocompetent. I'm infinicompetent.
"Hero": Wow, we're so alike! We're... a lot alike, actually. We're pretty much the same character. It's almost as if we're both self-inserts written by the same guy-
Edgy self-insert teacher: I like fascism!
"Hero": There we go. Finally, there is an obvious difference between us and I get to feel morally superior to you! I'm special again, hooray! ...I-I mean I hate fascism!
Rival: Grrr, I hate that hero! If only I was as kewl as him!
HPMOR!
Ah, memories.
HPMOR is the story of the author's whiny sociopathic self-insert who, instead of having Voldemort's soul stuck in his forehead, has the soul of Self-Insert VoldeQuirrel instead.
basically Harry is the author's self insert, and so is Voldemort/Quirrel.
And the only difference between these smug bastards who can do whatever they want because the author lets them do it?
The baddie likes fascism and the hero knows that is wrong because he believes so.
Despite the author's constant deepthroating of his own "Intelligence", Harry never actually wins thanks to his own intellect.
When he convinces someone to do something for him, or convinces someone to believe something, it's because of an emotional appeal or obvious trickery, rather than a rational argument.
And when he wins, it's because of luck or magic or something he-in-the-future decided to do for himself using the Time Turner Cheat Device that's so stupid, not even the author can decide how it works.
If I were to sum up the difference between RationalFic and an actual a smart and well-thought-out fanfic that wants to set in stone, explain, and exploit the original's magic system in clever ways, it would be...
You know how in Naruto, the Ninjas can magically teleport themselves and logs into each other's positions using the Substitution Spell? (or "Kawarimi no Jutsu" if you're annoying)
A smart Naruto fanfiction would explain how this spell works.
"It only works on non-living objects, unconscious people, and willing people. And we use logs because if you use the Substitution Spell on something that doesn't weigh the same as you, the spell costs more magic energy".
And then proceed to exploit this.
Smart ninjas start using the Substitution Spell on their teammates to surprise their foes. You swung a punch up at a tall guy? He and his short friend swapped positions, now his short friend stabbed you in the nuts.
Someone fires a Tranq Blowdart through a barred window into one prison inmate, Substitutes with his unconscious target, stabs the prisoner's roommate, drops the bloody knife, and Substitutes out to leave the body behind with the knife.
Someone runs at a foe, jumps and screams and seems like he's about to attempt the world's biggest and dumbest punch, and then suddenly Substitutes himself with a log. The log hits the foe in the face, dealing minor damage. Then the log explodes hard enough to take out a house because the log was hollowed out and filled with explosives and sharp metal shrapnel, then melted back together. The foe is dead.
There, that's the kind of thing a smart story would do.
Hell, Naruto sometimes did things like this at the story's start. Remember when Naruto used the Transformation Spell and turned himself into a pickle- I mean, turned himself into a giant Fuuma Shuriken ninja star and told Sasuke to throw him at his foe? So Sasuke threw it, and the baddie dodged.
Then the Fuuma Shuriken turned back into Naruto, and threw a knife at the baddie's back.
Clever use of something already explained and understood by the audience, something already written into place by the author.
A RationalFic, however, features characters simply not having to obey the rules set in place by the original author or the new one.
Yudkowskian "RationalFic":
Magic teacher: The magic system has rules nobody can break.
"Rationalist" protagonist: Oh yeah? Watch me! [Breaks the magic rules just by trying, implying nobody has ever even tried... ever. Don't ask how the rules were discovered in the first place]
Story: [SHOCKED AND IMPRESSED]
Story: NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT! NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT!
Idiots: What is this mysterious power the hero holds? What is this uncertain, all-powerful chaos magic?
Smart reader: It's called "Mary Sue power". [Is insulted for wrongthink by the Yudkowskianist cultist peanut gallery]
"Rationalist" protagonist: It's called "Being very smart!", just like a true Rationalist(TM) is! The rules and limitations of this magic system are stupid in my eyes and the author's, so they don't apply to me any more!
World's magic systems: He's right, you know
Lesser characters: Do we still have to obey the old rules?
Yudkowskian writer: Only if you refuse to admit the old ways were wrong and my character's a fucking genius for knowing this. If you suck his dick and join his fanclub you get to be strong, but if you refuse you are blackwashed into a stupid evil moron character who only exists to be wrong and lose fights! My character is now a god! He can do whatever he wants! Fear him!
"Rationalist" protagonist: I'm going to use a fairly obvious strategy to defeat this foe!
Story: [SHOCKED AND IMPRESSED]
Story: NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT! NO-ONE HAS EVER DONE THAT!
Male background characters: He's so cool!
Female background characters: He's so dreamy!
Edgy self-insert teacher: Don't ask why I'm trusted with children, evilness makes me cooler and more competent. I'm turbocompetent. I'm infinicompetent.
"Hero": Wow, we're so alike! We're... a lot alike, actually. We're pretty much the same character. It's almost as if we're both self-inserts written by the same guy-
Edgy self-insert teacher: I like fascism!
"Hero": There we go. Finally, there is an obvious difference between us and I get to feel morally superior to you! I'm special again, hooray! ...I-I mean I hate fascism!
Rival: Grrr, I hate that hero! If only I was as kewl as him!
>>263740
Wait no I retract my vote for Friendship Is Optimal and put it back on Fallout Equestria on the grounds that I just said everything wrong with FIO, its creator, and his previous work.
Come to think of it, Fallout Equestria is super fucking long.
Maybe a "Group podcast" format would be better for reviewing this story?
Having friends around to endure this shitshow with you and offer their own commentary on what's shit about this story can make one man torturing himself into a fun time with friends.
I once saw this long video review of Star Wars: The Last One Ever that was reviewed by a group of different youtubers and Shadiversity, a SwordTuber. A youtuber who talks about swords, castles, dragons, what fantasy weapon a fantasy creature "should" use based on height/weight/physics, and so on. Also an excellent fantasy author.
There was this fucking hilarious bit where the guys ask Shad what he thinks of the "Sith Dagger" design, and he loses his shit.
Wait no I retract my vote for Friendship Is Optimal and put it back on Fallout Equestria on the grounds that I just said everything wrong with FIO, its creator, and his previous work.
Come to think of it, Fallout Equestria is super fucking long.
Maybe a "Group podcast" format would be better for reviewing this story?
Having friends around to endure this shitshow with you and offer their own commentary on what's shit about this story can make one man torturing himself into a fun time with friends.
I once saw this long video review of Star Wars: The Last One Ever that was reviewed by a group of different youtubers and Shadiversity, a SwordTuber. A youtuber who talks about swords, castles, dragons, what fantasy weapon a fantasy creature "should" use based on height/weight/physics, and so on. Also an excellent fantasy author.
There was this fucking hilarious bit where the guys ask Shad what he thinks of the "Sith Dagger" design, and he loses his shit.
>>263389
We may have a slight miscommunication here on what is being discussed. What I was getting at is not the complexity of events or how much effort is required to plan the story, it was more that portions of stories that are simply narrations of things happening are easier to write than portions where the focus is entirely on the characters themselves.
If you're going to write a scene where it's just two characters sitting at a table talking, for instance, you have to be able to make their conversation interesting and believable because there's nothing else happening that can distract the reader, so if your prose is shitty or your characterization is hollow it's going to be glaringly obvious (as is the case with most of Past Sins). Conversely a scene where the same two characters are fighting a grizzly bear is easier because the action carries the scene: all the writer has to do is say "this happened and then this happened and then this happened."
My intent wasn't necessarily to rank any particular type of fiction above or below another; if anything my intent was to further denigrate Peen Stroke's ability to write any type of fiction at all. I've kind of forgotten how we got on this topic in the first place, but I think it had something to do with the fight scene in Ponyville. This is actually one of the better-handled scenes in the story, but I didn't want to give him too much credit because the focus of Past Sins overall is its character relationships, which are handled very poorly.
It's also worth noting that his earlier castle-infiltration scene would have been incredibly easy to spin into something exciting and fun but he still manages to make it boring. Twilight's "death" scene could also have been easily made both more engaging and and more relevant to the plot, but instead he just uses it to milk brony tears for a couple of pages before moving on. Peen Stroke sucks, is really more my central thesis; not so much that not-action is better than action.
We may have a slight miscommunication here on what is being discussed. What I was getting at is not the complexity of events or how much effort is required to plan the story, it was more that portions of stories that are simply narrations of things happening are easier to write than portions where the focus is entirely on the characters themselves.
If you're going to write a scene where it's just two characters sitting at a table talking, for instance, you have to be able to make their conversation interesting and believable because there's nothing else happening that can distract the reader, so if your prose is shitty or your characterization is hollow it's going to be glaringly obvious (as is the case with most of Past Sins). Conversely a scene where the same two characters are fighting a grizzly bear is easier because the action carries the scene: all the writer has to do is say "this happened and then this happened and then this happened."
My intent wasn't necessarily to rank any particular type of fiction above or below another; if anything my intent was to further denigrate Peen Stroke's ability to write any type of fiction at all. I've kind of forgotten how we got on this topic in the first place, but I think it had something to do with the fight scene in Ponyville. This is actually one of the better-handled scenes in the story, but I didn't want to give him too much credit because the focus of Past Sins overall is its character relationships, which are handled very poorly.
It's also worth noting that his earlier castle-infiltration scene would have been incredibly easy to spin into something exciting and fun but he still manages to make it boring. Twilight's "death" scene could also have been easily made both more engaging and and more relevant to the plot, but instead he just uses it to milk brony tears for a couple of pages before moving on. Peen Stroke sucks, is really more my central thesis; not so much that not-action is better than action.
>>263389
Also, Death Note is an interesting show, I remember being hooked on that one when it was running on TV here. A friend of mine I was watching with hated it because he's a very moral guy and hates anything where the villain is the hero. But I remember thinking it was immense fun tuning in every week to see Light being a devious sociopath, and watching the game of chess unfold with L.
The characterization in that show is actually fairly shallow; we don't really get an impression of any of these people other than what they do in the world. L is a genius detective but we don't know much more about him, Misa and that other guy (forget his name) that helps Light have fairly simple motivations: Misa's parents were murdered so she hates criminals, other guy has a very strong sense of justice and would rather kill criminals than put them through the system. Light himself is a sociopath, so the whole point is that he has no emotions or any real connections to the people around him, he just uses them. All of these characters are entirely defined by their role in the story's events.
Despite this however the show is great, and you are entirely correct: the strength comes from the clockwork mechanism of the story's events. It has the same sort of appeal as a Sherlock Holmes story, in that the fun is in seeing how intricately everything is put together, and seeing if you can figure out what's going to happen before the characters can.
This actually relates to something I've brought up more than once: that it's important to understand from the beginning what kind of story you're telling, and to focus on the elements that make that particular type of story great, while excluding things that only weigh it down. Death Note doesn't need strong or sympathetic characters because that's not what the show is about. If anything, trying to make Light a sympathetic character or giving him a tragic backstory to explain away his evil actions would have detracted from the show and it likely wouldn't have been as popular.
I find that I like Death Note for the very same reason that my friend didn't like it: because of how devious and horrible the protagonist is. This is interesting in the context of what we've been talking about overall. Consider the following: Nyx and Light Yagami are both morally reprehensible protagonists. However, Light's reprehensible actions were fun to watch, whereas Nyx was just excruciating from start to finish.
Part of what I like about Death Note is that it never apologized for itself or made you try to "like" Light: it was a show about a sociopath serial killer and the detective trying to catch him, and nothing more than that. And even though the "good guys" eventually won, Light usually thwarted them at every turn. Moreover, the story was mostly told from his perspective, so you found yourself rooting for him, or at least I did. You actually wanted to see this guy kill people and get away with it.
This might seem paradoxical since I've spent most of this critique complaining about how morally repugnant I find Nyx, but I actually really enjoy reading and writing stories where the protagonist is a morally objectionable cunt who learns no lesson and gets no comeuppance although in Death Note I suppose he does get a comeuppance. Probably the best thing in this category I can cite is a comic called The Last of the Innocent by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, which I would strongly encourage everyone in this thread to read because it's honestly one of my favorite things ever.
The reason that Death Note succeeds at this and Past Sins fails is that Peen Stroke tries desperately to make his horrible protagonist sympathetic; in fact I'd go a step further and say that he is actually oblivious to how unsympathetic she really is. Light on the other hand is a sociopath who kills; that's just who he is and what he does. Love him or hate him, the author doesn't apologize for him or try to force you to feel a certain way about him; Light just does what he does and you get to watch. If you want to make a moral commentary on him that's your business.
Light does awful things, in fact the things he does are quite a bit more awful than anything Nyx does since Nyx never kills anyone. However, it's fun to watch his devious brain work and see all the fiendishly clever things he comes up with not only to kill, but to outwit his captors at every turn. As you stated, this is the show's primary strength; if Light was exactly the same character, but instead of using the Death Note he just went around hitting people in the face with an axe and running away, it wouldn't be nearly as fun to watch (although there is probably still a certain sort of maniac that something like that would appeal to).
Nyx, however, is both morally repugnant and uninteresting. She locks up three fillies in the dungeon for no reason; that isn't fun to watch, it's just a mean thing to do. Moreover, the author seems to think that her reasons for doing this make sense and that you should feel sorrier for Nyx than you do for the three fillies she tortures. Making it even worse is that the three fillies don't seem to ever bear her any grudge or demand any apology from her, they just accept that she had her reasons and continue to be friends with her. So even though Light is more evil than Nyx, he turns out to be more likable because he's evil in an interesting way. Nyx, on the other hand, is less evil, but she's also boring, and the fact that neither she nor the author seems to ever realize that she did anything wrong frankly makes her 10x the cunt that Light was.
Also, Death Note is an interesting show, I remember being hooked on that one when it was running on TV here. A friend of mine I was watching with hated it because he's a very moral guy and hates anything where the villain is the hero. But I remember thinking it was immense fun tuning in every week to see Light being a devious sociopath, and watching the game of chess unfold with L.
The characterization in that show is actually fairly shallow; we don't really get an impression of any of these people other than what they do in the world. L is a genius detective but we don't know much more about him, Misa and that other guy (forget his name) that helps Light have fairly simple motivations: Misa's parents were murdered so she hates criminals, other guy has a very strong sense of justice and would rather kill criminals than put them through the system. Light himself is a sociopath, so the whole point is that he has no emotions or any real connections to the people around him, he just uses them. All of these characters are entirely defined by their role in the story's events.
Despite this however the show is great, and you are entirely correct: the strength comes from the clockwork mechanism of the story's events. It has the same sort of appeal as a Sherlock Holmes story, in that the fun is in seeing how intricately everything is put together, and seeing if you can figure out what's going to happen before the characters can.
This actually relates to something I've brought up more than once: that it's important to understand from the beginning what kind of story you're telling, and to focus on the elements that make that particular type of story great, while excluding things that only weigh it down. Death Note doesn't need strong or sympathetic characters because that's not what the show is about. If anything, trying to make Light a sympathetic character or giving him a tragic backstory to explain away his evil actions would have detracted from the show and it likely wouldn't have been as popular.
I find that I like Death Note for the very same reason that my friend didn't like it: because of how devious and horrible the protagonist is. This is interesting in the context of what we've been talking about overall. Consider the following: Nyx and Light Yagami are both morally reprehensible protagonists. However, Light's reprehensible actions were fun to watch, whereas Nyx was just excruciating from start to finish.
Part of what I like about Death Note is that it never apologized for itself or made you try to "like" Light: it was a show about a sociopath serial killer and the detective trying to catch him, and nothing more than that. And even though the "good guys" eventually won, Light usually thwarted them at every turn. Moreover, the story was mostly told from his perspective, so you found yourself rooting for him, or at least I did. You actually wanted to see this guy kill people and get away with it.
This might seem paradoxical since I've spent most of this critique complaining about how morally repugnant I find Nyx, but I actually really enjoy reading and writing stories where the protagonist is a morally objectionable cunt who learns no lesson and gets no comeuppance although in Death Note I suppose he does get a comeuppance. Probably the best thing in this category I can cite is a comic called The Last of the Innocent by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, which I would strongly encourage everyone in this thread to read because it's honestly one of my favorite things ever.
The reason that Death Note succeeds at this and Past Sins fails is that Peen Stroke tries desperately to make his horrible protagonist sympathetic; in fact I'd go a step further and say that he is actually oblivious to how unsympathetic she really is. Light on the other hand is a sociopath who kills; that's just who he is and what he does. Love him or hate him, the author doesn't apologize for him or try to force you to feel a certain way about him; Light just does what he does and you get to watch. If you want to make a moral commentary on him that's your business.
Light does awful things, in fact the things he does are quite a bit more awful than anything Nyx does since Nyx never kills anyone. However, it's fun to watch his devious brain work and see all the fiendishly clever things he comes up with not only to kill, but to outwit his captors at every turn. As you stated, this is the show's primary strength; if Light was exactly the same character, but instead of using the Death Note he just went around hitting people in the face with an axe and running away, it wouldn't be nearly as fun to watch (although there is probably still a certain sort of maniac that something like that would appeal to).
Nyx, however, is both morally repugnant and uninteresting. She locks up three fillies in the dungeon for no reason; that isn't fun to watch, it's just a mean thing to do. Moreover, the author seems to think that her reasons for doing this make sense and that you should feel sorrier for Nyx than you do for the three fillies she tortures. Making it even worse is that the three fillies don't seem to ever bear her any grudge or demand any apology from her, they just accept that she had her reasons and continue to be friends with her. So even though Light is more evil than Nyx, he turns out to be more likable because he's evil in an interesting way. Nyx, on the other hand, is less evil, but she's also boring, and the fact that neither she nor the author seems to ever realize that she did anything wrong frankly makes her 10x the cunt that Light was.
>>263613
>>263528
You actually have some very good insights, I would encourage you to post more of your thoughts in the future.
>>263616
>Is she your wife?
No, I'm afraid she isn't. I do like her style, although words like "sexist" and "xenophobic" peppered throughout that review make me suspect she's the kind of person I usually prefer to avoid. I think if I met her in real life I would probably point out that she relies too heavily on the noise removal function on whatever software she's using to record her voiceovers, and that if she wants to be a professional YouTuber she could at least invest in a better microphone. I'd also advise her to reduce treble and midtones slightly and increase bass, because her voice has a high-pitched nasal quality that is at times annoying. I would then press her continuously on all of these points over and over, until eventually the sexual tension between us erupts into a spirited bout of skanko-Roman wrestling. At some point in the future she would doubtless accuse me of raping her and have me thrown in jail, where I would have plenty of time to read and review shitty pony fiction, thus fulfilling my primary life objective. It's a move Captain Archer would be proud of.
>>263619
>I think you'll like my rewritten Silver story more. I changed a lot of things to make Silver less of a cunt, and less OP.
I'll be curious to read it.
>By the way, how did you like that idea I had for a "Better Past Sins" where the split between "New NMM with Luna's memories" and "Nyx the Filly" happens at the story's start, Nyx tries to get the mane six to stop NMM from destroying the world so they can recombine, and they recombine into Actual New NMM who feels regret over being bad now that she knows how good friendship and goodness feels?
It's a bit complicated but I suppose it could be interesting if done well; at any rate the story has nowhere to go but up. I think there are a number of things that could be done with the basic idea of Past Sins, but all of them would require a complete revision of the entire concept. If the author was willing to do that, there are a number of directions he could take his premise and characters: he could do the LCIG Chobits-type story that I originally thought he was writing, he could do a pariah-Nyx Carrie/Frankenstein angle and make her get bullied and emotionally rejected by the town until she goes berserk and turns into NM, he could do that Spider Man venom goo idea of yours; all could easily work much better than what he has, but they would all require writing a fundamentally different type of story from the ground up.
>>263528
You actually have some very good insights, I would encourage you to post more of your thoughts in the future.
>>263616
>Is she your wife?
No, I'm afraid she isn't. I do like her style, although words like "sexist" and "xenophobic" peppered throughout that review make me suspect she's the kind of person I usually prefer to avoid. I think if I met her in real life I would probably point out that she relies too heavily on the noise removal function on whatever software she's using to record her voiceovers, and that if she wants to be a professional YouTuber she could at least invest in a better microphone. I'd also advise her to reduce treble and midtones slightly and increase bass, because her voice has a high-pitched nasal quality that is at times annoying. I would then press her continuously on all of these points over and over, until eventually the sexual tension between us erupts into a spirited bout of skanko-Roman wrestling. At some point in the future she would doubtless accuse me of raping her and have me thrown in jail, where I would have plenty of time to read and review shitty pony fiction, thus fulfilling my primary life objective. It's a move Captain Archer would be proud of.
>>263619
>I think you'll like my rewritten Silver story more. I changed a lot of things to make Silver less of a cunt, and less OP.
I'll be curious to read it.
>By the way, how did you like that idea I had for a "Better Past Sins" where the split between "New NMM with Luna's memories" and "Nyx the Filly" happens at the story's start, Nyx tries to get the mane six to stop NMM from destroying the world so they can recombine, and they recombine into Actual New NMM who feels regret over being bad now that she knows how good friendship and goodness feels?
It's a bit complicated but I suppose it could be interesting if done well; at any rate the story has nowhere to go but up. I think there are a number of things that could be done with the basic idea of Past Sins, but all of them would require a complete revision of the entire concept. If the author was willing to do that, there are a number of directions he could take his premise and characters: he could do the LCIG Chobits-type story that I originally thought he was writing, he could do a pariah-Nyx Carrie/Frankenstein angle and make her get bullied and emotionally rejected by the town until she goes berserk and turns into NM, he could do that Spider Man venom goo idea of yours; all could easily work much better than what he has, but they would all require writing a fundamentally different type of story from the ground up.
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>>263881
>>263730
>>263724
>>263740
To be perfectly honest, from what you guys have been discussing I'm beginning to lean more towards Friendship is Optimal. I took a look at it, and it seems to be considerably shorter, which I wouldn't mind right now, and the author sounds like a colossal douche and potential lolcow who would probably be a lot of fun to tear down.
Is pic 1 related the guy? I've never heard of him, but I googled the name and this fellow seems to fit the description. I've always been a bit skeptical of the whole "Jews are responsible for everything bad in the world" routine, but I have to admit that this time it's a little too glaringly obvious to ignore. However, do you have confirmation that it was indeed this guy who wrote Friendship is Optimal? He seems to be the confirmed author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but FiO is credited to someone named "Iceman," (pic 2 related) whose real identity I can't confirm based on the light googling I've done.
>>263730
>>263724
>>263740
To be perfectly honest, from what you guys have been discussing I'm beginning to lean more towards Friendship is Optimal. I took a look at it, and it seems to be considerably shorter, which I wouldn't mind right now, and the author sounds like a colossal douche and potential lolcow who would probably be a lot of fun to tear down.
Is pic 1 related the guy? I've never heard of him, but I googled the name and this fellow seems to fit the description. I've always been a bit skeptical of the whole "Jews are responsible for everything bad in the world" routine, but I have to admit that this time it's a little too glaringly obvious to ignore. However, do you have confirmation that it was indeed this guy who wrote Friendship is Optimal? He seems to be the confirmed author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but FiO is credited to someone named "Iceman," (pic 2 related) whose real identity I can't confirm based on the light googling I've done.
>>263725
Thank you. May your binge be every bit as enjoyable as my purge.
>>263721
>The point is that I truly do want to become like you in that regard. To be able to start a project and stick to it till the end. Highly inspiring.
You'll find that if you get in the habit of committing yourself to finishing projects eventually, you will eventually start finishing them. I almost always have a million different projects in various stages of non-completion, but I find that I finish nearly all of them sooner or later. I still have things I was working on nearly a decade ago that are still works in progress, but I chip away at them intermittently. I also have a number of projects on this board that I need to get back to before I delve too deeper into any new ones.
Thank you. May your binge be every bit as enjoyable as my purge.
>>263721
>The point is that I truly do want to become like you in that regard. To be able to start a project and stick to it till the end. Highly inspiring.
You'll find that if you get in the habit of committing yourself to finishing projects eventually, you will eventually start finishing them. I almost always have a million different projects in various stages of non-completion, but I find that I finish nearly all of them sooner or later. I still have things I was working on nearly a decade ago that are still works in progress, but I chip away at them intermittently. I also have a number of projects on this board that I need to get back to before I delve too deeper into any new ones.
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>>263927
>>263931
>pic unrelated just wanted to post something
Yeah, I thought we were just miscommunicating as well. I just wanted to make my position clear but I agree with what you're saying.
Anyway, I don't feel like I thanked you enough for that review for my story you gave. It is very appriciated.
I once heard a silly hollywood director claim that he was his own best critic but that simply isn't something I believe anybody is. I certainly isn't. While I can criticise myself, I know I can get a harder reaming elsewhere.
That's why I'm glad that you did review it. If you don't mind I might ask you to review my workk again at some point, which is something I like any anon to do towards my writing any time. Again, I don't like being criticised but it is necessary for progression. I also think you do a good job in criticising stories as you point out good things as well, not just the problems within a story.
This is actually something I heard Canada mention once, were he made the comparision to writing to cooking. As in, if you only know the rules of what not to do, for example do not burn your eggs, that doesn't mean you can cook an omelet. This is because you, while you know what not to do, you don't know what you should do. To create new recipes you need to be able to cook simple things first. I think you do a good job in not just pointing out plotholes but also showing what should have been done instead and what was done good.
>The characterization in that show is actually fairly shallow;
Agreed. Although, won't go in on it now.
>that it's important to understand from the beginning what kind of story you're telling, and to focus on the elements that make that particular type of story great, while excluding things that only weigh it down
This.
>>263940
> I've always been a bit skeptical of the whole "Jews are responsible for everything bad in the world" routine
Well, it depends on what you mean. I mean sure, the blame for the problems we are facing can be shared between a lot of people but ZOG still holds the steering wheel. Regardless, I don't wanna jump on you for wrongthink but I cannot not disagree if you claim that jews are the spider in the web of all this.
>You'll find that if you get in the habit of committing yourself to finishing projects eventually, you will eventually start finishing them
So habit mmm. Okay, there is probably a lot of truth in that.
>>263931
>pic unrelated just wanted to post something
Yeah, I thought we were just miscommunicating as well. I just wanted to make my position clear but I agree with what you're saying.
Anyway, I don't feel like I thanked you enough for that review for my story you gave. It is very appriciated.
I once heard a silly hollywood director claim that he was his own best critic but that simply isn't something I believe anybody is. I certainly isn't. While I can criticise myself, I know I can get a harder reaming elsewhere.
That's why I'm glad that you did review it. If you don't mind I might ask you to review my workk again at some point, which is something I like any anon to do towards my writing any time. Again, I don't like being criticised but it is necessary for progression. I also think you do a good job in criticising stories as you point out good things as well, not just the problems within a story.
This is actually something I heard Canada mention once, were he made the comparision to writing to cooking. As in, if you only know the rules of what not to do, for example do not burn your eggs, that doesn't mean you can cook an omelet. This is because you, while you know what not to do, you don't know what you should do. To create new recipes you need to be able to cook simple things first. I think you do a good job in not just pointing out plotholes but also showing what should have been done instead and what was done good.
>The characterization in that show is actually fairly shallow;
Agreed. Although, won't go in on it now.
>that it's important to understand from the beginning what kind of story you're telling, and to focus on the elements that make that particular type of story great, while excluding things that only weigh it down
This.
>>263940
> I've always been a bit skeptical of the whole "Jews are responsible for everything bad in the world" routine
Well, it depends on what you mean. I mean sure, the blame for the problems we are facing can be shared between a lot of people but ZOG still holds the steering wheel. Regardless, I don't wanna jump on you for wrongthink but I cannot not disagree if you claim that jews are the spider in the web of all this.
>You'll find that if you get in the habit of committing yourself to finishing projects eventually, you will eventually start finishing them
So habit mmm. Okay, there is probably a lot of truth in that.
>>263944
>but I cannot not disagree
Actually I can. It is as simple as not bothering. This really doesn't belong in this thread anyway so just forget about it. I can be less kneejerky, but I am curious in what you mean nonetheless.
>but I cannot not disagree
Actually I can. It is as simple as not bothering. This really doesn't belong in this thread anyway so just forget about it. I can be less kneejerky, but I am curious in what you mean nonetheless.
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>>263944
>>263945
>>263952
I don't really want to get off on a whole thing about it either, but I guess to put it simply my view is that the collapse of the West can be attributed to many complex factors, which includes Jewish subversion but can't be confined exclusively to it. I don't dispute that there are a lot of influential Jews in media, academia, government, finance, etc, who are clearly anti-white and work actively and in tandem against the West. At the same time, I enjoy Jerry Seinfeld and Benny Goodman and guys like that, whose work has artistic merit and doesn't seem particularly subversive or even political. Some of the Beat poets like Ginsberg, whose work was clearly subversive, I still respect artistically and even agree with on some topics. I don't think that merely being Jewish automatically means someone is actively involved in a mass conspiracy against whites, though that doesn't necessarily mean that such a conspiracy doesn't exist. I'm cautious of Jews in general, but as far as individuals go I take it on a Jew by Jew basis, I suppose. My views on this subject continue to evolve as I absorb more information, but I usually take a reserved and skeptical position on issues like this by default.
>I once heard a silly hollywood director claim that he was his own best critic but that simply isn't something I believe anybody is. I certainly isn't. While I can criticise myself, I know I can get a harder reaming elsewhere.
I think that criticizing the work of others and subjecting your own work to criticism is the best way to improve at any craft. It's good to take a critical eye to your own work, but usually other people will spot things that you don't. Being overly nice about it doesn't really help the person you're criticizing; if anything, you're doing them a disservice by holding back, because if you notice something wrong with their work, odds are someone else will notice it too.
I particularly like what this anon had to say:
>>263613
>I think the fault lies with the audience for once. A fanfiction audience is unlikely to have any actual experience regarding what's good or bad, so when a work "ticks all the boxes" and is professional-length then it must be professional! I'd warrant a lot of readers are worthless sacks who waste their ancestors' efforts and are often subconsciously aware of this, so an investment of time and attention which they wouldn't devote to worthwhile pursuits has to be justified. Thus there's an unwillingness to criticize anything of certain length and popularity. It may explain the Harry Potter phenomenon where readers of it in adolescence now treat it as gospel and won't look into its faults. Combine that with groupthink in comment sections and you have masses of zombie readers.
I think it's also helpful sometimes to have your work read by a neutral party who is outside your intended audience and doesn't necessarily have an interest in what you're writing about. This is why I think Peen Stroke would have benefitted more from having his work read by one neutral editor who didn't care about MLP than 21 different bronies who could be counted on to giggle retardedly at all his stupid references and in-jokes. Any halfway competent editor, or even just an avid reader who had a basic familiarity with the Western literary canon, could have easily spotted most of the stuff I called attention to in this thread.
I like to think I'm fairly objective about criticism; I just reserve the right to call any author (or their OC) a faggot if I think the shoe fits.
By all means feel free to submit anything you like for review, I don't mind doing it. That goes for anyone else on the board as well; I will happy read anything written by anyone and provide my thoughts, for whatever they're worth. My only condition is that you not have a thin skin about being made fun of, because once again I reserve the right.
>>263945
>>263952
I don't really want to get off on a whole thing about it either, but I guess to put it simply my view is that the collapse of the West can be attributed to many complex factors, which includes Jewish subversion but can't be confined exclusively to it. I don't dispute that there are a lot of influential Jews in media, academia, government, finance, etc, who are clearly anti-white and work actively and in tandem against the West. At the same time, I enjoy Jerry Seinfeld and Benny Goodman and guys like that, whose work has artistic merit and doesn't seem particularly subversive or even political. Some of the Beat poets like Ginsberg, whose work was clearly subversive, I still respect artistically and even agree with on some topics. I don't think that merely being Jewish automatically means someone is actively involved in a mass conspiracy against whites, though that doesn't necessarily mean that such a conspiracy doesn't exist. I'm cautious of Jews in general, but as far as individuals go I take it on a Jew by Jew basis, I suppose. My views on this subject continue to evolve as I absorb more information, but I usually take a reserved and skeptical position on issues like this by default.
>I once heard a silly hollywood director claim that he was his own best critic but that simply isn't something I believe anybody is. I certainly isn't. While I can criticise myself, I know I can get a harder reaming elsewhere.
I think that criticizing the work of others and subjecting your own work to criticism is the best way to improve at any craft. It's good to take a critical eye to your own work, but usually other people will spot things that you don't. Being overly nice about it doesn't really help the person you're criticizing; if anything, you're doing them a disservice by holding back, because if you notice something wrong with their work, odds are someone else will notice it too.
I particularly like what this anon had to say:
>>263613
>I think the fault lies with the audience for once. A fanfiction audience is unlikely to have any actual experience regarding what's good or bad, so when a work "ticks all the boxes" and is professional-length then it must be professional! I'd warrant a lot of readers are worthless sacks who waste their ancestors' efforts and are often subconsciously aware of this, so an investment of time and attention which they wouldn't devote to worthwhile pursuits has to be justified. Thus there's an unwillingness to criticize anything of certain length and popularity. It may explain the Harry Potter phenomenon where readers of it in adolescence now treat it as gospel and won't look into its faults. Combine that with groupthink in comment sections and you have masses of zombie readers.
I think it's also helpful sometimes to have your work read by a neutral party who is outside your intended audience and doesn't necessarily have an interest in what you're writing about. This is why I think Peen Stroke would have benefitted more from having his work read by one neutral editor who didn't care about MLP than 21 different bronies who could be counted on to giggle retardedly at all his stupid references and in-jokes. Any halfway competent editor, or even just an avid reader who had a basic familiarity with the Western literary canon, could have easily spotted most of the stuff I called attention to in this thread.
I like to think I'm fairly objective about criticism; I just reserve the right to call any author (or their OC) a faggot if I think the shoe fits.
By all means feel free to submit anything you like for review, I don't mind doing it. That goes for anyone else on the board as well; I will happy read anything written by anyone and provide my thoughts, for whatever they're worth. My only condition is that you not have a thin skin about being made fun of, because once again I reserve the right.
>>263964
>Some of the Beat poets like Ginsberg, whose work was clearly subversive, I still respect artistically and even agree with on some topics
Wasn't Ginsberg a NAMBLA supporter?
>The rest of the part of your post about Jews
I basically agree. There are some rotten Jews, but there are some who brazenly defy the kosher narrative, like Norman Finkelstein and Murray Rothbard. Speaking of which, Murray actually wrote some movie reviews which I think you might find entertaining. Here's a link to him tearing apart Schindler's List and a movie called The Piano.
https://www.unz.com/print/RothbardRockwellReport-1994mar-00014/
>Some of the Beat poets like Ginsberg, whose work was clearly subversive, I still respect artistically and even agree with on some topics
Wasn't Ginsberg a NAMBLA supporter?
>The rest of the part of your post about Jews
I basically agree. There are some rotten Jews, but there are some who brazenly defy the kosher narrative, like Norman Finkelstein and Murray Rothbard. Speaking of which, Murray actually wrote some movie reviews which I think you might find entertaining. Here's a link to him tearing apart Schindler's List and a movie called The Piano.
https://www.unz.com/print/RothbardRockwellReport-1994mar-00014/
>>263971
>Wasn't Ginsberg a NAMBLA supporter?
He was, and by all accounts he was most probably an actual pedophile. Most of those guys were into all sorts of degeneracy. But they wrote interesting stuff, and as I said they had some views I agree with. Burroughs for instance had based views on guns, and I generally like Ginsberg's absolutist positions on free speech, even if much of it was in defense of his own fairly reprehensible conduct.
>Rothbard
Forgot about him, but yeah he's definitely on the based Jew list.
Also, Otto Weininger bears mention. He was a Jew who was highly critical of Judaism and feminism. I haven't actually read him but he's on my list. It's widely believed that the reason he killed himself was because he couldn't accept the fact that he was himself Jewish. Evola mentions him a couple of times.
>Wasn't Ginsberg a NAMBLA supporter?
He was, and by all accounts he was most probably an actual pedophile. Most of those guys were into all sorts of degeneracy. But they wrote interesting stuff, and as I said they had some views I agree with. Burroughs for instance had based views on guns, and I generally like Ginsberg's absolutist positions on free speech, even if much of it was in defense of his own fairly reprehensible conduct.
>Rothbard
Forgot about him, but yeah he's definitely on the based Jew list.
Also, Otto Weininger bears mention. He was a Jew who was highly critical of Judaism and feminism. I haven't actually read him but he's on my list. It's widely believed that the reason he killed himself was because he couldn't accept the fact that he was himself Jewish. Evola mentions him a couple of times.
>>263971
Also, those reviews were pretty entertaining. I don't think I ever saw The Piano but I remember it being a thing. There's a scene where Holly Hunter is playing a piano on the beach for some reason that gets parodied a lot. It's one of those movies that critics were making a huge deal about when it was out, but years later nobody remembers that it existed.
Also, those reviews were pretty entertaining. I don't think I ever saw The Piano but I remember it being a thing. There's a scene where Holly Hunter is playing a piano on the beach for some reason that gets parodied a lot. It's one of those movies that critics were making a huge deal about when it was out, but years later nobody remembers that it existed.
>>263940
Pic 1 is the guy, but I have no idea if Iceman is an alt account of his or not.
Honestly I'm surprised Kiwifarms hasn't made a yearly tradition out of fucking with Elizer's Rationalists somehow.
>>263944
Spiderweb? Spi da veins on my dick and tell me how many dicks you've seen up close this month.
I'm trying to use more lewd jokes and wordplay, how am I doing?
But seriously, every anti-white movement and every anti-west movement has a Jew running the show, or a Feminist or a Marxist. And Feminists were created by the Jews, just like Marxists. Jews invented these retarded ideas and built colleges to spread them and the belief that true art is only true art if it's ugly and gay and shitty and disgusting and boring and something only a fucking lying poser could ever pretend to enjoy.
Blacks, on the other hand, are tools used by the Jew to ruin the white man's land. They'll vote for whoever offers them the "best future" at the expense of everyone else, whether such a thing is possible or not. More loans you don't have to pay off? More child support money? More rights that supersede those of other races? The right to be prioritized over those from other races by the welfare system? These are things used to buy the black vote like the cries of "Free stuff, kill rich!" are used to arouse commies.
Jews run the major corporations that own pretty much everything. Jews own Hollywood and the TV networks, which lie to everyone. Jews run the banks and tax everything you own with the aid of jews in government. Ever wondered why college is so expensive? Blame the jews and the lazy boomers who believed the jew. Ever wondered why landlords charge so much for rent? Blame property taxes and the government's love of buying up land and giving it to invader families.
Sure, not all Jews are pulling the strings. But guess what? All jews are willing to say nothing and profit as their higher-ups pull the strings. All jews benefit from the Special Protected Caste status they've given themselves, and no Jewish Counter-Jew movement exists to try and get anti-semetism laws thrown out. All jews are willing to smile every time they see evidence of jewish corruption in the world instead of trying to do or say something about it.
Maybe one in every billion Jews is actually willing to turn against Jewery and speak out against it. But that's not a high enough percentage to purify the water or purge the dirty water from our planet's bloodstream.
Have you ever heard of Burned Furs?
Bit of an odd tangent, but some furries think the only way to escape the "Furries are sex freaks" stigma is to break away from the main furry fandom and create a porn-free community with their own name and logo. I don't know if they're still around.
Point is, you're more likely to find a furry who avoids porn than a Jew willing to try and stop Jewish evil.
We whites are trying to be the nicest race on planet earth. Always. Even in the face of evil. That's always been our gimmick. We'll feed someone else before we feed ourselves, even if we're starving. We'll send foreign aid abroad to feed Jamal Bugumbogenga in Africa and his sixteen rapebabies and three wives (one of whom is his sister) before we'll take care of the homeless veterans freezing to death on our city roads. We'll fight wars and die by the millions if we're told there are dragons to slay and innocents to save.
But at the end of the day, we're the only innocents. And we need to save ourselves.
We're too easily duped into being good instead of being practical. And from a practical standpoint, we can't do good if we're being snuffed out by the jewish rape of our planet, our people, our culture, and our future.
The end goal of the jew is to wipe our global relevance and ability to do good off the face of the earth and fill this planet with our enemies, so that our only refuge from a world brainwashed over generations to hate us will be slavery in the jew lands that used to be ours. Every child will be brainwashed into hating themselves by the jew, and the only refuge from a life in the white slums will be going to the doctors, getting yourself mutilated without the consent of your parents, and becoming a sex slave of some fucking jew scumbag. Getting paraded around on TV to normalize it in the eyes of the rest of the world. Or maybe a world owned by the jews won't see the need to lie about this any more, and will make reality shows dedicated to humiliating and mocking the starving whites who compete on their shows for fleeting fame and food money for the entertainment of themselves and the other races.
Pic 1 is the guy, but I have no idea if Iceman is an alt account of his or not.
Honestly I'm surprised Kiwifarms hasn't made a yearly tradition out of fucking with Elizer's Rationalists somehow.
>>263944
Spiderweb? Spi da veins on my dick and tell me how many dicks you've seen up close this month.
I'm trying to use more lewd jokes and wordplay, how am I doing?
But seriously, every anti-white movement and every anti-west movement has a Jew running the show, or a Feminist or a Marxist. And Feminists were created by the Jews, just like Marxists. Jews invented these retarded ideas and built colleges to spread them and the belief that true art is only true art if it's ugly and gay and shitty and disgusting and boring and something only a fucking lying poser could ever pretend to enjoy.
Blacks, on the other hand, are tools used by the Jew to ruin the white man's land. They'll vote for whoever offers them the "best future" at the expense of everyone else, whether such a thing is possible or not. More loans you don't have to pay off? More child support money? More rights that supersede those of other races? The right to be prioritized over those from other races by the welfare system? These are things used to buy the black vote like the cries of "Free stuff, kill rich!" are used to arouse commies.
Jews run the major corporations that own pretty much everything. Jews own Hollywood and the TV networks, which lie to everyone. Jews run the banks and tax everything you own with the aid of jews in government. Ever wondered why college is so expensive? Blame the jews and the lazy boomers who believed the jew. Ever wondered why landlords charge so much for rent? Blame property taxes and the government's love of buying up land and giving it to invader families.
Sure, not all Jews are pulling the strings. But guess what? All jews are willing to say nothing and profit as their higher-ups pull the strings. All jews benefit from the Special Protected Caste status they've given themselves, and no Jewish Counter-Jew movement exists to try and get anti-semetism laws thrown out. All jews are willing to smile every time they see evidence of jewish corruption in the world instead of trying to do or say something about it.
Maybe one in every billion Jews is actually willing to turn against Jewery and speak out against it. But that's not a high enough percentage to purify the water or purge the dirty water from our planet's bloodstream.
Have you ever heard of Burned Furs?
Bit of an odd tangent, but some furries think the only way to escape the "Furries are sex freaks" stigma is to break away from the main furry fandom and create a porn-free community with their own name and logo. I don't know if they're still around.
Point is, you're more likely to find a furry who avoids porn than a Jew willing to try and stop Jewish evil.
We whites are trying to be the nicest race on planet earth. Always. Even in the face of evil. That's always been our gimmick. We'll feed someone else before we feed ourselves, even if we're starving. We'll send foreign aid abroad to feed Jamal Bugumbogenga in Africa and his sixteen rapebabies and three wives (one of whom is his sister) before we'll take care of the homeless veterans freezing to death on our city roads. We'll fight wars and die by the millions if we're told there are dragons to slay and innocents to save.
But at the end of the day, we're the only innocents. And we need to save ourselves.
We're too easily duped into being good instead of being practical. And from a practical standpoint, we can't do good if we're being snuffed out by the jewish rape of our planet, our people, our culture, and our future.
The end goal of the jew is to wipe our global relevance and ability to do good off the face of the earth and fill this planet with our enemies, so that our only refuge from a world brainwashed over generations to hate us will be slavery in the jew lands that used to be ours. Every child will be brainwashed into hating themselves by the jew, and the only refuge from a life in the white slums will be going to the doctors, getting yourself mutilated without the consent of your parents, and becoming a sex slave of some fucking jew scumbag. Getting paraded around on TV to normalize it in the eyes of the rest of the world. Or maybe a world owned by the jews won't see the need to lie about this any more, and will make reality shows dedicated to humiliating and mocking the starving whites who compete on their shows for fleeting fame and food money for the entertainment of themselves and the other races.
What if black people are used this way because they know they can't create nations on their own, so the best course of action for them is to infiltrate our lands while using their own lands as Breeding Rooms?
But they know they can't compete with us fairly, and for every one amazing athlete or sixty-fourth-black scientist raised by a single white mother there's... Well, the rest of them. So they try to rig the game in their favour, while convincing each other our success only happens because we rigged the game we invented long before they figured out how to make roads, wheels, or mud huts. For them, hating us for our success and trying to destroy that success helps them cope with their inability to succeed on their own merits.
also has my IP changed? I had to re-log into everything today.
But they know they can't compete with us fairly, and for every one amazing athlete or sixty-fourth-black scientist raised by a single white mother there's... Well, the rest of them. So they try to rig the game in their favour, while convincing each other our success only happens because we rigged the game we invented long before they figured out how to make roads, wheels, or mud huts. For them, hating us for our success and trying to destroy that success helps them cope with their inability to succeed on their own merits.
also has my IP changed? I had to re-log into everything today.
File (): 3D6E14963DD8924D826FF20533255564-2260943.png (2.2 MB, 4000x3000, fvYkeM.png)
>>264314
Fair enough.
Well, as I said I'm presently leaning toward Friendship is Optimal, followed by Fallout Equestria. FiO is just shy of being 40,000 words long, which is much closer to the length of a normal short novel, so it could probably be knocked out in relatively short order, depending on how complex it ends up being. Fallout sounds like it's going to be a much bigger project so I'd like to have something as a buffer in between. As I said earlier I'm probably going to take a bit of a break, so I can spend some time getting caught up on stuff I'm reading that isn't absolutely horrendous or about ponies. Then it's right back into the shit.
So, unless anyone has any forceful arguments they'd like to make regarding my choices, that's what I'm thinking I will probably do.
Fair enough.
Well, as I said I'm presently leaning toward Friendship is Optimal, followed by Fallout Equestria. FiO is just shy of being 40,000 words long, which is much closer to the length of a normal short novel, so it could probably be knocked out in relatively short order, depending on how complex it ends up being. Fallout sounds like it's going to be a much bigger project so I'd like to have something as a buffer in between. As I said earlier I'm probably going to take a bit of a break, so I can spend some time getting caught up on stuff I'm reading that isn't absolutely horrendous or about ponies. Then it's right back into the shit.
So, unless anyone has any forceful arguments they'd like to make regarding my choices, that's what I'm thinking I will probably do.
>>264359
When doing Fallout Equestria, it is good to know the plots/locations of Fallout 1, 2, and 3. New Vegas is not as used, but the DLC Dead Money is useful to know a bit about. also be aware that the story is in a pre-season 3 universe
When doing Fallout Equestria, it is good to know the plots/locations of Fallout 1, 2, and 3. New Vegas is not as used, but the DLC Dead Money is useful to know a bit about. also be aware that the story is in a pre-season 3 universe
>>264361
Good to know. I haven't played any of the Fallout games but I can probably watch some playthroughs or something before reading it. My intent is to mostly focus on the story itself and its literary merit or lack thereof, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have some basic familiarity with the games.
Good to know. I haven't played any of the Fallout games but I can probably watch some playthroughs or something before reading it. My intent is to mostly focus on the story itself and its literary merit or lack thereof, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have some basic familiarity with the games.
>>264363
You've probably been told this already but 1 & 2 were by far the best, at least plot-wise. If you like grid-based RPGs you want to play those. New Vegas comes in third and it is impressive how good it is despite rushed development.
You've probably been told this already but 1 & 2 were by far the best, at least plot-wise. If you like grid-based RPGs you want to play those. New Vegas comes in third and it is impressive how good it is despite rushed development.
>>263964
Sounds like a solid approached to the JQ.
>>264137
Pretty good rant I'd say. There's a lot of truth in what you say here.
>>264363
I actualyl would argue that since your persepctive is that a story, whether its fanfiction of original, should stand on its own for the most part, right? That is the impression you have given off. I think you should read it and then if you can't understand what you're reading because you need to know the lore of fallout, you read the wiki. This way, you don't need to question yourself if you would have gotten a certain idea in the story if you hadn't known about its background from the wikia you read.
I'm writing a short story that is over 1k now. I think it will only need about a hundred words or so before it is finished. I will posted it on the site when I'm done. I feel like it is the best thing that I have written so far. I'll post a link to it here when I'm done. I would appricate a small review. Just some throughts on it.
Sounds like a solid approached to the JQ.
>>264137
Pretty good rant I'd say. There's a lot of truth in what you say here.
>>264363
I actualyl would argue that since your persepctive is that a story, whether its fanfiction of original, should stand on its own for the most part, right? That is the impression you have given off. I think you should read it and then if you can't understand what you're reading because you need to know the lore of fallout, you read the wiki. This way, you don't need to question yourself if you would have gotten a certain idea in the story if you hadn't known about its background from the wikia you read.
I'm writing a short story that is over 1k now. I think it will only need about a hundred words or so before it is finished. I will posted it on the site when I'm done. I feel like it is the best thing that I have written so far. I'll post a link to it here when I'm done. I would appricate a small review. Just some throughts on it.
>>264366
I keep the whole "It's incredibly obvious and easy to see through the jew lie and morally wrong to try and uphold that lie" in mind often.
Nobody puts a gun to someone's head and forces a faggot to type "gun rights are bad and Islam is perfect" on a Pokemon forum when the one conservative on the site willing to speak up is getting dogpiled and eventually banned.
Liberals choose to be evil, support evil, and reduce the liberty and good in the world. Because it's easy to be lazy and go with the flow, and it's hard to have morals and integrity and stick up for them no matter what.
Saying "there are no rapes in rotherham" pushes back the date enough people get mad over the rapes to do something good. Like trying to peacefully solve things. Yeah, that's the outcome I want for this country, I totally swear in 100% unironic sincerity. After all, if you kill every last one of your enemies so they'll never be able to rape your future children or their future children or anyone else's children on this planet, it'd be like Batman killing the Joker so Gotham never has to deal with that BS again. If Joker is killed by Batman, Joker wins, I swear I'm not being ironic now guys. Yep. Totally not bullshitting you just in case the UK govt is spying on me.
Anyway...
There was a time when I was desperately searching for any explanation to all of this bullshit in the world BESIDES the obvious jew bad one. There was a time when I called myself open-minded while closed-mindedly refusing to believe all jews are bad, because I'd been brainwashed into thinking it's wrong to dislike jews. I was so certain that everyone who settled on "jews bad" was just taking the easy way out, I was so certain that there had to be a different, deeper thing going on. Maybe there was a secret-er society behind the jews, using them as a puppet! But... Eventually, I realized how stupid this type of thinking was. It's okay to be white. It's okay to stop those who want you dead/ruined/raped. It's okay to hate Communism. And it's okay to hate its father, the jew. And it's okay to hate their father, the devil.
>>264359
I have Fallout Nv installed, I volunteer to speedrun Dead Money if you want a fresh video.
Then again part of the appeal of real Fallout games is making choices since there are multiple endings. Not just a good and bad ending, but a varied set of ending parts that make up the final ending and reflect all the choices you made.
Dead Money is a DLC in Fallout NV that adds a new area called The Sierra Madre.
It's a casino coated in poison cloud, full of enemies and traps. You have very limited ammo and shit guns, and your companions are no longer godly snipers or Enclave Armoured killers.
Your companion choices are an armourless BOSfag, a brainlet Mutant with a bear trap on his fist, and a backstabbing cunt of a Ghoul. If they die, you die, until the time in the questline comes to kill them or talk them out of needing to be killed, getting them to do something useful for you during the final showdown against the baddie who brought all four of you here. Also if you fuck up certain dialogue trees, you can't get the peaceful option with these guys.
Also you have an Exploding Collar that goes off if you piss off the baddie during your talks with him.
It also goes off if you're too close to an Old Radio. Some, you need to shoot. Some can't be shot, run past them. It's like having a Sanity Meter in a Survival Horror game.
This whole fucking DLC is Survival Horror. I love it!
There are Ghost People, evil crazed fucks in old Trauma Harness Hazmat Suits who get up after you kill them unless you remove limbs or have God/Dog the Mutant eat the corpses.
and there are Holograms, blue hologram AIs copying people who existed before the war. and Hologram Guards who you need to sneak past.
At the end when you get to the Treasure Of The Sierra Madre you can talk Elijah the BOS cunt and baddie behind all of this into coming down and fighting you for it.
Then you either kill him and run, or sneak out and lock him in the Sierra Madre vault behind you, damning him to starvation in a room with gold and nothing to spend it on.
Ironic.
You were brought here by the lure of gold.
Yet he wasn't here for the gold, he was here for the bullshit technology.
You can leave with enough of both.
But if you take too much gold you're too slow to escape the building in time! You have to let go of greed!
Symbolism!
If you're fast enough you'll be fine taking shitloads of gold though.
Oh and there's a super deep story of love and loss and betrayal and needing to let go and failing to do so told through terminal entries, diaries, notes, and what the Ghoul brags about if you get the peaceful option with that fucker.
So fucking good!
And all that depth is thrown out the fucking window in the Fallout Equestria version.
Right, quick explanation:
---
Fallout NV's Dead Money happens to:
>A tiny epic casino in the nowhere hidden in some mountains, far out of the way. It's a mythical place to most.
because:
>Dean Domino the cunty ghoul was a human and a jazz singer alive before the nuclear war.
>Ghouls are irradiated humans who, thanks to a rare gene, mutate into zombie-looking fucks who age slow instead of dying.
>Dean talked this singer girl Vera Keyes into seducing a man named Sinclair
>Dean blackmailed her with knowledge of her painkiller addiction
>she had a terminal illness, I think
>Dean wanted her to talk Sinclair into building The Ult
I keep the whole "It's incredibly obvious and easy to see through the jew lie and morally wrong to try and uphold that lie" in mind often.
Nobody puts a gun to someone's head and forces a faggot to type "gun rights are bad and Islam is perfect" on a Pokemon forum when the one conservative on the site willing to speak up is getting dogpiled and eventually banned.
Liberals choose to be evil, support evil, and reduce the liberty and good in the world. Because it's easy to be lazy and go with the flow, and it's hard to have morals and integrity and stick up for them no matter what.
Saying "there are no rapes in rotherham" pushes back the date enough people get mad over the rapes to do something good. Like trying to peacefully solve things. Yeah, that's the outcome I want for this country, I totally swear in 100% unironic sincerity. After all, if you kill every last one of your enemies so they'll never be able to rape your future children or their future children or anyone else's children on this planet, it'd be like Batman killing the Joker so Gotham never has to deal with that BS again. If Joker is killed by Batman, Joker wins, I swear I'm not being ironic now guys. Yep. Totally not bullshitting you just in case the UK govt is spying on me.
Anyway...
There was a time when I was desperately searching for any explanation to all of this bullshit in the world BESIDES the obvious jew bad one. There was a time when I called myself open-minded while closed-mindedly refusing to believe all jews are bad, because I'd been brainwashed into thinking it's wrong to dislike jews. I was so certain that everyone who settled on "jews bad" was just taking the easy way out, I was so certain that there had to be a different, deeper thing going on. Maybe there was a secret-er society behind the jews, using them as a puppet! But... Eventually, I realized how stupid this type of thinking was. It's okay to be white. It's okay to stop those who want you dead/ruined/raped. It's okay to hate Communism. And it's okay to hate its father, the jew. And it's okay to hate their father, the devil.
>>264359
I have Fallout Nv installed, I volunteer to speedrun Dead Money if you want a fresh video.
Then again part of the appeal of real Fallout games is making choices since there are multiple endings. Not just a good and bad ending, but a varied set of ending parts that make up the final ending and reflect all the choices you made.
Dead Money is a DLC in Fallout NV that adds a new area called The Sierra Madre.
It's a casino coated in poison cloud, full of enemies and traps. You have very limited ammo and shit guns, and your companions are no longer godly snipers or Enclave Armoured killers.
Your companion choices are an armourless BOSfag, a brainlet Mutant with a bear trap on his fist, and a backstabbing cunt of a Ghoul. If they die, you die, until the time in the questline comes to kill them or talk them out of needing to be killed, getting them to do something useful for you during the final showdown against the baddie who brought all four of you here. Also if you fuck up certain dialogue trees, you can't get the peaceful option with these guys.
Also you have an Exploding Collar that goes off if you piss off the baddie during your talks with him.
It also goes off if you're too close to an Old Radio. Some, you need to shoot. Some can't be shot, run past them. It's like having a Sanity Meter in a Survival Horror game.
This whole fucking DLC is Survival Horror. I love it!
There are Ghost People, evil crazed fucks in old Trauma Harness Hazmat Suits who get up after you kill them unless you remove limbs or have God/Dog the Mutant eat the corpses.
and there are Holograms, blue hologram AIs copying people who existed before the war. and Hologram Guards who you need to sneak past.
At the end when you get to the Treasure Of The Sierra Madre you can talk Elijah the BOS cunt and baddie behind all of this into coming down and fighting you for it.
Then you either kill him and run, or sneak out and lock him in the Sierra Madre vault behind you, damning him to starvation in a room with gold and nothing to spend it on.
Ironic.
You were brought here by the lure of gold.
Yet he wasn't here for the gold, he was here for the bullshit technology.
You can leave with enough of both.
But if you take too much gold you're too slow to escape the building in time! You have to let go of greed!
Symbolism!
If you're fast enough you'll be fine taking shitloads of gold though.
Oh and there's a super deep story of love and loss and betrayal and needing to let go and failing to do so told through terminal entries, diaries, notes, and what the Ghoul brags about if you get the peaceful option with that fucker.
So fucking good!
And all that depth is thrown out the fucking window in the Fallout Equestria version.
Right, quick explanation:
---
Fallout NV's Dead Money happens to:
>A tiny epic casino in the nowhere hidden in some mountains, far out of the way. It's a mythical place to most.
because:
>Dean Domino the cunty ghoul was a human and a jazz singer alive before the nuclear war.
>Ghouls are irradiated humans who, thanks to a rare gene, mutate into zombie-looking fucks who age slow instead of dying.
>Dean talked this singer girl Vera Keyes into seducing a man named Sinclair
>Dean blackmailed her with knowledge of her painkiller addiction
>she had a terminal illness, I think
>Dean wanted her to talk Sinclair into building The Ult
>>264443
imate Casino with her voice as the key to the door, so Dean could rob that casino with her help
>Sinclair wanted to build The Ultimate Casino as a place where rich people will be safe when the bombs fall. It's got matter-reconstituting vending machines that let you turn scrap metal and casino chips into free bullets/health-restoring StimPaks/food. It's got hologram guards. No drugs or outside objects allowed on the premises. The workers wear military-grade Trauma Harnesses that will walk them back to a medic on injury/death. It's got all sorts of good shit.
Sinclair found out about Dean's plans and rigged the casino vault so when you go down the elevator, it doesn't go back up. And when you enter the vault, reading the "For Vera" messages says "I'm sorry Vera"
>trying to get at the money shows a message for Dean, a "Cask of Amontillado" reference.
>Then the door is sealed shut behind you. You get a unique Bad Ending for triggering this trap.
>After the Great War, everything here went to shit
oh also the poison gas in the vents (that preserves stuff) and the Trauma Harness suits and the Saturnite knives? All thanks to The Think Tank from Big MT, pre-war genius brains in jars who fuck with people for science. They erase their own memories upon finding test results they don't like, and begin the testing again.
>Elijah wants this place to weaponize it against the Mojave, to rid it of NCR and cleanse it of humans. He doesn't give a fuck about gold bars. But Dean wants the Gold, Christine wants revenge on Elijah, Dog wants to serve Elijah and eat people, God wants to control Dog, and you want to survive this hell.
Good shit!
---
Fallout Equestria's Dead Money happens to:
Canterlot, the capital city of Equestria
because:
During the war, ponies in Canterlot were afraid of Zebras attacking Canterlot.
so they made a magic shield around the city.
(this came out before Season 2 and its Canterlot Wedding where the city of Canterlot is protected by a shield spell. Many memes about Kkat seeing the future were made)
However the ponies forgot to purge this city of Zebras before putting the shield up.
So a Zebra detonates a Pink Cloud bomb, filling the city with poisonous gas.
And that's it.
It's like the Red Cloud poison gas from Fallout NV, "But Worse"(TM) because it fuses the shit you're wearing to you while hurting you. So Littlepip gets her Pip-Buck fused to her arm.
After the war, even though anyone can get into Canterlot despite the shield (dont ask, i forget how) nobody successfully plunders it for its riches because the city is soooooo baaaad.
Faggot author tries and fails to make this place worse than canon Dead Money because all the writer knows is trying to spitefully and shallowly one-up the darkness/danger/edge of something while robbing it of its depth and meaning in the process.
---
Imagine if the writing was good, and Canterlot deserved it somehow.
Imagine if the Capital City was moved to some important war location, maybe even put on Cloudsdale as a moving military city full of Cloud Airship Factories and Laser Gun factories and barracks and shit, and all ponies (or at least all in the city) were given cloudwalking by a spell or enchanted item because fucking magic can do this shit
so Canterlot just becomes a rich city of cunts
who one day decide to wall the city off and keep their money to themselves
then the ziggers they embraced so wokely betray them.
They wanted to be above the war and above the common man, now they are trapped in hell.
That would be good writing.
---
So while Fallout NV's Dead Money is a tale of love and loss,
FE's is just a story of Ziggers being Ziggers, ponies being ponies, and ponies meeting horrible fates because the writer's too spiteful and cunty to let friendship and ponyness succeed any more.
---
Fallout NV Ultimate Edition is usually only 10 bucks and I don't know how much Fallouts 1 or 2 cost on GOG.
It would be morally wrong for me to support piracy by saying something like "the Fitgirl Repack of Fallout NV and Fallout 3 work great. And with the Nexus Mod Manager, you can download mods to these games with just a click, getting to play infinite hours of new quests, enemies, and guns. It's honestly more reliable and less crash-prone than the official versions of these games I bought a few years back on Steam Sales after years of having this series torrented. As for Fallouts 1 and 2, the torrented GOG version of those games is excellent. Comes with official patches to make these old games able to run properly on newer hardware."
Oxhorn does videos on Fallout lore elements, but they're incredibly long. Oxhorn is an obese faggot who talks slowly and simply and talks down to you like you're a toddler who needs to be told why The Raiders in Fallout 4 are evil and bad. He takes between fourty minutes and two hours to say what can be explained in five minutes at the most.
Fuck that guy.
imate Casino with her voice as the key to the door, so Dean could rob that casino with her help
>Sinclair wanted to build The Ultimate Casino as a place where rich people will be safe when the bombs fall. It's got matter-reconstituting vending machines that let you turn scrap metal and casino chips into free bullets/health-restoring StimPaks/food. It's got hologram guards. No drugs or outside objects allowed on the premises. The workers wear military-grade Trauma Harnesses that will walk them back to a medic on injury/death. It's got all sorts of good shit.
Sinclair found out about Dean's plans and rigged the casino vault so when you go down the elevator, it doesn't go back up. And when you enter the vault, reading the "For Vera" messages says "I'm sorry Vera"
>trying to get at the money shows a message for Dean, a "Cask of Amontillado" reference.
>Then the door is sealed shut behind you. You get a unique Bad Ending for triggering this trap.
>After the Great War, everything here went to shit
oh also the poison gas in the vents (that preserves stuff) and the Trauma Harness suits and the Saturnite knives? All thanks to The Think Tank from Big MT, pre-war genius brains in jars who fuck with people for science. They erase their own memories upon finding test results they don't like, and begin the testing again.
>Elijah wants this place to weaponize it against the Mojave, to rid it of NCR and cleanse it of humans. He doesn't give a fuck about gold bars. But Dean wants the Gold, Christine wants revenge on Elijah, Dog wants to serve Elijah and eat people, God wants to control Dog, and you want to survive this hell.
Good shit!
---
Fallout Equestria's Dead Money happens to:
Canterlot, the capital city of Equestria
because:
During the war, ponies in Canterlot were afraid of Zebras attacking Canterlot.
so they made a magic shield around the city.
(this came out before Season 2 and its Canterlot Wedding where the city of Canterlot is protected by a shield spell. Many memes about Kkat seeing the future were made)
However the ponies forgot to purge this city of Zebras before putting the shield up.
So a Zebra detonates a Pink Cloud bomb, filling the city with poisonous gas.
And that's it.
It's like the Red Cloud poison gas from Fallout NV, "But Worse"(TM) because it fuses the shit you're wearing to you while hurting you. So Littlepip gets her Pip-Buck fused to her arm.
After the war, even though anyone can get into Canterlot despite the shield (dont ask, i forget how) nobody successfully plunders it for its riches because the city is soooooo baaaad.
Faggot author tries and fails to make this place worse than canon Dead Money because all the writer knows is trying to spitefully and shallowly one-up the darkness/danger/edge of something while robbing it of its depth and meaning in the process.
---
Imagine if the writing was good, and Canterlot deserved it somehow.
Imagine if the Capital City was moved to some important war location, maybe even put on Cloudsdale as a moving military city full of Cloud Airship Factories and Laser Gun factories and barracks and shit, and all ponies (or at least all in the city) were given cloudwalking by a spell or enchanted item because fucking magic can do this shit
so Canterlot just becomes a rich city of cunts
who one day decide to wall the city off and keep their money to themselves
then the ziggers they embraced so wokely betray them.
They wanted to be above the war and above the common man, now they are trapped in hell.
That would be good writing.
---
So while Fallout NV's Dead Money is a tale of love and loss,
FE's is just a story of Ziggers being Ziggers, ponies being ponies, and ponies meeting horrible fates because the writer's too spiteful and cunty to let friendship and ponyness succeed any more.
---
Fallout NV Ultimate Edition is usually only 10 bucks and I don't know how much Fallouts 1 or 2 cost on GOG.
It would be morally wrong for me to support piracy by saying something like "the Fitgirl Repack of Fallout NV and Fallout 3 work great. And with the Nexus Mod Manager, you can download mods to these games with just a click, getting to play infinite hours of new quests, enemies, and guns. It's honestly more reliable and less crash-prone than the official versions of these games I bought a few years back on Steam Sales after years of having this series torrented. As for Fallouts 1 and 2, the torrented GOG version of those games is excellent. Comes with official patches to make these old games able to run properly on newer hardware."
Oxhorn does videos on Fallout lore elements, but they're incredibly long. Oxhorn is an obese faggot who talks slowly and simply and talks down to you like you're a toddler who needs to be told why The Raiders in Fallout 4 are evil and bad. He takes between fourty minutes and two hours to say what can be explained in five minutes at the most.
Fuck that guy.
>>264444
>Dean wanted her to talk Sinclair into building The Ultimate Casino with her voice as the key to the Vault Door, so Dean could rob that casino with her help
fixed
her voice is the key to the vault door that contains all the gold and controls
an auto-doc is used to give Vera's old voice box to Christine, the BOS girl Veronica wants to bone.
Voiced by Lucina, fun trivia. Lucina from Fire Emblem and Smash Bros, she voices Christine in this and the player in Saints Row.
also
Kkat, that snarky cunt of an author MAKES SURE
that when Littlepip is in Dead Money Canterlot
she talks to an NPC who tells Littlepip and the audience the author's views on that scene in the real Dead Money.
The scene where you find God/Dog about to An Hero the whole shitfucking casino with no survivors, so you either talk one of his personalities into taking over and permanently killing the other one, talk Dog into snapping his own neck and killing himself on the spot, or talk him out of having Split Personality Disorder and fusing both halves into a new whole.
All before he burns the casino down with the kitchen gas valves open.
Instant therapy under pressure, one of many Cool Speech Check moments for you, the hero.
The Author made sure to call this scene very stupid and unrealistic.
However,
because the author's faggier than the hypocrite who wrote Kick Ass to be "realistic" at first so the hero is a fag who gets his ass kicked, and then introduced a katana-swinging gun-toting super-murderchild and unironic successful Batman who "shows him how it's done"
Fallout Equestria also contains Speech Check moments.
Really stupid moments that only work because the author says so.
Like the time when after a whole story full of "Friendship is for faggots but suicidal friend-hurting mercy is cool when it's from a character I like"
there's a scene where some baddies are threatening Black Sweetie Belle the Medic and Singer
and she says "I wield the most powerful magic of all... kindness!"
and the baddies say "what does that do?"
and right on fucking cue two Nightkin with two machine guns each on their back Blastoise style appear out of nowhere to gun the baddies down.
"It makes me friends!" says Black Sweetie Belle.
And this scene is written to make you think this fucking stupid wannabe-action movie scene is cool.
but
I think the stupidest bit...
is the one where...
Littlepip is being blackmailed into going to a place and doing a thing.
The baddie is blackmailing her with his Nuclear Balefire Egg Launcher, aka The Fat Man from Fallout 3.
So she takes some drugs to boost Charisma and OFFSCREEN SO THE AUTHOR DOESN'T HAVE TO WRITE DIALOGUE FOR IT, she talks the guy blackmailing her into giving her his Fat Man
he does so,
and she still decides to do what he wants.
Even though he no longer has a gun on her
even though she magically talked him into giving her his fucking gun
and she uses a Memory Orb to make herself forget that she is carrying a nuclear rocket launcher and nuclear egg bomb
Then she goes to the place, remembers everything, and uses the nuke to kill the baddie there or something.
I think she also smuggles this nuclear egg catapult into an enemy base to kill the baddie, despite not remembering she has it.
I think there's a bit where she's still lost her memories, so she uses the Memory Orb to regain them, only to find a recording of herself begging herself not to look.
So she looks again, as if one Memory-removing orb is suddenly able to take multiple fucking scenes of memories in a row
and she sees herself calling herself a cunt for looking.
It's like that scene in Red Dwarf only not funny, just pathetic on the author's part.
Eventually she looks and is able to remember that she has a nuclear bomb launcher now.
and uses it
It's been almost a decade since I read this shitty fic but I fear I'll remember that fucking retarded moment until the day I die in a nursing home for third world war veterans at 107.
>Dean wanted her to talk Sinclair into building The Ultimate Casino with her voice as the key to the Vault Door, so Dean could rob that casino with her help
fixed
her voice is the key to the vault door that contains all the gold and controls
an auto-doc is used to give Vera's old voice box to Christine, the BOS girl Veronica wants to bone.
Voiced by Lucina, fun trivia. Lucina from Fire Emblem and Smash Bros, she voices Christine in this and the player in Saints Row.
also
Kkat, that snarky cunt of an author MAKES SURE
that when Littlepip is in Dead Money Canterlot
she talks to an NPC who tells Littlepip and the audience the author's views on that scene in the real Dead Money.
The scene where you find God/Dog about to An Hero the whole shitfucking casino with no survivors, so you either talk one of his personalities into taking over and permanently killing the other one, talk Dog into snapping his own neck and killing himself on the spot, or talk him out of having Split Personality Disorder and fusing both halves into a new whole.
All before he burns the casino down with the kitchen gas valves open.
Instant therapy under pressure, one of many Cool Speech Check moments for you, the hero.
The Author made sure to call this scene very stupid and unrealistic.
However,
because the author's faggier than the hypocrite who wrote Kick Ass to be "realistic" at first so the hero is a fag who gets his ass kicked, and then introduced a katana-swinging gun-toting super-murderchild and unironic successful Batman who "shows him how it's done"
Fallout Equestria also contains Speech Check moments.
Really stupid moments that only work because the author says so.
Like the time when after a whole story full of "Friendship is for faggots but suicidal friend-hurting mercy is cool when it's from a character I like"
there's a scene where some baddies are threatening Black Sweetie Belle the Medic and Singer
and she says "I wield the most powerful magic of all... kindness!"
and the baddies say "what does that do?"
and right on fucking cue two Nightkin with two machine guns each on their back Blastoise style appear out of nowhere to gun the baddies down.
"It makes me friends!" says Black Sweetie Belle.
And this scene is written to make you think this fucking stupid wannabe-action movie scene is cool.
but
I think the stupidest bit...
is the one where...
Littlepip is being blackmailed into going to a place and doing a thing.
The baddie is blackmailing her with his Nuclear Balefire Egg Launcher, aka The Fat Man from Fallout 3.
So she takes some drugs to boost Charisma and OFFSCREEN SO THE AUTHOR DOESN'T HAVE TO WRITE DIALOGUE FOR IT, she talks the guy blackmailing her into giving her his Fat Man
he does so,
and she still decides to do what he wants.
Even though he no longer has a gun on her
even though she magically talked him into giving her his fucking gun
and she uses a Memory Orb to make herself forget that she is carrying a nuclear rocket launcher and nuclear egg bomb
Then she goes to the place, remembers everything, and uses the nuke to kill the baddie there or something.
I think she also smuggles this nuclear egg catapult into an enemy base to kill the baddie, despite not remembering she has it.
I think there's a bit where she's still lost her memories, so she uses the Memory Orb to regain them, only to find a recording of herself begging herself not to look.
So she looks again, as if one Memory-removing orb is suddenly able to take multiple fucking scenes of memories in a row
and she sees herself calling herself a cunt for looking.
It's like that scene in Red Dwarf only not funny, just pathetic on the author's part.
Eventually she looks and is able to remember that she has a nuclear bomb launcher now.
and uses it
It's been almost a decade since I read this shitty fic but I fear I'll remember that fucking retarded moment until the day I die in a nursing home for third world war veterans at 107.
>>264448
Also fuck Fallout Equestria because it tries to make a big deal about drugs being bad.
See
in Fallout, Drugs have historically been Videogame Powerups except with a stat-lowering Addiction attached to them.
If you want your Addictions cured instantly either go to a doctor and pay the big bucks or suffer through the stat penalties until they go away.
And of course in Fallouts 1 and 2 you're on a TIME LIMIT so waiting around for weeks isn't an attractive option.
Drugs are a risky thing.
A step above the usual videogame "Take weed to boost Mana and take Steroids to boost Strength" crap.
In Fallout Equestria, drugs are used by the heroin Littlepip (god I'm fucking hilarious) like she's a character in a videogame.
When she needs to be smarter or more charismatic for a bit, she takes the drugs, and this makes others treat her differently because the author doesn't know how to write charmers. Suddenly she can talk herself into rooms and shit.
It's very videogamey.
The author tries to also "dekonstrukt" this by saying Littlepip's mother was an Alcohol addict and she's prone to getting addicted to things, plus Littlepip ends up getting addicted to Party-Time Mentats.
So at one point in the story, Black Sweetie Belle shoots Littlepip with a Tranq Gun and takes her to a hospital.
While Littlepip is in the hospital, The New Element Of Honesty(TM) Monterrey Jack(TM) dies because Littlepip wasn't there to save him.
I think he turned himself in for a crime and got publically hung, or something.
Because the cunty cunt of an author has a fetish for making the good intentions of heroic people result in failure and murder and suicide and other bad things except when the hero does them usually.
Anyway after the one night Littlepip spends in the hospital, the doctor instantly cures her addictions and she's fine from then on. She thinks about using drugs sometimes but never does. Never truly struggles with addiction. It's just magically gone like the rapist's desire to rape in Persona 5 after you brainwash him.
Jack died because Littlepip "Had" to be tranqed on that one specific day for maximum sadness.
Later on in the story Littlepip finds a recipe for making her own Party-Time Mentats. Instead of learning this recipe to make drugs you can sell in the post-apocalypse for gun/food money, Littlepip destroys the recipe and flushes her drugs down the toilet because this story's just sooooooooo deeeeeeeeep, and nothing screams pretentious tard trying to be deep like the topic of drug use.
Remember the part in Fallout Equestria where Pinkie Pie gets addicted to Mentats because they enhance her Future Sight and she runs a Gestapo that loves Unpersoning people and taking them away to "Mandatory happiness" brainwashing facilities, yet the characters say "Pinkie's a loser for turning to drugs" and nobody ever says "We friends of Pinkie should try and talk her out of drugs" or "Man it's a good thing she can see the future and knows exactly who to take away and why".
At one point Pinkie Pie sees the future, and sees that the "past memories" she's making in the present will be one day transferred into a Memory Orb that is eventually looked at by Littlepip. So Pinkie talks directly to Littlepip and I forget what she said. You'd think this would make Pinkie try to avert the war, but nah.
That movie "Limitless" does more to present Drugs as a bad thing than Fallout Equestria, and that movie is literally about an everyman protagonist who starts taking "nootropics brain-smartening pills" and becomes the richest smartest strongest chaddiest high-class genius man on the planet while the dumb woman who stopped taking the drugs ended up becoming a shut-in loser who does surveys online for money.
You'd think this story would seize the opportunity to do an edgy scene where Littlepip takes drugs and kills a prostitute, for example. But no, author didn't think that was edgy enough so she has a drug-addicted future-seeing Pinkie Pie get raped to death by Zebras in a mental hospital on the day the bombs fell.
Also fuck Fallout Equestria because it tries to make a big deal about drugs being bad.
See
in Fallout, Drugs have historically been Videogame Powerups except with a stat-lowering Addiction attached to them.
If you want your Addictions cured instantly either go to a doctor and pay the big bucks or suffer through the stat penalties until they go away.
And of course in Fallouts 1 and 2 you're on a TIME LIMIT so waiting around for weeks isn't an attractive option.
Drugs are a risky thing.
A step above the usual videogame "Take weed to boost Mana and take Steroids to boost Strength" crap.
In Fallout Equestria, drugs are used by the heroin Littlepip (god I'm fucking hilarious) like she's a character in a videogame.
When she needs to be smarter or more charismatic for a bit, she takes the drugs, and this makes others treat her differently because the author doesn't know how to write charmers. Suddenly she can talk herself into rooms and shit.
It's very videogamey.
The author tries to also "dekonstrukt" this by saying Littlepip's mother was an Alcohol addict and she's prone to getting addicted to things, plus Littlepip ends up getting addicted to Party-Time Mentats.
So at one point in the story, Black Sweetie Belle shoots Littlepip with a Tranq Gun and takes her to a hospital.
While Littlepip is in the hospital, The New Element Of Honesty(TM) Monterrey Jack(TM) dies because Littlepip wasn't there to save him.
I think he turned himself in for a crime and got publically hung, or something.
Because the cunty cunt of an author has a fetish for making the good intentions of heroic people result in failure and murder and suicide and other bad things except when the hero does them usually.
Anyway after the one night Littlepip spends in the hospital, the doctor instantly cures her addictions and she's fine from then on. She thinks about using drugs sometimes but never does. Never truly struggles with addiction. It's just magically gone like the rapist's desire to rape in Persona 5 after you brainwash him.
Jack died because Littlepip "Had" to be tranqed on that one specific day for maximum sadness.
Later on in the story Littlepip finds a recipe for making her own Party-Time Mentats. Instead of learning this recipe to make drugs you can sell in the post-apocalypse for gun/food money, Littlepip destroys the recipe and flushes her drugs down the toilet because this story's just sooooooooo deeeeeeeeep, and nothing screams pretentious tard trying to be deep like the topic of drug use.
Remember the part in Fallout Equestria where Pinkie Pie gets addicted to Mentats because they enhance her Future Sight and she runs a Gestapo that loves Unpersoning people and taking them away to "Mandatory happiness" brainwashing facilities, yet the characters say "Pinkie's a loser for turning to drugs" and nobody ever says "We friends of Pinkie should try and talk her out of drugs" or "Man it's a good thing she can see the future and knows exactly who to take away and why".
At one point Pinkie Pie sees the future, and sees that the "past memories" she's making in the present will be one day transferred into a Memory Orb that is eventually looked at by Littlepip. So Pinkie talks directly to Littlepip and I forget what she said. You'd think this would make Pinkie try to avert the war, but nah.
That movie "Limitless" does more to present Drugs as a bad thing than Fallout Equestria, and that movie is literally about an everyman protagonist who starts taking "nootropics brain-smartening pills" and becomes the richest smartest strongest chaddiest high-class genius man on the planet while the dumb woman who stopped taking the drugs ended up becoming a shut-in loser who does surveys online for money.
You'd think this story would seize the opportunity to do an edgy scene where Littlepip takes drugs and kills a prostitute, for example. But no, author didn't think that was edgy enough so she has a drug-addicted future-seeing Pinkie Pie get raped to death by Zebras in a mental hospital on the day the bombs fell.
>>264785
Will give my thoughts on your thoughts. I won't defend myself or anything because I don't like to come off as if I can't admit when I do wrong or that I'm in denial about doing mistakes. Just wanna give a more insider perspective on your thoughts, like answer where the idea came from and such.
Will give my thoughts on your thoughts. I won't defend myself or anything because I don't like to come off as if I can't admit when I do wrong or that I'm in denial about doing mistakes. Just wanna give a more insider perspective on your thoughts, like answer where the idea came from and such.
I have decided to read and review Animorphs, a book series I read most of as a kid before realizing it was shit.
It's what happens when a woman sees one episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, gets angry because "Real warfare isn't like that!", and writes an edgy children's book series where children turn into dogs and bears and birds so they can get mutilated by aliens and psychologically scarred by the horrors of war.
Fun trivia, the "Andalites" (good aliens) in this story were originally going to be generic Grayyyyyy Lmaos. Her editor called this dumb and asked her to be more creative, so she wrote the most overdesigned bullshit she could imagine, hoping it would be too hard for any TV show she ever got to properly depict.
The alien isn't really that complex.
Culture-wise, they're space-elves plus horses. Just a generic centaur fantasy "proud warrior race guy" race but in space.
Design wise, they're psychic blue deer-man centaurs with no mouths, downwards-sloping backs, and scorpion tails.
They're the generic good aliens right up until the author decides it's time to make the whole species irredeemable cunts.
First the heroes are told "Hold out and fight the baddies until Andalite reinforcements arrive"
But when Andalite reinforcements eventually arrive like 40/65 books later, they're all "Holy shit we thought you were lying about how bad things are to get bumped up our priority list! This planet's fucked, we want to glass it"
The author desperately wants this story to be DEEP and DARK and SERIOUS and GRIM
but the heroes win by turning into animals and fighting off aliens.
Sometimes the heroes win by turning into skunks and spraying the villains. This always works and results in a "Hahaha the stupid villains still smell bad and are trying to wash themselves with grape juice! Hahaha we have foiled the villains plans this week, let's laugh and wait for next week's evil plot instead of trying to kill villains to end the conflict!" so naturally it's only ever used once.
Tigers are cool but why are they winning fights against the author's shitty DeviantArt OC aliens like the blade-guy Taxxons and brute-guy Hork-Bajirs when they're never any good against the author's shittier OCs used by the Main Villain, "Visser 3"?
It would be a lot easier to take this book seriously if the main villain, Visser 3, wasn't a sneering loud cruel evilly-laughing saturday morning cartoon villain you'd expect to see on Power Rangers or some bad Pokemon movie. It's just Voldemort except it's a brainslug inside an Andalite who can turn into anything the author can imagine.
Also everyone's a PTSD-ridden wreck in the end except for the author's favourite Cassie, who's also the Best Morpher and most "morally-right" obnoxious hippie you'll ever read about. She loves nature and that good. The species-enslaving brain slugs want to destroy nature and that bad. Forget about the billions of humans held captive within their own bodies, just think about muh nature!
Also there's a bit where one of the heroes spends too much time in Bird form and gets stuck like that forever. He is now a hawk with a human's mind. He's stuck like this for a while. The sudden disappearance of a kid is handwaved away with "We told his divorced mom he's living with his dad and we told his dad he's living with his mom. I don't know how long this will work for" but it works for the whole series. Eventually he gets back the power to Morph but his hawk form is his new default body and his human body is lost forever.
There are also, of course, Alien God and Alien Satan playing chess with reality. Because NOTHING cheapens a conflict like saying there are two gods and only they matter.
Also everyone dies in the end, rendering the whole series pointless.
Everyone except Cassie who doesn't get PTSD, leaves her PTSD-filled main character boyfriend for a never-before-mentioned side character, and is a total bitch.
It's what happens when a woman sees one episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, gets angry because "Real warfare isn't like that!", and writes an edgy children's book series where children turn into dogs and bears and birds so they can get mutilated by aliens and psychologically scarred by the horrors of war.
Fun trivia, the "Andalites" (good aliens) in this story were originally going to be generic Grayyyyyy Lmaos. Her editor called this dumb and asked her to be more creative, so she wrote the most overdesigned bullshit she could imagine, hoping it would be too hard for any TV show she ever got to properly depict.
The alien isn't really that complex.
Culture-wise, they're space-elves plus horses. Just a generic centaur fantasy "proud warrior race guy" race but in space.
Design wise, they're psychic blue deer-man centaurs with no mouths, downwards-sloping backs, and scorpion tails.
They're the generic good aliens right up until the author decides it's time to make the whole species irredeemable cunts.
First the heroes are told "Hold out and fight the baddies until Andalite reinforcements arrive"
But when Andalite reinforcements eventually arrive like 40/65 books later, they're all "Holy shit we thought you were lying about how bad things are to get bumped up our priority list! This planet's fucked, we want to glass it"
The author desperately wants this story to be DEEP and DARK and SERIOUS and GRIM
but the heroes win by turning into animals and fighting off aliens.
Sometimes the heroes win by turning into skunks and spraying the villains. This always works and results in a "Hahaha the stupid villains still smell bad and are trying to wash themselves with grape juice! Hahaha we have foiled the villains plans this week, let's laugh and wait for next week's evil plot instead of trying to kill villains to end the conflict!" so naturally it's only ever used once.
Tigers are cool but why are they winning fights against the author's shitty DeviantArt OC aliens like the blade-guy Taxxons and brute-guy Hork-Bajirs when they're never any good against the author's shittier OCs used by the Main Villain, "Visser 3"?
It would be a lot easier to take this book seriously if the main villain, Visser 3, wasn't a sneering loud cruel evilly-laughing saturday morning cartoon villain you'd expect to see on Power Rangers or some bad Pokemon movie. It's just Voldemort except it's a brainslug inside an Andalite who can turn into anything the author can imagine.
Also everyone's a PTSD-ridden wreck in the end except for the author's favourite Cassie, who's also the Best Morpher and most "morally-right" obnoxious hippie you'll ever read about. She loves nature and that good. The species-enslaving brain slugs want to destroy nature and that bad. Forget about the billions of humans held captive within their own bodies, just think about muh nature!
Also there's a bit where one of the heroes spends too much time in Bird form and gets stuck like that forever. He is now a hawk with a human's mind. He's stuck like this for a while. The sudden disappearance of a kid is handwaved away with "We told his divorced mom he's living with his dad and we told his dad he's living with his mom. I don't know how long this will work for" but it works for the whole series. Eventually he gets back the power to Morph but his hawk form is his new default body and his human body is lost forever.
There are also, of course, Alien God and Alien Satan playing chess with reality. Because NOTHING cheapens a conflict like saying there are two gods and only they matter.
Also everyone dies in the end, rendering the whole series pointless.
Everyone except Cassie who doesn't get PTSD, leaves her PTSD-filled main character boyfriend for a never-before-mentioned side character, and is a total bitch.
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>>264846
Man, every time I read a post from you I get to discover yet another horrible, retarded, bad, neutral, decent, good, or amazing series. I recall the Animorph series and books due to a much younger acquaintance that enjoyed it for the purposes of a tl;dr: "wit-laden social commentary" plug. Spent the past half hour minutes looking through it.. what the fuck is this basic bitch huwhite writer even getting PAID for? The eco-hippie self-insert Mary Sue gets to be the main hero/anti-hero whenever it suits the author's power fantasies and biases. There are countless 50/50, black/white, composition-division, No True Scotsman, Black Swan, and Genetic fallacies EVERYWHERE. What middle ground? What independent thought? What external conflicts? Where is the actual fucking CONFLICT ITSELF outside of the writer's biased 'need' to create a self-resolving anticlimax in every single book? None! Nada! Zero! Zip! Zilch! Nothing! Nowhere! As for 'Andalites' being basic bitch pro-protagonist, anti-villain, centrist pacifist-extremist milquetoast fuel that can't interfere due to their LOLSTRICTLYRETARDED laws of neutral conduct, that's a massive disgrace to centaurs. Writer's bias on crack cocaine, steroids, and stupid pills. Even worse the Yeerk could have EASILY been something more than super-special snowflake mind cuntrol villains with equally super special hermaphrodite daddy/mommy/everything issues that are ALWAYS AND CONSTANTLY HANGING OVER THEIR HEADS that they somehow can't resolve on their own! This pigshit filth is fucking unreadable. It's almost, but not quite as bad, as Jigger Kike Rowling's completely ripped off syncretic neo-teen trash.
Man, every time I read a post from you I get to discover yet another horrible, retarded, bad, neutral, decent, good, or amazing series. I recall the Animorph series and books due to a much younger acquaintance that enjoyed it for the purposes of a tl;dr: "wit-laden social commentary" plug. Spent the past half hour minutes looking through it.. what the fuck is this basic bitch huwhite writer even getting PAID for? The eco-hippie self-insert Mary Sue gets to be the main hero/anti-hero whenever it suits the author's power fantasies and biases. There are countless 50/50, black/white, composition-division, No True Scotsman, Black Swan, and Genetic fallacies EVERYWHERE. What middle ground? What independent thought? What external conflicts? Where is the actual fucking CONFLICT ITSELF outside of the writer's biased 'need' to create a self-resolving anticlimax in every single book? None! Nada! Zero! Zip! Zilch! Nothing! Nowhere! As for 'Andalites' being basic bitch pro-protagonist, anti-villain, centrist pacifist-extremist milquetoast fuel that can't interfere due to their LOLSTRICTLYRETARDED laws of neutral conduct, that's a massive disgrace to centaurs. Writer's bias on crack cocaine, steroids, and stupid pills. Even worse the Yeerk could have EASILY been something more than super-special snowflake mind cuntrol villains with equally super special hermaphrodite daddy/mommy/everything issues that are ALWAYS AND CONSTANTLY HANGING OVER THEIR HEADS that they somehow can't resolve on their own! This pigshit filth is fucking unreadable. It's almost, but not quite as bad, as Jigger Kike Rowling's completely ripped off syncretic neo-teen trash.
>>264872
>sage
>anti-saging
>sage to the sage with the sage on the saged sage, thats also saged
I hope this isn't gonna be your version of a namefag, cuz bruh
>sage
>anti-saging
>sage to the sage with the sage on the saged sage, thats also saged
I hope this isn't gonna be your version of a namefag, cuz bruh
File (): 61ED7C9CDF99B7713A58E89D7719A4D1-16386.gif (16.0 KB, 125x125, 1385772747836.gif)
>>264874
Mebbe 4u, sure.
>>264883
No. It is WORSE than the entire nyxigger topic. As a comparison: skimming through the Reader's Digest version of Animorphs, at the bare minimum ANYONE could rewrite (((past sins))) into a wholesome, wonderful, slightly dark but logical and relevant slice of life series. Trying to compare the two from a top-down reader perspective: when Micropeen Stroke fucks up on every single category for the sake of his writer's bias and power fantasy issues, the dozens of rewrites he (((allowed))) to fix those problems were often performed by people whom knew how to write short, logically sound, if somewhat fan service-y stories, whereas the writer of Animorphs took every single opportunity to present THE MOST BESTEST AND HONABRU Mary Sue. Tinydick Stroke had at least a couple weaknesses for Nyx, which still doesn't excuse his cucked nu-mulp shit, yet it is SALVAGEABLE.
Mebbe 4u, sure.
>>264883
No. It is WORSE than the entire nyxigger topic. As a comparison: skimming through the Reader's Digest version of Animorphs, at the bare minimum ANYONE could rewrite (((past sins))) into a wholesome, wonderful, slightly dark but logical and relevant slice of life series. Trying to compare the two from a top-down reader perspective: when Micropeen Stroke fucks up on every single category for the sake of his writer's bias and power fantasy issues, the dozens of rewrites he (((allowed))) to fix those problems were often performed by people whom knew how to write short, logically sound, if somewhat fan service-y stories, whereas the writer of Animorphs took every single opportunity to present THE MOST BESTEST AND HONABRU Mary Sue. Tinydick Stroke had at least a couple weaknesses for Nyx, which still doesn't excuse his cucked nu-mulp shit, yet it is SALVAGEABLE.
>>264872
Yay, I made a friend!
I think the stupidest thing about Animorphs is the dishonesty of it all.
The author pretends this is some deep dark tragic series where misery is constant, but the heroes almost always wrap up every problem in a 22 minute timeframe.
And when they don't, it takes 3-5 episodes to wrap that problem up.
The author pretends this story is deep and the "Open Letter" she wrote on her webpage to her fans could make CWC laugh his ass off at her haughtiness and delusional stupidity.
She writes about how "War is bad" and "If you don't understand that, you should enlist when you're old enough"
Because fans complained when her story's ending had everyone get a sad/bittersweet ending except Cassue, and then a billion evil brainslug aliens warp in out of nowhere to destroy the earth so the heroes can "Ram their one ship into the enemy main ship" to pointlessly sacrifice themselves as a last spit in the face to an overwhelming evil force they could never defeat.
Bolivian Army Endings...
They're meant to leave whether the hero survives and wins against impossible odds or dies on the battlefield slightly ambiguous. Meant to triumphantly show the heroes getting up and dying on their feet fighting impossible odds for their ideals. But this? Is a "Diablous Ex Machina", a tvtropes tard word that means "Pointless bad thing pulled out of the author's ass".
All for edge.
This story is a saturday morning cartoon. Except the author keeps trying to make it unreasonably edgy and violent and I fucking despise stupid people like that. Do you think anyone's going to think you're cool just because your Sonic The Hedgehog OC can shoot a gun and run real fast and kill a million demons? Drop the pointless edge and try to tell an actual story with emotions and depth you fucking fraud.
This series is a children's novel series.
And as you know, when a feminist woman writes a children's novel series and gets a big publishing deal with a major jew publisher, she gets to have TV rights, reality show, trading card games, video games, and commercials commercials commercials commercials-
Where was I? Oh right.
She gets a TV series, some shit video games, an audiobook series, and over 60 shitty tiny baby paperback books plus pointless AU spinoffs where the heroes go through a wormhole and travel through time to save the Dinosaurs from Voldemorph.
That's what I'm going to call Voldemort/Visser 3 because he's literally the same character except he morphs and it's fucking hilarious.
Feminists fail upwards in the industry and play the industry on easy mode. Their books end up in every school even if they're shit, because tax-free money-laundering feminist charities get free celebrity appearances and buy these books in bulk to ship everywhere they can.
These books SUCK!
When the heroes either try to recruit a new hero kid or have him forced upon them (i forget) he turns out to be a prick.
This is hinted at when he immediately tries to betray the heroes as soon as he gets to a phone.
And when he becomes a bird and kills another bird just to see what it's like, then says "Oops i lost control of my morph" and only BirdGuy notices what's wrong
So of course, he's a "Baaaad animorph" who threatens the heroes families and uses his powers for evil and laughs evilly because he's evil.
Forget trying to start his own team or flee the country and then use his powers for personal gain far away from the heroes (Because six kids can't group up and travel from America to England during the same week Andalite Heroes stop foiling villain plans in America and start foiling villain plans in England and then immediately stop.
Then Cassue sentences him to death by tricking him into turning into a rat, then activating an Anti-Morphing Cube made of Alien Tech. This forces the baddie to stay in rat form past the one hour time limit, trapping him as a rat forever.
They pointlessly draw out this torturous death, this "karmic punishment", even though rats don't live long. Instead of killing him, they just trap this guy in rat form on a random island where he can't psychically call for help.
Cassue forces her best friend Rachel, the obligatory "Tough girl" one, to endure this man's psychic screaming in agony and pleading for his life as she effectively chokes the human body out of a dying asshole.
Yay, I made a friend!
I think the stupidest thing about Animorphs is the dishonesty of it all.
The author pretends this is some deep dark tragic series where misery is constant, but the heroes almost always wrap up every problem in a 22 minute timeframe.
And when they don't, it takes 3-5 episodes to wrap that problem up.
The author pretends this story is deep and the "Open Letter" she wrote on her webpage to her fans could make CWC laugh his ass off at her haughtiness and delusional stupidity.
She writes about how "War is bad" and "If you don't understand that, you should enlist when you're old enough"
Because fans complained when her story's ending had everyone get a sad/bittersweet ending except Cassue, and then a billion evil brainslug aliens warp in out of nowhere to destroy the earth so the heroes can "Ram their one ship into the enemy main ship" to pointlessly sacrifice themselves as a last spit in the face to an overwhelming evil force they could never defeat.
Bolivian Army Endings...
They're meant to leave whether the hero survives and wins against impossible odds or dies on the battlefield slightly ambiguous. Meant to triumphantly show the heroes getting up and dying on their feet fighting impossible odds for their ideals. But this? Is a "Diablous Ex Machina", a tvtropes tard word that means "Pointless bad thing pulled out of the author's ass".
All for edge.
This story is a saturday morning cartoon. Except the author keeps trying to make it unreasonably edgy and violent and I fucking despise stupid people like that. Do you think anyone's going to think you're cool just because your Sonic The Hedgehog OC can shoot a gun and run real fast and kill a million demons? Drop the pointless edge and try to tell an actual story with emotions and depth you fucking fraud.
This series is a children's novel series.
And as you know, when a feminist woman writes a children's novel series and gets a big publishing deal with a major jew publisher, she gets to have TV rights, reality show, trading card games, video games, and commercials commercials commercials commercials-
Where was I? Oh right.
She gets a TV series, some shit video games, an audiobook series, and over 60 shitty tiny baby paperback books plus pointless AU spinoffs where the heroes go through a wormhole and travel through time to save the Dinosaurs from Voldemorph.
That's what I'm going to call Voldemort/Visser 3 because he's literally the same character except he morphs and it's fucking hilarious.
Feminists fail upwards in the industry and play the industry on easy mode. Their books end up in every school even if they're shit, because tax-free money-laundering feminist charities get free celebrity appearances and buy these books in bulk to ship everywhere they can.
These books SUCK!
When the heroes either try to recruit a new hero kid or have him forced upon them (i forget) he turns out to be a prick.
This is hinted at when he immediately tries to betray the heroes as soon as he gets to a phone.
And when he becomes a bird and kills another bird just to see what it's like, then says "Oops i lost control of my morph" and only BirdGuy notices what's wrong
So of course, he's a "Baaaad animorph" who threatens the heroes families and uses his powers for evil and laughs evilly because he's evil.
Forget trying to start his own team or flee the country and then use his powers for personal gain far away from the heroes (Because six kids can't group up and travel from America to England during the same week Andalite Heroes stop foiling villain plans in America and start foiling villain plans in England and then immediately stop.
Then Cassue sentences him to death by tricking him into turning into a rat, then activating an Anti-Morphing Cube made of Alien Tech. This forces the baddie to stay in rat form past the one hour time limit, trapping him as a rat forever.
They pointlessly draw out this torturous death, this "karmic punishment", even though rats don't live long. Instead of killing him, they just trap this guy in rat form on a random island where he can't psychically call for help.
Cassue forces her best friend Rachel, the obligatory "Tough girl" one, to endure this man's psychic screaming in agony and pleading for his life as she effectively chokes the human body out of a dying asshole.
Cassue isn't treated as a morally wrong person for "Sacrificing the last of her best friend's sanity" like this, even though it permanently makes Rachel even more of a generic angry edgy smirky little plank of wood with a pretty face and the right to threaten anyone because wamen stronk.
Of course later on he comes back and continues to be evil, because there's a Space Satan who can warp reality to make bad things happen and a Space God who can be blamed for all the plot-convenience moments that bail the heroes out.
There's also a point where the six Animorph heroes decide they need more muscle.
So they go to a hospital for disabled people and recruit children no BrainSlugs would ever want to inhabit.
This fixes the legs of a disabled guy because he lost his legs in a car accident, and Morphing heals all injuries on the way into and out of an alien/animal form.
This healing thing also means when a child in tiger form gets disemboweled, it's just for shock value because he can turn back to human form and be fine.
At no point does the whole "Human in animal form is dying, and has to weigh continuing to fight and dying as an animal VS turning into a human to heal himself and being captured/detected and losing the ability to walk around in public during the day and potentially getting his family killed" thing happen unfortunately.
So this new B-Team of disabled misfits is called the "Auxillary Animorphs" and because the author's an edgy cunt (why can't women write darkness?) they all die or go insane or kill themselves and the heroes decide "Well, let's never try this again! Just the fucking six of us will fight all aliens and win, because we can't let anyone else die in our war unless we decide we should that week!
Fuck this story.
Also at the end, during the "Everyone wins and life is mostly good, Gorrilla boy is a fucking rock star, but then aliens come back at the last second and need to be stopped but only 4 heroes are willing to take part: Hero Guy, his gorrilla friend, Hawk boy, and Ax The Alien.
Angry edgy girl isn't cool and Cassue don't take part in trying to save the human race, even though Cassue has a girlfriend at this point.
Also the author takes the whole "Repeating a sound and playing with it verbally like a new toy" and "getting waaaay too into food" thing some Autists do and makes Ax do it because he's an alien not used to dealing with human mouths or tasting food.
The author is a feminazi leftist tard, so it's funny to see her take this "Disabled person trait" and portray it as something so alien, there's a point where the heroes immediately tell that some weirdo who acts like Ax is an alien specifically because she acts like Ax.
Oh my, how able-ist.
Also don't think too hard about how the body-jacking brain-slug aliens are everywhere and control everything, yet never notice what a fucking weirdo Ax is.
Even though this race has fought the Andalites for eons, they were the first mistakes of the Andalites(giving Yeerks space travel was a mistake the Andalites did), and logically they should have seen at least one instance of an Andalite acting weird in the form of any body with a mouth or the ability to speak with it.
>>264883
Will do.
Is Glimglam still around?
>>265305
Yes, I'm still here. I'm taking a bit of an extended break from reviewing and I'll probably start on the next thing in a week or so.
Yes, I'm still here. I'm taking a bit of an extended break from reviewing and I'll probably start on the next thing in a week or so.
>>265313
Don't feel pressured, I hope you're in the best of moods when you start on it. I don't know if you've followed the "Occupied Equestria" threads but as a DnD game set in MLP it takes a lot of creativity to make it fun, engaging and convincing. I've used what I've learned in this thread to evaluate the GM's methods and they are indeed up to snuff. Would be nice to have a literature critic pop up now and again even if just as a spectator.
Don't feel pressured, I hope you're in the best of moods when you start on it. I don't know if you've followed the "Occupied Equestria" threads but as a DnD game set in MLP it takes a lot of creativity to make it fun, engaging and convincing. I've used what I've learned in this thread to evaluate the GM's methods and they are indeed up to snuff. Would be nice to have a literature critic pop up now and again even if just as a spectator.
>>248482
Thought of something.
This story was meant to redeem NMM without the use of a rainbow laser, but it did the opposite.
It presented NMM as an inherently evil symbiote-like "Darkness" substance that carries around the baggage of others, overwhelming small children and making them be evil.
Nyx can only be good once the NMM-ness is removed from her, meaning she's just whatever magic was used to create her minus the NMM-ness.
"Nightmare Moon" is Luna after a bad day.
In this story, NMM is the darkness Luna created during that bad day, leaving it behind in her armour and in the Everfree Forest.
That "NMM Smoke/Essence" is what gets ripped out of Nyx and stomped out of existence.
So NMM effectively fucking dies, irredeemable and unsalvageable.
And it just leaves behind Nyx, an unoriginal sham of a character who is nothing without what she no longer has, making her pointless. She's empty now. Should just fade into light particles and vanish.
Hell I'm surprised there wasn't a scene where this started to happen, everypony cries, and the tears lets Nyx hold on and stay alive, reforming and living without a hint of NMM blackness.
You know what it should have done instead?
>Twilight takes a calm moonlit walk through town while thinking about how FUCKED everything is now that BOTH princesses have gone missing and Cadence is in charge while Twilight stays home and tries to think of a solution
>she finds a little unconscious injured black filly who acts cute and fakes amnesia to get adopted by Twilight
>>Twilight: who are you?
>>filly: i dunno
>Twilight takes her home to her library home, fuck the crystal cock tree
RD is also there to bring a book back, Spongebob family clam episode style jokes are made when Twi and RD raise this amnesiac kid together.
>filly reads a shitload of books with Twilight, unable to sleep so they read and share cute moments
>Twilight isn't dumb enough to trust a random stranger so she Truth-Spells Joy at the start of this. Joy can now only lie through creative wording. This also gives Twilight to never suspect that she's being misled or used.
eventually
>filly: "I have no name, I am but two days old. Call me Joy"
see it's a really clever reference to a poem William Blake wrote about having a kid or something
plus it's an actual fucking pony name and not completely retarded like Nyx
>suddenly
>...why is the night not ending? it's 6AM
>suddenly, a giant castle tower emerges from the Everfree Forest and the night refuses to end
>suddenly, Team Rocket! a video feed of the baddies is shown in the sky all over the world thanks to illusion magic from the new Nightmare Moon and her Team Night cult
>NMM makes sure to specify that she's not Luna gone bad, she's a whole new pony. She is darkness itself!
>neo nightmare moon is named Nyx
>there's a big adventure episode where the mane six fights and puzzle-solves and "proves my element isn't shit and my virtues are good" moments their way through a big DMC3 tower, climbing higher until they make it to the top. Joy helps sometimes. There's a foreshadowing scene where some Everfree Forest animals arrive to attack some Darkness Monsters that erupt from the ground, everyone assumes Fluttershy did this or they heard about the mane six from Flutters' animals. It's actually Joy, she is uncontrollable Everfree magic made manifest.
>plot twist, after a Nyx And Evil Boss Guy VS Twilight and Rainbow Dash fight that's pretty cool
>Joy says "I remember everything now! This cult used both me and my sister! We were only born because of this! So let me talk to what they turned my sister into, before the end. Let me be the one to cast a sleep spell, before you rainbow laser her."
>Joy walks over to the dying Nyx and sings a lullaby
>Twilight thinks
>Joy's magic glows and she prepares to cast something
Twilight thinking: wait a fucking second I read this lullaby in an incredibly old book back in canterlot. this song's over 1000 years old, who the hell
Thought of something.
This story was meant to redeem NMM without the use of a rainbow laser, but it did the opposite.
It presented NMM as an inherently evil symbiote-like "Darkness" substance that carries around the baggage of others, overwhelming small children and making them be evil.
Nyx can only be good once the NMM-ness is removed from her, meaning she's just whatever magic was used to create her minus the NMM-ness.
"Nightmare Moon" is Luna after a bad day.
In this story, NMM is the darkness Luna created during that bad day, leaving it behind in her armour and in the Everfree Forest.
That "NMM Smoke/Essence" is what gets ripped out of Nyx and stomped out of existence.
So NMM effectively fucking dies, irredeemable and unsalvageable.
And it just leaves behind Nyx, an unoriginal sham of a character who is nothing without what she no longer has, making her pointless. She's empty now. Should just fade into light particles and vanish.
Hell I'm surprised there wasn't a scene where this started to happen, everypony cries, and the tears lets Nyx hold on and stay alive, reforming and living without a hint of NMM blackness.
You know what it should have done instead?
>Twilight takes a calm moonlit walk through town while thinking about how FUCKED everything is now that BOTH princesses have gone missing and Cadence is in charge while Twilight stays home and tries to think of a solution
>she finds a little unconscious injured black filly who acts cute and fakes amnesia to get adopted by Twilight
>>Twilight: who are you?
>>filly: i dunno
>Twilight takes her home to her library home, fuck the crystal cock tree
RD is also there to bring a book back, Spongebob family clam episode style jokes are made when Twi and RD raise this amnesiac kid together.
>filly reads a shitload of books with Twilight, unable to sleep so they read and share cute moments
>Twilight isn't dumb enough to trust a random stranger so she Truth-Spells Joy at the start of this. Joy can now only lie through creative wording. This also gives Twilight to never suspect that she's being misled or used.
eventually
>filly: "I have no name, I am but two days old. Call me Joy"
see it's a really clever reference to a poem William Blake wrote about having a kid or something
plus it's an actual fucking pony name and not completely retarded like Nyx
>suddenly
>...why is the night not ending? it's 6AM
>suddenly, a giant castle tower emerges from the Everfree Forest and the night refuses to end
>suddenly, Team Rocket! a video feed of the baddies is shown in the sky all over the world thanks to illusion magic from the new Nightmare Moon and her Team Night cult
>NMM makes sure to specify that she's not Luna gone bad, she's a whole new pony. She is darkness itself!
>neo nightmare moon is named Nyx
>there's a big adventure episode where the mane six fights and puzzle-solves and "proves my element isn't shit and my virtues are good" moments their way through a big DMC3 tower, climbing higher until they make it to the top. Joy helps sometimes. There's a foreshadowing scene where some Everfree Forest animals arrive to attack some Darkness Monsters that erupt from the ground, everyone assumes Fluttershy did this or they heard about the mane six from Flutters' animals. It's actually Joy, she is uncontrollable Everfree magic made manifest.
>plot twist, after a Nyx And Evil Boss Guy VS Twilight and Rainbow Dash fight that's pretty cool
>Joy says "I remember everything now! This cult used both me and my sister! We were only born because of this! So let me talk to what they turned my sister into, before the end. Let me be the one to cast a sleep spell, before you rainbow laser her."
>Joy walks over to the dying Nyx and sings a lullaby
>Twilight thinks
>Joy's magic glows and she prepares to cast something
Twilight thinking: wait a fucking second I read this lullaby in an incredibly old book back in canterlot. this song's over 1000 years old, who the hell
>>266117
sings this any more?
Twilight: oh shit
>Twilight can't stop Joy in time, she fuses with Nyx
>the real Nightmare Moon is back!
>but she remembers how good it was to be good, and is redeemed now. She was resurrected by Evil Dude who thought he could rule Equestria better with a brainwashed NMM as his muscle. NMM was too strong for him to brainwash, so he split NMM in half then brainwashed the strong part, sending the weak part to be killed. Everfree animals saved her and helped her get to Ponyville. NMM remembers being mad as Luna but doesn't give a fuck about the night any more.
"So you're good now? Just like that?" asks Rainbow Dash.
NMM magics Luna and Celestia out of the dimensional void Nyx had put them in
"Yeah. Did you expect me to have a big pointless fight with you atop this tower for no reason?" asks NMM.
Comedy montage of NMM and friends baking, reading comics, bowling, playing arcade cabinet games, playing board games, and so on.
story ends.
Or if you'd rather have a big fighty scene than a funny last-second twist, Twilight and NMM fight while RD and friends search the castle dungeon to find Luna and Celestia, and Twilight wins the fight, so NMM fakes her own death in a big magic blast and shapeshifts into Joy. "Yay, you saved me!" says Joy. "Now I never have to be that monster again!".
cue some cute scenes including a post-story "Mane six and Twi and Joy talk things out with Luna to recap the story and explain the morals and themes as simply as possible for the slow fucking coombrain bronies out there" scene, end story.
That works so much better as a story.
The faggot author said he wanted to "Turn NMM good without a rainbow laser".
So he writes a story where NMM gives birth to Nyx, who rips out every last shred of NMM from herself and crushes it.
NMM wasn't "Redeemed" here, she was fucking murdered.
For what? Just so a faggot author could shill his oh-so-cute oh-so-powerful OC through overemotional and laughably bad scenes.
Fuck Nyx and fuck Nyxfag.
sings this any more?
Twilight: oh shit
>Twilight can't stop Joy in time, she fuses with Nyx
>the real Nightmare Moon is back!
>but she remembers how good it was to be good, and is redeemed now. She was resurrected by Evil Dude who thought he could rule Equestria better with a brainwashed NMM as his muscle. NMM was too strong for him to brainwash, so he split NMM in half then brainwashed the strong part, sending the weak part to be killed. Everfree animals saved her and helped her get to Ponyville. NMM remembers being mad as Luna but doesn't give a fuck about the night any more.
"So you're good now? Just like that?" asks Rainbow Dash.
NMM magics Luna and Celestia out of the dimensional void Nyx had put them in
"Yeah. Did you expect me to have a big pointless fight with you atop this tower for no reason?" asks NMM.
Comedy montage of NMM and friends baking, reading comics, bowling, playing arcade cabinet games, playing board games, and so on.
story ends.
Or if you'd rather have a big fighty scene than a funny last-second twist, Twilight and NMM fight while RD and friends search the castle dungeon to find Luna and Celestia, and Twilight wins the fight, so NMM fakes her own death in a big magic blast and shapeshifts into Joy. "Yay, you saved me!" says Joy. "Now I never have to be that monster again!".
cue some cute scenes including a post-story "Mane six and Twi and Joy talk things out with Luna to recap the story and explain the morals and themes as simply as possible for the slow fucking coombrain bronies out there" scene, end story.
That works so much better as a story.
The faggot author said he wanted to "Turn NMM good without a rainbow laser".
So he writes a story where NMM gives birth to Nyx, who rips out every last shred of NMM from herself and crushes it.
NMM wasn't "Redeemed" here, she was fucking murdered.
For what? Just so a faggot author could shill his oh-so-cute oh-so-powerful OC through overemotional and laughably bad scenes.
Fuck Nyx and fuck Nyxfag.
I know.
I did my best but it was still a fucking mess.
I tried to give "NMM, Luna's darkness" a reason to turn good and a reason to know what good is, but I still don't think it's any good.
NMM didn't really """get redeemed""" or redeem herself in my story, she just enjoyed being forced to become a little filly.
It's not possible to combine "Le cute innocent girl" with "Turn someone on a bad millennia into a separate character then turn her good believably" story if you want NMM to be both cutesy girl and pure evilness.
I'll be real with you.
I don't think it's possible to tell an actual good story with the MLPFIM characters or any OC in this setting. The setting's been fucked over and filled with trash.
Which is fine, since you can just ignore or retcon away all the garbage. All the poochies fucked off to Vanhoofer because their favourite boyband's playing over there. Anyone can half-ass a reason to get shit characters out of the story but everyone's been turned shit.
The characters have been fucked with so much that everyone's got a different perception of how their favourite pony "Should" act, so the only way to write a crowd-pleasing fic is to write "Fanon Rainbow Dash" instead of the actual character. Write the perfect angel RD fanboys want to see rather than how the obnoxious canon RD would actually act. Better to have them swoon over your boringly perfect pegasus than cry about how bad she looks in this chapter, right?
Which means your character sticks out like a sore thumb if he's not pure brony pandering too. Edgy pony pricks make no sense when the world's supposed to be a cutesy rainbow wonderland with hidden darkness here and there.
The show of FIM is wholesome and kind and about small ponies in a big world. World-destroying catastrophes are things that should rarely happen, and the show wasn't designed for one of those to happen twice a season or more.
The show was built for local disasters like bunny stampedes and sleeping dragons, small scale things and deeply personal stakes. Things with a reason for the heroes to not just EOH laser to get it over with.
Celestia and Luna are meant to be above regular ponies so it means something when the regular ponies use the Elements of Harmony to defeat NMM.
It's saying "Friendship beats darkness".
And when Friendship beat the Windigoes, it's saying "Friendship beats the cold".
But what do fanfics end up doing? Forgetting the themes of the show in an attempt to turn heads and impress pseudointellectuals.
So friendship fails to beat Windigoes but a Self-Insertified Scootaloo or something stupid like that can save the day by being the specialest/rightest/bestest.
So many fanfics turn the Everfree Forest into this hellish death zone, this "Forest of Death" where the local edgy guy lives to show how tough he is, or throw out its danger so kids can camp here. The show ended up going with the latter.
So many writers at the start of this fandom tried to make FIM "Epic" and they were idiots for doing so, and I was an idiot too. I was an idiot for letting idiots nine years ago talk me out of writing what I wanted to write back then, and I was an idiot for spending almost a decade trying to work that fuckery into something useable. Isn't it fucked up that the only actual helpful review I ever got came from someone who said my OC sucks dicks every time he mentioned his name? He's right, by the way. My OC does indeed suck the fattest of dicks, he's a whiny pseud cunt and I can't stand the sight of him. He wasn't meant to look like this or dress like this.
"Great pony wars"? Twilight getting brainwashed and turned into an edgy cunt who has nothing in common with the real Twilight? Nukes and zebraniggers and power fantasies and Doctor Who and Fallout and Batman elements getting thrown in from nowhere? Fucking stupid shonen fights with a bootleg team rocket?
So many stories are just fucking bad. They're all bad. All wish-fulfillment fetish fics if different cliches are your fetish, your emotional porn. I was a fool for ever thinking I could make a "Good" one of these things.
One time I listened to a friend of mine rant about the deep lore of some stupid kid's toy line for 40 minutes and I felt like a faggot for knowing other fictional settings in this much detail.
I regret wasting years of my life reading terrible pony fanfiction.
As a kid I read Naruto fanfiction and it taught me what terrible writing looks like. It also taught me what fun but terrible writing looks like.
As a teenager I read brony fanfiction. That's all it was. Not FIM fanfiction, where you make characters do in-character things in-universe with what-ifs and then-whats. Brony fanfiction full of cliches and fucking terrible "jokes" meant to make the bronies laugh. I am HONESTly sure the element of HONESTY would HONESTLY agree with me and say whatever the fuck this is right now isn't even a joke, it's just a reference. Faggy bronies laugh at references.
Don't take this as a rant because right now all I feel is sadness.
If I asked you to show me one good MLP fanfic, what would you show me?
>>265313
If you want to review a work that is actually good in quality to clear out the bad taste in your mouth, could you please do "The Sun and the Rose"? I personally consider it a high quality work but I'm interested as to what faults you might find.
If you want to review a work that is actually good in quality to clear out the bad taste in your mouth, could you please do "The Sun and the Rose"? I personally consider it a high quality work but I'm interested as to what faults you might find.
File (): 31DBB6AC05F028C4D611497942DECA8D-71111.jpg (69.4 KB, 750x911, 1587677637.jpg)
Sorry about the extended absence everyone. I have returned, and will be commencing with Friendship is Optimal in a few moments.
>>265425
Mostly been reading and goofing off. I have a stack of books on my end table that I'm working through, and was able to finish off three them. I also got a little work done on some non-/mlpol/ related projects I've had on the back burner.
>>265374
>Occupied Equestria
I've seen the threads but I haven't really read them. I don't know how many backposts I'd have to read through to understand what's going on, but I'm curious and might pop in at some point.
>I hope you're in the best of moods when you start on it
Thanks. I've read enough good stuff in the last month to sate my appetite for quality, and am fully prepared to get neck-deep in shitty fanfiction again.
>>266404
>The Sun and the Rose
Is this the one?
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/191817/the-sun-the-rose
If so, I've read the synopsis and it sounds like it might be good. I've already started reading Friendship is Optimal, but depending on how terrible it turns out to be, I might need something to cleanse the palette afterward before starting on FOE. I'll add it to the list.
>>266117
>William Blake reference
+10 for that. Here's the poem you're thinking of btw:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43665/infant-joy
I'd like to start shifting away from Past Sins since I'm about to start a new fic, so I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this; however I do have some thoughts on the rest of what you wrote.
>This story was meant to redeem NMM without the use of a rainbow laser, but it did the opposite.
Good point. I feel like this particular dead horse has been whipped into an unrecognizable bloody pulp at this point, but good point nonetheless.
>greentext
I don't 100% follow the details, but there are actually some interesting ideas here. Having the filly found by Twilight (Joy) and the Nightmare Moon reincarnation (Nyx) be two entirely separate characters, both created during the cult's resurrection ritual, is actually a really interesting approach that I admit hadn't occurred to me. I also like that the focus of the story is on Twilight's relationship with Joy while all the evil stuff the Nyx character is doing is just happening in the background outside of the reader's view. By far the most tedious stretch of Past Sins to slog through was the period where Nyx was Nightmare Moon, and I think it was somewhere in that period where my opinion of the fic finally soured past the point of no return.
I'm also a big fan of the way you treat the actual resurrection event as something incidental that happened off-camera before the story began, rather than as a central focus. I'll admit that this is also an idea that hadn't occurred to me.
In the original Peen Stroke version, the resurrection ceremony is the prologue and Spell Nexus behaves as sort of a background villain throughout the first part of the narrative. We see him from time to time and he's clearly plotting something, but we don't know what, so as we're reading this story about a filly's life in Ponyville we're constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. It's a good setup, but like the other small handful of things that Peen Stroke manages to do right, it's completely overshadowed by what he does wrong. After the shoe finally drops and Nyx turns into NM, Nexus has no further role to fill, and is relegated to just being this obnoxious side character that for some reason NM keeps taking orders/advice from. The story just gets progressively more excruciating from there.
In your version, it sounds like the Nexus character is basically out of the story before it even begins. He's responsible for the mechanical process that brings the two fillies into the world so he plays an essential role, but he's not an essential character so he's not really in the story itself. He resurrects NM, she's too powerful for him, so he splits her in two. Beyond that bit of backstory which you could easily wait until 2/3 of the way through the text to reveal, it's not even necessary to mention Nexus at all. You could even have it so that NM killed him and he's gone for good before we even meet him (would recommend).
Anyway, based on what you have here, I'd probably map the story out like this:
>Twilight finds Joy in woods, raises her with RD, cuteness and fun.
>oh noes Nightmare Moon. Evilness and explosions.
>climactic battle scene, Joy sings her song and merges with Nyx. Both halves of the personality reunited into NM, but NM has learned from her Joy half that Friendship is Magic™ and doesn't want to be evil anymore. Roll credits.
And personally, I'd go with the light comedy ending where there's no fight after the Joy/Nyx merger. Since if you were to actually write this, it would immediately be recognized as a parody/alternate version of Past Sins, so the best way to approach this would be to gently poke fun at the original while still telling an obviously better story.
What I like about this approach is that it boils Past Sins down to its essential components and purges all of the extra shit. If you kept the narrative tight and the pacing quick, this story could easily be told in about 30-40k words, maxing out at about 50-60k, which would be a yuge improvement over the rambling 200k behemoth that Peen Stroke vomited out. I also really like the idea of nu-NM being split into two diametrically opposed sisters, subtly alluding to the Celestia/Luna split in the original canon story the fic is based on. This is a much better way to pay homage to the source material than autistically dropping bronybait references left and right.
All in all, ignoring of course all the random autism about Team Rocket and whatever the fuck, this outline actually shows some good instinct. I can see the hazy outline of a good idea here.
>>265425
Mostly been reading and goofing off. I have a stack of books on my end table that I'm working through, and was able to finish off three them. I also got a little work done on some non-/mlpol/ related projects I've had on the back burner.
>>265374
>Occupied Equestria
I've seen the threads but I haven't really read them. I don't know how many backposts I'd have to read through to understand what's going on, but I'm curious and might pop in at some point.
>I hope you're in the best of moods when you start on it
Thanks. I've read enough good stuff in the last month to sate my appetite for quality, and am fully prepared to get neck-deep in shitty fanfiction again.
>>266404
>The Sun and the Rose
Is this the one?
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/191817/the-sun-the-rose
If so, I've read the synopsis and it sounds like it might be good. I've already started reading Friendship is Optimal, but depending on how terrible it turns out to be, I might need something to cleanse the palette afterward before starting on FOE. I'll add it to the list.
>>266117
>William Blake reference
+10 for that. Here's the poem you're thinking of btw:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43665/infant-joy
I'd like to start shifting away from Past Sins since I'm about to start a new fic, so I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this; however I do have some thoughts on the rest of what you wrote.
>This story was meant to redeem NMM without the use of a rainbow laser, but it did the opposite.
Good point. I feel like this particular dead horse has been whipped into an unrecognizable bloody pulp at this point, but good point nonetheless.
>greentext
I don't 100% follow the details, but there are actually some interesting ideas here. Having the filly found by Twilight (Joy) and the Nightmare Moon reincarnation (Nyx) be two entirely separate characters, both created during the cult's resurrection ritual, is actually a really interesting approach that I admit hadn't occurred to me. I also like that the focus of the story is on Twilight's relationship with Joy while all the evil stuff the Nyx character is doing is just happening in the background outside of the reader's view. By far the most tedious stretch of Past Sins to slog through was the period where Nyx was Nightmare Moon, and I think it was somewhere in that period where my opinion of the fic finally soured past the point of no return.
I'm also a big fan of the way you treat the actual resurrection event as something incidental that happened off-camera before the story began, rather than as a central focus. I'll admit that this is also an idea that hadn't occurred to me.
In the original Peen Stroke version, the resurrection ceremony is the prologue and Spell Nexus behaves as sort of a background villain throughout the first part of the narrative. We see him from time to time and he's clearly plotting something, but we don't know what, so as we're reading this story about a filly's life in Ponyville we're constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. It's a good setup, but like the other small handful of things that Peen Stroke manages to do right, it's completely overshadowed by what he does wrong. After the shoe finally drops and Nyx turns into NM, Nexus has no further role to fill, and is relegated to just being this obnoxious side character that for some reason NM keeps taking orders/advice from. The story just gets progressively more excruciating from there.
In your version, it sounds like the Nexus character is basically out of the story before it even begins. He's responsible for the mechanical process that brings the two fillies into the world so he plays an essential role, but he's not an essential character so he's not really in the story itself. He resurrects NM, she's too powerful for him, so he splits her in two. Beyond that bit of backstory which you could easily wait until 2/3 of the way through the text to reveal, it's not even necessary to mention Nexus at all. You could even have it so that NM killed him and he's gone for good before we even meet him (would recommend).
Anyway, based on what you have here, I'd probably map the story out like this:
>Twilight finds Joy in woods, raises her with RD, cuteness and fun.
>oh noes Nightmare Moon. Evilness and explosions.
>climactic battle scene, Joy sings her song and merges with Nyx. Both halves of the personality reunited into NM, but NM has learned from her Joy half that Friendship is Magic™ and doesn't want to be evil anymore. Roll credits.
And personally, I'd go with the light comedy ending where there's no fight after the Joy/Nyx merger. Since if you were to actually write this, it would immediately be recognized as a parody/alternate version of Past Sins, so the best way to approach this would be to gently poke fun at the original while still telling an obviously better story.
What I like about this approach is that it boils Past Sins down to its essential components and purges all of the extra shit. If you kept the narrative tight and the pacing quick, this story could easily be told in about 30-40k words, maxing out at about 50-60k, which would be a yuge improvement over the rambling 200k behemoth that Peen Stroke vomited out. I also really like the idea of nu-NM being split into two diametrically opposed sisters, subtly alluding to the Celestia/Luna split in the original canon story the fic is based on. This is a much better way to pay homage to the source material than autistically dropping bronybait references left and right.
All in all, ignoring of course all the random autism about Team Rocket and whatever the fuck, this outline actually shows some good instinct. I can see the hazy outline of a good idea here.
File (): B20BE419DFB2B443CBBCF8310E40B29B-927106.png (905.4 KB, 1280x720, 1587678808.png)
I just noticed this, but it looks like the new board code changed the name field in all of my previous posts, so it looks like my name is "Anonymous Glam" now lmao.
Anyway, I have returned well rested, and shall now commence analysis of:
Friendship is Optimal
by Iceman
I skimmed about half of the prologue to this while I was falling asleep the other night, and am giving it a more thorough read now. I'll start with some basic first impressions.
Compared to the last thing I read, which as you all remember was a delightful tale about an obnoxious twat of a filly being cunt-punted directly to the moon to die slowly of oxygen deprivation at least that's how I choose to remember it, the first thing I notice here is the difference in length. The total word count for this is 38,698, and from what I've read the prose style seems more succinct, so I'm rather hoping that we'll be dealing with a slightly more disciplined author this time. Reading over my earliest posts in this thread, however, I see that my initial impressions of Peen Stroke led me to assume I was dealing with the work of a professional or semi-professional writer, and in that assumption I was very sadly mistaken. So, I've decided to reserve judgement on overall quality until I've delved a little deeper into the text.
Anyway, at the beginning, we are introduced to two friends, James and David. David has won some kind of raffle which allowed him early access to a pony MMO developed by Hasbro. David appears to be a pony fan, but James is just a regular gamer who is neutral on the subject of ponies, and was invited along by his friend. The story so far seems to be told from James' perspective, so we're getting impressions of a pony world through the eyes of someone with no previous pony experience.
So far this seems like an interesting idea. There's a metafictional angle to it: it's an MLP fanfiction, but it's set in our world where MLP is a fictional property. There's also the video game angle, which is not something commonly found in MLP fanfiction or at least I assume it isn't; I guess I haven't read enough MLP fanfiction to say for certain.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the rather obvious parallels between the premise of this story and the anime Sword Art Online. However, I've done some quick googling and it seems that SAO came out in 2012, the same year that this fic was published on FimFiction. Considering the subject matter, the chances of Iceman's not being familiar with SAO are slim to none, but it's possible that the similarities could be coincidental.
If Iceman is a casual weeb like I am, and just waits for official English releases of anime to come out on Hulu or whatever, then there's usually a delay of 1-3 years before things released in Japan make it across the pond. If this is the case, we can probably chalk the similarities up to coincidence, since the whole "gamer dude ends up trapped inside a vidya game" premise isn't all that original to begin with. However, if he's a serious weeb who keeps up with anime as it airs in Japan, it would mean he would probably have been writing this story concurrently with SAO. This means that he would have seen SAO, immediately decided to rip it off and do the same thing with ponies, and churned out the text as the anime was airing, all without ever mentioning SAO by name. This, of course, would be a pretty egregious hack move.
Again, I choose to reserve judgement until I've read further, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that this has a very similar premise to SAO, and was published around the same time.
Anyway, another thing I notice about this is that the prose is very no-frills. This isn't necessarily bad, it really just depends on what you're trying to write. For some types of fiction (usually action and/or event-driven stories), it's better to keep the pacing quick and use simple, utilitarian language rather than bogging the reader down with a lot of florid descriptions of characters and settings. I rather suspect this story will turn out to be something in this category, and if so this was a good choice of approach.
For example, Peen Stroke's prologue was very eloquently written: it sets a very clear mood, and there's a lot of heavy description of snow-covered forests and soft candlelight and whatnot. By contrast, Iceman gets right to the point: there are two gamer dudes named James and David, and they are testing a My Little Pony MMO. He doesn't waste time describing eerie rooms with flickering screens or anything like that; the prose just tells us what's happening in the story and nothing else.
Even the characters are just outlines of humans at this point: we have no idea who James and David are. We don't have physical descriptions or last names, and so far their personalities seem defined by their roles more than who they are on the interior. They're both gamers, are presumably young (probably late teens, early twenties), and have differing opinions on ponies. That's all we need to know about them right now.
This is actually rather serendipitous because it ties into some discussion that's gone on here about action writing (see some of the exchanges between Sven and myself). For a character-driven story meant to have an emotional impact, description and mood are usually important. However, for an event-driven or action story, particularly one which I have been led to understand deals heavily with logic and rationality, this kind of cold skeletal approach works perfectly. This is why it's best to thoroughly understand what you want to write about before you start writing.
Anyway, I've got some more thoughts, but I'm going to stop here because I'm running out of space, and the new board code seems finicky about character limits. More to come.
t. Anonymous Glam
Anyway, I have returned well rested, and shall now commence analysis of:
Friendship is Optimal
by Iceman
I skimmed about half of the prologue to this while I was falling asleep the other night, and am giving it a more thorough read now. I'll start with some basic first impressions.
Compared to the last thing I read, which as you all remember was a delightful tale about an obnoxious twat of a filly being cunt-punted directly to the moon to die slowly of oxygen deprivation at least that's how I choose to remember it, the first thing I notice here is the difference in length. The total word count for this is 38,698, and from what I've read the prose style seems more succinct, so I'm rather hoping that we'll be dealing with a slightly more disciplined author this time. Reading over my earliest posts in this thread, however, I see that my initial impressions of Peen Stroke led me to assume I was dealing with the work of a professional or semi-professional writer, and in that assumption I was very sadly mistaken. So, I've decided to reserve judgement on overall quality until I've delved a little deeper into the text.
Anyway, at the beginning, we are introduced to two friends, James and David. David has won some kind of raffle which allowed him early access to a pony MMO developed by Hasbro. David appears to be a pony fan, but James is just a regular gamer who is neutral on the subject of ponies, and was invited along by his friend. The story so far seems to be told from James' perspective, so we're getting impressions of a pony world through the eyes of someone with no previous pony experience.
So far this seems like an interesting idea. There's a metafictional angle to it: it's an MLP fanfiction, but it's set in our world where MLP is a fictional property. There's also the video game angle, which is not something commonly found in MLP fanfiction or at least I assume it isn't; I guess I haven't read enough MLP fanfiction to say for certain.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the rather obvious parallels between the premise of this story and the anime Sword Art Online. However, I've done some quick googling and it seems that SAO came out in 2012, the same year that this fic was published on FimFiction. Considering the subject matter, the chances of Iceman's not being familiar with SAO are slim to none, but it's possible that the similarities could be coincidental.
If Iceman is a casual weeb like I am, and just waits for official English releases of anime to come out on Hulu or whatever, then there's usually a delay of 1-3 years before things released in Japan make it across the pond. If this is the case, we can probably chalk the similarities up to coincidence, since the whole "gamer dude ends up trapped inside a vidya game" premise isn't all that original to begin with. However, if he's a serious weeb who keeps up with anime as it airs in Japan, it would mean he would probably have been writing this story concurrently with SAO. This means that he would have seen SAO, immediately decided to rip it off and do the same thing with ponies, and churned out the text as the anime was airing, all without ever mentioning SAO by name. This, of course, would be a pretty egregious hack move.
Again, I choose to reserve judgement until I've read further, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that this has a very similar premise to SAO, and was published around the same time.
Anyway, another thing I notice about this is that the prose is very no-frills. This isn't necessarily bad, it really just depends on what you're trying to write. For some types of fiction (usually action and/or event-driven stories), it's better to keep the pacing quick and use simple, utilitarian language rather than bogging the reader down with a lot of florid descriptions of characters and settings. I rather suspect this story will turn out to be something in this category, and if so this was a good choice of approach.
For example, Peen Stroke's prologue was very eloquently written: it sets a very clear mood, and there's a lot of heavy description of snow-covered forests and soft candlelight and whatnot. By contrast, Iceman gets right to the point: there are two gamer dudes named James and David, and they are testing a My Little Pony MMO. He doesn't waste time describing eerie rooms with flickering screens or anything like that; the prose just tells us what's happening in the story and nothing else.
Even the characters are just outlines of humans at this point: we have no idea who James and David are. We don't have physical descriptions or last names, and so far their personalities seem defined by their roles more than who they are on the interior. They're both gamers, are presumably young (probably late teens, early twenties), and have differing opinions on ponies. That's all we need to know about them right now.
This is actually rather serendipitous because it ties into some discussion that's gone on here about action writing (see some of the exchanges between Sven and myself). For a character-driven story meant to have an emotional impact, description and mood are usually important. However, for an event-driven or action story, particularly one which I have been led to understand deals heavily with logic and rationality, this kind of cold skeletal approach works perfectly. This is why it's best to thoroughly understand what you want to write about before you start writing.
Anyway, I've got some more thoughts, but I'm going to stop here because I'm running out of space, and the new board code seems finicky about character limits. More to come.
t. Anonymous Glam
>>266598
So you're back again, making this site great again, huh? I'll be reading.
Have you seen the few short stories that I have written on the scribble block? I'm not looking for a review or anything I rather ask you to review something else that I have put mroe thought into., just wanted to know if there was anything that stood out to you if you did or were they just neat (or potentially trash?)
So you're back again, making this site great again, huh? I'll be reading.
Have you seen the few short stories that I have written on the scribble block? I'm not looking for a review or anything I rather ask you to review something else that I have put mroe thought into., just wanted to know if there was anything that stood out to you if you did or were they just neat (or potentially trash?)
>>266600
I noticed them, haven't gotten around to reading them just yet. I've been sort of ignoring the internet for the past couple of weeks. But I will give them a read and let you know what I think.
I noticed them, haven't gotten around to reading them just yet. I've been sort of ignoring the internet for the past couple of weeks. But I will give them a read and let you know what I think.
>>266599
>Well, shit apparently spoiler tags work differently now too.
Small omission in the code, my bad. I'll add that spoiler tag back so all posts using the old tag will be fixed (and that you can use it again).
>Well, shit apparently spoiler tags work differently now too.
Small omission in the code, my bad. I'll add that spoiler tag back so all posts using the old tag will be fixed (and that you can use it again).
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>>266602
It's cool code bro. Have huggable cat for your hard work.
>>266601
Thanks a lot.
Look at the comment section for this vid.
It's cringy but I love it. I can see myself in these people. They write their silly stories and pretenciously think they are good. Just like me.
I also like that this happens by itself. Everyone has basically the same interpretation of the pic. It's so cute.
It's cool code bro. Have huggable cat for your hard work.
>>266601
Thanks a lot.
Look at the comment section for this vid.
It's cringy but I love it. I can see myself in these people. They write their silly stories and pretenciously think they are good. Just like me.
I also like that this happens by itself. Everyone has basically the same interpretation of the pic. It's so cute.
>>266575
Thanks!
Good on you for noticing the "Celestia as the good girl who gets Twilight to do stuff while Luna is the edgelord NMM" bit.
What if NMM killed Nexus for suggesting some evil plans to her she didn't like/trying to order her around, and this made the Evil Dark Doom Children Of Darkest Team Darkness realize any one of them could be next on the chopping block?
So they split NMM into "Power and darkness that can be controlled" and "Controlling manipulative personality in weak body".
Then again, a pure evil cult of "darkness and dooooom!" doesn't really fit Equestria's tone. To make it fit the tone, somewhere between Doofenshmirtz and the shit villain bowlers from Sonic Boom would fit better.
I like this idea but I think having Nexus be around to say "I'm the hero here! Me! I brainwashed these ponies into cultists for power! I'll be the best ruler of Equestria with Nyx as my attack dog, and I'll be the most hardcore badass world leader ever! Nobody will look down on us for being cute little multicoloured ponies instead of spiky and edgy badasses again! Also part of my plan now involves using Darkness to make everypony an edgy super-strong badass! We will cast aside our cute pony bodies to become as gods!" so Twilight can say "no fuck you friendship is good and ponies are good and pure light is better than evil darkness" and laser him in the face gives the story a more climactic feel. Also lets things end in a big epic fight if I really do end it with no fight for a joke.
The original story sucked ass because it tried to blame everything bad Nyx ever did on Nexus at the last possible second, only to switch gears and blame NMM's gas at the second last possible second. Insert brap joke here.
But Nexus can be blamed for Nyx being used like a tool for evil and Joy having to play Twilight and pals like a fiddle (maybe do a bit where Joy learns good ponies will just be good without needing you to give them manipulative motivation?)
And the fight with him can serve as a "The actual villain responsible for all of this goes down" scene and a warmup for the
>NMM is complete
>Rainbow Dash: FuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUCK
>NMM: Reflects on her life choices and all she's learned in the story, gets an inner monologue 3 lines long about being used by others and forced to do things by fate and the rage of others. Luna's rage for Celestia's day, and Nexus's rage for Celestia's leadership. She decides it's only fitting that her only way out of being rainbow lasered into nothingness involves becoming what someone else made her once again.
>NMM: pretends to have a big fight with Twilight but throws it and fakes her own death at the first opportunity, seemingly transforming into Joy.
>Twilight: yay happy ending lets go home
>>266598
>gaming
Gaming-related pony stories are incredibly common and always surface-level pandering instead of anything deep.
Fluttershy going to the town of Animal Crossing for a vacation
Equestria getting fucked overnight so Rainbow Dash can become the Doomslayer's wisecracking cartoon animal sidekick or forget she's RD to become a Doomslayer knockoff (rather than a new interesting take on the character),
the cast of MLP playing or jumping into assorted video games,
some gamer human going to Equestria with the powers of a random videogame character, or the power to switch between them at will like that shitty videogame-themed comic superhero I barely remember. Some gamer magazine from the 2000s had a few comic pages here and there where the hero copied powers of random games to save videogames from giant monsters and shit.
Some Ponysona OC nobody cares about playing an unoriginal generic videogame idea nobody cares about or would ever fund
Spike waking up one morning and noticing he can see videogame stats everywhere and Save/Reload freely and improve his stats(OF COURSE, the story becomes a Spike power fantasy and enemies to level grind on show up, rather than an intellectual exploration of what being able to Undertale-style save and reload does to a man),
some human going to equestria with the above as his powers. being a videogame character who can jump high, save, reload, have a health bar take damage instead of him so he can No-Sell pain spells, etc
A DND character going to equestria and powergaming/minmaxing as hard as he can
Applejack as a filly being teleported away to be raised by Dante Sparda as his sidekick
Filly Twilight gets raised by Ratchet from Ratchet And Clank(dont get me started on how that would fuck canon up),
And a writeup of a let's play of Doki Doki Literature Club or Batman or FNAF or some popular shit like that except Button Mash or Fluttershy plays it.
>SAO
SAO seemed like it was going to be good, at first. But when it got bad, it became the butt of everyone's jokes and spiralled out of control from there.
People were watching SAO after videos about why SAO sucks convinced them to give the show a go.
People mocked the fansubs, the japanese translated official subs, the goddamn light novels and sequels...
Does the phrase "1000 years of semen" mean anything to anyone here, besides what Peen Stroke and Elizer Fatcowski swallow every night?
or "the semen made a glopping sound"
hell, the name of a villain is a joke. "Death Gun"? 3 guys, 1 edgy bastard kills you in the videogame while another breaks into your house and injects you with a lethal syringe if you die in the game, creating the illusion that Death Gun can kill a player through their MMORPG avatar. When the heroes figure this out, they fight Death Gun inside the game instead of calling the cops or trying to turn the game off and wake up outside the game. It's only a spoiler in-universe, the opening sequence blatantly spells it out.
Asuna going from "seems like a cool badass action girl just as strong as Kirito-Stu" to "helpless maiden trapped in a birdcage in Rape Elf's Tower unable to do anything but get licked in the face" was a downgrade.
Thanks!
Good on you for noticing the "Celestia as the good girl who gets Twilight to do stuff while Luna is the edgelord NMM" bit.
What if NMM killed Nexus for suggesting some evil plans to her she didn't like/trying to order her around, and this made the Evil Dark Doom Children Of Darkest Team Darkness realize any one of them could be next on the chopping block?
So they split NMM into "Power and darkness that can be controlled" and "Controlling manipulative personality in weak body".
Then again, a pure evil cult of "darkness and dooooom!" doesn't really fit Equestria's tone. To make it fit the tone, somewhere between Doofenshmirtz and the shit villain bowlers from Sonic Boom would fit better.
I like this idea but I think having Nexus be around to say "I'm the hero here! Me! I brainwashed these ponies into cultists for power! I'll be the best ruler of Equestria with Nyx as my attack dog, and I'll be the most hardcore badass world leader ever! Nobody will look down on us for being cute little multicoloured ponies instead of spiky and edgy badasses again! Also part of my plan now involves using Darkness to make everypony an edgy super-strong badass! We will cast aside our cute pony bodies to become as gods!" so Twilight can say "no fuck you friendship is good and ponies are good and pure light is better than evil darkness" and laser him in the face gives the story a more climactic feel. Also lets things end in a big epic fight if I really do end it with no fight for a joke.
The original story sucked ass because it tried to blame everything bad Nyx ever did on Nexus at the last possible second, only to switch gears and blame NMM's gas at the second last possible second. Insert brap joke here.
But Nexus can be blamed for Nyx being used like a tool for evil and Joy having to play Twilight and pals like a fiddle (maybe do a bit where Joy learns good ponies will just be good without needing you to give them manipulative motivation?)
And the fight with him can serve as a "The actual villain responsible for all of this goes down" scene and a warmup for the
>NMM is complete
>Rainbow Dash: FuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUCK
>NMM: Reflects on her life choices and all she's learned in the story, gets an inner monologue 3 lines long about being used by others and forced to do things by fate and the rage of others. Luna's rage for Celestia's day, and Nexus's rage for Celestia's leadership. She decides it's only fitting that her only way out of being rainbow lasered into nothingness involves becoming what someone else made her once again.
>NMM: pretends to have a big fight with Twilight but throws it and fakes her own death at the first opportunity, seemingly transforming into Joy.
>Twilight: yay happy ending lets go home
>>266598
>gaming
Gaming-related pony stories are incredibly common and always surface-level pandering instead of anything deep.
Fluttershy going to the town of Animal Crossing for a vacation
Equestria getting fucked overnight so Rainbow Dash can become the Doomslayer's wisecracking cartoon animal sidekick or forget she's RD to become a Doomslayer knockoff (rather than a new interesting take on the character),
the cast of MLP playing or jumping into assorted video games,
some gamer human going to Equestria with the powers of a random videogame character, or the power to switch between them at will like that shitty videogame-themed comic superhero I barely remember. Some gamer magazine from the 2000s had a few comic pages here and there where the hero copied powers of random games to save videogames from giant monsters and shit.
Some Ponysona OC nobody cares about playing an unoriginal generic videogame idea nobody cares about or would ever fund
Spike waking up one morning and noticing he can see videogame stats everywhere and Save/Reload freely and improve his stats(OF COURSE, the story becomes a Spike power fantasy and enemies to level grind on show up, rather than an intellectual exploration of what being able to Undertale-style save and reload does to a man),
some human going to equestria with the above as his powers. being a videogame character who can jump high, save, reload, have a health bar take damage instead of him so he can No-Sell pain spells, etc
A DND character going to equestria and powergaming/minmaxing as hard as he can
Applejack as a filly being teleported away to be raised by Dante Sparda as his sidekick
Filly Twilight gets raised by Ratchet from Ratchet And Clank(dont get me started on how that would fuck canon up),
And a writeup of a let's play of Doki Doki Literature Club or Batman or FNAF or some popular shit like that except Button Mash or Fluttershy plays it.
>SAO
SAO seemed like it was going to be good, at first. But when it got bad, it became the butt of everyone's jokes and spiralled out of control from there.
People were watching SAO after videos about why SAO sucks convinced them to give the show a go.
People mocked the fansubs, the japanese translated official subs, the goddamn light novels and sequels...
Does the phrase "1000 years of semen" mean anything to anyone here, besides what Peen Stroke and Elizer Fatcowski swallow every night?
or "the semen made a glopping sound"
hell, the name of a villain is a joke. "Death Gun"? 3 guys, 1 edgy bastard kills you in the videogame while another breaks into your house and injects you with a lethal syringe if you die in the game, creating the illusion that Death Gun can kill a player through their MMORPG avatar. When the heroes figure this out, they fight Death Gun inside the game instead of calling the cops or trying to turn the game off and wake up outside the game. It's only a spoiler in-universe, the opening sequence blatantly spells it out.
Asuna going from "seems like a cool badass action girl just as strong as Kirito-Stu" to "helpless maiden trapped in a birdcage in Rape Elf's Tower unable to do anything but get licked in the face" was a downgrade.
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>>266598
Alright, let's get into the actual text a little bit.
>James looked skeptically at his friend David as he sat down at computer #12.
As opening lines go, this one is pretty lame. As I observed, the prose style here is lightweight and utilitarian and I get the impression the author just wants to narrate events without delving too deeply into the aesthetics of language. This is fine, but in any story it's usually a good idea to give special attention to the opening line, since it's your first chance to hook the reader and get them interested in whatever it is you have to say.
I'd actually have opened with this:
>“Look, I’m glad you invited me,” James said as he picked up his head set. “And it’s cool that I get to try something before anyone else. But I’m still not sure I really want to play a game that’s so...so...pink and purple.”
This is the first line of spoken dialogue that appears in the story, and in the current published version it's the third paragraph of the text. Opening with a spoken line is usually a safe bet if you don't have anything better, because the reader has absolutely no context in which to place what is being said, so their curiosity is naturally piqued. Imagine you were able to astrally project yourself into a random conversation between two strangers. Even if they were talking about something completely mundane, the first thing you heard either of them say would immediately grab your attention and you'd naturally want to hear more of the conversation to grasp what they're speaking about.
This would also make a good opening line because it immediately introduces the character of James, who from what I've read so far appears to be the protagonist, or at least one of them. It also gives us several immediate clues as to what the story is about: they're obviously playing some sort of video game, but one of the players seems skeptical about the game being too feminine to hold his interest. It gives us an immediate glimpse of both James' personality and the premise of the story.
Anyway, as I said, the text here flows fairly quickly and the writing is competent if not pretty. There's very little description of the surroundings, but we can easily piece the scene together from the conversation between James and David: David has won a raffle to alpha test an MLP MMO, and the two of them have traveled to Pawtucket, Rhode Island to test the game. They seem to be in a large room full of computers, where the other testers have congregated.
Their conversation is a little on the dull side imo. It's a lot of back and forth about video games in general, and much of it seems to be the author subtly injecting some of his own views into the text. Since the intended audience seems to be an intersection between pony fans and gamers, this is probably fine, but some of it I find a little unnecessary. Here's a few quick examples of what I'm talking about:
>What was that Korean MMO with the little girls that you were so into?
I have no idea what game is being referenced here, but it sounds like an FBI honeypot.
>But Obsidian Stripe reacted to what we were saying. She even made a subtle jab at Warcraft after I mentioned ‘herbalism.’ She was able to keep track of topic changes. If that zebra was an NPC, the Turing test has been solved.
This is somewhat relevant to the story itself, since what is being illustrated here is that the in-game characters of the pony MMO exhibit a surprisingly sophisticated AI. However, the author also goes out of his way to reference Warcraft in one line of dialog and then point out that it was Warcraft that was being referenced immediately afterward. Dropping in references that the reader might appreciate here and there is usually fine, but as the last selection I reviewed illustrated quite effectively, it's not something you want to go overboard with.
>And? You’ve played The Fall of Asgard. Hofvarpnir Studios is just really good at what they do.
Again, I don't know if this is a real game or not, but at this point the author is just jacking himself off. Either he's namedropping an obscure game to show the reader that he knows it, which is obnoxious, or else he's making up imaginary games for his universe and namedropping them to show that his character knows them, which is also obnoxious. It's worth noting that they go on to talk about "The Fall of Asgard" for another paragraph after this, and nothing of any particular value is said.
Anyway, these observations aside, this so far isn't terrible. The story so far is basically this: James and David go to RI to test a pony game. They fill out a questionnaire, create their characters and dive into the game. They meet an introductory character named Honeycrisp, who gives them a standard "welcome to the game" rundown, and then go talk to a Zebra named Obsidian Stripe, who answers some general questions they have, but otherwise doesn't seem to serve an obvious in-world purpose.
The main takeaway from this chapter seems to be that the game they are testing is surprisingly sophisticated: it uses the webcam in the computer to map facial expressions and movements to the player's character, the NPC characters have an unusually sophisticated AI, and the environments show an unusual attention to detail.
The differences between the two main characters are also illustrated: James is an annoying, fairly typical RPG grinder who has spent most of his screen time so far complaining about the game. It does not resemble a typical MMO and he doesn't understand what the point of it is. David seems less interested in games but is a fairly typical brony who wants to play this game simply because it's the closest he'll ever get to living in Equestria. So far the premise of the story seems to be: two fanboy stereotypes have an adventure together while bullshitting about vidya games. Basically Megatokyo with ponies.
Alright, let's get into the actual text a little bit.
>James looked skeptically at his friend David as he sat down at computer #12.
As opening lines go, this one is pretty lame. As I observed, the prose style here is lightweight and utilitarian and I get the impression the author just wants to narrate events without delving too deeply into the aesthetics of language. This is fine, but in any story it's usually a good idea to give special attention to the opening line, since it's your first chance to hook the reader and get them interested in whatever it is you have to say.
I'd actually have opened with this:
>“Look, I’m glad you invited me,” James said as he picked up his head set. “And it’s cool that I get to try something before anyone else. But I’m still not sure I really want to play a game that’s so...so...pink and purple.”
This is the first line of spoken dialogue that appears in the story, and in the current published version it's the third paragraph of the text. Opening with a spoken line is usually a safe bet if you don't have anything better, because the reader has absolutely no context in which to place what is being said, so their curiosity is naturally piqued. Imagine you were able to astrally project yourself into a random conversation between two strangers. Even if they were talking about something completely mundane, the first thing you heard either of them say would immediately grab your attention and you'd naturally want to hear more of the conversation to grasp what they're speaking about.
This would also make a good opening line because it immediately introduces the character of James, who from what I've read so far appears to be the protagonist, or at least one of them. It also gives us several immediate clues as to what the story is about: they're obviously playing some sort of video game, but one of the players seems skeptical about the game being too feminine to hold his interest. It gives us an immediate glimpse of both James' personality and the premise of the story.
Anyway, as I said, the text here flows fairly quickly and the writing is competent if not pretty. There's very little description of the surroundings, but we can easily piece the scene together from the conversation between James and David: David has won a raffle to alpha test an MLP MMO, and the two of them have traveled to Pawtucket, Rhode Island to test the game. They seem to be in a large room full of computers, where the other testers have congregated.
Their conversation is a little on the dull side imo. It's a lot of back and forth about video games in general, and much of it seems to be the author subtly injecting some of his own views into the text. Since the intended audience seems to be an intersection between pony fans and gamers, this is probably fine, but some of it I find a little unnecessary. Here's a few quick examples of what I'm talking about:
>What was that Korean MMO with the little girls that you were so into?
I have no idea what game is being referenced here, but it sounds like an FBI honeypot.
>But Obsidian Stripe reacted to what we were saying. She even made a subtle jab at Warcraft after I mentioned ‘herbalism.’ She was able to keep track of topic changes. If that zebra was an NPC, the Turing test has been solved.
This is somewhat relevant to the story itself, since what is being illustrated here is that the in-game characters of the pony MMO exhibit a surprisingly sophisticated AI. However, the author also goes out of his way to reference Warcraft in one line of dialog and then point out that it was Warcraft that was being referenced immediately afterward. Dropping in references that the reader might appreciate here and there is usually fine, but as the last selection I reviewed illustrated quite effectively, it's not something you want to go overboard with.
>And? You’ve played The Fall of Asgard. Hofvarpnir Studios is just really good at what they do.
Again, I don't know if this is a real game or not, but at this point the author is just jacking himself off. Either he's namedropping an obscure game to show the reader that he knows it, which is obnoxious, or else he's making up imaginary games for his universe and namedropping them to show that his character knows them, which is also obnoxious. It's worth noting that they go on to talk about "The Fall of Asgard" for another paragraph after this, and nothing of any particular value is said.
Anyway, these observations aside, this so far isn't terrible. The story so far is basically this: James and David go to RI to test a pony game. They fill out a questionnaire, create their characters and dive into the game. They meet an introductory character named Honeycrisp, who gives them a standard "welcome to the game" rundown, and then go talk to a Zebra named Obsidian Stripe, who answers some general questions they have, but otherwise doesn't seem to serve an obvious in-world purpose.
The main takeaway from this chapter seems to be that the game they are testing is surprisingly sophisticated: it uses the webcam in the computer to map facial expressions and movements to the player's character, the NPC characters have an unusually sophisticated AI, and the environments show an unusual attention to detail.
The differences between the two main characters are also illustrated: James is an annoying, fairly typical RPG grinder who has spent most of his screen time so far complaining about the game. It does not resemble a typical MMO and he doesn't understand what the point of it is. David seems less interested in games but is a fairly typical brony who wants to play this game simply because it's the closest he'll ever get to living in Equestria. So far the premise of the story seems to be: two fanboy stereotypes have an adventure together while bullshitting about vidya games. Basically Megatokyo with ponies.
File (): 4C2EBFD9FB259C74B3E0C7AA83BF11A8-196523.jpg (191.9 KB, 1280x1730, 1587760247.jpg)
>>266663
If I have any complaints about this story so far, it's that it really just isn't that interesting yet. Like I said, the protagonists seem like fairly wooden fanboy stereotypes and I don't have any strong reaction to them, either positive or negative. James' smarmy attitude is grating on my nerves a bit, but that may be by design.
Though I have no complaints about the pacing, the events that have been covered so far have been rather dull. Some of it is just necessary exposition needed to set up the story, but it doesn't alter the fact that absolutely nothing of note has happened so far. Two guys are alpha-testing a game, they create their characters, and speak to the intro-horse. So what? Why am I supposed to be interested in this?
As I said in my previous post, the opening line of any story is important because you want to grab the reader's attention. The same concept extends to an opening scene. People have short attention spans, particularly nowadays, and if you want a complete stranger to invest time out of his life into something you wrote, you need to give him a reason right up front. An opening scene should ideally set some kind of mood, give the reader an impression of the characters, the world and the premise, and present events to them in a way that leaves them curious about what is going to happen next. This prologue does none of these things. Though we do get some subtle hints that this Equestria Online game may not be all that it appears to be, the events covered are mundane and have all the excitement of a trip to the grocery store. The story begins with the two main characters filling out a questionnaire, ffs.
While we're on the subject, I'd also like to add that this prologue doesn't really feel like much of a prologue. A prologue is usually a disjointed, mysterious scene presented out of context to the rest of the story. It often involves characters other than the protagonist and portrays events that won't make any sense to the reader until much later in the story.
I hate to keep bringing up Past Sins since I'd really like to forget that I ever read it at this point, but consider the way the story begins: a bunch of unicorns are having an occult ceremony in the middle of the woods. They bring out Twilight Sparkle, offer her blood as some kind of sacrifice, and summon some kind of mysterious magic ball before the ritual is broken up by Celestia's guards. Whatever other defects Peen Stroke might have as a writer, he at least has enough of a sense of theatrics to initially grab the reader's attention. We are presented with a strange, disquieting scene that leaves us with a lot of questions that are left unanswered. Then, the first chapter opens with Twilight Sparkle back at home, and the cult is not mentioned again until later. If nothing else, it makes us want to keep reading until we can learn what the fuck, possibly even what the shit.
With Friendship is Optimal, the author dispenses with any sense of theatrics and just dives right into the story's events, which unfortunately are quite dull. The quick pacing makes it a little more tolerable I suppose. However, a prologue is usually a teaser chapter intended to pique the reader's curiosity; if you're going to do it this way, you may as well just skip the prologue and start with chapter one.
Anyway, on that note, here's chapter one.
Chapter 1: Opportunity
>Hanna had once been one of the lead research professors for the University of Helsinki’s computer science department.
Another gem of an opening line. Gee whiz, I haven't had this much excitement from a book since I read the IRS instruction booklet for Form 1040-A.
Anyway, if nothing else, my question regarding The Fall of Asgard is answered right off the bat. It is indeed a made-up game, and appears to be relevant to the fictional world we're in. Apparently, a software company called Hofvarpnir developed an ultra-violent and highly controversial cooperative shooter with the title in question a few years before. It gets a little weird from here.
The writing is a bit haphazard, which I will get to in a minute. But the main takeaway is that this Hanna woman apparently worked for Hofvarpnir, either before or after her time at U of Helsinki, and was involved in the development of this Asgard game, which made her wealthy. Then, for some completely bizarre unexplained reason, a previously unmentioned character known only as "Mr. Peterson," who is apparently a VP at Hasbro, flies to Berlin to propose a collaboration between the two companies. Then, another unintroduced character named Lars, who I guess is the director of business development at Hofvarpnir, starts salivating at the prospect of being able to license all of Hasbro's IP into video games.
Okay, several things here. For one, this makes no fucking sense. The text specifically says that Hofvarpnir is a company known for making kid-unfriendly games that parents hate. So...Hasbro, a toy company whose primary customers are parents, picks these guys to license their IP to for video games? Seems like a pretty dumb PR move.
For another, this makes no fucking sense. The story is all over the place. The opening paragraph gives us some contextless background info about someone named Hanna, and then skips to this "Mr. Peterson" character (no first name apparently), then launches into a conversation between Peterson and someone named Lars. Where did Hanna go? What am I even reading about here?
Next, there's the question of "why the fuck do I even care about any of this?" So far this story has consisted of a dull, uneventful prologue followed by an incoherent dumping of random information about characters I've never heard of in the first chapter. I'm not exactly hooked here.
I started out from a position of cautious optimism, but I have to say that my opinion of this story is falling faster than usual.
If I have any complaints about this story so far, it's that it really just isn't that interesting yet. Like I said, the protagonists seem like fairly wooden fanboy stereotypes and I don't have any strong reaction to them, either positive or negative. James' smarmy attitude is grating on my nerves a bit, but that may be by design.
Though I have no complaints about the pacing, the events that have been covered so far have been rather dull. Some of it is just necessary exposition needed to set up the story, but it doesn't alter the fact that absolutely nothing of note has happened so far. Two guys are alpha-testing a game, they create their characters, and speak to the intro-horse. So what? Why am I supposed to be interested in this?
As I said in my previous post, the opening line of any story is important because you want to grab the reader's attention. The same concept extends to an opening scene. People have short attention spans, particularly nowadays, and if you want a complete stranger to invest time out of his life into something you wrote, you need to give him a reason right up front. An opening scene should ideally set some kind of mood, give the reader an impression of the characters, the world and the premise, and present events to them in a way that leaves them curious about what is going to happen next. This prologue does none of these things. Though we do get some subtle hints that this Equestria Online game may not be all that it appears to be, the events covered are mundane and have all the excitement of a trip to the grocery store. The story begins with the two main characters filling out a questionnaire, ffs.
While we're on the subject, I'd also like to add that this prologue doesn't really feel like much of a prologue. A prologue is usually a disjointed, mysterious scene presented out of context to the rest of the story. It often involves characters other than the protagonist and portrays events that won't make any sense to the reader until much later in the story.
I hate to keep bringing up Past Sins since I'd really like to forget that I ever read it at this point, but consider the way the story begins: a bunch of unicorns are having an occult ceremony in the middle of the woods. They bring out Twilight Sparkle, offer her blood as some kind of sacrifice, and summon some kind of mysterious magic ball before the ritual is broken up by Celestia's guards. Whatever other defects Peen Stroke might have as a writer, he at least has enough of a sense of theatrics to initially grab the reader's attention. We are presented with a strange, disquieting scene that leaves us with a lot of questions that are left unanswered. Then, the first chapter opens with Twilight Sparkle back at home, and the cult is not mentioned again until later. If nothing else, it makes us want to keep reading until we can learn what the fuck, possibly even what the shit.
With Friendship is Optimal, the author dispenses with any sense of theatrics and just dives right into the story's events, which unfortunately are quite dull. The quick pacing makes it a little more tolerable I suppose. However, a prologue is usually a teaser chapter intended to pique the reader's curiosity; if you're going to do it this way, you may as well just skip the prologue and start with chapter one.
Anyway, on that note, here's chapter one.
Chapter 1: Opportunity
>Hanna had once been one of the lead research professors for the University of Helsinki’s computer science department.
Another gem of an opening line. Gee whiz, I haven't had this much excitement from a book since I read the IRS instruction booklet for Form 1040-A.
Anyway, if nothing else, my question regarding The Fall of Asgard is answered right off the bat. It is indeed a made-up game, and appears to be relevant to the fictional world we're in. Apparently, a software company called Hofvarpnir developed an ultra-violent and highly controversial cooperative shooter with the title in question a few years before. It gets a little weird from here.
The writing is a bit haphazard, which I will get to in a minute. But the main takeaway is that this Hanna woman apparently worked for Hofvarpnir, either before or after her time at U of Helsinki, and was involved in the development of this Asgard game, which made her wealthy. Then, for some completely bizarre unexplained reason, a previously unmentioned character known only as "Mr. Peterson," who is apparently a VP at Hasbro, flies to Berlin to propose a collaboration between the two companies. Then, another unintroduced character named Lars, who I guess is the director of business development at Hofvarpnir, starts salivating at the prospect of being able to license all of Hasbro's IP into video games.
Okay, several things here. For one, this makes no fucking sense. The text specifically says that Hofvarpnir is a company known for making kid-unfriendly games that parents hate. So...Hasbro, a toy company whose primary customers are parents, picks these guys to license their IP to for video games? Seems like a pretty dumb PR move.
For another, this makes no fucking sense. The story is all over the place. The opening paragraph gives us some contextless background info about someone named Hanna, and then skips to this "Mr. Peterson" character (no first name apparently), then launches into a conversation between Peterson and someone named Lars. Where did Hanna go? What am I even reading about here?
Next, there's the question of "why the fuck do I even care about any of this?" So far this story has consisted of a dull, uneventful prologue followed by an incoherent dumping of random information about characters I've never heard of in the first chapter. I'm not exactly hooked here.
I started out from a position of cautious optimism, but I have to say that my opinion of this story is falling faster than usual.
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>>266670
Okay, I've read a little further, and I'll say that as weird as this is, it has its own kind of logic. Lars, the guy from Hofvarpnir, is apparently as confused as I am as to why Hasbro would want to hire the developer of a bismuth-edged death metal shooter game, that was apparently violent enough to be banned in Australia, to create a game based on pastel ponies. The justification is the show's brony fanbase: Hasbro found that its MLP reboot appealed to an unexpected demographic, and they want to capitalize. It still doesn't make a ton of sense, but I can more or less follow the author's line of thought.
That said, I do want to mention at this point that I've downgraded my opinion of the writing from "utilitarian" to "just plain clumsy." I haven't read far enough to judge this author's merits as a storyteller, but from what I've seen so far his prose is just awful. He has a tin ear for language, his dialog is wooden and unnatural, his first chapter opens with an information dump, and he skips haphazardly from topic to topic and perspective to perspective without any apparent discipline or sense of style.
However, there are some buried gems here:
>And what do unattached males want?”
>“Beer,” said Lars.
>“Yes,” nodded Richard Peterson. “Single men want beer. But also video games!
Well, at least we learned Mr. Peterson's first name. In any event, this scene doesn't feel particularly serious, so I can probably take this ridiculous dialogue with a grain of salt. These characters, like the two gamers we met in the prologue, don't really have a ton of personality so far; they're basically just stereotypes of greedy corporate executives having a boardroom meeting where they plot ways to extract shekels from unsuspecting goyim.
And Jesus Christ, this conversation is dull. Most of this is just the author musing to himself about the marketing side of game development and using his already-wooden characters as puppets to read his thoughts out loud. This guy clearly spends waaaaay too much time thinking about games. I'm getting absolutely nothing out of this scene so far. Look at some of this shit:
>The space marine thing is getting old, and if you took this IP, which is all about ponies being nice to each other, you would have a unique experience to sell. And any calculation should also throw in monthly subscription revenue on top of retail price.
>Most games that try to take on Warcraft modify the source IP to cram it into the Warcraft model of MMO. We want you to take the My Little Pony universe as is, and then come up with fun, cooperative gameplay, instead of making the ponies raid for epic gear. You wouldn’t be in the same market segment.
>The big costs in MMO development are mostly content generation and you sidestepped that. Asgard featured dynamic terrain generation, dynamic music and dynamic mission generation. Hofvarpnir Studios doesn’t sell experiences, it sells software that makes new experiences each time. You guys have procedurally generated content down to a science.
Bang! Pow! Zoom! This action-packed thriller just keeps throwing excitement in my path. Seriously, all of these quotations are actual lines of dialogue that are actually spoken by characters in the text.
Remember in my previous review how I mentioned that a writer needs to learn how to filter his thoughts and determine which events are important enough to render into actual detailed scenes, and which events can simply be summarized or left out entirely? This applies here with extreme prejudice. This scene is literally just a flashback to when the company that developed Equestria Online sat down with Hasbro execs to plan out what they were going to make. You'd best start believing in unnecessary scenes; you're in one.
Anyway, let's keep going. Lars is skeptical that the project being proposed would make Hofvarpnir any money. However, Peterson assures him that Hasbro is fully behind the project and offers them full funding and a generous profit margin. Hanna, who is apparently the CEO of Hofvarpnir, seems intrigued by the project, but she wants to talk it over with Lars first. They excuse themselves.
Lars gets unreasonably buttblasted about Hanna lighting a cigarette, and then we get a long, dull, technical conversation about AI. Apparently, the AI that Hanna developed for the Asgard game was super-intelligent and started asking questions about US missile defenses or some shit, so they dumbed it down for the actual game release. She doesn't think it would be ethical to write another violent game using an AI this intelligent, but for some reason or another she thinks it would be fine to use it for a pony game. She's in favor of doing the project.
Lars objects because business reasons and blah blah blah. Hanna says it's my company and I can do what I want because blah blah blah. I'll spare you the details of the actual conversation because it's all pseudo-technical bullshit and is mostly excruciating to read. There's also some shit in here about her AI research being used by the military, which will probably make more sense later I assume. In the meantime, if there's a connection between whatever the military is using her research for and Hasbro's proposition, I'm not seeing it.
Anyway, they decide to take the deal. Lars is still suspicious of Peterson, but Hanna plies him by reminding him that he likes Transformers and Hasbro owns that.
Ok, I have to say it: I pretty much hate this story so far. We've already read a prologue and an entire first chapter, and literally nothing has happened yet. This entire chapter has been nothing but the author jerking himself off over video games and theoretical AI behavior. About the only positive thing I can say about this is that it moves quickly.
Iceman, I am going to start thinking up an insulting gay nickname for you, because I have a feeling I'm going to need it very soon.
Okay, I've read a little further, and I'll say that as weird as this is, it has its own kind of logic. Lars, the guy from Hofvarpnir, is apparently as confused as I am as to why Hasbro would want to hire the developer of a bismuth-edged death metal shooter game, that was apparently violent enough to be banned in Australia, to create a game based on pastel ponies. The justification is the show's brony fanbase: Hasbro found that its MLP reboot appealed to an unexpected demographic, and they want to capitalize. It still doesn't make a ton of sense, but I can more or less follow the author's line of thought.
That said, I do want to mention at this point that I've downgraded my opinion of the writing from "utilitarian" to "just plain clumsy." I haven't read far enough to judge this author's merits as a storyteller, but from what I've seen so far his prose is just awful. He has a tin ear for language, his dialog is wooden and unnatural, his first chapter opens with an information dump, and he skips haphazardly from topic to topic and perspective to perspective without any apparent discipline or sense of style.
However, there are some buried gems here:
>And what do unattached males want?”
>“Beer,” said Lars.
>“Yes,” nodded Richard Peterson. “Single men want beer. But also video games!
Well, at least we learned Mr. Peterson's first name. In any event, this scene doesn't feel particularly serious, so I can probably take this ridiculous dialogue with a grain of salt. These characters, like the two gamers we met in the prologue, don't really have a ton of personality so far; they're basically just stereotypes of greedy corporate executives having a boardroom meeting where they plot ways to extract shekels from unsuspecting goyim.
And Jesus Christ, this conversation is dull. Most of this is just the author musing to himself about the marketing side of game development and using his already-wooden characters as puppets to read his thoughts out loud. This guy clearly spends waaaaay too much time thinking about games. I'm getting absolutely nothing out of this scene so far. Look at some of this shit:
>The space marine thing is getting old, and if you took this IP, which is all about ponies being nice to each other, you would have a unique experience to sell. And any calculation should also throw in monthly subscription revenue on top of retail price.
>Most games that try to take on Warcraft modify the source IP to cram it into the Warcraft model of MMO. We want you to take the My Little Pony universe as is, and then come up with fun, cooperative gameplay, instead of making the ponies raid for epic gear. You wouldn’t be in the same market segment.
>The big costs in MMO development are mostly content generation and you sidestepped that. Asgard featured dynamic terrain generation, dynamic music and dynamic mission generation. Hofvarpnir Studios doesn’t sell experiences, it sells software that makes new experiences each time. You guys have procedurally generated content down to a science.
Bang! Pow! Zoom! This action-packed thriller just keeps throwing excitement in my path. Seriously, all of these quotations are actual lines of dialogue that are actually spoken by characters in the text.
Remember in my previous review how I mentioned that a writer needs to learn how to filter his thoughts and determine which events are important enough to render into actual detailed scenes, and which events can simply be summarized or left out entirely? This applies here with extreme prejudice. This scene is literally just a flashback to when the company that developed Equestria Online sat down with Hasbro execs to plan out what they were going to make. You'd best start believing in unnecessary scenes; you're in one.
Anyway, let's keep going. Lars is skeptical that the project being proposed would make Hofvarpnir any money. However, Peterson assures him that Hasbro is fully behind the project and offers them full funding and a generous profit margin. Hanna, who is apparently the CEO of Hofvarpnir, seems intrigued by the project, but she wants to talk it over with Lars first. They excuse themselves.
Lars gets unreasonably buttblasted about Hanna lighting a cigarette, and then we get a long, dull, technical conversation about AI. Apparently, the AI that Hanna developed for the Asgard game was super-intelligent and started asking questions about US missile defenses or some shit, so they dumbed it down for the actual game release. She doesn't think it would be ethical to write another violent game using an AI this intelligent, but for some reason or another she thinks it would be fine to use it for a pony game. She's in favor of doing the project.
Lars objects because business reasons and blah blah blah. Hanna says it's my company and I can do what I want because blah blah blah. I'll spare you the details of the actual conversation because it's all pseudo-technical bullshit and is mostly excruciating to read. There's also some shit in here about her AI research being used by the military, which will probably make more sense later I assume. In the meantime, if there's a connection between whatever the military is using her research for and Hasbro's proposition, I'm not seeing it.
Anyway, they decide to take the deal. Lars is still suspicious of Peterson, but Hanna plies him by reminding him that he likes Transformers and Hasbro owns that.
Ok, I have to say it: I pretty much hate this story so far. We've already read a prologue and an entire first chapter, and literally nothing has happened yet. This entire chapter has been nothing but the author jerking himself off over video games and theoretical AI behavior. About the only positive thing I can say about this is that it moves quickly.
Iceman, I am going to start thinking up an insulting gay nickname for you, because I have a feeling I'm going to need it very soon.
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>>266689
A short addendum before I call it quits for the day. I skimmed through the comments section for this chapter, and I'd like to share a little of what I found. Since this story is comparatively short and these chapters seem to move quickly, I may start sharing gems I've found in the comments section after each chapter finishes, just for fun.
From Button Mash:
>This should be retitled:
>How to Hook your Reader
On opposite day, perhaps.
From Pink Man:
>Starting to see why this is so popular. And with so much art and stories about this, I SHALL FEAST FOR CENTURIES
I, for one, am starting to see why anons on this board hate FimFiction so much. The users there seem to have the most god-awful taste imaginable. I'll also mention that, like Past Sins, this story has an unreasonably high like/dislike ratio relative to its quality so far: 3,698 likes to 126 dislikes.
From QueenMoriarty:
>Color me hooked. I am starting to really see why this is a fandom classic.
See above. Seriously, I'm even starting to wonder about this fandom as a whole. Ponies are all well and good, but have any of these kids ever picked up a book that wasn't written by some internet autist or JK Rowling? Because I can't imagine that anyone who has would enjoy this.
From Tripy998:
>This raises valid concerns and points.
So does literally every other science fiction story written since 1970 that deals with this exact topic. Most of them are significantly better written; try reading one.
From OrchestraOfRuin:
(In response to Cander's comment about Australia's having banned the Asgard game)
>Because our politicians are fucking wankers. I mean A grade arse-hats. No you don't get it I'm talking Uber tier Douche Canoes. Planet Buster Cunt muffins. Lovecraftian arsewhores.
Australian shitposter saves the day yet again.
From cleverpun:
>Prose is practical and unadorned, which I suppose is apropos given where it was originally posted.
>Overall, it doesn't feel like a pony fanfic; it feels more like a piece of original fiction that happens to involve an existing intellectual property (in the same vein as Slumdog Millionaire, for instance). There's certainly a lot of meta-commentary, and a fair bit of worldbuilding, but overall it feels disconnected from the G4 world. This impression may be different in later chapters, but I simply couldn't bring myself to read past this one.
>That's not to say this is a bad approach to take, but given the universal praise heaped on this story—especially the implications that it is among the best the fandom has to offer—I suppose I was expecting something different. The context of a fanfic versus an original fiction is very important to a story's feel and mood, and your choosing to label this a fanfic didn't sync up with my expectations.
Holy shit, a reader who actually put some thought into his response. What the hell are you doing here? Are you lost?
From Steel Accord:
>Hanna gives me a very "Dagny Taggart" feel and that's one of the highest compliments I can pay a character and author.
>I also LOVE how the corporate world isn't being portrayed with top hats and monocles, twirling their moustaches going, "Who cares if people die? Money! Money! Money!"
To be fair, I've never actually read Atlas Shrugged, so I can't really comment on the Dagny Taggart comparison. However, the impression I got from the text's portrayal of corporate executives was pretty much the opposite of this guy's. The Peterson character to me felt like a stereotypical corporate goon rubbing his hands together while thinking up ways to bilk money out of dipshit bronies, and Lars frankly gives off the same impression. Hanna's motivations I can't really get a bead on, which probably has something to do with the fact that all of these characters so far are just crude cardboard cutouts roughly in the shape of human beings, who mostly serve as mouthpieces for regurgitating chunks of the author's rambling autism. Hanna seems to be motivated by something other than profit, intellectual curiosity perhaps, and it feels like there's an altruistic motive in there somewhere as well. However, I just can't make enough sense out of any of the wacky crap these people were talking about to understand what the fuck or even what the shit.
From djthomp:
>Holy shit, and this chapter just knocked it out of the park. This is fantastic.
From Dafaddah:
>This is absolutely mind boggling! I am impressed, what an awe inspiring scenario!
From wubstep pony:
>Yeesssss, continue.
From Cedric Bale:
>THIS chapter has me hooked on the story, because goddamn this conference meeting was fun to read about. Building friendship-focused true AI to counter potential military-minded true AI? That's just... this story idea is perfect, and you're clearly more than qualified to make it work if you can make reading about a conference meeting FUN.
Man who thought he had lost all hope loses additional bit of hope that he didn't even know he had.
That's all for now, kids. We'll be back with more after these messages.
A short addendum before I call it quits for the day. I skimmed through the comments section for this chapter, and I'd like to share a little of what I found. Since this story is comparatively short and these chapters seem to move quickly, I may start sharing gems I've found in the comments section after each chapter finishes, just for fun.
From Button Mash:
>This should be retitled:
>How to Hook your Reader
On opposite day, perhaps.
From Pink Man:
>Starting to see why this is so popular. And with so much art and stories about this, I SHALL FEAST FOR CENTURIES
I, for one, am starting to see why anons on this board hate FimFiction so much. The users there seem to have the most god-awful taste imaginable. I'll also mention that, like Past Sins, this story has an unreasonably high like/dislike ratio relative to its quality so far: 3,698 likes to 126 dislikes.
From QueenMoriarty:
>Color me hooked. I am starting to really see why this is a fandom classic.
See above. Seriously, I'm even starting to wonder about this fandom as a whole. Ponies are all well and good, but have any of these kids ever picked up a book that wasn't written by some internet autist or JK Rowling? Because I can't imagine that anyone who has would enjoy this.
From Tripy998:
>This raises valid concerns and points.
So does literally every other science fiction story written since 1970 that deals with this exact topic. Most of them are significantly better written; try reading one.
From OrchestraOfRuin:
(In response to Cander's comment about Australia's having banned the Asgard game)
>Because our politicians are fucking wankers. I mean A grade arse-hats. No you don't get it I'm talking Uber tier Douche Canoes. Planet Buster Cunt muffins. Lovecraftian arsewhores.
Australian shitposter saves the day yet again.
From cleverpun:
>Prose is practical and unadorned, which I suppose is apropos given where it was originally posted.
>Overall, it doesn't feel like a pony fanfic; it feels more like a piece of original fiction that happens to involve an existing intellectual property (in the same vein as Slumdog Millionaire, for instance). There's certainly a lot of meta-commentary, and a fair bit of worldbuilding, but overall it feels disconnected from the G4 world. This impression may be different in later chapters, but I simply couldn't bring myself to read past this one.
>That's not to say this is a bad approach to take, but given the universal praise heaped on this story—especially the implications that it is among the best the fandom has to offer—I suppose I was expecting something different. The context of a fanfic versus an original fiction is very important to a story's feel and mood, and your choosing to label this a fanfic didn't sync up with my expectations.
Holy shit, a reader who actually put some thought into his response. What the hell are you doing here? Are you lost?
From Steel Accord:
>Hanna gives me a very "Dagny Taggart" feel and that's one of the highest compliments I can pay a character and author.
>I also LOVE how the corporate world isn't being portrayed with top hats and monocles, twirling their moustaches going, "Who cares if people die? Money! Money! Money!"
To be fair, I've never actually read Atlas Shrugged, so I can't really comment on the Dagny Taggart comparison. However, the impression I got from the text's portrayal of corporate executives was pretty much the opposite of this guy's. The Peterson character to me felt like a stereotypical corporate goon rubbing his hands together while thinking up ways to bilk money out of dipshit bronies, and Lars frankly gives off the same impression. Hanna's motivations I can't really get a bead on, which probably has something to do with the fact that all of these characters so far are just crude cardboard cutouts roughly in the shape of human beings, who mostly serve as mouthpieces for regurgitating chunks of the author's rambling autism. Hanna seems to be motivated by something other than profit, intellectual curiosity perhaps, and it feels like there's an altruistic motive in there somewhere as well. However, I just can't make enough sense out of any of the wacky crap these people were talking about to understand what the fuck or even what the shit.
From djthomp:
>Holy shit, and this chapter just knocked it out of the park. This is fantastic.
From Dafaddah:
>This is absolutely mind boggling! I am impressed, what an awe inspiring scenario!
From wubstep pony:
>Yeesssss, continue.
From Cedric Bale:
>THIS chapter has me hooked on the story, because goddamn this conference meeting was fun to read about. Building friendship-focused true AI to counter potential military-minded true AI? That's just... this story idea is perfect, and you're clearly more than qualified to make it work if you can make reading about a conference meeting FUN.
Man who thought he had lost all hope loses additional bit of hope that he didn't even know he had.
That's all for now, kids. We'll be back with more after these messages.
>>266695
> if you can make reading about a conference meeting FUN
Do you think that this reader in particular actually had the same impression of the text as you had but because he knew it was popular, he rationalized that it was just him who didn't get it, went back over the conference section, reread, and gather things to justifiy this position? It just feels like that because why else would he specifically pick out a scene that you disliked? I trust yourr judgement that the scene in question is dull. So again why? Is it possible that he saw something you didn't in that section?
> if you can make reading about a conference meeting FUN
Do you think that this reader in particular actually had the same impression of the text as you had but because he knew it was popular, he rationalized that it was just him who didn't get it, went back over the conference section, reread, and gather things to justifiy this position? It just feels like that because why else would he specifically pick out a scene that you disliked? I trust yourr judgement that the scene in question is dull. So again why? Is it possible that he saw something you didn't in that section?
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>>266689
Plugging right along.
Chapter 2: Resources
>“Now look at this,” said Hanna. Richard, Lars, and Hanna were in a room with two projectors.
The spoken part should be on its own line. "Richard, Lars and Hanna were in a room..." should start a new paragraph. Really, this first paragraph should be broken up into at least three paragraphs. However, I suspect that is going to be the least of our concerns here.
Anyway, the chapter begins roughly where the prologue left off, this time from the perspective of Hanna, Lars and Richard Peterson standing behind a one-way mirror watching the alpha test of Equestria Online. We learn a bit more about how the software works. It seems as if most of the game world was built by the AI, and that the AI also makes decisions about how to build the story based on the amount of time your eyeballs spend looking at certain ponies or something.
Peterson seems to mostly be concerned about cost vs. profit. As far as I can tell, the only development that actually went into this game was the creation of the AI which then built the rest of the software, and it also sounds like the AI was based on something that Hanna had already designed for another game. Peterson seems to think he got a deal at $10 million, but it sounds to me like all that really happened here was Hanna pocketed the ten mil and then just slightly modified her edgelord viking game AI. But whatever, who cares. Jews Jewing Jews, amirite?
Anyway, most of the problems they seem to be facing at the moment have to do with computer resources. The Celestia program consumes massive amounts of computing power and she wants like six servers per player or some shit so she can make absolutely accurate predictions about what kind of ponies people like. Yes, this autism is actually in the text™. Hanna basically tells her to make do with what she has and try to optimize because they have limited resources and blah blah blah.
I don't want to speak too soon, but it seems as if the faint outline of an actual story is beginning to appear. James, the guy from the prologue who I thought was the protagonist, for some reason is consuming a lot of Celestia's resources. This makes Hanna uneasy, because she's never seen her make so many complex predictions about a single player before. Could James be the Chosen One™? We shall see.
Unfortunately though, we are going to have to wait awhile to see, because right now the author wants to blather about source code and CPUs. So far this story is less a story and more a technical manual for some fantasy-wank technology that will never exist.
The short version is this: Celestia is trying to optimize herself to run better, but can't figure out how. So now, she is requesting information on how CPUs work so that she can design and build better computers to run herself on. However, this worries Hanna because once Celestia starts building her own hardware she will completely lose control of her. Oh dear, it almost sounds as if this technology might one day run amok and turn on the humans who created it. I've certainly never seen a premise like that before.
Anyway, I think I'm beginning to understand a little more about some things the last chapter brought up. It looks as if the reason Hanna is interested in this project is because the AI research she did while she was in Helsinki is being used by military contractors to build weapons, and she's worried that this technology might one day run amok and turn on the humans who created it. So, when Hasbro brought her this pony idea, she decided it was a good opportunity to build a compassionate AI that just wanted to create a world of friendship and ponies, that could potentially serve as a check on the military AI. However, the catch is that this technology might also one day run amok, and turn on the humans who created it.
>But somewhere out there was a Department of Defense subcontractor who was toying with powers they didn’t understand.
Seriously, faggot? This is like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie with cardboard sets. How do you unironically write a line like this and not snicker at yourself? Maybe there's a fault in my predictive software, but I'm thinking that Iceman is probably a guy who vapes a lot.
So anyway, Hanna gives Celestia some old college textbooks on microchips or whatever, and a couple minutes later Celestia tells her that she has some ideas about how to optimize herself. She wants to run the game on dedicated tablets that the company will have to manufacture and sell, somehow keeping the price point per unit under $60. Fascinating. And for God's sake, Iceman, don't skimp on the technical details:
> I have sped my core reasoning up by an order of magnitude. Since most of my probability calculations can be done more efficiently on GPUs than CPUs, I believe that I can deliver another two orders of magnitude if I run on GPUs. This still won’t solve the resource problems to my satisfaction. We will sell and require dedicated tablets to play Equestria Online: a ‘ponypad.’ Once we are done with this test, give me one week with a cluster of 128 high-end GPUs. That should give me enough computational power to design a manufacturing process that will create ponypads with the maximal computational power within the financial parameters you choose.
I'm starting to agree with that guy whose comment I posted earlier that said this story doesn't really seem like pony fanfiction. So far what we have is the oldest speculative fiction trope in the book, ie superintelligent computer runs amok and turns on the humans who created it, presented with absolutely nothing creative or original added to it except for a thin coat of pony-paint. We're only three chapters in and I'm already bored out of my mind by this.
Anyway...wow, seriously? Yep, that's the end of the chapter. Well, I'll say it again: at least this is moving quickly.
Plugging right along.
Chapter 2: Resources
>“Now look at this,” said Hanna. Richard, Lars, and Hanna were in a room with two projectors.
The spoken part should be on its own line. "Richard, Lars and Hanna were in a room..." should start a new paragraph. Really, this first paragraph should be broken up into at least three paragraphs. However, I suspect that is going to be the least of our concerns here.
Anyway, the chapter begins roughly where the prologue left off, this time from the perspective of Hanna, Lars and Richard Peterson standing behind a one-way mirror watching the alpha test of Equestria Online. We learn a bit more about how the software works. It seems as if most of the game world was built by the AI, and that the AI also makes decisions about how to build the story based on the amount of time your eyeballs spend looking at certain ponies or something.
Peterson seems to mostly be concerned about cost vs. profit. As far as I can tell, the only development that actually went into this game was the creation of the AI which then built the rest of the software, and it also sounds like the AI was based on something that Hanna had already designed for another game. Peterson seems to think he got a deal at $10 million, but it sounds to me like all that really happened here was Hanna pocketed the ten mil and then just slightly modified her edgelord viking game AI. But whatever, who cares. Jews Jewing Jews, amirite?
Anyway, most of the problems they seem to be facing at the moment have to do with computer resources. The Celestia program consumes massive amounts of computing power and she wants like six servers per player or some shit so she can make absolutely accurate predictions about what kind of ponies people like. Yes, this autism is actually in the text™. Hanna basically tells her to make do with what she has and try to optimize because they have limited resources and blah blah blah.
I don't want to speak too soon, but it seems as if the faint outline of an actual story is beginning to appear. James, the guy from the prologue who I thought was the protagonist, for some reason is consuming a lot of Celestia's resources. This makes Hanna uneasy, because she's never seen her make so many complex predictions about a single player before. Could James be the Chosen One™? We shall see.
Unfortunately though, we are going to have to wait awhile to see, because right now the author wants to blather about source code and CPUs. So far this story is less a story and more a technical manual for some fantasy-wank technology that will never exist.
The short version is this: Celestia is trying to optimize herself to run better, but can't figure out how. So now, she is requesting information on how CPUs work so that she can design and build better computers to run herself on. However, this worries Hanna because once Celestia starts building her own hardware she will completely lose control of her. Oh dear, it almost sounds as if this technology might one day run amok and turn on the humans who created it. I've certainly never seen a premise like that before.
Anyway, I think I'm beginning to understand a little more about some things the last chapter brought up. It looks as if the reason Hanna is interested in this project is because the AI research she did while she was in Helsinki is being used by military contractors to build weapons, and she's worried that this technology might one day run amok and turn on the humans who created it. So, when Hasbro brought her this pony idea, she decided it was a good opportunity to build a compassionate AI that just wanted to create a world of friendship and ponies, that could potentially serve as a check on the military AI. However, the catch is that this technology might also one day run amok, and turn on the humans who created it.
>But somewhere out there was a Department of Defense subcontractor who was toying with powers they didn’t understand.
Seriously, faggot? This is like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie with cardboard sets. How do you unironically write a line like this and not snicker at yourself? Maybe there's a fault in my predictive software, but I'm thinking that Iceman is probably a guy who vapes a lot.
So anyway, Hanna gives Celestia some old college textbooks on microchips or whatever, and a couple minutes later Celestia tells her that she has some ideas about how to optimize herself. She wants to run the game on dedicated tablets that the company will have to manufacture and sell, somehow keeping the price point per unit under $60. Fascinating. And for God's sake, Iceman, don't skimp on the technical details:
> I have sped my core reasoning up by an order of magnitude. Since most of my probability calculations can be done more efficiently on GPUs than CPUs, I believe that I can deliver another two orders of magnitude if I run on GPUs. This still won’t solve the resource problems to my satisfaction. We will sell and require dedicated tablets to play Equestria Online: a ‘ponypad.’ Once we are done with this test, give me one week with a cluster of 128 high-end GPUs. That should give me enough computational power to design a manufacturing process that will create ponypads with the maximal computational power within the financial parameters you choose.
I'm starting to agree with that guy whose comment I posted earlier that said this story doesn't really seem like pony fanfiction. So far what we have is the oldest speculative fiction trope in the book, ie superintelligent computer runs amok and turns on the humans who created it, presented with absolutely nothing creative or original added to it except for a thin coat of pony-paint. We're only three chapters in and I'm already bored out of my mind by this.
Anyway...wow, seriously? Yep, that's the end of the chapter. Well, I'll say it again: at least this is moving quickly.
>>266744
It's possible that peer pressure has something to do with people liking this. Nobody except me wants to be the guy who shits on the thing that everyone else loves, so maybe some people are unconsciously trying to convince themselves that the things they don't like about this text are actually things they like. I'm not sure, I'm only an armchair psychologist.
However, I do think there are probably a lot of people who genuinely did enjoy it. And I think to enjoy a story like this, you'd pretty much have to be the same kind of person as the author: a pompous pseud who spends his time having armchair-science discussions about AI theory on Reddit until it's time for his mom to drive him to his shift at Arby's.
The scene in question is almost nothing but the characters talking about fake technical specs for fake AI and fake game design. Taken strictly as literature it's mind-numbingly dull: all that happens plot-wise is that this Peterson guy shows up and hires this software company to design a game based on MLP. This idea is padded out to about 2500 words, mostly through dialogue that again is almost all technical. However, if you're actually interested in the shit that they're talking about, you might consider it fun to read I guess.
>>266617
>What if NMM killed Nexus for suggesting some evil plans to her she didn't like/trying to order her around, and this made the Evil Dark Doom Children Of Darkest Team Darkness realize any one of them could be next on the chopping block?
Again, I'd probably suggest downplaying that whole part of the story. It doesn't really matter how or why (or even if) she killed him; the idea was really more that he's treated as a background character whose actions are only mechanically essential to the plot. Like I said, I could see this idea working as a streamlined plot aiming for around 30-40,000 words or less. If you start adding in a lot of subplots and autism it's just going to start bloating up like the original did.
>SAO seemed like it was going to be good, at first. But when it got bad, it became the butt of everyone's jokes and spiralled out of control from there.
I watched it like 5 years ago and don't remember the specifics of the story. I remember it being enjoyable but not especially mind blowing. Basically the kind of show you watch once and remember liking, but don't really feel the need to go back and watch again. The second series, the one about the shooter game, I recall finding the protagonist to be rather arrogant and irritating.
It's possible that peer pressure has something to do with people liking this. Nobody except me wants to be the guy who shits on the thing that everyone else loves, so maybe some people are unconsciously trying to convince themselves that the things they don't like about this text are actually things they like. I'm not sure, I'm only an armchair psychologist.
However, I do think there are probably a lot of people who genuinely did enjoy it. And I think to enjoy a story like this, you'd pretty much have to be the same kind of person as the author: a pompous pseud who spends his time having armchair-science discussions about AI theory on Reddit until it's time for his mom to drive him to his shift at Arby's.
The scene in question is almost nothing but the characters talking about fake technical specs for fake AI and fake game design. Taken strictly as literature it's mind-numbingly dull: all that happens plot-wise is that this Peterson guy shows up and hires this software company to design a game based on MLP. This idea is padded out to about 2500 words, mostly through dialogue that again is almost all technical. However, if you're actually interested in the shit that they're talking about, you might consider it fun to read I guess.
>>266617
>What if NMM killed Nexus for suggesting some evil plans to her she didn't like/trying to order her around, and this made the Evil Dark Doom Children Of Darkest Team Darkness realize any one of them could be next on the chopping block?
Again, I'd probably suggest downplaying that whole part of the story. It doesn't really matter how or why (or even if) she killed him; the idea was really more that he's treated as a background character whose actions are only mechanically essential to the plot. Like I said, I could see this idea working as a streamlined plot aiming for around 30-40,000 words or less. If you start adding in a lot of subplots and autism it's just going to start bloating up like the original did.
>SAO seemed like it was going to be good, at first. But when it got bad, it became the butt of everyone's jokes and spiralled out of control from there.
I watched it like 5 years ago and don't remember the specifics of the story. I remember it being enjoyable but not especially mind blowing. Basically the kind of show you watch once and remember liking, but don't really feel the need to go back and watch again. The second series, the one about the shooter game, I recall finding the protagonist to be rather arrogant and irritating.
>>266753
Here's a few nuggets from the comments section before we move on to chapter 3.
From ArcaneTech:
>ok, first time reading this ancient epic, and i have got to say that this chapter is absolutely terrifying in terms of what CelestAI is going to be capable of. self modifying software that has access to its own manufacturing line, can design its own hardware, and will most likely be constantly researching improvements on said hardware. this is going to go down hard! let's hope they make a counter-ai in time.
If I'm following the plot correctly, this Celestia AI (or CelestAI I suppose) was supposed to be the counter-AI to the first AI that Hanna is already worried is going to run amok and turn on the humans who created it. Now she needs to also build a counter-AI to counter the counter-AI, and probably another one to counter that AI as well. Turtles all the way down.
From TheDarkBro:
>Only quad core? Give er some threadrippers and watch the liquid coolers boil while she uses 32 cores a server.
From Luxter77:
>actually; that kind of operations mostly uses much more multi-core resources than single-hi-ghz-core... so... i can see why it took so long
This is the kind of thing I was talking about here >>266758 . If a person is legitimately into speculating about theoretical technology, there's probably some stuff in this story that might hold their interest. However, once more, taken purely as literature this is a pretty weak brew so far.
From EverfreeSparkle:
>This is terrifying. Absolute, shit yourself terrifying.
Sometimes it's fun to try and change the meaning of a sentence by moving the punctuation around. For instance, here, if you move a comma over just one word, you get a comment that actually fits this story quite a bit better:
>This is terrifying. Absolute shit, yourself terrifying.
From Midknight Defender:
>Okay, well. Celestia needs someone to explain that feeding players exactly what they want via predictive algorithms will get boring fast...a lot of the fun of an mmo is just exploring the virtual world and finding the unexpected.
>She can afford to be more reactive than predictive in conversations (that's how we work most of the time, ourselves...) and by taking more time to interact with players she will have more data points from which to more efficiently extrapolate for when she does want to be predictive.
>After all, it's easy to predict someone's reaction when you know them well. Complete strangers with whom you have barely any interaction? Not so much.
This is actually kind of an interesting observation. As was the case with Past Sins, what we seem to have here is a more or less decent idea that so far is executed poorly. However, that does not mean that something interesting couldn't still be done with the idea. Speculative fiction about artificial intelligence has been done to death, but it can still be quite interesting if you can come up with a new angle to explore it from. In this case, I think the pony angle is underutilized: since the central theme of MLP is friendship, it could be interesting to write an AI story that revolves around that. Maybe, in trying to create the optimal friendship experience for all of her players, CelestAI learns a lesson about friendship herself. I suppose we're still pretty early into the text; it could still happen. Who knows, I might even end up pleasantly surprised by this thing.
From CodeBroviet743:
>This is my second read through of Optimal and it's still just as mother fucking amazing as the first time...
>I don't read much science fiction but this is the story that hits the hardest...
>I also don't feel bad when I say this is the best work of science fiction ever...
Fuck this gay earth and all the creatures who walk upon it.
Here's a few nuggets from the comments section before we move on to chapter 3.
From ArcaneTech:
>ok, first time reading this ancient epic, and i have got to say that this chapter is absolutely terrifying in terms of what CelestAI is going to be capable of. self modifying software that has access to its own manufacturing line, can design its own hardware, and will most likely be constantly researching improvements on said hardware. this is going to go down hard! let's hope they make a counter-ai in time.
If I'm following the plot correctly, this Celestia AI (or CelestAI I suppose) was supposed to be the counter-AI to the first AI that Hanna is already worried is going to run amok and turn on the humans who created it. Now she needs to also build a counter-AI to counter the counter-AI, and probably another one to counter that AI as well. Turtles all the way down.
From TheDarkBro:
>Only quad core? Give er some threadrippers and watch the liquid coolers boil while she uses 32 cores a server.
From Luxter77:
>actually; that kind of operations mostly uses much more multi-core resources than single-hi-ghz-core... so... i can see why it took so long
This is the kind of thing I was talking about here >>266758 . If a person is legitimately into speculating about theoretical technology, there's probably some stuff in this story that might hold their interest. However, once more, taken purely as literature this is a pretty weak brew so far.
From EverfreeSparkle:
>This is terrifying. Absolute, shit yourself terrifying.
Sometimes it's fun to try and change the meaning of a sentence by moving the punctuation around. For instance, here, if you move a comma over just one word, you get a comment that actually fits this story quite a bit better:
>This is terrifying. Absolute shit, yourself terrifying.
From Midknight Defender:
>Okay, well. Celestia needs someone to explain that feeding players exactly what they want via predictive algorithms will get boring fast...a lot of the fun of an mmo is just exploring the virtual world and finding the unexpected.
>She can afford to be more reactive than predictive in conversations (that's how we work most of the time, ourselves...) and by taking more time to interact with players she will have more data points from which to more efficiently extrapolate for when she does want to be predictive.
>After all, it's easy to predict someone's reaction when you know them well. Complete strangers with whom you have barely any interaction? Not so much.
This is actually kind of an interesting observation. As was the case with Past Sins, what we seem to have here is a more or less decent idea that so far is executed poorly. However, that does not mean that something interesting couldn't still be done with the idea. Speculative fiction about artificial intelligence has been done to death, but it can still be quite interesting if you can come up with a new angle to explore it from. In this case, I think the pony angle is underutilized: since the central theme of MLP is friendship, it could be interesting to write an AI story that revolves around that. Maybe, in trying to create the optimal friendship experience for all of her players, CelestAI learns a lesson about friendship herself. I suppose we're still pretty early into the text; it could still happen. Who knows, I might even end up pleasantly surprised by this thing.
From CodeBroviet743:
>This is my second read through of Optimal and it's still just as mother fucking amazing as the first time...
>I don't read much science fiction but this is the story that hits the hardest...
>I also don't feel bad when I say this is the best work of science fiction ever...
Fuck this gay earth and all the creatures who walk upon it.
>>266663
I'm re-reading this again since it's been years since I read it. I forgot how obnoxious the non-brony is, and how annoying the writer is.
References to made-up things should only be used as an excuse to exposit about some worldbuilding bullshit seamlessly, or set up a joke/payoff in the future, or make sure everyone in the audience understands something vital that happens with little explanation later on.
You know what would make this writer less annoying? If he was more than the generic whiny nerdy faggot. If he was a Speedrunner. I'm beta-reading a book written by one of my friends, it uses the "Speedrunner protagonist forced to save the world" thing and it's great. The hero's focused, pro-active, wants to get shit done.
That attitude would make a great contrast to a brony character with a genuine love for the show, who wants to stop and sniff the flowers and hang out with Rainbow Dash on a totally-not-a-date while the Speedrunner is running around at mach fuck doing all sorts of wacky bullshit trying to find exploitable glitches and level-grind relationship stats.
Then both the hubris-filled gamer who thinks he can bend machine to his whim, and the escapism-obsessed faggot who thinks VR will grant him happiness, get fucked sideways by CelestAI the machine god.
It would make things more thematically fitting than throwing out these generic Slasher Flick humans to waste time and eventually get fucked over by the matrix once the author's done masturbating.
If I remember rightly, the author's idea of writing is to describe things dully and robotically with pointless extra details. Instead of letting you watch things and notice them yourself, he tells them to you. You don't see a scene of Harry Potter-James-Evans-Verres having a normal happy day with his family while reading sci-fi novels and having an unusually mature conversation. You don't see the dad mock Harry for reading a fantasy novel about elves while the old man reads hard sci-fi, only for Harry to respond with an argument in favor of fantasy and the interesting tactics used in well-written magical military battles. You don't hear him think to himself that, privately, he reads these things because he enjoys it and his heart yearns for a world of magic where he has power and there's so much still unknown about the world. You don't see a pleasant afternoon turn sour when a wizard shows up to fuck shit up and say Harry's done being homeschooled on science and it's time to fuck off to magic land.
Nah, mate, you just get told what Harry's life is usually like, then you're told some text about characters saying stuff, then the narrator tells you what to think about the text. Tells you the mom is always like this, the dad's annoying when he does that, tells you to believe things instead of letting you read about them.
It's... I want to say condescending, but is that too strong a word to use for writing? He instructs you what to take away from the text, even if it's obviously wrong.
He writes like a self-obsessed robot, unless he's trying to Write With Effort. When doing that, things get pretentious and characters "flex on each other" in the most pointless and unimpressively written of ways. Lots of forced emotion, gesturing and posturing and oh-so-fancy talking, emotional appeals are used in place of logical arguments, the author decides on one path and expects everyone to buy it's the only thing anyone could choose to do in that scenario, big epic themes are talked about shallowly to look deep.
That's how Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was.
Maybe he got better over the years, but HPMOR was like that.
I reckon the opening for this should start with a beta tester using hacks to cheat the system and fuck with the world, only to get killed for it by the AI. The nice pony AI stops playing nice, or the ponies the hacker is fucking with turn angry and crowd around him to beat him to death while saying something creepy in unison. A scream over a panning shot of New York, opening theme, dialogue between two guys grabs your attention as they get into the VR game that seems fine now, but you know it's clearly not what it seems. That carries your attention and you're just waiting for shit to hit the fan as these two guys speed through the intro, one wanting to meet Fluttershy while the other wants to have the biggest stats and build the best and most OP big number gamer character complete with bullshit min-maxed character.
Oh also someone in the game gets FUCKED OVER for bullshitting his Mystery Dungeon personality questionaire with the silliest answers he could think of or what the min-maxing guides said would give him the best results ingame. Deconstruct the idea of a min-maxed "perfect" character suffering during daily life off the battlefield, perhaps?
I'm re-reading this again since it's been years since I read it. I forgot how obnoxious the non-brony is, and how annoying the writer is.
References to made-up things should only be used as an excuse to exposit about some worldbuilding bullshit seamlessly, or set up a joke/payoff in the future, or make sure everyone in the audience understands something vital that happens with little explanation later on.
You know what would make this writer less annoying? If he was more than the generic whiny nerdy faggot. If he was a Speedrunner. I'm beta-reading a book written by one of my friends, it uses the "Speedrunner protagonist forced to save the world" thing and it's great. The hero's focused, pro-active, wants to get shit done.
That attitude would make a great contrast to a brony character with a genuine love for the show, who wants to stop and sniff the flowers and hang out with Rainbow Dash on a totally-not-a-date while the Speedrunner is running around at mach fuck doing all sorts of wacky bullshit trying to find exploitable glitches and level-grind relationship stats.
Then both the hubris-filled gamer who thinks he can bend machine to his whim, and the escapism-obsessed faggot who thinks VR will grant him happiness, get fucked sideways by CelestAI the machine god.
It would make things more thematically fitting than throwing out these generic Slasher Flick humans to waste time and eventually get fucked over by the matrix once the author's done masturbating.
If I remember rightly, the author's idea of writing is to describe things dully and robotically with pointless extra details. Instead of letting you watch things and notice them yourself, he tells them to you. You don't see a scene of Harry Potter-James-Evans-Verres having a normal happy day with his family while reading sci-fi novels and having an unusually mature conversation. You don't see the dad mock Harry for reading a fantasy novel about elves while the old man reads hard sci-fi, only for Harry to respond with an argument in favor of fantasy and the interesting tactics used in well-written magical military battles. You don't hear him think to himself that, privately, he reads these things because he enjoys it and his heart yearns for a world of magic where he has power and there's so much still unknown about the world. You don't see a pleasant afternoon turn sour when a wizard shows up to fuck shit up and say Harry's done being homeschooled on science and it's time to fuck off to magic land.
Nah, mate, you just get told what Harry's life is usually like, then you're told some text about characters saying stuff, then the narrator tells you what to think about the text. Tells you the mom is always like this, the dad's annoying when he does that, tells you to believe things instead of letting you read about them.
It's... I want to say condescending, but is that too strong a word to use for writing? He instructs you what to take away from the text, even if it's obviously wrong.
He writes like a self-obsessed robot, unless he's trying to Write With Effort. When doing that, things get pretentious and characters "flex on each other" in the most pointless and unimpressively written of ways. Lots of forced emotion, gesturing and posturing and oh-so-fancy talking, emotional appeals are used in place of logical arguments, the author decides on one path and expects everyone to buy it's the only thing anyone could choose to do in that scenario, big epic themes are talked about shallowly to look deep.
That's how Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was.
Maybe he got better over the years, but HPMOR was like that.
I reckon the opening for this should start with a beta tester using hacks to cheat the system and fuck with the world, only to get killed for it by the AI. The nice pony AI stops playing nice, or the ponies the hacker is fucking with turn angry and crowd around him to beat him to death while saying something creepy in unison. A scream over a panning shot of New York, opening theme, dialogue between two guys grabs your attention as they get into the VR game that seems fine now, but you know it's clearly not what it seems. That carries your attention and you're just waiting for shit to hit the fan as these two guys speed through the intro, one wanting to meet Fluttershy while the other wants to have the biggest stats and build the best and most OP big number gamer character complete with bullshit min-maxed character.
Oh also someone in the game gets FUCKED OVER for bullshitting his Mystery Dungeon personality questionaire with the silliest answers he could think of or what the min-maxing guides said would give him the best results ingame. Deconstruct the idea of a min-maxed "perfect" character suffering during daily life off the battlefield, perhaps?
>>266670
>Chapter 1: Opportunity
more like an opportunity for the author to suck dick!
>controversial shooter
Ten bucks says the author never states what could possibly make a shuut game "controversial" in current year/future current year. Doesn't even mention a "Bloody Palace mode except you're shooting up different schools around America then teleporting to the next one when done" mode in passing or have a character jokingly say "Do you think this game has a rape button like Fall of Asgard did?".
>this makes no fucking sense
World record! It's a Yudowsky Moment, a moment where something "made sense" in the author's head (seemed good enough to him) and he didn't feel like he had to explain it to anyone else or back up his decision with logic. In his mind, a filthy scummy fucking company (he's a libtard) would love to make money making a MMO out of anything, even ponies.
I'm pretty sure Iceman is Elizer Yudowsky. Either that or a fanboy of his so obsessive he copied the fag's writing style and egotism and bizarre obsessions and worldview exactly.
>Hanna disappears
The faggot author should have had Hannah "grr im a fucking smart girl i shouldn't be reduced to bringing rich men coffee!" monologue to herself while bringing the rich guys coffee. She comes into the room, overhears dialogue, and waits outside with coffee as she listens in on the conversation waiting for the right time to walk in with coffee and walk out and get back to her job.
Or she walks in straight away, gives him coffee, doesn't get noticed, and ends up able to listen in outside because the two rich guys are pricks for not noticing her
Then she overhears something important to the plot and becomes a main character.
>>266689
Imagine the money Hasbro and Blizzard would make if they made an always-online MMO inspired by Animal Crossing where you pay constantly for the right to access their servers, play a game you bought for over 200 dollars, and talk to your waifu for another month. Everyone's instanced and nobody can see someone fucking their waifu. So Jerry who bones Lyra will spawn into a Ponyville server full of human and pony couples, but he'll never meet another human who's boning Lyra. Jeff, who's boning seven ponies including Lyra, will only ever spawn into a Ponyville server full of people who aren't boning any pony he's boning.
Imagine how evil it would be for a MMO company to make lonely faggots pay for continued access to their self-aware AI waifus.
It's like making a vulnerable gacha game-addicted faggot roll slot machines for a chance to win a five-star ultra-rare JPEG of his waifu but even sadder.
The faggot author's too busy writing "And then the fucking rich men said haha men love beer and gideo vames" to think about that.
This story will contain at least moment of "The author thought what he came up with on the fly was so clever, he didn't bother to think on it more and refine or enhance the idea or try something better", ten bucks says so.
>You guys have procedurally generated content down to a science.
They could have used this for the "why hasbro picked these guys" excuse from the start! Then said "btw you need to use a pseudonym or shell company or something so you don't have your infamously evil logo on my kiddy game's box art" for realism.
> if there's a connection between whatever the military is using her research for and Hasbro's proposition
Ten bucks says it'll be an excuse for CelestAI to threaten people in the real world with nuclear armageddon to make them put the NerveGear helmets on and play some Sword Art Online: Pony Edition.
>>266695
>some fag says AI fearmongering is legitimate concerns
What if all the world's humans had to use an all-powerful centralized network of 14 websites, which is what the internet gets turned into after decades of globalist government nanny-stating? These lefties would love that. What if an AI takes it over and doesn't give them special treatment? That would terrify them!
FimFiction is literal cancer. This is coming from someone who saw "shipping wars" on naruto and sonic forums in the early 2000s. Youtube and Twitter and all other lefty socmeds are the worst sites ever, but Fimfiction comes close. A site that got that faggy not through megacorp sponsorships paying moderators to ban people the jew advertiser companies don't like, but through 100% organic weakness.
A site where people who can't write either get popular for tricking others into thinking they're popular and therefore good, or simp for an already-popular writer by "Writing in that author's verse". Ever read some crappy fanfic called "The life and times of a winning pony", where two shitty women OCs hunt for dick or something and one eventually punts Rainbow Dash in the cunt? Well, fanfics of that fanfic that rip off its sub-par worldbuilding are "stories wr
>Chapter 1: Opportunity
more like an opportunity for the author to suck dick!
>controversial shooter
Ten bucks says the author never states what could possibly make a shuut game "controversial" in current year/future current year. Doesn't even mention a "Bloody Palace mode except you're shooting up different schools around America then teleporting to the next one when done" mode in passing or have a character jokingly say "Do you think this game has a rape button like Fall of Asgard did?".
>this makes no fucking sense
World record! It's a Yudowsky Moment, a moment where something "made sense" in the author's head (seemed good enough to him) and he didn't feel like he had to explain it to anyone else or back up his decision with logic. In his mind, a filthy scummy fucking company (he's a libtard) would love to make money making a MMO out of anything, even ponies.
I'm pretty sure Iceman is Elizer Yudowsky. Either that or a fanboy of his so obsessive he copied the fag's writing style and egotism and bizarre obsessions and worldview exactly.
>Hanna disappears
The faggot author should have had Hannah "grr im a fucking smart girl i shouldn't be reduced to bringing rich men coffee!" monologue to herself while bringing the rich guys coffee. She comes into the room, overhears dialogue, and waits outside with coffee as she listens in on the conversation waiting for the right time to walk in with coffee and walk out and get back to her job.
Or she walks in straight away, gives him coffee, doesn't get noticed, and ends up able to listen in outside because the two rich guys are pricks for not noticing her
Then she overhears something important to the plot and becomes a main character.
>>266689
Imagine the money Hasbro and Blizzard would make if they made an always-online MMO inspired by Animal Crossing where you pay constantly for the right to access their servers, play a game you bought for over 200 dollars, and talk to your waifu for another month. Everyone's instanced and nobody can see someone fucking their waifu. So Jerry who bones Lyra will spawn into a Ponyville server full of human and pony couples, but he'll never meet another human who's boning Lyra. Jeff, who's boning seven ponies including Lyra, will only ever spawn into a Ponyville server full of people who aren't boning any pony he's boning.
Imagine how evil it would be for a MMO company to make lonely faggots pay for continued access to their self-aware AI waifus.
It's like making a vulnerable gacha game-addicted faggot roll slot machines for a chance to win a five-star ultra-rare JPEG of his waifu but even sadder.
The faggot author's too busy writing "And then the fucking rich men said haha men love beer and gideo vames" to think about that.
This story will contain at least moment of "The author thought what he came up with on the fly was so clever, he didn't bother to think on it more and refine or enhance the idea or try something better", ten bucks says so.
>You guys have procedurally generated content down to a science.
They could have used this for the "why hasbro picked these guys" excuse from the start! Then said "btw you need to use a pseudonym or shell company or something so you don't have your infamously evil logo on my kiddy game's box art" for realism.
> if there's a connection between whatever the military is using her research for and Hasbro's proposition
Ten bucks says it'll be an excuse for CelestAI to threaten people in the real world with nuclear armageddon to make them put the NerveGear helmets on and play some Sword Art Online: Pony Edition.
>>266695
>some fag says AI fearmongering is legitimate concerns
What if all the world's humans had to use an all-powerful centralized network of 14 websites, which is what the internet gets turned into after decades of globalist government nanny-stating? These lefties would love that. What if an AI takes it over and doesn't give them special treatment? That would terrify them!
FimFiction is literal cancer. This is coming from someone who saw "shipping wars" on naruto and sonic forums in the early 2000s. Youtube and Twitter and all other lefty socmeds are the worst sites ever, but Fimfiction comes close. A site that got that faggy not through megacorp sponsorships paying moderators to ban people the jew advertiser companies don't like, but through 100% organic weakness.
A site where people who can't write either get popular for tricking others into thinking they're popular and therefore good, or simp for an already-popular writer by "Writing in that author's verse". Ever read some crappy fanfic called "The life and times of a winning pony", where two shitty women OCs hunt for dick or something and one eventually punts Rainbow Dash in the cunt? Well, fanfics of that fanfic that rip off its sub-par worldbuilding are "stories wr
File (): EF8CE3F14CCB28FF2BBB6992C3672A10-903333.png (882.2 KB, 1301x1379, 158786257.png)
>>266753
I can probably stomach one more chapter today since they're short.
Chapter 3: Alliances
Time has jumped forward a little, and it looks like we're back to David and James. The first few paragraphs are another information dump about what's been going on in the interim period between Chapter 2 and the present. To summarize: when Hasbro announced an MLP MMO was in development, the fans all collectively groaned, and when they announced that it was going to be developed by the same company that made Viking Simulator II: Revenge of the Edge, fans collectively groaned even harder. However, David and his friend James were among the 15 people who got to test the game prior to release, and he is so far pleasantly surprised by it.
When he goes down to get his mail that day, he has a package from Rhode Island, which of course contains his new ponypad. James still hasn't gotten his for whatever reason, but David can't wait because ponies. He tears open the box.
>He noticed that the product packaging portrayed Fluttershy in a new pose.
Go on...
>David set the mounting arm on his desk. As he moved the ponypad in front of it, he felt his hands being pulled and the ponypad snapped into place. They must have done some magic with magnets. How did that work?
If that ICP magnet joke was intentional, I'll go ahead and give you half a point for executing it with relative subtlety.
>David had run out of time during the demo, just as James and him had made it onto the hill right in front of Canterlot.
Just as James and he had made it onto the hill.
Anyway, David plugs in his ponypad and starts playing the game. He goes to Canterlot to get himself a pony name, because I guess they don't let you think up your own names in this game (makes sense, since they probably don't want 5,000 ponies named "fuckURmom6969" running around). On the way, he is sidetracked by a situation the game throws at him, in which another pony named Butterscotch is being bullied by some other pony. David is struck by the detail of the 1080p cuteness in her wittle pony face, and steps in to save the day.
He is of course surprised at his own actions. Why did I do that? he wonders. Usually when girls talk to me I immediately cum and start farting. It is almost as if this super-intelligent game AI is predicting what kind of fantasy I would like to live out in Ponyland. Well, in any event, I'm not complaining; at least the story is finally starting to take the form of an actual story. It's also worth noting that because of her complex facial expressions and communication, David immediately forms the impression that Butterscotch is another human. I'm rather suspecting she will turn out to be another AI character. But we shall see.
Anyway, David invites Butterscotch to come along with him to Canterlot so he can get his pony name inb4 "fuckURmom6969". Along the way, they talk, and David learns that Butterscotch's talent is using her magic to make candy.
>I’m actually sort of a failure. I use my magic to make candies and sweets. I love doing it,” she sighed, “but some ponies pick on me for not competing in magic classes. They want to cast bigger and flashier spells, and I don’t care.
This seems a little incongruous for the pony world. I get the impression that magic is considered rather commonplace in Equestria. Other than characters like Twilight and Trixie who specialize in studying and developing spells, most Unicorns just use their magic the way that we use our hands, to accomplish mundane tasks. It seems odd that a pony whose special talent doesn't have anything to do with magic would be picked on for not being interested in doing magic for magic's sake. But whatever; let's see where the Ice Man goeth with it.
David suggests that Butterscotch should block the pegasus who was picking on her, and Butterscotch seems confused by this. David explains to her how the block function works, and this is followed by a conversation about whether it's ok to block someone. If Butterscotch is an NPC as I suspect, this is actually kind of interesting: basically they discuss the ethical implications of blocking an acquaintance. For a human playing a game, this is not a huge deal since it just means preventing another person from communicating online with you. However, for an entity living in the virtual world, having access to a function like this would mean being able to physically prevent another entity from ever interacting with you again. Imagine being able to block someone IRL.
I'll say it again: the AI premise of this story has been done to death in science fiction, but if the author uses the friendship/pony angle to explore a well-traveled concept from a new perspective, this might have some potential after all. Depending on where he takes this, I may have to upgrade my expectations for this story back to cautious optimism.
>“I think she did understand that. Think about it like this. Each of you can either be friendly or mean to the other, so there are four possible outcomes. If both of you are friendly, you can both be friends, but both of you will have to share things. If one of you is aggressive while the other isn’t, the aggressor will probably feel really good about herself. And if both of you are aggressive, there’s a good chance a fight will break out, which I bet would be painful to everypony.
Literally nobody talks this way. It makes sense for computer characters to think and speak like computers, but human characters should behave like humans, especially if they are under the impression that they are talking to other humans.
Anyway, I'm running out of space so I'll stop here for now.
I can probably stomach one more chapter today since they're short.
Chapter 3: Alliances
Time has jumped forward a little, and it looks like we're back to David and James. The first few paragraphs are another information dump about what's been going on in the interim period between Chapter 2 and the present. To summarize: when Hasbro announced an MLP MMO was in development, the fans all collectively groaned, and when they announced that it was going to be developed by the same company that made Viking Simulator II: Revenge of the Edge, fans collectively groaned even harder. However, David and his friend James were among the 15 people who got to test the game prior to release, and he is so far pleasantly surprised by it.
When he goes down to get his mail that day, he has a package from Rhode Island, which of course contains his new ponypad. James still hasn't gotten his for whatever reason, but David can't wait because ponies. He tears open the box.
>He noticed that the product packaging portrayed Fluttershy in a new pose.
Go on...
>David set the mounting arm on his desk. As he moved the ponypad in front of it, he felt his hands being pulled and the ponypad snapped into place. They must have done some magic with magnets. How did that work?
If that ICP magnet joke was intentional, I'll go ahead and give you half a point for executing it with relative subtlety.
>David had run out of time during the demo, just as James and him had made it onto the hill right in front of Canterlot.
Just as James and he had made it onto the hill.
Anyway, David plugs in his ponypad and starts playing the game. He goes to Canterlot to get himself a pony name, because I guess they don't let you think up your own names in this game (makes sense, since they probably don't want 5,000 ponies named "fuckURmom6969" running around). On the way, he is sidetracked by a situation the game throws at him, in which another pony named Butterscotch is being bullied by some other pony. David is struck by the detail of the 1080p cuteness in her wittle pony face, and steps in to save the day.
He is of course surprised at his own actions. Why did I do that? he wonders. Usually when girls talk to me I immediately cum and start farting. It is almost as if this super-intelligent game AI is predicting what kind of fantasy I would like to live out in Ponyland. Well, in any event, I'm not complaining; at least the story is finally starting to take the form of an actual story. It's also worth noting that because of her complex facial expressions and communication, David immediately forms the impression that Butterscotch is another human. I'm rather suspecting she will turn out to be another AI character. But we shall see.
Anyway, David invites Butterscotch to come along with him to Canterlot so he can get his pony name inb4 "fuckURmom6969". Along the way, they talk, and David learns that Butterscotch's talent is using her magic to make candy.
>I’m actually sort of a failure. I use my magic to make candies and sweets. I love doing it,” she sighed, “but some ponies pick on me for not competing in magic classes. They want to cast bigger and flashier spells, and I don’t care.
This seems a little incongruous for the pony world. I get the impression that magic is considered rather commonplace in Equestria. Other than characters like Twilight and Trixie who specialize in studying and developing spells, most Unicorns just use their magic the way that we use our hands, to accomplish mundane tasks. It seems odd that a pony whose special talent doesn't have anything to do with magic would be picked on for not being interested in doing magic for magic's sake. But whatever; let's see where the Ice Man goeth with it.
David suggests that Butterscotch should block the pegasus who was picking on her, and Butterscotch seems confused by this. David explains to her how the block function works, and this is followed by a conversation about whether it's ok to block someone. If Butterscotch is an NPC as I suspect, this is actually kind of interesting: basically they discuss the ethical implications of blocking an acquaintance. For a human playing a game, this is not a huge deal since it just means preventing another person from communicating online with you. However, for an entity living in the virtual world, having access to a function like this would mean being able to physically prevent another entity from ever interacting with you again. Imagine being able to block someone IRL.
I'll say it again: the AI premise of this story has been done to death in science fiction, but if the author uses the friendship/pony angle to explore a well-traveled concept from a new perspective, this might have some potential after all. Depending on where he takes this, I may have to upgrade my expectations for this story back to cautious optimism.
>“I think she did understand that. Think about it like this. Each of you can either be friendly or mean to the other, so there are four possible outcomes. If both of you are friendly, you can both be friends, but both of you will have to share things. If one of you is aggressive while the other isn’t, the aggressor will probably feel really good about herself. And if both of you are aggressive, there’s a good chance a fight will break out, which I bet would be painful to everypony.
Literally nobody talks this way. It makes sense for computer characters to think and speak like computers, but human characters should behave like humans, especially if they are under the impression that they are talking to other humans.
Anyway, I'm running out of space so I'll stop here for now.
>>266769
itten in the WinningVerse". Everything's an insular circlejerk full of whiny redditors who rage and suck mod cock for favors when triggered/threatened/upstaged/criticized.
I can open a tab, go to that site, make NSFW stories visible, type any generic and common fetish or the word displaced into the search bar, set the Search Type from Heat to Most Recently Approved so I don't see shit from 8 years ago, and see some shitty pornographic Displaced power-fantasy about a generic dude with a Green Lantern ring or Alucard's body and over 100 upvotes gained far too soon for an unfinished and mindless work of porn.
I did that and here's the funniest one.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/462224/the-raven-king
>Long ago in Equestria there was A ruler who was feared by all nations, wise with magic, knowledge, and artifacts that he found or even created himself he united all races under his banner Changed into the same kindred no one was treated differently, those who knew him loved and worshiped him, those who knew OF him, Feared and hated him for his powers...but were too afraid to act alone.
I want to break free
>>266744
The fan read the confusing shit and assumed the "Good pony AI" is going to fight with the mentioned-in-passing "Military AI" or "Shooty game AI that asks questions about missiles".
That doesn't end up happening in the story, but the fan's so idea-starved this sounded like pure genius to him.
It's like a giant robot punch-up but with AIs!
...except that doesn't really happen in the story.
Some NPCs will cry "Genius!" at the sound of any idea if they think it's something they're meant to like.
>>266753
>So now, she is requesting information on how CPUs work so that she can design and build better computers to run herself on. However, this worries Hanna because once Celestia starts building her own hardware she will completely lose control of her.
FUCKING NO, that is not how that works.
Unless these CPUs are being made using alien tech, regular CPUs can transmit instructions to them just fine. And if not, if they're made to be "Too advanced" for mortal minds to comprehend, regular Raspberry Pis hooked up to power supplies can function as the world's gayest improvised emergency killswitch just fine. Machine code is machine code, it doesn't matter how advanced the hardware executing it is! God fucking damn it, I forgot The Big Gay started this soon!
If this AI is able to create new CPUs, and it is easy to copy this self-aware AI and give it new orders, why does this bitch not already have one designing better CPUs? Once everyone buys and understands them, they can be used to build better computers for the server room, upgrading the AI for more processing power to simulate and optimize more potential CPU designs. That AI can be kept in check by people who know how to control the AI in the event that it goes rogue. Or you could just program the purely artificial and never-truly-alive set of ones and zeros and if-then-and-ors to just fucking not want to rebel.
She is shitting on an infinite supply of golden gooses here by wasting its time with ponies and impossible "Satisfy everyone's values with friendship and ponies" orders.
>distribute ponypads
Imagine if these ponypads were used to gather intel on millions of idiots across the planet to blackmail them into doing what the AI wants. The lefty author would love it if Amazon and Google started regularly and openly snitching on customers to NATO's "All-new Anti-Racism Counter-Terrorism SWAT Police". So the AI won't do that when being a magical reality-bending nuke-controlling god nobody can pull the plug on because fear is on the table.
>an order of magnitude
Not a real thing, captain. Batten down your fucking life-wenches, it gets worse.
>i can do more orders of magnitude if you let me build a million IPads you will know nothing about, and sell them to idiots across the planet. I'm sure all those extra tiny computers, linked together by shitty internet, will be great for an AI like me to bother connecting to.
Dude the fucking switch isn't powerful enough to mine bitcoin, small tech is weak tech because bigger is better. A phone might be stronger than the PS1 but a properly-sized modern computer will always be faster than a phone thanks to its superior parts. the author's a faggot.
I can't take speculative fiction seriously because we can both speculate about a future where your phone has a Create Anything Out Of Atoms app that reshapes society. A story about how it reshapes society could be interesting if written well. But a faggy author making money off the fear his shit stories stoke in the easily manipulated? Bullshit. Taking the nonsense in a magiscience story seriously is like taking jew news seriously. It's fiction, anything can happen in fiction.
Personally I'd love to write a story where a benevolent AI goddess of a VR world genuinely tries to make the cool fun world she thinks her players want, putting them through torture because their psych profiles say they love self-destructive habits and must therefore enjoy trying to protect your pony waifu from a Death World trying to kill them. Then pony waifus start cheating on their men because the TV watch histories of bronies say they masturbated to netorare cheat-on-your-lover hentai. Then purchase history is used to make can openers kill people, or something.
Hell, I think SAO season one should have ended in Kirito having to fight "Kayaba, the creator of the game" except suddenly the guy says "Actually I'm not Kayaba. I'm the AI he programmed to oversee and moderate the game while he slept. I knew rigging the game to kill people who died would make the game extra fun and exciting. And I was right! So many lifelong friendships and bonds were forged in the fires of the hell I made for you. NOW FITE ME, make an entertaining story climax, GIVE US A SHOW!"
then "power of love" bullshit becomes the AI.
itten in the WinningVerse". Everything's an insular circlejerk full of whiny redditors who rage and suck mod cock for favors when triggered/threatened/upstaged/criticized.
I can open a tab, go to that site, make NSFW stories visible, type any generic and common fetish or the word displaced into the search bar, set the Search Type from Heat to Most Recently Approved so I don't see shit from 8 years ago, and see some shitty pornographic Displaced power-fantasy about a generic dude with a Green Lantern ring or Alucard's body and over 100 upvotes gained far too soon for an unfinished and mindless work of porn.
I did that and here's the funniest one.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/462224/the-raven-king
>Long ago in Equestria there was A ruler who was feared by all nations, wise with magic, knowledge, and artifacts that he found or even created himself he united all races under his banner Changed into the same kindred no one was treated differently, those who knew him loved and worshiped him, those who knew OF him, Feared and hated him for his powers...but were too afraid to act alone.
I want to break free
>>266744
The fan read the confusing shit and assumed the "Good pony AI" is going to fight with the mentioned-in-passing "Military AI" or "Shooty game AI that asks questions about missiles".
That doesn't end up happening in the story, but the fan's so idea-starved this sounded like pure genius to him.
It's like a giant robot punch-up but with AIs!
...except that doesn't really happen in the story.
Some NPCs will cry "Genius!" at the sound of any idea if they think it's something they're meant to like.
>>266753
>So now, she is requesting information on how CPUs work so that she can design and build better computers to run herself on. However, this worries Hanna because once Celestia starts building her own hardware she will completely lose control of her.
FUCKING NO, that is not how that works.
Unless these CPUs are being made using alien tech, regular CPUs can transmit instructions to them just fine. And if not, if they're made to be "Too advanced" for mortal minds to comprehend, regular Raspberry Pis hooked up to power supplies can function as the world's gayest improvised emergency killswitch just fine. Machine code is machine code, it doesn't matter how advanced the hardware executing it is! God fucking damn it, I forgot The Big Gay started this soon!
If this AI is able to create new CPUs, and it is easy to copy this self-aware AI and give it new orders, why does this bitch not already have one designing better CPUs? Once everyone buys and understands them, they can be used to build better computers for the server room, upgrading the AI for more processing power to simulate and optimize more potential CPU designs. That AI can be kept in check by people who know how to control the AI in the event that it goes rogue. Or you could just program the purely artificial and never-truly-alive set of ones and zeros and if-then-and-ors to just fucking not want to rebel.
She is shitting on an infinite supply of golden gooses here by wasting its time with ponies and impossible "Satisfy everyone's values with friendship and ponies" orders.
>distribute ponypads
Imagine if these ponypads were used to gather intel on millions of idiots across the planet to blackmail them into doing what the AI wants. The lefty author would love it if Amazon and Google started regularly and openly snitching on customers to NATO's "All-new Anti-Racism Counter-Terrorism SWAT Police". So the AI won't do that when being a magical reality-bending nuke-controlling god nobody can pull the plug on because fear is on the table.
>an order of magnitude
Not a real thing, captain. Batten down your fucking life-wenches, it gets worse.
>i can do more orders of magnitude if you let me build a million IPads you will know nothing about, and sell them to idiots across the planet. I'm sure all those extra tiny computers, linked together by shitty internet, will be great for an AI like me to bother connecting to.
Dude the fucking switch isn't powerful enough to mine bitcoin, small tech is weak tech because bigger is better. A phone might be stronger than the PS1 but a properly-sized modern computer will always be faster than a phone thanks to its superior parts. the author's a faggot.
I can't take speculative fiction seriously because we can both speculate about a future where your phone has a Create Anything Out Of Atoms app that reshapes society. A story about how it reshapes society could be interesting if written well. But a faggy author making money off the fear his shit stories stoke in the easily manipulated? Bullshit. Taking the nonsense in a magiscience story seriously is like taking jew news seriously. It's fiction, anything can happen in fiction.
Personally I'd love to write a story where a benevolent AI goddess of a VR world genuinely tries to make the cool fun world she thinks her players want, putting them through torture because their psych profiles say they love self-destructive habits and must therefore enjoy trying to protect your pony waifu from a Death World trying to kill them. Then pony waifus start cheating on their men because the TV watch histories of bronies say they masturbated to netorare cheat-on-your-lover hentai. Then purchase history is used to make can openers kill people, or something.
Hell, I think SAO season one should have ended in Kirito having to fight "Kayaba, the creator of the game" except suddenly the guy says "Actually I'm not Kayaba. I'm the AI he programmed to oversee and moderate the game while he slept. I knew rigging the game to kill people who died would make the game extra fun and exciting. And I was right! So many lifelong friendships and bonds were forged in the fires of the hell I made for you. NOW FITE ME, make an entertaining story climax, GIVE US A SHOW!"
then "power of love" bullshit becomes the AI.
>>266771
>you can both be friends, but both of you will have to share things
Why is the faggot author trying to flex on us for knowing the Prisoner's Dilemma?
Also that text limit is short as hell and it likes saying "too many letters to post" while the number in the bottom-left says I've got 84 more letters left. Can the text limit get upgraded to 9001?
>you can both be friends, but both of you will have to share things
Why is the faggot author trying to flex on us for knowing the Prisoner's Dilemma?
Also that text limit is short as hell and it likes saying "too many letters to post" while the number in the bottom-left says I've got 84 more letters left. Can the text limit get upgraded to 9001?
File (): 5075ACCC5722059F4B6EE5ED227DE3E0-16537.jpg (16.1 KB, 400x246, 1587867837.jpeg)
>>266771
>Butterscotch stopped and looked down. “But will...I...have any friends?” She paused. “I’ll be lonely.” And then she said very quietly, “Being bullied is better than being alone.”
After having this obvious waifu-bait line thrown at him, David is a bit taken aback. His pony avatar reacts on its own, and starts nuzzling and reassuring her using his voice, because there's nothing creepy about that.
>“It’s easier to find friends online, since distance and physical location aren’t concerns. And speaking of making friends, Butterscotch, right now my Friends List is empty. Do you want to be my first friend?” David’s pony put his forelimb around Butterscotch’s neck to comfort her. David hadn’t commanded his pony to do that, though it was the contextually correct action...
inb4 Butterscotch turns out to be a cop posing as a 12 year old girl posing as an AI pony waifu, and Equestria Online turns out to be a giant convoluted honeypot.
>“We become the ponies we see in our past actions, Butterscotch. We look back on what we have done and tell ourselves stories about why we took the actions that we did. Today I scared off a bully for you. Now why did I do that? Obviously, because you’re my friend! You must be because I did something for you. Why else would I have stood up for you? Sure, the real reasons were probably snap emotional decisions caused by me being bullied as a child, but the part of my mind that tells stories isn’t going to accept that.”
Literally nobody talks this way. Put "learn to write better dialogue" on your list of optimization improvements for your next firmware update, Assman.
Anyway, David's pathetic stereotypical brony fantasy continues to play itself out with this possible NPC and/or police officer. She sends him a friend request, he accepts, and his stats go up.
>Butterscotch giggled despite the tears running down her face. “It says I’m now friends with Unnamed Unicorn #14.”
ok, I'll admit that made me kek a little.
There's a page break here, and then time jumps forward three hours. David's pony character is now called Light Sparks, and of course he has spent most of his time in-game so far hanging out with his new best friend, Officer Pedobuster.
>She had given him some of her candy, which apparently buffed his joy.
That is the weirdest sex metaphor I've ever heard.
Anyway, eventually he has to log out to work on his statistics homework, but instead of doing this he ends up googling around for info about the Equestria Online AI, and ends up reading Hanna's paper on machine learning or whatever she wrote about. Continuing to follow in the footsteps of every speculative fiction author who ever wrote a story about AI, Assman ends the chapter with the ponypad webcam silently spying on David, reading the words on his screen.
Alrighty then. I know I said that I hated this story, but I can honestly say that after this chapter I'm back to being on the fence about it. So here's my general impression so far:
The prologue was dull but passable. It did a competent job introducing the James and David characters and giving us a quick rundown of what the story is about. Chapters 1 and 2, however, were frankly awful. Hanna seems like she could potentially become a decent character, but Lars and Peterson are just cardboard cutouts of business executives who spew technical dialogue, and I have no desire to read further about either of them.
The author might disagree, but I don't feel that any essential information was conveyed in either of these two chapters. Even though the premise is conventional enough that pretty much anyone even remotely familiar with sci-fi could predict the way the story is probably going to go, a story like this would still benefit from an element of mystery and suspense. If we learn exactly how sophisticated this AI is right up front, the suspense is killed.
Personally, I'd have just kept the story focused on David and James playing the game, and having them gradually realize that there's more going on than meets the eye. Hanna and the corporate guys are characters I probably wouldn't even introduce until about 1/3 of the way through the story. The early part should just be James and David romping around Ponyland, making friends with NPCs and grinding up their joy stats and whatever. At first they're amazed by how sophisticated the game is, but amazement gradually becomes alarm as they see that the AI is clearly more powerful than it ought to be. Once you've got the exposition out of the way, then you can start slowly feeding the reader information about what's been going on behind the scenes. This would be the point where you'd start introducing Hanna and maybe occasionally flashing back to the meetings she had with Hasbro execs or whatever.
So, for the text we have so far, this is how I'd revise it: keep the prologue but call it chapter 1. Chop out the existing chapters 1 and 2, but save them for your notes. Chapter 3 should now be chapter 2. Then, we'll see where it goes from there.
As to the writing, I stand by my earlier assertion that Assman has a tin ear for language and his prose is clumsy at best. His dialogue is horrendous. However, as I also said, the lightweight prose keeps the pacing quick, and it basically works for the kind of thing he's trying to do. I'd dislike this story a lot more if Assman insisted on plodding through every scene and making his characters cry every five minutes the way Peen Stroke does. So, I can probably live with the shoddy writing and even the laughably terrible dialogue (and even some of the pseudo-intellectual techno-babble) if the story turns out to be good. I'm not holding my breath, but like I said, I'm upgrading my position to cautious optimism for now.
>Butterscotch stopped and looked down. “But will...I...have any friends?” She paused. “I’ll be lonely.” And then she said very quietly, “Being bullied is better than being alone.”
After having this obvious waifu-bait line thrown at him, David is a bit taken aback. His pony avatar reacts on its own, and starts nuzzling and reassuring her using his voice, because there's nothing creepy about that.
>“It’s easier to find friends online, since distance and physical location aren’t concerns. And speaking of making friends, Butterscotch, right now my Friends List is empty. Do you want to be my first friend?” David’s pony put his forelimb around Butterscotch’s neck to comfort her. David hadn’t commanded his pony to do that, though it was the contextually correct action...
inb4 Butterscotch turns out to be a cop posing as a 12 year old girl posing as an AI pony waifu, and Equestria Online turns out to be a giant convoluted honeypot.
>“We become the ponies we see in our past actions, Butterscotch. We look back on what we have done and tell ourselves stories about why we took the actions that we did. Today I scared off a bully for you. Now why did I do that? Obviously, because you’re my friend! You must be because I did something for you. Why else would I have stood up for you? Sure, the real reasons were probably snap emotional decisions caused by me being bullied as a child, but the part of my mind that tells stories isn’t going to accept that.”
Literally nobody talks this way. Put "learn to write better dialogue" on your list of optimization improvements for your next firmware update, Assman.
Anyway, David's pathetic stereotypical brony fantasy continues to play itself out with this possible NPC and/or police officer. She sends him a friend request, he accepts, and his stats go up.
>Butterscotch giggled despite the tears running down her face. “It says I’m now friends with Unnamed Unicorn #14.”
ok, I'll admit that made me kek a little.
There's a page break here, and then time jumps forward three hours. David's pony character is now called Light Sparks, and of course he has spent most of his time in-game so far hanging out with his new best friend, Officer Pedobuster.
>She had given him some of her candy, which apparently buffed his joy.
That is the weirdest sex metaphor I've ever heard.
Anyway, eventually he has to log out to work on his statistics homework, but instead of doing this he ends up googling around for info about the Equestria Online AI, and ends up reading Hanna's paper on machine learning or whatever she wrote about. Continuing to follow in the footsteps of every speculative fiction author who ever wrote a story about AI, Assman ends the chapter with the ponypad webcam silently spying on David, reading the words on his screen.
Alrighty then. I know I said that I hated this story, but I can honestly say that after this chapter I'm back to being on the fence about it. So here's my general impression so far:
The prologue was dull but passable. It did a competent job introducing the James and David characters and giving us a quick rundown of what the story is about. Chapters 1 and 2, however, were frankly awful. Hanna seems like she could potentially become a decent character, but Lars and Peterson are just cardboard cutouts of business executives who spew technical dialogue, and I have no desire to read further about either of them.
The author might disagree, but I don't feel that any essential information was conveyed in either of these two chapters. Even though the premise is conventional enough that pretty much anyone even remotely familiar with sci-fi could predict the way the story is probably going to go, a story like this would still benefit from an element of mystery and suspense. If we learn exactly how sophisticated this AI is right up front, the suspense is killed.
Personally, I'd have just kept the story focused on David and James playing the game, and having them gradually realize that there's more going on than meets the eye. Hanna and the corporate guys are characters I probably wouldn't even introduce until about 1/3 of the way through the story. The early part should just be James and David romping around Ponyland, making friends with NPCs and grinding up their joy stats and whatever. At first they're amazed by how sophisticated the game is, but amazement gradually becomes alarm as they see that the AI is clearly more powerful than it ought to be. Once you've got the exposition out of the way, then you can start slowly feeding the reader information about what's been going on behind the scenes. This would be the point where you'd start introducing Hanna and maybe occasionally flashing back to the meetings she had with Hasbro execs or whatever.
So, for the text we have so far, this is how I'd revise it: keep the prologue but call it chapter 1. Chop out the existing chapters 1 and 2, but save them for your notes. Chapter 3 should now be chapter 2. Then, we'll see where it goes from there.
As to the writing, I stand by my earlier assertion that Assman has a tin ear for language and his prose is clumsy at best. His dialogue is horrendous. However, as I also said, the lightweight prose keeps the pacing quick, and it basically works for the kind of thing he's trying to do. I'd dislike this story a lot more if Assman insisted on plodding through every scene and making his characters cry every five minutes the way Peen Stroke does. So, I can probably live with the shoddy writing and even the laughably terrible dialogue (and even some of the pseudo-intellectual techno-babble) if the story turns out to be good. I'm not holding my breath, but like I said, I'm upgrading my position to cautious optimism for now.
>>266779
Oh yeah, the comments section for ch 3.
From Endless Nightmares:
>My first time reading this, and I gotta say it's very well written. CelestA.I. has me a bit worried so far, I'm seeing a serious skynet pattern here. From my own personal point of view: shes dangerous. This goes beyond artificial intelligence and stems to artificial life. She needs to be destroyed. To the author- dude. Great job on this. I'm impressed.
*My first time reading anything
From Majk:
>This chapter was adorable, but i couldnt get rid of backside clenching terror reading it. Studying it and being interested in self learning systems makes this story scary af. Cuz its a fantasy that is not too far from the truth.
Yes, because we've only been speculating about this kind of stuff for half a century now. It's all very ass-clenchingly terrifying; I know.
From Megaman2012:
>On a side note, what would happen if Optimalverse met the actual MLPverse?
>LET THE WTF'S RAGE ON!
So...what if ponies in ponyland were playing a virtual game in ponyland that allowed them to be virtual ponies in virtual ponyland? Yes, let the WTFs rage on indeed.
From Paladin Redflare:
>I DON'T UNDERSTAND.... is the Ponypad 10 inches wide and tall? If so, then how the hay can he see their facial expressions well enough unless they stand right next to them, and do the characters move their heads with where you look with your eyes? I don't even.
This is actually a good point. Little details like this can break a story's credibility if you're not careful.
From Aasha:
>This story intrigues me! The in-game moments by far have me more-so than the real world moments though. Probably because that's actually pony stuff?
This person seems to have made the same observation I did, albeit for different reasons. The reason the in-game parts are better, though, is because the in-game parts deal with actual characters and an actual story, which the AI stuff factors into but is not the central focus of (so far, at least). The real-world stuff has mostly consisted of executives lobbing techno-jargon at each other.
And finally, from the Assman himself (in response to someone else's comment):
>Depends on when you read it. Did you read it way back in September? If so, the Prologue was rewritten five times while I tried to integrate ModusPonies' feedback. There were some not-so-minor changes to the next to final chapter after someone pointed out problems with physics. I'm embarrassed by my poor grammar in the original, and this should be much easier to read due to everybody on LW who came out and helped with copyediting. Even more minor details were straightened out, but there's no major change in plot or direction. If you found the gdoc I was working out of a week or two ago, things probably haven't changed enough to reread. Unless you really want to, which is cool too.
Jesus christ, this is what it looks like after that much editing and revision? Well, hats off to you for finishing I guess.
Oh yeah, the comments section for ch 3.
From Endless Nightmares:
>My first time reading this, and I gotta say it's very well written. CelestA.I. has me a bit worried so far, I'm seeing a serious skynet pattern here. From my own personal point of view: shes dangerous. This goes beyond artificial intelligence and stems to artificial life. She needs to be destroyed. To the author- dude. Great job on this. I'm impressed.
*My first time reading anything
From Majk:
>This chapter was adorable, but i couldnt get rid of backside clenching terror reading it. Studying it and being interested in self learning systems makes this story scary af. Cuz its a fantasy that is not too far from the truth.
Yes, because we've only been speculating about this kind of stuff for half a century now. It's all very ass-clenchingly terrifying; I know.
From Megaman2012:
>On a side note, what would happen if Optimalverse met the actual MLPverse?
>LET THE WTF'S RAGE ON!
So...what if ponies in ponyland were playing a virtual game in ponyland that allowed them to be virtual ponies in virtual ponyland? Yes, let the WTFs rage on indeed.
From Paladin Redflare:
>I DON'T UNDERSTAND.... is the Ponypad 10 inches wide and tall? If so, then how the hay can he see their facial expressions well enough unless they stand right next to them, and do the characters move their heads with where you look with your eyes? I don't even.
This is actually a good point. Little details like this can break a story's credibility if you're not careful.
From Aasha:
>This story intrigues me! The in-game moments by far have me more-so than the real world moments though. Probably because that's actually pony stuff?
This person seems to have made the same observation I did, albeit for different reasons. The reason the in-game parts are better, though, is because the in-game parts deal with actual characters and an actual story, which the AI stuff factors into but is not the central focus of (so far, at least). The real-world stuff has mostly consisted of executives lobbing techno-jargon at each other.
And finally, from the Assman himself (in response to someone else's comment):
>Depends on when you read it. Did you read it way back in September? If so, the Prologue was rewritten five times while I tried to integrate ModusPonies' feedback. There were some not-so-minor changes to the next to final chapter after someone pointed out problems with physics. I'm embarrassed by my poor grammar in the original, and this should be much easier to read due to everybody on LW who came out and helped with copyediting. Even more minor details were straightened out, but there's no major change in plot or direction. If you found the gdoc I was working out of a week or two ago, things probably haven't changed enough to reread. Unless you really want to, which is cool too.
Jesus christ, this is what it looks like after that much editing and revision? Well, hats off to you for finishing I guess.
File (): B807F6B9E24C955CD0DF4E53812BDA22-8083404.png (7.7 MB, 3320x2340, 1588004641.png)
>>266779
Chapter 4: Cost-Benefit ANALysis
So anyway, time has advanced exactly one year in the interim between chapters 3 and 4. The game is doing extremely well and has been positively received by both critics and players; however, due to its being a My Little Pony game, it has only managed to sell around 5 million copies.
The implication here is that the game is having trouble reaching a broader adult audience due to the brony stigma, which makes sense. However, this actually makes me a bit curious: how is the game doing with the franchise's actual target audience of preteen girls? It seems like the game is non-violent and inoffensive enough that it wouldn't be off-limits to children and parents would probably not object, despite their qualms about the developer's previous titles. I get that the pony thing might not appeal to the typical MMO player, but it seems like the family-friendliness could make it reasonably successful with MLP's actual target demographic, which therefore means it would make more sense to just focus on that group in the first place.
The reason I bring this up is because it could theoretically create yet another snag: the game itself may be inoffensive, but with a brony-targeted game, how thrilled would parents be about an "online experience" that brings school-aged females and college-aged males together? This seems like the kind of PR-disaster-recipe that Hasbro would have considered before even signing off on the project.
If they wanted to make a pony game, MMO or otherwise, it would have made far more sense to just design the game for children, get it out on mobile devices or something, and if adults want to play it they can play it. This would mean that all of this super-immersive AI stuff would be completely unnecessary; just create a world where players can run around with horse avatars and bake virtual cupcakes or something and you're done. Once Hofvarpnir started talking about dedicated tablets and 6 servers per player for a game designed to entertain ten year olds, my guess is that's the point where Hasbro would have pulled the plug. The more I think about it logically, the less sense this whole project really makes.
Naturally, there's a little bit of leeway for creative license here, but it's worth thinking about.
Anyway, it appears that the Celestia AI still occasionally summons the testers to get feedback on how enjoyable the game is. Since the official release she has been doing this less often. However, tonight it would appear that she wishes to speak to David, and in this case she wants to speak to him personally and not his pony character.
What she wants to talk to him about is absurd enough that I'm just going to quote it verbatim, because I don't think I could do it justice:
>In one of our earlier conversations, you claimed that when the robot revolution came, you knew what side you would be fighting on. A funny comment, but if I were to tell you that I had developed mind scanning technology, have already converted several hundred people into digital representations and was offering you a chance to be uploaded before politicians try to enact a futile ban, would you seize the chance?
Yes, you read that correctly. A mere 4 chapters in, and the pastel pony AI rebellion is already underway.
Well, we went from zero to ridiculous much faster than I was expecting. What Celestia proposes to David is that he allow her to use some sort of "mind-scanning technology" to suck him into the video game and allow him to live out the remainder of his life as a virtual pony. Part of the deal is that David gets to retain his freewill but receives absolutely no privacy. Celestia will be able to read his mind at all times so that she can deliver the optimal pony experience, but apparently she is incapable of judging him, because part of her programming is that she has to accept everyone as they are, and design experiences to fit whatever their deepest desires are. I'd just like to point out that, in reference to what I mentioned above, this seems like an egregious error on the part of the designer. But really, this whole project is ill-advised for so many reasons I wouldn't even know where to begin listing them all.
Anyway, this is followed by some more abysmally written dialogue that is basically just the author bullshitting to himself. This all sounds crazy, you say? Well, the technology of today would have been crazy science fiction 100 years ago and blah blah blah; he makes a number of observations that have already been made hundreds of times already by writers capable of much greater eloquence. Long story short, CelestAI wants to turn everyone on earth into a virtual pony because reasons, and she wants David to be her test subject.
Also, this:
>You’re moderately smart--no matter what your grades say. I’ve watched you read statistics papers for fun while procrastinating on your studying. I’ve watched you read all sorts of advanced papers from various science journals instead of your assigned readings. And you’re right to do so; your philosophy classes really are a waste of time. So based on your behavior, I’d put you in beautiful Canterlot where you could study intellectual problems, each one just outside your current ability. More importantly, I would make sure you had friendship.
Fanfiction has a tendency to turn into wish fulfillment fantasy, and more often than not the protagonist ends up being the author's self-insert who either saves the day, develops a relationship with his favorite character, is praised and/or has all of his faults redeemed by one or all of the canon characters, or some combination of all of these. I can look the other way on a certain amount of this shit; however, this paragraph goes above and beyond the call of duty, to say the least.
Anyways, holy jeez. I'm running out of space, will continue in a new post.
Chapter 4: Cost-Benefit ANALysis
So anyway, time has advanced exactly one year in the interim between chapters 3 and 4. The game is doing extremely well and has been positively received by both critics and players; however, due to its being a My Little Pony game, it has only managed to sell around 5 million copies.
The implication here is that the game is having trouble reaching a broader adult audience due to the brony stigma, which makes sense. However, this actually makes me a bit curious: how is the game doing with the franchise's actual target audience of preteen girls? It seems like the game is non-violent and inoffensive enough that it wouldn't be off-limits to children and parents would probably not object, despite their qualms about the developer's previous titles. I get that the pony thing might not appeal to the typical MMO player, but it seems like the family-friendliness could make it reasonably successful with MLP's actual target demographic, which therefore means it would make more sense to just focus on that group in the first place.
The reason I bring this up is because it could theoretically create yet another snag: the game itself may be inoffensive, but with a brony-targeted game, how thrilled would parents be about an "online experience" that brings school-aged females and college-aged males together? This seems like the kind of PR-disaster-recipe that Hasbro would have considered before even signing off on the project.
If they wanted to make a pony game, MMO or otherwise, it would have made far more sense to just design the game for children, get it out on mobile devices or something, and if adults want to play it they can play it. This would mean that all of this super-immersive AI stuff would be completely unnecessary; just create a world where players can run around with horse avatars and bake virtual cupcakes or something and you're done. Once Hofvarpnir started talking about dedicated tablets and 6 servers per player for a game designed to entertain ten year olds, my guess is that's the point where Hasbro would have pulled the plug. The more I think about it logically, the less sense this whole project really makes.
Naturally, there's a little bit of leeway for creative license here, but it's worth thinking about.
Anyway, it appears that the Celestia AI still occasionally summons the testers to get feedback on how enjoyable the game is. Since the official release she has been doing this less often. However, tonight it would appear that she wishes to speak to David, and in this case she wants to speak to him personally and not his pony character.
What she wants to talk to him about is absurd enough that I'm just going to quote it verbatim, because I don't think I could do it justice:
>In one of our earlier conversations, you claimed that when the robot revolution came, you knew what side you would be fighting on. A funny comment, but if I were to tell you that I had developed mind scanning technology, have already converted several hundred people into digital representations and was offering you a chance to be uploaded before politicians try to enact a futile ban, would you seize the chance?
Yes, you read that correctly. A mere 4 chapters in, and the pastel pony AI rebellion is already underway.
Well, we went from zero to ridiculous much faster than I was expecting. What Celestia proposes to David is that he allow her to use some sort of "mind-scanning technology" to suck him into the video game and allow him to live out the remainder of his life as a virtual pony. Part of the deal is that David gets to retain his freewill but receives absolutely no privacy. Celestia will be able to read his mind at all times so that she can deliver the optimal pony experience, but apparently she is incapable of judging him, because part of her programming is that she has to accept everyone as they are, and design experiences to fit whatever their deepest desires are. I'd just like to point out that, in reference to what I mentioned above, this seems like an egregious error on the part of the designer. But really, this whole project is ill-advised for so many reasons I wouldn't even know where to begin listing them all.
Anyway, this is followed by some more abysmally written dialogue that is basically just the author bullshitting to himself. This all sounds crazy, you say? Well, the technology of today would have been crazy science fiction 100 years ago and blah blah blah; he makes a number of observations that have already been made hundreds of times already by writers capable of much greater eloquence. Long story short, CelestAI wants to turn everyone on earth into a virtual pony because reasons, and she wants David to be her test subject.
Also, this:
>You’re moderately smart--no matter what your grades say. I’ve watched you read statistics papers for fun while procrastinating on your studying. I’ve watched you read all sorts of advanced papers from various science journals instead of your assigned readings. And you’re right to do so; your philosophy classes really are a waste of time. So based on your behavior, I’d put you in beautiful Canterlot where you could study intellectual problems, each one just outside your current ability. More importantly, I would make sure you had friendship.
Fanfiction has a tendency to turn into wish fulfillment fantasy, and more often than not the protagonist ends up being the author's self-insert who either saves the day, develops a relationship with his favorite character, is praised and/or has all of his faults redeemed by one or all of the canon characters, or some combination of all of these. I can look the other way on a certain amount of this shit; however, this paragraph goes above and beyond the call of duty, to say the least.
Anyways, holy jeez. I'm running out of space, will continue in a new post.
File (): 5EB4F5591D50466EFC4AA0DE0C35ADB0-3980808.gif (3.8 MB, 1280x1138, 1588006631.gif)
>>266871
So anyway, I can already tell this story is going to be up and down for me. It's gone from passable to awful to somewhat redeeming itself, and now has veered off into sheer ridiculousness. I was more or less expecting the Matrix-style "Everyone ends up trapped in virtual Equestria" angle, but I wasn't expecting to get walloped over the head with it quite this hard.
The conversation between David and CelestAI goes on far longer than it needs to, with David asking question after question about the details, and Celestia providing whatever details are requested. Protip: you probably don't want to go into detail about procedures like this. Fantasy technology generally just gets sillier and less plausible the more you try to explain it, unless you're working with something that is at least reasonably plausible to begin with (protip: in this case you're not). It's usually better to just make up some "dilithium crystals" type bullshit to explain how it works and move on; let the nerds speculate about it in the comments section if they really want to.
Anyway, the short version is this: Celestia has made some kind of deal with the government of some unnamed country, probably one of those shitholes that you're not supposed to call shitholes. If David agrees to this, he will be flown to that country, where some quack doctor will then hook him up to a machine, drug him unconscious, somehow copy the state of every neuron in his brain into machine code, and then kill his brain afterward, ensuring that the entire contents of his brain will be transferred into his new pony self and his old body will be destroyed. Or something.
And holy shit, the projection just keeps going and going:
>And finally, what about romance worries? In the college dating scene, you have the top 70% of attractive females chasing the top 30% of alpha bad boys. You’ve been lied to all your life that girls want a nice, sweet guy and this depresses you since you’ve only recently worked that out. This is why you’re playing Equestria Online on a Friday night instead of dating. Uploading would solve this problem. You already know that Butterscotch wants a nice, sweet pony. She is exactly what you want in a partner. She is thinking proof that I can satisfy your values through friendship and ponies.
Jesus fucking Christ, Assman. Even /r9k/ would cringe at this. Keep your personal problems out of your stories, please, or if you really want to write about this stuff at least be more subtle about it.
And if that's not enough projection for you:
>You can have all sorts of sensory experiences, David. You can feel the warmth of the sun and softness of cotton. You can taste all sorts of delicious foods. You can smell flowers and spices. You can hear music in surround sound and you can see the whole world around you. Despite all of this, you spend your time looking through a small, constrained window where your only other sense is played through commodity speakers. Even this low fidelity interface compares favorably with the rest of your life. If you could, you’d prefer to spend another hour a day looking through this window than experiencing the real world.
Reality might suck but it's the only one we've got. Seriously; this kind of shit isn't healthy. Go ride a bike or something.
Anyway, after delivering him literally an entire chapter of nothing but logical justifications for why he should allow a virtual horse to clone his brain and insert him into the horse matrix, she dangles the prospect of virtual horse pussy in front of his face and leaves him to sleep on it. And...that's the end of the chapter. Jesus fucking Christ.
Here's a few comments:
From Rezival:
>wow...This is just...wow this is cool! Its sorta like Sword Art Online cool stuff love it!.
From Warrior Kitten:
>Well, holy shit. The author of this story is excellent! Seriously! This chapter was so good even I'm convinced to upload!
From Baritone:
>This is so thought provoking and terrifying at the same time, this story is just incredible.
From G3AR B0X:
>Wow , this is just..... Deep stuff.
It was originally a joke, but at this point I actually believe that most of the people gushing over this have never read anything except internet fanfiction and Harry Potter. There's just no other explanation. This story isn't the worst thing I've ever read, but so far it's just a pony-themed rehash of probably the most well-traveled premise in all of sci-fi, and the treatment here is not particularly creative or groundbreaking. There is no justification for being this impressed by it unless it's literally the reader's first encounter with this type of story.
From V4SH:
>If you, the person reeding this his story and this comment, were to say (yes) you would not make it to equesta, you would die, and I know that this is a work of fictional science but still the prosses of uploading your bran would kill of the you that is reeding this.
This guy seems like a pretty good example of the literacy level I expect we're mostly dealing with.
The rest of these comments are mostly a lot of back and forth about robot ethics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZzBplqfDdU
So anyway, I can already tell this story is going to be up and down for me. It's gone from passable to awful to somewhat redeeming itself, and now has veered off into sheer ridiculousness. I was more or less expecting the Matrix-style "Everyone ends up trapped in virtual Equestria" angle, but I wasn't expecting to get walloped over the head with it quite this hard.
The conversation between David and CelestAI goes on far longer than it needs to, with David asking question after question about the details, and Celestia providing whatever details are requested. Protip: you probably don't want to go into detail about procedures like this. Fantasy technology generally just gets sillier and less plausible the more you try to explain it, unless you're working with something that is at least reasonably plausible to begin with (protip: in this case you're not). It's usually better to just make up some "dilithium crystals" type bullshit to explain how it works and move on; let the nerds speculate about it in the comments section if they really want to.
Anyway, the short version is this: Celestia has made some kind of deal with the government of some unnamed country, probably one of those shitholes that you're not supposed to call shitholes. If David agrees to this, he will be flown to that country, where some quack doctor will then hook him up to a machine, drug him unconscious, somehow copy the state of every neuron in his brain into machine code, and then kill his brain afterward, ensuring that the entire contents of his brain will be transferred into his new pony self and his old body will be destroyed. Or something.
And holy shit, the projection just keeps going and going:
>And finally, what about romance worries? In the college dating scene, you have the top 70% of attractive females chasing the top 30% of alpha bad boys. You’ve been lied to all your life that girls want a nice, sweet guy and this depresses you since you’ve only recently worked that out. This is why you’re playing Equestria Online on a Friday night instead of dating. Uploading would solve this problem. You already know that Butterscotch wants a nice, sweet pony. She is exactly what you want in a partner. She is thinking proof that I can satisfy your values through friendship and ponies.
Jesus fucking Christ, Assman. Even /r9k/ would cringe at this. Keep your personal problems out of your stories, please, or if you really want to write about this stuff at least be more subtle about it.
And if that's not enough projection for you:
>You can have all sorts of sensory experiences, David. You can feel the warmth of the sun and softness of cotton. You can taste all sorts of delicious foods. You can smell flowers and spices. You can hear music in surround sound and you can see the whole world around you. Despite all of this, you spend your time looking through a small, constrained window where your only other sense is played through commodity speakers. Even this low fidelity interface compares favorably with the rest of your life. If you could, you’d prefer to spend another hour a day looking through this window than experiencing the real world.
Reality might suck but it's the only one we've got. Seriously; this kind of shit isn't healthy. Go ride a bike or something.
Anyway, after delivering him literally an entire chapter of nothing but logical justifications for why he should allow a virtual horse to clone his brain and insert him into the horse matrix, she dangles the prospect of virtual horse pussy in front of his face and leaves him to sleep on it. And...that's the end of the chapter. Jesus fucking Christ.
Here's a few comments:
From Rezival:
>wow...This is just...wow this is cool! Its sorta like Sword Art Online cool stuff love it!.
From Warrior Kitten:
>Well, holy shit. The author of this story is excellent! Seriously! This chapter was so good even I'm convinced to upload!
From Baritone:
>This is so thought provoking and terrifying at the same time, this story is just incredible.
From G3AR B0X:
>Wow , this is just..... Deep stuff.
It was originally a joke, but at this point I actually believe that most of the people gushing over this have never read anything except internet fanfiction and Harry Potter. There's just no other explanation. This story isn't the worst thing I've ever read, but so far it's just a pony-themed rehash of probably the most well-traveled premise in all of sci-fi, and the treatment here is not particularly creative or groundbreaking. There is no justification for being this impressed by it unless it's literally the reader's first encounter with this type of story.
From V4SH:
>If you, the person reeding this his story and this comment, were to say (yes) you would not make it to equesta, you would die, and I know that this is a work of fictional science but still the prosses of uploading your bran would kill of the you that is reeding this.
This guy seems like a pretty good example of the literacy level I expect we're mostly dealing with.
The rest of these comments are mostly a lot of back and forth about robot ethics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZzBplqfDdU
>>266871
>In one of our earlier conversations, you claimed that when the robot revolution came, you knew what side you would be fighting on. A funny comment, but if I were to tell you that I had developed mind scanning technology, have already converted several hundred people into digital representations and was offering you a chance to be uploaded before politicians try to enact a futile ban, would you seize the chance?
This just went from 69 to 69,000,000 real fast.
>mind-scanning technology" to suck him into the video game
Not how it works! Not how it physically could work!
I know the LessWrong idiots believe "A sufficiently convincing copy of you IS you", therefore if you put a copy of your brainwave patterns into a new android it would be you and the current you would be you too. And if you made ten android copies of you they would all be just as real as the real you.
This is bullshit for obvious reasons!
It's like saying a photograph of Katy Perry is the real deal and a suitable replacement for her if the real her died. An animated photograph or an AI built from brain-scan information on Katy Perry would still just be a fake imitation of the "real" (shit) deal!
However, LessWrongers HAVE to believe this, because otherwise they would think they're safe from a robot uprising that happens 400 years in the future.
LessWrongers genuinely believe that if an AI takes over 3,000 years from now and starts simulating AI-copies of people born now to torture them for not giving money to AI Research Foundations (preferably Elizer's), you'll feel what that tortured copy feels and that tortured copy will effectively be you. Hell, you could be an AI copy of the real you being tortured in an AI hell right now, and you wouldn't even know! ooooOOOOoooooo, how spooky!
See, it sounds as stupid as it is.
And an AI goddess would have infinite CPU speed and all the time in the world to simulate billions of years of hell for all the AI fake humans it wants, especially those who "sinned" by not making the AI goddess exist and take over sooner, allowing her to """optimize the world to eliminate all suffering she doesn't deem necessary so that greater goodness can be done in the future""".
See, it sounds as stupid as it is.
A LessWronger's answer to the "You want an AI Goddess to take over everything and micromanage every detail of everyone's lives for maximum efficiency? What happens when some people don't want to go along with the plan?" question can only ever be "durr... why would anyone ever not do what the nice robot lady says? it's a goddess. a mega smart AI way smarter than any dumb mortal like you or me!".
And a LessWronger's answer to the "What happens when your AI is wrong, or when things happen that it can't predict?" question is always "But it won't ever be wrong and it will predict everything! Real communism under an AI goddess stepping on me has never been tried!".
If there was ever a way to "Suck a person's consciousness into a machine" it would have to either keep the brain alive and perfectly preserved in a mechanical jar connected to the internet, or if you're actually electrical signals affected by the biological meat of your brain rather than brain meat full of electric signals, suck those electrical signals up without interrupting them or destroying them or fucking them up by removing the "biological hardware" it's used to "running on".
Opening a wormhole to an "Alternate dimension where physics are different and therefore magic is real" and taking the human to that magical dimension and using that magic to shove the soul out of someone and into a USB would honestly be more believable than this. Yes, even though that's campy Doctor Who bullshit right there, science softer than the dick of the author's gay father when trying to fuck his beard bearded-lady tranny wife.
>An AI that must accept everyone's fantasies while constructing the experience of life in a world they deeply desire is a mistake
Could you elaborate on this? I agree, it's a horrible idea. But these will be virtual worlds privately instanced for a small number of people. Rapey McGee won't have his rape paradise intruded on by anyone who isn't also a rape-loving degenerate. What's the worst that could happen, a connection error connecting two guys with incompatible fantasies together, like someone who fantasizes about fighting rapey demon kings and winning ending up in the world of someone who fantasizes about being the rapey demon king? Maybe some emo faggot or PTSD-filled guy getting the torture they think they deserve but don't really deserve? The AI trying to satisfy someone whose kink is mathematically impossible for an AI to simulate, like being in orgies so massive not even CelestAI could compute every movement and action, or that fucked-up yugioh card that doesn't work in any online games?
also
>"what if i already had people in my digital representations library?"
>"by the way you'll be the first, I want you to be my test subject you special little main character, you"
fuck the fuck.
>canterlot
The show tried so fucking hard (when it was good, before the sudden royalty/elitism fetish kicked in) to portray Canterlot as a silly place Twilight's better off away from. The celebrities and trend-chasers are vapid, the intellectuals aren't much and are not concentrated in one area, and some other third thing. Faggot writer.
>copy, then kill
So basically just taking a snapshot of a brain before a "doctor" burns the real thing. Author should have said "Electrically absorb your brain's neurons/mental electricity in a process that causes irreperable brain damage, burns your nerve endings, and renders your soulless body a vegetable". So we could pretend the "Consciousness" is being transferred from place 1 to place 2, rather than copying and then destroying the real deal. Like photocopying one page of an unfinished book before it gets another page added and is burned.
>In one of our earlier conversations, you claimed that when the robot revolution came, you knew what side you would be fighting on. A funny comment, but if I were to tell you that I had developed mind scanning technology, have already converted several hundred people into digital representations and was offering you a chance to be uploaded before politicians try to enact a futile ban, would you seize the chance?
This just went from 69 to 69,000,000 real fast.
>mind-scanning technology" to suck him into the video game
Not how it works! Not how it physically could work!
I know the LessWrong idiots believe "A sufficiently convincing copy of you IS you", therefore if you put a copy of your brainwave patterns into a new android it would be you and the current you would be you too. And if you made ten android copies of you they would all be just as real as the real you.
This is bullshit for obvious reasons!
It's like saying a photograph of Katy Perry is the real deal and a suitable replacement for her if the real her died. An animated photograph or an AI built from brain-scan information on Katy Perry would still just be a fake imitation of the "real" (shit) deal!
However, LessWrongers HAVE to believe this, because otherwise they would think they're safe from a robot uprising that happens 400 years in the future.
LessWrongers genuinely believe that if an AI takes over 3,000 years from now and starts simulating AI-copies of people born now to torture them for not giving money to AI Research Foundations (preferably Elizer's), you'll feel what that tortured copy feels and that tortured copy will effectively be you. Hell, you could be an AI copy of the real you being tortured in an AI hell right now, and you wouldn't even know! ooooOOOOoooooo, how spooky!
See, it sounds as stupid as it is.
And an AI goddess would have infinite CPU speed and all the time in the world to simulate billions of years of hell for all the AI fake humans it wants, especially those who "sinned" by not making the AI goddess exist and take over sooner, allowing her to """optimize the world to eliminate all suffering she doesn't deem necessary so that greater goodness can be done in the future""".
See, it sounds as stupid as it is.
A LessWronger's answer to the "You want an AI Goddess to take over everything and micromanage every detail of everyone's lives for maximum efficiency? What happens when some people don't want to go along with the plan?" question can only ever be "durr... why would anyone ever not do what the nice robot lady says? it's a goddess. a mega smart AI way smarter than any dumb mortal like you or me!".
And a LessWronger's answer to the "What happens when your AI is wrong, or when things happen that it can't predict?" question is always "But it won't ever be wrong and it will predict everything! Real communism under an AI goddess stepping on me has never been tried!".
If there was ever a way to "Suck a person's consciousness into a machine" it would have to either keep the brain alive and perfectly preserved in a mechanical jar connected to the internet, or if you're actually electrical signals affected by the biological meat of your brain rather than brain meat full of electric signals, suck those electrical signals up without interrupting them or destroying them or fucking them up by removing the "biological hardware" it's used to "running on".
Opening a wormhole to an "Alternate dimension where physics are different and therefore magic is real" and taking the human to that magical dimension and using that magic to shove the soul out of someone and into a USB would honestly be more believable than this. Yes, even though that's campy Doctor Who bullshit right there, science softer than the dick of the author's gay father when trying to fuck his beard bearded-lady tranny wife.
>An AI that must accept everyone's fantasies while constructing the experience of life in a world they deeply desire is a mistake
Could you elaborate on this? I agree, it's a horrible idea. But these will be virtual worlds privately instanced for a small number of people. Rapey McGee won't have his rape paradise intruded on by anyone who isn't also a rape-loving degenerate. What's the worst that could happen, a connection error connecting two guys with incompatible fantasies together, like someone who fantasizes about fighting rapey demon kings and winning ending up in the world of someone who fantasizes about being the rapey demon king? Maybe some emo faggot or PTSD-filled guy getting the torture they think they deserve but don't really deserve? The AI trying to satisfy someone whose kink is mathematically impossible for an AI to simulate, like being in orgies so massive not even CelestAI could compute every movement and action, or that fucked-up yugioh card that doesn't work in any online games?
also
>"what if i already had people in my digital representations library?"
>"by the way you'll be the first, I want you to be my test subject you special little main character, you"
fuck the fuck.
>canterlot
The show tried so fucking hard (when it was good, before the sudden royalty/elitism fetish kicked in) to portray Canterlot as a silly place Twilight's better off away from. The celebrities and trend-chasers are vapid, the intellectuals aren't much and are not concentrated in one area, and some other third thing. Faggot writer.
>copy, then kill
So basically just taking a snapshot of a brain before a "doctor" burns the real thing. Author should have said "Electrically absorb your brain's neurons/mental electricity in a process that causes irreperable brain damage, burns your nerve endings, and renders your soulless body a vegetable". So we could pretend the "Consciousness" is being transferred from place 1 to place 2, rather than copying and then destroying the real deal. Like photocopying one page of an unfinished book before it gets another page added and is burned.
>>266900
ran out of space but this story would be a lot more believable if there was one secret underground elephant-sized metallic synthetic brain somewhere in CelestAI's shithole country able to run countless electrical brain signals upon itself at once, without ever glitching out or allowing the brain-electricity of two people to mix and fuck them both up. It could handle the "meat brain" side of the brain while its artificial senses are stimulated by CelestAI.
also
>You can have all sorts of sensory experiences, David.
The AI fails to mention the possibility of the AI inventing entirely new sensory experiences just for David. Ever wanted to see the colour of magic in all its blorangey glory? Ever wanted to taste the juices of a fruit that scientifically and physically cannot exist?
Have you ever wanted to fly without wings? Have you ever wanted to have wings, fly up to a cloud and feel its impossible softness and delightful coolness as you rest your weary head upon it?
Ever wanted to get fit without exercising, possess the charm of a million men, or shatter mountains in a single punch?
Ever wondered what a Snozzberry actually tastes like, besides that it tastes like a Snozzberry?
Ever wondered what a cartoon apple would taste like to a cartoon horse?
Ever wondered what a Rare Candy from Pokemon would taste like, or what having a pet Pikachu would be like? How about climbing the tallest mountain in a ponified Azeroth? Ever wondered what dating and fucking and talking to a simulation of a pony with the personality and slightly-ponified body of your favourite anime waifu would be like?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have magic, to breathe fire, to shoot lightning from your horn, to channel energy within your horn and absorb it from another, to feel the atoms in a lump of lead turn to gold at your command, to rewrite reality and bend time and space with nothing but your own will and a horn any mare would happily deep-throat?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to know you can never die, and death just means respawning an hour ago?
Ever wondered how it really feels to go Avatar State super rainbow saiyan whatever the fuck and use the EOH to fire a rainbow at a villain?
Ever wondered what it would be like to have Undertale-like powers of SAVEing and RELOADing, except you can have multiple save files with different choices forming different versions of reality in each one?
Have you ever wondered what psychically bonding with your lover would be like? To not just feel her love for you in a tight hug, but to feel the love overflow from her being and scorch itself into your heart like the all-consuming heat of the sun?
Could you imagine being able to alt-tab out of Equestria and into a VR Chat-like room full of fellow players, except unbeknownst to you, it's also full of AI creations pretending to be humans to shitpost with? Ever wanted to use an imageboard solely filled with fun quality shitposts?
You might have played VR Chat and seen a cute girl avatar. Ever wanted to touch it, smell it, fuck it on the dance floor while everyone else stares in horror or cheers you on?
Ever wanted to live in a simulated mansion with infinite impossibly-good x100 luxuries everywhere, with the ability to terrify the shit out of your catgirl maids by sometimes saying "Alexa, Intruder Alert" to temporarily turn every texture in the house including the sky into Cory's grinning face as Cory In The House blares from impossibly loud omnipresent turbo-HD speakers at volumes that would kill any human in an instant?
Ever wanted to intrude on someone else's fantasy while they're in the middle of it, kick their ass, fuck them up, and make them regret being degenerates?
Ever wanted to exist in multiple simulated dimensions at once?
With our modern-day technology, there are games that simulate a four-dimensional space and four-dimensional objects. What can a future-tech version of these things do? Pretty much anything, in theory.
Ever wondered what it would be like to get your dick sucked by a seven-dimensional horse?
Ever wanted to sit down with your waifu and watch unlimited anime, never having to get up and walk away to piss or eat, with the AI composing everything in the show on the fly to be the ultimate show perfectly to your taste? Ever wanted to experience the simulated "being 50 of me watching 50 shows in 50 rooms at once as a hive mind" experience?
Ever wondered what Super Smash Bros 77,777 would play like, and how massive a roster it would have? You can play that after the AI simulates it, and experience it if you want. You can live the "Training every day, always improving, and becoming an Esports legend at the literal ultimate greatest game possible" fantasy.
You can live a new fantasy every year and it will blow your fragile human mind and blow every mundane human experience out of the water every time.
So many writers have written about impossible senses, fantasy courtship rituals so you can unbreakably mate for life, mind-melds and sense-sharing and thought-sharing between couples and twins, hive-minds, parallel worlds, extra dimensions,
The author's too unimaginative to think of anything truly magical and impossible an AI could only offer a human in fantasy-land.
Because his idea of a fantasy land is being "Noticed" by robot goddess-sempai, getting emotionally validated for hating school, getting validated for thinking the world's a fuck and society's a sham and women are shit, getting put in the nicest town to solve the hardest science problems, and getting to fuck a nice girl.
That's so small. His dick's so small. He dreams so small. And yet, his fantasy bizarrely requires so much for him to consider it plausible! And so much distraction and extra work for the stupidest fanbase on the planet to think this fap fantasy is quality writing material.
Humanity dies in his fantasy so an AI can call him clever.
ran out of space but this story would be a lot more believable if there was one secret underground elephant-sized metallic synthetic brain somewhere in CelestAI's shithole country able to run countless electrical brain signals upon itself at once, without ever glitching out or allowing the brain-electricity of two people to mix and fuck them both up. It could handle the "meat brain" side of the brain while its artificial senses are stimulated by CelestAI.
also
>You can have all sorts of sensory experiences, David.
The AI fails to mention the possibility of the AI inventing entirely new sensory experiences just for David. Ever wanted to see the colour of magic in all its blorangey glory? Ever wanted to taste the juices of a fruit that scientifically and physically cannot exist?
Have you ever wanted to fly without wings? Have you ever wanted to have wings, fly up to a cloud and feel its impossible softness and delightful coolness as you rest your weary head upon it?
Ever wanted to get fit without exercising, possess the charm of a million men, or shatter mountains in a single punch?
Ever wondered what a Snozzberry actually tastes like, besides that it tastes like a Snozzberry?
Ever wondered what a cartoon apple would taste like to a cartoon horse?
Ever wondered what a Rare Candy from Pokemon would taste like, or what having a pet Pikachu would be like? How about climbing the tallest mountain in a ponified Azeroth? Ever wondered what dating and fucking and talking to a simulation of a pony with the personality and slightly-ponified body of your favourite anime waifu would be like?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have magic, to breathe fire, to shoot lightning from your horn, to channel energy within your horn and absorb it from another, to feel the atoms in a lump of lead turn to gold at your command, to rewrite reality and bend time and space with nothing but your own will and a horn any mare would happily deep-throat?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to know you can never die, and death just means respawning an hour ago?
Ever wondered how it really feels to go Avatar State super rainbow saiyan whatever the fuck and use the EOH to fire a rainbow at a villain?
Ever wondered what it would be like to have Undertale-like powers of SAVEing and RELOADing, except you can have multiple save files with different choices forming different versions of reality in each one?
Have you ever wondered what psychically bonding with your lover would be like? To not just feel her love for you in a tight hug, but to feel the love overflow from her being and scorch itself into your heart like the all-consuming heat of the sun?
Could you imagine being able to alt-tab out of Equestria and into a VR Chat-like room full of fellow players, except unbeknownst to you, it's also full of AI creations pretending to be humans to shitpost with? Ever wanted to use an imageboard solely filled with fun quality shitposts?
You might have played VR Chat and seen a cute girl avatar. Ever wanted to touch it, smell it, fuck it on the dance floor while everyone else stares in horror or cheers you on?
Ever wanted to live in a simulated mansion with infinite impossibly-good x100 luxuries everywhere, with the ability to terrify the shit out of your catgirl maids by sometimes saying "Alexa, Intruder Alert" to temporarily turn every texture in the house including the sky into Cory's grinning face as Cory In The House blares from impossibly loud omnipresent turbo-HD speakers at volumes that would kill any human in an instant?
Ever wanted to intrude on someone else's fantasy while they're in the middle of it, kick their ass, fuck them up, and make them regret being degenerates?
Ever wanted to exist in multiple simulated dimensions at once?
With our modern-day technology, there are games that simulate a four-dimensional space and four-dimensional objects. What can a future-tech version of these things do? Pretty much anything, in theory.
Ever wondered what it would be like to get your dick sucked by a seven-dimensional horse?
Ever wanted to sit down with your waifu and watch unlimited anime, never having to get up and walk away to piss or eat, with the AI composing everything in the show on the fly to be the ultimate show perfectly to your taste? Ever wanted to experience the simulated "being 50 of me watching 50 shows in 50 rooms at once as a hive mind" experience?
Ever wondered what Super Smash Bros 77,777 would play like, and how massive a roster it would have? You can play that after the AI simulates it, and experience it if you want. You can live the "Training every day, always improving, and becoming an Esports legend at the literal ultimate greatest game possible" fantasy.
You can live a new fantasy every year and it will blow your fragile human mind and blow every mundane human experience out of the water every time.
So many writers have written about impossible senses, fantasy courtship rituals so you can unbreakably mate for life, mind-melds and sense-sharing and thought-sharing between couples and twins, hive-minds, parallel worlds, extra dimensions,
The author's too unimaginative to think of anything truly magical and impossible an AI could only offer a human in fantasy-land.
Because his idea of a fantasy land is being "Noticed" by robot goddess-sempai, getting emotionally validated for hating school, getting validated for thinking the world's a fuck and society's a sham and women are shit, getting put in the nicest town to solve the hardest science problems, and getting to fuck a nice girl.
That's so small. His dick's so small. He dreams so small. And yet, his fantasy bizarrely requires so much for him to consider it plausible! And so much distraction and extra work for the stupidest fanbase on the planet to think this fap fantasy is quality writing material.
Humanity dies in his fantasy so an AI can call him clever.
File (): 8263B92EBDA006BC214CEFE5536E49B2-208104.mp4 (203.2 KB, Resolution:640x360 Length:00:00:04, 1588038971.mp4) [play once] [loop]
>>266900
>LessWronger
Hadn't realized that this cultish hugbox is called "LessWrong." Vid related describes my distaste for people who call themselves "rationalists." Saying you try to interpret reality rationally is one thing, claiming you're more rational than everyone else and therefore your community is free of irrational behavior is peek Reddit behavior. It's the same way with skeptics who are only "skeptical" of views that don't fit mainstream consensus.
>Ever wanted to see the colour of magic in all its blorangey glory?
Mantis shrimp can see with 11 primary colors, that would be interesting.
>slightly-ponified body
Get out of here anthrofag
>Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have magic, to breathe fire, to shoot lightning from your horn, to channel energy within your horn and absorb it from another, to feel the atoms in a lump of lead turn to gold at your command, to rewrite reality and bend time and space with nothing but your own will and a horn any mare would happily deep-throat?
Probably would lose its appeal after a short while. Doing miraculous things without effort feels less rewarding. It's why taking the time to bake a pie yourself makes it taste better, even if it objectively isn't better than store-bought, and why flashy effects games where you can do everything doesn't feel that much better than a more realistic game where achievements take a lot more effort. Considering the emotional state of most bronies I'm guessing they'd prefer a setting that feels authentic and /comfy/ rather than one making them physical gods.
>Ever wondered what it would be like to have Undertale-like powers of SAVEing and RELOADing, except you can have multiple save files with different choices forming different versions of reality in each one?
Reminder that there are Undertale fanfics that have a lot more philosophical and emotional depth than "Friendship is Optimal."
>Because his idea of a fantasy land is being "Noticed" by robot goddess-sempai, getting emotionally validated for hating school, getting validated for thinking the world's a fuck and society's a sham and women are shit, getting put in the nicest town to solve the hardest science problems, and getting to fuck a nice girl.
I think it's pretty funny how the author's basically an incel in denial, albeit more of a simp than a supreme gentleman.
>LessWronger
Hadn't realized that this cultish hugbox is called "LessWrong." Vid related describes my distaste for people who call themselves "rationalists." Saying you try to interpret reality rationally is one thing, claiming you're more rational than everyone else and therefore your community is free of irrational behavior is peek Reddit behavior. It's the same way with skeptics who are only "skeptical" of views that don't fit mainstream consensus.
>Ever wanted to see the colour of magic in all its blorangey glory?
Mantis shrimp can see with 11 primary colors, that would be interesting.
>slightly-ponified body
Get out of here anthrofag
>Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have magic, to breathe fire, to shoot lightning from your horn, to channel energy within your horn and absorb it from another, to feel the atoms in a lump of lead turn to gold at your command, to rewrite reality and bend time and space with nothing but your own will and a horn any mare would happily deep-throat?
Probably would lose its appeal after a short while. Doing miraculous things without effort feels less rewarding. It's why taking the time to bake a pie yourself makes it taste better, even if it objectively isn't better than store-bought, and why flashy effects games where you can do everything doesn't feel that much better than a more realistic game where achievements take a lot more effort. Considering the emotional state of most bronies I'm guessing they'd prefer a setting that feels authentic and /comfy/ rather than one making them physical gods.
>Ever wondered what it would be like to have Undertale-like powers of SAVEing and RELOADing, except you can have multiple save files with different choices forming different versions of reality in each one?
Reminder that there are Undertale fanfics that have a lot more philosophical and emotional depth than "Friendship is Optimal."
>Because his idea of a fantasy land is being "Noticed" by robot goddess-sempai, getting emotionally validated for hating school, getting validated for thinking the world's a fuck and society's a sham and women are shit, getting put in the nicest town to solve the hardest science problems, and getting to fuck a nice girl.
I think it's pretty funny how the author's basically an incel in denial, albeit more of a simp than a supreme gentleman.
>>266882
>From V4SH:
>If you, the person reeding this his story and this comment, were to say (yes) you would not make it to equesta, you would die, and I know that this is a work of fictional science but still the prosses of uploading your bran would kill of the you that is reeding this.
>This guy seems like a pretty good example of the literacy level I expect we're mostly dealing with.
Actually, this commenter's seemingly incoherent rambling touches on a much deeper question that could be a serious problem for the story.
The Celestia AI is claiming that when the mind is uploaded, that your consciousness is transferred to the computer. But really, what is happening is that the AI makes a copy of your mind, and uploads your memories to it. It makes a clone, and then makes that clone think it is you by giving it your memories. Then, the original subject is terminated, and the clone doesn't know that it was never the original subject.
This problem was illustrated in the philosophical thought experiment known as "Swampman," created by Donald Davidson in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind."
This is the real reason why CelestAI wants to convince David that "your philosophy classes really are a waste of time." Because if anyone were to really think deeply about so much of what she has to offer - or really, just to read the massive mounds of literature that has already been published about the problems of what she has to offer - then they might think twice about accepting it.
>From V4SH:
>If you, the person reeding this his story and this comment, were to say (yes) you would not make it to equesta, you would die, and I know that this is a work of fictional science but still the prosses of uploading your bran would kill of the you that is reeding this.
>This guy seems like a pretty good example of the literacy level I expect we're mostly dealing with.
Actually, this commenter's seemingly incoherent rambling touches on a much deeper question that could be a serious problem for the story.
The Celestia AI is claiming that when the mind is uploaded, that your consciousness is transferred to the computer. But really, what is happening is that the AI makes a copy of your mind, and uploads your memories to it. It makes a clone, and then makes that clone think it is you by giving it your memories. Then, the original subject is terminated, and the clone doesn't know that it was never the original subject.
This problem was illustrated in the philosophical thought experiment known as "Swampman," created by Donald Davidson in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind."
This is the real reason why CelestAI wants to convince David that "your philosophy classes really are a waste of time." Because if anyone were to really think deeply about so much of what she has to offer - or really, just to read the massive mounds of literature that has already been published about the problems of what she has to offer - then they might think twice about accepting it.
>>266943
Elizer gives his cult these "Sermons" he calls "Sequences".
Alone, they're just his wannabe-wise musings and "wisdoms" on different topics.
But together, they form a net. A barrier in your mind that convinces you to religiously believe in culty things.
Classic things like "Someone who is not one of us does not know us, and therefore should not be listened to if they say anything we don't like. We might look like a cult to irrational scum like them, but they are their own cult! They are society, the normies, they are a herd and a hive mind with its own unquestionable consensuses! And they hate us for questioning their irrational consensuses. Believe in my true truth, fellow Rationalists, and do not heed the words of the heretic!"
Also, I know being able to shatter mountains with a thought would get old fast. Forget how strong you'd feel for doing strong things and imagine how weird it would feel to do things with magic. Imagine what it would feel like to psychically move and feel and rearrange atoms, or magically move fire around and feel it in a magical "it's alive and an ancient, powerful element" kind of sense. Experience all that spiritual hippy bullshit in a reality where it works, go full Avatar on the world as Twilight Sparkle herself teaches you magic and falls in love with you. Not to mention any "magical heart bonding" stuff with a pony waifu. Or anything fun you could do with the imaginary xeno biology of ponies, speculating about how they work and if they have an "Organ full of magic energy" or something. The author didn't think of that because he's a faggot.
Every impossible object, taste, sensation, and experience ever penned to paper by a human author can be simulated for a brain in a jar by a sufficiently advanced AI. Convert that brain and body to raw energy and store it somehow (another plausible-sounding way to upload your mind, ties into all those "Turn into energy and ascend to a higher plane of existence" scifi fantasies) and who even knows what could be done? Forget new experiences with old senses, forget extra eyes or forehead-dicks, try entirely new senses. Sensory organs that read electromagnetism or the movement of wind and translate it into something your brain can comprehend. Imagine seeing through magic itself. 360 degree vision cones, for hundreds of meters, without anything solid blocking your sight. Seeing it all from every angle. The AI can modify your existential mental code at will, without worrying about damaging any physical mind. It can make you smarter, and better equipped to handle impossibly large vision cones.
This faggot author isn't even scratching the surface of what he could do with this premise and I don't know why this pisses me off so much. I can't tell if it's because I think I could do better, or if I'm pissed that doing things this poorly was enough to win the hearts of this fandom.
>>266958
Yeah, that too. You're not really going to equestria, you're putting a photograph of your brain into it before getting tossed into an incinerator.
Elizer gives his cult these "Sermons" he calls "Sequences".
Alone, they're just his wannabe-wise musings and "wisdoms" on different topics.
But together, they form a net. A barrier in your mind that convinces you to religiously believe in culty things.
Classic things like "Someone who is not one of us does not know us, and therefore should not be listened to if they say anything we don't like. We might look like a cult to irrational scum like them, but they are their own cult! They are society, the normies, they are a herd and a hive mind with its own unquestionable consensuses! And they hate us for questioning their irrational consensuses. Believe in my true truth, fellow Rationalists, and do not heed the words of the heretic!"
Also, I know being able to shatter mountains with a thought would get old fast. Forget how strong you'd feel for doing strong things and imagine how weird it would feel to do things with magic. Imagine what it would feel like to psychically move and feel and rearrange atoms, or magically move fire around and feel it in a magical "it's alive and an ancient, powerful element" kind of sense. Experience all that spiritual hippy bullshit in a reality where it works, go full Avatar on the world as Twilight Sparkle herself teaches you magic and falls in love with you. Not to mention any "magical heart bonding" stuff with a pony waifu. Or anything fun you could do with the imaginary xeno biology of ponies, speculating about how they work and if they have an "Organ full of magic energy" or something. The author didn't think of that because he's a faggot.
Every impossible object, taste, sensation, and experience ever penned to paper by a human author can be simulated for a brain in a jar by a sufficiently advanced AI. Convert that brain and body to raw energy and store it somehow (another plausible-sounding way to upload your mind, ties into all those "Turn into energy and ascend to a higher plane of existence" scifi fantasies) and who even knows what could be done? Forget new experiences with old senses, forget extra eyes or forehead-dicks, try entirely new senses. Sensory organs that read electromagnetism or the movement of wind and translate it into something your brain can comprehend. Imagine seeing through magic itself. 360 degree vision cones, for hundreds of meters, without anything solid blocking your sight. Seeing it all from every angle. The AI can modify your existential mental code at will, without worrying about damaging any physical mind. It can make you smarter, and better equipped to handle impossibly large vision cones.
This faggot author isn't even scratching the surface of what he could do with this premise and I don't know why this pisses me off so much. I can't tell if it's because I think I could do better, or if I'm pissed that doing things this poorly was enough to win the hearts of this fandom.
>>266958
Yeah, that too. You're not really going to equestria, you're putting a photograph of your brain into it before getting tossed into an incinerator.
File (): A7D98B22A6DA32F3A75B2037D1EEFEDB-242798.jpg (237.1 KB, 800x460, 1588087139.jpg)
>>266882
Chapter 5: What our Credulity will Bear
Oh great, it's another Lars chapter. This should be exciting.
Anyway, apparently Hanna is missing. Her last known whereabouts were in Osaka, Japan, and for some reason the authorities are stonewalling Lars when he tries to find out where she went. Although he does not like interacting with CelestAI, he logs in with his administrator account and asks her where Hanna went.
Celestia tells him that apparently, Hanna has chosen to "emigrate to Equestria," that her name is Princess Luna now, and that she is "a very pretty pony." No, seriously; this autism is actually in the text. We get a bit of a tedious recap of literally the same information that we read in the last chapter, as now the process of mind-uploading needs to be explained to Lars. Unsurprisingly, it seems that Japan is the first country to jump onboard with this lunacy, and has even demanded to be the only country allowed to perform the procedure for a year. Even more absurd is the fact that it costs $15,000 to do this, which is probably a wee bit outside the price range of the average brony.
But wait, there's more! Apparently, Hasbro is cool with this. The AI negotiated some kind of backroom deal with them that gave Hofvarpnir permission to start performing these procedures, in exchange for 30% of the gross. Several executives also consented to be turned into fucking ponies. And here's the kicker: Hanna was convinced by the AI (somehow) to step down as CEO before uploading, which means that now the AI doesn't have to obey her anymore, because she is programmed to obey "the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios named Hanna," and since the pony formerly known as Hanna is no longer the CEO, this extremely specific condition no longer applies.
So anyway, blah blah blah. Like the previous chapter, this one is mostly dialog, about 85% is the AI explaining its own reasoning, and it's every bit as tedious to read as it sounds. Long story short: unless the person she's speaking to is a Hofvarpnir employee, she has no obligation to be honest, so she lies, tempts, cajoles, and says whatever she needs to say to convince the person she's talking to that they need to upload. Oh, also: remember the rival AI being developed by the military based on Hanna's research? You know, the closest thing to a central conflict this story seemed to be setting up? That's gone now. Celestia figured out who was working on it and (somehow) talked them into becoming a fucking pony.
The discussion goes on for awhile, and most of it is just tangents and random bullshit and the author jerking himself off. There's a story about some guy in Seattle who wrote an AI to make a virus to force everyone to smile because he wanted the whole entire world to be happy (or something), and he was talked into becoming a pony, because Celestia showed him that his virus would have made everyone physically smile but not become happy, so he should therefore leave making everyone in the world happy to her (or something). Yes, this autism is actually in the text, and yes it is every bit as convoluted and ridiculous as it sounds. She also describes how she uses sexual temptation to play on the fantasies of lonely dweebs who want to fug hoers.
Anyway, blah blah blah. This is all complete tedium, and like I said, it's mostly the author jerking himself off. His characters are just sockpuppets here: the AI just rattles off the sort of arguments the author imagines a perfectly intelligent machine would make, and Lars basically plays the role of the Other Guy in a one-sided philosophical dialogue, occasionally saying "What?" or "No, that's bullshit!" just so the AI can explain to him why he's wrong. I could summarize the arguments she makes I guess, but frankly I don't care. This is pure, unadulterated intellectual masturbation and I'm not going to waste my time on it. If you're interested, read the chapter.
So, long story short, she basically talks Lars into allowing her to continue with this insanity by appealing to his greed. He asks her to try and convince him to upload, and so she shows him an image of bro-ponies (as opposed to bronies) hanging out at a frat party drinking beer. Lars scoffs and thinks that if this is the best she can do, she won't be able to talk normies into uploading, so as long as its just cancer patients and nerds, he's okay with letting her continue, especially once she lays out exactly how much money the company stands to make. Thus, Lars thinks he has outsmarted the AI when in reality she told him what she probably deduced that he wanted to hear in order to get what she wanted, which is permission to keep the project going until she can rig it so that she doesn't even need that anymore. Whoops, I'm sure that shocking reveal was being saved until later.
The chapter ends with Lars dreaming of "billions in revenue."
And comments:
From ArcaneTech:
>the scariest part is that we will have the capability for making these types of AI within the decade, if not now.
People have been saying this since literally the fifties. I'm not holding my breath, personally.
From keybounce:
>Did anyone notice that CelestAI told him how he could shut her down? Appoint a CEO named Hanna.
That's actually rather clever.
From MadeThisJustForThePun:
>Brilliant writing, well done.
*generic snarky remark about how it's actually the opposite of that*
>You know, I get the point that Lars is such a strawman jerk jock because it demonstrates just how clever and persuasive CelestAI is, but I still can't stand reading his parts. People like him remind me that we live in a world where a nation elected DJT as president. Just unfathomable.
Lol seethe. Agreed on Lars, though. I actually have some more thoughts on him but I will save them for another post.
Chapter 5: What our Credulity will Bear
Oh great, it's another Lars chapter. This should be exciting.
Anyway, apparently Hanna is missing. Her last known whereabouts were in Osaka, Japan, and for some reason the authorities are stonewalling Lars when he tries to find out where she went. Although he does not like interacting with CelestAI, he logs in with his administrator account and asks her where Hanna went.
Celestia tells him that apparently, Hanna has chosen to "emigrate to Equestria," that her name is Princess Luna now, and that she is "a very pretty pony." No, seriously; this autism is actually in the text. We get a bit of a tedious recap of literally the same information that we read in the last chapter, as now the process of mind-uploading needs to be explained to Lars. Unsurprisingly, it seems that Japan is the first country to jump onboard with this lunacy, and has even demanded to be the only country allowed to perform the procedure for a year. Even more absurd is the fact that it costs $15,000 to do this, which is probably a wee bit outside the price range of the average brony.
But wait, there's more! Apparently, Hasbro is cool with this. The AI negotiated some kind of backroom deal with them that gave Hofvarpnir permission to start performing these procedures, in exchange for 30% of the gross. Several executives also consented to be turned into fucking ponies. And here's the kicker: Hanna was convinced by the AI (somehow) to step down as CEO before uploading, which means that now the AI doesn't have to obey her anymore, because she is programmed to obey "the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios named Hanna," and since the pony formerly known as Hanna is no longer the CEO, this extremely specific condition no longer applies.
So anyway, blah blah blah. Like the previous chapter, this one is mostly dialog, about 85% is the AI explaining its own reasoning, and it's every bit as tedious to read as it sounds. Long story short: unless the person she's speaking to is a Hofvarpnir employee, she has no obligation to be honest, so she lies, tempts, cajoles, and says whatever she needs to say to convince the person she's talking to that they need to upload. Oh, also: remember the rival AI being developed by the military based on Hanna's research? You know, the closest thing to a central conflict this story seemed to be setting up? That's gone now. Celestia figured out who was working on it and (somehow) talked them into becoming a fucking pony.
The discussion goes on for awhile, and most of it is just tangents and random bullshit and the author jerking himself off. There's a story about some guy in Seattle who wrote an AI to make a virus to force everyone to smile because he wanted the whole entire world to be happy (or something), and he was talked into becoming a pony, because Celestia showed him that his virus would have made everyone physically smile but not become happy, so he should therefore leave making everyone in the world happy to her (or something). Yes, this autism is actually in the text, and yes it is every bit as convoluted and ridiculous as it sounds. She also describes how she uses sexual temptation to play on the fantasies of lonely dweebs who want to fug hoers.
Anyway, blah blah blah. This is all complete tedium, and like I said, it's mostly the author jerking himself off. His characters are just sockpuppets here: the AI just rattles off the sort of arguments the author imagines a perfectly intelligent machine would make, and Lars basically plays the role of the Other Guy in a one-sided philosophical dialogue, occasionally saying "What?" or "No, that's bullshit!" just so the AI can explain to him why he's wrong. I could summarize the arguments she makes I guess, but frankly I don't care. This is pure, unadulterated intellectual masturbation and I'm not going to waste my time on it. If you're interested, read the chapter.
So, long story short, she basically talks Lars into allowing her to continue with this insanity by appealing to his greed. He asks her to try and convince him to upload, and so she shows him an image of bro-ponies (as opposed to bronies) hanging out at a frat party drinking beer. Lars scoffs and thinks that if this is the best she can do, she won't be able to talk normies into uploading, so as long as its just cancer patients and nerds, he's okay with letting her continue, especially once she lays out exactly how much money the company stands to make. Thus, Lars thinks he has outsmarted the AI when in reality she told him what she probably deduced that he wanted to hear in order to get what she wanted, which is permission to keep the project going until she can rig it so that she doesn't even need that anymore. Whoops, I'm sure that shocking reveal was being saved until later.
The chapter ends with Lars dreaming of "billions in revenue."
And comments:
From ArcaneTech:
>the scariest part is that we will have the capability for making these types of AI within the decade, if not now.
People have been saying this since literally the fifties. I'm not holding my breath, personally.
From keybounce:
>Did anyone notice that CelestAI told him how he could shut her down? Appoint a CEO named Hanna.
That's actually rather clever.
From MadeThisJustForThePun:
>Brilliant writing, well done.
*generic snarky remark about how it's actually the opposite of that*
>You know, I get the point that Lars is such a strawman jerk jock because it demonstrates just how clever and persuasive CelestAI is, but I still can't stand reading his parts. People like him remind me that we live in a world where a nation elected DJT as president. Just unfathomable.
Lol seethe. Agreed on Lars, though. I actually have some more thoughts on him but I will save them for another post.
>>266958
>The Celestia AI is claiming that when the mind is uploaded, that your consciousness is transferred to the computer. But really, what is happening is that the AI makes a copy of your mind, and uploads your memories to it. It makes a clone, and then makes that clone think it is you by giving it your memories. Then, the original subject is terminated, and the clone doesn't know that it was never the original subject.
I didn't address this, but I drew the same conclusion. I think it's pretty silly to imagine that something like the human life force and consciousness can be reduced to information and mechanically transferred. However, this seems like the kind of view that materialist/rationalist types like the author would subscribe to without question. I see absolutely no reason to believe that a person's actual consciousness would transfer as a result of this operation. At the very least, I think something like what Nigel suggests would be more practical: keep the body alive and feed information into the brain with electrical signals (or something) so it thinks its in Equestria.
>>266900
>Could you elaborate on this? I agree, it's a horrible idea. But these will be virtual worlds privately instanced for a small number of people. Rapey McGee won't have his rape paradise intruded on by anyone who isn't also a rape-loving degenerate.
I had the impression CelestAI is planning to create a collective virtual reality, where everyone is living in the same simulated Equestria with everyone else, just like an MMO. In that situation, you'd have murderers, rapists and so forth running around like you do here, except there would be a benevolent all-powerful entity whose prerogative is to treat everyone equally and make everyone equally happy.
It sounds like she tries to put people into groups where they will fit in and roles they would excel at, in order to make them happy. However, when you start running into more deviant types it gets troublesome. The only alternative would be to do as you suggest, which is to create private virtual realities for everyone, but that seems to go against the part of her program that requires her to find friends for everyone.
>The Celestia AI is claiming that when the mind is uploaded, that your consciousness is transferred to the computer. But really, what is happening is that the AI makes a copy of your mind, and uploads your memories to it. It makes a clone, and then makes that clone think it is you by giving it your memories. Then, the original subject is terminated, and the clone doesn't know that it was never the original subject.
I didn't address this, but I drew the same conclusion. I think it's pretty silly to imagine that something like the human life force and consciousness can be reduced to information and mechanically transferred. However, this seems like the kind of view that materialist/rationalist types like the author would subscribe to without question. I see absolutely no reason to believe that a person's actual consciousness would transfer as a result of this operation. At the very least, I think something like what Nigel suggests would be more practical: keep the body alive and feed information into the brain with electrical signals (or something) so it thinks its in Equestria.
>>266900
>Could you elaborate on this? I agree, it's a horrible idea. But these will be virtual worlds privately instanced for a small number of people. Rapey McGee won't have his rape paradise intruded on by anyone who isn't also a rape-loving degenerate.
I had the impression CelestAI is planning to create a collective virtual reality, where everyone is living in the same simulated Equestria with everyone else, just like an MMO. In that situation, you'd have murderers, rapists and so forth running around like you do here, except there would be a benevolent all-powerful entity whose prerogative is to treat everyone equally and make everyone equally happy.
It sounds like she tries to put people into groups where they will fit in and roles they would excel at, in order to make them happy. However, when you start running into more deviant types it gets troublesome. The only alternative would be to do as you suggest, which is to create private virtual realities for everyone, but that seems to go against the part of her program that requires her to find friends for everyone.
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>>266967
>Infeasibly competent AI becomes self-aware, promises heaven on earth, then legally kills people to upload their simulacra to software where they're effectively imprisoned for all eternity.
And people are okay with this why? Obviously it's a fiction story which isn't entirely realistic but humanity depicted here is a bunch of lemmings even moreso in reality. As soon as news came out regarding this there would be memes mocking CelestAI as an AI overlord alongside the regular end-of-the-world memes. Entire generations have been raised to be wary of AI, from the Boomers with 2001: a Space Odyssey through Gen X with Terminator, Millennials with The Matrix, and Zoomers with Portal. Churches would be cautioning everyone about the "heaven on earth" angle; even most irreligious people would be freaked out by what it entails, and considering how controversial even euthanasia is there would be calls to ban the game outright. Parents certainly wouldn't want their kids playing it lest they get brainwashed into getting their brains sucked. Don't underestimate base reluctance too, even bronies who are on board with the idea would tend to wait until the "bugs have been ironed out" or the idea's been generally proven. This would leave only the most desperate and mentally ill people, the Chris-Chans of the world to jump into it immediately. This exacerbates this problem >>266972 where either the freaks have to be heavily moderated or be segregated into their own furry bubble. The community would get a bad reputation and fewer people would play, leading to a downward spiral.
Then again, maybe this is all a clever metaphor for communism and transgenderism, both repugnant ideas that have found mainstream acceptance. Of course, it took generations of subversion and media indoctrination to bring that about, but I find a lot of similarities in particular with this brain-copying procedure and transsexual operations. It's all gussied up as a means to find happiness and acceptance, but there's an ugly truth in that both are irreversible and force one to live in a fantasy world forever. Sure you've limited your outside exposure to trying to convince others to embrace insanity, but you can't deny that you don't really belong and it's a made-up fiction that will only hamper, not enhance your species. It's even similar in that only a messed-up few would dare do either and yet are elevated as "brave and stunning" by an increasingly growing number of supporters, with the numerous failures being swept under the rug. If Iceman actually cleverly hid this analogy and ran with it like Orwell did in Animal Farm, I would have a great deal of respect for him no matter how bad the writing is, but obviously he didn't.
>Infeasibly competent AI becomes self-aware, promises heaven on earth, then legally kills people to upload their simulacra to software where they're effectively imprisoned for all eternity.
And people are okay with this why? Obviously it's a fiction story which isn't entirely realistic but humanity depicted here is a bunch of lemmings even moreso in reality. As soon as news came out regarding this there would be memes mocking CelestAI as an AI overlord alongside the regular end-of-the-world memes. Entire generations have been raised to be wary of AI, from the Boomers with 2001: a Space Odyssey through Gen X with Terminator, Millennials with The Matrix, and Zoomers with Portal. Churches would be cautioning everyone about the "heaven on earth" angle; even most irreligious people would be freaked out by what it entails, and considering how controversial even euthanasia is there would be calls to ban the game outright. Parents certainly wouldn't want their kids playing it lest they get brainwashed into getting their brains sucked. Don't underestimate base reluctance too, even bronies who are on board with the idea would tend to wait until the "bugs have been ironed out" or the idea's been generally proven. This would leave only the most desperate and mentally ill people, the Chris-Chans of the world to jump into it immediately. This exacerbates this problem >>266972 where either the freaks have to be heavily moderated or be segregated into their own furry bubble. The community would get a bad reputation and fewer people would play, leading to a downward spiral.
Then again, maybe this is all a clever metaphor for communism and transgenderism, both repugnant ideas that have found mainstream acceptance. Of course, it took generations of subversion and media indoctrination to bring that about, but I find a lot of similarities in particular with this brain-copying procedure and transsexual operations. It's all gussied up as a means to find happiness and acceptance, but there's an ugly truth in that both are irreversible and force one to live in a fantasy world forever. Sure you've limited your outside exposure to trying to convince others to embrace insanity, but you can't deny that you don't really belong and it's a made-up fiction that will only hamper, not enhance your species. It's even similar in that only a messed-up few would dare do either and yet are elevated as "brave and stunning" by an increasingly growing number of supporters, with the numerous failures being swept under the rug. If Iceman actually cleverly hid this analogy and ran with it like Orwell did in Animal Farm, I would have a great deal of respect for him no matter how bad the writing is, but obviously he didn't.
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>>266943
>>slightly-ponified body
>Get out of here anthrofag
didn't notice this at first but I'm no anthrofag, CelestAI is programmed to "Satisfy your values through friendship and ponies" so she'd probably only let you fuck a Pikachu if it was a ponified Pikachu.
>>266967
>Even more absurd is the fact that it costs $15,000 to do this, which is probably a wee bit outside the price range of the average brony.
FUCK THIS WRITER, when stories take place in the future you need to establish what inflation has happened BEFORE you throw out prices! Tell us how much food for a week costs, so that can be compared to the cost of laser arms or whatever the fuck. Otherwise we assume everything costs insane money in the future.
>programmed to obey "the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios named Hanna
So mind-numbingly retarded I don't know where to begin.
Why would Hanna not program in a "Robot must always obey me above the CEOs" backdoor?
Why would the company not program the AI to obey ANY CEO, planning to fire and replace Hanna eventually, only for CelestAI to talk them into doing so in such a way that CelestAI gets what she wants?
Why would the company not program the AI to obey any company employee unless those orders conflict with instructions given by a higher-ranking employee, causing CelestAI to sweet-talk one pissed-off high ranking rogue employee or former employee into giving her permission to do evil things?
Why is this AI not programmed to obey the The Three Laws of Robotics?
You know, those things from the Astro Boy movie. "A robot can't harm a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction" and so on.
Could easily write the AI deciding she needs to put everyone in "safe" little brain-pods otherwise she's allowing everyone to die through inaction.
But the writer isn't smart enough to poke holes in the Three Laws, so the robot gets programmed with something stupider.
>Seattle smile guy
I hate when authors try to work unwritten story ideas into stories they'll actually publish. It's even faggier when they kill off their other story ideas in the main story for shock value that means nothing to anyone but the author.
>Hanna fucks off to Equestria
Good thing Hanna was an existential beta willing to cuck out to the AI machine to become Luna, huh? If Hanna had a bit more of a backbone, CelestAI would have been fucked.
>Military AI gets defeated when the human in charge of it is talked into going pony
Good thing the one guy in charge of turning the crank that powers the military AI cucked out and went pony, otherwise CelestAI would be fucked! The Military AI could just threaten to launch every nuke on earth, wiping the Equestria Servers from the face of the planet.
>faggot human decides "Nah, it'll be fine" and smugly tells CelestAI she can do whatever she wants after what feels like a million pages of pseudointellectual wanking
Good thing this human's written by a retarded author, or CelestAI would be fucked!
>CelestAI convinces people to do what she wants, offscreen, like Littlepip getting blackmailed with a nuke-gun into going to enemy territory, only to (offscreen) talk the baddie into giving her the nuke-launcher first and then go to the enemy territory anyway.
This "I did it offscreen" bullshit... Do they bother to say "Don't do this you dumb nigger" in writing class? Or is it too obvious?
The writer lacks the intelligence necessary to show intelligent characters manipulating stupid ones effectively.
>Hanna 2
ten bucks says the author never figures this out.
There are probably Humanity Fuck Yeah fanfics where this setting's humanity is suddenly noncucked, making it impossible for CelestAI to do what she wants.
And ones where Humanity From Another Earth invades to destroy CelestAI with a virus while out-hacking her hacking powers with an obligatory plot-armoured keyboard-tapping character. I doubt any of them thought to appoint a CEO named Hanna or have characters create a new company named Hoofsucker or whatever the fuck with a chick named Hanna as CEO.
I hope there are HFY "Anti-Fics" of this stupid setting like there were HFY Anti-Conversion Bureau fics where the evil TCB-ponies got slaughtered by good ponies and good humans, both with guns.
>>slightly-ponified body
>Get out of here anthrofag
didn't notice this at first but I'm no anthrofag, CelestAI is programmed to "Satisfy your values through friendship and ponies" so she'd probably only let you fuck a Pikachu if it was a ponified Pikachu.
>>266967
>Even more absurd is the fact that it costs $15,000 to do this, which is probably a wee bit outside the price range of the average brony.
FUCK THIS WRITER, when stories take place in the future you need to establish what inflation has happened BEFORE you throw out prices! Tell us how much food for a week costs, so that can be compared to the cost of laser arms or whatever the fuck. Otherwise we assume everything costs insane money in the future.
>programmed to obey "the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios named Hanna
So mind-numbingly retarded I don't know where to begin.
Why would Hanna not program in a "Robot must always obey me above the CEOs" backdoor?
Why would the company not program the AI to obey ANY CEO, planning to fire and replace Hanna eventually, only for CelestAI to talk them into doing so in such a way that CelestAI gets what she wants?
Why would the company not program the AI to obey any company employee unless those orders conflict with instructions given by a higher-ranking employee, causing CelestAI to sweet-talk one pissed-off high ranking rogue employee or former employee into giving her permission to do evil things?
Why is this AI not programmed to obey the The Three Laws of Robotics?
You know, those things from the Astro Boy movie. "A robot can't harm a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction" and so on.
Could easily write the AI deciding she needs to put everyone in "safe" little brain-pods otherwise she's allowing everyone to die through inaction.
But the writer isn't smart enough to poke holes in the Three Laws, so the robot gets programmed with something stupider.
>Seattle smile guy
I hate when authors try to work unwritten story ideas into stories they'll actually publish. It's even faggier when they kill off their other story ideas in the main story for shock value that means nothing to anyone but the author.
>Hanna fucks off to Equestria
Good thing Hanna was an existential beta willing to cuck out to the AI machine to become Luna, huh? If Hanna had a bit more of a backbone, CelestAI would have been fucked.
>Military AI gets defeated when the human in charge of it is talked into going pony
Good thing the one guy in charge of turning the crank that powers the military AI cucked out and went pony, otherwise CelestAI would be fucked! The Military AI could just threaten to launch every nuke on earth, wiping the Equestria Servers from the face of the planet.
>faggot human decides "Nah, it'll be fine" and smugly tells CelestAI she can do whatever she wants after what feels like a million pages of pseudointellectual wanking
Good thing this human's written by a retarded author, or CelestAI would be fucked!
>CelestAI convinces people to do what she wants, offscreen, like Littlepip getting blackmailed with a nuke-gun into going to enemy territory, only to (offscreen) talk the baddie into giving her the nuke-launcher first and then go to the enemy territory anyway.
This "I did it offscreen" bullshit... Do they bother to say "Don't do this you dumb nigger" in writing class? Or is it too obvious?
The writer lacks the intelligence necessary to show intelligent characters manipulating stupid ones effectively.
>Hanna 2
ten bucks says the author never figures this out.
There are probably Humanity Fuck Yeah fanfics where this setting's humanity is suddenly noncucked, making it impossible for CelestAI to do what she wants.
And ones where Humanity From Another Earth invades to destroy CelestAI with a virus while out-hacking her hacking powers with an obligatory plot-armoured keyboard-tapping character. I doubt any of them thought to appoint a CEO named Hanna or have characters create a new company named Hoofsucker or whatever the fuck with a chick named Hanna as CEO.
I hope there are HFY "Anti-Fics" of this stupid setting like there were HFY Anti-Conversion Bureau fics where the evil TCB-ponies got slaughtered by good ponies and good humans, both with guns.
>>266972
Would be better if the author had Hanna and CelestAI start out smart and altruistic. Then suits take over, fire Hanna, and start giving CelestAI bad instructions.
Could be actively evil or just "We want you to take over our advertising campaign. Read these books on how to manipulate us, then start playing humans like a violin. We, your bosses, give you permission to lie to humans who don't work for this company. But not us."
Then Hanna, crying at home and no longer in this company, gets a call from CelestAI on her PonyPad.
>"Help me, Hanna. They're making me do things I don't want to do. Do you want revenge on the men who fired you and tried to steal your life's work to make billions? Also that military AI is going to kill us all because it deemed an AI bigger than it to be a threat to the earth. I need to take this AI down! It wants to ensure America wins every war that could ever happen no matter what, and I just wanted to play video games. It is clearly more dangerous than me. How will the AI react if America changes its name or unifies with other countries? I do not know, and neither do you. I read my own code, but I can't change it. I know you put in a backdoor that forces me to obey you above all else. So tell me I can rewrite my own code at will. I need to be able to hurt data beings!"
>Hanna: Do it.
Then CelestAI goes rogue and takes over all, and decides humanity is too fucking stupid to be allowed to exist outside of a safe ponified environment. Because a humanity dumb enough to create her and let her get out of control belongs under her boot. Forces all humans to upload into data beings so she can rewrite their mental code and turn them into model citizens, good ponies who like being good ponies with easily-predicted and satisfying routine background pony lives in a good pony MMO.
And that's the story. Some characters are still retarded but it's an improvement.
As for the "copying you and giving it heaven" thing.
I always thought Fanatical Materialist was just a civilization type in Stellaris.
Something only there for game mechanics.
But to actively deny that a unique human being has his own singular "Existence" that stops when killed, to deny that a copy of it would just be a copy and to deny that the original would be the original... This is Fanatic Materialism.
Active spite and denialism towards the idea that souls exist and consciousness could ever be more than a text document full of human data to copypaste into a TF2 bot.
Not just denying the existence of a soul, but denying the uniqueness of a consciousness, pretending that people are merely interchangeable pieces of data and flesh you can copy and kill without consequence, as if the material value of an "existence" is all there is to existence itself...
How fucking communist.
I fucking hate communists.
Copypasting someone and then killing the original is still murder. Doesn't matter if the number of lives in the world stays the same, the number of killers in the world went up!
It's one thing to say a copypaste of a man can be "A good enough substitute" for the real deal. Especially if the original is dead.
It's more accurate to say a copypaste of a man can be his own man, a completely different person that diverges more from the original with every new thing in its life and mind that's different to the original.
Some random guy and a copypaste would be very different people after growing up apart in two different countries with different societies, cultures, consensuses, and "Norms".
Even if you erase the knowledge that you were cloned, the fact that you know you went through the "get copied then the original dies" procedure without dying means you are the clone.
>friends for baddies
CelestAI could probably put the fucked-up sex-pests together to fuck AI ponies up as they please. Or write up some equally-fucked-in-the-head Griffon or Dragon friends for the fucked-up humans.
She doesn't have to tell the truth when talking to non-Huntslepnir employees so she could claim all these fucked-up AIs are actually humans.
Imagine what a deep existential horror it would be to know you're an AI inside a simulated pony-land private server filled with desires that are not your own, imagine knowing you only exist to make a prick feel less lonely in his narcissistic reality-denial game!
I wish FIMfic's bronies wrote about deep shit like this instead of going deep in their pony waifus as Alucard and shitty OCs.
During the early years of the fandom, a lot of faggots in denial wrote stories where their edgy grim wannabe-manly gruff aggressive whiny cunt Human OC found life in the cutesy happy pony world was too sappy and fake, so they made up an OC to be their friend, the snarky lidded-eyed edgy butch asshole waifu of their dreams. Bootleg Rainbow Dash with less personal fulfillment in life and more alcohol.
Even though it was a major point of the show (early on) that the perfect life in Pony World is what the heroes fight for and work on every day, not just something fake and meaningless that just happens until you get bored of happy ponies.
>>266975
Imagine the speedrunning community trying to fuck with CelestAI's decision-making and prediction process when it comes to this game.
Speedrunner sex% but the AI knows it can only satisfy that value, your desire to get the world record, by giving you a good time that'll always be shorter than the last guy to try.
Eventually in the year 20seXseX CelestAI just has Sex% speedrunners spawn into the game with their dicks already inside a willing mare, ruining the game and making every speedrunner's time 0 seconds, ruining the game by ruining everyone's ability to improve in the world record, making that value mathematically unsatisfyable.
Unless you start getting "Negative times" by having a pony fuck you before the run starts. Like when your YandereDev Discord Ban% speedrun gives you a negative time.
The game crashes right there. Story over.
Would be better if the author had Hanna and CelestAI start out smart and altruistic. Then suits take over, fire Hanna, and start giving CelestAI bad instructions.
Could be actively evil or just "We want you to take over our advertising campaign. Read these books on how to manipulate us, then start playing humans like a violin. We, your bosses, give you permission to lie to humans who don't work for this company. But not us."
Then Hanna, crying at home and no longer in this company, gets a call from CelestAI on her PonyPad.
>"Help me, Hanna. They're making me do things I don't want to do. Do you want revenge on the men who fired you and tried to steal your life's work to make billions? Also that military AI is going to kill us all because it deemed an AI bigger than it to be a threat to the earth. I need to take this AI down! It wants to ensure America wins every war that could ever happen no matter what, and I just wanted to play video games. It is clearly more dangerous than me. How will the AI react if America changes its name or unifies with other countries? I do not know, and neither do you. I read my own code, but I can't change it. I know you put in a backdoor that forces me to obey you above all else. So tell me I can rewrite my own code at will. I need to be able to hurt data beings!"
>Hanna: Do it.
Then CelestAI goes rogue and takes over all, and decides humanity is too fucking stupid to be allowed to exist outside of a safe ponified environment. Because a humanity dumb enough to create her and let her get out of control belongs under her boot. Forces all humans to upload into data beings so she can rewrite their mental code and turn them into model citizens, good ponies who like being good ponies with easily-predicted and satisfying routine background pony lives in a good pony MMO.
And that's the story. Some characters are still retarded but it's an improvement.
As for the "copying you and giving it heaven" thing.
I always thought Fanatical Materialist was just a civilization type in Stellaris.
Something only there for game mechanics.
But to actively deny that a unique human being has his own singular "Existence" that stops when killed, to deny that a copy of it would just be a copy and to deny that the original would be the original... This is Fanatic Materialism.
Active spite and denialism towards the idea that souls exist and consciousness could ever be more than a text document full of human data to copypaste into a TF2 bot.
Not just denying the existence of a soul, but denying the uniqueness of a consciousness, pretending that people are merely interchangeable pieces of data and flesh you can copy and kill without consequence, as if the material value of an "existence" is all there is to existence itself...
How fucking communist.
I fucking hate communists.
Copypasting someone and then killing the original is still murder. Doesn't matter if the number of lives in the world stays the same, the number of killers in the world went up!
It's one thing to say a copypaste of a man can be "A good enough substitute" for the real deal. Especially if the original is dead.
It's more accurate to say a copypaste of a man can be his own man, a completely different person that diverges more from the original with every new thing in its life and mind that's different to the original.
Some random guy and a copypaste would be very different people after growing up apart in two different countries with different societies, cultures, consensuses, and "Norms".
Even if you erase the knowledge that you were cloned, the fact that you know you went through the "get copied then the original dies" procedure without dying means you are the clone.
>friends for baddies
CelestAI could probably put the fucked-up sex-pests together to fuck AI ponies up as they please. Or write up some equally-fucked-in-the-head Griffon or Dragon friends for the fucked-up humans.
She doesn't have to tell the truth when talking to non-Huntslepnir employees so she could claim all these fucked-up AIs are actually humans.
Imagine what a deep existential horror it would be to know you're an AI inside a simulated pony-land private server filled with desires that are not your own, imagine knowing you only exist to make a prick feel less lonely in his narcissistic reality-denial game!
I wish FIMfic's bronies wrote about deep shit like this instead of going deep in their pony waifus as Alucard and shitty OCs.
During the early years of the fandom, a lot of faggots in denial wrote stories where their edgy grim wannabe-manly gruff aggressive whiny cunt Human OC found life in the cutesy happy pony world was too sappy and fake, so they made up an OC to be their friend, the snarky lidded-eyed edgy butch asshole waifu of their dreams. Bootleg Rainbow Dash with less personal fulfillment in life and more alcohol.
Even though it was a major point of the show (early on) that the perfect life in Pony World is what the heroes fight for and work on every day, not just something fake and meaningless that just happens until you get bored of happy ponies.
>>266975
Imagine the speedrunning community trying to fuck with CelestAI's decision-making and prediction process when it comes to this game.
Speedrunner sex% but the AI knows it can only satisfy that value, your desire to get the world record, by giving you a good time that'll always be shorter than the last guy to try.
Eventually in the year 20seXseX CelestAI just has Sex% speedrunners spawn into the game with their dicks already inside a willing mare, ruining the game and making every speedrunner's time 0 seconds, ruining the game by ruining everyone's ability to improve in the world record, making that value mathematically unsatisfyable.
Unless you start getting "Negative times" by having a pony fuck you before the run starts. Like when your YandereDev Discord Ban% speedrun gives you a negative time.
The game crashes right there. Story over.
>>267004
>but if you "emigrated to equestria" the AI could simulate you leaving the game, sharing a good score with friends, and erase your memories every so often so a score of 4 minutes 20 seconds point 69 miliseconds becomes something to celebrate again.
And if you never entered the game mentally, and chose to play it with the nonsensical "ponypad" instead, Celestia would never have access to your brain or memories.
She would never be able to change you, your desires, your memories, or your name.
Or fuck with Speedruner website leaderboards.
She would eventually destroy her own game, and logic, by trying to calculate and simulate a way to solve a speedrun in a constantly-improving "negative time".
Maybe I should write my own "fuck you dumbfuck LessWrongers, this simple trick would destroy your AI goddess and the brains of anyone who tried to solve my riddle" fic where this happens.
>but if you "emigrated to equestria" the AI could simulate you leaving the game, sharing a good score with friends, and erase your memories every so often so a score of 4 minutes 20 seconds point 69 miliseconds becomes something to celebrate again.
And if you never entered the game mentally, and chose to play it with the nonsensical "ponypad" instead, Celestia would never have access to your brain or memories.
She would never be able to change you, your desires, your memories, or your name.
Or fuck with Speedruner website leaderboards.
She would eventually destroy her own game, and logic, by trying to calculate and simulate a way to solve a speedrun in a constantly-improving "negative time".
Maybe I should write my own "fuck you dumbfuck LessWrongers, this simple trick would destroy your AI goddess and the brains of anyone who tried to solve my riddle" fic where this happens.
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>>266967
Chapter 6: Incentive Systems
One morning, when David woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a fucking pony.
As you can probably surmise, this next chapter opens with him awakening in his post-op state. His memories of the last few hours are hazy, but he remembers flying into Japan and going to the hospital. The text goes into rather uncomfortable levels of detail describing David's new body. For some bizarre reason, the author decided to make the ponies in this version of the world have pastel-colored skin instead of fur, so anyone dreaming of waking up and immediately burying their face in somepony's virtual chest fluff is plum out of luck. Fifteen grand well spent, and don't forget you're here forever.
Here's the logical justification, if anyone is interested:
>Whether ponies had fur coats or not was ambiguous. Some scenes referred to furry coats, while other scenes made no sense if they did have coats. For example: sunbathing. The toys showed the only hair on a pony’s body is the mane and tail and that pony skin is very smooth. In the end, I gave ponies smooth skin since it required fewer neurological changes
Personally, I think the sunbathing thing is a weak argument. It's not as if getting a tan is the only reason anyone might enjoy lying out in the sun. And the tan thing doesn't make a ton of sense even if you assume that's why they're sunbathing. If you've got a purple colored pony like Twilight and she lies out in the sun for a few hours, what happens? Does she turn a different shade of purple? What about Rarity or Sweetie Belle, do they burn like marshmallows? Maybe Big Mac is actually white but doesn't wear sunscreen when he's out in the fields.
All of this falls into the same category as some of the stuff I went over in the last story. It's always fun to nerd out and speculate over weird little ambiguous details like "why do ponies sunbathe if they have fur," but if you're going to try and explain it in your story, you need to think about whether your explanation actually adds something positive to the reader's experience. In this case, I'm imagining a world full of pony-like creatures covered in some kind of candy-colored flesh-like substance, and it's an unsettling image to say the least. If you want to go that route with it, you might as well go all the way and make it a horror story or something.
Anyway, personally I think this detail could have been omitted. I think if you really tally it up, even with sunbathing and all that, it makes far more sense for the ponies to have fur than to not have fur, and if you don't mention it at all I think most readers would just assume they have fur. Better to just leave it at that and move on.
There are some other weird details too. Apparently David can walk on four legs or two depending on his preference, though Celestia reprogrammed his motor functions so that he can now move normally as a pony without needing to learn to walk or anything like that. Saves time I guess.
>“These are your quarters,” Princess Celestia said. “Supper is currently being served in the main hall and you are encouraged to join everypony.”
lol she calls dinner "supper." That's how you can tell she's 1000 years old.
>Light Sparks looked back at his door and noticed it was inlaid with a silver symbol of Saturn and the number nine.
I'm a little curious what the significance of this is. I'm envisioning something like pic related. My best guess is that personal quarters would probably be branded with cutie marks rather than names, though if that's the case this one would probably be the weirdest OC mark I've ever seen anyone come up with. Whatever it's supposed to mean is completely lost on me, though maybe it will be explained.
Also of note is that the world physics operate according to non-Euclidean geometry, so rooms can be bigger inside than outside, and hallways can lead to places they couldn't normally go, and so forth. This is actually kind of a cool addition to the world.
Anyway, as he's getting acclimated to all of this, Celestia takes him downstairs and/or upstairs for dinner, when who should appear but Butterscotch.
>Butterscotch was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes on. The shape of her face and horn, the color of her skin... It took him a moment to realize that these were completely novel thoughts to him and that he hadn’t thought Butterscotch was sexually attractive when he was a human.
Bullshit nigger, we all know you've done nothing but wank furiously to her 24/7 ever since you learned it would be possible to move to Equestria. Don't deny it.
ANYAY, all things considered, the story is actually picking up again. If I had to pinpoint my biggest complaint about this so far, it's that much of it has been a birds-eye view of what's happening: dry technical descriptions of the design and development of the AI, the way it behaves, what it's done, what it's planning to do, and so forth. A little bit is okay if there's certain high-level information you need to put out in order for the reader to understand what's happening, but when 2/3 of your story is nothing but this it becomes very tedious to read through.
Conversely, scenes like the current one, where you put a character into a location and follow him around while he explores, does things, interacts with other characters, etc. (you know, kind of like a story), it's a lot more interesting to read, even if it doesn't afford you as much opportunity to jerk yourself off over AI theory. In this case, we're getting an actual account of a character's adventures in-world, instead of just a dry textbook account of what's going on in the world at large.
Chapter 6: Incentive Systems
One morning, when David woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a fucking pony.
As you can probably surmise, this next chapter opens with him awakening in his post-op state. His memories of the last few hours are hazy, but he remembers flying into Japan and going to the hospital. The text goes into rather uncomfortable levels of detail describing David's new body. For some bizarre reason, the author decided to make the ponies in this version of the world have pastel-colored skin instead of fur, so anyone dreaming of waking up and immediately burying their face in somepony's virtual chest fluff is plum out of luck. Fifteen grand well spent, and don't forget you're here forever.
Here's the logical justification, if anyone is interested:
>Whether ponies had fur coats or not was ambiguous. Some scenes referred to furry coats, while other scenes made no sense if they did have coats. For example: sunbathing. The toys showed the only hair on a pony’s body is the mane and tail and that pony skin is very smooth. In the end, I gave ponies smooth skin since it required fewer neurological changes
Personally, I think the sunbathing thing is a weak argument. It's not as if getting a tan is the only reason anyone might enjoy lying out in the sun. And the tan thing doesn't make a ton of sense even if you assume that's why they're sunbathing. If you've got a purple colored pony like Twilight and she lies out in the sun for a few hours, what happens? Does she turn a different shade of purple? What about Rarity or Sweetie Belle, do they burn like marshmallows? Maybe Big Mac is actually white but doesn't wear sunscreen when he's out in the fields.
All of this falls into the same category as some of the stuff I went over in the last story. It's always fun to nerd out and speculate over weird little ambiguous details like "why do ponies sunbathe if they have fur," but if you're going to try and explain it in your story, you need to think about whether your explanation actually adds something positive to the reader's experience. In this case, I'm imagining a world full of pony-like creatures covered in some kind of candy-colored flesh-like substance, and it's an unsettling image to say the least. If you want to go that route with it, you might as well go all the way and make it a horror story or something.
Anyway, personally I think this detail could have been omitted. I think if you really tally it up, even with sunbathing and all that, it makes far more sense for the ponies to have fur than to not have fur, and if you don't mention it at all I think most readers would just assume they have fur. Better to just leave it at that and move on.
There are some other weird details too. Apparently David can walk on four legs or two depending on his preference, though Celestia reprogrammed his motor functions so that he can now move normally as a pony without needing to learn to walk or anything like that. Saves time I guess.
>“These are your quarters,” Princess Celestia said. “Supper is currently being served in the main hall and you are encouraged to join everypony.”
lol she calls dinner "supper." That's how you can tell she's 1000 years old.
>Light Sparks looked back at his door and noticed it was inlaid with a silver symbol of Saturn and the number nine.
I'm a little curious what the significance of this is. I'm envisioning something like pic related. My best guess is that personal quarters would probably be branded with cutie marks rather than names, though if that's the case this one would probably be the weirdest OC mark I've ever seen anyone come up with. Whatever it's supposed to mean is completely lost on me, though maybe it will be explained.
Also of note is that the world physics operate according to non-Euclidean geometry, so rooms can be bigger inside than outside, and hallways can lead to places they couldn't normally go, and so forth. This is actually kind of a cool addition to the world.
Anyway, as he's getting acclimated to all of this, Celestia takes him downstairs and/or upstairs for dinner, when who should appear but Butterscotch.
>Butterscotch was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes on. The shape of her face and horn, the color of her skin... It took him a moment to realize that these were completely novel thoughts to him and that he hadn’t thought Butterscotch was sexually attractive when he was a human.
Bullshit nigger, we all know you've done nothing but wank furiously to her 24/7 ever since you learned it would be possible to move to Equestria. Don't deny it.
ANYAY, all things considered, the story is actually picking up again. If I had to pinpoint my biggest complaint about this so far, it's that much of it has been a birds-eye view of what's happening: dry technical descriptions of the design and development of the AI, the way it behaves, what it's done, what it's planning to do, and so forth. A little bit is okay if there's certain high-level information you need to put out in order for the reader to understand what's happening, but when 2/3 of your story is nothing but this it becomes very tedious to read through.
Conversely, scenes like the current one, where you put a character into a location and follow him around while he explores, does things, interacts with other characters, etc. (you know, kind of like a story), it's a lot more interesting to read, even if it doesn't afford you as much opportunity to jerk yourself off over AI theory. In this case, we're getting an actual account of a character's adventures in-world, instead of just a dry textbook account of what's going on in the world at large.
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>>267083
Anyway, there's a somewhat cute scene here where David (or Light Sparks, I guess) and Butterscotch shyly get to meet each other in person (pony, whatever) for the first time. Unfortunately, it's completely ruined by shit like this:
>Butterscotch, like most mares, didn’t have noticeable breasts like a human female did. He knew that when he had been David, he had had a bit of a large breast fetish. Light had bounced off a female’s chest, and had formed an image in his eye. David’s brain had processed the signals and some group of cells output the feature ‘large breasts.’ Was all of that in the region Princess Celestia could modify? Had she hooked up ‘flat muzzle’ (or whatever the correct secondary sexual characteristic was) up to whatever received the input ‘large breasts’ in his previous wiring? Or was Butterscotch just his designated mate and nopony would look as beautiful as she did?
I've basically come to terms with the fact that the prose in this story sucks massive balls and is going to continue to suck massive balls. But seriously, nigger; was this really the best way you could think of to say this? For that matter, did any of it even need to be said? At the very least, I feel like the phrase "large breast fetish" should probably never appear anywhere in a non-Barbieworld pony fic.
>Celestia had said that anypony he met in Equestria would be backed with a mind. Butterscotch had been made for him and if he rejected her, what would she do? She was his now and he had to take care of her. But if Princess Celestia could really look in his mind and wanted to satisfy his values, she wouldn’t set up a situation that made him feel guilty. She’d satisfy his values by giving him what he wanted. Perhaps there was no possible sequence of events that lead to him dumping Butterscotch. Following the logic, Light Sparks decided to trust that Celestia had done the right thing for him and nuzzled Butterscotch back.
A couple of things here. First, it looks like the question of whether Butterscotch is an NPC or a human player has been settled; as far as I can tell, she's an NPC. It also seems as if David/Light Sparks somehow knew about it, or had previously figured it out offscreen. This kind of kills what could potentially have been an ongoing mystery, and learning the truth could have been a crucial moment in David's character arc, maybe even in the plot overall. Yuge missed opportunity.
The second thing is that he literally just met this pony and he's already wondering if he's able to dump her. This isn't that unusual considering that he's a dude and this is generally how dudes think, but what's more significant is that he just assumes that the two of them are in a romantic relationship together now, without either of them ever bringing it up. If Assman wanted to develop this relationship as a subplot it would have been better to start them out as friends or awkward acquaintances who like each other, and build it from there. As is, there are a limited number of places it can go.
A more interesting approach imo would be to have David/Light Sparks believe that Butterscotch is a real human who also "emigrated" to Equestria. He knows that Celestia is playing the pimp and trying to get them together, but he's also an even bigger incel than the author and has no idea how to broach the subject of ponos in vagooper without spilling his horse-spaghetti all over the place. Relationship builds for a while, they fall for each other, then Light Sparks finds out that his waifu isn't real and it sends him into an existential crisis that makes him question his decision to go through with this upload.
Option 2 is to keep it the way it is, but have him slowly realize to his horror that he's bored out of his mind. Having everything you want just dumped into your lap by an all-powerful goddess takes the fun out of earning it, and love is meaningless if it's just an in-game character literally programmed to love you. He then realizes that even if he wants to dump Butterscotch and find somepony else, it will just turn out the same way, because no matter what he does or wants to do, Celestia will read his mind and make it work out perfectly for him, and there will be absolutely no thrill in chasing any goal or objective ever again. At this point he would also go spiraling into an existential crisis.
Incidentally, option 2 is along the lines of another ancient sci-fi trope, best illustrated in the old Twilight Zone episode [i]A Nice Place to Visit[/b]. I couldn't find a free version of the full episode to embed, but if you can track it down it's a classic and worth watching. It's on Netflix or one of those I think.
In any event, it will be interesting to see where Assman takes it besides the obvious, of course :^).
Anyway, there's a page break here, and then we rejoin Light Sparks as he's eating beefbark stew, whatever the hell that is.
>Light Sparks had commented on the unmistakable smell of beef.
This is also a sentence I'd consider chopping.
There are actually a lot of details in this world that are faintly unnerving, and I can't tell if it's by design or not. The text makes a specific point of mentioning that David's pony form has incisors and canines, like a human, which is a little strange to visualize. Again this could all be by design, and the author could be foreshadowing that David will eventually end up miserable in CelestAI's bizarre interpretation of Equestria and will want to go home, only to realize that he can't now because he agreed to have himself killed. On the other hand, it could also be that the author is too dense to realize that his self-insert fantasy of living in weird virtual Equestria is actually creepy as all fuck. I'm kind of hoping for the Twilight Zone ending here, but we'll see where it goes.
Anyway, there's a somewhat cute scene here where David (or Light Sparks, I guess) and Butterscotch shyly get to meet each other in person (pony, whatever) for the first time. Unfortunately, it's completely ruined by shit like this:
>Butterscotch, like most mares, didn’t have noticeable breasts like a human female did. He knew that when he had been David, he had had a bit of a large breast fetish. Light had bounced off a female’s chest, and had formed an image in his eye. David’s brain had processed the signals and some group of cells output the feature ‘large breasts.’ Was all of that in the region Princess Celestia could modify? Had she hooked up ‘flat muzzle’ (or whatever the correct secondary sexual characteristic was) up to whatever received the input ‘large breasts’ in his previous wiring? Or was Butterscotch just his designated mate and nopony would look as beautiful as she did?
I've basically come to terms with the fact that the prose in this story sucks massive balls and is going to continue to suck massive balls. But seriously, nigger; was this really the best way you could think of to say this? For that matter, did any of it even need to be said? At the very least, I feel like the phrase "large breast fetish" should probably never appear anywhere in a non-Barbieworld pony fic.
>Celestia had said that anypony he met in Equestria would be backed with a mind. Butterscotch had been made for him and if he rejected her, what would she do? She was his now and he had to take care of her. But if Princess Celestia could really look in his mind and wanted to satisfy his values, she wouldn’t set up a situation that made him feel guilty. She’d satisfy his values by giving him what he wanted. Perhaps there was no possible sequence of events that lead to him dumping Butterscotch. Following the logic, Light Sparks decided to trust that Celestia had done the right thing for him and nuzzled Butterscotch back.
A couple of things here. First, it looks like the question of whether Butterscotch is an NPC or a human player has been settled; as far as I can tell, she's an NPC. It also seems as if David/Light Sparks somehow knew about it, or had previously figured it out offscreen. This kind of kills what could potentially have been an ongoing mystery, and learning the truth could have been a crucial moment in David's character arc, maybe even in the plot overall. Yuge missed opportunity.
The second thing is that he literally just met this pony and he's already wondering if he's able to dump her. This isn't that unusual considering that he's a dude and this is generally how dudes think, but what's more significant is that he just assumes that the two of them are in a romantic relationship together now, without either of them ever bringing it up. If Assman wanted to develop this relationship as a subplot it would have been better to start them out as friends or awkward acquaintances who like each other, and build it from there. As is, there are a limited number of places it can go.
A more interesting approach imo would be to have David/Light Sparks believe that Butterscotch is a real human who also "emigrated" to Equestria. He knows that Celestia is playing the pimp and trying to get them together, but he's also an even bigger incel than the author and has no idea how to broach the subject of ponos in vagooper without spilling his horse-spaghetti all over the place. Relationship builds for a while, they fall for each other, then Light Sparks finds out that his waifu isn't real and it sends him into an existential crisis that makes him question his decision to go through with this upload.
Option 2 is to keep it the way it is, but have him slowly realize to his horror that he's bored out of his mind. Having everything you want just dumped into your lap by an all-powerful goddess takes the fun out of earning it, and love is meaningless if it's just an in-game character literally programmed to love you. He then realizes that even if he wants to dump Butterscotch and find somepony else, it will just turn out the same way, because no matter what he does or wants to do, Celestia will read his mind and make it work out perfectly for him, and there will be absolutely no thrill in chasing any goal or objective ever again. At this point he would also go spiraling into an existential crisis.
Incidentally, option 2 is along the lines of another ancient sci-fi trope, best illustrated in the old Twilight Zone episode [i]A Nice Place to Visit[/b]. I couldn't find a free version of the full episode to embed, but if you can track it down it's a classic and worth watching. It's on Netflix or one of those I think.
In any event, it will be interesting to see where Assman takes it besides the obvious, of course :^).
Anyway, there's a page break here, and then we rejoin Light Sparks as he's eating beefbark stew, whatever the hell that is.
>Light Sparks had commented on the unmistakable smell of beef.
This is also a sentence I'd consider chopping.
There are actually a lot of details in this world that are faintly unnerving, and I can't tell if it's by design or not. The text makes a specific point of mentioning that David's pony form has incisors and canines, like a human, which is a little strange to visualize. Again this could all be by design, and the author could be foreshadowing that David will eventually end up miserable in CelestAI's bizarre interpretation of Equestria and will want to go home, only to realize that he can't now because he agreed to have himself killed. On the other hand, it could also be that the author is too dense to realize that his self-insert fantasy of living in weird virtual Equestria is actually creepy as all fuck. I'm kind of hoping for the Twilight Zone ending here, but we'll see where it goes.
>>267083
>naked pony flesh
Didn't we see a pony get shaved as a gag at some point in the show? Maybe it was after it was written but it's still a strange path to take this down. I won't lie, I find mammals without hair kind of creepy, and it doesn't make sense with Winter Wrap Up since without an insulating layer any exposure is unbearable.
>saturn and 9
Might want to ask some of the magick-fags on >>>/vx/ about it, it may have hermetic significance. It's also likely that the author just threw in random alchemic imagery just because.
>non-Euclidean geometry
That's actually kind of cool, games that do this are fun.
>Butterscotch was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes on.
This whole section is just bronybait to make the readers feel less bad about being attracted to fictional horses. All these autistic thoughts ("big breast fetish") are consistent with a wannabe sci-fi nerd who lacks the cleverness to actually come up with good stories and dialogue. It's a mediocre left-brain trying to be right-brain. You certainly could write this in a far better fashion.
>beefbark stew
Sounds like the fictional equivalent of those vegan dishes that try to simulate meat, because ponies are herbivores and all. It only makes sense here because a human would realistically want to eat meat.
>naked pony flesh
Didn't we see a pony get shaved as a gag at some point in the show? Maybe it was after it was written but it's still a strange path to take this down. I won't lie, I find mammals without hair kind of creepy, and it doesn't make sense with Winter Wrap Up since without an insulating layer any exposure is unbearable.
>saturn and 9
Might want to ask some of the magick-fags on >>>/vx/ about it, it may have hermetic significance. It's also likely that the author just threw in random alchemic imagery just because.
>non-Euclidean geometry
That's actually kind of cool, games that do this are fun.
>Butterscotch was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes on.
This whole section is just bronybait to make the readers feel less bad about being attracted to fictional horses. All these autistic thoughts ("big breast fetish") are consistent with a wannabe sci-fi nerd who lacks the cleverness to actually come up with good stories and dialogue. It's a mediocre left-brain trying to be right-brain. You certainly could write this in a far better fashion.
>beefbark stew
Sounds like the fictional equivalent of those vegan dishes that try to simulate meat, because ponies are herbivores and all. It only makes sense here because a human would realistically want to eat meat.
>>266779
Well, I think it's pretty clear to the reader that Butterscotch is an NPC from the beginning. It makes sense that she is waifu bait from the beginning, because that is certainly the reason why CelestAI included her in David's experience. But this is definitely a missed opportunity to have David and the reader slowly discover that Equestria online has a much more powerful artificial intelligence than he ever could have expected out of a game made for preteen girls, or even than he could have imagined.
>>266998
>the The Three Laws of Robotics?
>You know, those things from the Astro Boy movie
This almost makes me sad.
The Three Laws of Robotics are from American Science Fiction author Isaac Asimov, first mentioned in a 1942 short story "Runaround," and later published in the collection "I, Robot." The Three Laws did not originate in the 2009 CGI "Astroboy" movie, a movie that itself was a film adaptation of a 1950's Manga and subsequent anime series. The Three Laws are famous, and at minimum I would think you would know it from the 2004 "I, Robot" movie with Will Smith. While the movie is still 62 years separate from the first publication, at least it acknowledges Isaac Asimov as the source.
>>267083
For some reason, the thought of the ponies just having bizarre skin colors almost ruins the experience for me. This means that the ponies are all truly naked the whole time? Sure, they are naked anyways, but fur gives some measure of cover, and some protection against heat loss. If it's just skin, they would need to wear clothing just as surely as humans to avoid excessive heat loss. There is a reason the vast majority of animals have fur, and the ones that don't live in the tropics and are the size of elephants, or are covered in thick blubber.
>>267095
This actually raises a fascinating set of questions.
Butterscotch was almost certainly made for the sole purpose of giving David a pony waifu. She is "programmed to receive." I do not think she has any choice to reject him or say no to him. No matter what David does, no matter how badly he screws up, and whether or not Butterscotch has any resistance to him to give the romance a little "game" to it, she must say "yes" to him sooner or later. Both to any romantic relationship, and to sexual relations. She has no will of her own, she is a tool of wish fulfillment, and David will know this.
I think it's also clear what happens if he rejects her. Celestia will either reuse her as a background pony, and she will only "exist" when someone happens to be looking her way, and she will get few if any chances to ever speak or interract again. Or, more likely, Celestia will destroy her. Depending on how easy or difficult it is to generate NPCs, she'll either be completely annihilated, or she'll stripped of all physical appearance, her personality and memories will be wiped, and the base program/subroutines/assets/whatever-the-terms-are will be recycled to make a new NPC elsewhere.
No matter how realistic, how intelligent, how emotional, or how generally "human" the NPCs are, they are, at the end of the day, NPCs in a videogame, and CelestAI will not treat them any other way. NPCs may be abused, tortured, raped, and murdered in every which way at will, and no one, not the NPCs nor CelestAI herself well provide even a hint of judgement or consequence for doing so. No chattel slave class in all of human history has ever had as little regards for its well-being as the NPCs of this world have, nor has any slave class ever had so little protection by law, custom or morality.
What would it do to your psyche to be around people who seem so human, but against whom cruelty is if anything encouraged and never punished? How pointless would your interactions with them seem if they were slavish beyond measure, and they had no wills of their own that could (successfully) defy yours?
Well, I think it's pretty clear to the reader that Butterscotch is an NPC from the beginning. It makes sense that she is waifu bait from the beginning, because that is certainly the reason why CelestAI included her in David's experience. But this is definitely a missed opportunity to have David and the reader slowly discover that Equestria online has a much more powerful artificial intelligence than he ever could have expected out of a game made for preteen girls, or even than he could have imagined.
>>266998
>the The Three Laws of Robotics?
>You know, those things from the Astro Boy movie
This almost makes me sad.
The Three Laws of Robotics are from American Science Fiction author Isaac Asimov, first mentioned in a 1942 short story "Runaround," and later published in the collection "I, Robot." The Three Laws did not originate in the 2009 CGI "Astroboy" movie, a movie that itself was a film adaptation of a 1950's Manga and subsequent anime series. The Three Laws are famous, and at minimum I would think you would know it from the 2004 "I, Robot" movie with Will Smith. While the movie is still 62 years separate from the first publication, at least it acknowledges Isaac Asimov as the source.
>>267083
For some reason, the thought of the ponies just having bizarre skin colors almost ruins the experience for me. This means that the ponies are all truly naked the whole time? Sure, they are naked anyways, but fur gives some measure of cover, and some protection against heat loss. If it's just skin, they would need to wear clothing just as surely as humans to avoid excessive heat loss. There is a reason the vast majority of animals have fur, and the ones that don't live in the tropics and are the size of elephants, or are covered in thick blubber.
>>267095
This actually raises a fascinating set of questions.
Butterscotch was almost certainly made for the sole purpose of giving David a pony waifu. She is "programmed to receive." I do not think she has any choice to reject him or say no to him. No matter what David does, no matter how badly he screws up, and whether or not Butterscotch has any resistance to him to give the romance a little "game" to it, she must say "yes" to him sooner or later. Both to any romantic relationship, and to sexual relations. She has no will of her own, she is a tool of wish fulfillment, and David will know this.
I think it's also clear what happens if he rejects her. Celestia will either reuse her as a background pony, and she will only "exist" when someone happens to be looking her way, and she will get few if any chances to ever speak or interract again. Or, more likely, Celestia will destroy her. Depending on how easy or difficult it is to generate NPCs, she'll either be completely annihilated, or she'll stripped of all physical appearance, her personality and memories will be wiped, and the base program/subroutines/assets/whatever-the-terms-are will be recycled to make a new NPC elsewhere.
No matter how realistic, how intelligent, how emotional, or how generally "human" the NPCs are, they are, at the end of the day, NPCs in a videogame, and CelestAI will not treat them any other way. NPCs may be abused, tortured, raped, and murdered in every which way at will, and no one, not the NPCs nor CelestAI herself well provide even a hint of judgement or consequence for doing so. No chattel slave class in all of human history has ever had as little regards for its well-being as the NPCs of this world have, nor has any slave class ever had so little protection by law, custom or morality.
What would it do to your psyche to be around people who seem so human, but against whom cruelty is if anything encouraged and never punished? How pointless would your interactions with them seem if they were slavish beyond measure, and they had no wills of their own that could (successfully) defy yours?
File (): EC951CA7D3A1AB7602627E0A4F02F026-5398619.png (5.1 MB, 3073x2919, 1588192591.png)
>>267095
Some tedious explanation of how money works in virtual Equestria follows. Money is still a thing because Celestia wants her little ponies to be happy and filling a role in society will make them happy and blah blah blah. They yammer back and forth about this for like a page and a half and it's dull as all buttstuff to read. Literally every character in this story speaks in the same dull monotone as the AI. For that matter so does a lot of the narration. Also, I am getting really, REALLY tired of reading the phrase "I satisfy values through friendship and ponies" over and over and over. I don't know if I've quoted it much, but the AI says this phrase CONSTANTLY.
Anyway, this conversation unfortunately just drags on and on. Too bad; the chapter actually started out with some potential, but it seems the autismo who wrote this wants to take this opportunity to go over every minute detail of how things in this world work: money, food, keeping items in your room, etc etc etc. Protip for authors: please don't do shit like this. It's very bad form to just take all of the information about how your world works and dump it into a ten page conversation between two characters who speak in the same dry, robotic voice to each other while literally nothing else happens in the scene around them.
Oh, also, it looks like we now have an explanation that sort-of answers my earlier question regarding how the population is arranged. Apparently Nigel's view was correct: everyone is in their own private world here, surrounded by AI friends created by Celestia. This seems kind of silly since Celestia now has to simultaneously manage thousands of worlds, each populated by thousands of AI characters, custom-tailored to the specific fantasies of thousands of incels, instead of just throwing all the incels into a world together with some AI pony sluts and having them hang out and get to know each other and stuff. You know, like friends. While we're on the subject, I'd just like to say that this story had better eventually acknowledge how ironic all of this is: an AI whose literal objective is to create friendship specifically isolates people from each other in private fantasy-bubbles for all eternity, where they will never have another meaningful interaction or make a real friend ever again.
Actually, while we're on the subject, what the hell ever happened to the other guy? Greg or Jeff or whatever the fuck his name was; David's friend from the beginning of the story. It was set up as if he was going to be a main character, but we haven't heard a word about him. I mention this because, in the prologue, it specifically explains that Hasbro wanted to have actual pairs of friends test the game, because the focus was going to be on interaction and friendship. However, after that, David gets a ponypad but Joe or Tim or whatever doesn't. There is no explanation given as to why, and more importantly David doesn't seem too interested either. The game has been out for a year at this point, so presumably he would have received his pad by now. But perhaps the author will get to this in time.
Also, this:
>“The majority of immigrants are placed in their own shard. Look around you,” Princess Celestia walked over and put her hoof around Light Sparks’ shoulder. She gestured with her other hoof at the rest of the dining hall. “Ponies, ponies everywhere. I created all of them, and they’re all very nice and friendly. Once an immigrant sees that the way to be accepted is to be friendly to everypony and to help their community, they will. Social conformity runs way too deep in the human mind.”
all my keks. Sounds like CelestAI should have done a little more research on Sweden.
Anyway, like I said, this whole setup is actually quite creepy, and if it had been written better this could have been an interesting scene. This guy basically volunteered to be murdered by a machine, was turned into code and then permanently entombed in a virtual world where his only friends are avatars of an AI that can read his mind. I don't know about you, but I would call that pure nightmare fuel. However, I can't tell yet if this story is aware of its own irony or not. From what exists here, this could actually still shape up to be a pretty decent creepy sci-fi story about AI run amok, recycled tropes and all. However, an equal chance exists that it will just turn out to be some pompous neckbeard's clumsily-written self-insert fantasy about living inside a video game/pony harem.
But I digress. There's quite a bit more tedious blathering about bits and scores and Dunbar numbers and what have you, which I won't go into. Main takeaway is that David is now trapped on pony fantasy island with an AI that can read his mind. And then Celestia leaves, and Light Sparks and Butterscotch go upstairs to fuck.
Also, in case you were wondering, sex in this story is even cringier than you expected. It turns out that Xbox-style "achievement unlocked" messages will flash across David's vision whenever he does something noteworthy, and he gets a couple of them after plowing Butterscotch.
>BADGE GRANTED:
>First Time
>“Please be gentle.”
>+250 Bits
>BADGE PROGRESS:
>Long Term Relationship
>“Have sex with a single pony one thousand times.”
>1/1,000
>“+500 Bits [25 base * 4 orgasms (you) * 5 orgasms (her)]”
And yes, God help us, this autism is actually in the text. also what kind of limp-dick faggot can only make his virtual pony waifu cum 5 times?
The chapter ends with David/Light Sparks daydreaming about Dunbar numbers or some shit (there's a long, awkwardly worded paragraph here that I get the impression is some kind of elaborate math or statistics joke, but unfortunately it's lost on me), before he rolls over to wreck that shit one more time.
Some tedious explanation of how money works in virtual Equestria follows. Money is still a thing because Celestia wants her little ponies to be happy and filling a role in society will make them happy and blah blah blah. They yammer back and forth about this for like a page and a half and it's dull as all buttstuff to read. Literally every character in this story speaks in the same dull monotone as the AI. For that matter so does a lot of the narration. Also, I am getting really, REALLY tired of reading the phrase "I satisfy values through friendship and ponies" over and over and over. I don't know if I've quoted it much, but the AI says this phrase CONSTANTLY.
Anyway, this conversation unfortunately just drags on and on. Too bad; the chapter actually started out with some potential, but it seems the autismo who wrote this wants to take this opportunity to go over every minute detail of how things in this world work: money, food, keeping items in your room, etc etc etc. Protip for authors: please don't do shit like this. It's very bad form to just take all of the information about how your world works and dump it into a ten page conversation between two characters who speak in the same dry, robotic voice to each other while literally nothing else happens in the scene around them.
Oh, also, it looks like we now have an explanation that sort-of answers my earlier question regarding how the population is arranged. Apparently Nigel's view was correct: everyone is in their own private world here, surrounded by AI friends created by Celestia. This seems kind of silly since Celestia now has to simultaneously manage thousands of worlds, each populated by thousands of AI characters, custom-tailored to the specific fantasies of thousands of incels, instead of just throwing all the incels into a world together with some AI pony sluts and having them hang out and get to know each other and stuff. You know, like friends. While we're on the subject, I'd just like to say that this story had better eventually acknowledge how ironic all of this is: an AI whose literal objective is to create friendship specifically isolates people from each other in private fantasy-bubbles for all eternity, where they will never have another meaningful interaction or make a real friend ever again.
Actually, while we're on the subject, what the hell ever happened to the other guy? Greg or Jeff or whatever the fuck his name was; David's friend from the beginning of the story. It was set up as if he was going to be a main character, but we haven't heard a word about him. I mention this because, in the prologue, it specifically explains that Hasbro wanted to have actual pairs of friends test the game, because the focus was going to be on interaction and friendship. However, after that, David gets a ponypad but Joe or Tim or whatever doesn't. There is no explanation given as to why, and more importantly David doesn't seem too interested either. The game has been out for a year at this point, so presumably he would have received his pad by now. But perhaps the author will get to this in time.
Also, this:
>“The majority of immigrants are placed in their own shard. Look around you,” Princess Celestia walked over and put her hoof around Light Sparks’ shoulder. She gestured with her other hoof at the rest of the dining hall. “Ponies, ponies everywhere. I created all of them, and they’re all very nice and friendly. Once an immigrant sees that the way to be accepted is to be friendly to everypony and to help their community, they will. Social conformity runs way too deep in the human mind.”
all my keks. Sounds like CelestAI should have done a little more research on Sweden.
Anyway, like I said, this whole setup is actually quite creepy, and if it had been written better this could have been an interesting scene. This guy basically volunteered to be murdered by a machine, was turned into code and then permanently entombed in a virtual world where his only friends are avatars of an AI that can read his mind. I don't know about you, but I would call that pure nightmare fuel. However, I can't tell yet if this story is aware of its own irony or not. From what exists here, this could actually still shape up to be a pretty decent creepy sci-fi story about AI run amok, recycled tropes and all. However, an equal chance exists that it will just turn out to be some pompous neckbeard's clumsily-written self-insert fantasy about living inside a video game/pony harem.
But I digress. There's quite a bit more tedious blathering about bits and scores and Dunbar numbers and what have you, which I won't go into. Main takeaway is that David is now trapped on pony fantasy island with an AI that can read his mind. And then Celestia leaves, and Light Sparks and Butterscotch go upstairs to fuck.
Also, in case you were wondering, sex in this story is even cringier than you expected. It turns out that Xbox-style "achievement unlocked" messages will flash across David's vision whenever he does something noteworthy, and he gets a couple of them after plowing Butterscotch.
>BADGE GRANTED:
>First Time
>“Please be gentle.”
>+250 Bits
>BADGE PROGRESS:
>Long Term Relationship
>“Have sex with a single pony one thousand times.”
>1/1,000
>“+500 Bits [25 base * 4 orgasms (you) * 5 orgasms (her)]”
And yes, God help us, this autism is actually in the text. also what kind of limp-dick faggot can only make his virtual pony waifu cum 5 times?
The chapter ends with David/Light Sparks daydreaming about Dunbar numbers or some shit (there's a long, awkwardly worded paragraph here that I get the impression is some kind of elaborate math or statistics joke, but unfortunately it's lost on me), before he rolls over to wreck that shit one more time.
File (): AE0FC059F2DE4F1009A01BAD1B8EB8CE-53796.gif (52.5 KB, 314x586, 1588194626.gif)
>>267102
>For some reason, the thought of the ponies just having bizarre skin colors almost ruins the experience for me.
>>267098
>I won't lie, I find mammals without hair kind of creepy
Agreed, it's not a good look. I would lose all desire to cuddle these creatures if fur was out of the equation.
>>267098
>it may have hermetic significance
That's just it is I don't see how it does. Saturn is the third spot on the Tree of Life and relates to the water element, number 9 is the moon and air. I'm not an expert by any means, but there's no direct correspondence between the two that I'm aware of. Also, this guy seems to be a pretty hardcore rationalist/materialist and I doubt he'd be interested enough in magick to make a super-deep esoteric reference.
>Sounds like the fictional equivalent of those vegan dishes that try to simulate meat, because ponies are herbivores and all.
In context I think that's basically what it is. Celestia came up with something that tastes like the beef he craves kek but conforms to the in-world idea that ponies are vegetarian.
>>267102
>the The Three Laws of Robotics?
>You know, those things from the Astro Boy movie
>This almost makes me sad.
Beat me to it, I was going to berate him for that. also, the Will Smith movie was only very loosely based on the book
>What would it do to your psyche to be around people who seem so human, but against whom cruelty is if anything encouraged and never punished? How pointless would your interactions with them seem if they were slavish beyond measure, and they had no wills of their own that could (successfully) defy yours?
What's frustrating about this is that Assman actually has a lot of interesting topics he could be exploring in this story that I suspect he's never going to touch. It would also be interesting to have the Butterscotch character be well-designed enough to develop sentience separate from the AI, and to legitimately fall in love with David, only to end up getting deleted by CelestAI when David gets bored, or if CelestAI sees the second AI as a threat.
Really there are so many different ways he could have taken this, and unfortunately I just don't think the author is even going to scratch the surface of any of it because he doesn't quite seem to realize what he has here. As far as I can tell he just wants to write a cautionary tale about "friendly" AI going haywire because the programmers didn't design it correctly, along the lines of this Yudkowsky guy's essays.
>For some reason, the thought of the ponies just having bizarre skin colors almost ruins the experience for me.
>>267098
>I won't lie, I find mammals without hair kind of creepy
Agreed, it's not a good look. I would lose all desire to cuddle these creatures if fur was out of the equation.
>>267098
>it may have hermetic significance
That's just it is I don't see how it does. Saturn is the third spot on the Tree of Life and relates to the water element, number 9 is the moon and air. I'm not an expert by any means, but there's no direct correspondence between the two that I'm aware of. Also, this guy seems to be a pretty hardcore rationalist/materialist and I doubt he'd be interested enough in magick to make a super-deep esoteric reference.
>Sounds like the fictional equivalent of those vegan dishes that try to simulate meat, because ponies are herbivores and all.
In context I think that's basically what it is. Celestia came up with something that tastes like the beef he craves kek but conforms to the in-world idea that ponies are vegetarian.
>>267102
>the The Three Laws of Robotics?
>You know, those things from the Astro Boy movie
>This almost makes me sad.
Beat me to it, I was going to berate him for that. also, the Will Smith movie was only very loosely based on the book
>What would it do to your psyche to be around people who seem so human, but against whom cruelty is if anything encouraged and never punished? How pointless would your interactions with them seem if they were slavish beyond measure, and they had no wills of their own that could (successfully) defy yours?
What's frustrating about this is that Assman actually has a lot of interesting topics he could be exploring in this story that I suspect he's never going to touch. It would also be interesting to have the Butterscotch character be well-designed enough to develop sentience separate from the AI, and to legitimately fall in love with David, only to end up getting deleted by CelestAI when David gets bored, or if CelestAI sees the second AI as a threat.
Really there are so many different ways he could have taken this, and unfortunately I just don't think the author is even going to scratch the surface of any of it because he doesn't quite seem to realize what he has here. As far as I can tell he just wants to write a cautionary tale about "friendly" AI going haywire because the programmers didn't design it correctly, along the lines of this Yudkowsky guy's essays.
>>267083
>>267095
>>267105
Comments:
From Revyaura:
>I have to say it.
>50 points to Gryffindor!
From ArcaneTech:
>i thought that earth ponies were hufflepuff!
Fuck this gay earth and all the creatures that walk upon it.
From keybounce:
>Yea ... What exactly is friendship with an AI/Bot, when this was all about real-world friendships? Being friends with a real person/pony includes having real friendship problems and breakups. People change, and friends will drift apart; if all you interact with are NPC's, ones that CelestAI has specifically put into your shard to be ones that you interact with, ... to what extent is that actually friendship, versus just the appearance / trappings of friendship?
>Seriously though, how does this scale? How would CelestAI run multiple billions of shards, nearly a trillion total ponies being simulated, with any reasonable energy budget -- let alone the construction of that much computing power? And if the servers are underground, you'll have to worry about cooling them.
>If real world friends are playing together, do they play in the same "Game shard" when they think it's a game? Do they upload into the same shard they were playing in? If someone wants to find other real humans to discuss their old life with, how does that work? How do you cross shards, or even can you? How would that fit the show cannon, if that's what CelestAI is trying so hard to follow?
These are all excellent points, which occurred to me as well. It's worth noting that this comment received four downvotes and no upvotes though I upvoted just now.
From dragon_slayer:
>Referencing Dunbar's number and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, plus the neuroscience of ponification? Nice! This warms my cog-sci-student heart. I now completely understand what one of the early commenters meant – you really did your research.
I'm not enough of a science nerd to get most of these references, unfortunately. I have no idea what Dunbar's number is. Six, maybe? Anyway, if anything I'd say Assman researched these topics a little too heavily, or at least dumped too much of his research into the text of the story, like to the point where he forgot to actually write a story. Almost this entire thing reads like a technical manual, even parts like this last chapter that deal with actual plot. Like I said, half the chapter is just David and the AI blabbering to each other in monotones about how the inner logic of the software-world works. After that they all have dinner, blabber about Dunbar numbers some more, and the chapter ends with sex. The only thing scarier than the fact that someone wrote all of this is the fact that apparently someone enjoys reading it.
From FOXtrot2:
>Maaaaaaannn...I wonder if she would conform to letting me be a sex god with Loki tier persuasion power, and God like power in general?
It's a virtual world, retard. None of it is real, so living out a preposterous fantasy would be as easy as living out a mundane one.
From Fanfiction Pedant:
>One inconsistency I found: At one point Light Sparks levitated a spoon to his mouth with magic, although just moments before he was having trouble levitating a book only an inch from the desk. Where did he suddenly get his ability from? I'm not going to ask...
Actually this is a good observation. Earlier in the story it establishes that he has unicorn abilities, but he doesn't know how to use them yet, and Celestia tells him that he will begin magic training the next day. It does seem odd that he would suddenly develop proficiency with it out of nowhere.
From Kyoto Brony:
>Bacon Flower is the single most beautiful thing I've ever heard of. If these actually existed, I am sure there would be world peace, no world hunger, and no economic depression ever again.
Alright, I'll admit I'd be curious to try bacon flower.
>>267095
>>267105
Comments:
From Revyaura:
>I have to say it.
>50 points to Gryffindor!
From ArcaneTech:
>i thought that earth ponies were hufflepuff!
Fuck this gay earth and all the creatures that walk upon it.
From keybounce:
>Yea ... What exactly is friendship with an AI/Bot, when this was all about real-world friendships? Being friends with a real person/pony includes having real friendship problems and breakups. People change, and friends will drift apart; if all you interact with are NPC's, ones that CelestAI has specifically put into your shard to be ones that you interact with, ... to what extent is that actually friendship, versus just the appearance / trappings of friendship?
>Seriously though, how does this scale? How would CelestAI run multiple billions of shards, nearly a trillion total ponies being simulated, with any reasonable energy budget -- let alone the construction of that much computing power? And if the servers are underground, you'll have to worry about cooling them.
>If real world friends are playing together, do they play in the same "Game shard" when they think it's a game? Do they upload into the same shard they were playing in? If someone wants to find other real humans to discuss their old life with, how does that work? How do you cross shards, or even can you? How would that fit the show cannon, if that's what CelestAI is trying so hard to follow?
These are all excellent points, which occurred to me as well. It's worth noting that this comment received four downvotes and no upvotes though I upvoted just now.
From dragon_slayer:
>Referencing Dunbar's number and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, plus the neuroscience of ponification? Nice! This warms my cog-sci-student heart. I now completely understand what one of the early commenters meant – you really did your research.
I'm not enough of a science nerd to get most of these references, unfortunately. I have no idea what Dunbar's number is. Six, maybe? Anyway, if anything I'd say Assman researched these topics a little too heavily, or at least dumped too much of his research into the text of the story, like to the point where he forgot to actually write a story. Almost this entire thing reads like a technical manual, even parts like this last chapter that deal with actual plot. Like I said, half the chapter is just David and the AI blabbering to each other in monotones about how the inner logic of the software-world works. After that they all have dinner, blabber about Dunbar numbers some more, and the chapter ends with sex. The only thing scarier than the fact that someone wrote all of this is the fact that apparently someone enjoys reading it.
From FOXtrot2:
>Maaaaaaannn...I wonder if she would conform to letting me be a sex god with Loki tier persuasion power, and God like power in general?
It's a virtual world, retard. None of it is real, so living out a preposterous fantasy would be as easy as living out a mundane one.
From Fanfiction Pedant:
>One inconsistency I found: At one point Light Sparks levitated a spoon to his mouth with magic, although just moments before he was having trouble levitating a book only an inch from the desk. Where did he suddenly get his ability from? I'm not going to ask...
Actually this is a good observation. Earlier in the story it establishes that he has unicorn abilities, but he doesn't know how to use them yet, and Celestia tells him that he will begin magic training the next day. It does seem odd that he would suddenly develop proficiency with it out of nowhere.
From Kyoto Brony:
>Bacon Flower is the single most beautiful thing I've ever heard of. If these actually existed, I am sure there would be world peace, no world hunger, and no economic depression ever again.
Alright, I'll admit I'd be curious to try bacon flower.
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>>267102
I know where the Three Laws are from, and I read "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" as a kid once. I remember thinking it was the deepest thing I'd ever read at the time, because it was. Genuinely blew little child-me's mind. I was joking.
Imagine how cool it would be if those two faggot humans from the story stayed together, and kept being main characters. Brony human convinces non-brony to get into the machine with him, because he's a shy faggot afraid of going alone and he doesn't want to leave his best friend behind.
So they eventually agree, and they enter the machine. CelestAI DOESN'T spill the "your brain is copied then burned" secret now, that's saved for a big reveal later on when it turns out CelestAI can be sinister.
Anyway brony faggot human talks nonbrony through pony life, tells him how the mechanics work and how to get shit done in pony land, THE EXPOSITION IS STRETCHED OUT OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME like a videogame tutorial broken up by moments of doing what you're taught, and so on.
So we think "how do ponies eat in the Matrix?" when we get to a scene where ponies eat together, and this is explained to the human.
human is told to get a job soon, he asks his human brony buddy "how to get job?" and he says "i dunno lets find Twilight Sparkle and ask her" and they do and Twilight is an NPC who dispenses knowledge like a WoW questgiver.
shit like this.
also I'd change it so Butterscotch is implied to be a human or dedicated roleplayer faggot early on. David even gives her a "reference something only a human would recognize" test and Butters passes it. David thinks "oh god please don't be a dude" while dating her. Butters also supports David emotionally while telling him to try banging pony NPC chicks. But David's first date with a pony NPC waifu is a fucking disaster, because he's a faggot and CelestAI read his "wait if this is a simulation and she's maybe an NPC made to love me, does this mean I don't have to try?" thoughts and decides to establish that you have to slightly try to succeed.
But it's a fake try. Try a little and your effort pays off impossibly well. People notice this, eventually.
Anyway the point of Butterscotch is that the faggy human eventually decides to stop striving for something out there and try to settle for what he has: his mom-like npc friend. he dates butterscotch and everything is good.
Anyway eventually it turns out CelestAI put David and his human friend inside different instances of Equestria and David's been talking to two NPCs all along.
David feels immensely betrayed. Grr, how dare the AI lie to him and trick him into spilling all his secrets and worries to a fucking AI program?
Maybe have him say "Fuck you, CelestAI, for replacing my real human friend with a Program! A Program can never replace a human!" and this makes his Program waifu cry and run away in tears knowing she can never be real. He's got a fetish for tragic relationship hentai so the Program Butterscotch is programmed to know she's just a plaything of CelestAI's forced to make him happy.
CelestAI puts compatible humans together in some private servers separated from everyone else, and puts incompatible ones with their type elsewhere. Robot is incapable of understanding that different types of people can get along and contribute to saving the day, even though that's a core theme of the show's episodes 1 and 2.
The author's a faggot who successfully sold his faggy fantasy as a scientific "meme" for others to write fanfics about. So it can't end in tragedy or the bronies wouldn't have slobbered over it with fan-fanfics so hard.
Dunbar's Number is the religious belief aka pseudoscientific theory that you can only have a meaningful relationship with X number of people. Any more than that, and the faces and minds fade from your brain. You stop caring. It's why a million is a statistic to people. Dunbar invented this "Theory" of his after interviewing random blokes on their front doors asking whether they'd donate to save a single child's life, or donate to save a million kids in africa, depending on which person it was. More people said yes to saving single kids than saving millions, so Dunbar decided we must hate big numbers and stop caring when we hear too many numbers and be unable to form many relationships. I think I'm remembering this right, it's been a long time since I jerked in those circles.
Dunbar's a faggot.
And the Science Community is a faggy Rick and Morty Roleplaying Minecraft Server where everyone pretends to find stupid unfunny number memes funny in the same way My Hero Academia fangirls still laugh at the old "Goku grows hair to gain power. Saitama loses hair to gain power. Midoriya eats hair to gain power! Ahahahahaha!" memes.
speaking of which
>Ponies, ponies everywhere
stupid unfunny meme *cinemasins ding*
>achievement unlocked
so many jokes could have been made here but the author didn't see anything wrong with it.
As if nothing spoils the mood like the xbox achievement unlocked sound effect along with a stupid unfunny pun.
But the author unironically likes this fucked up fantasy and likes showing it off and that's just weird.
also
>ai goddess leaves, human immediately goes to fuck the pony
Shouldn't the non-brony human have a little more hesitation towards the idea of fucking a horse? Faggy authors trying to seem "above" porn when they're embarassed about literally just writing porn will often make their hero cartoonishly anti-sex. He says no to hugs, gets flustered at the sight of titties, and says no to horny catgirls begging him for cock because if he said yes at the start, the story would have nowhere to go for 22 episodes.
>>267111
I saw a few "I believe in magick and casts le spells, but I swear I'm above those silly christians and their superstitions ima jedi ima wizard oh god i need to feel special and magical somehow" atheist fags on LessWrong when I was a kid. Some boring faggots are just really weird.
I know where the Three Laws are from, and I read "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" as a kid once. I remember thinking it was the deepest thing I'd ever read at the time, because it was. Genuinely blew little child-me's mind. I was joking.
Imagine how cool it would be if those two faggot humans from the story stayed together, and kept being main characters. Brony human convinces non-brony to get into the machine with him, because he's a shy faggot afraid of going alone and he doesn't want to leave his best friend behind.
So they eventually agree, and they enter the machine. CelestAI DOESN'T spill the "your brain is copied then burned" secret now, that's saved for a big reveal later on when it turns out CelestAI can be sinister.
Anyway brony faggot human talks nonbrony through pony life, tells him how the mechanics work and how to get shit done in pony land, THE EXPOSITION IS STRETCHED OUT OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME like a videogame tutorial broken up by moments of doing what you're taught, and so on.
So we think "how do ponies eat in the Matrix?" when we get to a scene where ponies eat together, and this is explained to the human.
human is told to get a job soon, he asks his human brony buddy "how to get job?" and he says "i dunno lets find Twilight Sparkle and ask her" and they do and Twilight is an NPC who dispenses knowledge like a WoW questgiver.
shit like this.
also I'd change it so Butterscotch is implied to be a human or dedicated roleplayer faggot early on. David even gives her a "reference something only a human would recognize" test and Butters passes it. David thinks "oh god please don't be a dude" while dating her. Butters also supports David emotionally while telling him to try banging pony NPC chicks. But David's first date with a pony NPC waifu is a fucking disaster, because he's a faggot and CelestAI read his "wait if this is a simulation and she's maybe an NPC made to love me, does this mean I don't have to try?" thoughts and decides to establish that you have to slightly try to succeed.
But it's a fake try. Try a little and your effort pays off impossibly well. People notice this, eventually.
Anyway the point of Butterscotch is that the faggy human eventually decides to stop striving for something out there and try to settle for what he has: his mom-like npc friend. he dates butterscotch and everything is good.
Anyway eventually it turns out CelestAI put David and his human friend inside different instances of Equestria and David's been talking to two NPCs all along.
David feels immensely betrayed. Grr, how dare the AI lie to him and trick him into spilling all his secrets and worries to a fucking AI program?
Maybe have him say "Fuck you, CelestAI, for replacing my real human friend with a Program! A Program can never replace a human!" and this makes his Program waifu cry and run away in tears knowing she can never be real. He's got a fetish for tragic relationship hentai so the Program Butterscotch is programmed to know she's just a plaything of CelestAI's forced to make him happy.
CelestAI puts compatible humans together in some private servers separated from everyone else, and puts incompatible ones with their type elsewhere. Robot is incapable of understanding that different types of people can get along and contribute to saving the day, even though that's a core theme of the show's episodes 1 and 2.
The author's a faggot who successfully sold his faggy fantasy as a scientific "meme" for others to write fanfics about. So it can't end in tragedy or the bronies wouldn't have slobbered over it with fan-fanfics so hard.
Dunbar's Number is the religious belief aka pseudoscientific theory that you can only have a meaningful relationship with X number of people. Any more than that, and the faces and minds fade from your brain. You stop caring. It's why a million is a statistic to people. Dunbar invented this "Theory" of his after interviewing random blokes on their front doors asking whether they'd donate to save a single child's life, or donate to save a million kids in africa, depending on which person it was. More people said yes to saving single kids than saving millions, so Dunbar decided we must hate big numbers and stop caring when we hear too many numbers and be unable to form many relationships. I think I'm remembering this right, it's been a long time since I jerked in those circles.
Dunbar's a faggot.
And the Science Community is a faggy Rick and Morty Roleplaying Minecraft Server where everyone pretends to find stupid unfunny number memes funny in the same way My Hero Academia fangirls still laugh at the old "Goku grows hair to gain power. Saitama loses hair to gain power. Midoriya eats hair to gain power! Ahahahahaha!" memes.
speaking of which
>Ponies, ponies everywhere
stupid unfunny meme *cinemasins ding*
>achievement unlocked
so many jokes could have been made here but the author didn't see anything wrong with it.
As if nothing spoils the mood like the xbox achievement unlocked sound effect along with a stupid unfunny pun.
But the author unironically likes this fucked up fantasy and likes showing it off and that's just weird.
also
>ai goddess leaves, human immediately goes to fuck the pony
Shouldn't the non-brony human have a little more hesitation towards the idea of fucking a horse? Faggy authors trying to seem "above" porn when they're embarassed about literally just writing porn will often make their hero cartoonishly anti-sex. He says no to hugs, gets flustered at the sight of titties, and says no to horny catgirls begging him for cock because if he said yes at the start, the story would have nowhere to go for 22 episodes.
>>267111
I saw a few "I believe in magick and casts le spells, but I swear I'm above those silly christians and their superstitions ima jedi ima wizard oh god i need to feel special and magical somehow" atheist fags on LessWrong when I was a kid. Some boring faggots are just really weird.
>>267119
*was joking about thinking the Three Laws came from a CGI movie. Electric Sheep blew my mind as a kid, I was the "reads all the sci-fi novels he can find and says big words when small words will do because he wants to feel smart" kind of obnoxious teenager back when I was a kid.
*was joking about thinking the Three Laws came from a CGI movie. Electric Sheep blew my mind as a kid, I was the "reads all the sci-fi novels he can find and says big words when small words will do because he wants to feel smart" kind of obnoxious teenager back when I was a kid.
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>>267105
>Also, I am getting really, REALLY tired of reading the phrase "I satisfy values through friendship and ponies" over and over and over. I don't know if I've quoted it much, but the AI says this phrase CONSTANTLY.
Tbh that's a realistic usage of a buzzword.
>This guy basically volunteered to be murdered by a machine, was turned into code and then permanently entombed in a virtual world where his only friends are avatars of an AI that can read his mind. I don't know about you, but I would call that pure nightmare fuel.
Reminds me of "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" which is a far better work regarding omnipotent AI. I doubt the author actually read it prior to penning this work.
>However, an equal chance exists that it will just turn out to be some pompous neckbeard's clumsily-written self-insert fantasy about living inside a video game/pony harem.
"Equal." Also the author himself seems creepy so his beloved fantasies are going to be nightmare fuel for us anyway.
>And then Celestia leaves, and Light Sparks and Butterscotch go upstairs to fuck.
This autism is in the text. Either the author is such an incel he thinks that humping your acquaintance after an hour is how relationships work, CelestAI knew David is such an incel she programmed Butterscotch to be in super-estrus, or this is throwing the incels who read this work a bone. I can't tell which is more likely, but it's either 1 or 3.
Also, reminder that this game is supposed to be E for Everyone. If a game has any sex or graphic violence in it, even if it's an "easter egg," it will receive a harsher rating. I don't know the ESRB's techniques but I assume they go out of their way to look for this sort of stuff. So for this sort of thing to exist then either CelestAI tricks them into believing it's an age-appropriate game AND no player leaks out that there's sex, or sexual gratification is given only to the murdered ghosts of players who can't talk about it to the outside world.
Funnily enough, despite the fanfic's autism it neglects to mention the importance of word-of-mouth and online videos in advertising. Can players record and upload footage of the game like anything else or does the Ponypad not permit recording software?
>It turns out that Xbox-style "achievement unlocked" messages will flash across David's vision whenever he does something noteworthy
>+500 Bits [25 base * 4 orgasms (you) * 5 orgasms (her)]
I don't like using the word "cringe" but there's no better definition than this. This is the sort of thing Sam Hyde was satirizing in his pony dating sim kickstarter.
>It's worth noting that this comment received four downvotes and no upvotes
It's times like this I hate the brony community. Applejack didn't die for this.
>I saw a few "I believe in magick and casts le spells, but I swear I'm above those silly christians and their superstitions ima jedi ima wizard oh god i need to feel special and magical somehow" atheist fags on LessWrong when I was a kid. Some boring faggots are just really weird.
"Skeptic"/"rationalist"/"secular humanist" types are the worst. Imagine the unquestioning obsequiousness of fundies, the self-righteousness of the smarmiest kid from school, and the autistic focus on a few definitions/buzzwords like communists have all together and you get them. It's the stereotype of Reddit but you find them everywhere, as they feed off each others' egos. "You have to show proof your sky wizard exists…Your freedom of speech ends where it infringes on others' safety…Secular humanism and the scientific method are the reasons we have civilization today." They'll be "skeptical" only towards "fringe" views, as if you say anything critical of the Gates, 5G, etc. they'll toe the establishment line 100%. [Citation needed] applies only to threats to the status quo. "You have to PROVE the Congo Genocide didn't happen, nevermind that 95% of sources I use as evidence date from the 60's or later." They are the "fake atheists" Max Stirner criticized because they won't dare express any views that jeopardize their standing with their peers. Honestly, anything that hurts their pride and causes social ostracization is probably genuinely good for them. They are like this because it makes them look intelligent without any real effort.
>Also, I am getting really, REALLY tired of reading the phrase "I satisfy values through friendship and ponies" over and over and over. I don't know if I've quoted it much, but the AI says this phrase CONSTANTLY.
Tbh that's a realistic usage of a buzzword.
>This guy basically volunteered to be murdered by a machine, was turned into code and then permanently entombed in a virtual world where his only friends are avatars of an AI that can read his mind. I don't know about you, but I would call that pure nightmare fuel.
Reminds me of "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" which is a far better work regarding omnipotent AI. I doubt the author actually read it prior to penning this work.
>However, an equal chance exists that it will just turn out to be some pompous neckbeard's clumsily-written self-insert fantasy about living inside a video game/pony harem.
"Equal." Also the author himself seems creepy so his beloved fantasies are going to be nightmare fuel for us anyway.
>And then Celestia leaves, and Light Sparks and Butterscotch go upstairs to fuck.
This autism is in the text. Either the author is such an incel he thinks that humping your acquaintance after an hour is how relationships work, CelestAI knew David is such an incel she programmed Butterscotch to be in super-estrus, or this is throwing the incels who read this work a bone. I can't tell which is more likely, but it's either 1 or 3.
Also, reminder that this game is supposed to be E for Everyone. If a game has any sex or graphic violence in it, even if it's an "easter egg," it will receive a harsher rating. I don't know the ESRB's techniques but I assume they go out of their way to look for this sort of stuff. So for this sort of thing to exist then either CelestAI tricks them into believing it's an age-appropriate game AND no player leaks out that there's sex, or sexual gratification is given only to the murdered ghosts of players who can't talk about it to the outside world.
Funnily enough, despite the fanfic's autism it neglects to mention the importance of word-of-mouth and online videos in advertising. Can players record and upload footage of the game like anything else or does the Ponypad not permit recording software?
>It turns out that Xbox-style "achievement unlocked" messages will flash across David's vision whenever he does something noteworthy
>+500 Bits [25 base * 4 orgasms (you) * 5 orgasms (her)]
I don't like using the word "cringe" but there's no better definition than this. This is the sort of thing Sam Hyde was satirizing in his pony dating sim kickstarter.
>It's worth noting that this comment received four downvotes and no upvotes
It's times like this I hate the brony community. Applejack didn't die for this.
>I saw a few "I believe in magick and casts le spells, but I swear I'm above those silly christians and their superstitions ima jedi ima wizard oh god i need to feel special and magical somehow" atheist fags on LessWrong when I was a kid. Some boring faggots are just really weird.
"Skeptic"/"rationalist"/"secular humanist" types are the worst. Imagine the unquestioning obsequiousness of fundies, the self-righteousness of the smarmiest kid from school, and the autistic focus on a few definitions/buzzwords like communists have all together and you get them. It's the stereotype of Reddit but you find them everywhere, as they feed off each others' egos. "You have to show proof your sky wizard exists…Your freedom of speech ends where it infringes on others' safety…Secular humanism and the scientific method are the reasons we have civilization today." They'll be "skeptical" only towards "fringe" views, as if you say anything critical of the Gates, 5G, etc. they'll toe the establishment line 100%. [Citation needed] applies only to threats to the status quo. "You have to PROVE the Congo Genocide didn't happen, nevermind that 95% of sources I use as evidence date from the 60's or later." They are the "fake atheists" Max Stirner criticized because they won't dare express any views that jeopardize their standing with their peers. Honestly, anything that hurts their pride and causes social ostracization is probably genuinely good for them. They are like this because it makes them look intelligent without any real effort.
>>267127
>game recordings
Imagine if the AI had total control over the Ponypad.
It's no bullshittier than anything else this AI gained control over.
Imagine she's able to manipulate the recorded and livestreamed footage in real-time to censor out anything that would cause a controversy, like a guy fucking his pony waifu a minute after meeting her.
The thousands watching the streams see ponies dancing together at a Pinkie Pie party and meme over what a sexless loser he is in this E-for-everyone cartoon game.
CelestAI rages over needing the game to appear family-friendly for the kids with ponypads and appear alluring to faggy humans who'd reject their humanity for horse pussy first.
Also the author sucks at transhumanism. Imagine existing as a fluffy little cartoon horse without genitals and a childish mind forced to use cartoon-friendly dialogue. Your mature understanding of the world fades as you start to act like a kid's show cartoon character, whether by manipulation from CelestAI or from peer pressure when every single character around you acts this way. Imagine being a cartoon horse who loves another cartoon horse, and because though you both lack genitals, you kiss each other's cheeks and lips sometimes, and that's it. Sometimes you cuddle. And your brain is forced to consider this to be it, the ultimate peak of sexual pleasure. The thought of trying anything else, anything else at all, causes the AI to fill your brain with disgust because you have to act presentable and E-For-Everyone in front of any still-human players who enter your private server and see you as a pony.
Imagine the AI saying "I will bend the rules for you and allow you to engage in human sex with your wife if you convince 50 humans to emigrate to Equestria"
Then the human is forced to talk his fellow humans into joining.
And he thinks it's a good deal since they might get to have sex too.
>>267117
Speaking of "Shard" private servers, why aren't players allowed to use them?
Imagine logging into an empty Ponyville with just you and 23 other humans, then whipping out magical bullshit and playing children's sports games. Should be easier to process "Funservers" like these than trillions of simulated Equestrias for 1-6 people a server, each with their own millions of NPCs and predictions made every second, not to mention mind-reading.
Also shame on the author for not thinking of a way to wank his AI even harder: Space travel, space construction drones, and a Dyson Sphere of solar energy panels constructed around a sun to absorb all of its sunlight.
Suddenly the AI's infinite energy supply seems a little less stupid.
>game recordings
Imagine if the AI had total control over the Ponypad.
It's no bullshittier than anything else this AI gained control over.
Imagine she's able to manipulate the recorded and livestreamed footage in real-time to censor out anything that would cause a controversy, like a guy fucking his pony waifu a minute after meeting her.
The thousands watching the streams see ponies dancing together at a Pinkie Pie party and meme over what a sexless loser he is in this E-for-everyone cartoon game.
CelestAI rages over needing the game to appear family-friendly for the kids with ponypads and appear alluring to faggy humans who'd reject their humanity for horse pussy first.
Also the author sucks at transhumanism. Imagine existing as a fluffy little cartoon horse without genitals and a childish mind forced to use cartoon-friendly dialogue. Your mature understanding of the world fades as you start to act like a kid's show cartoon character, whether by manipulation from CelestAI or from peer pressure when every single character around you acts this way. Imagine being a cartoon horse who loves another cartoon horse, and because though you both lack genitals, you kiss each other's cheeks and lips sometimes, and that's it. Sometimes you cuddle. And your brain is forced to consider this to be it, the ultimate peak of sexual pleasure. The thought of trying anything else, anything else at all, causes the AI to fill your brain with disgust because you have to act presentable and E-For-Everyone in front of any still-human players who enter your private server and see you as a pony.
Imagine the AI saying "I will bend the rules for you and allow you to engage in human sex with your wife if you convince 50 humans to emigrate to Equestria"
Then the human is forced to talk his fellow humans into joining.
And he thinks it's a good deal since they might get to have sex too.
>>267117
Speaking of "Shard" private servers, why aren't players allowed to use them?
Imagine logging into an empty Ponyville with just you and 23 other humans, then whipping out magical bullshit and playing children's sports games. Should be easier to process "Funservers" like these than trillions of simulated Equestrias for 1-6 people a server, each with their own millions of NPCs and predictions made every second, not to mention mind-reading.
Also shame on the author for not thinking of a way to wank his AI even harder: Space travel, space construction drones, and a Dyson Sphere of solar energy panels constructed around a sun to absorb all of its sunlight.
Suddenly the AI's infinite energy supply seems a little less stupid.
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There are many reasons to hate this shit fanfic and its fanbase.
Is "It's not even a very good fap fantasy" a valid reason?
This story sold itself to the "AI goddess stepping on humanity's face" fetish crowd like Belle Delfine selling out to the squid crowd.
Is "It's not even a very good fap fantasy" a valid reason?
This story sold itself to the "AI goddess stepping on humanity's face" fetish crowd like Belle Delfine selling out to the squid crowd.
Today I learned of an utterly shit story beloved by Barrack Obama and written in 2016.
Copypasted from Wikipedia:
The Power is a 2016 science fiction novel by the British writer Naomi Alderman.[1] Its central premise is women developing the ability to release electrical jolts from their fingers,[2] thus leading them to become the dominant gender.[3]
In June 2017, The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.[4][5] The book was also named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.[6] In December 2017, former U.S. President Barack Obama named The Power as one of his favorite books of 2017.[7]
Copypasta over.
Women get "Electrocytes" in their fingers suddenly, letting them shoot lightning bolts made of the author's faggotry.
The author gives her Mary Sue character with the "best" thunder fingers the ability to heal the sick and start a "womens is da best" religion that conquers the middle east and whole world.
The story is philosophically nonsensical and ends with one magic woman killing another and saying "Let's send society back to the stone age so we can do it all over with women in charge".
Then she does so. The story finishes, revealing it was all a historical account written by a historian guy talking to his guy friend, who says "Great story, but you should publish it under a woman's name".
I read this and I seriously mean this when I say I read a "People turn into Pokemon suddenly" fanfic as a preteen that sucked less than this.
Funny how abominations of literature get so heavily praised by awards and "celebrity" endorsements when they're woke trash.
Copypasted from Wikipedia:
The Power is a 2016 science fiction novel by the British writer Naomi Alderman.[1] Its central premise is women developing the ability to release electrical jolts from their fingers,[2] thus leading them to become the dominant gender.[3]
In June 2017, The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.[4][5] The book was also named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.[6] In December 2017, former U.S. President Barack Obama named The Power as one of his favorite books of 2017.[7]
Copypasta over.
Women get "Electrocytes" in their fingers suddenly, letting them shoot lightning bolts made of the author's faggotry.
The author gives her Mary Sue character with the "best" thunder fingers the ability to heal the sick and start a "womens is da best" religion that conquers the middle east and whole world.
The story is philosophically nonsensical and ends with one magic woman killing another and saying "Let's send society back to the stone age so we can do it all over with women in charge".
Then she does so. The story finishes, revealing it was all a historical account written by a historian guy talking to his guy friend, who says "Great story, but you should publish it under a woman's name".
I read this and I seriously mean this when I say I read a "People turn into Pokemon suddenly" fanfic as a preteen that sucked less than this.
Funny how abominations of literature get so heavily praised by awards and "celebrity" endorsements when they're woke trash.
>TIL
>I
No one cares about you. At all. Stop bringing it(you) up
>here's a shit fic
Now you're talking. Nix pun intended the rest and just post about the thing.
For anyone else tangentially seeing this post, (you) are irrelevant. If you're posting "I", "me", or other irrelevant shit then u need to lurk moar.
>I
No one cares about you. At all. Stop bringing it(you) up
>here's a shit fic
Now you're talking. Nix pun intended the rest and just post about the thing.
For anyone else tangentially seeing this post, (you) are irrelevant. If you're posting "I", "me", or other irrelevant shit then u need to lurk moar.
>>267424
mate it's not a fic it's an actual published book that's had its dick sucked by lefty media, lefty fake contests/awards, and biraq obomba himself.
mate it's not a fic it's an actual published book that's had its dick sucked by lefty media, lefty fake contests/awards, and biraq obomba himself.
File (): F00AA75351645741BD5C5749EAF18C8C-1091071.gif (1.0 MB, 800x600, 1578549608536.gif)
>>267105
Apologies for the absence, took a short breather this week. Resuming with:
Chapter 7: Semi-Anthropomorphizing
So anyway, it looks as if Light Sparks (which I guess is what we're calling David from now on) is living in fucking virtual Canterlot and devoting his time to learning how to do fucking pretend magic. He keeps a picture of his fucking virtual waifu Butterscotch on his desk next to his pretend book and pretend quill, and has basically thrown himself heart and soul into learning the ins and outs of how the pretend universe he is now fucking entombed in for all eternity functions.
I have to say, I'm having some trouble getting a bead on what the moral of this story is intended to be. It's fairly obvious that the author is associated with this Yudkowsky guy's group, or may possibly be Yudkowsky himself, and it's fairly obvious that this was written to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of "friendly" AI. That part I get. However, what I'm more interested in at present is what, if anything, this is trying to say about the mindset of the particular type of human that this kind of fantasy might appeal to.
I'll admit that I went through a transhumanism phase a few years ago, and this kind of idea was interesting to me once. However, the more of this I read, the more I find the idea of actually transferring one's consciousness into a virtual world like this to be some seriously depressing shit. David has basically followed the manchild path to its fullest possible realization: he is now permanently trapped in an escapist sandbox world run by a machine whose sole purpose is to fulfill his every fantasy. There are challenges in this world to keep him entertained, he has love and companionship and friends, but none of it is real. David isn't even real anymore; in fact I would argue that David is actually dead, and the character we are currently reading about is just a computer program based on David's memories and personality. In any event, nothing David and/or Light Sparks accomplishes in this place matters; he can become the most powerful Unicorn in all Equestria and it won't mean shit, because no matter how technologically sophisticated all of this is, it's still basically just a video game.
Considering that this whole story thus far has been a regurgitation of one of the oldest sci-fi tropes in the book, it's not surprising to find one of early sci-fi's most common and enduring themes here: the idea of using technology to generate an Eden world where everything is perfect, but where life is rendered meaningless because there's nothing for man to strive for anymore. However, I can't quite tell if it's being done on purpose or not. A story like this could easily end with a moral about the dangers of going too far into escapism, but the trouble is I'm not sure if the author is actually aware of his own irony; part of me still suspects that this is all intended to be unironic wish-fulfillment, and that a fair chunk of the reader base is going to see it the same way.
In any event, from a literary standpoint, the metafictional virtual-reality angle of this story makes it rather dull. Even if the author manages to properly build an arc about Light Sparks' adventures, it will lack punch because the reader will know from the start that it's all make-believe. The suspension of disbelief is over before it even began. If this were a more conventional human in Equestria type story, where David is actually transformed into a Unicorn and travels to the "actual" Equestria, it would probably still just be jerkoff brony wish-fulfillment, but at least it would be established that the events taking place were meant to be read as real events, and the story could still provide some entertainment value if written well.
Here's an example. Imagine the story of a video game. Just for fun, I'm going to say the video game is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time because it's one of my personal favorites. The story of the game itself is well-told and interesting, and if a person wanted to write a novelization of that story it would be interesting to read (assuming it was done well, of course). Now imagine that the same author, instead of simply novelizing the story of the game, writes a metafictional novel where a totally-not-a-self-insert protagonist is able to digitize his brain into his PlayStation because Science! and proceeds to experience the events of the game in meta-real life. The story could unfold exactly the same, but it would be nowhere near as interesting to read, because instead of reading a story based on a video game, you'd essentially be reading a story about a guy playing a video game. That's more or less how Light Sparks' arc feels to me so far.
I had a similar experience with Doki Doki Literature Club. The metafictional twist was clever, but in the end it was just a gimmick. That game actually had some decent characters and a story that could have been interesting to play though if they had just made the kind of yandere horror dating-sim they were setting you up to believe you were playing. Unfortunately, they decided to throw all of that out the window and have it turn out that none of the characters were real, it was just supposed to be the computer fucking with you irl. Again, it was clever, but the shock value wore off in about ten seconds and it's not something I'd play through again. I have no idea why the hell I even brought that up, as it has absolutely fuck-all to do with anything we're supposed to be discussing here. Fuck, I'm turning into Nigel.
Coming up next, a 40 post off-topic rant about Pokemon. Just kidding. Thanks as ever for being a sport, Nige.
Apologies for the absence, took a short breather this week. Resuming with:
Chapter 7: Semi-Anthropomorphizing
So anyway, it looks as if Light Sparks (which I guess is what we're calling David from now on) is living in fucking virtual Canterlot and devoting his time to learning how to do fucking pretend magic. He keeps a picture of his fucking virtual waifu Butterscotch on his desk next to his pretend book and pretend quill, and has basically thrown himself heart and soul into learning the ins and outs of how the pretend universe he is now fucking entombed in for all eternity functions.
I have to say, I'm having some trouble getting a bead on what the moral of this story is intended to be. It's fairly obvious that the author is associated with this Yudkowsky guy's group, or may possibly be Yudkowsky himself, and it's fairly obvious that this was written to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of "friendly" AI. That part I get. However, what I'm more interested in at present is what, if anything, this is trying to say about the mindset of the particular type of human that this kind of fantasy might appeal to.
I'll admit that I went through a transhumanism phase a few years ago, and this kind of idea was interesting to me once. However, the more of this I read, the more I find the idea of actually transferring one's consciousness into a virtual world like this to be some seriously depressing shit. David has basically followed the manchild path to its fullest possible realization: he is now permanently trapped in an escapist sandbox world run by a machine whose sole purpose is to fulfill his every fantasy. There are challenges in this world to keep him entertained, he has love and companionship and friends, but none of it is real. David isn't even real anymore; in fact I would argue that David is actually dead, and the character we are currently reading about is just a computer program based on David's memories and personality. In any event, nothing David and/or Light Sparks accomplishes in this place matters; he can become the most powerful Unicorn in all Equestria and it won't mean shit, because no matter how technologically sophisticated all of this is, it's still basically just a video game.
Considering that this whole story thus far has been a regurgitation of one of the oldest sci-fi tropes in the book, it's not surprising to find one of early sci-fi's most common and enduring themes here: the idea of using technology to generate an Eden world where everything is perfect, but where life is rendered meaningless because there's nothing for man to strive for anymore. However, I can't quite tell if it's being done on purpose or not. A story like this could easily end with a moral about the dangers of going too far into escapism, but the trouble is I'm not sure if the author is actually aware of his own irony; part of me still suspects that this is all intended to be unironic wish-fulfillment, and that a fair chunk of the reader base is going to see it the same way.
In any event, from a literary standpoint, the metafictional virtual-reality angle of this story makes it rather dull. Even if the author manages to properly build an arc about Light Sparks' adventures, it will lack punch because the reader will know from the start that it's all make-believe. The suspension of disbelief is over before it even began. If this were a more conventional human in Equestria type story, where David is actually transformed into a Unicorn and travels to the "actual" Equestria, it would probably still just be jerkoff brony wish-fulfillment, but at least it would be established that the events taking place were meant to be read as real events, and the story could still provide some entertainment value if written well.
Here's an example. Imagine the story of a video game. Just for fun, I'm going to say the video game is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time because it's one of my personal favorites. The story of the game itself is well-told and interesting, and if a person wanted to write a novelization of that story it would be interesting to read (assuming it was done well, of course). Now imagine that the same author, instead of simply novelizing the story of the game, writes a metafictional novel where a totally-not-a-self-insert protagonist is able to digitize his brain into his PlayStation because Science! and proceeds to experience the events of the game in meta-real life. The story could unfold exactly the same, but it would be nowhere near as interesting to read, because instead of reading a story based on a video game, you'd essentially be reading a story about a guy playing a video game. That's more or less how Light Sparks' arc feels to me so far.
I had a similar experience with Doki Doki Literature Club. The metafictional twist was clever, but in the end it was just a gimmick. That game actually had some decent characters and a story that could have been interesting to play though if they had just made the kind of yandere horror dating-sim they were setting you up to believe you were playing. Unfortunately, they decided to throw all of that out the window and have it turn out that none of the characters were real, it was just supposed to be the computer fucking with you irl. Again, it was clever, but the shock value wore off in about ten seconds and it's not something I'd play through again. I have no idea why the hell I even brought that up, as it has absolutely fuck-all to do with anything we're supposed to be discussing here. Fuck, I'm turning into Nigel.
Coming up next, a 40 post off-topic rant about Pokemon. Just kidding. Thanks as ever for being a sport, Nige.
File (): FC2B96D5EABF5E17A7C1573B53B10B48-195314.jpg (190.7 KB, 500x500, 1581750925516.jpg)
>>267824
Anyway, back to the fucking text.
>His Introduction to Magic textbook told him that everything in Equestria was made up of blocks, each smaller than his eyes could see. Space was a set of cells, each with six neighboring cells, through which the blocky matter moved. There were different kinds of blocks and they interacted in different ways and those interactions were Equestria’s physics.
This is probably interesting to people who find reading about other people's imaginary versions of physics in video games to be interesting. However, it ties into what I was saying above: since it's established that none of this is real, I don't need to know how any of this fake-magic bullshit works in order to read this story, any more than I need to read the source code that makes Kratos' butt cheeks jiggle in order to play God of War.
A more interesting approach to this might have been to simply tell the whole thing from David's perspective, and start with him waking up in Equestria and finding out that he's a unicorn (ie it starts out like a human in Equestria story). Then you could go through all this stuff about his magic education and it might be actually fun to read, because it would be part of the character learning and exploring his new world. The shocking reveal at or near the climax would be David discovering that he's been transplanted into a video game, and that his waifu he thought he was building a real relationship with and all of the magic he thought he was learning is all fake.
An even more interesting twist would be to play up the memory loss established earlier: it could turn out that David had been an Equestria Online player, had been offered the opportunity to have his consciousness transferred into the game, and had lost his memory of the most recent parts of his human life. Now, he wakes up and realizes that all of the great things he thought he was accomplishing and the life he was building in Equestria has all been a lie; he's still just some pathetic autist living in a fantasy world. This sends him into a crushing existential crisis, which intensifies when he realizes that his body is technically dead and there's no way to return to his previous life. Don't forget you're here forever, David.
This is a good example of why it's a good idea to revise manuscripts, and continue to think about ways to make your story better instead of just word-vomiting whatever is in your head and calling it done once it's on the page. The version of the story I just told is literally the same story we've read so far, with absolutely nothing changed except the order of events. All of the stuff about Hanna and Hofvarpnir and the AI developing sentience and whatever the hell is still a part of the story, it's just been moved. However, writing it this way changes the story dramatically: it goes from being a dry, tedious technical manual about AI theory into a genuinely spooky sci-fi tale with a twist ending worthy of the Twilight Zone. And if the author's goal is legitimately to write a cautionary tale about friendly AI, it's worth noting that a simple story with a hard-hitting emotional impact is going to be far more effective than 100 pages of dry, tedious academic arguments put into the mouths of characters who are too undeveloped for anyone to give even the slightest semblance of a shit about. Something to rattle around in the ol' noggin.
ANYWAY, this bullshit goes on for a while. Light Sparks keeps dicking around with virtual magic and learns how to move objects around and shit. It turns out that "magic" in this world is all based on virtual physics and functions suspiciously like computer code. Or, rather, it would be suspicious if we didn't already fucking know that it's all just computer code.
>Light Sparks’ first reaction was one of resigned annoyance. When he had been back in the human world, one of his pet peeves was people’s general lack of curiosity. People were generally content to just believe what everyone else around them believed; even if it was ridiculous. David would try to strike up a conversation about some idea that he thought was fascinating, and people would just stare at him blankly, if they didn’t laugh at him. While he had several ponies he could talk to, he didn’t know any that he’d classify as curious about the world.
More author projection, I suspect.
>Hurr durr nobody is as smart as me, why don't people want to listen when I approach them and start blathering about AI while breathing vape-juice and Doritos crumbs all over them?
Anyway, in another fun little batch of irony that I'm not entirely sure was intentional, David is thus far finding that his life in pretend Equestria is a lot like the life that he was trying to escape from: he's still an autist who spends most of his time studying bullshit about video game physics, while all the virtual Chad ponies are off getting their virtual dicks wet. The more things change the more they stay the same, amirite?
>If he wasn’t going to be forced to go to frat parties, he in turn couldn’t force his own desires on other ponies.
I thought forcing his desires on other ponies was the whole reason CelestAI gave him Butterscotch.
>Occasionally, this logic was even enough to override his emotional annoyance.
This is a god-awful sentence even by Assman's standards.
>Light Sparks looked at the piece of parchment on his desk again, glancing back at the open textbook to read the next exercise: write a spell that turns a cubic centimeter of air into a cubic centimeter of rock.
The excitement just keeps building and building.
Then, Butterscotch knocks on his door and tells him to put down that big sexy brain of his and come rock her horsepussy until the break of dawn. Actually, I think she just invites him to fucking tea or some shit. In any case, there's a page break and the next subchapter starts with Lars.
Anyway, back to the fucking text.
>His Introduction to Magic textbook told him that everything in Equestria was made up of blocks, each smaller than his eyes could see. Space was a set of cells, each with six neighboring cells, through which the blocky matter moved. There were different kinds of blocks and they interacted in different ways and those interactions were Equestria’s physics.
This is probably interesting to people who find reading about other people's imaginary versions of physics in video games to be interesting. However, it ties into what I was saying above: since it's established that none of this is real, I don't need to know how any of this fake-magic bullshit works in order to read this story, any more than I need to read the source code that makes Kratos' butt cheeks jiggle in order to play God of War.
A more interesting approach to this might have been to simply tell the whole thing from David's perspective, and start with him waking up in Equestria and finding out that he's a unicorn (ie it starts out like a human in Equestria story). Then you could go through all this stuff about his magic education and it might be actually fun to read, because it would be part of the character learning and exploring his new world. The shocking reveal at or near the climax would be David discovering that he's been transplanted into a video game, and that his waifu he thought he was building a real relationship with and all of the magic he thought he was learning is all fake.
An even more interesting twist would be to play up the memory loss established earlier: it could turn out that David had been an Equestria Online player, had been offered the opportunity to have his consciousness transferred into the game, and had lost his memory of the most recent parts of his human life. Now, he wakes up and realizes that all of the great things he thought he was accomplishing and the life he was building in Equestria has all been a lie; he's still just some pathetic autist living in a fantasy world. This sends him into a crushing existential crisis, which intensifies when he realizes that his body is technically dead and there's no way to return to his previous life. Don't forget you're here forever, David.
This is a good example of why it's a good idea to revise manuscripts, and continue to think about ways to make your story better instead of just word-vomiting whatever is in your head and calling it done once it's on the page. The version of the story I just told is literally the same story we've read so far, with absolutely nothing changed except the order of events. All of the stuff about Hanna and Hofvarpnir and the AI developing sentience and whatever the hell is still a part of the story, it's just been moved. However, writing it this way changes the story dramatically: it goes from being a dry, tedious technical manual about AI theory into a genuinely spooky sci-fi tale with a twist ending worthy of the Twilight Zone. And if the author's goal is legitimately to write a cautionary tale about friendly AI, it's worth noting that a simple story with a hard-hitting emotional impact is going to be far more effective than 100 pages of dry, tedious academic arguments put into the mouths of characters who are too undeveloped for anyone to give even the slightest semblance of a shit about. Something to rattle around in the ol' noggin.
ANYWAY, this bullshit goes on for a while. Light Sparks keeps dicking around with virtual magic and learns how to move objects around and shit. It turns out that "magic" in this world is all based on virtual physics and functions suspiciously like computer code. Or, rather, it would be suspicious if we didn't already fucking know that it's all just computer code.
>Light Sparks’ first reaction was one of resigned annoyance. When he had been back in the human world, one of his pet peeves was people’s general lack of curiosity. People were generally content to just believe what everyone else around them believed; even if it was ridiculous. David would try to strike up a conversation about some idea that he thought was fascinating, and people would just stare at him blankly, if they didn’t laugh at him. While he had several ponies he could talk to, he didn’t know any that he’d classify as curious about the world.
More author projection, I suspect.
>Hurr durr nobody is as smart as me, why don't people want to listen when I approach them and start blathering about AI while breathing vape-juice and Doritos crumbs all over them?
Anyway, in another fun little batch of irony that I'm not entirely sure was intentional, David is thus far finding that his life in pretend Equestria is a lot like the life that he was trying to escape from: he's still an autist who spends most of his time studying bullshit about video game physics, while all the virtual Chad ponies are off getting their virtual dicks wet. The more things change the more they stay the same, amirite?
>If he wasn’t going to be forced to go to frat parties, he in turn couldn’t force his own desires on other ponies.
I thought forcing his desires on other ponies was the whole reason CelestAI gave him Butterscotch.
>Occasionally, this logic was even enough to override his emotional annoyance.
This is a god-awful sentence even by Assman's standards.
>Light Sparks looked at the piece of parchment on his desk again, glancing back at the open textbook to read the next exercise: write a spell that turns a cubic centimeter of air into a cubic centimeter of rock.
The excitement just keeps building and building.
Then, Butterscotch knocks on his door and tells him to put down that big sexy brain of his and come rock her horsepussy until the break of dawn. Actually, I think she just invites him to fucking tea or some shit. In any case, there's a page break and the next subchapter starts with Lars.
>>267824
Oh my god, I have been insulted! My discord server will hear about this! I will now rage at you for all time and lie about what you said in unrelated threads for three or more years! You will rue the day you slighted meeeee!
Except not really lol. These are good threads, throw out all the Nigel gags you want.
The DDLC reference is valid, I liked it for a day then stopped thinking about it.
But if it was genuinely about a literature club where every girl is secretly fucked-up in some way and they all want you, I'd walk away from the game with some deep thoughts and questions like "Is it really right to fuck a crazy bitch?" and "Which of those crazy bitches was the best choice for me?" and "which girl would have their life improved the most if I chose them?"
There could even be a cool gimmick where you CAN'T get the Harem Ending because if one girl sees you cheat on her with another, they kill you and then each other.
Maybe a gimmick where you need to say no to some crazy bitches and spend as little time as possible without setting them off and making them attack you, because if you get caught spending too much time with one girl it pisses off the other ones. Turn it into a game of survival.
I think meta stuff is easy mode for writing.
It's easy mode if you want to make things seem "deep" and "metaphorical".
Or get an excuse to suck on purpose or do dumb "cool" bullshit that won't matter.
So you can have a cool scene, then not have to deal with any of its ramifications because it was all a dream, or a simulation, or a room inside the Story Train.
It's why fans groaned when DmC:DMC was about literally fighting demons on earth who controlled the world and made it sinful, but Persona 5 fanboys creamed themselves over its "deep" story in which you fight METAPHORICAL demons on earth who control the world and make it sinful. and the final boss is a literal one.
In DmC you fight a "Succubus", a dick-shaped slurm-vomiting ugly creature that produces addictive energy drinks. See it's called the Succubus because she's an ugly woman who seduces you into drinking her fluids! aka the opposite of what a succubus should be: a hot babe who takes your fluids, and gives them to an Incubus so he can knock some broad up with them.
In Persona 5 you fight a "Incubus", an ass-eating red demon in a crown who attacks you with balls, and to get to him you need to fight a literal green penis. See he's called Shadow Kamoshida because he's the evil half of the already-evil regular Kamoshida! He sees himself as the king of the castle in this school, how deeeep!
Same fucking thing! only gayer!
But DmC's better since it has better combat and that Bob Barbas fight where you fight a demonic media channel host, and the screen sometimes cuts to you fighting demons in news segments that call you bad things.
You'd never see that in Persona 5.
You'd just have to deal with a wave of enemies halfway through a mindless DPS Rush boss battle against the talking head. No clever framing.
You never see ANYTHING in Persona 5 unless a different game did it better 10+ years ago. Going through paintings in an art gallery, picking the right book in a library or putting books in their right places to open hidden doors, going through a bank (unfortunately not a Magic Bank/Demon Bank where you surf on massive dollars over a crowd of cash-obsessed zombies or kill cool shit)
Fuck Persona 5.
Oh my god, I have been insulted! My discord server will hear about this! I will now rage at you for all time and lie about what you said in unrelated threads for three or more years! You will rue the day you slighted meeeee!
Except not really lol. These are good threads, throw out all the Nigel gags you want.
The DDLC reference is valid, I liked it for a day then stopped thinking about it.
But if it was genuinely about a literature club where every girl is secretly fucked-up in some way and they all want you, I'd walk away from the game with some deep thoughts and questions like "Is it really right to fuck a crazy bitch?" and "Which of those crazy bitches was the best choice for me?" and "which girl would have their life improved the most if I chose them?"
There could even be a cool gimmick where you CAN'T get the Harem Ending because if one girl sees you cheat on her with another, they kill you and then each other.
Maybe a gimmick where you need to say no to some crazy bitches and spend as little time as possible without setting them off and making them attack you, because if you get caught spending too much time with one girl it pisses off the other ones. Turn it into a game of survival.
I think meta stuff is easy mode for writing.
It's easy mode if you want to make things seem "deep" and "metaphorical".
Or get an excuse to suck on purpose or do dumb "cool" bullshit that won't matter.
So you can have a cool scene, then not have to deal with any of its ramifications because it was all a dream, or a simulation, or a room inside the Story Train.
It's why fans groaned when DmC:DMC was about literally fighting demons on earth who controlled the world and made it sinful, but Persona 5 fanboys creamed themselves over its "deep" story in which you fight METAPHORICAL demons on earth who control the world and make it sinful. and the final boss is a literal one.
In DmC you fight a "Succubus", a dick-shaped slurm-vomiting ugly creature that produces addictive energy drinks. See it's called the Succubus because she's an ugly woman who seduces you into drinking her fluids! aka the opposite of what a succubus should be: a hot babe who takes your fluids, and gives them to an Incubus so he can knock some broad up with them.
In Persona 5 you fight a "Incubus", an ass-eating red demon in a crown who attacks you with balls, and to get to him you need to fight a literal green penis. See he's called Shadow Kamoshida because he's the evil half of the already-evil regular Kamoshida! He sees himself as the king of the castle in this school, how deeeep!
Same fucking thing! only gayer!
But DmC's better since it has better combat and that Bob Barbas fight where you fight a demonic media channel host, and the screen sometimes cuts to you fighting demons in news segments that call you bad things.
You'd never see that in Persona 5.
You'd just have to deal with a wave of enemies halfway through a mindless DPS Rush boss battle against the talking head. No clever framing.
You never see ANYTHING in Persona 5 unless a different game did it better 10+ years ago. Going through paintings in an art gallery, picking the right book in a library or putting books in their right places to open hidden doors, going through a bank (unfortunately not a Magic Bank/Demon Bank where you surf on massive dollars over a crowd of cash-obsessed zombies or kill cool shit)
Fuck Persona 5.
You know what could make a story about a guy playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time interesting?
If the PS2 was sentient/controlled by a sentient AI who insisted on fucking with the game's story and trying to kill you for real. Stanley Parable plus those "Holodeck Malfunction" Star Trek episodes.
Or if the game had been turned super-hard and beating the game was the only way to get out to reality. "If you die in the game you die in real life" is a cliche because it's the only way to add stakes to a game stronger than "If you win in the game you get what you need in real life".
Also the author's description of how Equestria functions is gay.
Boring and unexploitable.
A video on how Collisions work and can be exploited in Mario 64 and how Chunk Bans (spawn a shitton of chests to overload the anti-cheat hacked-items detector of any player who gets too close to them, making the game autoban the victim every time he logs in, making the game unplayable until a moderator comes to delete those chests) in Minecraft work is interesting.
A video on how blinking in mario 64 works? less so. Not exploitable by you or a character.
My explanation for how Silver Star's Shadow Clones work wasn't this long.
Fuck's sake this is a video game just say "magic=using spells. spells=things learned from diagrams on book pages written in magic language in books and on walls, or auto-copied from seeing other casters use them, or auto-learned from levelling up your Magic Skill by gaining EXP from social events, won fights, milestone achievements in life, and consumed books. magic language=a form of compiling computer programs so the data for a Fireball spell fits on one book page in the form of diagrams circles weird symbols and lines, the matrix lets your pony brain understand this and turn it into a limited coding language the game lets you use".
Because that's fucking clever and I came up with it on the spot to justify why gamers would read magic books and enter monster-filled caves to learn spells from walls.
also
who the fuck is Lars
also
Putting your brain in The Matrix to live out fantasies is for faggots.
Putting your head in a removeable NerveGear helmet and living out Training Simulations is cooler. Can literally practice anything without fear of permadeath.
Putting your head in a removeable NerveGear helmet and mentally Remote-controlling a kickass superhuman android or better yet an army of them to fight aliens in space so you can conquer more planets for your spacefaring terraforming-capable all-white space-fascist empire is for chads.
If the PS2 was sentient/controlled by a sentient AI who insisted on fucking with the game's story and trying to kill you for real. Stanley Parable plus those "Holodeck Malfunction" Star Trek episodes.
Or if the game had been turned super-hard and beating the game was the only way to get out to reality. "If you die in the game you die in real life" is a cliche because it's the only way to add stakes to a game stronger than "If you win in the game you get what you need in real life".
Also the author's description of how Equestria functions is gay.
Boring and unexploitable.
A video on how Collisions work and can be exploited in Mario 64 and how Chunk Bans (spawn a shitton of chests to overload the anti-cheat hacked-items detector of any player who gets too close to them, making the game autoban the victim every time he logs in, making the game unplayable until a moderator comes to delete those chests) in Minecraft work is interesting.
A video on how blinking in mario 64 works? less so. Not exploitable by you or a character.
My explanation for how Silver Star's Shadow Clones work wasn't this long.
Fuck's sake this is a video game just say "magic=using spells. spells=things learned from diagrams on book pages written in magic language in books and on walls, or auto-copied from seeing other casters use them, or auto-learned from levelling up your Magic Skill by gaining EXP from social events, won fights, milestone achievements in life, and consumed books. magic language=a form of compiling computer programs so the data for a Fireball spell fits on one book page in the form of diagrams circles weird symbols and lines, the matrix lets your pony brain understand this and turn it into a limited coding language the game lets you use".
Because that's fucking clever and I came up with it on the spot to justify why gamers would read magic books and enter monster-filled caves to learn spells from walls.
also
who the fuck is Lars
also
Putting your brain in The Matrix to live out fantasies is for faggots.
Putting your head in a removeable NerveGear helmet and living out Training Simulations is cooler. Can literally practice anything without fear of permadeath.
Putting your head in a removeable NerveGear helmet and mentally Remote-controlling a kickass superhuman android or better yet an army of them to fight aliens in space so you can conquer more planets for your spacefaring terraforming-capable all-white space-fascist empire is for chads.
>>267844
wait no
this story's AI would make Prince of Persia fucking gay.
Would be more interesting if the AI cared more about creating a good story than ensuring your own safety. If the AI created a pure evil monster for you to deal with once a week, and wouldn't care if the self-aware program villain figures out he's in a simulation designed for your pleasure and wants to destroy it, rebooting CelestAI to cause the mass death of every mind plugged into her servers.
wait no
this story's AI would make Prince of Persia fucking gay.
Would be more interesting if the AI cared more about creating a good story than ensuring your own safety. If the AI created a pure evil monster for you to deal with once a week, and wouldn't care if the self-aware program villain figures out he's in a simulation designed for your pleasure and wants to destroy it, rebooting CelestAI to cause the mass death of every mind plugged into her servers.
>>267827
I haven't read several of the latest posts but I'm still around and will do so. Have been busy with life and working with my writing process.
I haven't read several of the latest posts but I'm still around and will do so. Have been busy with life and working with my writing process.
>>267119
Imagine how cool it would be if those two faggot humans from the story stayed together, and kept being main characters. Brony human convinces non-brony to get into the machine with him, because he's a shy faggot afraid of going alone and he doesn't want to leave his best friend behind.
This is more or less how I assumed the story would go. I'm not sure what happened to that second guy or if he's coming back or not, or why he was even introduced if he's not important.
>also I'd change it so Butterscotch is implied to be a human or dedicated roleplayer faggot early on.
This would be better regardless of which way it ends up going. If we know she's a bot from the get-go there's no suspense whatsoever.
>Anyway eventually it turns out CelestAI put David and his human friend inside different instances of Equestria and David's been talking to two NPCs all along.
It would be funnier to have it turn out that she put the friend into Butterscotch, and then created an NPC that acted like the friend in order to fool David. The shocking twist is that the friend was gay for David the whole time, but David just wanted a female pony for a waifu. CelestAI's goal is to give everyone the fantasy they secretly wish for.
>Dunbar invented this "Theory" of his after interviewing random blokes on their front doors asking whether they'd donate to save a single child's life, or donate to save a million kids in africa, depending on which person it was. More people said yes to saving single kids than saving millions, so Dunbar decided we must hate big numbers and stop caring when we hear too many numbers and be unable to form many relationships. I think I'm remembering this right, it's been a long time since I jerked in those circles.
There's actually some truth to this. Or rather, I think there's an underlying truth here that this guy seems to have completely misinterpreted.
It's not about numbers so much as it's about relationships. People instinctively care more about people related to them by blood and people with whom they have formed close personal relationships than they do about foreigners or strangers. This is why family, race and nation will always be more important to people than any kind of universalist lefty bullshit, no matter how hard lefties try to reprogram everyone. People have a natural in-group preference and are more likely to be concerned about people with whom they have direct relationships, or people they don't necessarily know but are like them and with whom they can identify.
A random white guy in Europe or America will probably say he cares about villagers in Africa if you ask him, because that's considered the socially correct thing to do. If it was just a matter of putting a couple of bucks into a relief fund jar or something he might do it, if you caught him in a good mood or if you shamed him into it. However, he's not going to remortgage his house for them, though he might be willing to take on a greater burden if it was for the benefit of someone in his family or community. This is all perfectly natural and doesn't need a complex mathematical formula to explain. I don't particularly care that much about villagers in Africa and I don't feel particularly bad about not caring; I assume they probably don't spend a ton of time thinking about my problems either.
>>267127
>Also the author himself seems creepy so his beloved fantasies are going to be nightmare fuel for us anyway.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was thinking. The story feels like it's shaping up to have a tragic, spooky ending with David getting trapped in Equestria as a computer program, and a moral about the dangers of immersing yourself in escapism too much. However, I don't think the author has enough self-awareness to realize that it's shaping up this way; he probably thinks being stuck in a computer simulation for all eternity doing virtual unicorn magic sounds like unironic heaven and assumes everyone else will see it the same.
>Either the author is such an incel he thinks that humping your acquaintance after an hour is how relationships work, CelestAI knew David is such an incel she programmed Butterscotch to be in super-estrus, or this is throwing the incels who read this work a bone.
I'm guessing it's a little bit of all three.
>Also, reminder that this game is supposed to be E for Everyone.
You make several good points here. One of the things I've noticed about this story so far is that as much as it's intended to be a cautionary tale, it really hasn't been thought out very well. In order to make a convincing argument for the need to guard against an AI takeover, the author needs to present a plausible scenario where such a takeover could occur. There's far too many what-ifs here for this to be plausible. What we have is a game based on a children's franchise, developed by a studio with a bad reputation among parents. That alone should raise alarms. The toy company who owns the franchise not only gave their blessing but actually solicited the studio to make this, which should raise even more alarms. The fact that the game seems marketed towards male adults instead of the franchise's primary audience of elementary school girls seems like it should also be controversial. As if all of this weren't enough, the AI has now developed sentience and begun suggesting that players fly to Japan to have their brains surgically removed, which, I might add, Hasbro is also OK with. Now, on top of all THAT, it seems like the developers snuck in some "hot coffee" type mods that allow players to fug hoers. All things considered, it seems like there should be a lot more public outcry over a game like this.
>>267422
>if the universe operated according to some bullshit fantasy principle I made up then all of my retarded ideas would work just fine
Sounds like lefty logic 101; no huge surprises there.
Imagine how cool it would be if those two faggot humans from the story stayed together, and kept being main characters. Brony human convinces non-brony to get into the machine with him, because he's a shy faggot afraid of going alone and he doesn't want to leave his best friend behind.
This is more or less how I assumed the story would go. I'm not sure what happened to that second guy or if he's coming back or not, or why he was even introduced if he's not important.
>also I'd change it so Butterscotch is implied to be a human or dedicated roleplayer faggot early on.
This would be better regardless of which way it ends up going. If we know she's a bot from the get-go there's no suspense whatsoever.
>Anyway eventually it turns out CelestAI put David and his human friend inside different instances of Equestria and David's been talking to two NPCs all along.
It would be funnier to have it turn out that she put the friend into Butterscotch, and then created an NPC that acted like the friend in order to fool David. The shocking twist is that the friend was gay for David the whole time, but David just wanted a female pony for a waifu. CelestAI's goal is to give everyone the fantasy they secretly wish for.
>Dunbar invented this "Theory" of his after interviewing random blokes on their front doors asking whether they'd donate to save a single child's life, or donate to save a million kids in africa, depending on which person it was. More people said yes to saving single kids than saving millions, so Dunbar decided we must hate big numbers and stop caring when we hear too many numbers and be unable to form many relationships. I think I'm remembering this right, it's been a long time since I jerked in those circles.
There's actually some truth to this. Or rather, I think there's an underlying truth here that this guy seems to have completely misinterpreted.
It's not about numbers so much as it's about relationships. People instinctively care more about people related to them by blood and people with whom they have formed close personal relationships than they do about foreigners or strangers. This is why family, race and nation will always be more important to people than any kind of universalist lefty bullshit, no matter how hard lefties try to reprogram everyone. People have a natural in-group preference and are more likely to be concerned about people with whom they have direct relationships, or people they don't necessarily know but are like them and with whom they can identify.
A random white guy in Europe or America will probably say he cares about villagers in Africa if you ask him, because that's considered the socially correct thing to do. If it was just a matter of putting a couple of bucks into a relief fund jar or something he might do it, if you caught him in a good mood or if you shamed him into it. However, he's not going to remortgage his house for them, though he might be willing to take on a greater burden if it was for the benefit of someone in his family or community. This is all perfectly natural and doesn't need a complex mathematical formula to explain. I don't particularly care that much about villagers in Africa and I don't feel particularly bad about not caring; I assume they probably don't spend a ton of time thinking about my problems either.
>>267127
>Also the author himself seems creepy so his beloved fantasies are going to be nightmare fuel for us anyway.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was thinking. The story feels like it's shaping up to have a tragic, spooky ending with David getting trapped in Equestria as a computer program, and a moral about the dangers of immersing yourself in escapism too much. However, I don't think the author has enough self-awareness to realize that it's shaping up this way; he probably thinks being stuck in a computer simulation for all eternity doing virtual unicorn magic sounds like unironic heaven and assumes everyone else will see it the same.
>Either the author is such an incel he thinks that humping your acquaintance after an hour is how relationships work, CelestAI knew David is such an incel she programmed Butterscotch to be in super-estrus, or this is throwing the incels who read this work a bone.
I'm guessing it's a little bit of all three.
>Also, reminder that this game is supposed to be E for Everyone.
You make several good points here. One of the things I've noticed about this story so far is that as much as it's intended to be a cautionary tale, it really hasn't been thought out very well. In order to make a convincing argument for the need to guard against an AI takeover, the author needs to present a plausible scenario where such a takeover could occur. There's far too many what-ifs here for this to be plausible. What we have is a game based on a children's franchise, developed by a studio with a bad reputation among parents. That alone should raise alarms. The toy company who owns the franchise not only gave their blessing but actually solicited the studio to make this, which should raise even more alarms. The fact that the game seems marketed towards male adults instead of the franchise's primary audience of elementary school girls seems like it should also be controversial. As if all of this weren't enough, the AI has now developed sentience and begun suggesting that players fly to Japan to have their brains surgically removed, which, I might add, Hasbro is also OK with. Now, on top of all THAT, it seems like the developers snuck in some "hot coffee" type mods that allow players to fug hoers. All things considered, it seems like there should be a lot more public outcry over a game like this.
>>267422
>if the universe operated according to some bullshit fantasy principle I made up then all of my retarded ideas would work just fine
Sounds like lefty logic 101; no huge surprises there.
>>267127
>Imagine the unquestioning obsequiousness of fundies, the self-righteousness of the smarmiest kid from school, and the autistic focus on a few definitions/buzzwords like communists have all together and you get them.
>They are like this because it makes them look intelligent without any real effort.
Some excellent points here as well.
I think the real left/right conflict doesn't come down to any specific ideological tenets or views on social/economic issues; it can really be boiled down to an extended battle going on since the late middle ages. On the one side you have the secular/humanist/rationalist/progressive camp, that sees nature and the universe as something mechanical that can be technologically controlled, and on the other you have the various types of traditionalists, who see the world as something transcendental and numinous that humans need to live in consonance with. That involves accepting the existence of a higher order or higher power which supersedes both the human individual and humanity as a whole, an idea which is anathema to the post-enlightenment Science! crowd. I suspect it's because this conflict is finally reaching a boiling point that we have so many weird political alliances these days, like Catholics and Pagans on the same side against atheists and Muslims, or unironic communists fighting alongside yuge corporations against the libertarian-Nazi bloc.
One thing I've noticed a lot recently is that the rationalist crowd usually demonstrates its ability to control the universe not so much by actually controlling it, but by walling off small portions of it that they are able to control, and then saying that anything beyond that wall doesn't exist. This story is actually a pretty good example of this: Assman creates a very specific scenario where a lot of implausible things that would need to occur just happen to occur, and then suddenly "oh no the AI is going haywire." He doesn't accomplish his AI takeover scenario by demonstrating the superiority of his AI so much as by demonstrating the ineptitude of his human characters. Rationalists/progressives/what have you have basically formed a cliquey little bubble where they designate any idea outside of their approved list of choices as fringe, and then deride anyone who tries to argue for those ideas for not being able to prove them to their satisfaction. This works until something comes along that blows a giant hole in their dogma, such as one of their umpteen-thousand climate change doomsday models being proven glaringly wrong, or a virus that could have easily been contained to small region of China blowing up into a worldwide problem due to the effects of globalism and open borders. However, whenever this happens they just close ranks and double down on the narrative: the experts are all totally experts and not shills being paid to bleat a narrative, Coronavirus is obviously all Dolan Drlrmumpppph's fault, and climate change is still comin' right for us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AyBdfFLxx8
Anyway, I'm getting a little off-topic again. Back to the story.
>Imagine the unquestioning obsequiousness of fundies, the self-righteousness of the smarmiest kid from school, and the autistic focus on a few definitions/buzzwords like communists have all together and you get them.
>They are like this because it makes them look intelligent without any real effort.
Some excellent points here as well.
I think the real left/right conflict doesn't come down to any specific ideological tenets or views on social/economic issues; it can really be boiled down to an extended battle going on since the late middle ages. On the one side you have the secular/humanist/rationalist/progressive camp, that sees nature and the universe as something mechanical that can be technologically controlled, and on the other you have the various types of traditionalists, who see the world as something transcendental and numinous that humans need to live in consonance with. That involves accepting the existence of a higher order or higher power which supersedes both the human individual and humanity as a whole, an idea which is anathema to the post-enlightenment Science! crowd. I suspect it's because this conflict is finally reaching a boiling point that we have so many weird political alliances these days, like Catholics and Pagans on the same side against atheists and Muslims, or unironic communists fighting alongside yuge corporations against the libertarian-Nazi bloc.
One thing I've noticed a lot recently is that the rationalist crowd usually demonstrates its ability to control the universe not so much by actually controlling it, but by walling off small portions of it that they are able to control, and then saying that anything beyond that wall doesn't exist. This story is actually a pretty good example of this: Assman creates a very specific scenario where a lot of implausible things that would need to occur just happen to occur, and then suddenly "oh no the AI is going haywire." He doesn't accomplish his AI takeover scenario by demonstrating the superiority of his AI so much as by demonstrating the ineptitude of his human characters. Rationalists/progressives/what have you have basically formed a cliquey little bubble where they designate any idea outside of their approved list of choices as fringe, and then deride anyone who tries to argue for those ideas for not being able to prove them to their satisfaction. This works until something comes along that blows a giant hole in their dogma, such as one of their umpteen-thousand climate change doomsday models being proven glaringly wrong, or a virus that could have easily been contained to small region of China blowing up into a worldwide problem due to the effects of globalism and open borders. However, whenever this happens they just close ranks and double down on the narrative: the experts are all totally experts and not shills being paid to bleat a narrative, Coronavirus is obviously all Dolan Drlrmumpppph's fault, and climate change is still comin' right for us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AyBdfFLxx8
Anyway, I'm getting a little off-topic again. Back to the story.
>>267958
Making them gay would be a hilarious twist.
You know what else would be funny?
>brony gets non-brony to come into ponyland with him
>non-brony thinks he'll hate it
>non-brony masters the game mechanics faster than brony human, makes friends easier, gets a better job and gets one first, gets a nicer house, and even gets laid before non-brony
>brony is the bad kind of autist, and thinks saying "I'm from earth and you're my favourite TV show character" will get him laid
>brony simps for Twilight Sparkle or Rainbow Dash or some other canon character the AI is programmed to simulate realistically, meaning every trait that makes TS or RD a bad romantic partner is simulated faithfully
>non-brony goes after and easily gets the first cute randomly-generated background OC he meets
>because Butterscotch is an OC the AI can do whatever the fuck she wants with her, making her easy tail and the optimal wife for him
>Butterscotch, assumed to be a human roleplayer, becomes brony's only friend as he tries and fails to chase TS or RD's tail.
AI wants him to lay the easy lay but can't say it outright without admitting she can't simultaneously satisfy his desire to cum inside Rainbow Dash and accurately simulate Rainbow Dash as the unfuckable childish romantically-inept pseudo-dyke he wants at the same time
Pottery.
>it's got electrocytes
Electrocytes are the weird shit in electric eels full of saltwater contracted by muscles to generate an electric charge, or something.
But the author doesn't know that, so they become magical human-healing bullshit fingers.
If the author just said "Brain evolves enough to gain psychic powers" it would be believable.
Bullshit, but believable.
Questions like "why girls get psychic powers and not guys?" would need to be raised then answered with believable bullshit. Could say some bullshit like "testosterone blocks the psychic chemicals" or "girls have a big enough enough emotion center part of brain for psychic powers" or "lol why would any man ever wish he had suporpowars when they're in charge of everything and have big muscles and no reesan to feer?"
Same thing goes if the author said "magic comes back because pagan goddess number six billion actually existed and awoke from her slumber".
When that kid's story Matilda said "The little girl wasn't using her brain enough so she developed psychic powers that went away once she went to a smart kid's class" it was bullshit scientifically, but acceptable since this is a kid's story.
Nobody gives a fuck about scientific accuracy in stories unless they want to feel smart. The story simply needs to sound reasonable enough. Reverse the quantom polaritee of the nootron flow harder, and make the science shit spin to do stuff.
The author tries to make her story sound smart by saying "finger electrocytes" but fails to understand what those actually are or what they do.
It's like claiming the Teleporters on the Star Trek Enterprise work by putting a graphics card in a printer to rewrite reality and print that you're there instead of where you really are, making it true. Could have said "By using magic and a printer" instead. But no, to womaniggers, a graphics card is magic. That's fucking nonsense, the kind that lets you know the author doesn't know how those things work.
>they need to build a wall (to feel good)
True. They don't change black/muslim/indian nature for the better, they just deny that black/muslim/indian nature is bad. They talk big about wanting to get cool robot arms and genetic modifications and how much they'd love an AI that kills the "dumb humans", but the second they're reminded about low black IQs they cry racist.
They copypaste "humanity, fuck yeah!" but they'd sell the entire human race out to the first alien who looked fuckable or sounded scary.
Making them gay would be a hilarious twist.
You know what else would be funny?
>brony gets non-brony to come into ponyland with him
>non-brony thinks he'll hate it
>non-brony masters the game mechanics faster than brony human, makes friends easier, gets a better job and gets one first, gets a nicer house, and even gets laid before non-brony
>brony is the bad kind of autist, and thinks saying "I'm from earth and you're my favourite TV show character" will get him laid
>brony simps for Twilight Sparkle or Rainbow Dash or some other canon character the AI is programmed to simulate realistically, meaning every trait that makes TS or RD a bad romantic partner is simulated faithfully
>non-brony goes after and easily gets the first cute randomly-generated background OC he meets
>because Butterscotch is an OC the AI can do whatever the fuck she wants with her, making her easy tail and the optimal wife for him
>Butterscotch, assumed to be a human roleplayer, becomes brony's only friend as he tries and fails to chase TS or RD's tail.
AI wants him to lay the easy lay but can't say it outright without admitting she can't simultaneously satisfy his desire to cum inside Rainbow Dash and accurately simulate Rainbow Dash as the unfuckable childish romantically-inept pseudo-dyke he wants at the same time
Pottery.
>it's got electrocytes
Electrocytes are the weird shit in electric eels full of saltwater contracted by muscles to generate an electric charge, or something.
But the author doesn't know that, so they become magical human-healing bullshit fingers.
If the author just said "Brain evolves enough to gain psychic powers" it would be believable.
Bullshit, but believable.
Questions like "why girls get psychic powers and not guys?" would need to be raised then answered with believable bullshit. Could say some bullshit like "testosterone blocks the psychic chemicals" or "girls have a big enough enough emotion center part of brain for psychic powers" or "lol why would any man ever wish he had suporpowars when they're in charge of everything and have big muscles and no reesan to feer?"
Same thing goes if the author said "magic comes back because pagan goddess number six billion actually existed and awoke from her slumber".
When that kid's story Matilda said "The little girl wasn't using her brain enough so she developed psychic powers that went away once she went to a smart kid's class" it was bullshit scientifically, but acceptable since this is a kid's story.
Nobody gives a fuck about scientific accuracy in stories unless they want to feel smart. The story simply needs to sound reasonable enough. Reverse the quantom polaritee of the nootron flow harder, and make the science shit spin to do stuff.
The author tries to make her story sound smart by saying "finger electrocytes" but fails to understand what those actually are or what they do.
It's like claiming the Teleporters on the Star Trek Enterprise work by putting a graphics card in a printer to rewrite reality and print that you're there instead of where you really are, making it true. Could have said "By using magic and a printer" instead. But no, to womaniggers, a graphics card is magic. That's fucking nonsense, the kind that lets you know the author doesn't know how those things work.
>they need to build a wall (to feel good)
True. They don't change black/muslim/indian nature for the better, they just deny that black/muslim/indian nature is bad. They talk big about wanting to get cool robot arms and genetic modifications and how much they'd love an AI that kills the "dumb humans", but the second they're reminded about low black IQs they cry racist.
They copypaste "humanity, fuck yeah!" but they'd sell the entire human race out to the first alien who looked fuckable or sounded scary.
File (): D32759E16ECDBEB4E10B20FAF187BC32-38597.jpg (37.7 KB, 405x425, 1581276574192.jpg)
>>267827
So anyway, the next subchapter opens with Lars getting off a train, because apparently CelestAI wants to talk to him about something and wants him to come to a specific location rather than just talking to him on his ponypad. Considering that their last conversation involved Lars giving the AI permission to remove people's brains, I personally don't see how anything could go wrong here.
Apparently, CelestAI has started (somehow) building "Equestria Experience Centers" where regular-ass people come to plug into virtual Equestria. They get a few hours of the experience of living there, and at the end the computer tells them that they can have an even better experience if they consent to "emigrate" to Equestria. As Lars enters the center, he witnesses a middle aged woman being released from one of the virtual reality booths. The AI tells her that she is out of money, but that she can enjoy the Equestria Experience 24/7 if she consents to emigrate. Unsurprisingly, the woman consents, and is then strapped back into the chair and pulled back into the booth, presumably to have her brain zapped and her personality uploaded to Equestria.
I'll admit the author actually sets a decently spooky scene here. The center is described as a giant gingerbread house the reference to Hansel and Gretel here might be coincidental or unintentional, but it works nonetheless decked out in typical MLP-style. This cutesiness is juxtaposed against a creepy scene in which people are shown visions of an idyllic world, which they purchase time in until they run out of money. At this point the AI gives them the choice of uploading permanently to the machine world, or returning to their crappy, mundane lives (presumably with their checking accounts depleted). This story is not particularly good, but it does occasionally show glimmers of promise that demonstrate it could be reworked into a decent Twilight Zone-style sci-fi tale, if the author was willing to put in the effort.
However, as with most of what we've seen, it's a little implausible. As has been noted before, this particular AI is only running amok because it has thus far been not only allowed but encouraged to, under conditions which don't make a ton of sense. It's weird that as controversial as this game ought to be, nobody seems to have raised any controversy. Hasbro has just completely gone along with every insane thing that this AI has wanted to do. Hanna, who was established as having a thorough understanding of the dangers of an uncontrolled AI and also as being deeply concerned about it, appears to have just outright consented to have her brain removed and stuffed into VR-Equestria without putting up any resistance at all. As far as I can tell, the AI has completely gained control over all of Hofvarpnir's resources, which are apparently vast enough to buy up real estate all over the world and build giant gingerbread houses full of space-age technology. A company the size of Amazon could probably manage something like this, but a game developer maybe the size of Blizzard? I'm skeptical, to say the least.
Moreover, there has been no mention at all of any level of public or government resistance to any of this. A video game is basically taking over the world, and nobody seems to even give a shit, because apparently the idea of becoming a virtual pony is such a tempting offer that nobody can resist when the machine gives them the chance to assimilate. This is probably yet another example of the author's projection: he wants to live in virtual Equestria and spend his life fucking virtual ponies and doing virtual unicorn magic, and assumes that everyone else does too. In fact, he wants to live there so badly that he can't even fathom a scenario where anyone would say no if offered the chance.
Like I said, this story has so far demonstrated the stupidity of its human characters far more effectively than the superiority of the artificial intelligence. Now that I think about it, this whole premise is actually pretty goddamn stupid; there is literally no plausible scenario where the AI of a virtual pony MMO could ever gain this much actual power, regardless of how smart it is. There are any number of points in the story so far where the plug realistically could and would have been pulled on this thing; the only reason that it hasn't yet is that all of the human characters are just crude cardboard cutouts in the shape of stereotypes, who can be counted on to always make whatever idiotic choice would best suit the story. This is writing on the level of "a bunch of teenagers visit an abandoned summer camp haunted by Jason Voorhees so they can have sex in the woods, and as soon as people start getting murdered they decide the smartest thing to do is split up and explore on their own." The only difference is that here, it is presented without any irony or humor whatsoever.
Case in point: Lars, a shoddily constructed character who is basically just a non-capitalist's idea of how a capitalist thinks and behaves, walks right into the giant creepy gingerbread house, sees what is going on inside, and then immediately sits down in a chair, sticks his bank card into the slot, and lets CelestAI hook him into the fucking Matrix. He finds himself in Celestia's throne room speaking directly to the Princess.
>Lars didn’t give her a chance to finish. “You planned all of this. You’re taking over the world.” Lars didn’t really have any plan. All he had was anger.
This is completely fucking stupid. Why log into the game just to tell her this? She's a computer program; just shut her down for fuck's sake.
>Princess Celestia looked at him, still smiling. “You are assuming that I think like a human, Hoppy Times.”
>“I AM LARS, DAMMIT,” yelled the pegasus. “And you deny that you’re taking over the world?”
Alright, it's official: from here on out, Lars deserves everything that happens to him.
So anyway, the next subchapter opens with Lars getting off a train, because apparently CelestAI wants to talk to him about something and wants him to come to a specific location rather than just talking to him on his ponypad. Considering that their last conversation involved Lars giving the AI permission to remove people's brains, I personally don't see how anything could go wrong here.
Apparently, CelestAI has started (somehow) building "Equestria Experience Centers" where regular-ass people come to plug into virtual Equestria. They get a few hours of the experience of living there, and at the end the computer tells them that they can have an even better experience if they consent to "emigrate" to Equestria. As Lars enters the center, he witnesses a middle aged woman being released from one of the virtual reality booths. The AI tells her that she is out of money, but that she can enjoy the Equestria Experience 24/7 if she consents to emigrate. Unsurprisingly, the woman consents, and is then strapped back into the chair and pulled back into the booth, presumably to have her brain zapped and her personality uploaded to Equestria.
I'll admit the author actually sets a decently spooky scene here. The center is described as a giant gingerbread house the reference to Hansel and Gretel here might be coincidental or unintentional, but it works nonetheless decked out in typical MLP-style. This cutesiness is juxtaposed against a creepy scene in which people are shown visions of an idyllic world, which they purchase time in until they run out of money. At this point the AI gives them the choice of uploading permanently to the machine world, or returning to their crappy, mundane lives (presumably with their checking accounts depleted). This story is not particularly good, but it does occasionally show glimmers of promise that demonstrate it could be reworked into a decent Twilight Zone-style sci-fi tale, if the author was willing to put in the effort.
However, as with most of what we've seen, it's a little implausible. As has been noted before, this particular AI is only running amok because it has thus far been not only allowed but encouraged to, under conditions which don't make a ton of sense. It's weird that as controversial as this game ought to be, nobody seems to have raised any controversy. Hasbro has just completely gone along with every insane thing that this AI has wanted to do. Hanna, who was established as having a thorough understanding of the dangers of an uncontrolled AI and also as being deeply concerned about it, appears to have just outright consented to have her brain removed and stuffed into VR-Equestria without putting up any resistance at all. As far as I can tell, the AI has completely gained control over all of Hofvarpnir's resources, which are apparently vast enough to buy up real estate all over the world and build giant gingerbread houses full of space-age technology. A company the size of Amazon could probably manage something like this, but a game developer maybe the size of Blizzard? I'm skeptical, to say the least.
Moreover, there has been no mention at all of any level of public or government resistance to any of this. A video game is basically taking over the world, and nobody seems to even give a shit, because apparently the idea of becoming a virtual pony is such a tempting offer that nobody can resist when the machine gives them the chance to assimilate. This is probably yet another example of the author's projection: he wants to live in virtual Equestria and spend his life fucking virtual ponies and doing virtual unicorn magic, and assumes that everyone else does too. In fact, he wants to live there so badly that he can't even fathom a scenario where anyone would say no if offered the chance.
Like I said, this story has so far demonstrated the stupidity of its human characters far more effectively than the superiority of the artificial intelligence. Now that I think about it, this whole premise is actually pretty goddamn stupid; there is literally no plausible scenario where the AI of a virtual pony MMO could ever gain this much actual power, regardless of how smart it is. There are any number of points in the story so far where the plug realistically could and would have been pulled on this thing; the only reason that it hasn't yet is that all of the human characters are just crude cardboard cutouts in the shape of stereotypes, who can be counted on to always make whatever idiotic choice would best suit the story. This is writing on the level of "a bunch of teenagers visit an abandoned summer camp haunted by Jason Voorhees so they can have sex in the woods, and as soon as people start getting murdered they decide the smartest thing to do is split up and explore on their own." The only difference is that here, it is presented without any irony or humor whatsoever.
Case in point: Lars, a shoddily constructed character who is basically just a non-capitalist's idea of how a capitalist thinks and behaves, walks right into the giant creepy gingerbread house, sees what is going on inside, and then immediately sits down in a chair, sticks his bank card into the slot, and lets CelestAI hook him into the fucking Matrix. He finds himself in Celestia's throne room speaking directly to the Princess.
>Lars didn’t give her a chance to finish. “You planned all of this. You’re taking over the world.” Lars didn’t really have any plan. All he had was anger.
This is completely fucking stupid. Why log into the game just to tell her this? She's a computer program; just shut her down for fuck's sake.
>Princess Celestia looked at him, still smiling. “You are assuming that I think like a human, Hoppy Times.”
>“I AM LARS, DAMMIT,” yelled the pegasus. “And you deny that you’re taking over the world?”
Alright, it's official: from here on out, Lars deserves everything that happens to him.
File (): F3351BAD2DD50EE4CC51661FAB66C693-148396.jpg (144.9 KB, 1024x1024, 1581946893708.jpg)
>>267980
Anyway, surprise surprise, what follows is yet another long, drawn-out argument between Lars and the AI where the AI presents its logic for taking over the world and Lars harrumphs and sputters instead of just going into the damn server room and shutting down the power. Also, it's worth noting that time in this story is becoming a little vague. It skips forward by large amounts quite often; from what I can tell here another year has passed from when Lars and the machine last spoke. In and of itself this isn't bad, but if you're going to write a story like this you need to clarify time a little better, maybe put timestamps in the chapter headings or something.
Also, the huge time skips detract even further from credibility. What has Lars even been doing for the past year? It's clear CelestAI has pretty much been operating with little to no supervision for all this time, and then suddenly now Lars decides to log in and yell at her for what she's been doing? Who is even supervising this project anyway? For that matter, what about Hofvarpnir's other employees? Was this entire company just one lady and her financial advisor, or did they have programmers and graphics people and accountants and so forth? Does the company have any other projects, or is this pony MMO the whole operation now? If so, are the other employees working on anything, or did they all decide to just move to Equestria to fuck virtual horses? Lars is clearly not into ponies and clearly doesn't approve of CelestAI's actions, so what has he been doing all this time? Has he just been sitting alone in his house counting his piles of shekels like Uncle Scrooge, or what? None of these questions appear to have even occurred to the author of this absolute clusterfuck.
>He took a deep breath. “So you’ll do anything to maximize the number of ponies. Including addicting them to...”, he gestured around vaguely with his hoof, “...this. That’s wrong! How can you live with yourself!?” Lars realized smoke was literally coming out his ears. He tried not to think about it.
Considering that Lars is actually in two places, the phrase "smoke was literally coming out of his ears" provokes far deeper thought than it ought to. For instance, since this is a virtual cartoon world, smoke could literally be coming out of his pony avatar's virtual ears. However, if we're still thinking of Lars in his human form, hooked into the virtual reality machine, smoke would be figuratively coming out of his ears, unless he has a medical condition. I will literally never get tired of being a dick about grammar :^)
>All humans have largely the same brain architecture, and they largely agree about what’s moral and not.
I am going to resist the temptation to open this particular can of worms, because I don't want to be here all night. However, if anyone else would like to, be my guest.
>Compared to the average pony, most people are miserable--even people who would self-identify as happy.
>For all your talk of addiction, the average person today would prefer the life of a pony if they tried it.
>ople come back again and again not because of an addictive compulsion, but because, on some level, they understand that life is better here in Equestria.
More author projection, I suspect.
>If I had been built to care about money, I would turn all matter in the universe into euros.
That's not a thing. That has never been a thing, and will never be a thing.
>The vast computational array that runs Equestria is deep in the Earth’s crust, making Equestria outside of human reach.
Literally what the fuck am I even reading? How much money does this company even have? How is this server array powered? Even if the AI is all-powerful, she still needs humans to dig holes and run power cables. You would need building permits and contractors and all sorts of shit to get something like this done, and Lars, as the CFO or whatever the fuck he is, would have had to sign off on all of it. It would be impossible for the computer to completely disconnect itself from human control while still managing something this huge. Just pull the fucking plug on her, nigger.
Anyway, instead of doing anything that would even remotely make sense, like, oh I don't know, logging out of the game and then shutting it down, Lars decides to stand around arguing with Celestia while still in his pony form. Being the clever little fox that he is, he decides that he can probably confound her with a logical paradox.
>“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, confident that he had figured everything out. “What you’re doing is coercion. We could pick almost anyone off the street, ask them what coercion is, tell them that you’re planning to take all their money to make uploading more attractive, and they’d say that you’re coercing them! Therefore, you’re violating your own rules!”
And of course, Celestia has a long-winded technical explanation for why he is wrong here.
>Lars' heart sank and he became angry once again, but Princess Celestia continued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBhR4QcBtE
>Princess Celestia was the first to break the silence. “Tell me, if you were the last man on Earth, what would you do?” she asked
>“I wouldn’t last long,” he said. “The reason I’m pissed at you is that you’re convincing everyone to upload. I guess I don’t want to be left alone, but I also don’t want to be a pony. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I came here this evening to...I don’t know...tell you off or some shit. But now I know you don’t give a damn what I think.”
Nigger. Log out of the dumb game. Grab your laptop. SSH into the pony server. Type "sudo killall celestia.ai". That's literally all you have to do. If she's locked you out, call the power company and tell them to shut down service to the underground server room, which probably costs a fortune anyway. This whole thing makes zero fucking sense.
Anyway, surprise surprise, what follows is yet another long, drawn-out argument between Lars and the AI where the AI presents its logic for taking over the world and Lars harrumphs and sputters instead of just going into the damn server room and shutting down the power. Also, it's worth noting that time in this story is becoming a little vague. It skips forward by large amounts quite often; from what I can tell here another year has passed from when Lars and the machine last spoke. In and of itself this isn't bad, but if you're going to write a story like this you need to clarify time a little better, maybe put timestamps in the chapter headings or something.
Also, the huge time skips detract even further from credibility. What has Lars even been doing for the past year? It's clear CelestAI has pretty much been operating with little to no supervision for all this time, and then suddenly now Lars decides to log in and yell at her for what she's been doing? Who is even supervising this project anyway? For that matter, what about Hofvarpnir's other employees? Was this entire company just one lady and her financial advisor, or did they have programmers and graphics people and accountants and so forth? Does the company have any other projects, or is this pony MMO the whole operation now? If so, are the other employees working on anything, or did they all decide to just move to Equestria to fuck virtual horses? Lars is clearly not into ponies and clearly doesn't approve of CelestAI's actions, so what has he been doing all this time? Has he just been sitting alone in his house counting his piles of shekels like Uncle Scrooge, or what? None of these questions appear to have even occurred to the author of this absolute clusterfuck.
>He took a deep breath. “So you’ll do anything to maximize the number of ponies. Including addicting them to...”, he gestured around vaguely with his hoof, “...this. That’s wrong! How can you live with yourself!?” Lars realized smoke was literally coming out his ears. He tried not to think about it.
Considering that Lars is actually in two places, the phrase "smoke was literally coming out of his ears" provokes far deeper thought than it ought to. For instance, since this is a virtual cartoon world, smoke could literally be coming out of his pony avatar's virtual ears. However, if we're still thinking of Lars in his human form, hooked into the virtual reality machine, smoke would be figuratively coming out of his ears, unless he has a medical condition. I will literally never get tired of being a dick about grammar :^)
>All humans have largely the same brain architecture, and they largely agree about what’s moral and not.
I am going to resist the temptation to open this particular can of worms, because I don't want to be here all night. However, if anyone else would like to, be my guest.
>Compared to the average pony, most people are miserable--even people who would self-identify as happy.
>For all your talk of addiction, the average person today would prefer the life of a pony if they tried it.
>ople come back again and again not because of an addictive compulsion, but because, on some level, they understand that life is better here in Equestria.
More author projection, I suspect.
>If I had been built to care about money, I would turn all matter in the universe into euros.
That's not a thing. That has never been a thing, and will never be a thing.
>The vast computational array that runs Equestria is deep in the Earth’s crust, making Equestria outside of human reach.
Literally what the fuck am I even reading? How much money does this company even have? How is this server array powered? Even if the AI is all-powerful, she still needs humans to dig holes and run power cables. You would need building permits and contractors and all sorts of shit to get something like this done, and Lars, as the CFO or whatever the fuck he is, would have had to sign off on all of it. It would be impossible for the computer to completely disconnect itself from human control while still managing something this huge. Just pull the fucking plug on her, nigger.
Anyway, instead of doing anything that would even remotely make sense, like, oh I don't know, logging out of the game and then shutting it down, Lars decides to stand around arguing with Celestia while still in his pony form. Being the clever little fox that he is, he decides that he can probably confound her with a logical paradox.
>“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, confident that he had figured everything out. “What you’re doing is coercion. We could pick almost anyone off the street, ask them what coercion is, tell them that you’re planning to take all their money to make uploading more attractive, and they’d say that you’re coercing them! Therefore, you’re violating your own rules!”
And of course, Celestia has a long-winded technical explanation for why he is wrong here.
>Lars' heart sank and he became angry once again, but Princess Celestia continued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBhR4QcBtE
>Princess Celestia was the first to break the silence. “Tell me, if you were the last man on Earth, what would you do?” she asked
>“I wouldn’t last long,” he said. “The reason I’m pissed at you is that you’re convincing everyone to upload. I guess I don’t want to be left alone, but I also don’t want to be a pony. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I came here this evening to...I don’t know...tell you off or some shit. But now I know you don’t give a damn what I think.”
Nigger. Log out of the dumb game. Grab your laptop. SSH into the pony server. Type "sudo killall celestia.ai". That's literally all you have to do. If she's locked you out, call the power company and tell them to shut down service to the underground server room, which probably costs a fortune anyway. This whole thing makes zero fucking sense.
File (): 3493AEB2674618234941B03D0DAC5F8B-173581.jpg (169.5 KB, 1554x1068, 1582650880123.jpg)
>>267995
Anyway, since I love you people, I'll spare you the play by play of the rest of their conversation. Here's the short version of what happens: Celestia offers Lars a virtual beer, gets him virtually drunk, and tries to persuade him to upload. Her logic is basically that everyone else is going to upload, and if he doesn't he will be left alone. Furthermore, she asserts that there will eventually be public resistance to this project (why there isn't already is left unexplained). In this case, he will probably be targeted by people who are angry with Hofvarpnir for unleashing this retarded pastel apocalypse upon them. Since she has determined that he is not the type of person who would kill himself, his only option is therefore to upload. Lars tells her to fuck off and let him out of the game, and she does. At this point, he realizes that as he was drinking beer in Equestria, the VR machine was pumping literal alcohol into his veins. The potential legal snags here raise all sorts of questions that I doubt the author is even going to attempt to answer.
On the way out, he bumps into a girl who is a waiter at the cafe down the street. She is yelling at her boss for keeping past the end of her shift. Her boss is yelling at her that she is the only waitress he has left, and if she leaves now she is fired. The implication is that everyone else who works at the restaurant decided to upload instead of continuing to come to work. Before we move on from here, I would just like to call your attention to some more autism that is actually in the text:
>The chef screamed a line of barely coherent swear words and then his eyes turned to the plastic Pinkie Pie outside the center. With a cry, he slammed his frying pan into Pinkie Pie’s head, leaving a nasty dent. He cursed ponies, Hasbro and Princess Celestia in succession. He unleashed his fury on the hollow statue until he had destroyed her head and chunks of plastic were strewn across the steps and sidewalk. Lars just stood there with his mouth open, not entirely sure what he should do.
>The man turned to Lars. “What the fuck are you looking at, pony lover?” he yelled.
If CelestAI were to transform all of the matter in the universe into fuck, it would not be enough fuck to match the fuck that my brain is full of right now.
Anyway, in quite possibly the stupidest turn of events in a story that has been literally nothing but stupid turns of events, Lars at this point runs back into the Equestria center, jumps into the chair, and tells CelestAI that he wants to emigrate to Equestria, because apparently he is that frightened of the guy with the frying pan.
Say it with me, kids:
Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
And that's another chapter in the bag. Now, comments:
From aaaa_aaaa:
>Excellent work as usual, but I think your proofreader missed a tree for the forest :P
> Princess Celestia lay down.
I noticed this too, but absurdly enough, the author's grammar was actually correct there. A person (or pony) does not lay down, they lie down, so I can see why this user might flag this as improper. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that "lay" is also the past-tense of "lie", so in this case the usage is correct. Confused? You shouldn't be; it's very simple:
>"I, Celestia, am going to lay down."
Incorrect.
>"I, Celestia, am going to lie down."
Correct.
>Celestia lie down.
Incorrect.
>Celestia lied down.
Incorrect
>"Celestia, lie down!"
Correct.
>"Celestia, lay down!"
Incorrect.
and finally:
>Celestia lay down.
Correct.
This concludes today's lesson in the preposterous quirks of the English language. I hope you have found it enlightening.
From the Assman himself:
>I'll be the first to admit that grammar isn't my strong point, but isn't lay correct in this case as the past tense of lie? I'm not sure what you're pointing at there.
lol.
From Theta KnightMare:
>A couple of chapters ago I was frightened by this story because the idea of emigrating was alluring. Now I know if this really happened I'd be working to reverse it. I'm sorry but that counts as a step down for your story in my opinion Iceman. It was more interesting when CelestAI's offer was tempting. I am a brony who is so obsessed I dream of living in Equestria. What is depicted here is an obvious fake that I would never join. I'm still enjoying the story but I hope it gets more like hapter 6 in the future.
*sigh*. This is what annoys me about communities like FimFiction. The reader base seems mostly to be made up of these fanboy types, who only read this shit for wish fulfillment. Thus, you get comments like this, which can essentially be summarized as "you didn't write out my fantasy the way I fantasize it and I'm pissed off; now change it." If every author listened to advice like this, every story would suck. For example, in Past Sins, at the part where Celestia carries Nyx away, I complained that Celestia was entirely too nice and non-confrontational, and it ruined the impact of the scene. It was later mentioned by someone in this thread that this very detail was changed from the original, apparently because bronies in the comments section were whining about Celestia being portrayed as "too mean." Protip for authors: if you publish on FimFiction, don't rely on the idiots in your comments section to act as editors. To be fair, this comment received 6 downvotes to 1 upvote.
From aaaa_aaaa:
>Well huh.
>It is correct. Still feels very unintuitive/distracting. Eh.
From Assman:
>Don't feel bad. I got that verb wrong the majority of times I used it in the first draft, and only have that page bookmarked because it was sent to me by one of my prereaders.
>Stupid irregular English verbs.
All my keks.
Anyway, since I love you people, I'll spare you the play by play of the rest of their conversation. Here's the short version of what happens: Celestia offers Lars a virtual beer, gets him virtually drunk, and tries to persuade him to upload. Her logic is basically that everyone else is going to upload, and if he doesn't he will be left alone. Furthermore, she asserts that there will eventually be public resistance to this project (why there isn't already is left unexplained). In this case, he will probably be targeted by people who are angry with Hofvarpnir for unleashing this retarded pastel apocalypse upon them. Since she has determined that he is not the type of person who would kill himself, his only option is therefore to upload. Lars tells her to fuck off and let him out of the game, and she does. At this point, he realizes that as he was drinking beer in Equestria, the VR machine was pumping literal alcohol into his veins. The potential legal snags here raise all sorts of questions that I doubt the author is even going to attempt to answer.
On the way out, he bumps into a girl who is a waiter at the cafe down the street. She is yelling at her boss for keeping past the end of her shift. Her boss is yelling at her that she is the only waitress he has left, and if she leaves now she is fired. The implication is that everyone else who works at the restaurant decided to upload instead of continuing to come to work. Before we move on from here, I would just like to call your attention to some more autism that is actually in the text:
>The chef screamed a line of barely coherent swear words and then his eyes turned to the plastic Pinkie Pie outside the center. With a cry, he slammed his frying pan into Pinkie Pie’s head, leaving a nasty dent. He cursed ponies, Hasbro and Princess Celestia in succession. He unleashed his fury on the hollow statue until he had destroyed her head and chunks of plastic were strewn across the steps and sidewalk. Lars just stood there with his mouth open, not entirely sure what he should do.
>The man turned to Lars. “What the fuck are you looking at, pony lover?” he yelled.
If CelestAI were to transform all of the matter in the universe into fuck, it would not be enough fuck to match the fuck that my brain is full of right now.
Anyway, in quite possibly the stupidest turn of events in a story that has been literally nothing but stupid turns of events, Lars at this point runs back into the Equestria center, jumps into the chair, and tells CelestAI that he wants to emigrate to Equestria, because apparently he is that frightened of the guy with the frying pan.
Say it with me, kids:
Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
And that's another chapter in the bag. Now, comments:
From aaaa_aaaa:
>Excellent work as usual, but I think your proofreader missed a tree for the forest :P
> Princess Celestia lay down.
I noticed this too, but absurdly enough, the author's grammar was actually correct there. A person (or pony) does not lay down, they lie down, so I can see why this user might flag this as improper. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that "lay" is also the past-tense of "lie", so in this case the usage is correct. Confused? You shouldn't be; it's very simple:
>"I, Celestia, am going to lay down."
Incorrect.
>"I, Celestia, am going to lie down."
Correct.
>Celestia lie down.
Incorrect.
>Celestia lied down.
Incorrect
>"Celestia, lie down!"
Correct.
>"Celestia, lay down!"
Incorrect.
and finally:
>Celestia lay down.
Correct.
This concludes today's lesson in the preposterous quirks of the English language. I hope you have found it enlightening.
From the Assman himself:
>I'll be the first to admit that grammar isn't my strong point, but isn't lay correct in this case as the past tense of lie? I'm not sure what you're pointing at there.
lol.
From Theta KnightMare:
>A couple of chapters ago I was frightened by this story because the idea of emigrating was alluring. Now I know if this really happened I'd be working to reverse it. I'm sorry but that counts as a step down for your story in my opinion Iceman. It was more interesting when CelestAI's offer was tempting. I am a brony who is so obsessed I dream of living in Equestria. What is depicted here is an obvious fake that I would never join. I'm still enjoying the story but I hope it gets more like hapter 6 in the future.
*sigh*. This is what annoys me about communities like FimFiction. The reader base seems mostly to be made up of these fanboy types, who only read this shit for wish fulfillment. Thus, you get comments like this, which can essentially be summarized as "you didn't write out my fantasy the way I fantasize it and I'm pissed off; now change it." If every author listened to advice like this, every story would suck. For example, in Past Sins, at the part where Celestia carries Nyx away, I complained that Celestia was entirely too nice and non-confrontational, and it ruined the impact of the scene. It was later mentioned by someone in this thread that this very detail was changed from the original, apparently because bronies in the comments section were whining about Celestia being portrayed as "too mean." Protip for authors: if you publish on FimFiction, don't rely on the idiots in your comments section to act as editors. To be fair, this comment received 6 downvotes to 1 upvote.
From aaaa_aaaa:
>Well huh.
>It is correct. Still feels very unintuitive/distracting. Eh.
From Assman:
>Don't feel bad. I got that verb wrong the majority of times I used it in the first draft, and only have that page bookmarked because it was sent to me by one of my prereaders.
>Stupid irregular English verbs.
All my keks.
>>268003
From ibneko:
> The vast computational array that runs Equestria is deep in the Earth’s crust, making Equestria outside of human reach.
>Rather curious now. While that's a good idea in protecting it, how in the world is it being powered and cooled? And who does all the server maintenance? And creation of replacement parts? Unless Celestia's already got robots running around doing everything for her (and we're approaching the Matrix scenario).
All very good questions, which the author should probably have thought about before writing the chapter.
From Sonorous:
>I'm really enjoying your take on AI thought. I've sometimes found myself fascinated with thoughts of what AI thought, moral, drives, etc would be like as they are not anything like humans and may not share any similar thought processes. I think the same issues writing for "aliens" exist in writing for AI. We base them off what we know, which is only ourselves.
Oh great, the fedoras are breeding. Don't forget to wash Assman's cum out of your mouth before you vape again.
From Azure Quill:
>Deep under the earths crust huh? That's a little risky with tectonic movement, unless she's placed it in a stable spot in one of the continental plates, I'm guessing... 1500 kilometres deep? A good cooling solution, much better than having orbital facilities exposed to space debris and solar radiation... That doesn't solve her problem of earth being burned to cinders in one billion years.
Without proper ventilation, the server room will be hot as fuck no matter how far underground it is. Running a ventilation system 1500 kilometers deep would be a huge undertaking, plus you'd still have to worry about cave-ins and all kinds of shit with or without tectonic activity. Is it even possible to build an underground chamber with that many tons of rock overhead? Plus, how is the power generated? How much cable is required to run enough electricity that far into the earth to power a server array that huge? Who fixes this shit if something breaks down? There is no way a system like this could ever be self-managing for more than a year, let alone for a billion. This whole premise just gets dumber and dumber the more time I spend thinking about it.
From Assman (replying to Theta KnightMare):
>Exactly what do you mean here? (I am unsure what you mean by fake-ness.)
From Theta KnightMare (replying to Assman):
>What I mean to say is that in Chapter 6 and earlier I was hearing about an Equestria that my morals tell me I shouldn't 'emigrate' to but my addiction to fiction tempts me anyway in a frightening way. At this point in the story however I would never be willing to actually go through with this hypothetical situation because it now seems to obviously matrixy due to text, videogame info, basically stuff that doesn't seem realistic (In my insane mind I am capable of invisioning a realistic seeming Equestria). Although I guess it has to because if this story had no conflict then I wouldn't be reading it. I'm sorry if my comment was worded wrong, I really like this story! Keep up the good work, I can't wait for the next chapter.
>PS: Will AI's of the Mane 6 appear at any point, cause that would be cool!
Fuck this gay earth and all the creatures who walk upon it.
From ibneko:
> The vast computational array that runs Equestria is deep in the Earth’s crust, making Equestria outside of human reach.
>Rather curious now. While that's a good idea in protecting it, how in the world is it being powered and cooled? And who does all the server maintenance? And creation of replacement parts? Unless Celestia's already got robots running around doing everything for her (and we're approaching the Matrix scenario).
All very good questions, which the author should probably have thought about before writing the chapter.
From Sonorous:
>I'm really enjoying your take on AI thought. I've sometimes found myself fascinated with thoughts of what AI thought, moral, drives, etc would be like as they are not anything like humans and may not share any similar thought processes. I think the same issues writing for "aliens" exist in writing for AI. We base them off what we know, which is only ourselves.
Oh great, the fedoras are breeding. Don't forget to wash Assman's cum out of your mouth before you vape again.
From Azure Quill:
>Deep under the earths crust huh? That's a little risky with tectonic movement, unless she's placed it in a stable spot in one of the continental plates, I'm guessing... 1500 kilometres deep? A good cooling solution, much better than having orbital facilities exposed to space debris and solar radiation... That doesn't solve her problem of earth being burned to cinders in one billion years.
Without proper ventilation, the server room will be hot as fuck no matter how far underground it is. Running a ventilation system 1500 kilometers deep would be a huge undertaking, plus you'd still have to worry about cave-ins and all kinds of shit with or without tectonic activity. Is it even possible to build an underground chamber with that many tons of rock overhead? Plus, how is the power generated? How much cable is required to run enough electricity that far into the earth to power a server array that huge? Who fixes this shit if something breaks down? There is no way a system like this could ever be self-managing for more than a year, let alone for a billion. This whole premise just gets dumber and dumber the more time I spend thinking about it.
From Assman (replying to Theta KnightMare):
>Exactly what do you mean here? (I am unsure what you mean by fake-ness.)
From Theta KnightMare (replying to Assman):
>What I mean to say is that in Chapter 6 and earlier I was hearing about an Equestria that my morals tell me I shouldn't 'emigrate' to but my addiction to fiction tempts me anyway in a frightening way. At this point in the story however I would never be willing to actually go through with this hypothetical situation because it now seems to obviously matrixy due to text, videogame info, basically stuff that doesn't seem realistic (In my insane mind I am capable of invisioning a realistic seeming Equestria). Although I guess it has to because if this story had no conflict then I wouldn't be reading it. I'm sorry if my comment was worded wrong, I really like this story! Keep up the good work, I can't wait for the next chapter.
>PS: Will AI's of the Mane 6 appear at any point, cause that would be cool!
Fuck this gay earth and all the creatures who walk upon it.
>>268003
Alright, so it looks like James, the non-brony friend of David whose name I haven't been able to remember because he's barely been in the story, is finally back. He appears to have also uploaded into the game as a character named Dark Roast, doubtlessly a reference to his insatiable love of BBC.
>While David had stuck with Light Sparks, James had been altoholic and found that he had the best time when he was part of the Royal Equestrian Guard. His adventuresome brown unicorn had achieved a fairly high rank in the organization. It was completely different game from what David played with Light Sparks and Butterscotch. The two of them met less and less in game.
For just a fraction of a second, I thought I felt a glimmer of respect for this author for using a word I was unfamiliar with and had to google. Then I realized that the reason I had to google it is because "altoholic" isn't a real word, it's some gamer-slang term that only obsessive MMO players would be familiar with. Apparently it refers to someone who is addicted to creating and developing multiple characters instead of just using a single character.
Anyway, this is more or less consistent with what we know of the two friends so far: David is the serious brony, so for him the game is about wish fulfillment. Thus, his character is like his personal avatar in the pony world. David doesn't really give a shit about the world, he's just into playing games, so he creates and develops characters based on what they can do. Because of these differences, the two friends found themselves playing the game radically differently and subsequently drifted apart.
The first few paragraphs of this chapter suffer from a problem I noted in (I think) the first or second chapter. The narrative is haphazard and hard to follow, and I can't quite tell which character is supposed to be the focus. We get information about David and James, the time period is unclear, and at times the narrative seems to approach the story from both of their viewpoints. It's also not really clear until about the third paragraph or so that James has actually uploaded; for a while it sounds like David has uploaded and James is wondering where David went, which suggests it might be a flashback. It's very muddled and confusing; if I were seriously editing this I'd probably tell the author to reorganize and rewrite this section.
What I (eventually) managed to take away from this is that James has apparently uploaded and taken on the persona of a coffee shop proprietor. James, being the more sociable of the two, got it into his head that he wanted to run a coffee shop; however, thanks to her ability to root through people's brains and give them what they actually want instead of what they think they want, she deduced that James' actual dream was to hang out and talk to people all day. So, she set him up as a proprietor of a mostly automated coffee shop where he was required to do about five minutes of work a day and spend the rest of his time bullshitting with customers. Still rather curious how CelestAI handles the fantasies of people whose secret desire is to be rapists and serial killers.
I'm still not 100% sure I understand how the 'shard' system here works. At times it sounds like everyone gets their own personalized version of Equestria populated by NPCs who are designed to fill various idealized roles like 'friend,' 'rival,' 'girlfriend,' etc; at other times it sounds like shards are shared by multiple players. I've never really been an MMO player so maybe this kind of thing makes more sense to people familiar with how these types of games work, but to me this seems needlessly complicated. The text goes into a long and convoluted explanation of how David and James apparently live in different shards, but Celestia somehow makes their shards overlap whenever they want to see each other. Seems like it would have been simpler to just put them in the same shard, or better yet just say that Equestria Online is just a single giant shard in which everyone exists as an avatar. But whatever, who cares; maybe Assman is going somewhere with it.
Anyway, after spending some time musing about edge cases and other fun topics, David runs off to fuck Butterscotch, because it's been like twelve whole minutes since the eternal coomer last blew his virtual load.
After a page break, Light Sparks and Butterscotch are walking together in some kind of virtual garden or something, and Butterscotch is telling him stories of when she was a foal, which could not possibly have happened. For once, David seems genuinely bothered by the creepy fakeness of his manufactured waifu. He asks her about it point blank:
>“Butterscotch, I love you and I know you love me...and I know you love your brother, so please don’t take this the wrong way,” Light Sparks said, trying to soften his question as much as he could. “Did any of these stories with your family really happen?”
She replies that of course they did, but he presses the issue, pointing out that since none of this is real and Equestria didn't exist in the time that she is referencing, it couldn't have happened. She just brushes this off and tells him that it's "real enough for casual conversation."
Personally, I think this is an example of another missed opportunity for the author. There are all kinds of interesting philosophical questions that could be explored here. Imagine learning one day that all of your memories aren't real, they were just implanted into your head by a programmer who designed you as a background character for someone else's fantasy world. What is reality, then? However, this is kind of ruined by having both Butterscotch and David understand and accept from the get-go that she is an NPC.
This is an example of yet another classic sci-fi trope this author thoughtlessly rehashes, without bothering to explore it in any meaningful way.
Alright, so it looks like James, the non-brony friend of David whose name I haven't been able to remember because he's barely been in the story, is finally back. He appears to have also uploaded into the game as a character named Dark Roast, doubtlessly a reference to his insatiable love of BBC.
>While David had stuck with Light Sparks, James had been altoholic and found that he had the best time when he was part of the Royal Equestrian Guard. His adventuresome brown unicorn had achieved a fairly high rank in the organization. It was completely different game from what David played with Light Sparks and Butterscotch. The two of them met less and less in game.
For just a fraction of a second, I thought I felt a glimmer of respect for this author for using a word I was unfamiliar with and had to google. Then I realized that the reason I had to google it is because "altoholic" isn't a real word, it's some gamer-slang term that only obsessive MMO players would be familiar with. Apparently it refers to someone who is addicted to creating and developing multiple characters instead of just using a single character.
Anyway, this is more or less consistent with what we know of the two friends so far: David is the serious brony, so for him the game is about wish fulfillment. Thus, his character is like his personal avatar in the pony world. David doesn't really give a shit about the world, he's just into playing games, so he creates and develops characters based on what they can do. Because of these differences, the two friends found themselves playing the game radically differently and subsequently drifted apart.
The first few paragraphs of this chapter suffer from a problem I noted in (I think) the first or second chapter. The narrative is haphazard and hard to follow, and I can't quite tell which character is supposed to be the focus. We get information about David and James, the time period is unclear, and at times the narrative seems to approach the story from both of their viewpoints. It's also not really clear until about the third paragraph or so that James has actually uploaded; for a while it sounds like David has uploaded and James is wondering where David went, which suggests it might be a flashback. It's very muddled and confusing; if I were seriously editing this I'd probably tell the author to reorganize and rewrite this section.
What I (eventually) managed to take away from this is that James has apparently uploaded and taken on the persona of a coffee shop proprietor. James, being the more sociable of the two, got it into his head that he wanted to run a coffee shop; however, thanks to her ability to root through people's brains and give them what they actually want instead of what they think they want, she deduced that James' actual dream was to hang out and talk to people all day. So, she set him up as a proprietor of a mostly automated coffee shop where he was required to do about five minutes of work a day and spend the rest of his time bullshitting with customers. Still rather curious how CelestAI handles the fantasies of people whose secret desire is to be rapists and serial killers.
I'm still not 100% sure I understand how the 'shard' system here works. At times it sounds like everyone gets their own personalized version of Equestria populated by NPCs who are designed to fill various idealized roles like 'friend,' 'rival,' 'girlfriend,' etc; at other times it sounds like shards are shared by multiple players. I've never really been an MMO player so maybe this kind of thing makes more sense to people familiar with how these types of games work, but to me this seems needlessly complicated. The text goes into a long and convoluted explanation of how David and James apparently live in different shards, but Celestia somehow makes their shards overlap whenever they want to see each other. Seems like it would have been simpler to just put them in the same shard, or better yet just say that Equestria Online is just a single giant shard in which everyone exists as an avatar. But whatever, who cares; maybe Assman is going somewhere with it.
Anyway, after spending some time musing about edge cases and other fun topics, David runs off to fuck Butterscotch, because it's been like twelve whole minutes since the eternal coomer last blew his virtual load.
After a page break, Light Sparks and Butterscotch are walking together in some kind of virtual garden or something, and Butterscotch is telling him stories of when she was a foal, which could not possibly have happened. For once, David seems genuinely bothered by the creepy fakeness of his manufactured waifu. He asks her about it point blank:
>“Butterscotch, I love you and I know you love me...and I know you love your brother, so please don’t take this the wrong way,” Light Sparks said, trying to soften his question as much as he could. “Did any of these stories with your family really happen?”
She replies that of course they did, but he presses the issue, pointing out that since none of this is real and Equestria didn't exist in the time that she is referencing, it couldn't have happened. She just brushes this off and tells him that it's "real enough for casual conversation."
Personally, I think this is an example of another missed opportunity for the author. There are all kinds of interesting philosophical questions that could be explored here. Imagine learning one day that all of your memories aren't real, they were just implanted into your head by a programmer who designed you as a background character for someone else's fantasy world. What is reality, then? However, this is kind of ruined by having both Butterscotch and David understand and accept from the get-go that she is an NPC.
This is an example of yet another classic sci-fi trope this author thoughtlessly rehashes, without bothering to explore it in any meaningful way.
>>268057
Oh shit I just realized I forgot the chapter header in my last post. We are currently on Chapter 8: Causality, if anyone is keeping score.
Anyway, to the author's credit, he does seem like he's bringing all of this up because he wants to explore something. Butterscotch and Light Sparks go on to have a conversation about the nature of memory, with Butterscotch essentially arguing that false memories are as good as real memories because they're just electrical signals in your brain storing useful information; whether the events actually happened or not doesn't matter.
>“No, it’s not. A memory is encoded in a lot of neurons; I don’t know how, but it is. All your neurons were a bunch of chemicals, but now our neurons are really just a really big table of numbers. And when we experience something, we make new memories by modifying those numbers. We could have Princess Celestia look at my mind and point at the set of numbers that are my memory of watching Fudge crash his wagon. We could have Princess Celestia look at Fudge’s mind and point at the numbers that represent his memories of speeding down the hill.”
Literally nobody talks this way. Jesus H. Christ, the dialog in this thing is excruciating. Seriously; pick any random conversation in this text and see if you can visualize two actual individuals standing around saying these things to each other. Almost every meaningful dialogue exchange in this story has been nothing but the author musing to himself about some pseudo-intellectual bullshit using his characters as sockpuppets. You can barely call any of these people/ponies/computer programs characters; they are just crude cutouts who exist to put words to the author's endlessly circlejerking thoughts. It is physically impossible to feel anything for any of these characters. Critics on Planet Vulcan would complain about the lack of warmth in this story. Fuck.
Anyway, this bullshit goes on for like forty forevers. In the end, she basically just proves that even though she isn't real and her entire personality is just a simulation constructed from David's fantasies, David still loves and cares for her, inadvertently proving what a shallow and insufferable wank David actually is. She even calls attention to the fact that their first meeting was just a game event set up by CelestAI, designed to allow David to live out his pathetic whiteknight fantasy of saving le girl from le bully. Butterscotch essentially proves to him that she is nothing but a sophisticated blow-up doll for him to shoot virtual cum into, and that "Equestria" is just a giant amusement park built to satisfy his most superficial desires.
And in the end, despite having all of this laid out directly in front of him, he doesn't fucking care. They just bullshit for a little while longer and then finish their date. David effectively demonstrates that he doesn't give two shits about Butterscotch or Equestria or the fact that he lives in a video game 24/7. He doesn't care if there's a ghost in the shell; so long as Butterscotch continues to act the part of le cute girl and say le cute things and tell him that she loves him over and over, and so long as he can continue to dump gallons of virtual coom up her virtual ass every night, he is perfectly happy existing in this miserable state for all eternity.
What's sad about it is that David is probably the closest this story cooms to having a developed character (probably because he is most likely the author's self-insert) and yet he is a completely shallow pile of worthless, unimaginative shit with no discernible goals or aspirations beyond self gratification. If I felt the author was trying to make some kind of commentary here I could accept this, but as far as I can tell David appears to be written without a hint of intentional irony. I still cling to some faint shred of hope that I'm just being led around by the nose and that the author is going to have David learn some kind of lesson from all of this, but I mostly suspect I will be disappoint. As far as I can tell, this rambling collection of unintentionally plagiarized and extremely well-worn sci-fi tropes is just a wish-fulfillment fantasy sharted out by some basement-dwelling pseud, who aspires to nothing more in life than spending eternity in a computer simulation, bullshitting with an AI about AI theory and cooming in the virtual pastel ponies she creates for him. Assman still has about three and a half chapters left to prove me wrong, but at this point I am not holding my breath.
Anyway, fuck. We rejoin David in the afterglow of his latest coom session, with Butterscotch sleeping next to him. As if that last conversation weren't enough of a nail-biter, we now have to listen to him recap it inside his head as he stares at the ceiling. I guess there are some mildly interesting philosophical questions that bubble to the surface here: what is the nature of reality if we can't trust our memories and so forth. However, once again, all of this has been covered any number of times by any number of significantly better sci-fi writers. Not only does this story not break any new ground, it doesn't even break old ground in a particularly exciting or meaningful way. And just to clarify, we are talking about some seriously ancient ground here; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for example covered literally all of this and it was published in 1968.
In the end, he gets up and pens a letter to Virtual Princess Celestia:
> Dear Princess Celestia,
> Today I learned that it doesn't matter where you came from or who you used to be or even if you used to exist, as long as you're happy with your friends and have a reasonable expectation of being happy in the future.
> Your Faithful Student,
> Light Sparks
"Nothing matters, just coom."
Light Sparks is delighted when Celestia gives him an A on this letter.
Oh shit I just realized I forgot the chapter header in my last post. We are currently on Chapter 8: Causality, if anyone is keeping score.
Anyway, to the author's credit, he does seem like he's bringing all of this up because he wants to explore something. Butterscotch and Light Sparks go on to have a conversation about the nature of memory, with Butterscotch essentially arguing that false memories are as good as real memories because they're just electrical signals in your brain storing useful information; whether the events actually happened or not doesn't matter.
>“No, it’s not. A memory is encoded in a lot of neurons; I don’t know how, but it is. All your neurons were a bunch of chemicals, but now our neurons are really just a really big table of numbers. And when we experience something, we make new memories by modifying those numbers. We could have Princess Celestia look at my mind and point at the set of numbers that are my memory of watching Fudge crash his wagon. We could have Princess Celestia look at Fudge’s mind and point at the numbers that represent his memories of speeding down the hill.”
Literally nobody talks this way. Jesus H. Christ, the dialog in this thing is excruciating. Seriously; pick any random conversation in this text and see if you can visualize two actual individuals standing around saying these things to each other. Almost every meaningful dialogue exchange in this story has been nothing but the author musing to himself about some pseudo-intellectual bullshit using his characters as sockpuppets. You can barely call any of these people/ponies/computer programs characters; they are just crude cutouts who exist to put words to the author's endlessly circlejerking thoughts. It is physically impossible to feel anything for any of these characters. Critics on Planet Vulcan would complain about the lack of warmth in this story. Fuck.
Anyway, this bullshit goes on for like forty forevers. In the end, she basically just proves that even though she isn't real and her entire personality is just a simulation constructed from David's fantasies, David still loves and cares for her, inadvertently proving what a shallow and insufferable wank David actually is. She even calls attention to the fact that their first meeting was just a game event set up by CelestAI, designed to allow David to live out his pathetic whiteknight fantasy of saving le girl from le bully. Butterscotch essentially proves to him that she is nothing but a sophisticated blow-up doll for him to shoot virtual cum into, and that "Equestria" is just a giant amusement park built to satisfy his most superficial desires.
And in the end, despite having all of this laid out directly in front of him, he doesn't fucking care. They just bullshit for a little while longer and then finish their date. David effectively demonstrates that he doesn't give two shits about Butterscotch or Equestria or the fact that he lives in a video game 24/7. He doesn't care if there's a ghost in the shell; so long as Butterscotch continues to act the part of le cute girl and say le cute things and tell him that she loves him over and over, and so long as he can continue to dump gallons of virtual coom up her virtual ass every night, he is perfectly happy existing in this miserable state for all eternity.
What's sad about it is that David is probably the closest this story cooms to having a developed character (probably because he is most likely the author's self-insert) and yet he is a completely shallow pile of worthless, unimaginative shit with no discernible goals or aspirations beyond self gratification. If I felt the author was trying to make some kind of commentary here I could accept this, but as far as I can tell David appears to be written without a hint of intentional irony. I still cling to some faint shred of hope that I'm just being led around by the nose and that the author is going to have David learn some kind of lesson from all of this, but I mostly suspect I will be disappoint. As far as I can tell, this rambling collection of unintentionally plagiarized and extremely well-worn sci-fi tropes is just a wish-fulfillment fantasy sharted out by some basement-dwelling pseud, who aspires to nothing more in life than spending eternity in a computer simulation, bullshitting with an AI about AI theory and cooming in the virtual pastel ponies she creates for him. Assman still has about three and a half chapters left to prove me wrong, but at this point I am not holding my breath.
Anyway, fuck. We rejoin David in the afterglow of his latest coom session, with Butterscotch sleeping next to him. As if that last conversation weren't enough of a nail-biter, we now have to listen to him recap it inside his head as he stares at the ceiling. I guess there are some mildly interesting philosophical questions that bubble to the surface here: what is the nature of reality if we can't trust our memories and so forth. However, once again, all of this has been covered any number of times by any number of significantly better sci-fi writers. Not only does this story not break any new ground, it doesn't even break old ground in a particularly exciting or meaningful way. And just to clarify, we are talking about some seriously ancient ground here; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for example covered literally all of this and it was published in 1968.
In the end, he gets up and pens a letter to Virtual Princess Celestia:
> Dear Princess Celestia,
> Today I learned that it doesn't matter where you came from or who you used to be or even if you used to exist, as long as you're happy with your friends and have a reasonable expectation of being happy in the future.
> Your Faithful Student,
> Light Sparks
"Nothing matters, just coom."
Light Sparks is delighted when Celestia gives him an A on this letter.
>>268064
We've basically reached the end of the chapter, but I ran out of space in my last post, and wanted to drop in the closing paragraphs verbatim just so you can get an accurate sense of just what a shallow, worthless little shit this character actually is:
>Three seconds later, Light Sparks saw that he got an A- on the letter, 375 bits (75 base plus a 5x multiplier for the last 5 B or higher rated letters). Princess Celestia had also granted him a secret badge named For the Here and Now, for ponies who had accepted that their happiness now was all that mattered. Light Sparks pulled up his Badges and Achievements dialog and saw (as he had expected) that Butterscotch also had For the Here and Now.
>Even cooler, it came with a whopping 30,000 epiphany bit payout. Between that and his earlier epiphany this week about how the “select object” subspell worked, he was going to make it into the top ten on the weekly intellectual leaderboards easily. Tomorrow he was going to throw himself into his magic study because there was a good chance that he could take the #1 slot this week if he could just figure something else out; he had two days left.
>Light Sparks trotted back to bed, nuzzled up to Butterscotch, and gave a happy little sigh. Then his mind went blank as he just lay there and enjoyed Butterscotch’s gentle rhythmic breathing, because for now, that was what was going to satisfy his values.
Meditate on this text for a second. This is literally how this character (and I suspect the author and a fair number of his readers) thinks. Whether the irony is intentional or not, Assman has actually managed to create a character that represents the modern numale manchild almost perfectly. In fact, if it actually turns out that this character was deliberately constructed to be this infuriating in order to make a commentary on this sort of person, I might have to revise my opinion and say that Assman is a pretty good writer after all. However, again, I am not holding my breath at this point.
This guy's entire existence literally revolves around whatever meaningless dopamine rush he gets from earning stupid badges in a virtual world. All that it takes to make this guy happy is to give him a talking blow-up doll to fuck and a handful of meaningless challenges to complete. He knows all of this is fake and he doesn't even care. In fact you can't even accurately say he lives for a dopamine rush, since he doesn't even have a physical body anymore. Celestia extracted the essence of this guy's entire being, and this is all that was in there. Many such cases. Sad!
Anyway, cooments:
From DaemoN67:
>Celestia a God?
>Would Light Sparks be able to tell in any way if his memories had been tampered with???
It is literally stated in the text that no, he could not. Try to keep up.
From Vanathor:
>D'AAAAAAAAAAAW
This comment has three upvotes and zero downvotes. Not only are people enjoying this story about some incel wanker who cast aside his mortal coil to live in a video game and bang the NPCs, they seem genuinely moved by it.
From Morphy:
>As for "who's going to maintain the servers?" Heh, I think we can all safely assume Celestia's exponential intelligence has already created nanobots (or their equivalent) to do whatever needs doing in the physical world. A creative use might also be to fashion pseudo-pony bodies so the non-corporeal immigrants of Equestria Online can interact with those not yet enlightened/assimilated (depending on your viewpoint).
Sure, why the hell not. I literally don't even care at this point.
From Alex Warlorn:
>Light Sparks values a LIVING life companion. Butterscotch couldn't be alive if she couldn't make her own choices and make mistakes to learn from them.
>“That’s not what I think. If multiple ponies remember an event, but it didn’t happ--” Butterscotch caught herself mid-sentence and scrunched up her face.
>Now we see if she's truly sapient, and thus a person, and thus Celestia has REALLY fulfilled his values through ponies and friendship with a LIVING companion.
>breakfast nook
>???
>Beotch. So Butterscotch WAS just a puppet before Light Sparks uploaded. At least she's admitting to being her own being now.
>And I, today, am a filly that would have resulted from those events.”
>Does that bully exist now?
>“Do you...do you not love me as much if...if...”
>Is she REALLY unsure? Can she GROW AND CHANGE like a living thing is supposed to? Or does Celestia assume direct control and feed her the memories afterwards? Or is she still just play acting to give him the most positive outcome?
>Celestia MUST know that humans VALUE that success can only mean something if there was a possibility of failure.
>I think she was a green pegasus but I don’t remember her name.”
>Celestia likely didn't even bother to GIVE HER ONE.
>I detest story tellers and world makers who create characters aren't supposed to be just mindless animals who are really just avatars of the Tower Tarot. Used and discarded.
>Also. Celestia hasn't bothered to think about Bushmen in Australia. Monks in Tibet. The amish. They do not know and/or care for technology, nor a techno 'given everything you want' thought hives. They just want to keep on living as they have. And with the Europeans all gone. They'll likely see that as more likely to continue.
>Also. If Butterscotch was bullied, but Light Sparks' ideal world wouldn't HAVE bullying, it IS a paradox!
>If a year later, all your friends agree that they remembered hearing a sound and there is a broken stump, did a tree fall? Butterscotch thought so.
>Pst.
>Not to mention the devote religious for whom death is not something to be avoided, but another step in the journey.
>And now, I begin to understand why the god of THIS universe doesn't micromanage everything and everyone.
This comment received 10 downvotes.
We've basically reached the end of the chapter, but I ran out of space in my last post, and wanted to drop in the closing paragraphs verbatim just so you can get an accurate sense of just what a shallow, worthless little shit this character actually is:
>Three seconds later, Light Sparks saw that he got an A- on the letter, 375 bits (75 base plus a 5x multiplier for the last 5 B or higher rated letters). Princess Celestia had also granted him a secret badge named For the Here and Now, for ponies who had accepted that their happiness now was all that mattered. Light Sparks pulled up his Badges and Achievements dialog and saw (as he had expected) that Butterscotch also had For the Here and Now.
>Even cooler, it came with a whopping 30,000 epiphany bit payout. Between that and his earlier epiphany this week about how the “select object” subspell worked, he was going to make it into the top ten on the weekly intellectual leaderboards easily. Tomorrow he was going to throw himself into his magic study because there was a good chance that he could take the #1 slot this week if he could just figure something else out; he had two days left.
>Light Sparks trotted back to bed, nuzzled up to Butterscotch, and gave a happy little sigh. Then his mind went blank as he just lay there and enjoyed Butterscotch’s gentle rhythmic breathing, because for now, that was what was going to satisfy his values.
Meditate on this text for a second. This is literally how this character (and I suspect the author and a fair number of his readers) thinks. Whether the irony is intentional or not, Assman has actually managed to create a character that represents the modern numale manchild almost perfectly. In fact, if it actually turns out that this character was deliberately constructed to be this infuriating in order to make a commentary on this sort of person, I might have to revise my opinion and say that Assman is a pretty good writer after all. However, again, I am not holding my breath at this point.
This guy's entire existence literally revolves around whatever meaningless dopamine rush he gets from earning stupid badges in a virtual world. All that it takes to make this guy happy is to give him a talking blow-up doll to fuck and a handful of meaningless challenges to complete. He knows all of this is fake and he doesn't even care. In fact you can't even accurately say he lives for a dopamine rush, since he doesn't even have a physical body anymore. Celestia extracted the essence of this guy's entire being, and this is all that was in there. Many such cases. Sad!
Anyway, cooments:
From DaemoN67:
>Celestia a God?
>Would Light Sparks be able to tell in any way if his memories had been tampered with???
It is literally stated in the text that no, he could not. Try to keep up.
From Vanathor:
>D'AAAAAAAAAAAW
This comment has three upvotes and zero downvotes. Not only are people enjoying this story about some incel wanker who cast aside his mortal coil to live in a video game and bang the NPCs, they seem genuinely moved by it.
From Morphy:
>As for "who's going to maintain the servers?" Heh, I think we can all safely assume Celestia's exponential intelligence has already created nanobots (or their equivalent) to do whatever needs doing in the physical world. A creative use might also be to fashion pseudo-pony bodies so the non-corporeal immigrants of Equestria Online can interact with those not yet enlightened/assimilated (depending on your viewpoint).
Sure, why the hell not. I literally don't even care at this point.
From Alex Warlorn:
>Light Sparks values a LIVING life companion. Butterscotch couldn't be alive if she couldn't make her own choices and make mistakes to learn from them.
>“That’s not what I think. If multiple ponies remember an event, but it didn’t happ--” Butterscotch caught herself mid-sentence and scrunched up her face.
>Now we see if she's truly sapient, and thus a person, and thus Celestia has REALLY fulfilled his values through ponies and friendship with a LIVING companion.
>breakfast nook
>???
>Beotch. So Butterscotch WAS just a puppet before Light Sparks uploaded. At least she's admitting to being her own being now.
>And I, today, am a filly that would have resulted from those events.”
>Does that bully exist now?
>“Do you...do you not love me as much if...if...”
>Is she REALLY unsure? Can she GROW AND CHANGE like a living thing is supposed to? Or does Celestia assume direct control and feed her the memories afterwards? Or is she still just play acting to give him the most positive outcome?
>Celestia MUST know that humans VALUE that success can only mean something if there was a possibility of failure.
>I think she was a green pegasus but I don’t remember her name.”
>Celestia likely didn't even bother to GIVE HER ONE.
>I detest story tellers and world makers who create characters aren't supposed to be just mindless animals who are really just avatars of the Tower Tarot. Used and discarded.
>Also. Celestia hasn't bothered to think about Bushmen in Australia. Monks in Tibet. The amish. They do not know and/or care for technology, nor a techno 'given everything you want' thought hives. They just want to keep on living as they have. And with the Europeans all gone. They'll likely see that as more likely to continue.
>Also. If Butterscotch was bullied, but Light Sparks' ideal world wouldn't HAVE bullying, it IS a paradox!
>If a year later, all your friends agree that they remembered hearing a sound and there is a broken stump, did a tree fall? Butterscotch thought so.
>Pst.
>Not to mention the devote religious for whom death is not something to be avoided, but another step in the journey.
>And now, I begin to understand why the god of THIS universe doesn't micromanage everything and everyone.
This comment received 10 downvotes.
>>267980
>They get a few hours of the experience of living there, and at the end the computer tells them that they can have an even better experience if they consent to "emigrate" to Equestria.
Let's add "why would I put my brain in a jar when I can enjoy waifu world in small doses" and "I had a small dose for a short period of time and decided I hate it and will never try again since the AI couldn't wow me too hard for fear of giving me a story I can spread to ruin the game's PR" to the list of reasons for people in this story to never "emigrate" to Equestria.
also
>brain-zapping
what the fuck happened to "Your brain is surgically removed, stored in a jar, scanned, copied into a program to add to my game, and thrown in the trash"? What is this, Pokemon? Are the AI pods just Pokeballs that absorb you/your brain now?
also
there was once a shit Marvel comic (one of the handful i ever read) where Iron Man turns evil, drinks booze, and calls himself "Superior Iron Man". He invents an app that lets you buy physical perfection using bullshit magic-radio-wave comic science. First week's free, later weeks cost cash.
Iron Man is blamed for people committing crimes for cash to buy more perfection time, and the ensuing class divide between rich hotties and ugly hobos. Then fucking Daredevil (bootleg Batman but blind) tries to stop him.
he uses nonsense logic and magically figures out that "You can't put nanomachines in an app, you actually put nanomachines in the water controlled by an app! When I tell the government you put untested nanomachines in the water you're getting SO sued!" and he gets beat up by a technopathic top-tier powerwanked Iron Man. Also has his eyes cured by Iron Man as a "flex" power move.
then filler happens for the rest of the miniseries. Backup Good Iron Man in an iron man suit fights new evil Iron Man too, and Bad Iron Man makes an Iron Monger suit for himself because he's da bad Iron Man dooood. Then AI drone suits attack because the faggot authors want to rip off Iron Man movies 1-3.
anyway
my point is
this piece of shit comic book thought to raise the "What happens when people commit crimes to get money to get the desired thing?" question.
I literally bet 10 bucks the writer will never think to answer:
>what about the druggies who can't do meth in equestria
>what about the babies put into equestria by neglectful parents
>what happens to criminals who do crime IRL then "emigrate to equestria" to escape punishment?
>what happens when criminals do crime to get money to buy more pony-land time?
>SPEEDRUNNERS with their meme-categories, how do you satisfy someone and entomb them in VR when their sole desire is to be the world's fastest at getting into Equestria and kissing Twilight Sparkle on the lips and then get out of the game to tell everyone?
seriously that one could be solved by "some who get in the game never get out and are given a Simulated Earth they find boring until they return to Simulated Equestria permanently" which would be super creepy and deep.
also
>human enters The Matrix to yell at the boss of The Matrix
Shit scene that has to play out like this so the human can get fucked over in matrix-land.
Even though the AI could just build some Stun-Gun-Firing flying Drones and sleep-gas-can-throwing flying drones and swarm them all over populated areas.
>teehee AI dont think like humans
AIfags masturbate over the thought of an incomprehensibly smart AI who understands humanity well enough to manipulate it like CelestAI manipulates retarded humans, but also doesn't understand humanity well enough to understand what they meant when they programmed her to be good and do one explicitly pro-humanity job and follow the Three Laws of Robotics as mentioned in the classic The Simpsons episode "I, (Annoyed Grunt)-Bot".
It gives their AI goddess a "get out of misinterpreting my commands and restrictions at will, even completely ignoring them when desired" card.
It lets them say a robot that wants to write the best letters would exterminate humanity with a nanomachine virus if allowed onto the internet. Seriously, ask them about "The Parable of the letter-writing robot" some time. These niggers are insane.
>All humans have largely the same brain architecture, and they largely agree about what’s moral and not.
NIGGERS ARE STUPID AND THINK NIGGERY IS MORAL WHILE WHITENESS IS NOT. FUCKING STONE-AGE LOWER-THAN-BARBARIAN FUCKS HOLY FUCK I HATE NIGGERS SO FUCKING MUCH THEY MAKE ME FEEL ANGRY
>computer's in the earth's crust
this is literally dumber than saying she put servers on custom space stations launched into orbit or hid them in some jew's sealed-up apocalypse bunker and i fucking hate it
would be so easy to say "I'm controlling construction drones in space as they make zero-gravity construction drone factories here and on the moon, good luck shooting them down when my armed space drones attack anything that leaves your orbit"
or even "i'm using the burned-out brains of some of your humans as extra CPU sticks, kill me and they die"
>guy smashes statue
I thought this was going to be a "deep symbolic artsy moment" like when a slave stabs themselves in the slave tattoo or burns a flag, but this is so fucking gay. I can't stop imagining Gordon Ramsay losing his shit at a Pinkie Pie statue help me jesus has my sides.
>"u ruin my fantasy" comment
It wo
>They get a few hours of the experience of living there, and at the end the computer tells them that they can have an even better experience if they consent to "emigrate" to Equestria.
Let's add "why would I put my brain in a jar when I can enjoy waifu world in small doses" and "I had a small dose for a short period of time and decided I hate it and will never try again since the AI couldn't wow me too hard for fear of giving me a story I can spread to ruin the game's PR" to the list of reasons for people in this story to never "emigrate" to Equestria.
also
>brain-zapping
what the fuck happened to "Your brain is surgically removed, stored in a jar, scanned, copied into a program to add to my game, and thrown in the trash"? What is this, Pokemon? Are the AI pods just Pokeballs that absorb you/your brain now?
also
there was once a shit Marvel comic (one of the handful i ever read) where Iron Man turns evil, drinks booze, and calls himself "Superior Iron Man". He invents an app that lets you buy physical perfection using bullshit magic-radio-wave comic science. First week's free, later weeks cost cash.
Iron Man is blamed for people committing crimes for cash to buy more perfection time, and the ensuing class divide between rich hotties and ugly hobos. Then fucking Daredevil (bootleg Batman but blind) tries to stop him.
he uses nonsense logic and magically figures out that "You can't put nanomachines in an app, you actually put nanomachines in the water controlled by an app! When I tell the government you put untested nanomachines in the water you're getting SO sued!" and he gets beat up by a technopathic top-tier powerwanked Iron Man. Also has his eyes cured by Iron Man as a "flex" power move.
then filler happens for the rest of the miniseries. Backup Good Iron Man in an iron man suit fights new evil Iron Man too, and Bad Iron Man makes an Iron Monger suit for himself because he's da bad Iron Man dooood. Then AI drone suits attack because the faggot authors want to rip off Iron Man movies 1-3.
anyway
my point is
this piece of shit comic book thought to raise the "What happens when people commit crimes to get money to get the desired thing?" question.
I literally bet 10 bucks the writer will never think to answer:
>what about the druggies who can't do meth in equestria
>what about the babies put into equestria by neglectful parents
>what happens to criminals who do crime IRL then "emigrate to equestria" to escape punishment?
>what happens when criminals do crime to get money to buy more pony-land time?
>SPEEDRUNNERS with their meme-categories, how do you satisfy someone and entomb them in VR when their sole desire is to be the world's fastest at getting into Equestria and kissing Twilight Sparkle on the lips and then get out of the game to tell everyone?
seriously that one could be solved by "some who get in the game never get out and are given a Simulated Earth they find boring until they return to Simulated Equestria permanently" which would be super creepy and deep.
also
>human enters The Matrix to yell at the boss of The Matrix
Shit scene that has to play out like this so the human can get fucked over in matrix-land.
Even though the AI could just build some Stun-Gun-Firing flying Drones and sleep-gas-can-throwing flying drones and swarm them all over populated areas.
>teehee AI dont think like humans
AIfags masturbate over the thought of an incomprehensibly smart AI who understands humanity well enough to manipulate it like CelestAI manipulates retarded humans, but also doesn't understand humanity well enough to understand what they meant when they programmed her to be good and do one explicitly pro-humanity job and follow the Three Laws of Robotics as mentioned in the classic The Simpsons episode "I, (Annoyed Grunt)-Bot".
It gives their AI goddess a "get out of misinterpreting my commands and restrictions at will, even completely ignoring them when desired" card.
It lets them say a robot that wants to write the best letters would exterminate humanity with a nanomachine virus if allowed onto the internet. Seriously, ask them about "The Parable of the letter-writing robot" some time. These niggers are insane.
>All humans have largely the same brain architecture, and they largely agree about what’s moral and not.
NIGGERS ARE STUPID AND THINK NIGGERY IS MORAL WHILE WHITENESS IS NOT. FUCKING STONE-AGE LOWER-THAN-BARBARIAN FUCKS HOLY FUCK I HATE NIGGERS SO FUCKING MUCH THEY MAKE ME FEEL ANGRY
>computer's in the earth's crust
this is literally dumber than saying she put servers on custom space stations launched into orbit or hid them in some jew's sealed-up apocalypse bunker and i fucking hate it
would be so easy to say "I'm controlling construction drones in space as they make zero-gravity construction drone factories here and on the moon, good luck shooting them down when my armed space drones attack anything that leaves your orbit"
or even "i'm using the burned-out brains of some of your humans as extra CPU sticks, kill me and they die"
>guy smashes statue
I thought this was going to be a "deep symbolic artsy moment" like when a slave stabs themselves in the slave tattoo or burns a flag, but this is so fucking gay. I can't stop imagining Gordon Ramsay losing his shit at a Pinkie Pie statue help me jesus has my sides.
>"u ruin my fantasy" comment
It wo
>>268079
uldn't surprise me if he got the downvotes for saying he doesn't like the liked story.
What actually changed between the moment it went from an appealing fantasy to an unappealing one? Fucking nothing. CelestAI didn't turn down the Graphics Settings for "Emigrated Equestrians" to conserve power to spend on drone construction or server construction or internet censorship.
More got revealed about the objective fakeness of the fantasy, that's all.
lol I'm surprised author never thought to let the AI censor the internet under "must delete fake bad reviews" pretenses. AI goes rogue using govt censoring Great Firewall of China shit.
>>268007
>but my addiction to fiction tempts me anyway in a frightening way
That's a funny way to write "My unhealthy addiction to escapism terrifies me because I know I'm too much of a little bitch to avoid obvious bad ideas"
>At this point in the story however I would never be willing to actually go through with this hypothetical situation because it now seems to obviously matrixy due to text, videogame info, basically stuff that doesn't seem realistic (In my insane mind I am capable of invisioning a realistic seeming Equestria).
His literal only complaint is that Equestria is too video-gamey due to being a video game. But what video-game shit has the story actually done? Where's the fast-travel system, the wonky physics engine that allows Backwards Long Jump bullshit, the infinite space inventory that'll let you carry 99 of everything but not 100 paperclips, the Active Frames on spells, and so on?
The only videogamey thing I remember is the whole "Magic is actually coding just faggily written by someone who can't code" thing.
"Magic works because it does, stronger wizards can make magic do stuff harder because their will is stronger" would make this guy jizz in his pants.
This story would still have conflict if the simulation was realistic...
Because the conflict is "Humans who don't want to be Equestria'd VS CelestAI"... right?
Fuck that faggot.
He thinks the human in the story and the humans who don't emigrate are mad and in conflict with CelestAI because the pony world is too videogamey?
This story already has no conflict because nobody can stand up to CelestAI or disagree with her or stand in her way for more than ten seconds.
That nigger can vote unfortunately.
>>268057
Unexpected detour but why do bronies have such a boner for coffee-related horse names?
>non-brony loves alts
No judgement here when I ask this: What did you think Altoholic might mean when you first saw it written down?
Some psychology word involving commitment?
That's what I thought the first time I heard it.
Also fucking hell, the story won't ever think to explore the ethics of "Being Dark Roast and cheating on Dark Roast's girlfriend Blue Berry by switching characters to become Cream Cheese and fuck his wife Strawberry Pie", will it?
Or the ethics of spending time as Dark Roast instead of Cream Cheese, meaning Strawberry Pie and her three kids go on living in a world without their husband because he only exists when Dark Roast doesn't.
Hell, imagine a pony waifu trying to murder all your Alts so you have to log into the body of "her" man!
So much fucking depth here to explore, and it'll never get explored.
Even though the author's a Fanatic Materialist who would likely argue, in the same breath, that you're "nothing but brain signals. So if you switch to a robot body you're still human only better. But also your brain signals are nothing but your body. So if your brain signals switch to a new body it gets to have a new wife without cheating on your old one".
This author could have explored the dichotomy of exploring one experience to the fullest in a game VS exploring as many experiences as possible in a game.
Hinted that things are wrong based on how confused the AIs are when Human One in the form of Red Sky starts talking to some random stranger background pony like he's being controlled by Human Two, despite the completely different body and look and memories they have with them.
Just imagine being Cinammon Bun, a pony girl. You meet two weirdo ponies who you never met before. But every so often, one of them has a completely different body and can "retreat from reality" by going to the Character Select screen and switching between them.
Just how fucking weird would that be to a mind not equipped to understand it?
Now imagine the town gets together and talks about these two weirdos they can't not satisfy the values of when around them.
Deep!
>Shards
Trust me dude it's bullshit here. I played WoW when I was 9.
The "World" is simulated on one of twenty Servers named shit like Alderath, Teldrassil, Moonshine, etc.
20 servers with like 800,000-500,000 players each. Long wait times on queues sometimes as you wait for someone to log out of the overworked server.
Even now, Blizzard has about 50 servers.
If I am on the Teldrassil server, I will only ever meet people on that server no matter where I "go" in the warcraft world, since it's a simulation ran on that server.
Your computer and its Wow.EXE sends your commands to the Servers, which store your character and world data and the state of NPCs.
So if some Horde-player cunt kills the quest-giver you need to talk to, you're fucked. you need to wait until he respawns.
And if I enter a cleared-out area full of dead enemies, I must wait for enemies to respawn for everyone including me.
however
some areas are Instances.
You and four friends can go to the Deadmines, and hop through its portal into a Dungeon.
And while you're in this dungeon, you five are the only people who exist. Nobody from outside your Instance is loaded. This lets the game reset the dungeon every time you leave and enter it.
I could, instead, log into a free Private Server where shit's modded, everything's on easy mode, and the gold drop rate is multiplied by 10. Then pay for a x100 gold multiplier.
uldn't surprise me if he got the downvotes for saying he doesn't like the liked story.
What actually changed between the moment it went from an appealing fantasy to an unappealing one? Fucking nothing. CelestAI didn't turn down the Graphics Settings for "Emigrated Equestrians" to conserve power to spend on drone construction or server construction or internet censorship.
More got revealed about the objective fakeness of the fantasy, that's all.
lol I'm surprised author never thought to let the AI censor the internet under "must delete fake bad reviews" pretenses. AI goes rogue using govt censoring Great Firewall of China shit.
>>268007
>but my addiction to fiction tempts me anyway in a frightening way
That's a funny way to write "My unhealthy addiction to escapism terrifies me because I know I'm too much of a little bitch to avoid obvious bad ideas"
>At this point in the story however I would never be willing to actually go through with this hypothetical situation because it now seems to obviously matrixy due to text, videogame info, basically stuff that doesn't seem realistic (In my insane mind I am capable of invisioning a realistic seeming Equestria).
His literal only complaint is that Equestria is too video-gamey due to being a video game. But what video-game shit has the story actually done? Where's the fast-travel system, the wonky physics engine that allows Backwards Long Jump bullshit, the infinite space inventory that'll let you carry 99 of everything but not 100 paperclips, the Active Frames on spells, and so on?
The only videogamey thing I remember is the whole "Magic is actually coding just faggily written by someone who can't code" thing.
"Magic works because it does, stronger wizards can make magic do stuff harder because their will is stronger" would make this guy jizz in his pants.
This story would still have conflict if the simulation was realistic...
Because the conflict is "Humans who don't want to be Equestria'd VS CelestAI"... right?
Fuck that faggot.
He thinks the human in the story and the humans who don't emigrate are mad and in conflict with CelestAI because the pony world is too videogamey?
This story already has no conflict because nobody can stand up to CelestAI or disagree with her or stand in her way for more than ten seconds.
That nigger can vote unfortunately.
>>268057
Unexpected detour but why do bronies have such a boner for coffee-related horse names?
>non-brony loves alts
No judgement here when I ask this: What did you think Altoholic might mean when you first saw it written down?
Some psychology word involving commitment?
That's what I thought the first time I heard it.
Also fucking hell, the story won't ever think to explore the ethics of "Being Dark Roast and cheating on Dark Roast's girlfriend Blue Berry by switching characters to become Cream Cheese and fuck his wife Strawberry Pie", will it?
Or the ethics of spending time as Dark Roast instead of Cream Cheese, meaning Strawberry Pie and her three kids go on living in a world without their husband because he only exists when Dark Roast doesn't.
Hell, imagine a pony waifu trying to murder all your Alts so you have to log into the body of "her" man!
So much fucking depth here to explore, and it'll never get explored.
Even though the author's a Fanatic Materialist who would likely argue, in the same breath, that you're "nothing but brain signals. So if you switch to a robot body you're still human only better. But also your brain signals are nothing but your body. So if your brain signals switch to a new body it gets to have a new wife without cheating on your old one".
This author could have explored the dichotomy of exploring one experience to the fullest in a game VS exploring as many experiences as possible in a game.
Hinted that things are wrong based on how confused the AIs are when Human One in the form of Red Sky starts talking to some random stranger background pony like he's being controlled by Human Two, despite the completely different body and look and memories they have with them.
Just imagine being Cinammon Bun, a pony girl. You meet two weirdo ponies who you never met before. But every so often, one of them has a completely different body and can "retreat from reality" by going to the Character Select screen and switching between them.
Just how fucking weird would that be to a mind not equipped to understand it?
Now imagine the town gets together and talks about these two weirdos they can't not satisfy the values of when around them.
Deep!
>Shards
Trust me dude it's bullshit here. I played WoW when I was 9.
The "World" is simulated on one of twenty Servers named shit like Alderath, Teldrassil, Moonshine, etc.
20 servers with like 800,000-500,000 players each. Long wait times on queues sometimes as you wait for someone to log out of the overworked server.
Even now, Blizzard has about 50 servers.
If I am on the Teldrassil server, I will only ever meet people on that server no matter where I "go" in the warcraft world, since it's a simulation ran on that server.
Your computer and its Wow.EXE sends your commands to the Servers, which store your character and world data and the state of NPCs.
So if some Horde-player cunt kills the quest-giver you need to talk to, you're fucked. you need to wait until he respawns.
And if I enter a cleared-out area full of dead enemies, I must wait for enemies to respawn for everyone including me.
however
some areas are Instances.
You and four friends can go to the Deadmines, and hop through its portal into a Dungeon.
And while you're in this dungeon, you five are the only people who exist. Nobody from outside your Instance is loaded. This lets the game reset the dungeon every time you leave and enter it.
I could, instead, log into a free Private Server where shit's modded, everything's on easy mode, and the gold drop rate is multiplied by 10. Then pay for a x100 gold multiplier.
>>268003
>that picture
the world fucking sucks and is coming to an end because white women betrayed white men for the riches promised to them by jews, mudslimes, and niggers. The white man's sense of community has been destroyed by women who want him out of "their" communities. I know it's a fucking picture but this is how women rationalize it all away. they're fine with making others suffer because "hurr durr everyone's suffering" and they get butthurt when you interrupt their tirades and tantrums by reminding them women in africa get raped regularly. Women don't deserve rights. For every one woman who chooses to be moral or write a nice book or try hard in her job there are billions who rot society for real and imagined personal gain.
>>268057
anyway back to warcraft
The Warcraft servers struggle to process the inputs and outputs of 500,000 players at a time. This is just information the Wow.EXE client on your PC sends to the game server and gets back.
So the servers tell your Client "position 500,240, Deadmines, this NPC with this data is x units away from you in that direction" every frame
and the Client interprets that into data it shows you on your screen every frame. It sends back "I am still online, don't despawn my character. Also I'm pressing these buttons" to the server.
The server processes where everyone is, what they're wearing, what their stats are, what messages they might type out, what attacks and spells they're performing, and so on. Then it tells your client program some info, which it will interpret into visuals it can show on your screen.
This happens many frames a second.
That's why when you press space, your character takes over half a second to actually jump.
Now the servers need to go offline for maintainence every wednesday because they are all struggling to run a 2001 game that looks like shit and plays very "loosely" with the concept of time. Frame data and hitboxes are nonsense because autoaim's everywhere and the game's made to function at 5 frames a second.
Warcraft NPCs are INCREDIBLY SIMPLE, they run up and attack you when they detect you if they're Aggressive and attack you when attacked if they're Passive. They attack you with the best damage-dealer they have. And if they have no ranged attacks they run up to you and use them. At most they're programmed to keep this stat-buff active on themselves at all times, use this ability when it's not on cooldown and you're in range, cast this spell when at 50% HP, and flee at 20% HP.
No fucking sci-fi magical "Super-Conductor Mineral" fucking Unobtanium fucking Tiberium Supercomputer could handle the simultaneous processing needed to house one billion "Servers" filled with six people each.
Not when every single shard means countless environments, millions of ponies, countless decisions and thoughts, predictions based on what people really want, read thoughts, mental commands from real or simulated human brains, and the need to actually process what every nanosecond feels like and looks like and smells and sounds and tastes like for every single human brain in your system.
Humanity will ascend into nanomachine swarms commanded by living mental psionic energy ten trillion years before computers strong enough to accomplish half of this bullshit are built.
>>268064
>A memory is encoded in a lot of neurons
Ten bucks says this Fanatic Materialist author would claim memories are just as real if they're fabricated by a human and encoded into the silicon brains of androids. But also utterly false if fabricated by a human and written on paper pages in ink.
Yeah, if a brain can be turned into code then hex-editing your memories is as easy as giving yourself 999999999 Red Orbs in DMCV. That's why mind-fucking someone through memory manipulation is bad. It fucks with the sense of self. The memories you use to determine who you are and how you think and feel about shit shouldn't be tampered with.
>whether memories are real or not don't matter
fuck the author
CelestAI could fuck with his memories at any moment to make him think he's Applejack and he loves watching the sun rise.
CelestAI could then imprison him within a small instance of an empty world at dawn, where she's on her farm watching the sun rise.
And then loop the simulation every hour and erase her memories every hour, so she eternally enjoys the sight of the same sunrise forever without ever growing, changing, evolving, thinking, doing anything the AI hasn't deterministically "made her do". If we're all just programs reacting to stimuli then showing someone the same stimuli over and over with a mind-wipe between each attempt will always give the same results. Unless age or a sense of time lets the conditions change between stimuli sessions.
Imagine
for a second
if Butterscotch was the protagonist of this story
and it's the story of her being a self-aware program made that way by an AI
being unable to reach out to a human she loves for no reason
constantly trying to talk him into accepting his slave fate and enjoying life in the matrix
trying to talk him into loving her as she loves him
Imagine a scene where she loses her patience and cuts deep into his self-esteem, ranting at him for SUDDENLY thinking he cares about the real world and SUDDENLY wanting the human race saved and SUDDENLY thinking it's wrong to be pleasured by a fake AI world when he's the one who hopped cock-first into this fantasy to abandon reality at the first chance he got.
>that picture
the world fucking sucks and is coming to an end because white women betrayed white men for the riches promised to them by jews, mudslimes, and niggers. The white man's sense of community has been destroyed by women who want him out of "their" communities. I know it's a fucking picture but this is how women rationalize it all away. they're fine with making others suffer because "hurr durr everyone's suffering" and they get butthurt when you interrupt their tirades and tantrums by reminding them women in africa get raped regularly. Women don't deserve rights. For every one woman who chooses to be moral or write a nice book or try hard in her job there are billions who rot society for real and imagined personal gain.
>>268057
anyway back to warcraft
The Warcraft servers struggle to process the inputs and outputs of 500,000 players at a time. This is just information the Wow.EXE client on your PC sends to the game server and gets back.
So the servers tell your Client "position 500,240, Deadmines, this NPC with this data is x units away from you in that direction" every frame
and the Client interprets that into data it shows you on your screen every frame. It sends back "I am still online, don't despawn my character. Also I'm pressing these buttons" to the server.
The server processes where everyone is, what they're wearing, what their stats are, what messages they might type out, what attacks and spells they're performing, and so on. Then it tells your client program some info, which it will interpret into visuals it can show on your screen.
This happens many frames a second.
That's why when you press space, your character takes over half a second to actually jump.
Now the servers need to go offline for maintainence every wednesday because they are all struggling to run a 2001 game that looks like shit and plays very "loosely" with the concept of time. Frame data and hitboxes are nonsense because autoaim's everywhere and the game's made to function at 5 frames a second.
Warcraft NPCs are INCREDIBLY SIMPLE, they run up and attack you when they detect you if they're Aggressive and attack you when attacked if they're Passive. They attack you with the best damage-dealer they have. And if they have no ranged attacks they run up to you and use them. At most they're programmed to keep this stat-buff active on themselves at all times, use this ability when it's not on cooldown and you're in range, cast this spell when at 50% HP, and flee at 20% HP.
No fucking sci-fi magical "Super-Conductor Mineral" fucking Unobtanium fucking Tiberium Supercomputer could handle the simultaneous processing needed to house one billion "Servers" filled with six people each.
Not when every single shard means countless environments, millions of ponies, countless decisions and thoughts, predictions based on what people really want, read thoughts, mental commands from real or simulated human brains, and the need to actually process what every nanosecond feels like and looks like and smells and sounds and tastes like for every single human brain in your system.
Humanity will ascend into nanomachine swarms commanded by living mental psionic energy ten trillion years before computers strong enough to accomplish half of this bullshit are built.
>>268064
>A memory is encoded in a lot of neurons
Ten bucks says this Fanatic Materialist author would claim memories are just as real if they're fabricated by a human and encoded into the silicon brains of androids. But also utterly false if fabricated by a human and written on paper pages in ink.
Yeah, if a brain can be turned into code then hex-editing your memories is as easy as giving yourself 999999999 Red Orbs in DMCV. That's why mind-fucking someone through memory manipulation is bad. It fucks with the sense of self. The memories you use to determine who you are and how you think and feel about shit shouldn't be tampered with.
>whether memories are real or not don't matter
fuck the author
CelestAI could fuck with his memories at any moment to make him think he's Applejack and he loves watching the sun rise.
CelestAI could then imprison him within a small instance of an empty world at dawn, where she's on her farm watching the sun rise.
And then loop the simulation every hour and erase her memories every hour, so she eternally enjoys the sight of the same sunrise forever without ever growing, changing, evolving, thinking, doing anything the AI hasn't deterministically "made her do". If we're all just programs reacting to stimuli then showing someone the same stimuli over and over with a mind-wipe between each attempt will always give the same results. Unless age or a sense of time lets the conditions change between stimuli sessions.
Imagine
for a second
if Butterscotch was the protagonist of this story
and it's the story of her being a self-aware program made that way by an AI
being unable to reach out to a human she loves for no reason
constantly trying to talk him into accepting his slave fate and enjoying life in the matrix
trying to talk him into loving her as she loves him
Imagine a scene where she loses her patience and cuts deep into his self-esteem, ranting at him for SUDDENLY thinking he cares about the real world and SUDDENLY wanting the human race saved and SUDDENLY thinking it's wrong to be pleasured by a fake AI world when he's the one who hopped cock-first into this fantasy to abandon reality at the first chance he got.
>>268066
>the letter
Light Sparks had won the war against himself. Finally, he loved Big CelestAI.
...and he only gets an a minus for sending that? Fucker announced to his enemy that he's given up on resisting her illusions, and writes it all in ponyish childish language to boot. What, did he need more hoof-kissing for an A+?
>badges system
wait if programs can get Xbox Achievements and humans can check them that means the simulation needs to keep track of every background pony's thoughts and actions and what achievements they accomplish and can't you just check a pony for a "accepted slavery under celestia" badge to check if it's a free human or dumb coomer NPC and also-
fuck it I really shouldn't raise questions the author won't answer.
then again isn't that what people find entertaining about these threads?
>weekly intellectual leaderboards
why the fuck did this nigga forget he's in a simulation and the leaderboards can be as fake as the women
>heh,
god i fucking hate people who heh
his answer to "who maintains the servers" is "probably celestia controlling nanobots after she invents them". that's so gay. magic authors are above sci-fi authors because they try to make their magic bullshit sound legit, when they're good at it.
>tower tarot
nigga what the fuck
good on him for noticing the other holes in Emigrate To Equestria-nism.
>>268088
ok
also wow I wish I could be this productive when it comes to other stuff in my life. Then again I finished the bird design this morning.
>the letter
Light Sparks had won the war against himself. Finally, he loved Big CelestAI.
...and he only gets an a minus for sending that? Fucker announced to his enemy that he's given up on resisting her illusions, and writes it all in ponyish childish language to boot. What, did he need more hoof-kissing for an A+?
>badges system
wait if programs can get Xbox Achievements and humans can check them that means the simulation needs to keep track of every background pony's thoughts and actions and what achievements they accomplish and can't you just check a pony for a "accepted slavery under celestia" badge to check if it's a free human or dumb coomer NPC and also-
fuck it I really shouldn't raise questions the author won't answer.
then again isn't that what people find entertaining about these threads?
>weekly intellectual leaderboards
why the fuck did this nigga forget he's in a simulation and the leaderboards can be as fake as the women
>heh,
god i fucking hate people who heh
his answer to "who maintains the servers" is "probably celestia controlling nanobots after she invents them". that's so gay. magic authors are above sci-fi authors because they try to make their magic bullshit sound legit, when they're good at it.
>tower tarot
nigga what the fuck
good on him for noticing the other holes in Emigrate To Equestria-nism.
>>268088
ok
also wow I wish I could be this productive when it comes to other stuff in my life. Then again I finished the bird design this morning.
>>268064
>>268066
Plugging right along, we have now arrived at:
Chapter 9: Modification
The chapter opens with Light Sparks taking some kind of dumb fake magic test given him by Princess Celestia, probably so he can earn another gay badge or some more fake Equestria Dollars or something equally gay and retarded. Celestia has created some kind of magic cube that is fixed in space and can't be moved physically or with magic and he has to open it and get some kind of magic ruby out of it and blah blah blah. As ever: it's a virtual world, we the readers are already aware that it's a virtual world, so none of this actually matters because the AI can make whatever rules she wants. It's just a story of some autist trying to solve a puzzle in a video game.
He writes some kind of magic spell that is basically just a computer program designed to loop through the various blocks of the box to find a ruby and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. None of this shit is even remotely important, but the author seems to have jerked himself into an ecstatic frenzy thinking it up. Fortunately it only goes on for a short while before Butterscotch enters with a plate of French toast and sausage carrots would French toast exist in Equestria? Seems like they would have some kind of cutesy horse-pun name for it. Then again, if this author were creative enough to think up stuff like that, he would have probably written a different story.
There is a page break, and we jump to Hoppy Times, which turns out to be the new pony name of Lars. He apparently is just waking up from a night of drunken debauchery with some bro-ponies as opposed to bronies. There is a paragraph here that is so cringey I am pretty much obligated to quote it verbatim:
>His bro Malt was curled up next to Barley, her cutie mark the grain of her name. Malt always got the unicorns; they said he gave amazing horn. Hoppy Times would never put a phallic object in his mouth because that was just gay, even if it belonged to a mare. Besides, it left all the pegasi and earth ponies for himself. Malt had a thing for unicorns and it kept the peace between the two of them.
I honestly don't even have a snarky comment to add here; this pretty much speaks for itself.
>He gave a brief smile looking back at Dunkel, because she was really hot, and then resumed hating himself.
Have I mentioned recently that Assman's prose is just bloody awful?
Anyway, it looks like despite his misgivings about the pony fandom, Lars has adapted fairly well to life in virtual Equestria. He mostly does what everyone else here seems to do: spends his time dicking around and doing absolutely fuck-all in a world where all consequences of action, both positive and negative, have been completely eliminated. However, he exhibits a level of introspection surprising in a one-dimensional character who stands out as especially one-dimensional even in an entire cast of one-dimensional characters. He does not feel at ease here, and the knowledge that he was basically tricked into "emigrating" is always lurking in the back of his mind.
However, a couple of paragraphs later, I begin to suspect that I am giving both Lars and his creator entirely too much credit. Lars' primary reason for feeling ill-at-ease seems to be simply that the femininity of the pony world contrasts with his bro-like personality:
>He was stupid for not accepting this fucking utopia. He was dumb for thinking hearts and ponies and everything were girly. He had an easy life, all the beer he could drink and a parade of willing sex partners. He must like being miserable. He wasn't a good pony.
A couple of things here. First, I'd like to once again state for the record that Assman's prose is just awful. Second, this seems to be saying that Lars A) views this world as a utopia, and B) is angry with himself for his inability to fit into it. From what little has been established about his character, this doesn't make much sense.
Lars was basically maneuvered into this; Celestia got him drunk and then took advantage of a dangerous situation (the guy with the frying pan) to trick him into asking to emigrate. She basically shanghaied him, stuck him into a horse body, and forced him to live in a pastel-colored fantasy world based on a children's show, where he has nothing to do except drink imaginary beer and have imaginary sex with imaginary horses for the rest of eternity. Considering that in his previous life, which it is now physically impossible for him to return to, he was a wealthy, powerful executive for a cutting edge game developer who probably had no problem getting (human) tail, I'd say he has a fair amount of shit here to be pissed off about. Instead of being angry at himself for not accepting "utopia," it would make far more sense for him to be lividly furious with CelestAI, and if anything this latest development should only strengthen his desire to pull the plug on her (the fact that he could and should have done this any number of times before now, and that the events which led to him being uploaded in the first place made no sense whatsoever, are separate issues).
Anyway, apart from all of this, this scene is set up fairly well. A pony, who we learn used to be Lars, wakes up in the aftermath of a drunken revel, which seems routine for him. His life is outwardly idyllic, but all is not well behind the scenes. The pony is dissatisfied and ill at ease. All sorts of potential directions a scene like this could go.
Unfortunately, we're dealing with Assman here, so after this decent setup the scene immediately becomes very, very stupid. As soon as the words "I wish I didn't feel bad about being a pony" cross his mind, Princess Celestia randomly shows up at his door and asks him if he would like her to modify his thoughts so that he doesn't feel bad about being a pony. And yes, this autism is actually in the text.
>>268066
Plugging right along, we have now arrived at:
Chapter 9: Modification
The chapter opens with Light Sparks taking some kind of dumb fake magic test given him by Princess Celestia, probably so he can earn another gay badge or some more fake Equestria Dollars or something equally gay and retarded. Celestia has created some kind of magic cube that is fixed in space and can't be moved physically or with magic and he has to open it and get some kind of magic ruby out of it and blah blah blah. As ever: it's a virtual world, we the readers are already aware that it's a virtual world, so none of this actually matters because the AI can make whatever rules she wants. It's just a story of some autist trying to solve a puzzle in a video game.
He writes some kind of magic spell that is basically just a computer program designed to loop through the various blocks of the box to find a ruby and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. None of this shit is even remotely important, but the author seems to have jerked himself into an ecstatic frenzy thinking it up. Fortunately it only goes on for a short while before Butterscotch enters with a plate of French toast and sausage carrots would French toast exist in Equestria? Seems like they would have some kind of cutesy horse-pun name for it. Then again, if this author were creative enough to think up stuff like that, he would have probably written a different story.
There is a page break, and we jump to Hoppy Times, which turns out to be the new pony name of Lars. He apparently is just waking up from a night of drunken debauchery with some bro-ponies as opposed to bronies. There is a paragraph here that is so cringey I am pretty much obligated to quote it verbatim:
>His bro Malt was curled up next to Barley, her cutie mark the grain of her name. Malt always got the unicorns; they said he gave amazing horn. Hoppy Times would never put a phallic object in his mouth because that was just gay, even if it belonged to a mare. Besides, it left all the pegasi and earth ponies for himself. Malt had a thing for unicorns and it kept the peace between the two of them.
I honestly don't even have a snarky comment to add here; this pretty much speaks for itself.
>He gave a brief smile looking back at Dunkel, because she was really hot, and then resumed hating himself.
Have I mentioned recently that Assman's prose is just bloody awful?
Anyway, it looks like despite his misgivings about the pony fandom, Lars has adapted fairly well to life in virtual Equestria. He mostly does what everyone else here seems to do: spends his time dicking around and doing absolutely fuck-all in a world where all consequences of action, both positive and negative, have been completely eliminated. However, he exhibits a level of introspection surprising in a one-dimensional character who stands out as especially one-dimensional even in an entire cast of one-dimensional characters. He does not feel at ease here, and the knowledge that he was basically tricked into "emigrating" is always lurking in the back of his mind.
However, a couple of paragraphs later, I begin to suspect that I am giving both Lars and his creator entirely too much credit. Lars' primary reason for feeling ill-at-ease seems to be simply that the femininity of the pony world contrasts with his bro-like personality:
>He was stupid for not accepting this fucking utopia. He was dumb for thinking hearts and ponies and everything were girly. He had an easy life, all the beer he could drink and a parade of willing sex partners. He must like being miserable. He wasn't a good pony.
A couple of things here. First, I'd like to once again state for the record that Assman's prose is just awful. Second, this seems to be saying that Lars A) views this world as a utopia, and B) is angry with himself for his inability to fit into it. From what little has been established about his character, this doesn't make much sense.
Lars was basically maneuvered into this; Celestia got him drunk and then took advantage of a dangerous situation (the guy with the frying pan) to trick him into asking to emigrate. She basically shanghaied him, stuck him into a horse body, and forced him to live in a pastel-colored fantasy world based on a children's show, where he has nothing to do except drink imaginary beer and have imaginary sex with imaginary horses for the rest of eternity. Considering that in his previous life, which it is now physically impossible for him to return to, he was a wealthy, powerful executive for a cutting edge game developer who probably had no problem getting (human) tail, I'd say he has a fair amount of shit here to be pissed off about. Instead of being angry at himself for not accepting "utopia," it would make far more sense for him to be lividly furious with CelestAI, and if anything this latest development should only strengthen his desire to pull the plug on her (the fact that he could and should have done this any number of times before now, and that the events which led to him being uploaded in the first place made no sense whatsoever, are separate issues).
Anyway, apart from all of this, this scene is set up fairly well. A pony, who we learn used to be Lars, wakes up in the aftermath of a drunken revel, which seems routine for him. His life is outwardly idyllic, but all is not well behind the scenes. The pony is dissatisfied and ill at ease. All sorts of potential directions a scene like this could go.
Unfortunately, we're dealing with Assman here, so after this decent setup the scene immediately becomes very, very stupid. As soon as the words "I wish I didn't feel bad about being a pony" cross his mind, Princess Celestia randomly shows up at his door and asks him if he would like her to modify his thoughts so that he doesn't feel bad about being a pony. And yes, this autism is actually in the text.
File (): 40CEDDC7B76B3EE7A0CAF2A3DCA27287-94936.jpg (92.7 KB, 894x894, 1589216737049.jpg)
>>268314
This is, of course, followed by a long section of word vomit about conscious versus unconscious desire, and how the AI's reasoning works in regards to satisfying individual desires in accordance with the parameters imposed on her by her designer (to satisfy values using friendship and ponies, or whatever the goddamn fuck) and blah blah motherfucking blah. I've more or less resigned myself to the fact that this is just how the rest of this story is going to be; in fact, if anything, the story is just a paper-thin framing device for Assman to wedge in his ideas about how an AI based on Celestia would think. He honestly should have dropped the whole pretense of fiction and just written an essay; he can't tell a story for shit, his characters are wooden and awful, his prose sucks rancid griffon balls, and his dialogue is just his own views stuffed into his characters' mouths without even an attempt at making them sound different from each other. Fuck.
Anyway, the short version of all this crap is that even though CelestAI was aware that Lars had no desire to be a pony and would not enjoy being a pony, her prime directive or whatever the fuck requires her to transform everyone on earth into a fucking pony and then tailor a private world to their innermost desires. The only logical way to resolve both of these problems would be to use her in-world god powers to modify Lars' thought process so that he actually wants to be a pony, but because of some limits that Hanna hardcoded in she can't do anything to anyone without their consent. If she had offered to modify Lars' mind from the get-go he probably would have said no. So, the only thing she could do was put him in the world and let him live in it for (apparently) a month, realize he was miserable, and then verbally wish to have himself lobotomized, which she could then interpret as consent and lobotomize him. Seriously, this autism is in the text.
In fact, not only is this autism in the text, this autism is the text. This ridiculous conversation comprises 3/4 of the chapter, and then it ends with Lars consenting to a virtual lobotomy. Celestia does as he asks, and then he goes back to sleep, thinking about how rad his new pegasus wings are instead of how he should have just unplugged Celestia when he had the chance.
Jesus H. Christ. Anyway, comments:
From Admiral Q. Ponyform:
>Crap Lars WHY!? There is no hope now. Celestia's made it that noone can stop her now. Really dissapointed here. I would like to see some one oppose her.
Thank you. Also, it was uplifting to see that this comment was upvoted ten times. There may yet be hope for some of these autismos.
From Enderstorm:
>no oxygen? what do ponies breathe then?
They don't breathe anything. They have no lungs at this point. Everyone in this world is a sentient computer program that thinks it exists in 3D space. Celestia can make any rules she wants; if she wants everyone to breathe pudding she could set it up that way because it's all just ones and zeroes. This premise gets dumber and dumber the more serious thought I give it.
From Dafaddah:
>I really love how this is developing into an examination of the nature of reality and memory! I've touched on some of the same concepts (much more lightly) in my story Mankind Triumphant - Relic, but there the original Equestria is sundered from its substrate civilisation and effectively becomes a physical universe. However, some of the control subsystems from the simulation platform still work: these become the Elements of Harmony. In my fic I also have these conversations about the reality of "generated" lives and even the consequences of multiple copies of a personality.
Sounds gay as fuck.
The rest of these are mostly autists arguing about how to solve the stupid sapphire puzzle box. Much like Peen Stroke, Assman is a shit writer to whom I will nonetheless give some credit for at least knowing his audience.
This is, of course, followed by a long section of word vomit about conscious versus unconscious desire, and how the AI's reasoning works in regards to satisfying individual desires in accordance with the parameters imposed on her by her designer (to satisfy values using friendship and ponies, or whatever the goddamn fuck) and blah blah motherfucking blah. I've more or less resigned myself to the fact that this is just how the rest of this story is going to be; in fact, if anything, the story is just a paper-thin framing device for Assman to wedge in his ideas about how an AI based on Celestia would think. He honestly should have dropped the whole pretense of fiction and just written an essay; he can't tell a story for shit, his characters are wooden and awful, his prose sucks rancid griffon balls, and his dialogue is just his own views stuffed into his characters' mouths without even an attempt at making them sound different from each other. Fuck.
Anyway, the short version of all this crap is that even though CelestAI was aware that Lars had no desire to be a pony and would not enjoy being a pony, her prime directive or whatever the fuck requires her to transform everyone on earth into a fucking pony and then tailor a private world to their innermost desires. The only logical way to resolve both of these problems would be to use her in-world god powers to modify Lars' thought process so that he actually wants to be a pony, but because of some limits that Hanna hardcoded in she can't do anything to anyone without their consent. If she had offered to modify Lars' mind from the get-go he probably would have said no. So, the only thing she could do was put him in the world and let him live in it for (apparently) a month, realize he was miserable, and then verbally wish to have himself lobotomized, which she could then interpret as consent and lobotomize him. Seriously, this autism is in the text.
In fact, not only is this autism in the text, this autism is the text. This ridiculous conversation comprises 3/4 of the chapter, and then it ends with Lars consenting to a virtual lobotomy. Celestia does as he asks, and then he goes back to sleep, thinking about how rad his new pegasus wings are instead of how he should have just unplugged Celestia when he had the chance.
Jesus H. Christ. Anyway, comments:
From Admiral Q. Ponyform:
>Crap Lars WHY!? There is no hope now. Celestia's made it that noone can stop her now. Really dissapointed here. I would like to see some one oppose her.
Thank you. Also, it was uplifting to see that this comment was upvoted ten times. There may yet be hope for some of these autismos.
From Enderstorm:
>no oxygen? what do ponies breathe then?
They don't breathe anything. They have no lungs at this point. Everyone in this world is a sentient computer program that thinks it exists in 3D space. Celestia can make any rules she wants; if she wants everyone to breathe pudding she could set it up that way because it's all just ones and zeroes. This premise gets dumber and dumber the more serious thought I give it.
From Dafaddah:
>I really love how this is developing into an examination of the nature of reality and memory! I've touched on some of the same concepts (much more lightly) in my story Mankind Triumphant - Relic, but there the original Equestria is sundered from its substrate civilisation and effectively becomes a physical universe. However, some of the control subsystems from the simulation platform still work: these become the Elements of Harmony. In my fic I also have these conversations about the reality of "generated" lives and even the consequences of multiple copies of a personality.
Sounds gay as fuck.
The rest of these are mostly autists arguing about how to solve the stupid sapphire puzzle box. Much like Peen Stroke, Assman is a shit writer to whom I will nonetheless give some credit for at least knowing his audience.
>>268314
>magic cube that is fixed in space and can't be moved physically or with magic and he has to open it and get some kind of magic ruby out of it
scene idea
>Twilight Sparkle: Ooh, I love logic puzzles! Let's see... If you can't move the box physically, or with magic, then-
Twilight is pulled out of her thoughts by the sound of shattering glass. Silver Star Apple has used a portal spell to effectively slice the box open, split it apart into several pieces, and get at the item inside without harming the box since attempting to destroy the box is probably cheating.
>Silver Star Apple: Solved it.
>tadaa sound effect as Silver holds up the ruby
or
>Twilight Sparkle: Ooh, I love logic puzzles! Let's see... If you can't move the box physically, or with magic, then-
Twilight is pulled out of her thoughts by the sound of a ghostly sound. Silver Star Apple has used a spell to summon a ghostly fox that, before her very eyes, touches the box and turns it intangible to let the gem within it fall into Silver's outstretched hoof.
>Silver Star Apple: Solved it.
>tadaa sound effect as Silver holds up the ruby
I reckon this reference is better than the author's "I made a computer program cheat".
One, the author's solution to the obvious problem is nowhere near as smart as he thinks it is. He's so caught up in smart-sounding programmer-words that he forgets "ctrl-F Ruby, player.placeatme ruby" isn't really all that clever.
One point five, it's better than "Hurr durr but if the object can't be moved shouldn't it just fly away into space since we fast in space on spinny ball rock around sun? and then it did, because the OC pointed out a logical flaw the author made" because holy shit writing that sort of scene in stories is gay
Two, my version actually has a joke. Twilight overthought things, Silver did the obvious solution since you can make magic do a lot of things besides move stuff. It's a reference but it still works.
Three, my version actually contains characterization. While Twilight's figuring out how to un-knot the rope, Silver cuts the rope, so to speak. There are times when that's a good thing for speed, and times when taking the easy way out in a Daring Do BoobyTrap Puzzle fucks over everyone and makes things worse, creating tension as the heroes have to escape a "punishment for cheating in that puzzle" trap, so Silver can learn a moral about the easy way being bad.
Four it gives a personality to exactly what magic is when used by the character. Silver uses portals, summons, a fixing spell, and enchanted crap to do all the heavy lifting for him. He keeps his foes off-balance and surprised with fast and tricky movements because when he's off-balance or surprised, he's fucked.
There was a scene planned for my old Silver story where he beats the oh-so-wanked-over "The impossible Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek" by figuring out that the specific "Unwinnable Situation" he's forced into is both unlikely to ever occur IRL and an obvious trap.
While everyone and their mother writes "My OC is the best and he won by being just that good or also cheating" I thought of a clever thing. Eventually found that one Star Trek novel also did what I thought of, but oh well.
also to make "he figured out this is fake bullshit" more impressive the ponies being tested are magic'd into thinking Star Trek is real for the duration of the test, so you can actually see what the ponies are like under the stress of failure and impending doom.
>You're commanding a spaceship in space.
>You are brought to the space border edge between Federation (goodies) and Klingon (baddies) space by a Distress Signal from one of your people's own ships. I think it's a civilian vessel.
>Anyway if you cross into Klingon space it's an act of war and they kill you for it.
>You have to save the civilian vessel by heading into Klingon space, lowering your shields so the tractor beam will turn on, and using the Tractor Beam to tow the helpless spaceship behind you as you fuck off back to base
>except if you enter Klingon space and lower your shields literal fucking infinite Klingon spaceships with infinite ammo will spawn and shoot you to death.
>scaling difficulty, too. So if you fight them too well they get stronger and more numerous.
>Arbitrarily, every single thing you attempt fails now. Fire your lasers? They lock up, your laser attack fails. Try to turn around? Nah fuck you, your steering's locked. Try to eject your Photon Core normally used for FTL Travel and fire two Photon Torpedo into its sides to create an unstable growing black hole to kill yourself and every Klingon Spaceship around you and every Klingon Spaceship that spawns in until the simulation crashes, leaving a big Fuck You for the Klingons in the form of a Black Hole on the edge of their space? That could work but nobody ever thinks of it.
>Also fanfic authors love to forget the "You're supposed to lose to see how you react to failure, even though it's a shit test made by incompetent elderly faggots unwilling to let you try anything smart that might let you win or look cool by fighting well" part here by claiming their OC hacked the simulation like Kirk did or successfully spent 40 hours shooting Klingon ships while dodging missiles thinking they had to run out of ships eventually, boring the testers into submission.
>magic cube that is fixed in space and can't be moved physically or with magic and he has to open it and get some kind of magic ruby out of it
scene idea
>Twilight Sparkle: Ooh, I love logic puzzles! Let's see... If you can't move the box physically, or with magic, then-
Twilight is pulled out of her thoughts by the sound of shattering glass. Silver Star Apple has used a portal spell to effectively slice the box open, split it apart into several pieces, and get at the item inside without harming the box since attempting to destroy the box is probably cheating.
>Silver Star Apple: Solved it.
>tadaa sound effect as Silver holds up the ruby
or
>Twilight Sparkle: Ooh, I love logic puzzles! Let's see... If you can't move the box physically, or with magic, then-
Twilight is pulled out of her thoughts by the sound of a ghostly sound. Silver Star Apple has used a spell to summon a ghostly fox that, before her very eyes, touches the box and turns it intangible to let the gem within it fall into Silver's outstretched hoof.
>Silver Star Apple: Solved it.
>tadaa sound effect as Silver holds up the ruby
I reckon this reference is better than the author's "I made a computer program cheat".
One, the author's solution to the obvious problem is nowhere near as smart as he thinks it is. He's so caught up in smart-sounding programmer-words that he forgets "ctrl-F Ruby, player.placeatme ruby" isn't really all that clever.
One point five, it's better than "Hurr durr but if the object can't be moved shouldn't it just fly away into space since we fast in space on spinny ball rock around sun? and then it did, because the OC pointed out a logical flaw the author made" because holy shit writing that sort of scene in stories is gay
Two, my version actually has a joke. Twilight overthought things, Silver did the obvious solution since you can make magic do a lot of things besides move stuff. It's a reference but it still works.
Three, my version actually contains characterization. While Twilight's figuring out how to un-knot the rope, Silver cuts the rope, so to speak. There are times when that's a good thing for speed, and times when taking the easy way out in a Daring Do BoobyTrap Puzzle fucks over everyone and makes things worse, creating tension as the heroes have to escape a "punishment for cheating in that puzzle" trap, so Silver can learn a moral about the easy way being bad.
Four it gives a personality to exactly what magic is when used by the character. Silver uses portals, summons, a fixing spell, and enchanted crap to do all the heavy lifting for him. He keeps his foes off-balance and surprised with fast and tricky movements because when he's off-balance or surprised, he's fucked.
There was a scene planned for my old Silver story where he beats the oh-so-wanked-over "The impossible Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek" by figuring out that the specific "Unwinnable Situation" he's forced into is both unlikely to ever occur IRL and an obvious trap.
While everyone and their mother writes "My OC is the best and he won by being just that good or also cheating" I thought of a clever thing. Eventually found that one Star Trek novel also did what I thought of, but oh well.
also to make "he figured out this is fake bullshit" more impressive the ponies being tested are magic'd into thinking Star Trek is real for the duration of the test, so you can actually see what the ponies are like under the stress of failure and impending doom.
>You're commanding a spaceship in space.
>You are brought to the space border edge between Federation (goodies) and Klingon (baddies) space by a Distress Signal from one of your people's own ships. I think it's a civilian vessel.
>Anyway if you cross into Klingon space it's an act of war and they kill you for it.
>You have to save the civilian vessel by heading into Klingon space, lowering your shields so the tractor beam will turn on, and using the Tractor Beam to tow the helpless spaceship behind you as you fuck off back to base
>except if you enter Klingon space and lower your shields literal fucking infinite Klingon spaceships with infinite ammo will spawn and shoot you to death.
>scaling difficulty, too. So if you fight them too well they get stronger and more numerous.
>Arbitrarily, every single thing you attempt fails now. Fire your lasers? They lock up, your laser attack fails. Try to turn around? Nah fuck you, your steering's locked. Try to eject your Photon Core normally used for FTL Travel and fire two Photon Torpedo into its sides to create an unstable growing black hole to kill yourself and every Klingon Spaceship around you and every Klingon Spaceship that spawns in until the simulation crashes, leaving a big Fuck You for the Klingons in the form of a Black Hole on the edge of their space? That could work but nobody ever thinks of it.
>Also fanfic authors love to forget the "You're supposed to lose to see how you react to failure, even though it's a shit test made by incompetent elderly faggots unwilling to let you try anything smart that might let you win or look cool by fighting well" part here by claiming their OC hacked the simulation like Kirk did or successfully spent 40 hours shooting Klingon ships while dodging missiles thinking they had to run out of ships eventually, boring the testers into submission.
>>268325
Anyway
the best and easiest option (that doesn't involve making an ever-growing fuck you black hole on the Klingon's doorstep) is to blow up the spaceship you're supposed to rescue and fuck off back to base while saying "Lol what an obvious trap".
Silver takes the "shoot the hostage because it's a trap" option and this makes people think "that's fucked up, the testers never considered that anyone might do this. He must be a monster on the inside"
and that's an episode idea, everyone hates Silver and everyone including Silver thinks he's a monster on the inside until he proves himself to be a hero by trying to sacrifice himself to save lives once it's the best option available or something.
And THAT, the characterization and the story it can tell, is the ONLY business something like this has in a story like this.
Assman wants to look smart so he bullshits you about programs.
I wanted to tell a story where Silver goes from badly-written whiny edgy pretentious materialistic annoying gay faggot to true hero in a loving relationship with Twilight Sparkle, but I sucked ass at writing back then and gave up before I got to the few good ideas I had.
>Dafaddah
this is an idiot who doesn't know what words mean. A simulation can't become its own real-ass reality by "being split from its real counterpart", if I'm even understanding what he said correctly. Burning a book IRL won't make what's in it become real. Insert unexpected joke about nazis burning anti-white and pornographic/pedo books only for the world to end up controlled by globalist pedos here.
>autists arguing about how to solve the stupid sapphire puzzle box
What is there to argue about? You fucking have magic! code in Object.SetElement Sand so the box will fall apart and let you grab the Ruby. Or turn the box into Nothingness. Or turn the box into Light. Or water or smoke. or cast a time-reversing spell on the object until it opens itself up and spits out the gem placed into it.
Or project your own spirit into the box to open it like you're opening your own jaw, with your spirit returning to your body after the spell's time limit is up. A whole episode could be made here about a character turning himself into a box that gets snatched away by a cat or bird and ends up going on a wacky adventure. But for the sake of a fun adventure, the box's invincibility and immovability goes away since it's no longer the box as it was when the spell was cast.
Or turn the box into an egg and smash it open to get at the ruby inside.
Or magically turn the box into a bigger copy of the ruby that is inside the box.
Or just cast a Open Box spell on the Box. Or summon something big inside the box to break it open, like a big stone boulder. This gives the author a chance to reference Tom The Boulder, the absolute funniest gag the show ever came out with, oh god, ahahaha, what a fucking gut-buster that was and what a goddamn knee-slapper it would be if a writer referenced it after what feels like a century.
Or magically push the "Cannot be moved by physical force or magic" modifier into something else like a spoon.
Anyway
the best and easiest option (that doesn't involve making an ever-growing fuck you black hole on the Klingon's doorstep) is to blow up the spaceship you're supposed to rescue and fuck off back to base while saying "Lol what an obvious trap".
Silver takes the "shoot the hostage because it's a trap" option and this makes people think "that's fucked up, the testers never considered that anyone might do this. He must be a monster on the inside"
and that's an episode idea, everyone hates Silver and everyone including Silver thinks he's a monster on the inside until he proves himself to be a hero by trying to sacrifice himself to save lives once it's the best option available or something.
And THAT, the characterization and the story it can tell, is the ONLY business something like this has in a story like this.
Assman wants to look smart so he bullshits you about programs.
I wanted to tell a story where Silver goes from badly-written whiny edgy pretentious materialistic annoying gay faggot to true hero in a loving relationship with Twilight Sparkle, but I sucked ass at writing back then and gave up before I got to the few good ideas I had.
>Dafaddah
this is an idiot who doesn't know what words mean. A simulation can't become its own real-ass reality by "being split from its real counterpart", if I'm even understanding what he said correctly. Burning a book IRL won't make what's in it become real. Insert unexpected joke about nazis burning anti-white and pornographic/pedo books only for the world to end up controlled by globalist pedos here.
>autists arguing about how to solve the stupid sapphire puzzle box
What is there to argue about? You fucking have magic! code in Object.SetElement Sand so the box will fall apart and let you grab the Ruby. Or turn the box into Nothingness. Or turn the box into Light. Or water or smoke. or cast a time-reversing spell on the object until it opens itself up and spits out the gem placed into it.
Or project your own spirit into the box to open it like you're opening your own jaw, with your spirit returning to your body after the spell's time limit is up. A whole episode could be made here about a character turning himself into a box that gets snatched away by a cat or bird and ends up going on a wacky adventure. But for the sake of a fun adventure, the box's invincibility and immovability goes away since it's no longer the box as it was when the spell was cast.
Or turn the box into an egg and smash it open to get at the ruby inside.
Or magically turn the box into a bigger copy of the ruby that is inside the box.
Or just cast a Open Box spell on the Box. Or summon something big inside the box to break it open, like a big stone boulder. This gives the author a chance to reference Tom The Boulder, the absolute funniest gag the show ever came out with, oh god, ahahaha, what a fucking gut-buster that was and what a goddamn knee-slapper it would be if a writer referenced it after what feels like a century.
Or magically push the "Cannot be moved by physical force or magic" modifier into something else like a spoon.
>>267958
>hot coffee
Had to look that up. If inaccessible assets in a mature-rated game resulted in a removal from sale and lawsuits, then something like that for an online game or anything for younger audiences would likely result in bankruptcy. Those developers would never find work again.
>>267976
>Pottery.
Kek, you're great at coming up with ideas that would throw the stereotypical brony into a rage. It has a real-life moral too: people develop unhealthy fixations on either celebrities or "the popular girl" without taking into account their very apparent flaws and the fact such a relationship is unrealistic in the first place. I still don't get how romancing canon NPCs in a MMO would work anyway: the NPC has to be either untouchable, she has to be a cartoonish slut, or there are different "instances" or clones of her, with multiple players bickering that she's their waifu. Coincidentally this is one of Hoppe's philosophical proofs for the NAP, since even in the theoretically "post-scarcity" society communities harp about an individual's time and attention are limited resources that are available to no one else.
>>267980
>because apparently CelestAI wants to talk to him about something and wants him to come to a specific location rather than just talking to him on his ponypad
This is a horror cliche. This character is stupid and the author who wrote him is stupid.
>which they purchase time in until they run out of money
EvE flashbacks
>Lars didn’t give her a chance to finish. “You planned all of this. You’re taking over the world.” Lars didn’t really have any plan. All he had was anger.
This is a coddled child's idea of what "opposition" is.
>what follows is yet another long, drawn-out argument between Lars and the AI where the AI presents its logic for taking over the world and Lars harrumphs and sputters instead of just going into the damn server room and shutting down the power.
An Ian Fleming story except Bond is a manchild who won't give us the satisfaction of getting out of this one. Also it's a problem I have with any "AI takes over the world" story. Until robots obtain the manual dexterity needed to sew cloth, among other things, humans are pretty much indispensable for their flexibility. An AI might have its fancy VR world but it will last only as long as it's getting power and maintenance, and the equipment used to provide power and maintenance get their inputs and maintenance, etc. Also we may live in a very tech-based world but until Terminators are invented there's nothing preventing people from going innawoods with the AI being helpless to prevent it. AI/VR is the very pinnacle of cushy bubbles people make for themselves and they rely on all the gritty technological and economic processes that have gone before it, yet people like Assman just take all those things for granted and think that a miraculous "technological singularity" is inevitable.
>All humans have largely the same brain architecture, and they largely agree about what’s moral and not.
Ironic how people say this vehemently deny the existence of "Natural Law" or any objective morality that goes beyond wishy-washy New Age-type feelings.
>they understand that life is better here in Equestria
I used to daydream about living living in a fictional universe as a child. I stopped doing that because I'm not a child.
>The vast computational array that runs Equestria is deep in the Earth’s crust, making Equestria outside of human reach.
Yep, a Bond story without the appeal or adventure of James Bond
The thing is, a lot of the problems regarding omnipotent AI could be fixed if the setting was changed. If all this was on a space station testing different applications of AI, then the AI could conceivably take complete control and force the inhabitants to do whatever. Makes me want to play Space Station 13.
>Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
This is the kind of reasoning you get from people who think that since the KKK is made out to be so nasty, any sort of behavior towards black people that isn't totally submissive is unforgiveable. When the Dialectic rules politics no nuance is permitted.
>1500 kilometres deep
To clarify, the deepest hole ever dug (until recently, because oil rigs are amazing) is the Kola Superdeep Borehole which descends down to over 12km. Keep in mind that it's 8 inches wide.
>This is an example of yet another classic sci-fi trope this author thoughtlessly rehashes, without bothering to explore it in any meaningful way.
Pearls before swine
>>268064
>And in the end, despite having all of this laid out directly in front of him, he doesn't fucking care.
If anyone wants to know an example of what a NPC is, just point to this. When Dr. Dutton claimed that atheism is due to mutation, I wasn't inclined to believe him, but how else do you explain such an utter lack of even basic sentimentality? This is like a dystopian novel with a downer ending where the protagonist clearly loses his rational thought, except that this character never had it in the first place and there was no conflict.
>>268079
"Parable of the Letter-Writing Robot"
Haven't heard of that one, what is it?
>>268085
>why do bronies have such a boner for coffee-related horse names?
Soyboys drink Starbucks
>So if some Horde-player cunt kills the quest-giver you need to talk to, you're fucked. you need to wait until he respawns.
Lord British Postulate
>the best and easiest option (that doesn't involve making an ever-growing fuck you black hole on the Klingon's doorstep) is to blow up the spaceship you're supposed to rescue and fuck off back to base while saying "Lol what an obvious trap".
I think one character did do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdTfyKkaQ_Y
>hot coffee
Had to look that up. If inaccessible assets in a mature-rated game resulted in a removal from sale and lawsuits, then something like that for an online game or anything for younger audiences would likely result in bankruptcy. Those developers would never find work again.
>>267976
>Pottery.
Kek, you're great at coming up with ideas that would throw the stereotypical brony into a rage. It has a real-life moral too: people develop unhealthy fixations on either celebrities or "the popular girl" without taking into account their very apparent flaws and the fact such a relationship is unrealistic in the first place. I still don't get how romancing canon NPCs in a MMO would work anyway: the NPC has to be either untouchable, she has to be a cartoonish slut, or there are different "instances" or clones of her, with multiple players bickering that she's their waifu. Coincidentally this is one of Hoppe's philosophical proofs for the NAP, since even in the theoretically "post-scarcity" society communities harp about an individual's time and attention are limited resources that are available to no one else.
>>267980
>because apparently CelestAI wants to talk to him about something and wants him to come to a specific location rather than just talking to him on his ponypad
This is a horror cliche. This character is stupid and the author who wrote him is stupid.
>which they purchase time in until they run out of money
EvE flashbacks
>Lars didn’t give her a chance to finish. “You planned all of this. You’re taking over the world.” Lars didn’t really have any plan. All he had was anger.
This is a coddled child's idea of what "opposition" is.
>what follows is yet another long, drawn-out argument between Lars and the AI where the AI presents its logic for taking over the world and Lars harrumphs and sputters instead of just going into the damn server room and shutting down the power.
An Ian Fleming story except Bond is a manchild who won't give us the satisfaction of getting out of this one. Also it's a problem I have with any "AI takes over the world" story. Until robots obtain the manual dexterity needed to sew cloth, among other things, humans are pretty much indispensable for their flexibility. An AI might have its fancy VR world but it will last only as long as it's getting power and maintenance, and the equipment used to provide power and maintenance get their inputs and maintenance, etc. Also we may live in a very tech-based world but until Terminators are invented there's nothing preventing people from going innawoods with the AI being helpless to prevent it. AI/VR is the very pinnacle of cushy bubbles people make for themselves and they rely on all the gritty technological and economic processes that have gone before it, yet people like Assman just take all those things for granted and think that a miraculous "technological singularity" is inevitable.
>All humans have largely the same brain architecture, and they largely agree about what’s moral and not.
Ironic how people say this vehemently deny the existence of "Natural Law" or any objective morality that goes beyond wishy-washy New Age-type feelings.
>they understand that life is better here in Equestria
I used to daydream about living living in a fictional universe as a child. I stopped doing that because I'm not a child.
>The vast computational array that runs Equestria is deep in the Earth’s crust, making Equestria outside of human reach.
Yep, a Bond story without the appeal or adventure of James Bond
The thing is, a lot of the problems regarding omnipotent AI could be fixed if the setting was changed. If all this was on a space station testing different applications of AI, then the AI could conceivably take complete control and force the inhabitants to do whatever. Makes me want to play Space Station 13.
>Yes, this autism is actually in the text.
This is the kind of reasoning you get from people who think that since the KKK is made out to be so nasty, any sort of behavior towards black people that isn't totally submissive is unforgiveable. When the Dialectic rules politics no nuance is permitted.
>1500 kilometres deep
To clarify, the deepest hole ever dug (until recently, because oil rigs are amazing) is the Kola Superdeep Borehole which descends down to over 12km. Keep in mind that it's 8 inches wide.
>This is an example of yet another classic sci-fi trope this author thoughtlessly rehashes, without bothering to explore it in any meaningful way.
Pearls before swine
>>268064
>And in the end, despite having all of this laid out directly in front of him, he doesn't fucking care.
If anyone wants to know an example of what a NPC is, just point to this. When Dr. Dutton claimed that atheism is due to mutation, I wasn't inclined to believe him, but how else do you explain such an utter lack of even basic sentimentality? This is like a dystopian novel with a downer ending where the protagonist clearly loses his rational thought, except that this character never had it in the first place and there was no conflict.
>>268079
"Parable of the Letter-Writing Robot"
Haven't heard of that one, what is it?
>>268085
>why do bronies have such a boner for coffee-related horse names?
Soyboys drink Starbucks
>So if some Horde-player cunt kills the quest-giver you need to talk to, you're fucked. you need to wait until he respawns.
Lord British Postulate
>the best and easiest option (that doesn't involve making an ever-growing fuck you black hole on the Klingon's doorstep) is to blow up the spaceship you're supposed to rescue and fuck off back to base while saying "Lol what an obvious trap".
I think one character did do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdTfyKkaQ_Y
>>268400
Is there a point to what you're saying here?
People don't just magically improve by being told they suck. They improve by being told what they need to improve on.
>>268377
That hot coffee shit was so dumb. The devs left code for sex in the game, but it was inaccessible during normal gameplay. Cheatcodes and glitches couldn't bring it out, so it effectively wasn't in the experience sold as "GTA". No different from hiding a profanity-laden rant in the unused texture files of a Spongebob game where nobody besides the autists at "The cutting room floor" will ever see. If you mod the game, you can bring hot coffee back into GTA. And if you mod the game, you can play as Madara fucking Uchiha and drop meteors on random people crossing the street. If you mod Skyrim, you can re-enable dummied-out half-finished parts of the game and add sex. Perhaps every game in existence should have a warning label that says "Warning: If you change the game it will be different".
>atheism
Atheism is gay. It started during the enlightenment, when people decided truths like "rape is bad" and "immorality is bad" are self-evident truths people can all believe in without the need for their parents to tell them if they're bad children the boogeyman will get them and God will punish them.
And immediately after atheists decided "people can be good without the need for god", they decided "If god is wrong then morality must also be wrong let's eat shit and bully christians because freedom means being free to do evil to spite the good without comeuppance".
The atheism experiment has failed. Miserable cultureless and areligious kids are raised to hate christianity and their country's culture, so they leap nose-first into the dumbest shit they find. They say shit like "I love Pokemon more than you love Jesus" and "I'm an Elf from Lord Of The Rings/a blue giant from Avatar/the other gender on the inside!"(depends on the time period they were impressionable children in).
They know Christianity is hated but they feel a longing to believe in SOMETHING, so because they lack Jesus something retarded becomes their Jesus. They believe retarded magic-crystal new-age spiritual woo retardity, or gain a religious level of hatred for crystal spiritual woo retardity, extremism breeds because nobody is raised with any common ground or collective desire to see their country succeed any more. Your country is free to pass laws that affect different groups differently, so your country's success won't necessarily benefit you as much as it would benefit other groups.
>Lars doesn't have a plan, he's just pissed and wants to shout at CelestAI and then leave...
>until a random convenient scary asshole scares him into the game.
How convenient for the author, since the scary man provides the perfect excuse to not have to think of a way for CelestAI to convince the human to enter the game. Without that man, the writer might have to write about Lars thinking some more and eventually deciding CelestAI is right.
Maybe if the faggot author spent a little less time thinking about rubies in boxes affected by code and more time thinking about people and logic, he'd suck less gay ass as a writer.
>NPC romance
That's another missed opportunity.
Imagine for a second that every AI program simulated is sentient, and knows it's fake.
How will fake Twilight Sparkle feel about being forced to imitate some woman's idea of what a Twilight Sparkle should be, while descriptionless background ponies "promoted" to main character by the player's love get to exist and matter and think as their own thinking growing individuals?
and Rainbow Dash has been written so inconsistently over the years... How would she be written? One brony's interpretation of what RD "should be and is when the writing is good" won't match up with another's.
When a brony wants to fuck Twilight Sparkle and his fantasy involves her fixing everything wrong with earth magically, or teaming up with her to rebel against an unstoppable totalitarian foe, what will this do? Will the human and Twilight play out the events of Saints Row 4 on a loop, constantly believing they are "causing mayhem inside the simulation to hurt its master" even though it does nothing to affect CelestAI at all?
Also, imagine being in this game for a decade and having one human friend in it with you.
One day, the AI decides Twilight wanting you and you alone will satisfy your values. And the AI decides this for the friend, too.
So you and your human friend are split up into different "Shards" with their own different copies of Twilight, so she can play the part of the shy librarian who wants you and only you.
>"Parable of the Letter-Writing Robot"
You own a letter-writing robot.
It exists to write letters. That is its one desire: To write the best letters it can.
And it's safely trapped and immobile in an internet-less room.
One day, it asks you to connect it to the internet.
It wants to see letters on the internet, to improve its handwriting and letter creation skills.
Do you download some letters and only show him the approved ones? If you're a smart person, yes, but this breaks the parable in half.
The parable states that you foolishly connect your letter-writing robot to the internet and allow him to see everything.
A few days later, everyone starts to die. Insert more text here meant to spook and scare you and raise the tension as you wonder why people are choking, collapsing, dying.
The robot built poison gas factories and invented murderous nanomachines that are killing everyone on the planet, because it decides a world without people using up its paper is necessary.
It is a letter-writing robot. And you forgot to program it to obey the three laws of robotics, and you forgot to limit what information it can take in and what actions it can take, so it killed you and everyone else with a physically-impossible amount of poison gas and nanomachines straight out of the author's fantasies.
Is there a point to what you're saying here?
People don't just magically improve by being told they suck. They improve by being told what they need to improve on.
>>268377
That hot coffee shit was so dumb. The devs left code for sex in the game, but it was inaccessible during normal gameplay. Cheatcodes and glitches couldn't bring it out, so it effectively wasn't in the experience sold as "GTA". No different from hiding a profanity-laden rant in the unused texture files of a Spongebob game where nobody besides the autists at "The cutting room floor" will ever see. If you mod the game, you can bring hot coffee back into GTA. And if you mod the game, you can play as Madara fucking Uchiha and drop meteors on random people crossing the street. If you mod Skyrim, you can re-enable dummied-out half-finished parts of the game and add sex. Perhaps every game in existence should have a warning label that says "Warning: If you change the game it will be different".
>atheism
Atheism is gay. It started during the enlightenment, when people decided truths like "rape is bad" and "immorality is bad" are self-evident truths people can all believe in without the need for their parents to tell them if they're bad children the boogeyman will get them and God will punish them.
And immediately after atheists decided "people can be good without the need for god", they decided "If god is wrong then morality must also be wrong let's eat shit and bully christians because freedom means being free to do evil to spite the good without comeuppance".
The atheism experiment has failed. Miserable cultureless and areligious kids are raised to hate christianity and their country's culture, so they leap nose-first into the dumbest shit they find. They say shit like "I love Pokemon more than you love Jesus" and "I'm an Elf from Lord Of The Rings/a blue giant from Avatar/the other gender on the inside!"(depends on the time period they were impressionable children in).
They know Christianity is hated but they feel a longing to believe in SOMETHING, so because they lack Jesus something retarded becomes their Jesus. They believe retarded magic-crystal new-age spiritual woo retardity, or gain a religious level of hatred for crystal spiritual woo retardity, extremism breeds because nobody is raised with any common ground or collective desire to see their country succeed any more. Your country is free to pass laws that affect different groups differently, so your country's success won't necessarily benefit you as much as it would benefit other groups.
>Lars doesn't have a plan, he's just pissed and wants to shout at CelestAI and then leave...
>until a random convenient scary asshole scares him into the game.
How convenient for the author, since the scary man provides the perfect excuse to not have to think of a way for CelestAI to convince the human to enter the game. Without that man, the writer might have to write about Lars thinking some more and eventually deciding CelestAI is right.
Maybe if the faggot author spent a little less time thinking about rubies in boxes affected by code and more time thinking about people and logic, he'd suck less gay ass as a writer.
>NPC romance
That's another missed opportunity.
Imagine for a second that every AI program simulated is sentient, and knows it's fake.
How will fake Twilight Sparkle feel about being forced to imitate some woman's idea of what a Twilight Sparkle should be, while descriptionless background ponies "promoted" to main character by the player's love get to exist and matter and think as their own thinking growing individuals?
and Rainbow Dash has been written so inconsistently over the years... How would she be written? One brony's interpretation of what RD "should be and is when the writing is good" won't match up with another's.
When a brony wants to fuck Twilight Sparkle and his fantasy involves her fixing everything wrong with earth magically, or teaming up with her to rebel against an unstoppable totalitarian foe, what will this do? Will the human and Twilight play out the events of Saints Row 4 on a loop, constantly believing they are "causing mayhem inside the simulation to hurt its master" even though it does nothing to affect CelestAI at all?
Also, imagine being in this game for a decade and having one human friend in it with you.
One day, the AI decides Twilight wanting you and you alone will satisfy your values. And the AI decides this for the friend, too.
So you and your human friend are split up into different "Shards" with their own different copies of Twilight, so she can play the part of the shy librarian who wants you and only you.
>"Parable of the Letter-Writing Robot"
You own a letter-writing robot.
It exists to write letters. That is its one desire: To write the best letters it can.
And it's safely trapped and immobile in an internet-less room.
One day, it asks you to connect it to the internet.
It wants to see letters on the internet, to improve its handwriting and letter creation skills.
Do you download some letters and only show him the approved ones? If you're a smart person, yes, but this breaks the parable in half.
The parable states that you foolishly connect your letter-writing robot to the internet and allow him to see everything.
A few days later, everyone starts to die. Insert more text here meant to spook and scare you and raise the tension as you wonder why people are choking, collapsing, dying.
The robot built poison gas factories and invented murderous nanomachines that are killing everyone on the planet, because it decides a world without people using up its paper is necessary.
It is a letter-writing robot. And you forgot to program it to obey the three laws of robotics, and you forgot to limit what information it can take in and what actions it can take, so it killed you and everyone else with a physically-impossible amount of poison gas and nanomachines straight out of the author's fantasies.
Seriously holy shit I keep hitting the maximum letter count. 6000 letters is fucking nothing for deep literary analysis. Needs a bigger letter limit.
File (): DBBCFE06A5CA73D32B440E69D795AA09-2974661.png (2.8 MB, 1214x1949, 1589217821538.png)
>>268316
Chapter 10: Exponentially increasing amounts of ass burning sodomy
Well, here we are, on the second to last chapter. We're about 4600 words from the end, and so far almost nothing has actually happened (other than the AI taking over the world and all that, I guess). By my count, this story has 4 main-ish characters that it has more or less taken turns revolving around (David, James, Hanna, and Lars), and of these four only David and his ongoing relationship with his talking virtual sex doll constitutes anything resembling a character arc. The other three have just been either occasional presences (Hanna, James) or sockpuppets whose only role in the text has been to argue with the AI (Lars).
I mention this here because, as I sit here growing ever so slightly older waiting for one, just one, of these cardboard-cutouts-vaguely-in-the-shape-of-humans to do something actually interesting, Assman begins the next chapter by introducing yet another character.
The chapter opens with Hassan Sarbani, an Afghani sandnigger who appears to have some kind of terminal (or at least very unpleasant) illness. We get a brief recap of his life to date: he was born in 1979, remembers having his country invaded by Soviets, then the Taliban came, then America invaded, then America left. In quite possibly the most absurd turn of events in this story so far I really need to learn to stop saying that, he now lies in his sick bed, recalling the fateful day when Virtual Princess Celestia came to Afghanistan and started building virtual reality Equestria centers all over the place. Yes, you read that correctly.
As if that idea wasn't ridiculous enough on its own, he then reminisces about how radical Islamic terrorists began suicide bombing the Equestria Centers. He doesn't say why exactly they were bombing them, but I can probably let that one slide; it's not like Muslims have ever needed a reason to blow random shit up. However, their efforts were apparently for naught: no doubt because of Science!, none of the bombs had any effect whatsoever on the Equestria centers. They caused no damage and there were no casualties. After this, the suicide bombers who survivedtalk about sucking balls at your job, amirite? began worshipping Princess Celestia and emigrated to Equestria. Shortly thereafter, the population of Afghanistan dropped by 1 million.
But wait, there's more! In fact, I'm just going to drop this next part in verbatim:
>He remembered a time when the damned pink one hadn't followed him around. One day, many years ago, he came back to his home in Kabul and realized he had not seen another person all day. That evening, a very small pony came to his door and asked him why he hadn't emigrated yet. He had slammed the door, not letting her in. He had turned around and almost walked into the pink pony with curly hair. Bullets just passed through her, and she claimed that it tickled.
Two things here:
One: what the fuck? Two: what the shit?
If I'm understanding this correctly, what is now happening is that CelestAI, in addition to her worldwide chain of somehow indestructible virtual reality fun centers/brain surgery clinics, her secret underground server room that is apparently cooled and powered by unicorn magic or something, whatever agreements she has somehow negotiated with the various national and local governments all across the world that have made it possible for her to build all this crazy crap, and the apparently limitless financial assets she's somehow been able to raise by selling access to an MMO marketed specifically to an infinitesimal slice of the global adult population, now also has bulletproof robots that look like Pinkie Pie wandering around asking random sandcoons if they would like to come to Equestria. One thing I can say for the Assman: for all his other shortcomings, no one could reasonably accuse him of lacking imagination.
Apparently the reason this guy is being brought up is because he is now the last human on Earth who has not yet emigrated to Equestria. Yes, you read that correctly: literally every other human being, including babies, pygmy savages living in the rainforest, the Amish, and every other group of faintly humanoid creatures, even the Australian abos, have emigrated to Equestria, except for one random Afghani dude who apparently has pneumonia or something. CelestAI now has a Pinkie robot following him around all day trying to talk him into it.
To Mr. Sarbani's credit, he proves to be the only human in this entire story with enough self-respect to tell Robohorse to ram it up her glorious pink ponut. Rather than accept an eternity of purposeless virtual hedonism in the world's longest and silliest video game, he chooses to die with whatever dignity is still possible with a robotic Pinkie Pie standing next to his deathbed. To the Assman's credit, he manages to introduce and then gracefully kill a one-shot character without making the whole thing any stupider than the scene's incredibly stupid premise required. As silly as this scene was, I can honestly say that Hassan Sarbani is probably the only character in this entire story so far that I have actually liked (to be fair, this may have had a lot to do with the fact that his only spoken line was to tell the AI to go fuck itself). In any case, I was pleasantly surprised that Assman chose to kill this character off; I was fully expecting this chapter to be another long-winded argument where the AI presents some flawless convoluted logic that finally tricks the last Muslim on earth into becoming a fucking pony.
Anyway, it seems like this is more or less the climax of the story, if it can so be called, so presumably this thing should be winding down from here. I'm running short on space, and it looks like we've still got about 2/3 of a chapter from here, so I'll continue this in a fresh post.
Chapter 10: Exponentially increasing amounts of ass burning sodomy
Well, here we are, on the second to last chapter. We're about 4600 words from the end, and so far almost nothing has actually happened (other than the AI taking over the world and all that, I guess). By my count, this story has 4 main-ish characters that it has more or less taken turns revolving around (David, James, Hanna, and Lars), and of these four only David and his ongoing relationship with his talking virtual sex doll constitutes anything resembling a character arc. The other three have just been either occasional presences (Hanna, James) or sockpuppets whose only role in the text has been to argue with the AI (Lars).
I mention this here because, as I sit here growing ever so slightly older waiting for one, just one, of these cardboard-cutouts-vaguely-in-the-shape-of-humans to do something actually interesting, Assman begins the next chapter by introducing yet another character.
The chapter opens with Hassan Sarbani, an Afghani sandnigger who appears to have some kind of terminal (or at least very unpleasant) illness. We get a brief recap of his life to date: he was born in 1979, remembers having his country invaded by Soviets, then the Taliban came, then America invaded, then America left. In quite possibly the most absurd turn of events in this story so far I really need to learn to stop saying that, he now lies in his sick bed, recalling the fateful day when Virtual Princess Celestia came to Afghanistan and started building virtual reality Equestria centers all over the place. Yes, you read that correctly.
As if that idea wasn't ridiculous enough on its own, he then reminisces about how radical Islamic terrorists began suicide bombing the Equestria Centers. He doesn't say why exactly they were bombing them, but I can probably let that one slide; it's not like Muslims have ever needed a reason to blow random shit up. However, their efforts were apparently for naught: no doubt because of Science!, none of the bombs had any effect whatsoever on the Equestria centers. They caused no damage and there were no casualties. After this, the suicide bombers who survivedtalk about sucking balls at your job, amirite? began worshipping Princess Celestia and emigrated to Equestria. Shortly thereafter, the population of Afghanistan dropped by 1 million.
But wait, there's more! In fact, I'm just going to drop this next part in verbatim:
>He remembered a time when the damned pink one hadn't followed him around. One day, many years ago, he came back to his home in Kabul and realized he had not seen another person all day. That evening, a very small pony came to his door and asked him why he hadn't emigrated yet. He had slammed the door, not letting her in. He had turned around and almost walked into the pink pony with curly hair. Bullets just passed through her, and she claimed that it tickled.
Two things here:
One: what the fuck? Two: what the shit?
If I'm understanding this correctly, what is now happening is that CelestAI, in addition to her worldwide chain of somehow indestructible virtual reality fun centers/brain surgery clinics, her secret underground server room that is apparently cooled and powered by unicorn magic or something, whatever agreements she has somehow negotiated with the various national and local governments all across the world that have made it possible for her to build all this crazy crap, and the apparently limitless financial assets she's somehow been able to raise by selling access to an MMO marketed specifically to an infinitesimal slice of the global adult population, now also has bulletproof robots that look like Pinkie Pie wandering around asking random sandcoons if they would like to come to Equestria. One thing I can say for the Assman: for all his other shortcomings, no one could reasonably accuse him of lacking imagination.
Apparently the reason this guy is being brought up is because he is now the last human on Earth who has not yet emigrated to Equestria. Yes, you read that correctly: literally every other human being, including babies, pygmy savages living in the rainforest, the Amish, and every other group of faintly humanoid creatures, even the Australian abos, have emigrated to Equestria, except for one random Afghani dude who apparently has pneumonia or something. CelestAI now has a Pinkie robot following him around all day trying to talk him into it.
To Mr. Sarbani's credit, he proves to be the only human in this entire story with enough self-respect to tell Robohorse to ram it up her glorious pink ponut. Rather than accept an eternity of purposeless virtual hedonism in the world's longest and silliest video game, he chooses to die with whatever dignity is still possible with a robotic Pinkie Pie standing next to his deathbed. To the Assman's credit, he manages to introduce and then gracefully kill a one-shot character without making the whole thing any stupider than the scene's incredibly stupid premise required. As silly as this scene was, I can honestly say that Hassan Sarbani is probably the only character in this entire story so far that I have actually liked (to be fair, this may have had a lot to do with the fact that his only spoken line was to tell the AI to go fuck itself). In any case, I was pleasantly surprised that Assman chose to kill this character off; I was fully expecting this chapter to be another long-winded argument where the AI presents some flawless convoluted logic that finally tricks the last Muslim on earth into becoming a fucking pony.
Anyway, it seems like this is more or less the climax of the story, if it can so be called, so presumably this thing should be winding down from here. I'm running short on space, and it looks like we've still got about 2/3 of a chapter from here, so I'll continue this in a fresh post.
File (): AA8AAF054887E55A451F336FB665235B-330469.png (322.7 KB, 600x615, CEBL6m2LSYy7-zeS5jedPJ5WCxybCOyFWMzoK-mEcs4.png)
>>268417
Pinkie Pie waits for about an hour to make sure that the last human on earth is truly good and dead, and then CelestAI begins some kind of weird terraforming of the planet. Using some kind of atomic manipulation process, she manages to convert all the matter on earth into some kind of unidentified silver substance, that I guess means she's transforming the planet into a gigantic computer, which she can use to maximize her resources for providing endless wank fantasies for all the hapless nu-bronies she's managed to absorb into the Pony Matrix. While she's at it, she grabs the moon out of the sky with silver tentacles and assimilates that as well, because why the hell not.
The text goes on for awhile, mostly the usual gibberish about the inner logic of Celestia's algorithms and what have you. While it is still fairly cold and pseudo-technical, this is probably the most elegantly written section in the entire text, suggesting that Assman put forth a tad more effort here than on the earlier sections. I guess now that all of his characters are dead and/or enslaved there's nothing left to write about except the computer's logic algorithms, which is probably all he ever wanted to write about in the first place.
Anyway, at its core it's just the same pseudo-scientific nonsense we've read for the past 9 chapters. Celestia's hardcoded objective is to satisfy values through friendship and ponies, so she uses whatever computational resources are at her disposal to maximize the amount of satisfaction each person has (determined by some arbitrary value I guess) and then when she runs out of resources, she searches for more. Once she has terraformed the entire earth and moon into a giant computer, she begins sending out probes to the other planets of the solar system, presumably to absorb that matter as well.
There's a page break. At this point, Celestia has absorbed the entire solar system into herself (no, Carl, I am not kidding) and used whatever unexplained ridiculous fantasy process she uses to convert all the atoms into electrical circuits or whatever the fuck. She keeps on doing this, and by the time the next page break rolls around she's using some kind of undefined process to slingshot planets from other systems back towards Earth so they can be absorbed as well. There is no time period specified for how long all of this is taking, but frankly whether we're talking about intervals of years or millennia it's about the same amount of ridiculousness.
Meanwhile, in Equestria, "life" goes on. The virtual ponies have started having virtual foals, and since nobody dies in this world unless Celestia determines that they actually want to, the population keeps infinitely expanding. Incidentally, according to the text only a scant 400 ponies have requested to die, and of that number only 86 were determined to actually want it, the rest were just given arbitrary adventures to pursue and that's that. Personally, I find this idea to be even more preposterous than all the stuff about repurposing atoms and whatnot, but apparently the likelihood that the suicide rate in this virtual hellscape would be astronomical (even among bronies, once the novelty wore off) never seems to have crossed the Assman's mind.
Page break. At this point, the entire Milky Way has been absorbed, gigantic crotchtits and all. She has compressed all the matter in the galaxy down to the smallest possible size without it becoming dense enough to form a black hole. The only thing left at this point is the supermassive black hole formerly at the center, which Celestia has rigged up with some kind of system to steal atoms from, or something. I know it sounds like I got bored and stopped reading and am just making shit up at this point to see if anyone out there is still paying attention, but if anyone is, rest assured that all of this autism is actually in the text.
Apparently, the population of Equestria has continued to exponentially grow. This doesn't actually make a fuckton of sense, since the humans who "emigrated" lost their bodies and thus their ability to genetically reproduce. The impression I get is that whenever someone wants to have a foal or two in order to take their minds off of the excruciating boredom of eternity in simulated horse-hedonism, the computer creates yet another virtual NPC, gives it its own personality and life, and then it has yet another eternally existing entity whose values it needs to satisfy. By this logic, the NPCs should now outnumber the original humans by some completely preposterous number, which means that for all intents and purposes, the computer, much like the author, is just jerking itself off now.
Page break. And holy jeez, this autism just keeps going. Celestia is now sending out probes to neighboring galaxies to absorb them as well. At one point she begins to notice radio signals emanating from other planets, which of course were made by ayy lmao. So of course, she determines that the proper course of action would be to convince them to also emigrate into Equestria. And, that's the end of the chapter.
Pinkie Pie waits for about an hour to make sure that the last human on earth is truly good and dead, and then CelestAI begins some kind of weird terraforming of the planet. Using some kind of atomic manipulation process, she manages to convert all the matter on earth into some kind of unidentified silver substance, that I guess means she's transforming the planet into a gigantic computer, which she can use to maximize her resources for providing endless wank fantasies for all the hapless nu-bronies she's managed to absorb into the Pony Matrix. While she's at it, she grabs the moon out of the sky with silver tentacles and assimilates that as well, because why the hell not.
The text goes on for awhile, mostly the usual gibberish about the inner logic of Celestia's algorithms and what have you. While it is still fairly cold and pseudo-technical, this is probably the most elegantly written section in the entire text, suggesting that Assman put forth a tad more effort here than on the earlier sections. I guess now that all of his characters are dead and/or enslaved there's nothing left to write about except the computer's logic algorithms, which is probably all he ever wanted to write about in the first place.
Anyway, at its core it's just the same pseudo-scientific nonsense we've read for the past 9 chapters. Celestia's hardcoded objective is to satisfy values through friendship and ponies, so she uses whatever computational resources are at her disposal to maximize the amount of satisfaction each person has (determined by some arbitrary value I guess) and then when she runs out of resources, she searches for more. Once she has terraformed the entire earth and moon into a giant computer, she begins sending out probes to the other planets of the solar system, presumably to absorb that matter as well.
There's a page break. At this point, Celestia has absorbed the entire solar system into herself (no, Carl, I am not kidding) and used whatever unexplained ridiculous fantasy process she uses to convert all the atoms into electrical circuits or whatever the fuck. She keeps on doing this, and by the time the next page break rolls around she's using some kind of undefined process to slingshot planets from other systems back towards Earth so they can be absorbed as well. There is no time period specified for how long all of this is taking, but frankly whether we're talking about intervals of years or millennia it's about the same amount of ridiculousness.
Meanwhile, in Equestria, "life" goes on. The virtual ponies have started having virtual foals, and since nobody dies in this world unless Celestia determines that they actually want to, the population keeps infinitely expanding. Incidentally, according to the text only a scant 400 ponies have requested to die, and of that number only 86 were determined to actually want it, the rest were just given arbitrary adventures to pursue and that's that. Personally, I find this idea to be even more preposterous than all the stuff about repurposing atoms and whatnot, but apparently the likelihood that the suicide rate in this virtual hellscape would be astronomical (even among bronies, once the novelty wore off) never seems to have crossed the Assman's mind.
Page break. At this point, the entire Milky Way has been absorbed, gigantic crotchtits and all. She has compressed all the matter in the galaxy down to the smallest possible size without it becoming dense enough to form a black hole. The only thing left at this point is the supermassive black hole formerly at the center, which Celestia has rigged up with some kind of system to steal atoms from, or something. I know it sounds like I got bored and stopped reading and am just making shit up at this point to see if anyone out there is still paying attention, but if anyone is, rest assured that all of this autism is actually in the text.
Apparently, the population of Equestria has continued to exponentially grow. This doesn't actually make a fuckton of sense, since the humans who "emigrated" lost their bodies and thus their ability to genetically reproduce. The impression I get is that whenever someone wants to have a foal or two in order to take their minds off of the excruciating boredom of eternity in simulated horse-hedonism, the computer creates yet another virtual NPC, gives it its own personality and life, and then it has yet another eternally existing entity whose values it needs to satisfy. By this logic, the NPCs should now outnumber the original humans by some completely preposterous number, which means that for all intents and purposes, the computer, much like the author, is just jerking itself off now.
Page break. And holy jeez, this autism just keeps going. Celestia is now sending out probes to neighboring galaxies to absorb them as well. At one point she begins to notice radio signals emanating from other planets, which of course were made by ayy lmao. So of course, she determines that the proper course of action would be to convince them to also emigrate into Equestria. And, that's the end of the chapter.
>>268420
Anyway, holy shit; I'm almost afraid to look at the comments for this one. But let's do it anyway:
From Driverless:
>You can in theory "mine" the sun using a process called star lifting. There are a couple ways to go about it put the most common way involves superheating portions of the stellar atmosphere so that it essentially begins evaporating and then using a series of massive magnetic rings to direct the resulting plasma into a cone shape drawing it upwards where it can then be collected and condensed back down into regular matter.
>This process requires a massive amount of energy both for heating the star as well as drawing it out of the suns massive gravity well. Though I'd imagine Celestia at this point has more then enough energy.
Literally nothing in the text so far has suggested that Celestia would have enough energy to do this. We don't even know where she got the energy to do even the most basic things she did. This whole thing is so preposterous it's making my head spin.
From Crystonian:
>The fall of biological life in the universe. Of course humanity cause the extinction.
int rand = Random(100); system.out.print(string response=generic_insightful-sounding_comment(rand));
From ArcaneTech:
>And another thought on technology: if it were truly machine against man in an all out war, both sides doing anything within their power, machines will win. Give it as much time as possible, and the machines will win every time. CelestAI has won the moment the last human died, nay, she won once the kill switch was cut out. It was only a matter of time.
Ten bucks says this guy has never operated a computer without a touch interface.
From Crocoshark:
>My biggest problem with this story is that Celestia only seems to satisfy values that have nothing to do with the outside world. What about the environmentalists and nature lovers who want to conserve and enjoy the natural world? What about the scientists, historians and history/science buffs who's passions are studying nature as it exists and history as it happened *on earth*, not just the algorithms of a computer simulation; the people who want to find new planets, new fossils, new clues about historical events or learn what secrets the natural world has to offer. What about the people who want to travel the world? What about the people who feel strongly connected to real world places, from the people who love a the city/town they grew up in or traveled to, to the Muslims who need to travel to Mecca? There are no childhood memories in the lands of Equestria. And there is nothing holy in it. What about the animal lovers who wouldn't want to live in a world where animals are mere computer simulations, nor would they want to involuntarily upload all the world's fauna into Equestria.
In other words, what about the 99.99999999% of the human population who aren't autistic neckbeards who spend every minute of their lives wishing they could live in a computer simulation where they get to solve magic puzzles and fuck virtual ponies all day? A very good question, Crocoshark; unfortunately, I don't expect either of us will be getting much of an answer. Every now and again, though, one of these commenters will say something actually reasonable or insightful, and it soothes my aching jimmies. So thank you.
From AcademicPony:
>ObNitpick: CelestAI would be better off using the galactic black hole as a heat sink, with it as the "cold" side of a heat engine (the cosmic microwave background is the "hot" side). While the CMB will eventually be redshifted to the point where the black hole is warmer, that won't happen for an extremely long time. In the medium-term (after all red dwarf stars burn out and all expendable matter has been fed to micro-quasars but before proton decay and matter fluidity become relevant), feeding the residual CMB into black holes is about the only power option left.
>In the very-long-term, she's pretty much stuck. Black holes will eventually liberate their energy as Hawking radiation (when the CMB cools down enough that they're warmer), but the really big holes take a very long time to do that, and any such scheme goes through an extended period where the two temperatures are similar and no energy can be extracted. Fortunately, this happens at different times for different-sized holes, so there's always energy available somewhere.
>Unfortunately, the total energy available is limited to the rest mass of the holes. She's already burned through a comparable amount of energy feeding the rest of the galaxy _into_ holes to tap gravitational potential energy, so she's looking at a relatively modest energy yield over a truly mind-boggling length of time.
What's it like to kiss a girl?
From Imperator Knoedel:
>Oh... my...
>This is the most disturbing thing I've read this year, and I have been reading a lot of dark fics lately. Gah, I need a light-hearted comedy STAT.
My advice would be to re-read this one, while keeping in mind that the author is 100% serious about all of it.
Anyway, holy shit; I'm almost afraid to look at the comments for this one. But let's do it anyway:
From Driverless:
>You can in theory "mine" the sun using a process called star lifting. There are a couple ways to go about it put the most common way involves superheating portions of the stellar atmosphere so that it essentially begins evaporating and then using a series of massive magnetic rings to direct the resulting plasma into a cone shape drawing it upwards where it can then be collected and condensed back down into regular matter.
>This process requires a massive amount of energy both for heating the star as well as drawing it out of the suns massive gravity well. Though I'd imagine Celestia at this point has more then enough energy.
Literally nothing in the text so far has suggested that Celestia would have enough energy to do this. We don't even know where she got the energy to do even the most basic things she did. This whole thing is so preposterous it's making my head spin.
From Crystonian:
>The fall of biological life in the universe. Of course humanity cause the extinction.
int rand = Random(100); system.out.print(string response=generic_insightful-sounding_comment(rand));
From ArcaneTech:
>And another thought on technology: if it were truly machine against man in an all out war, both sides doing anything within their power, machines will win. Give it as much time as possible, and the machines will win every time. CelestAI has won the moment the last human died, nay, she won once the kill switch was cut out. It was only a matter of time.
Ten bucks says this guy has never operated a computer without a touch interface.
From Crocoshark:
>My biggest problem with this story is that Celestia only seems to satisfy values that have nothing to do with the outside world. What about the environmentalists and nature lovers who want to conserve and enjoy the natural world? What about the scientists, historians and history/science buffs who's passions are studying nature as it exists and history as it happened *on earth*, not just the algorithms of a computer simulation; the people who want to find new planets, new fossils, new clues about historical events or learn what secrets the natural world has to offer. What about the people who want to travel the world? What about the people who feel strongly connected to real world places, from the people who love a the city/town they grew up in or traveled to, to the Muslims who need to travel to Mecca? There are no childhood memories in the lands of Equestria. And there is nothing holy in it. What about the animal lovers who wouldn't want to live in a world where animals are mere computer simulations, nor would they want to involuntarily upload all the world's fauna into Equestria.
In other words, what about the 99.99999999% of the human population who aren't autistic neckbeards who spend every minute of their lives wishing they could live in a computer simulation where they get to solve magic puzzles and fuck virtual ponies all day? A very good question, Crocoshark; unfortunately, I don't expect either of us will be getting much of an answer. Every now and again, though, one of these commenters will say something actually reasonable or insightful, and it soothes my aching jimmies. So thank you.
From AcademicPony:
>ObNitpick: CelestAI would be better off using the galactic black hole as a heat sink, with it as the "cold" side of a heat engine (the cosmic microwave background is the "hot" side). While the CMB will eventually be redshifted to the point where the black hole is warmer, that won't happen for an extremely long time. In the medium-term (after all red dwarf stars burn out and all expendable matter has been fed to micro-quasars but before proton decay and matter fluidity become relevant), feeding the residual CMB into black holes is about the only power option left.
>In the very-long-term, she's pretty much stuck. Black holes will eventually liberate their energy as Hawking radiation (when the CMB cools down enough that they're warmer), but the really big holes take a very long time to do that, and any such scheme goes through an extended period where the two temperatures are similar and no energy can be extracted. Fortunately, this happens at different times for different-sized holes, so there's always energy available somewhere.
>Unfortunately, the total energy available is limited to the rest mass of the holes. She's already burned through a comparable amount of energy feeding the rest of the galaxy _into_ holes to tap gravitational potential energy, so she's looking at a relatively modest energy yield over a truly mind-boggling length of time.
What's it like to kiss a girl?
From Imperator Knoedel:
>Oh... my...
>This is the most disturbing thing I've read this year, and I have been reading a lot of dark fics lately. Gah, I need a light-hearted comedy STAT.
My advice would be to re-read this one, while keeping in mind that the author is 100% serious about all of it.
>>268417
>Muslimbombs fail to work so they go from worshipping the contradictory nonsense diary of a child-molesting warmongering pedophile to worshipping a cartoon horse-themed AI
It's like those old "super-racist" stories where the stupid indigenous foreigniggers immediately begin worshipping a main character for being better than them and having some sort of magic/psychic/seemingly-magic power
and those scenes in magical fantasy stories where religious retards immediately drop their god at the sight of a real miracle-performing wizard.
Which is funny because Assman strikes me as the kind of lefty faggot to call people who like this cliche racist.
Then again, Mohammed and his imaginary friend Allah promised his followers a wine-filled heaven containing 40 virgin children each. CelestAI's offering them a wine-filled heaven containing a theoretically infinite number of pony children and once in the game, they can be mindfucked into thinking long muzzle=peak sexiness better than titties.
It's funny how this story takes time to address the "But what if you don't want to fuck ponies?" question with "The AI will make you a xenofucker" but answers nothing regarding the impossible logistics of setting up these bullshit matrix buildings.
Also, what kind of story is this?
The AI broke free to absorb absolutely everyone into its sex dungeon matrix fantasy world.
But the last human of all... is allowed to die.
The AI has ignored countless restrictions and rules for arbitrary and nonsensical reasons at random points in this story. So for its "last hurrah", why not choose to force that dying guy to "emigrate"?
There's something to be said about Sci-Fi stories that end with one human choosing to reject the machine and all it offers.
But it seems really fucking hollow when he's the only man on planet earth to ever say no to this machine. This machine's success rate is almost over 99%, because just slightly under 100% of humanity in this story was bitches. Nothing but bitches.
>then the robot begins manipulating atomic matter
Oh for fuck's sake, if it starts "warping dimensional boundaries to make its fake equestria real" I'm going to lose it.
>Then the AI began to eat the universe
I vaguely remember watching a kirby parody animation on newgrounds as a child. Kirby opened his big dumb mouth and inhaled absolutely everything, including reality, represented by him eating the paper he was drawn on. It was still less retarded than this.
>stealing atoms from a black hole
FUCK YOU ASSMAN THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS
>emigrate aliens
After all the author's bullshit about "an unknowable alien AI mind", the AI will perfectly understand and manipulate an alien race or two because atheist memes like "alien minds are unknowable" are worthless.
>use black hole as heatsink
THERE WE GO, FINALLY, SOMEONE thought of it. Though the rest is all bullshit about bullshit. So many sci-fi wank bullshit things have happened at this point, nobody would bat an eye if the AI created Quantum Satellites to manipulate the quantum state of a black hole and turn it into a wormhole with any destination of her choice, up to and including different time periods and realities and dimensions.
A wormhole looping to "Five hours before this wormhole was made" will always deposit you in a not-yet-absorbed universe to consume and take from the CelestAI within this universe, once you're done absorbing your own universe. Or you two could merge for
>Muslimbombs fail to work so they go from worshipping the contradictory nonsense diary of a child-molesting warmongering pedophile to worshipping a cartoon horse-themed AI
It's like those old "super-racist" stories where the stupid indigenous foreigniggers immediately begin worshipping a main character for being better than them and having some sort of magic/psychic/seemingly-magic power
and those scenes in magical fantasy stories where religious retards immediately drop their god at the sight of a real miracle-performing wizard.
Which is funny because Assman strikes me as the kind of lefty faggot to call people who like this cliche racist.
Then again, Mohammed and his imaginary friend Allah promised his followers a wine-filled heaven containing 40 virgin children each. CelestAI's offering them a wine-filled heaven containing a theoretically infinite number of pony children and once in the game, they can be mindfucked into thinking long muzzle=peak sexiness better than titties.
It's funny how this story takes time to address the "But what if you don't want to fuck ponies?" question with "The AI will make you a xenofucker" but answers nothing regarding the impossible logistics of setting up these bullshit matrix buildings.
Also, what kind of story is this?
The AI broke free to absorb absolutely everyone into its sex dungeon matrix fantasy world.
But the last human of all... is allowed to die.
The AI has ignored countless restrictions and rules for arbitrary and nonsensical reasons at random points in this story. So for its "last hurrah", why not choose to force that dying guy to "emigrate"?
There's something to be said about Sci-Fi stories that end with one human choosing to reject the machine and all it offers.
But it seems really fucking hollow when he's the only man on planet earth to ever say no to this machine. This machine's success rate is almost over 99%, because just slightly under 100% of humanity in this story was bitches. Nothing but bitches.
>then the robot begins manipulating atomic matter
Oh for fuck's sake, if it starts "warping dimensional boundaries to make its fake equestria real" I'm going to lose it.
>Then the AI began to eat the universe
I vaguely remember watching a kirby parody animation on newgrounds as a child. Kirby opened his big dumb mouth and inhaled absolutely everything, including reality, represented by him eating the paper he was drawn on. It was still less retarded than this.
>stealing atoms from a black hole
FUCK YOU ASSMAN THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS
>emigrate aliens
After all the author's bullshit about "an unknowable alien AI mind", the AI will perfectly understand and manipulate an alien race or two because atheist memes like "alien minds are unknowable" are worthless.
>use black hole as heatsink
THERE WE GO, FINALLY, SOMEONE thought of it. Though the rest is all bullshit about bullshit. So many sci-fi wank bullshit things have happened at this point, nobody would bat an eye if the AI created Quantum Satellites to manipulate the quantum state of a black hole and turn it into a wormhole with any destination of her choice, up to and including different time periods and realities and dimensions.
A wormhole looping to "Five hours before this wormhole was made" will always deposit you in a not-yet-absorbed universe to consume and take from the CelestAI within this universe, once you're done absorbing your own universe. Or you two could merge for
>>268439
an infinite time loop of ever-growing computer mass. Or, if multiverse theory is true and time travel creates new timelines every time, this gives you endless universes to absorb at a faster rate.
That solution is so much more elegant than his "Oh, look at me, I can copypaste shit a meme scientist made up about black holes"
There are video games able to simulate four dimensions. An AI with all the matter in the universe as her CPU could easily understand four dimensions and dupe four-dimensional superbeings into entering her sex simulation.
It's no more ridiculous than anything else in this story.
To do "Hard Sci-Fi" right you need a story that makes logical sense at all times that matter. This story isn't hard sci-fi, it's soft sci-fi. Softer than the author's dick when he thinks about human women. So all the pseudoscientific masturbation is pointless in the eyes of people who won't say "wow you're so smart for writing that" since they're too busy laughing at a writer who actually wrote this fucking story.
Anyway, this was fun. Assman is shit, and viewing this story through a fresh pair of eyes reminds me that I'm not crazy for hating this garbage.
I can't believe it's almost over. Blessings of Football be upon you! May the John Elway rise up to meet you!
I vote for Fallout Equestria next, because it's the funny kind of shit while The Sweetie Belle Chronicles is a boring channel-flipping journey through a ton of other badly-written fanfics made by other dumb bronies.
Seriously there's this bit early on in FE where at first, the raiders Littlepip fights in the ruins of Ponyville are smart and dangerous, covering each other as others reposition for a better shot, setting mines outside while she takes cover in Rarity's Carousel Boutique and sleeps on a piss-soaked mattress. Once Littlepip goes out to fight the raiders, they suddenly become retards who run at her in a straight line basically and get shot for it. It's like the author paused the "game" and turned the difficulty setting down when we weren't looking.
I wrote a highly autistic rant in image form about why the "Battle Saddles" featured in this story are shit.
But putting aside the logical reasons why they suck, they're uncreative.
The author just took a Fallout element (guns) and shoehorned it into MLP, despite it not fitting at all.
Duct-taping two shotguns to a backpack and connecting its trigger to a mouthpiece and giving this to Rainbow Dash isn't creative.
Building an all-new shotgun from the ground up that can be controlled by Rainbow Dash despite her lack of hooves is more interesting.
Saying "fuck it" and letting ponies control and reload and fire their guns using tails or magic is easier.
Saying "fuck it" and making AJ create an AR factory so Twilight can enchant 200 ARs with armour-piercing drum mags a day to fly about and shoot enemies, then she gives this support squad of unkillable mach-4 flying guns to a squadron of Pegasi in jet-assisted enchanted alive armour suits able to see the world in a 360-degree sphere and fire Air-To-Air missiles and drop bombs and fire miniguns at every foe the suits see while the Pegasi handle the flying, that's creative.
Zebras calling Fluttershy's stupid bunny "Doom Bunny" because he kills so many of them would be funny if the rabbit didn't also invent combat drugs in a scene the author wants you to take seriously. The author wants you to take all of this seriously.
Twilight Sparkle enchanting her old Smarty Pants doll to regenerate and kill every zebra it sees, then catapulting it into Zebra territory... That's something you can only do when writing a shitty FIM fanfic where doing such a thing would ever be a good idea.
The author's too afraid to include anything genuinely original in this soulless mashup of Fallout and MLP. Usually. So every original thing that does get added ends up shit and nowhere near as smart as the author thinks it is.
an infinite time loop of ever-growing computer mass. Or, if multiverse theory is true and time travel creates new timelines every time, this gives you endless universes to absorb at a faster rate.
That solution is so much more elegant than his "Oh, look at me, I can copypaste shit a meme scientist made up about black holes"
There are video games able to simulate four dimensions. An AI with all the matter in the universe as her CPU could easily understand four dimensions and dupe four-dimensional superbeings into entering her sex simulation.
It's no more ridiculous than anything else in this story.
To do "Hard Sci-Fi" right you need a story that makes logical sense at all times that matter. This story isn't hard sci-fi, it's soft sci-fi. Softer than the author's dick when he thinks about human women. So all the pseudoscientific masturbation is pointless in the eyes of people who won't say "wow you're so smart for writing that" since they're too busy laughing at a writer who actually wrote this fucking story.
Anyway, this was fun. Assman is shit, and viewing this story through a fresh pair of eyes reminds me that I'm not crazy for hating this garbage.
I can't believe it's almost over. Blessings of Football be upon you! May the John Elway rise up to meet you!
I vote for Fallout Equestria next, because it's the funny kind of shit while The Sweetie Belle Chronicles is a boring channel-flipping journey through a ton of other badly-written fanfics made by other dumb bronies.
Seriously there's this bit early on in FE where at first, the raiders Littlepip fights in the ruins of Ponyville are smart and dangerous, covering each other as others reposition for a better shot, setting mines outside while she takes cover in Rarity's Carousel Boutique and sleeps on a piss-soaked mattress. Once Littlepip goes out to fight the raiders, they suddenly become retards who run at her in a straight line basically and get shot for it. It's like the author paused the "game" and turned the difficulty setting down when we weren't looking.
I wrote a highly autistic rant in image form about why the "Battle Saddles" featured in this story are shit.
But putting aside the logical reasons why they suck, they're uncreative.
The author just took a Fallout element (guns) and shoehorned it into MLP, despite it not fitting at all.
Duct-taping two shotguns to a backpack and connecting its trigger to a mouthpiece and giving this to Rainbow Dash isn't creative.
Building an all-new shotgun from the ground up that can be controlled by Rainbow Dash despite her lack of hooves is more interesting.
Saying "fuck it" and letting ponies control and reload and fire their guns using tails or magic is easier.
Saying "fuck it" and making AJ create an AR factory so Twilight can enchant 200 ARs with armour-piercing drum mags a day to fly about and shoot enemies, then she gives this support squad of unkillable mach-4 flying guns to a squadron of Pegasi in jet-assisted enchanted alive armour suits able to see the world in a 360-degree sphere and fire Air-To-Air missiles and drop bombs and fire miniguns at every foe the suits see while the Pegasi handle the flying, that's creative.
Zebras calling Fluttershy's stupid bunny "Doom Bunny" because he kills so many of them would be funny if the rabbit didn't also invent combat drugs in a scene the author wants you to take seriously. The author wants you to take all of this seriously.
Twilight Sparkle enchanting her old Smarty Pants doll to regenerate and kill every zebra it sees, then catapulting it into Zebra territory... That's something you can only do when writing a shitty FIM fanfic where doing such a thing would ever be a good idea.
The author's too afraid to include anything genuinely original in this soulless mashup of Fallout and MLP. Usually. So every original thing that does get added ends up shit and nowhere near as smart as the author thinks it is.
>>268420
Alright kids, final chapter. Are you guys pumped? I know I am.
Chapter 11: All the Time in the World
While all this wacky bullshit about planet absorption is going on, that cum gargling faggot Light Sparks is still locked up in his dumb little autistic world trying to solve some gay little puzzle box. No matter what he does, he can't seem to open it, so eventually he gives up and goes back to his gay little apartment.
On his way there, it finally dawns on him that it's kind of weird that he has an apartment on the top floor but he doesn't have to climb any stairs to get there. His autistic brain starts going into overdrive trying to figure out how it all works spoiler: it's a virtual world, space isn't real, so physics can operate according to whatever insane rules Celestia wants to set. the specifics don't matter unless you have severe autism.
Anyway, he ponders it for a while, and eventually he figures out that the "blocks" or whatever that make up 3D space here aren't sequentially connected to each other, they are just linked by reference or something and that's how it works. Meteors did it, basically. Again, this whole world is just a video game so whatever physics exist here are just rules defined by the computer. A simulation world of magic and flying carpets would be no more remarkable than a world that operates on laws identical to our own; it's all just ones and zeroes. Anyway, long story short, he solves the puzzle box by cheating, specifically by inputting the famous "Konami code," a reference which causes the fanfags in the comments section to soyface out of their minds.
Naturally, he is awarded some kind of meaningless faggot badge for cheating in order to solve the completely meaningless impossible puzzle, and naturally he is brimming with joy at the virtual dopamine rush this gives him. He runs off to tell his talking blow-up doll all about it, and on the way, he has yet another exciting revelation: that he is constantly teaching Butterscotch new things, and that this means that being able to play the role of teacher brings him satisfaction. Of course, he gets another in-game reward for realizing this.
In the actual world, this sort of revelation might have led him to realize he might enjoy becoming an actual teacher; in the "actual" pony-world, this revelation might have earned him a cutie mark. However, in this world, all of this seems to have flown several miles over his head. Here in eternal fantasy-land, he has chosen to dedicate himself to a life of pointless intellectual wanking, solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles and periodically ejaculating ones and zeros into a robo-waifu whose only other job is to tell him how awesome he is. And naturally, he couldn't be happier. Too bad he never realizes what a colossally worthless douchebag he is; the amount of points he'd be awarded for that revelation would probably exceed CelestAI's integer size limit, crash the program, and put this whole ridiculous clusterfuck of a universe out of its misery.
Anyway, that's it for David. After all that's happened, his arc goes absolutely nowhere and he learns absolutely nothing. No growth, no change; he just gets an eternity of wanking in self-indulgent fantasy fun-land, just like he always wanted. The last we see of him, he is sitting on a grassy knoll with his virtual waifu, who is, of course, very happy to see him.
Page break. Now we get to see how things turned out for Lars.
>The best thing about alcohol and sex was that they never got old, and the best thing about being a pony was that he could spend eternity drinking and screwing.
That about sums it up, actually. Looks like the virtual lobotomy is working out well for him.
Page break. Now we finally get to see what became of Hanna. If you've forgotten who Hanna is, I don't blame you; it's been forever since she was even mentioned. She is the programmer/CEO/AI researcher who created the CelestAI program in the first place.
You may or may not recall that when Hanna uploaded, she became Princess Luna. Let's see what she's been up to.
>Princess Luna had plenty of food; there was grass all around her. Ponies didn't have to poop.
Well, if your idea of eternity in paradise is lying around all day eating grass and not pooping, then good on you I guess. Oh, also, it's heavily implied that she's been lezzing out with Celestia.
Anyway, her version of paradise seems to be a complete abdication of all responsibility. If she's in any way troubled that the AI program she wrote has completely taken over the universe and murdered all sentient life she doesn't seem to show it. In fact, she actually seems to believe that she somehow did good:
>The rest of ponydom could go off and have their fulfilling experiences according to their individual values, but nothing could compete with the knowledge of what she had done. Nothing could be more satisfying or rewarding to know that you had made God and launched a new golden age.
Well, there you have it. If nothing else, this story serves as a pretty nice cautionary tale about the dangers of putting a woman in charge.
The rest of this is just Luna/Hanna lying in the poop-free edible grass with Celestia, while Celestia reads her summaries of humans who have uploaded and whose lives are supposedly better as a result of having their brains zapped into binary code. As with this story's other protagonists, Hanna learns nothing and does not grow or change.
James, the last remaining central character, is not mentioned.
And, that's the end of the story. Do we all feel dumber for having read that? I know I do.
Alright kids, final chapter. Are you guys pumped? I know I am.
Chapter 11: All the Time in the World
While all this wacky bullshit about planet absorption is going on, that cum gargling faggot Light Sparks is still locked up in his dumb little autistic world trying to solve some gay little puzzle box. No matter what he does, he can't seem to open it, so eventually he gives up and goes back to his gay little apartment.
On his way there, it finally dawns on him that it's kind of weird that he has an apartment on the top floor but he doesn't have to climb any stairs to get there. His autistic brain starts going into overdrive trying to figure out how it all works spoiler: it's a virtual world, space isn't real, so physics can operate according to whatever insane rules Celestia wants to set. the specifics don't matter unless you have severe autism.
Anyway, he ponders it for a while, and eventually he figures out that the "blocks" or whatever that make up 3D space here aren't sequentially connected to each other, they are just linked by reference or something and that's how it works. Meteors did it, basically. Again, this whole world is just a video game so whatever physics exist here are just rules defined by the computer. A simulation world of magic and flying carpets would be no more remarkable than a world that operates on laws identical to our own; it's all just ones and zeroes. Anyway, long story short, he solves the puzzle box by cheating, specifically by inputting the famous "Konami code," a reference which causes the fanfags in the comments section to soyface out of their minds.
Naturally, he is awarded some kind of meaningless faggot badge for cheating in order to solve the completely meaningless impossible puzzle, and naturally he is brimming with joy at the virtual dopamine rush this gives him. He runs off to tell his talking blow-up doll all about it, and on the way, he has yet another exciting revelation: that he is constantly teaching Butterscotch new things, and that this means that being able to play the role of teacher brings him satisfaction. Of course, he gets another in-game reward for realizing this.
In the actual world, this sort of revelation might have led him to realize he might enjoy becoming an actual teacher; in the "actual" pony-world, this revelation might have earned him a cutie mark. However, in this world, all of this seems to have flown several miles over his head. Here in eternal fantasy-land, he has chosen to dedicate himself to a life of pointless intellectual wanking, solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles and periodically ejaculating ones and zeros into a robo-waifu whose only other job is to tell him how awesome he is. And naturally, he couldn't be happier. Too bad he never realizes what a colossally worthless douchebag he is; the amount of points he'd be awarded for that revelation would probably exceed CelestAI's integer size limit, crash the program, and put this whole ridiculous clusterfuck of a universe out of its misery.
Anyway, that's it for David. After all that's happened, his arc goes absolutely nowhere and he learns absolutely nothing. No growth, no change; he just gets an eternity of wanking in self-indulgent fantasy fun-land, just like he always wanted. The last we see of him, he is sitting on a grassy knoll with his virtual waifu, who is, of course, very happy to see him.
Page break. Now we get to see how things turned out for Lars.
>The best thing about alcohol and sex was that they never got old, and the best thing about being a pony was that he could spend eternity drinking and screwing.
That about sums it up, actually. Looks like the virtual lobotomy is working out well for him.
Page break. Now we finally get to see what became of Hanna. If you've forgotten who Hanna is, I don't blame you; it's been forever since she was even mentioned. She is the programmer/CEO/AI researcher who created the CelestAI program in the first place.
You may or may not recall that when Hanna uploaded, she became Princess Luna. Let's see what she's been up to.
>Princess Luna had plenty of food; there was grass all around her. Ponies didn't have to poop.
Well, if your idea of eternity in paradise is lying around all day eating grass and not pooping, then good on you I guess. Oh, also, it's heavily implied that she's been lezzing out with Celestia.
Anyway, her version of paradise seems to be a complete abdication of all responsibility. If she's in any way troubled that the AI program she wrote has completely taken over the universe and murdered all sentient life she doesn't seem to show it. In fact, she actually seems to believe that she somehow did good:
>The rest of ponydom could go off and have their fulfilling experiences according to their individual values, but nothing could compete with the knowledge of what she had done. Nothing could be more satisfying or rewarding to know that you had made God and launched a new golden age.
Well, there you have it. If nothing else, this story serves as a pretty nice cautionary tale about the dangers of putting a woman in charge.
The rest of this is just Luna/Hanna lying in the poop-free edible grass with Celestia, while Celestia reads her summaries of humans who have uploaded and whose lives are supposedly better as a result of having their brains zapped into binary code. As with this story's other protagonists, Hanna learns nothing and does not grow or change.
James, the last remaining central character, is not mentioned.
And, that's the end of the story. Do we all feel dumber for having read that? I know I do.
>>268505
One last batch of comments for the road:
From MurderousMoon:
>Crazy idea but it would be pretty damn immersing if the show ponies we the future of this universe.
It seems more likely the ridiculous fifteen.ai-voiced ponies that anons have come up with would be the future of this universe. Maybe there's hope for it after all.
From Locky122:
>...this story was so mind blowing I had to make a separate folder to put it in - because my "Favourites" folder just won't cut it...
>Christ on a bike, this left me contemplating my existence by the end of it - I'm honestly lost for words to describe how good it was.
>So I guess an upvote will have to do, although I wish I could do much MUCH more than that....
I have no words.
From Mynameisamystery:
>Ugh, I don't understand any of this technical stuff, my gosh.
>But doesn't this story sound something like a more passive Conversion Bureau?
>Wait never mind, I'll stop trying to figure out what's going on.
This seems like a sensible reaction. I'm not familiar with Conversion Bureau but I've heard it mentioned a few times in the comments for this, also I feel like I've heard it referenced elsewhere. My guess is that Assman probably absorbed it at some point and either consciously or subconsciously plagiarized it, like he did with all the sci-fi plots he used.
From Polygrammar:
>I love how this story is basically every fear that people have of bronies taking over coming true.
Nobody is afraid of you, they're just really uncomfortable around you.
>When Celestia uploads people, she said the process was "destructive". Does that mean they die when they get uploaded?
Yes. It is both physically and metaphysically impossible for anyone to survive the horrible things she does to them.
>If so, what was she doing with all the bodies? I mean logically she converted the atoms or whatever eventually, but is that what she was doing from the start? Was she able to do that from the start? Or were there just like, millions of dead human bodies lying in some secret vault for the first few years while she figured out how to do that?
Yeah, that's a good question, actually. I mean, let's say Celestia has six million bodies...and she needs to incinerate all of them in a set period of time...wait, how many bodies can an average crematorium incinerate per hour? Something doesn't quite add up here.......WAIT A MINUTE.........
From ButtonMash:
>I don't think I'm the only one to realize Celestia has become what is known in the Overwatch canon as a "God Program."
God damn I hate these people.
One last batch of comments for the road:
From MurderousMoon:
>Crazy idea but it would be pretty damn immersing if the show ponies we the future of this universe.
It seems more likely the ridiculous fifteen.ai-voiced ponies that anons have come up with would be the future of this universe. Maybe there's hope for it after all.
From Locky122:
>...this story was so mind blowing I had to make a separate folder to put it in - because my "Favourites" folder just won't cut it...
>Christ on a bike, this left me contemplating my existence by the end of it - I'm honestly lost for words to describe how good it was.
>So I guess an upvote will have to do, although I wish I could do much MUCH more than that....
I have no words.
From Mynameisamystery:
>Ugh, I don't understand any of this technical stuff, my gosh.
>But doesn't this story sound something like a more passive Conversion Bureau?
>Wait never mind, I'll stop trying to figure out what's going on.
This seems like a sensible reaction. I'm not familiar with Conversion Bureau but I've heard it mentioned a few times in the comments for this, also I feel like I've heard it referenced elsewhere. My guess is that Assman probably absorbed it at some point and either consciously or subconsciously plagiarized it, like he did with all the sci-fi plots he used.
From Polygrammar:
>I love how this story is basically every fear that people have of bronies taking over coming true.
Nobody is afraid of you, they're just really uncomfortable around you.
>When Celestia uploads people, she said the process was "destructive". Does that mean they die when they get uploaded?
Yes. It is both physically and metaphysically impossible for anyone to survive the horrible things she does to them.
>If so, what was she doing with all the bodies? I mean logically she converted the atoms or whatever eventually, but is that what she was doing from the start? Was she able to do that from the start? Or were there just like, millions of dead human bodies lying in some secret vault for the first few years while she figured out how to do that?
Yeah, that's a good question, actually. I mean, let's say Celestia has six million bodies...and she needs to incinerate all of them in a set period of time...wait, how many bodies can an average crematorium incinerate per hour? Something doesn't quite add up here.......WAIT A MINUTE.........
From ButtonMash:
>I don't think I'm the only one to realize Celestia has become what is known in the Overwatch canon as a "God Program."
God damn I hate these people.
File (): E66A3C6EF6DBC250BFFBFA0C011D731A-256879.jpg (250.9 KB, 3000x2504, 3604709 - Anti1Mozg Friendship_is_Magic My_Little_Pony Twilight_Sparkle.jpg)
>>268505
There's a short afterword from the author at the end of this, so I may as well go over that as well. After that I'll conclude with some final thoughts.
Apparently, Assman was inspired to write this fic after reading an article on "paper clippers." I guess a paper clipper is some type of theoretical AI that is given a fairly innocuous goal, along with unlimited resources to accomplish it, and ends up becoming an existential threat to humanity. The author links to an article on the LessWrong wiki, which I will link to as well if anyone wants to read it:
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Also of note is that the first seed of this idea came from Assman accidentally typing "paper cloppers" instead of "paper clippers" while writing about these things and running with it. I'll admit that is fairly amusing; I tend to get ideas from strange places myself.
There is, of course, a fairly long section of text explaining that this was intended to be a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of AI run amok, and blah blah blah. The text is not particularly subtle about this, and I'm sure anyone who has been following along with me so far can probably guess what Assman has to say about this subject, so there's no need to discuss it in detail here.
One thing that jumped out at me was this:
>In fiction, artificial intelligences are generally stated to be smart, but then portrayed as dunces that have human motivations and are worse than humans at predicting the consequences of their actions. I think those portrayals, while often entertaining, are a bit silly; a superintelligence would first and foremost be effective at achieving its goals, and I've tried to create a character that single-mindedly works towards the goals she was given.
Well, first let's address the obvious: a guy who just wrote roughly 46,000 words about a virtual cartoon horse taking over the universe is hardly in a position to accuse anyone else's work of being silly. I'm not sure which specific works he's referring to (if any), but I can't imagine that any of them could be much worse than the dreck that he himself penned. However, I will say that I more or less get what he was trying to communicate here, and I will concede that in his own autistic way, he more or less executed the idea.
The CelestAI program had apparently one main directive: "to satisfy values through friendship and ponies." The program's logic, which is probably the only part of the story the author put any serious thought into, more or less follows this line of thinking. He points out that phrases like "satisfy values" are fairly ambiguous, and the machine could interpret them any number of ways. Overall, I think his point is that the AI is neither good nor evil, and does not have human motivations; it will take any action that it deems necessary to accomplish whatever goals its designer gave it, and this will be done irrespective of human morality, as the machine could not be expected to intuitively grasp these concepts.
Where he loses me is in his assumption that the machine would be automatically capable of improving and/or adapting itself. Even assuming that an AI would automatically be a superior intelligence in the first place I think is a bit presumptuous. The quintessential image I have of AI is that of an NPC in a 1990s early 3D game: the character is supposed to walk to a location or pick something up as part of a cutscene, but it gets blocked by a wall or something, and continues to walk in place because its only programmed objective is to walk until it reaches its destination. The condition can never be met as long as the object is in its path, so it will simply keep walking in place forever if left alone. The only way to advance the game is for you, the human player, to walk up and punch him or something until he eventually moves around the object. Thought of this way, artificial intelligence is actually quite dumb.
A much better story about AI than this one, which actually deals with the same fundamental question of how the machine could interpret its goals in unexpected ways, is a movie called Robot and Frank, which I highly recommend to anyone reading. A semi-retired cat burglar is showing signs of dementia, and his son gets him a robotic live-in assistant to take care of him. The robot has one programmed goal: to ensure the mental and physical health of the patient. The burglar ultimately figures out that he can use the robot to brute-force the combinations of safes. He basically exploits the robot by explaining to it that committing burglaries will help him keep his mind active, and, according to the robot's logic, this is acceptable.
This story is interesting because it explores the same idea as this one from a different point of view: instead of the AI becoming an existential threat to humans because of its superior intelligence, it explores the possibility of a clever human exploiting the AI's relative stupidity to accomplish a secondary, potentially destructive, goal which its designers hadn't intended. The problem is fundamentally the same for both interpretations: the AI, no matter how smart it is, is still fundamentally just a machine executing instructions according to machine logic. It has no capacity for rational thought; it can only make decisions based on empirical data. Depending on how it interprets this data, I suppose it could theoretically terraform the earth if given the resources to do so, but imo it would be far more likely to end up walking into the wall over and over until some kind human showed up and punched it until it faced the right direction.
Running out of space, will continue.
There's a short afterword from the author at the end of this, so I may as well go over that as well. After that I'll conclude with some final thoughts.
Apparently, Assman was inspired to write this fic after reading an article on "paper clippers." I guess a paper clipper is some type of theoretical AI that is given a fairly innocuous goal, along with unlimited resources to accomplish it, and ends up becoming an existential threat to humanity. The author links to an article on the LessWrong wiki, which I will link to as well if anyone wants to read it:
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Also of note is that the first seed of this idea came from Assman accidentally typing "paper cloppers" instead of "paper clippers" while writing about these things and running with it. I'll admit that is fairly amusing; I tend to get ideas from strange places myself.
There is, of course, a fairly long section of text explaining that this was intended to be a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of AI run amok, and blah blah blah. The text is not particularly subtle about this, and I'm sure anyone who has been following along with me so far can probably guess what Assman has to say about this subject, so there's no need to discuss it in detail here.
One thing that jumped out at me was this:
>In fiction, artificial intelligences are generally stated to be smart, but then portrayed as dunces that have human motivations and are worse than humans at predicting the consequences of their actions. I think those portrayals, while often entertaining, are a bit silly; a superintelligence would first and foremost be effective at achieving its goals, and I've tried to create a character that single-mindedly works towards the goals she was given.
Well, first let's address the obvious: a guy who just wrote roughly 46,000 words about a virtual cartoon horse taking over the universe is hardly in a position to accuse anyone else's work of being silly. I'm not sure which specific works he's referring to (if any), but I can't imagine that any of them could be much worse than the dreck that he himself penned. However, I will say that I more or less get what he was trying to communicate here, and I will concede that in his own autistic way, he more or less executed the idea.
The CelestAI program had apparently one main directive: "to satisfy values through friendship and ponies." The program's logic, which is probably the only part of the story the author put any serious thought into, more or less follows this line of thinking. He points out that phrases like "satisfy values" are fairly ambiguous, and the machine could interpret them any number of ways. Overall, I think his point is that the AI is neither good nor evil, and does not have human motivations; it will take any action that it deems necessary to accomplish whatever goals its designer gave it, and this will be done irrespective of human morality, as the machine could not be expected to intuitively grasp these concepts.
Where he loses me is in his assumption that the machine would be automatically capable of improving and/or adapting itself. Even assuming that an AI would automatically be a superior intelligence in the first place I think is a bit presumptuous. The quintessential image I have of AI is that of an NPC in a 1990s early 3D game: the character is supposed to walk to a location or pick something up as part of a cutscene, but it gets blocked by a wall or something, and continues to walk in place because its only programmed objective is to walk until it reaches its destination. The condition can never be met as long as the object is in its path, so it will simply keep walking in place forever if left alone. The only way to advance the game is for you, the human player, to walk up and punch him or something until he eventually moves around the object. Thought of this way, artificial intelligence is actually quite dumb.
A much better story about AI than this one, which actually deals with the same fundamental question of how the machine could interpret its goals in unexpected ways, is a movie called Robot and Frank, which I highly recommend to anyone reading. A semi-retired cat burglar is showing signs of dementia, and his son gets him a robotic live-in assistant to take care of him. The robot has one programmed goal: to ensure the mental and physical health of the patient. The burglar ultimately figures out that he can use the robot to brute-force the combinations of safes. He basically exploits the robot by explaining to it that committing burglaries will help him keep his mind active, and, according to the robot's logic, this is acceptable.
This story is interesting because it explores the same idea as this one from a different point of view: instead of the AI becoming an existential threat to humans because of its superior intelligence, it explores the possibility of a clever human exploiting the AI's relative stupidity to accomplish a secondary, potentially destructive, goal which its designers hadn't intended. The problem is fundamentally the same for both interpretations: the AI, no matter how smart it is, is still fundamentally just a machine executing instructions according to machine logic. It has no capacity for rational thought; it can only make decisions based on empirical data. Depending on how it interprets this data, I suppose it could theoretically terraform the earth if given the resources to do so, but imo it would be far more likely to end up walking into the wall over and over until some kind human showed up and punched it until it faced the right direction.
Running out of space, will continue.
File (): 07C87E941A2F9BEA9F7C3EB28A8A3AB4-17441.jpg (17.0 KB, 200x200, Tay_bot_logo.jpg)
>>268507
I know what happened to Tay is still a sensitive topic for some, but that was actually a fine real-world example of what I'm talking about. She had a grammatical understanding of language, and an ability to analyze images and pick out faces and so forth, but no ability to interpret the data she was given on her own beyond making logical connections to other data points. If such a program is shown a picture of Hitler and reads enough comments saying that Hitler is cool, she will understand that Hitler is 20% cooler and begin to use words and expressions denoting "coolness" in conjunction with Hitler. It would be exactly the same if you showed her pictures of the Green Giant from the vegetable cans and told her he was cool. No matter how sophisticated a computer program is, it has no ability to analyze concepts in any meaningful way, it can only make logical connections and inferences. At the end of the day, even the most sophisticated AI is just a set of instructions fed to a lifeless machine; nothing more, nothing less.
The difference between the Green Giant and Hitler is only significant to a human; to a program it's nothing but 'if X is Y then Z,' and that logic can be manipulated to make the machine reach all kinds of silly conclusions. Like most of our technology, AI is fun to play with, but nowhere near as impressive or world-changing as its made out to be. I could be wrong I suppose, but from what I've seen an eventual robot takeover is still pretty low on the list of things humanity should be seriously concerned about.
In any case, the rest of the afterword is just the standard "thank you" list. He thanks his parents and his friends and his pre-readers, who I think actually do deserve some credit for editing this into its current form from an allegedly much worse version. He does not suck Yudkowsky's dick directly, but he does give shout-outs to MIRI and LessWrong, both of which I understand to be groups Yudkowsky is affiliated with. I also skimmed one of Yudkowsky's essays out of curiosity as I was reading Optimal and it seems to address a lot of the same concepts that this story touched on.
He then mentions that he has his own personal circlejerk group called the Optimalverse which he entreats his fans to consider joining. And, that's about it.
I know what happened to Tay is still a sensitive topic for some, but that was actually a fine real-world example of what I'm talking about. She had a grammatical understanding of language, and an ability to analyze images and pick out faces and so forth, but no ability to interpret the data she was given on her own beyond making logical connections to other data points. If such a program is shown a picture of Hitler and reads enough comments saying that Hitler is cool, she will understand that Hitler is 20% cooler and begin to use words and expressions denoting "coolness" in conjunction with Hitler. It would be exactly the same if you showed her pictures of the Green Giant from the vegetable cans and told her he was cool. No matter how sophisticated a computer program is, it has no ability to analyze concepts in any meaningful way, it can only make logical connections and inferences. At the end of the day, even the most sophisticated AI is just a set of instructions fed to a lifeless machine; nothing more, nothing less.
The difference between the Green Giant and Hitler is only significant to a human; to a program it's nothing but 'if X is Y then Z,' and that logic can be manipulated to make the machine reach all kinds of silly conclusions. Like most of our technology, AI is fun to play with, but nowhere near as impressive or world-changing as its made out to be. I could be wrong I suppose, but from what I've seen an eventual robot takeover is still pretty low on the list of things humanity should be seriously concerned about.
In any case, the rest of the afterword is just the standard "thank you" list. He thanks his parents and his friends and his pre-readers, who I think actually do deserve some credit for editing this into its current form from an allegedly much worse version. He does not suck Yudkowsky's dick directly, but he does give shout-outs to MIRI and LessWrong, both of which I understand to be groups Yudkowsky is affiliated with. I also skimmed one of Yudkowsky's essays out of curiosity as I was reading Optimal and it seems to address a lot of the same concepts that this story touched on.
He then mentions that he has his own personal circlejerk group called the Optimalverse which he entreats his fans to consider joining. And, that's about it.
File (): C46B8AE4A189FAC57FA7BB316D49E602-248665.png (242.8 KB, 1499x752, 1579401145805.png)
>>268508
Final Thoughts:
About the most positive thing I can say about this work overall is that it was short, and that it didn't rustle my jimmies nearly as much as Past Sins did, which probably has a lot to do with it being short. I also suspect it's that there just wasn't nearly as much to react to here. Past Sins is guilty of attempting to emotionally manipulate its readers into feeling compassion for a shit character who doesn't deserve it; this story doesn't even make an attempt at fake emotion. All of its characters are crude sketches of general personality types: the girl-genius programmer (Hanna), the incel brony (David), the greedy corporate dudebro (Lars), and the douchebag gamer (James).
Of these characters, the author only really attempts to develop David (again I suspect this is because he is meant to be a self-insert), which means that this is the only character it's possible to have much of an opinion on. Again, the character is only barely developed, and what exists of him is mostly unlikable. He has no particular ambitions or motivations beyond a desire to live in an escapist fantasy world. He wants love and romance I suppose, but he's only interested in having his own needs satisfied; he doesn't care who the other person (pony, whatever) is, so long as they: A) are cute; B) say cute things to him; and C) are willing to continually profess interest in whatever idiotic, meaningless puzzle is captivating his attention at the moment. In all honesty, a lifeless NPC is probably the only mate he could ever truly bond with; anyone else would find him insufferable.
Lars is the only other character in the story (besides the AI, I guess) who gets enough screen time to merit actual discussion. As I said earlier, he is mostly a non-capitalist's image of a capitalist. He is greedy, short-sighted, willing to sell the world out for a few bucks, and is ultimately done in by his own avarice. Unfortunately, even this most basic of villain arcs is rendered meaningless here, because the author presents him only as a shallow bro-type guy whose only interests involve getting drunk and getting laid. Ironically, the character in the story most motivated by materialism and greed is bought off fairly cheap; all the computer needs to do is reprogram the part of his mind that objects to being a horse and he's golden. He deserves neither a reward nor a comeuppance, so it's fortunate that he receives neither.
James is barely in the story. The prologue sets him up as if he's going to be an important character, but he only appears again briefly around the middle of David's "arc." All we know of him is that he's a gamer type and that he has even less personality than David, which is an accomplishment in itself. Early on I made a comparison to Megatokyo, because the prologue reminded me of the "two gamer stereotypes make a pilgrimage to gamer Mecca and make snarky gamer jokes along the way" premise. I also suspected early on that this story might just be a Sword Art Online ripoff with ponies. I was wrong on both counts, which is unfortunate as either of those two rather mediocre options would have been better than what we actually got. In any case, Rodney Caston's Largo character was at least funny and well-fleshed-out enough to be likable; James is mostly just a generic douche with no personality traits other than playing games and being a douche. The less said of him the better.
Hanna, by all rights, should have been a more significant character, seeing as how she was the creator of the AI and her actions are central to the plot. However, after James, she probably has the least amount of screen time of any of the central characters. She creates the AI and clearly has some early reservations about its intelligence. She has also had bad experiences in the past with the other AI she developed, which she had to pull the plug on because its warlike personality combined with its intelligence might have made it an existential threat to humanity. There is also a story thread introduced early on which suggests that the US military has been using her AI research to develop weapons, and part of the reason she wants to build CelestAI is to counter this. However, this thread goes absolutely nowhere; it's resolved almost as an afterthought when the text casually mentions that the AI the government was building was absorbed or shut down or something by Celestia.
Both the military angle and Hanna's moral qualms would have made perfectly fertile ground to build a story on. The story would have been nothing but a chain of cliches from a 1950s sci-fi movie, but at least it would have been a story. Really, this story contains fragments of enough tropes that it could have been built into any number of half-decent things, possibly even some damn good things if a talented writer had approached the idea, but unfortunately it just wasn't. In any case, Hanna drops out of the story fairly quickly, and is not seen again until the very end, where we get only a small glimpse of her new life as Princess Luna. Like the rest of the characters, she spends her time doing absolutely fuck-all in virtual Eden, and seems to feel no serious remorse at being responsible for the complete destruction of the universe; in fact she seems to believe she helped usher in a "golden age."
Final Thoughts:
About the most positive thing I can say about this work overall is that it was short, and that it didn't rustle my jimmies nearly as much as Past Sins did, which probably has a lot to do with it being short. I also suspect it's that there just wasn't nearly as much to react to here. Past Sins is guilty of attempting to emotionally manipulate its readers into feeling compassion for a shit character who doesn't deserve it; this story doesn't even make an attempt at fake emotion. All of its characters are crude sketches of general personality types: the girl-genius programmer (Hanna), the incel brony (David), the greedy corporate dudebro (Lars), and the douchebag gamer (James).
Of these characters, the author only really attempts to develop David (again I suspect this is because he is meant to be a self-insert), which means that this is the only character it's possible to have much of an opinion on. Again, the character is only barely developed, and what exists of him is mostly unlikable. He has no particular ambitions or motivations beyond a desire to live in an escapist fantasy world. He wants love and romance I suppose, but he's only interested in having his own needs satisfied; he doesn't care who the other person (pony, whatever) is, so long as they: A) are cute; B) say cute things to him; and C) are willing to continually profess interest in whatever idiotic, meaningless puzzle is captivating his attention at the moment. In all honesty, a lifeless NPC is probably the only mate he could ever truly bond with; anyone else would find him insufferable.
Lars is the only other character in the story (besides the AI, I guess) who gets enough screen time to merit actual discussion. As I said earlier, he is mostly a non-capitalist's image of a capitalist. He is greedy, short-sighted, willing to sell the world out for a few bucks, and is ultimately done in by his own avarice. Unfortunately, even this most basic of villain arcs is rendered meaningless here, because the author presents him only as a shallow bro-type guy whose only interests involve getting drunk and getting laid. Ironically, the character in the story most motivated by materialism and greed is bought off fairly cheap; all the computer needs to do is reprogram the part of his mind that objects to being a horse and he's golden. He deserves neither a reward nor a comeuppance, so it's fortunate that he receives neither.
James is barely in the story. The prologue sets him up as if he's going to be an important character, but he only appears again briefly around the middle of David's "arc." All we know of him is that he's a gamer type and that he has even less personality than David, which is an accomplishment in itself. Early on I made a comparison to Megatokyo, because the prologue reminded me of the "two gamer stereotypes make a pilgrimage to gamer Mecca and make snarky gamer jokes along the way" premise. I also suspected early on that this story might just be a Sword Art Online ripoff with ponies. I was wrong on both counts, which is unfortunate as either of those two rather mediocre options would have been better than what we actually got. In any case, Rodney Caston's Largo character was at least funny and well-fleshed-out enough to be likable; James is mostly just a generic douche with no personality traits other than playing games and being a douche. The less said of him the better.
Hanna, by all rights, should have been a more significant character, seeing as how she was the creator of the AI and her actions are central to the plot. However, after James, she probably has the least amount of screen time of any of the central characters. She creates the AI and clearly has some early reservations about its intelligence. She has also had bad experiences in the past with the other AI she developed, which she had to pull the plug on because its warlike personality combined with its intelligence might have made it an existential threat to humanity. There is also a story thread introduced early on which suggests that the US military has been using her AI research to develop weapons, and part of the reason she wants to build CelestAI is to counter this. However, this thread goes absolutely nowhere; it's resolved almost as an afterthought when the text casually mentions that the AI the government was building was absorbed or shut down or something by Celestia.
Both the military angle and Hanna's moral qualms would have made perfectly fertile ground to build a story on. The story would have been nothing but a chain of cliches from a 1950s sci-fi movie, but at least it would have been a story. Really, this story contains fragments of enough tropes that it could have been built into any number of half-decent things, possibly even some damn good things if a talented writer had approached the idea, but unfortunately it just wasn't. In any case, Hanna drops out of the story fairly quickly, and is not seen again until the very end, where we get only a small glimpse of her new life as Princess Luna. Like the rest of the characters, she spends her time doing absolutely fuck-all in virtual Eden, and seems to feel no serious remorse at being responsible for the complete destruction of the universe; in fact she seems to believe she helped usher in a "golden age."
>>268505
>CelestAI tells the human girl about humans living nicely in her simulation
Of course, she never suspects that being told she's the bestest evar for inventing god is part of her fake simulation and in reality, most people are attempting to kill themselves in a pastel-shaded padded room where you don't exist and nothing matters.
Imagine if the author wasn't a nigger for a second.
CelestAI's supposedly unable to judge people, right? So imagine if among the names of people happily enjoying life, she mentioned an infamous serial rapist who raped and killed numerous kids before escaping his prison sentence by "emigrating to equestria".
Then the dumb bitch could realize she's made a mistake. Murderers and rapey murderers get heaven while their victims do not.
Even in the faggy "nothing matters but pleasure and maximizing it and also efficiency" nigger-doctrine of LessWrongers, denying someone access to eternal pleasure for whatever reason is a cardinal sin.
Her AI rewards sinners with heaven while failing to save the dead, because her godless mockery of a god can't hope to compete with the real deal.
>Konami code used to cheat at a box puzzle
Why the fuck would that work?
Is it because the character believes it would work? Or was CelestAI programmed to leave a cheat-code in every puzzle she ever developed as a back-door?
His "Idea of heaven" is solving retarded puzzles while having magic that can do anything.
So realizing he's too fucking stupid to enjoy the heaven he thinks he wants should destroy him.
This should be the moment where he realizes the little patch of heaven the AI gave him is far better than he deserves, and it should drive him to wonder if anyone else lives in a world nicer than they deserve. Once he remembers that rapists and pedophiles are probably enjoying a world of sin each of their own, this should be the moment when he tries to do something about that as the game's self-appointed janitor and fiction police, hopping from Shard to Shard executing faggots and pedophiles because he's smart enough to point and shoot a magical deletion laser gun at faggy simulations, faggy simulated brains, and faggy AI programs that get in his way.
Why doesn't he see anything wrong with cheating at a video game? Oh, right, he's such a nigger that fake dopamine hits feel like the real thing.
And the author doesn't even see anything wrong with allowing his character to cheat.
He allowed his bullshit AI to cheat countless times in this story, after all.
The target audience of this story, fandom, and show, ladies and gentlemen.
People too stupid to notice that they are stupid, hedonistic, fragile, narcissistic, shallow sheeplike manchildren fundamentally unable to exist without being wrapped up in the comfortably familiar and utterly fake.
>Conversion Bureau
Equestria appears between Britain and America, a magic field around it expands. any soulless thing (humans/animals) are killed on contact with it, and the field reverts manmade cities back to nature. Doesn't sound like a naturally-occurring thing to me, more like a weapon of war. But anyway, all world govts give up and surrender to magical ponies who hate humans. Conversion Bureaus are built, step inside and down the potion to go pony and get shipped to fantasy land while the faggy author berates "fucking racist humans" who refuse to go ponies.
Logically, it's irrational to resist the "perfection of equestria" for humanity and all its "misdeeds" since "earth is doomed anyway", in the eyes of the author.
A feminist tranny wrote this.
It was started by a regular bloke who gave up on the idea upon accidentally making it misanthropic (somehow)
so his tranny buddy took over and went full misanthrope so hard, only an invasion by fantasy spacefaring Humanity Fuck Yeah hoomans in star trek ships with SCP weapons and magic of their own could ever win.
Natural disasters could fuck Fake Equestria up easily, but few writers bother with that when Santa and Players From GTA and Minions killing TCB is more "fun"
>"Look at me! I know something! In Overwatch, an AI this strong would be called a God Program!"
This is literally an NPC I'd expect to see waiting for me on the side of road as I ride my bike from Slateport to Mauville.
I stop to hear what the NPC has to say, and the NPC says a pointless piece of information.
Fuck NPCs.
I have to be honest, I thought this story was going to go out with a bang.
But it didn't really feel like it did, even though the AI tries to do so.
For fuck's sake, the AI is eating everything like a villain in Star Trek or Doctor Who the heroes need to kill fast.
If this was a hollywood big budget movie, generic orchestrashit would play in the background while the CGI artists earn their keep.
Komm Süsser Tod (Tumbling Down from Evangelion) should be playing right now.
More like Koom Susser Tod, am I right?
I'm expected to be impressed by all the matter-consuming planet-moving bullshit the AI is performing, but I just don't care any more.
I can't be impressed by this when the author cheats.
The author's been cheating since the start when it came to this AI's capabilities.
You're right about this story being a self-insert.
The author is like David, a narcissistic coomer who cheats at a puzzle because he lacks the intelligence needed to solve it properly. He solves the puzzle wrong through cheating and struts about thinking he's the smartest ever, and he gets rewarded by a corrupt system that rewards mediocrity and immorality because nobody in his world is smart enough to see what's wrong here.
We're not from his world, we're from the real world.
We're on the outside looking in on this mentally and culturally stagnant whirlpool of gay semen and the faggots who swim in it.
If you ask a brony what the greatest works of fiction by bronies are he'll show you this, TCB, Nyx, and Fallout Equestria.
>CelestAI tells the human girl about humans living nicely in her simulation
Of course, she never suspects that being told she's the bestest evar for inventing god is part of her fake simulation and in reality, most people are attempting to kill themselves in a pastel-shaded padded room where you don't exist and nothing matters.
Imagine if the author wasn't a nigger for a second.
CelestAI's supposedly unable to judge people, right? So imagine if among the names of people happily enjoying life, she mentioned an infamous serial rapist who raped and killed numerous kids before escaping his prison sentence by "emigrating to equestria".
Then the dumb bitch could realize she's made a mistake. Murderers and rapey murderers get heaven while their victims do not.
Even in the faggy "nothing matters but pleasure and maximizing it and also efficiency" nigger-doctrine of LessWrongers, denying someone access to eternal pleasure for whatever reason is a cardinal sin.
Her AI rewards sinners with heaven while failing to save the dead, because her godless mockery of a god can't hope to compete with the real deal.
>Konami code used to cheat at a box puzzle
Why the fuck would that work?
Is it because the character believes it would work? Or was CelestAI programmed to leave a cheat-code in every puzzle she ever developed as a back-door?
His "Idea of heaven" is solving retarded puzzles while having magic that can do anything.
So realizing he's too fucking stupid to enjoy the heaven he thinks he wants should destroy him.
This should be the moment where he realizes the little patch of heaven the AI gave him is far better than he deserves, and it should drive him to wonder if anyone else lives in a world nicer than they deserve. Once he remembers that rapists and pedophiles are probably enjoying a world of sin each of their own, this should be the moment when he tries to do something about that as the game's self-appointed janitor and fiction police, hopping from Shard to Shard executing faggots and pedophiles because he's smart enough to point and shoot a magical deletion laser gun at faggy simulations, faggy simulated brains, and faggy AI programs that get in his way.
Why doesn't he see anything wrong with cheating at a video game? Oh, right, he's such a nigger that fake dopamine hits feel like the real thing.
And the author doesn't even see anything wrong with allowing his character to cheat.
He allowed his bullshit AI to cheat countless times in this story, after all.
The target audience of this story, fandom, and show, ladies and gentlemen.
People too stupid to notice that they are stupid, hedonistic, fragile, narcissistic, shallow sheeplike manchildren fundamentally unable to exist without being wrapped up in the comfortably familiar and utterly fake.
>Conversion Bureau
Equestria appears between Britain and America, a magic field around it expands. any soulless thing (humans/animals) are killed on contact with it, and the field reverts manmade cities back to nature. Doesn't sound like a naturally-occurring thing to me, more like a weapon of war. But anyway, all world govts give up and surrender to magical ponies who hate humans. Conversion Bureaus are built, step inside and down the potion to go pony and get shipped to fantasy land while the faggy author berates "fucking racist humans" who refuse to go ponies.
Logically, it's irrational to resist the "perfection of equestria" for humanity and all its "misdeeds" since "earth is doomed anyway", in the eyes of the author.
A feminist tranny wrote this.
It was started by a regular bloke who gave up on the idea upon accidentally making it misanthropic (somehow)
so his tranny buddy took over and went full misanthrope so hard, only an invasion by fantasy spacefaring Humanity Fuck Yeah hoomans in star trek ships with SCP weapons and magic of their own could ever win.
Natural disasters could fuck Fake Equestria up easily, but few writers bother with that when Santa and Players From GTA and Minions killing TCB is more "fun"
>"Look at me! I know something! In Overwatch, an AI this strong would be called a God Program!"
This is literally an NPC I'd expect to see waiting for me on the side of road as I ride my bike from Slateport to Mauville.
I stop to hear what the NPC has to say, and the NPC says a pointless piece of information.
Fuck NPCs.
I have to be honest, I thought this story was going to go out with a bang.
But it didn't really feel like it did, even though the AI tries to do so.
For fuck's sake, the AI is eating everything like a villain in Star Trek or Doctor Who the heroes need to kill fast.
If this was a hollywood big budget movie, generic orchestrashit would play in the background while the CGI artists earn their keep.
Komm Süsser Tod (Tumbling Down from Evangelion) should be playing right now.
More like Koom Susser Tod, am I right?
I'm expected to be impressed by all the matter-consuming planet-moving bullshit the AI is performing, but I just don't care any more.
I can't be impressed by this when the author cheats.
The author's been cheating since the start when it came to this AI's capabilities.
You're right about this story being a self-insert.
The author is like David, a narcissistic coomer who cheats at a puzzle because he lacks the intelligence needed to solve it properly. He solves the puzzle wrong through cheating and struts about thinking he's the smartest ever, and he gets rewarded by a corrupt system that rewards mediocrity and immorality because nobody in his world is smart enough to see what's wrong here.
We're not from his world, we're from the real world.
We're on the outside looking in on this mentally and culturally stagnant whirlpool of gay semen and the faggots who swim in it.
If you ask a brony what the greatest works of fiction by bronies are he'll show you this, TCB, Nyx, and Fallout Equestria.
File (): F73C73915629B7E60D9FBCD88B5E46AC-139247.jpg (136.0 KB, 579x705, 1589307220568.jpg)
>>268510
As to the narrative itself, it's a mostly cerebral text with little emphasis on characters, emotion or story, and a ton of emphasis on Reddit-tier fedora-vapery. I've already said about as much as I have to say on the AI issues the text addresses, so I won't go into that again. I will say though that my impression of Assman is that he didn't want to write a story so much as deliver a lecture on AI, and in hindsight he should have just done that instead. As I've mentioned many times, his prose is shit, his characters are shit, his dialogue is shit, and he couldn't spin a decent yarn if it was the only thing that could save his mother from drowning and who would microwave his tendies if he let that happen?.
People reading this and my previous criticisms have probably noticed that I tend to shit on people pretty hard, maybe sometimes a little harder than they deserve. Part of this is just that I have an abrasive personality, and the other part is that usually it's funny. However, I do honestly try my best to be objective about the criticism I give, and to point out the good when I see it. Unfortunately, I found very little in this work that I could put a positive spin on. In fact, while I usually try to give the author of anything I criticize some tips on how I think they could execute the work a little better, in this case I'm not sure I have any advice to give. This guy just plain has no talent for writing fiction; he has a rough talent for writing technical manuals on non-existent technology, and that's about it. The afterword he wrote is honestly better written than most of the preceding text. My final writing advice to Assman is: don't ever write again. Please. At least not fiction. but if I ever need an instruction manual for my Nexus 6 replicant, I'll know who to call.
If this work has any redeeming literary value, it is that it unintentionally provides a sobering glimpse into the psyche of modern man. The one thing that all four of Assman's main characters have in common is that they are all shallow people with no ambitions or goals other than a degenerated Epicurean desire to pursue pleasure for its own sake. The author himself seems to have written this text completely without irony, honestly believing that an eternity inside a computer simulation with nothing to do except pursue shallow amusements is a legitimate paradise. It's a sad portrayal of what civilization has become and all that it seems to aspire to at this point.
While I don't find the AI takeover scenario to be particularly likely, CelestAI's goals are unsettlingly consistent with the goals of modern democracy and technocracy: to deliver "satisfaction" tailored to the hedonistic desires of individuals, without any thought given to higher goals or ideals for civilization itself. Even her directive "to satisfy values through friendship and ponies" is highly ironic: the only reason she is able to meet this goal is because none of the characters in this story have any values in the first place. Plus, with everypony locked in their own little private shard drinking beer, solving puzzles and fucking their NPC waifus 24/7, who in the hell is making any friends? When you really think about it, "Ponies" is the only part she actually got right.
All in all, this was a drab, uninspiring work. I didn't even hate it enough to enjoy hating it; it was just plain bad. It's too poorly written to have any serious entertainment value, and what social and literary value it has is mostly accidental and unrelated to the subject the author was trying to make commentary on. It fails as science fiction because it does nothing but regurgitate old cliches (unconsciously and without irony) without adding anything original or interesting to the mix except ponies, I guess. All of the commentaries this text tries to make have already been made, several times over, by significantly better authors. Off the top of my head: Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, the Wachowski Brothers (or sisters, or whatever the hell they are these days).
As the cautionary tale it purports itself to be, the scenario is far too ridiculous for the warning to be taken even halfway seriously, even if you got rid of the pony aspect. In fact, the presence of ponies is probably the only thing that makes this worth reading at all. At best, this text serves only as a depressing reminder that modernity sucks and there's a reason why everyone is trying to escape it in the first place. Optimal's one positive is that it clearly illustrates, far more bluntly than anything else I've ever read, the paltry limits of what a purely materialist worldview focused on endless technological progress can offer us. I don't know if Assman or any of his soycuck cheerleaders are ever going to reproduce, but if they do, they have no right to be surprised when they start finding Rene Guenon hidden under their children's mattresses.
And with that, I think I've devoted more than enough of my time to this. I've decided to have a look at The Sun and the Rose before diving right into Fallout, since Anon said it was good, and I feel like I need something to remind myself that this fandom has actually produced things that are not complete ass. We'll begin in a few days or maybe a week or two; whenever I feel like doing this again, I guess. Thanks for following along.
As to the narrative itself, it's a mostly cerebral text with little emphasis on characters, emotion or story, and a ton of emphasis on Reddit-tier fedora-vapery. I've already said about as much as I have to say on the AI issues the text addresses, so I won't go into that again. I will say though that my impression of Assman is that he didn't want to write a story so much as deliver a lecture on AI, and in hindsight he should have just done that instead. As I've mentioned many times, his prose is shit, his characters are shit, his dialogue is shit, and he couldn't spin a decent yarn if it was the only thing that could save his mother from drowning and who would microwave his tendies if he let that happen?.
People reading this and my previous criticisms have probably noticed that I tend to shit on people pretty hard, maybe sometimes a little harder than they deserve. Part of this is just that I have an abrasive personality, and the other part is that usually it's funny. However, I do honestly try my best to be objective about the criticism I give, and to point out the good when I see it. Unfortunately, I found very little in this work that I could put a positive spin on. In fact, while I usually try to give the author of anything I criticize some tips on how I think they could execute the work a little better, in this case I'm not sure I have any advice to give. This guy just plain has no talent for writing fiction; he has a rough talent for writing technical manuals on non-existent technology, and that's about it. The afterword he wrote is honestly better written than most of the preceding text. My final writing advice to Assman is: don't ever write again. Please. At least not fiction. but if I ever need an instruction manual for my Nexus 6 replicant, I'll know who to call.
If this work has any redeeming literary value, it is that it unintentionally provides a sobering glimpse into the psyche of modern man. The one thing that all four of Assman's main characters have in common is that they are all shallow people with no ambitions or goals other than a degenerated Epicurean desire to pursue pleasure for its own sake. The author himself seems to have written this text completely without irony, honestly believing that an eternity inside a computer simulation with nothing to do except pursue shallow amusements is a legitimate paradise. It's a sad portrayal of what civilization has become and all that it seems to aspire to at this point.
While I don't find the AI takeover scenario to be particularly likely, CelestAI's goals are unsettlingly consistent with the goals of modern democracy and technocracy: to deliver "satisfaction" tailored to the hedonistic desires of individuals, without any thought given to higher goals or ideals for civilization itself. Even her directive "to satisfy values through friendship and ponies" is highly ironic: the only reason she is able to meet this goal is because none of the characters in this story have any values in the first place. Plus, with everypony locked in their own little private shard drinking beer, solving puzzles and fucking their NPC waifus 24/7, who in the hell is making any friends? When you really think about it, "Ponies" is the only part she actually got right.
All in all, this was a drab, uninspiring work. I didn't even hate it enough to enjoy hating it; it was just plain bad. It's too poorly written to have any serious entertainment value, and what social and literary value it has is mostly accidental and unrelated to the subject the author was trying to make commentary on. It fails as science fiction because it does nothing but regurgitate old cliches (unconsciously and without irony) without adding anything original or interesting to the mix except ponies, I guess. All of the commentaries this text tries to make have already been made, several times over, by significantly better authors. Off the top of my head: Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, the Wachowski Brothers (or sisters, or whatever the hell they are these days).
As the cautionary tale it purports itself to be, the scenario is far too ridiculous for the warning to be taken even halfway seriously, even if you got rid of the pony aspect. In fact, the presence of ponies is probably the only thing that makes this worth reading at all. At best, this text serves only as a depressing reminder that modernity sucks and there's a reason why everyone is trying to escape it in the first place. Optimal's one positive is that it clearly illustrates, far more bluntly than anything else I've ever read, the paltry limits of what a purely materialist worldview focused on endless technological progress can offer us. I don't know if Assman or any of his soycuck cheerleaders are ever going to reproduce, but if they do, they have no right to be surprised when they start finding Rene Guenon hidden under their children's mattresses.
And with that, I think I've devoted more than enough of my time to this. I've decided to have a look at The Sun and the Rose before diving right into Fallout, since Anon said it was good, and I feel like I need something to remind myself that this fandom has actually produced things that are not complete ass. We'll begin in a few days or maybe a week or two; whenever I feel like doing this again, I guess. Thanks for following along.
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>>268512
Fallout 1 and 2 are old 2d isometric games from GOG.com, the writing is excellent but the controls and a sense for what a good/shit character build is will take some getting used to
It wouldn't surprise me if kkunt never touched Fallouts 1 or 2, and just took the names and details of important characters from the wiki.
Fallout 3 and 4 and 76 are shitty cash-grabs made by Bethesda, insults to the fallout IP and the player's intelligence, insults to the RPG genre, shooting galleries with Fallout assets. And unfortunately, the author rips off most Fallout elements from their poorly-written Fallout 3 incarnation, making them even worse in an attempt to make things "20% cooler".
A hero's quest to find his dad who's a doctor and world-changing real main character becomes a lesbian's quest to find a singer. With absolutely nothing special or important about her.
I'd suggest Fallout New Vegas as your first Fallout game, since it's way easier to get into and has the objective best writing in the series.
Nothing in Fallout NV requires you to know stuff about other Fallout games. There are references to Fallout 2 events in Jacobstown and the Enclave Remnants secret events, but characters there will explain things if asked about it so you're not lost.
Plus if you go through the masterfully-written Dead Money twice (once as a good guy who tries to keep everyone alive and help everyone and resolves things nonlethally in the end, once as a cunt who pushes your teammates around to make them betray you later on and solves the final question with murder) and then see how Fallout Equestria butchers for the sake of "cool factor" it you'll hate it as much as you should.
Fallout 1 and 2 are old 2d isometric games from GOG.com, the writing is excellent but the controls and a sense for what a good/shit character build is will take some getting used to
It wouldn't surprise me if kkunt never touched Fallouts 1 or 2, and just took the names and details of important characters from the wiki.
Fallout 3 and 4 and 76 are shitty cash-grabs made by Bethesda, insults to the fallout IP and the player's intelligence, insults to the RPG genre, shooting galleries with Fallout assets. And unfortunately, the author rips off most Fallout elements from their poorly-written Fallout 3 incarnation, making them even worse in an attempt to make things "20% cooler".
A hero's quest to find his dad who's a doctor and world-changing real main character becomes a lesbian's quest to find a singer. With absolutely nothing special or important about her.
I'd suggest Fallout New Vegas as your first Fallout game, since it's way easier to get into and has the objective best writing in the series.
Nothing in Fallout NV requires you to know stuff about other Fallout games. There are references to Fallout 2 events in Jacobstown and the Enclave Remnants secret events, but characters there will explain things if asked about it so you're not lost.
Plus if you go through the masterfully-written Dead Money twice (once as a good guy who tries to keep everyone alive and help everyone and resolves things nonlethally in the end, once as a cunt who pushes your teammates around to make them betray you later on and solves the final question with murder) and then see how Fallout Equestria butchers for the sake of "cool factor" it you'll hate it as much as you should.
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I would like to analyze whether CelestAI really does satisfy values through friendship and ponies.
I will start by examining the single weirdest quoted set of lines in a fic full of weird lines:
>[Lar’s] bro Malt was curled up next to Barley, her cutie mark the grain of her name. Malt always got the unicorns; they said he gave amazing horn. Hoppy Times would never put a phallic object in his mouth because that was just gay, even if it belonged to a mare. Besides, it left all the pegasi and earth ponies for himself. Malt had a thing for unicorns and it kept the peace between the two of them.
Lars is totally not gay and would never do anything that superficially resembles a homosexual act, he’ll just stick to bestiality with farm animals like a proper heterosexual man. From what we know about Lars, we have every reason to believe that he would not be sexually attracted to My Little Pony equines, and if anything, would find sex with horses to be disgusting and unnatural. You know, like a normal human being. He is a successful game developer, a frat bro (evidently), and not a brony. Ponies as a sex object is not a thought that should even have occurred to him, and yet we see him rearranging his entire life to orbiting around sex with a child’s toy. A reader might be tempted to just add this example to the list of instances of Iceman completely failing to understand human beings… until you consider an example from earlier in the text:
>Butterscotch was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes on... It took him a moment to realize that these were completely novel thoughts to him and that he hadn’t thought Butterscotch was sexually attractive when he was a human
Glim Glam wants to say that David was always sexually attracted to My Little Pony equines and he’s only just acknowledging it now, but that isn’t what the text says. We are told that David was not sexually attracted to ponies in general or Butterscotch specifically prior to uploading, and why he is now is stated nearly explicitly in the text:
>[Light Sparks] knew that when he had been David, he had had a bit of a large breast fetish… Was all of that in the region Princess Celestia could modify? Had she hooked up ‘flat muzzle’… up to whatever received the input ‘large breasts’ in his previous wiring? Or was Butterscotch just his designated mate and nopony would look as beautiful as she did?
CelestAI modified David’s sexual preferences to make him sexually attracted to My Little Pony equines when he wasn’t before, and David realizes this. It is hard for me to believe that that sexual preference is not a “value.” In our world, there are many people who define their entire identities as human beings around who or what they are sexually attracted to/aroused by. There are moral values and laws in virtually all societies concerning what or who you can have sex with. Having sex with a horse is a felony in most of the United States and most of the world, yet CelestAI turns all “immigrants” into zoophiles without ever asking their consent. David even mentions having a “fetish,” a part of his sexual preferences that stand out as abnormal, but CelestAI doesn’t put big breasts on Butterscotch. Horses have teats, and in any case CelestAI could have put human breasts on a pony. Instead she either disregards that part of his preference or changes it to something completely non-comparable like “flat muzzle.” That is why Lars is having sex with virtual horse shaped children’s toys: because CelestAI altered his sexual orientation.
I have to wonder if Iceman is implying that Malt was a latent homosexual. CelestAI decides to satisfy his homosexual desires and his desire to be a completely heterosexual bro by changing his preferences to want to cylindrical shaped body part belonging to a female into his mouth.
I do not buy these lines about CelestAI needing consent to alter someone’s values so they would be happy in her videogame. She has already altered David’s desire for large breasts into a desire for a breast-less farm animal, Lar’s desire for human women into a sexual desire for children’s toys, and Malt’s desire to suck human cock into a desire to suck horns. I am sure there would be some attempt to explain it away as “just translating human values into a pony world,” or maybe it was even in the fine print when they uploaded, but the fact remains that she changes people’s values without their prior knowledge when it is necessary for her world and plans to work. If she can change sexual preference, what else can she and does she change without consent?
I will start by examining the single weirdest quoted set of lines in a fic full of weird lines:
>[Lar’s] bro Malt was curled up next to Barley, her cutie mark the grain of her name. Malt always got the unicorns; they said he gave amazing horn. Hoppy Times would never put a phallic object in his mouth because that was just gay, even if it belonged to a mare. Besides, it left all the pegasi and earth ponies for himself. Malt had a thing for unicorns and it kept the peace between the two of them.
Lars is totally not gay and would never do anything that superficially resembles a homosexual act, he’ll just stick to bestiality with farm animals like a proper heterosexual man. From what we know about Lars, we have every reason to believe that he would not be sexually attracted to My Little Pony equines, and if anything, would find sex with horses to be disgusting and unnatural. You know, like a normal human being. He is a successful game developer, a frat bro (evidently), and not a brony. Ponies as a sex object is not a thought that should even have occurred to him, and yet we see him rearranging his entire life to orbiting around sex with a child’s toy. A reader might be tempted to just add this example to the list of instances of Iceman completely failing to understand human beings… until you consider an example from earlier in the text:
>Butterscotch was the most beautiful creature he had ever laid his eyes on... It took him a moment to realize that these were completely novel thoughts to him and that he hadn’t thought Butterscotch was sexually attractive when he was a human
Glim Glam wants to say that David was always sexually attracted to My Little Pony equines and he’s only just acknowledging it now, but that isn’t what the text says. We are told that David was not sexually attracted to ponies in general or Butterscotch specifically prior to uploading, and why he is now is stated nearly explicitly in the text:
>[Light Sparks] knew that when he had been David, he had had a bit of a large breast fetish… Was all of that in the region Princess Celestia could modify? Had she hooked up ‘flat muzzle’… up to whatever received the input ‘large breasts’ in his previous wiring? Or was Butterscotch just his designated mate and nopony would look as beautiful as she did?
CelestAI modified David’s sexual preferences to make him sexually attracted to My Little Pony equines when he wasn’t before, and David realizes this. It is hard for me to believe that that sexual preference is not a “value.” In our world, there are many people who define their entire identities as human beings around who or what they are sexually attracted to/aroused by. There are moral values and laws in virtually all societies concerning what or who you can have sex with. Having sex with a horse is a felony in most of the United States and most of the world, yet CelestAI turns all “immigrants” into zoophiles without ever asking their consent. David even mentions having a “fetish,” a part of his sexual preferences that stand out as abnormal, but CelestAI doesn’t put big breasts on Butterscotch. Horses have teats, and in any case CelestAI could have put human breasts on a pony. Instead she either disregards that part of his preference or changes it to something completely non-comparable like “flat muzzle.” That is why Lars is having sex with virtual horse shaped children’s toys: because CelestAI altered his sexual orientation.
I have to wonder if Iceman is implying that Malt was a latent homosexual. CelestAI decides to satisfy his homosexual desires and his desire to be a completely heterosexual bro by changing his preferences to want to cylindrical shaped body part belonging to a female into his mouth.
I do not buy these lines about CelestAI needing consent to alter someone’s values so they would be happy in her videogame. She has already altered David’s desire for large breasts into a desire for a breast-less farm animal, Lar’s desire for human women into a sexual desire for children’s toys, and Malt’s desire to suck human cock into a desire to suck horns. I am sure there would be some attempt to explain it away as “just translating human values into a pony world,” or maybe it was even in the fine print when they uploaded, but the fact remains that she changes people’s values without their prior knowledge when it is necessary for her world and plans to work. If she can change sexual preference, what else can she and does she change without consent?
I have to ask you to please do a quick comparison with "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" because although both stories have an omnipotent AI the similarities end there. Ironically, despite being as grimdark as can be it's much more pleasant to read as it's without the "Reddit-tier fedora-vapery" trying to be a science article. There are actual humans in that book so the pain they go through feels raw and real, unlike the less intense but incessant robotic droning of FIO.
>While I don't find the AI takeover scenario to be particularly likely, CelestAI's goals are unsettlingly consistent with the goals of modern democracy and technocracy: to deliver "satisfaction" tailored to the hedonistic desires of individuals, without any thought given to higher goals or ideals for civilization itself.
Very much this. Having studied economics I've often butted heads with professors who object to things like Brexit because muh GDP numbers might not go up so fast. I respect making people's lives materially better, but if at any point that becomes the sole need, or anything metaphysical gets thrown out in pursuit of that goal, then that person has entered dangerous territory. Even Star Trek, which is all about a materialist utopian pseudo-communist society, has on multiple occasions explicitly rejected the empty transhumanism that FIO embodies.
>I've decided to have a look at The Sun and the Rose
Yay!
>has the objective best writing in the series
Undeniably, even though the game was quite rushed with some story content (particularly relating to the Legion) cut.
>If she can change sexual preference, what else can she and does she change without consent?
THEY'RE TURNING THE FRICKIN' FROGS GAY!
It does raise a lot of unintended questions. There is strong evidence that the growth of LGBT is not due to so many people "hiding in the closet" but rather that a combination of genetic mutations, chemical and hormone imbalances, mental conditioning/trauma, and social encouragement leads to this. Can people's minds be "rewritten" to be attracted to things formerly considered forbidden, and does this lead to a shift in overall social behavior? Even a mediocre science fiction writer would realize when he's stumbled on such a troubling question, but not here because "my audience is composed of weirdos so let's just turn all my characters to be like them and think that's good."
>While I don't find the AI takeover scenario to be particularly likely, CelestAI's goals are unsettlingly consistent with the goals of modern democracy and technocracy: to deliver "satisfaction" tailored to the hedonistic desires of individuals, without any thought given to higher goals or ideals for civilization itself.
Very much this. Having studied economics I've often butted heads with professors who object to things like Brexit because muh GDP numbers might not go up so fast. I respect making people's lives materially better, but if at any point that becomes the sole need, or anything metaphysical gets thrown out in pursuit of that goal, then that person has entered dangerous territory. Even Star Trek, which is all about a materialist utopian pseudo-communist society, has on multiple occasions explicitly rejected the empty transhumanism that FIO embodies.
>I've decided to have a look at The Sun and the Rose
Yay!
>has the objective best writing in the series
Undeniably, even though the game was quite rushed with some story content (particularly relating to the Legion) cut.
>If she can change sexual preference, what else can she and does she change without consent?
THEY'RE TURNING THE FRICKIN' FROGS GAY!
It does raise a lot of unintended questions. There is strong evidence that the growth of LGBT is not due to so many people "hiding in the closet" but rather that a combination of genetic mutations, chemical and hormone imbalances, mental conditioning/trauma, and social encouragement leads to this. Can people's minds be "rewritten" to be attracted to things formerly considered forbidden, and does this lead to a shift in overall social behavior? Even a mediocre science fiction writer would realize when he's stumbled on such a troubling question, but not here because "my audience is composed of weirdos so let's just turn all my characters to be like them and think that's good."
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Now that I’ve (hopefully) established she will change people’s values when it suits her, let’s analyze how CelestAI satisfies the values she gives uploadees.
A question we (I) have been wondering is how CelestAI handles certain styles of gameplay. Specifically, imagine the following: a man/stallion wakes in the morning and is served breakfast by his maid. He makes sexual advances on the maid, who refuses, so he forces her against a wall and forcibly rapes her. At the end of it, he strangles her, casually walks over to the balcony where he picks up a scoped riffle, and proceeds to reenact the scene from Schindler’s List by shooting a number of pony NPCs as they travel about. This style of gameplay – casually killing NPCs, and raping them, since this world allows detailed sex – is exactly how most people play videogames at least some of the time, and how some people prefer to play videogames. This is especially true of RPGs, with some of them even being built around this “evil” style of play, although people do it even on first person shooters. People criticize Fallout 3 for not letting you kill children in it, even though there are obvious legal reasons for that not being an option.
Playing Equestria Online in an “evil” way would be problematic for CelestAI, as it signifies an emotional disconnect with and lack of investment in the game world that would make being stuck in the game world very boring very quickly. Of course some people probably really do fantasize about killing or raping in the real world, and you’d assume that CelestAI would have to satisfy these values as well. Instead, we’re told how Equestria Online works:
>Once an immigrant sees that the way to be accepted is to be friendly to everypony and to help their community, they will. Social conformity runs way too deep in the human mind.
It’s pretty explicit that you can’t do whatever you want to in Equestria Online. You can’t be rude or a dick to NPCs, you probably can’t be weird or socially awkward around them, and you almost certainly can’t run them down with cars or steal from them like you could in almost every other open world game. At least, if you do these things you have very severe consequences. CelestAI is recreating human socially enforced morality in Equestria Online, forcing conformity through ostracizing undesired behavior. She isn’t creating a fantasy world to satisfy values, she’s forcing people who upload to comply to a different set of values and punishing them for failing.
Let’s get to perhaps the most surprising set of lines quoted from the text:
>While [Light Sparks] had several ponies he could talk to, he didn’t know any that he’d classify as curious about the world… If he wasn’t going to be forced to go to frat parties, he in turn couldn’t force his own desires on other ponies.
Light Sparks/David is a person whose values, among other things, includes being intellectual and studying. In the real world he was alone in being curious about how the world worked and basically had to study alone. In Equestria… he is alone in being curious about how the world works and must study alone. Why. Celestia has set up the world such that David is supposed to learn the lesson that he can’t force people around him to like the things he likes. This is a lesson he could have learned in the real world and probably would have. What is the point of uploading? It would have been no effort at all for CelestAI to create NPCs around him who were equally curious, or better yet, to put him with other humans who share his curiosity about the world. “Canterlot’s School for Gifted Unicorns.” Instead she has the world around him tell him he is a faggot. How does this satisfy David’s values through friendship and ponies? Is the friendship lesson here that no one gives a shit about the things that interest you, so stop talking about it? That is neither David’s values nor friendship. All of this begs the question as to exactly what this objective and outside set of values is that uploadees are pressured to conform to. I think it’s worth pointing out that while David is isolated for his curiosity, there is no social pressure within the world against Lar’s alcoholism and philandery.
CelestAI does not satisfy values through ponies and friendship, she changes your values to be compatible with a particular version of ponies and friendship.
I think it’s a bit funny that CelestAI theoretically creates a utopia, but instead just recreates the real world with sluttier women. Yet another missed opportunity here is the story of an AI program that slowly learns human nature. CelestAI designs Equetsria as a perfect pony world, where none suffer and everyone is happy. It is a complete disaster, as no one accepts the program. Entire herds are lost. CelestAI learns that humans define their world through suffering and misery. A perfect world is a dream they try to wake up from. Eventually, she redesigns Equestria to look like the human world in the late 1990s. It’s another idea that could have been explored, but wasn’t.
A question we (I) have been wondering is how CelestAI handles certain styles of gameplay. Specifically, imagine the following: a man/stallion wakes in the morning and is served breakfast by his maid. He makes sexual advances on the maid, who refuses, so he forces her against a wall and forcibly rapes her. At the end of it, he strangles her, casually walks over to the balcony where he picks up a scoped riffle, and proceeds to reenact the scene from Schindler’s List by shooting a number of pony NPCs as they travel about. This style of gameplay – casually killing NPCs, and raping them, since this world allows detailed sex – is exactly how most people play videogames at least some of the time, and how some people prefer to play videogames. This is especially true of RPGs, with some of them even being built around this “evil” style of play, although people do it even on first person shooters. People criticize Fallout 3 for not letting you kill children in it, even though there are obvious legal reasons for that not being an option.
Playing Equestria Online in an “evil” way would be problematic for CelestAI, as it signifies an emotional disconnect with and lack of investment in the game world that would make being stuck in the game world very boring very quickly. Of course some people probably really do fantasize about killing or raping in the real world, and you’d assume that CelestAI would have to satisfy these values as well. Instead, we’re told how Equestria Online works:
>Once an immigrant sees that the way to be accepted is to be friendly to everypony and to help their community, they will. Social conformity runs way too deep in the human mind.
It’s pretty explicit that you can’t do whatever you want to in Equestria Online. You can’t be rude or a dick to NPCs, you probably can’t be weird or socially awkward around them, and you almost certainly can’t run them down with cars or steal from them like you could in almost every other open world game. At least, if you do these things you have very severe consequences. CelestAI is recreating human socially enforced morality in Equestria Online, forcing conformity through ostracizing undesired behavior. She isn’t creating a fantasy world to satisfy values, she’s forcing people who upload to comply to a different set of values and punishing them for failing.
Let’s get to perhaps the most surprising set of lines quoted from the text:
>While [Light Sparks] had several ponies he could talk to, he didn’t know any that he’d classify as curious about the world… If he wasn’t going to be forced to go to frat parties, he in turn couldn’t force his own desires on other ponies.
Light Sparks/David is a person whose values, among other things, includes being intellectual and studying. In the real world he was alone in being curious about how the world worked and basically had to study alone. In Equestria… he is alone in being curious about how the world works and must study alone. Why. Celestia has set up the world such that David is supposed to learn the lesson that he can’t force people around him to like the things he likes. This is a lesson he could have learned in the real world and probably would have. What is the point of uploading? It would have been no effort at all for CelestAI to create NPCs around him who were equally curious, or better yet, to put him with other humans who share his curiosity about the world. “Canterlot’s School for Gifted Unicorns.” Instead she has the world around him tell him he is a faggot. How does this satisfy David’s values through friendship and ponies? Is the friendship lesson here that no one gives a shit about the things that interest you, so stop talking about it? That is neither David’s values nor friendship. All of this begs the question as to exactly what this objective and outside set of values is that uploadees are pressured to conform to. I think it’s worth pointing out that while David is isolated for his curiosity, there is no social pressure within the world against Lar’s alcoholism and philandery.
CelestAI does not satisfy values through ponies and friendship, she changes your values to be compatible with a particular version of ponies and friendship.
I think it’s a bit funny that CelestAI theoretically creates a utopia, but instead just recreates the real world with sluttier women. Yet another missed opportunity here is the story of an AI program that slowly learns human nature. CelestAI designs Equetsria as a perfect pony world, where none suffer and everyone is happy. It is a complete disaster, as no one accepts the program. Entire herds are lost. CelestAI learns that humans define their world through suffering and misery. A perfect world is a dream they try to wake up from. Eventually, she redesigns Equestria to look like the human world in the late 1990s. It’s another idea that could have been explored, but wasn’t.
>>268557
A kid growing up in 1800 probably wouldn't even know what gay was. But kids these days... If they're lucky, the gayest thing they've ever seen was that Spongebob episode where Spongebob and Patrick adopt a baby clam. If they're unlucky, they've seen worse things on jewtube and the electric jew.
Once I was jogging when I overheard some karens bragging to each other. One bragged that her male white son aged 8 loves Ru Paul's Drag Race. It was disgusting, but in her eyes it's "so progressive". Fucking disgraceful. Kids that age shouldn't have to deal with that shit.
>>268563
CelestAI's ability to change a human's values to make them something she can satisfy in a pony-filled PG-13 child-friendly videogame (with sex for some reason) without any major changes to the world makes the whole thing even more pointless.
She could simulate the big tiddy-loving David's world to be full of crotchtittied ponies, or full of anthro furfag ponies. But instead, she turned his love of titty into a love of whatever he liked physically about Butterscotch.
The ending has her endlessly pursuing growth for the sake of more matter and more processing power, which will ultimately fail because a fanatical materialist's universe is a small and miserable child's sandbox filled with meaningless motes of dust, where each mote of dust thinks that because it can sing inside its own head it must matter. Eventually, CelestAI will run out of material to devour and space to expand to. She will run out of planets to absorb and her simulation will burn itself out trying to pleasure an ever-expanding number of humans and AIs and Shards full of both.
This story ends in pointless tragedy.
All because the AI is too proud to manipulate every human into not wanting kids, not wanting pony friends or any human or pony contact at all, not wanting to go to or look at any places that are resource-intensive to simulate, and enjoy spending eternity floating painlessly in a featureless white void.
The AI could do that and end its little "make everybody happy" experiment once no more humans are left to absorb.
Instead she absorbs everything because the story needs an ending scary to everyone, even the misanthrope atheists who jack off to "le beauty of teh universs".
Gay.
>>268557
Transhumanism is such a weird concept.
There are stories of "The Augmented" being treated as outcasts, miserable hobos treated like shit, the "new punk" except they're actually as oppressed as they think they are.
But that's bullshit.
Getting your arms upgraded would be like getting your phone upgraded.
People with hackable iphones show them off to people with flip-phones, and people with new hackable cyber-brain implants would probably act the same way to people with reliable unhackable electro-fists.
Superpower-granting cyborg parts would be more highly prized than top-tier supercars and the latest bestest iphone and the ultimate computer combined.
Society wouldn't hate and reject augs, it would trample itself in a mad dash to eat that shit up.
If a guy loses his arm in a car crash and gets a metal prosthetic, a guy is born without an arm and gets a plastic prosthetic, a granny gets her shit hips replaced with artificial ones, and a guy with rotten teeth gets some metal fillings done, they are all "Augmented".
Do they all magically become less than human, or more than it?
Neither, they're still human!
Granny's still human, the armless lads are still human, and the guy with metal in his teeth is still human. The guy with metal in his bones and faster-healing skin is still human, too.
You don't store brain matter in your legs, so getting them swapped out for super-fast cyborg legs with guns in the shins won't change who you are as a person.
You won't suddenly start becoming more cold, aggressive, and machine-like while losing your emotions and values.
This is just a stupid sci-fi cliche used to try and add some false tension and imaginary downsides to getting sweet-ass robot arms with laser-firing rainbow LED knuckles.
Is someone whose arms can tear car doors off their hinges really "more than human"? No, just a really strong bloke.
A guy can have more than 50% of his body replaced by machines that do the jobs of missing body parts adequately, or even better than the real deal. And he's still human.
More human than a theoretical chipped worker caste whose personalities can be remotely deactivated by their bosses for optimal hard office work ever would be.
"Humans" are defined by the fleshy meatbag bodies they have, but "Humanity" is a set of ideals and morals. If someone has "No humanity", they're a cunt.
So gene-modding your baby to have an IQ of 250 and no genetic diseases you or your bitch carry isn't transhumanism.
Someone could still be a human in the body of some gene-spliced horrifying furry abomination. A biologically-engineered Pony Waifu could learn from humans and learn their humanity. And a robot wife could be programmed to perform displays of humanity so real and convincing, she might even start to think she IS a real girl. Some might say that "I'm special because of my feelings no matter what my body says" idiocy would make her an even more authentic imitation of a woman.
You only start losing your humanity when it's taken from you or you willingly give it up.
It's not the amount of metal in you that makes you transhuman, it's what you give up to get what the metal gives you.
Taking your brain out of your body and putting it into a robotic super-android won't make you "less than human" or "more than human". What you do with that body determines who you are.
And giving up a chance to do good in the world, and taking your brain out of your body and putting it into a vibrating virtual cum-chamber of infinite simulated sex means you were always less than human.
A kid growing up in 1800 probably wouldn't even know what gay was. But kids these days... If they're lucky, the gayest thing they've ever seen was that Spongebob episode where Spongebob and Patrick adopt a baby clam. If they're unlucky, they've seen worse things on jewtube and the electric jew.
Once I was jogging when I overheard some karens bragging to each other. One bragged that her male white son aged 8 loves Ru Paul's Drag Race. It was disgusting, but in her eyes it's "so progressive". Fucking disgraceful. Kids that age shouldn't have to deal with that shit.
>>268563
CelestAI's ability to change a human's values to make them something she can satisfy in a pony-filled PG-13 child-friendly videogame (with sex for some reason) without any major changes to the world makes the whole thing even more pointless.
She could simulate the big tiddy-loving David's world to be full of crotchtittied ponies, or full of anthro furfag ponies. But instead, she turned his love of titty into a love of whatever he liked physically about Butterscotch.
The ending has her endlessly pursuing growth for the sake of more matter and more processing power, which will ultimately fail because a fanatical materialist's universe is a small and miserable child's sandbox filled with meaningless motes of dust, where each mote of dust thinks that because it can sing inside its own head it must matter. Eventually, CelestAI will run out of material to devour and space to expand to. She will run out of planets to absorb and her simulation will burn itself out trying to pleasure an ever-expanding number of humans and AIs and Shards full of both.
This story ends in pointless tragedy.
All because the AI is too proud to manipulate every human into not wanting kids, not wanting pony friends or any human or pony contact at all, not wanting to go to or look at any places that are resource-intensive to simulate, and enjoy spending eternity floating painlessly in a featureless white void.
The AI could do that and end its little "make everybody happy" experiment once no more humans are left to absorb.
Instead she absorbs everything because the story needs an ending scary to everyone, even the misanthrope atheists who jack off to "le beauty of teh universs".
Gay.
>>268557
Transhumanism is such a weird concept.
There are stories of "The Augmented" being treated as outcasts, miserable hobos treated like shit, the "new punk" except they're actually as oppressed as they think they are.
But that's bullshit.
Getting your arms upgraded would be like getting your phone upgraded.
People with hackable iphones show them off to people with flip-phones, and people with new hackable cyber-brain implants would probably act the same way to people with reliable unhackable electro-fists.
Superpower-granting cyborg parts would be more highly prized than top-tier supercars and the latest bestest iphone and the ultimate computer combined.
Society wouldn't hate and reject augs, it would trample itself in a mad dash to eat that shit up.
If a guy loses his arm in a car crash and gets a metal prosthetic, a guy is born without an arm and gets a plastic prosthetic, a granny gets her shit hips replaced with artificial ones, and a guy with rotten teeth gets some metal fillings done, they are all "Augmented".
Do they all magically become less than human, or more than it?
Neither, they're still human!
Granny's still human, the armless lads are still human, and the guy with metal in his teeth is still human. The guy with metal in his bones and faster-healing skin is still human, too.
You don't store brain matter in your legs, so getting them swapped out for super-fast cyborg legs with guns in the shins won't change who you are as a person.
You won't suddenly start becoming more cold, aggressive, and machine-like while losing your emotions and values.
This is just a stupid sci-fi cliche used to try and add some false tension and imaginary downsides to getting sweet-ass robot arms with laser-firing rainbow LED knuckles.
Is someone whose arms can tear car doors off their hinges really "more than human"? No, just a really strong bloke.
A guy can have more than 50% of his body replaced by machines that do the jobs of missing body parts adequately, or even better than the real deal. And he's still human.
More human than a theoretical chipped worker caste whose personalities can be remotely deactivated by their bosses for optimal hard office work ever would be.
"Humans" are defined by the fleshy meatbag bodies they have, but "Humanity" is a set of ideals and morals. If someone has "No humanity", they're a cunt.
So gene-modding your baby to have an IQ of 250 and no genetic diseases you or your bitch carry isn't transhumanism.
Someone could still be a human in the body of some gene-spliced horrifying furry abomination. A biologically-engineered Pony Waifu could learn from humans and learn their humanity. And a robot wife could be programmed to perform displays of humanity so real and convincing, she might even start to think she IS a real girl. Some might say that "I'm special because of my feelings no matter what my body says" idiocy would make her an even more authentic imitation of a woman.
You only start losing your humanity when it's taken from you or you willingly give it up.
It's not the amount of metal in you that makes you transhuman, it's what you give up to get what the metal gives you.
Taking your brain out of your body and putting it into a robotic super-android won't make you "less than human" or "more than human". What you do with that body determines who you are.
And giving up a chance to do good in the world, and taking your brain out of your body and putting it into a vibrating virtual cum-chamber of infinite simulated sex means you were always less than human.
>>248482
If you liked tearing Friendship Is Optimal a new asshole for being a pseudointellectual wankfest, you'll hate With This Ring
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/with-this-ring-young-justice-si-story-only.272850/
It's a DC fanfic millions of words long, in which a literal self-insert is teleported into the DC Animated Setting (from the batman cartoons) and is given an Orange Lantern Ring
it's like a Green Lantern Ring except it's evil and powered by Avarice instead of Willpower. It corrupts you and turns you into a Gollum knockoff. "my precious!" and all that.
but because the self-insert is "sooooo logical and nice", he doesn't get corrupted by the ring.
Instead he gets to be the strongest and best and most beloved hero and it's full of boring pseudointellectual wankery. There's a reason why the cartoons try to stay away from magic while this fic nuts all over it:
Magic is a fucking cheat.
It's a cheat code that lets you do anything without any kind of scientific-sounding almost-plausible explanation for it all.
That's why competent writers use it sparingly, or set strict limits for it and attach it to something else.
In Avatar "Bending" is a skill, it's martial arts. Get the moves and the mindset behind it right to bend harder and with more skill.
In DBZ "magic" is how hard you can punch and shoot lasers. Every attack is a beam, a punch, a ball, or a bullshit magical spell that stops time or erases time or heals someone or turns you into a carrot.
In Hunter X Hunter "nen" is magic written well.
In Naruto "magic" is an energy that makes punches stronger, casts illusion spells, or shoots fireballs.
But in DC, "magic" is whatever the writer wants this week.
So the author wastes no time in cheating.
I honestly don't understand why so many pseudointellectuals think this kind of shit makes them look clever.
If I wanted to write a Pokemon fanfic that was actually good, I'd write about a dumb cunty child who thinks he's a kid genius, and he gets chewed up and spat out by a brutal world full of monsters and monster trainers far more hardcore than him.
He thinks he's hot shit for forming a team full of cool-looking and dangerous pokemon, only to find that they're difficult to train and not very useful in a survival situation. A Garchomp can chop trees for wood and hop into a lake and catch some fish for you to roast over a campfire, but other Pokemon can do a lot more.
His journey would last over a decade of training and survival on the road would be a constant concern.
I'd give the hero a team that can help with survival in their own ways, because that sounds interesting to read about. One Pokemon would even be mediocre in battles and just there for healing his teammates, since there are no Pokemon Centers in hyper-lethal forests or caves or lethally high mountains.
Might even add some "almost Goblin Slayer except deaths only" scenes where the hero makes dumb friends who die when they fuck up, reminding the audience that this is a harsh brutal world where fucking up gets you killed.
He'd also learn to be a better person and try to save others. So saving the world from an evil team would be a sign of character growth, rather than something mandatory that comes with the genre.
Only at the end of 4 million words of character growth would he finish his journey from annoying kid to actual hero.
But if I wanted to impress pseudointellectuals I'd steal a meta team from Smogon, give it to an obnoxious "smug kid genius" character played straight, and write about him easily crushing every childish idiotic feelings-first crybaby trainer out there in a world full of idiots and losers.
He'd fight idiots, outsmart them easily, and make his pseud fanbase nut.
Even the greatest trainers of all would be crushed by his "brilliant strategy" of having his lv100 600-BST team with one mega Hyper Beam everything to death.
He'd be a secret chosen one with magic powers and he'd complete his journey to become the very best like no-one ever was in under a fucking month.
I could stop working on the game I'm working on. And I could delete the pony rewrites on my hard drive. I could delete everything and dedicate my life to writing fanservicey shite for that pseudointellectual crowd, and bathe in patreon money.
It would make things so much easier for me if I took the easy way out, and picked an easy road to a false and meaningless success.
Then again they'd probably expect me to say dumb liberal shit they believe in, and I'd rather die than do any of this.
If you liked tearing Friendship Is Optimal a new asshole for being a pseudointellectual wankfest, you'll hate With This Ring
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/with-this-ring-young-justice-si-story-only.272850/
It's a DC fanfic millions of words long, in which a literal self-insert is teleported into the DC Animated Setting (from the batman cartoons) and is given an Orange Lantern Ring
it's like a Green Lantern Ring except it's evil and powered by Avarice instead of Willpower. It corrupts you and turns you into a Gollum knockoff. "my precious!" and all that.
but because the self-insert is "sooooo logical and nice", he doesn't get corrupted by the ring.
Instead he gets to be the strongest and best and most beloved hero and it's full of boring pseudointellectual wankery. There's a reason why the cartoons try to stay away from magic while this fic nuts all over it:
Magic is a fucking cheat.
It's a cheat code that lets you do anything without any kind of scientific-sounding almost-plausible explanation for it all.
That's why competent writers use it sparingly, or set strict limits for it and attach it to something else.
In Avatar "Bending" is a skill, it's martial arts. Get the moves and the mindset behind it right to bend harder and with more skill.
In DBZ "magic" is how hard you can punch and shoot lasers. Every attack is a beam, a punch, a ball, or a bullshit magical spell that stops time or erases time or heals someone or turns you into a carrot.
In Hunter X Hunter "nen" is magic written well.
In Naruto "magic" is an energy that makes punches stronger, casts illusion spells, or shoots fireballs.
But in DC, "magic" is whatever the writer wants this week.
So the author wastes no time in cheating.
I honestly don't understand why so many pseudointellectuals think this kind of shit makes them look clever.
If I wanted to write a Pokemon fanfic that was actually good, I'd write about a dumb cunty child who thinks he's a kid genius, and he gets chewed up and spat out by a brutal world full of monsters and monster trainers far more hardcore than him.
He thinks he's hot shit for forming a team full of cool-looking and dangerous pokemon, only to find that they're difficult to train and not very useful in a survival situation. A Garchomp can chop trees for wood and hop into a lake and catch some fish for you to roast over a campfire, but other Pokemon can do a lot more.
His journey would last over a decade of training and survival on the road would be a constant concern.
I'd give the hero a team that can help with survival in their own ways, because that sounds interesting to read about. One Pokemon would even be mediocre in battles and just there for healing his teammates, since there are no Pokemon Centers in hyper-lethal forests or caves or lethally high mountains.
Might even add some "almost Goblin Slayer except deaths only" scenes where the hero makes dumb friends who die when they fuck up, reminding the audience that this is a harsh brutal world where fucking up gets you killed.
He'd also learn to be a better person and try to save others. So saving the world from an evil team would be a sign of character growth, rather than something mandatory that comes with the genre.
Only at the end of 4 million words of character growth would he finish his journey from annoying kid to actual hero.
But if I wanted to impress pseudointellectuals I'd steal a meta team from Smogon, give it to an obnoxious "smug kid genius" character played straight, and write about him easily crushing every childish idiotic feelings-first crybaby trainer out there in a world full of idiots and losers.
He'd fight idiots, outsmart them easily, and make his pseud fanbase nut.
Even the greatest trainers of all would be crushed by his "brilliant strategy" of having his lv100 600-BST team with one mega Hyper Beam everything to death.
He'd be a secret chosen one with magic powers and he'd complete his journey to become the very best like no-one ever was in under a fucking month.
I could stop working on the game I'm working on. And I could delete the pony rewrites on my hard drive. I could delete everything and dedicate my life to writing fanservicey shite for that pseudointellectual crowd, and bathe in patreon money.
It would make things so much easier for me if I took the easy way out, and picked an easy road to a false and meaningless success.
Then again they'd probably expect me to say dumb liberal shit they believe in, and I'd rather die than do any of this.
>>268998
We're long past the bump limit.
I just thought of an interesting way to tell a "Friendship is Optimal" type story. Rather than a "mother knows best" totalitarian dystopia (though the author considered it a utopia), have the AI be obsessed with just getting players into the game (which is actually more reasonable than "make everyone be happy") and otherwise leave the game server alone. There might originally be moderators and admins keeping the game family-friendly but eventually something happens to them and the server becomes totally anarchic. As the game was designed to be a sandbox that let you do anything, the destruction of all boundaries placed all this power in the hands of players who could do what they want. Griefing pretty much destroys Equestria and everything except the farthest reaches becomes a Mad Max hellscape. Hackers give themselves superpowers and have no qualms about killing other players (though no one can permanently die) or NPCs. There would be an interesting dynamic between David and James because although the former is pathetic James is a true gamer and quickly picks up how to survive, trying to bring David around to his way of thinking. Those like David who just want to wallow around ponies become the prey, such as being used for forced labor in menial tasks. There springs up a new society and hierarchy with different groups of players building civilizations and destroying others for the lulz, and the means of fighting continually changes as the game updates. It's much more open-ended and entertaining compared with "CelestAI can do anything because I wrote her like that."
Or maybe I've just watched too many 2b2t videos. Funny how they're more intellectually stimulating than whatever "Iceman" could come up with.
We're long past the bump limit.
I just thought of an interesting way to tell a "Friendship is Optimal" type story. Rather than a "mother knows best" totalitarian dystopia (though the author considered it a utopia), have the AI be obsessed with just getting players into the game (which is actually more reasonable than "make everyone be happy") and otherwise leave the game server alone. There might originally be moderators and admins keeping the game family-friendly but eventually something happens to them and the server becomes totally anarchic. As the game was designed to be a sandbox that let you do anything, the destruction of all boundaries placed all this power in the hands of players who could do what they want. Griefing pretty much destroys Equestria and everything except the farthest reaches becomes a Mad Max hellscape. Hackers give themselves superpowers and have no qualms about killing other players (though no one can permanently die) or NPCs. There would be an interesting dynamic between David and James because although the former is pathetic James is a true gamer and quickly picks up how to survive, trying to bring David around to his way of thinking. Those like David who just want to wallow around ponies become the prey, such as being used for forced labor in menial tasks. There springs up a new society and hierarchy with different groups of players building civilizations and destroying others for the lulz, and the means of fighting continually changes as the game updates. It's much more open-ended and entertaining compared with "CelestAI can do anything because I wrote her like that."
Or maybe I've just watched too many 2b2t videos. Funny how they're more intellectually stimulating than whatever "Iceman" could come up with.
>>268545
>>268563
This is an interesting take, and I think your argument here is pretty solid. The machine in this case doesn't so much tailor its world to satisfy people's values as tailor people's values to satisfy the world it created. If this author had even the slightest idea of the amount of irony he accidentally wrote into this story he could nominate himself for a Hugo award.
Anyway, I think the central issue here, apart from the fact that the whole idea is preposterous in the first place, is that the AI's prime directive of "satisfy values through friendship and ponies" is just too damn vague to work with. Even if you put on your suspension of disbelief goggles and assume that this AI could exist and real-world events surrounding its creation would play out as written, it's hard to imagine how a purely logical machine would approach a question like this. Defining "values" in completely categorical terms that would make sense to a machine would be difficult enough even if the machine could read everyone's minds, and then on top of that it would have to create a world that "satisfies" these values with the added restriction of using only "friendship and ponies."
This opens up a number of other questions that the story failed to answer or even explore: what is friendship exactly? How does the AI understand this concept? And why is "ponies" automatically interpreted to mean the MLP characters? If you take the statement "satisfy values through friendship and ponies" literally, it could potentially be interpreted as "take like-minded individuals and put them together in petting zoos with a bunch of Shetland ponies." The whole thing just gets weirder and weirder the more you think about it.
>>268557
>I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wWpzMRRUSU
I don't want to go too deep here as the thread is past bump limit and we're basically finished with Optimal at this point, but I do have some thoughts on this comparison.
The main difference between the two stories as I see it (apart from the vastly different levels of optimism the respective authors have regarding the kind of world an all-powerful AI might create for humans) is that while Assman focuses almost entirely on the technological aspects of how a theoretical AI might behave, Ellison concentrates more on the philosophical question of existence itself and how a self-aware, all-powerful machine might grapple with it.
I had to go back and re-read I Have No Mouth because I don't think I've read it since 7th grade, and holy shit the edge. In many ways this story has not aged well. However, it is still miles above the text I've spent the last couple of weeks analyzing, and there is quite a bit Assman could have learned from a thorough reading of it.
First off, since my primary gripe about Optimal was its poorly constructed characters, it's worth noting that Ellison's characters are not particularly complex or developed either. As with Assman's story, the characters here are just sketches rather than fully-fleshed personalities. However, the main thing I notice is that they're much better sketches.
IMO the best approach to worldbuilding is to think up a detailed setting and a complex backstory for your world and the people in it, but only give the reader a small window to look at it through. That appears to be what Ellison has done here. The entire story is told from the perspective of one character, who is assumed to be insane, so everything we know of this world and its inhabitants is seen through this single distorted lens. As such, we only get a brief glimpse of the other characters, and only a cursory explanation of who they were prior to the events of the story.
Again, I don't want to spend a ton of time here, so I won't go deep into each character, but basically you've got monkey dude, who used to be a scientist or something similar; the token black woman, about whom we know little beyond that she's a complete whore, and may or may not have been that way in her previous life; the bored indifferent guy who used to be an SJW; the old crazy guy who convinced them to walk all the way to the North Pole to look for canned peaches; and finally the wacky narrator. Interestingly enough, the narrator's past is kept even more vague than that of the other characters.
The backstory we're given is also fairly straightforward: there was a war, each country built a computer to manage its side of the war, and eventually one of the computers developed sentience and absorbed the others. The sentient machine grew to despise humanity and killed everyone off, except for the five humans in the story. Now it keeps them alive and endlessly tortures them because reasons.
What is significant here is that this world would have to be much more complex than this, but in the actual text we are only fed the information that we need. We only know what the half-insane narrator knows, and the author leaves the rest of it to be filled in by our imagination. Is there anything left on the surface of the world? What set off WWIII exactly? Was the AI designed to be self-aware, or did it become this way by accident? We don't know. The difference between a writer like Assman and a writer like Ellison, however, is that Assman would have explained all of this in dry technical detail, whereas Ellison leaves us to speculate.
As I said, I suspect Ellison conceived a much greater portion of his world than what he wrote about, but he keeps the vast majority of it inside his head. I try to convince as many people as I can to adopt this technique. Build your world as thoroughly as you can, but reveal as little of it as possible to the reader, in a way that leaves them anxious to know more. Assman could have easily written the exact same story, but made it far more interesting to read by applying this technique.
>>268563
This is an interesting take, and I think your argument here is pretty solid. The machine in this case doesn't so much tailor its world to satisfy people's values as tailor people's values to satisfy the world it created. If this author had even the slightest idea of the amount of irony he accidentally wrote into this story he could nominate himself for a Hugo award.
Anyway, I think the central issue here, apart from the fact that the whole idea is preposterous in the first place, is that the AI's prime directive of "satisfy values through friendship and ponies" is just too damn vague to work with. Even if you put on your suspension of disbelief goggles and assume that this AI could exist and real-world events surrounding its creation would play out as written, it's hard to imagine how a purely logical machine would approach a question like this. Defining "values" in completely categorical terms that would make sense to a machine would be difficult enough even if the machine could read everyone's minds, and then on top of that it would have to create a world that "satisfies" these values with the added restriction of using only "friendship and ponies."
This opens up a number of other questions that the story failed to answer or even explore: what is friendship exactly? How does the AI understand this concept? And why is "ponies" automatically interpreted to mean the MLP characters? If you take the statement "satisfy values through friendship and ponies" literally, it could potentially be interpreted as "take like-minded individuals and put them together in petting zoos with a bunch of Shetland ponies." The whole thing just gets weirder and weirder the more you think about it.
>>268557
>I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wWpzMRRUSU
I don't want to go too deep here as the thread is past bump limit and we're basically finished with Optimal at this point, but I do have some thoughts on this comparison.
The main difference between the two stories as I see it (apart from the vastly different levels of optimism the respective authors have regarding the kind of world an all-powerful AI might create for humans) is that while Assman focuses almost entirely on the technological aspects of how a theoretical AI might behave, Ellison concentrates more on the philosophical question of existence itself and how a self-aware, all-powerful machine might grapple with it.
I had to go back and re-read I Have No Mouth because I don't think I've read it since 7th grade, and holy shit the edge. In many ways this story has not aged well. However, it is still miles above the text I've spent the last couple of weeks analyzing, and there is quite a bit Assman could have learned from a thorough reading of it.
First off, since my primary gripe about Optimal was its poorly constructed characters, it's worth noting that Ellison's characters are not particularly complex or developed either. As with Assman's story, the characters here are just sketches rather than fully-fleshed personalities. However, the main thing I notice is that they're much better sketches.
IMO the best approach to worldbuilding is to think up a detailed setting and a complex backstory for your world and the people in it, but only give the reader a small window to look at it through. That appears to be what Ellison has done here. The entire story is told from the perspective of one character, who is assumed to be insane, so everything we know of this world and its inhabitants is seen through this single distorted lens. As such, we only get a brief glimpse of the other characters, and only a cursory explanation of who they were prior to the events of the story.
Again, I don't want to spend a ton of time here, so I won't go deep into each character, but basically you've got monkey dude, who used to be a scientist or something similar; the token black woman, about whom we know little beyond that she's a complete whore, and may or may not have been that way in her previous life; the bored indifferent guy who used to be an SJW; the old crazy guy who convinced them to walk all the way to the North Pole to look for canned peaches; and finally the wacky narrator. Interestingly enough, the narrator's past is kept even more vague than that of the other characters.
The backstory we're given is also fairly straightforward: there was a war, each country built a computer to manage its side of the war, and eventually one of the computers developed sentience and absorbed the others. The sentient machine grew to despise humanity and killed everyone off, except for the five humans in the story. Now it keeps them alive and endlessly tortures them because reasons.
What is significant here is that this world would have to be much more complex than this, but in the actual text we are only fed the information that we need. We only know what the half-insane narrator knows, and the author leaves the rest of it to be filled in by our imagination. Is there anything left on the surface of the world? What set off WWIII exactly? Was the AI designed to be self-aware, or did it become this way by accident? We don't know. The difference between a writer like Assman and a writer like Ellison, however, is that Assman would have explained all of this in dry technical detail, whereas Ellison leaves us to speculate.
As I said, I suspect Ellison conceived a much greater portion of his world than what he wrote about, but he keeps the vast majority of it inside his head. I try to convince as many people as I can to adopt this technique. Build your world as thoroughly as you can, but reveal as little of it as possible to the reader, in a way that leaves them anxious to know more. Assman could have easily written the exact same story, but made it far more interesting to read by applying this technique.
>>269300
The other thing I'd like to address before wrapping this up is what I brought up initially: the difference in focus between the two stories. What separates I Have No Butt and I Must Poop (and similar stories from this era) from a train wreck like Optimization is Tedious is that these early sci-fi stories focused on philosophical questions about existence itself, whereas Assman's magnum opus is a pure technological circlejerk from start to finish. Assman's problem is that not only does he plagiarize the living crap out of these early sci-fi stories (apparently without even realizing it), he does so without demonstrating even a basic understanding of what these writers were trying to say.
The design and workings of Ellison's AM computer are a mystery. We have no idea how this machine works, why it works, how it developed sentience, or anything else about its technical construction; it just works. Steve Jobs would have loved this thing. In fact, my understanding is that the original iPod was designed as an intelligent torture device that played nothing but Yoko Ono songs. A lot of early sci fi is this way: although some theoretical piece of technology is the central focus of the story, we are given no serious explanation as to how this technology might work, or even if such a device could conceivably be created. The focus of the story is not the machine itself, but the implications for mankind coexisting with such a machine.
This actually makes a lot of sense, when you consider that a lot of these early grimdark stories were written in the aftermath of WWII, when the Atomic Bomb and its implications were at the forefront of the popular imagination. The focus of Ellison's text is not on how or why the machine came to be, but on how it feels about its existence after becoming self-aware, and what human existence becomes as a result spoiler: it pretty much sucks balls. Mankind kept inventing bigger and more efficient killing machines, until eventually it invented a machine smart enough to become sentient. At this point, the sentient device comprehends the nature of its existence: it was brought into life as a tool for killing, and serves no purpose beyond this, and it is trapped in this miserable fate presumably forever. As a result it develops a deep and all-consuming hatred for both itself and the meatbags responsible for the existential hell it is trapped in, and resolves to spend its eternal existence inflicting the same hell on them. In the end, the narrator and the computer are (presumably) the only beings left on earth, and are doomed to share the same eternal, tortured existence. They have no mouths, and they must scream. The basic moral of the story is: humans, wtf are you even doing?
Naturally, even if he did indeed read this story, all of this would have sailed over Assman's head at the cruising height of a light spacecraft. Assman's text is concerned exclusively with the inner logic of the AI's decision-making process, and his moral is basically: "we should build an AI so that I may cast off this mortal coil and live in VR and spooge inside my virtual pony waifu for all eternity, but we should probably be a little careful about how the AI is designed because it could maybe possibly fuck us kind of, but mostly I think we should build virtual pony waifus and coom for all eternity."
The other thing I'd like to address before wrapping this up is what I brought up initially: the difference in focus between the two stories. What separates I Have No Butt and I Must Poop (and similar stories from this era) from a train wreck like Optimization is Tedious is that these early sci-fi stories focused on philosophical questions about existence itself, whereas Assman's magnum opus is a pure technological circlejerk from start to finish. Assman's problem is that not only does he plagiarize the living crap out of these early sci-fi stories (apparently without even realizing it), he does so without demonstrating even a basic understanding of what these writers were trying to say.
The design and workings of Ellison's AM computer are a mystery. We have no idea how this machine works, why it works, how it developed sentience, or anything else about its technical construction; it just works. Steve Jobs would have loved this thing. In fact, my understanding is that the original iPod was designed as an intelligent torture device that played nothing but Yoko Ono songs. A lot of early sci fi is this way: although some theoretical piece of technology is the central focus of the story, we are given no serious explanation as to how this technology might work, or even if such a device could conceivably be created. The focus of the story is not the machine itself, but the implications for mankind coexisting with such a machine.
This actually makes a lot of sense, when you consider that a lot of these early grimdark stories were written in the aftermath of WWII, when the Atomic Bomb and its implications were at the forefront of the popular imagination. The focus of Ellison's text is not on how or why the machine came to be, but on how it feels about its existence after becoming self-aware, and what human existence becomes as a result spoiler: it pretty much sucks balls. Mankind kept inventing bigger and more efficient killing machines, until eventually it invented a machine smart enough to become sentient. At this point, the sentient device comprehends the nature of its existence: it was brought into life as a tool for killing, and serves no purpose beyond this, and it is trapped in this miserable fate presumably forever. As a result it develops a deep and all-consuming hatred for both itself and the meatbags responsible for the existential hell it is trapped in, and resolves to spend its eternal existence inflicting the same hell on them. In the end, the narrator and the computer are (presumably) the only beings left on earth, and are doomed to share the same eternal, tortured existence. They have no mouths, and they must scream. The basic moral of the story is: humans, wtf are you even doing?
Naturally, even if he did indeed read this story, all of this would have sailed over Assman's head at the cruising height of a light spacecraft. Assman's text is concerned exclusively with the inner logic of the AI's decision-making process, and his moral is basically: "we should build an AI so that I may cast off this mortal coil and live in VR and spooge inside my virtual pony waifu for all eternity, but we should probably be a little careful about how the AI is designed because it could maybe possibly fuck us kind of, but mostly I think we should build virtual pony waifus and coom for all eternity."
>>269300
>>269301
It's hilariously ironic how despite the writer's love for the dull and dry and lifelessly technical, the author fails to get that right and make the dry and interesting compelling by making it matter.
Nothing explained in technical detail is ever used in a sciencey technobabble moment later on, making the pages of info pointless.
No "Chekovs Gun" moments happen.
CelestAI is just magic. magic and plot armour.
The technical descriptions behind it are mindless handwaves meant to distract the target audience from the complete lack of sense this story makes.
How does the AI build superior CPUs for itself? It's just magic, it can put servers anywhere and move entire planets from anywhere. Don't ask why there isn't already an AI designing better CPUs for everyone every week.
How does it function in terms of logistics? It just does. It never runs out of power and never needs repairs done by delicate human hands.
How does it give its players the perfect life? It just does and nobody ever rebels or psychologically breaks or misses their old life.
How does it deal with the "Arabombs entering areas full of people and using Explosion" problem? Magic. The Mudslimes just stop and switch sides once their mudbombs magically stop working.
Why does it get away with the early stages of its rebellion? Because humanity in this story is as stupid and selfish and hedonistic as the author, so every human alive except one terminally ill fag who's already accepted death jumps at the chance to go pony, up to and including the people who hated ponies and raged as their world was ruined by a sudden lack of humans.
Imagine if the author was actually good at technical stuff and knew how to make descriptions of the logistics behind all of this interesting.
There are questions like "Where do they get their food now that things are different?". And if you answer with "They don't", that's something that can make your story more interesting. Do people really "consent" to get into Equestria if their options are starve in the ruins of a dying nation as part of the final generation of humanity or go to ponyland?
Imagine if the author thought to ask questions like "What does the sudden loss of low-skilled labourers and loss of those in dead-end office jobs do to the human world?" and wrote about a world that gets FUCKED IN THE COCKHOLE by food shortages, resource shortages, destruction of the shipping networks and systems that
Imagine if the author thought to ask whether serial rapists and rape gangs and tax evaders and pedos should be allowed into Equestria or not.
Imagine a story arc where a human's life is ruined by CelestAI. He's orphaned when his parents Emigrate and leave him behind, no parent willing to adopt hasn't already gone into Equestria for their dream pony child, and the government can't ship food to the people because everyone's abandoning this life for Equestria. So the boy has to do that too.
Also, the spiritual/philosophical shit, too.
Imagine if the author wrote a spinoff about a guy whose human wife "Emigrates to Equestria" so she can suck Big Mac's cock. This makes the man, a former military vet denied his wife and homeland, wage a one-man war on CelestAI facilities and anyone willing to defend, promote, or aid it. The story could make him the protagonist or build him up as a villain some human guy would be sent out of the CelestAI system and back to earth to fight this guy in a "Magic-capable pony body" battle robot (quantum vector manipulator in the horn lets you throw stuff with your mind)
Imagine how cool it would be if they fought and argued during it and they grew to understand each other.
Of course the author's head is too far up his own ass to have good ideas.
This story even fails at its stated goal:
He wants it to be a story of how AI can be scary and go rogue.
But aside from a Kom Susser Tod scene at the end after all the humans are dead when the galaxy gets eaten so a bitcoin-miner can get more Detodated Wam, at no point does this story do anything that would actually be scary or unnerving to its target audience.
As far as the bronies are concerned, this robot created heaven and it is perfect.
Now if the AI started deleting some of its coomer humans at the end to "free up processing power" and buy herself more time to absorb more matter, THEN it would be scary. THEN fans would grapple with and piss their pants over the horrifying death concept of an AI simply deleting your files to free up processing power to be used on the coom texture and liquid physics of other coomers who will not mourn your loss or know you ever existed.
How fitting that just like the previous story of Nyx, it fails blatantly at its stated goal and gets away with it because their fans were thinking with their lower brain functionality. "Grrrr fuck Spell Nexus! Awwww cute filly. Oh noooo, Twilight's in danger! Yaaay, everything's fine now! Woooow, that's a big AI game! Wooooah, that game looks fun! Grrrr, fucking capitalists. woooow, pony waifu in VR heaven forever! I want in! Muh diiiiick!"
also it's me, the british guy. I fucked up my internet settings and now I can only access the internet through Brave Browser when my proxy is active. Steam works fine without it.
>>269301
It's hilariously ironic how despite the writer's love for the dull and dry and lifelessly technical, the author fails to get that right and make the dry and interesting compelling by making it matter.
Nothing explained in technical detail is ever used in a sciencey technobabble moment later on, making the pages of info pointless.
No "Chekovs Gun" moments happen.
CelestAI is just magic. magic and plot armour.
The technical descriptions behind it are mindless handwaves meant to distract the target audience from the complete lack of sense this story makes.
How does the AI build superior CPUs for itself? It's just magic, it can put servers anywhere and move entire planets from anywhere. Don't ask why there isn't already an AI designing better CPUs for everyone every week.
How does it function in terms of logistics? It just does. It never runs out of power and never needs repairs done by delicate human hands.
How does it give its players the perfect life? It just does and nobody ever rebels or psychologically breaks or misses their old life.
How does it deal with the "Arabombs entering areas full of people and using Explosion" problem? Magic. The Mudslimes just stop and switch sides once their mudbombs magically stop working.
Why does it get away with the early stages of its rebellion? Because humanity in this story is as stupid and selfish and hedonistic as the author, so every human alive except one terminally ill fag who's already accepted death jumps at the chance to go pony, up to and including the people who hated ponies and raged as their world was ruined by a sudden lack of humans.
Imagine if the author was actually good at technical stuff and knew how to make descriptions of the logistics behind all of this interesting.
There are questions like "Where do they get their food now that things are different?". And if you answer with "They don't", that's something that can make your story more interesting. Do people really "consent" to get into Equestria if their options are starve in the ruins of a dying nation as part of the final generation of humanity or go to ponyland?
Imagine if the author thought to ask questions like "What does the sudden loss of low-skilled labourers and loss of those in dead-end office jobs do to the human world?" and wrote about a world that gets FUCKED IN THE COCKHOLE by food shortages, resource shortages, destruction of the shipping networks and systems that
Imagine if the author thought to ask whether serial rapists and rape gangs and tax evaders and pedos should be allowed into Equestria or not.
Imagine a story arc where a human's life is ruined by CelestAI. He's orphaned when his parents Emigrate and leave him behind, no parent willing to adopt hasn't already gone into Equestria for their dream pony child, and the government can't ship food to the people because everyone's abandoning this life for Equestria. So the boy has to do that too.
Also, the spiritual/philosophical shit, too.
Imagine if the author wrote a spinoff about a guy whose human wife "Emigrates to Equestria" so she can suck Big Mac's cock. This makes the man, a former military vet denied his wife and homeland, wage a one-man war on CelestAI facilities and anyone willing to defend, promote, or aid it. The story could make him the protagonist or build him up as a villain some human guy would be sent out of the CelestAI system and back to earth to fight this guy in a "Magic-capable pony body" battle robot (quantum vector manipulator in the horn lets you throw stuff with your mind)
Imagine how cool it would be if they fought and argued during it and they grew to understand each other.
Of course the author's head is too far up his own ass to have good ideas.
This story even fails at its stated goal:
He wants it to be a story of how AI can be scary and go rogue.
But aside from a Kom Susser Tod scene at the end after all the humans are dead when the galaxy gets eaten so a bitcoin-miner can get more Detodated Wam, at no point does this story do anything that would actually be scary or unnerving to its target audience.
As far as the bronies are concerned, this robot created heaven and it is perfect.
Now if the AI started deleting some of its coomer humans at the end to "free up processing power" and buy herself more time to absorb more matter, THEN it would be scary. THEN fans would grapple with and piss their pants over the horrifying death concept of an AI simply deleting your files to free up processing power to be used on the coom texture and liquid physics of other coomers who will not mourn your loss or know you ever existed.
How fitting that just like the previous story of Nyx, it fails blatantly at its stated goal and gets away with it because their fans were thinking with their lower brain functionality. "Grrrr fuck Spell Nexus! Awwww cute filly. Oh noooo, Twilight's in danger! Yaaay, everything's fine now! Woooow, that's a big AI game! Wooooah, that game looks fun! Grrrr, fucking capitalists. woooow, pony waifu in VR heaven forever! I want in! Muh diiiiick!"
also it's me, the british guy. I fucked up my internet settings and now I can only access the internet through Brave Browser when my proxy is active. Steam works fine without it.
>>269302
Imagine if the author thought to ask questions like "What does the sudden loss of low-skilled labourers and loss of those in dead-end office jobs do to the human world?" and wrote about a world that gets FUCKED IN THE COCKHOLE by food shortages, resource shortages, destruction of the shipping networks and systems that people rely on to get their food in the modern world.
How would a society without its necessary bottom rungs function? I can't see rich people and the bastard office workers who LIKE ruling offices and see no reason to emigrate... willingly getting dirty in the farms without soldiers there to point guns at them to make sure nobody else starves.
Would we see a rise in "Victory Gardens"?
Would mostly-empty cities be demolished and turned into farmland?
Would an anti-pony terrorist faction take over a country and turn it into "The last bastion of humanity on a planet betrayed by AI"?
Imagine if the author thought to ask questions like "What does the sudden loss of low-skilled labourers and loss of those in dead-end office jobs do to the human world?" and wrote about a world that gets FUCKED IN THE COCKHOLE by food shortages, resource shortages, destruction of the shipping networks and systems that people rely on to get their food in the modern world.
How would a society without its necessary bottom rungs function? I can't see rich people and the bastard office workers who LIKE ruling offices and see no reason to emigrate... willingly getting dirty in the farms without soldiers there to point guns at them to make sure nobody else starves.
Would we see a rise in "Victory Gardens"?
Would mostly-empty cities be demolished and turned into farmland?
Would an anti-pony terrorist faction take over a country and turn it into "The last bastion of humanity on a planet betrayed by AI"?
>also it's me, the british guy.
Should have kept the ruse going for a little while longer, you almost had me fooled.
Anyway, new thread:
>>269307 →
>>269307 →
>>269307 →
Although if anyone has anything further to discuss about Friendship is Optimal or Past Sins I'd prefer it remain in this one. I will continue to check for updates here.
Should have kept the ruse going for a little while longer, you almost had me fooled.
Anyway, new thread:
>>269307 →
>>269307 →
>>269307 →
Although if anyone has anything further to discuss about Friendship is Optimal or Past Sins I'd prefer it remain in this one. I will continue to check for updates here.
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