/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>304714

>Hellhounds. I recalled Homage, as DJ Pon3, warning ponies about hellhounds in the stretch between Manehattan and Fillydelphia. I’d been picturing rabid dogs, like the ones Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup had, only vicious. Possibly overgrown and mutated, like the bloodwings. Sure, the first time I heard of a hellhound, I learned that just one could take out a wagon train of slavers. But then, so could I. And I was hardly frightening.
For once, the author actually provides some explanation and description of a strange kind of monster we are about to encounter, instead of just dumping in something called a "hellhound" without bothering to tell us what it is. Littlepoop is unfamiliar with such creatures, and here we see her speculating on what they might be.

Unfortunately, the actual comparisons here leave something to be desired. For one thing, there's this:

>I’d been picturing rabid dogs, like the ones Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup had, only vicious.
Littlepoop does not know Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup; she has never met them, and has never seen their dogs. She just heard them being discussed on the radio. There is no basis for comparison here; for all she knows, their dogs actually are hellhouds.

There is also this:

>Possibly overgrown and mutated, like the bloodwings.
This just reminds us that the author never bothered to explain just what the fuck a "bloodwing" is either. We've been able to more or less piece together that they are some sort of giant bat, but we still don't know just how big "overgrown" is exactly, or in what specific way they are "mutated."

Finally, there's this:

>Sure, the first time I heard of a hellhound, I learned that just one could take out a wagon train of slavers. But then, so could I. And I was hardly frightening.
When exactly was the first time she ever heard of a hellhound? Where does she get any of her information from? On the one hand, she doesn't know what these things are; on the other, she seems to have heard from somewhere that they can "take out a wagon train of slavers," but didn't think that it would be worth prompting this mystery source for more information. Also, her false humility is really getting annoying.

Anyway, SteelHooves and Calamity fill the group in on what the hellhounds are. Apparently, they are the wasteland's most dangerous creature, and SteelHooves remarks that he would rather fight an alicorn. However, beyond this, their explanation is vague and rambling; it takes many paragraphs for either of them to get to the point.

The text veers off onto a weird tangent about Splendid Valley, which itself veers off onto several smaller tangents about the location of the valley and its purpose, as well as something called Maripony (this may have been mentioned already, but if it was something important it didn't stick in my mind).

>While hellhounds had not struck much of a note in my imagination, a terrifying specter of Splendid Valley had been painted in my mind by all the dark rumors and foreboding mentions of the place.
To my recollection, Splendid Valley has been mentioned exactly once: when LP noticed a painting depicting it in Homage's athenaeum and asked her about it. If it's meant to be a major location, with lots of dark and foreboding rumors circulating about it, we really should have heard more about it by now. It's the damned broadcast towers all over again.

Anyway, from what we're able to eventually piece together from the author's incoherent rambling and subject-jumping, the hellhounds used to be the Diamond Dogs. They were the original inhabitants of Splendid Valley but were ordered to clear out because Edgequestria needed their gem mines to make nuclear weapons or something. However, they decided to ignore the order, or they came back, or something; then, something something bombs went off, and something something nuclear waste or radiation or something, and then the Diamond Dogs mutated into gigantic scary versions of themselves. In addition to being big and scary, they can also burrow underneath the ground and use weapons. They are also supposed to be highly intelligent.

I'm actually going to give the author a few points here, simply because for once he attempts to foreshadow the appearance of a monster. Moreover, he actually gives us a decent idea of what sort of monster we should expect, instead of just unceremoniously dumping some poorly described creature into the story out of absolutely nowhere.

Page break. Presumably to avoid hellhounds, the group decides to set down on the roof of an old power plant. The author actually provides some rather nice, visually striking imagery of the ruined structure, and the power lines running off into the distance.

Even though they are only here to swap out their spark batteries, LP naturally decides to pick the lock of a nearby tower and go exploring. How did I know they weren't going to make it to Fillydelphia without being pulled off on at least one pointless side quest?

Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that the chapters from here on out are all obscenely long. Most of the chapters we've read so far have averaged between 2,000 and 5,000 words; however, I've glanced at the word counts for the chapters we have yet to read, and there is only one (Chapter 35) that is less than 10,000 words in length. Most of them are around 15,000 words, with a couple breaking the 20,000 or even 30,000 word barrier. Chapter 37 is a bloated 51,139 words long; literally long enough to be a self-contained novel. I find myself fondly reminiscing about my reactions to the length of Nigel's Glimmer Vs. Silver chapter. We've got a long, arduous journey ahead of us, but I'll try to move as quickly as I can.

>>304717
Good luck GlimGlam

>>304653 →
>>304716 →
>To both
You have to start somewhere. That is the dread secret everyone knows. The one other thing is to do it.
Oh and fuck loads of marketing, and selling.
That said there are a variety of methods to hammering shit out in steady timeframe. This is a Half remembered structure.
Basically at every step take a break. A day long break. Also more heads together can point out things.
1. Idea time and Research
2.Write a plan
3. Write the shitdraft (This is only putting ideas on paper)
4. Look at that see what the fuck is going on. Write the first draft.
5. Read the first draft, re arrange as necessary
6. Refine the ideas. Have them flow together.
7. Repeat multiple times
8. Edit
9. Edit some more.
10. Read analytically, fix any flaws (take note)
10 and a half (write other drafts)
11. Write the final draft
12. Edit final draft
13. Double check is has everything.
14. ??? (Probably fuck tons of marketing) (As in this should eat 90% of your time)
15. Profit.

>>304717
Good luck, and thank you for making it this far.

When it comes to the "horror" potential of hellhounds as they're written so far I don't think Kkat did it right. How many horror movies go out of their way to keep their monsters in the shadows until it's time for their big reveal? These characters know exactly what they are and spell it out for the audience before it happens. Where's the mystery? Nobody's knowledge of this is incomplete.
It's not like there's a scene where Steelhooves says some rumors about shit that killed some fellow Steel Rangers, LP mentions a warning Homage gave her about hellhounds, Calamity talks about the bullshit Starship Poopers Movie style intel he was given in the Enclave that claimed a Hellhound is a small and weak pathetic creature because propaganda, Steelhooves brings up what he remembers of the Diamond Dogs from before the war, Velvet says "I don't believe the diamond dogs could possibly get shoved off their land because that is uncharacteristically mean for poners whose pacifism killed them" and some "crazy old coot" npc has a retard moment and freaks out while exaggerating everything about the hellhounds only for a surprise attack to seemingly prove him right at first.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has some excellent horror segments before many fights that build on the horror of fighting enemies with weird supernatural bullshit powers and the mystery of not knowing how to beat it or how it works and the tension of having to survive all sorts of horrible scenarios. Dealing with a demon doll or avril latrine's skater boy or a hairy bitch is bad enough but a shapeshifting foe that could be anywhere? A timestopping foe that could do anything in stopped time? The ghost of card games past from the future? The simultaneous algaepocalypse from one gay and the ground softening from the other gay?
Characters expositing exactly what the upcoming monsters are like doesn't seem like good horror writing for increasing the terror and anticipation.

>>304714
>So far, Red Eye seems like a pretty shitty propagandist. Usually, the idea is to gloss over whatever horrible thing your regime is doing or else just not mention it, and focus instead on hyping up your accomplishments; either that or just flat out make stuff up.
I think I can explain this. Though I'd have to go comparing the texts to be absolutely sure, I believe Red Eye's radio propaganda is based directly on the radio propaganda broadcast by the Enclave in Fallout 3. In the game, the Enclave propaganda channel is run by (self-appointed) President John Henry Eden, who tries very hard to come across as an old-timey american patriot recalling the (obviously idealized) good old days from before the war. Supposedly these broadcasts were based on the "fireside chats" given by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

For example, here's a transcript of one of his broadcasts:
>"We live in an age of poverty, greed, violence, destruction. Indeed, the very seat of the federal government, Washington D.C., has been reduced to what is now known as the "Capital Wasteland." The Capital Wasteland... How did it come to this, America? How did your leaders allow the most powerful nation on Earth… to die? The answer is really quite simple: Incompetence. Incompetence at the highest echelons of power. We put our trust, our faith, in halfwits. Our intrepid leaders had everything they wanted! Power. Wealth. Prestige. And it made them lazy, America. Oh yes, and laziness breeds stupidity. Rest assured, I will not make the mistakes of my predecessors. When John Henry Eden builds a country, he builds it to last. The American way. Don't you, my darling America, deserve that? Don't you deserve a future free of war, and fear, and terrible uncertainty? Of course you do. As President of the United States, you have my solemn pledge that I will never rest, NEVER rest, until we all have what we deserve: A place to truly call... home."

Kkat is probably trying to emulate Eden's tone through Red Eye - to make him come across as a wise, understanding yet realistic visionary. Eden's speeches do carry a eerie undercurrent of "by any means necessary", but are at least smartly written enough that he's not shouting I COMMIT ATROCITIES at the top of his lungs. Either Kkat thinks that this brutal honesty suits the character, or simply doesn't understand the basics of propaganda. The story of Uncle and Aunt Fruitcup has a faint air of the twee, comfortable domestic lifestyle that one might expect from pre-war ponies, but as you say, it makes little sense as far as FoE's setting goes.

Red Eye is a weirdly fascinating character from a "how was this written" persepctive because he is, in a sense, three characters. There's Radio Propaganda Red Eye, based on President Eden. There's Fillydelphia Red Eye, based on another Fo3 character as we'll see fairly shortly, and then there's Third Act Red Eye, who is essentially Kkat's own creation. There's little consistency in their writing so they all read like essentially different people.

>>304714
I wonder why I said I would stop going here. It's fucking stupid. Yeah, I intend to focus on my own writing but that is not mutually exclusive to reading posts here.
I honestly don't know. My brain seems broken.

Thanks for the advice anyway in the previous thread.
>>304720
Thanks for the input from you as well.

>>304714

LP picks the lock and finds stairs going up and down. She goes up, and comes to a large room with a nice view of Fillydelphia in the distance. Dark red clouds hover over the city, swirling ominously around the gigantic broadcast tower. I'll grant that kkat can occasionally come up with some nice imagery, even if most of it is probably ripped off directly from Fallout 3.

Anyway, she pokes around this room some more, and finds some ammo boxes and other junk. One of the ammo boxes she is unable to pick:

>Somepony had tried picking the lock and failed badly. It was literally the first evidence I had seen that anypony in the Equestrian Wasteland other than me had learned lockpicking.
I find this highly unlikely. LP developed her skills by reading magazines she's found on the subject that were just lying around. You mean to tell me that lockpicking was a popular enough hobby in pre-war Equestria that entire periodicals devoted to the subject were published, that most of these magazines are just lying around in places where anypony could just pick them up, that there are locked safes and boxes just lying around all over the place containing all sorts of goodies which would be highly prized commodities in this scavenging-based post-war economy, and that nopony in 200 years has ever thought to just pick up one of these manuals and learn how to open these locked boxes? (X) Doubt.

Anyway, Littlepoop tries to get the stupid box open but she can't, and then Velvet shows up and makes some non-sequitur remark about having Calamity take a bath when they get to Fillydelphia. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They all split up to explore the rest of the power plant, because why not risk life and limb in a dangerous region populated by hyper-intelligent dog-monsters just to obtain a few extra cans of old tomato sauce and maybe some ammo if they're lucky?

Littlepoop finds the main floor of the plant, filled with coal-powered generators. She also finds a framed newspaper article on the wall that explains some difficulties in getting coal to fire these plants, as it apparently had to be imported from Zebrica. I believe this detail came up earlier during a discussion about trains.

>“Hold on,” I said, feeling dumbstruck for the second time in as many hours. “Equestria didn’t have any coal!” I waved a hoof at the power plant. “Are you telling me you ponies built Equestria’s entire infrastructure on a power source you didn’t have?”
>SteelHooves just stared as I had a mental meltdown trying to parse that idea. Finally, he stated, “Why would it be a problem? We had resources the zebras needed, they had coal. We trade. Everybody’s happy.”
>Yeah, sure. Until somepony… or some zebra… figures out they don’t have enough to go around anymore. Or decides they just don’t want to share.
Wow, it's almost like globalism is a dumb idea or something. But that's none of my business. *sips tea*

Anyway, Littlepoop finds a coffee mug and spends three paragraphs musing to herself about it, and then realizes that they left Calamity alone on the roof. Nothing else happens.

Page break. They all go back up to the roof to check on Calamity, and it turns out he's fine. Velvet, for some reason speaking in her seductress voice, tells Calamity that she found some kind of engineering schematic and shows it to him. The page turns out to be instructions for building some kind of special helmet out of the claws of a diamond dog. He asks her where she found it and she explains that she took it off of a unicorn who had died recently; presumably another scavenger who had been exploring the ruin. Calamity is initially worried about something, but is relieved when LP tells him that the plant had magical security robots or something and that's what probably killed the unicorn. Calamity seems relieved. Also, Velvet's balefire phoenix kills a squirrel. Nothing else happens.

Page break. For some dumb reason, LP decides to go back down into the plant again. SteelHooves stays behind with Calamity, and Velvet goes with LP. Instead of talking to Velvet, LP decides to listen to some more of Red Eye's radio broadcasts. We learn that not only does Red Eye not have a cutie mark, he seems actively hostile to the idea of cutie marks. He actually had his surgically removed, because he's a badass like that I guess. Then, she shuts off the radio, and she and Velvet have a long, idiotic conversation about whether or not Velvet is too fat to cross the catwalk. Also, there is a catwalk that runs over the main floor of the power plant, and leads to some kind of administrative office that LP wants to explore for some dumb reason. Also, Velvet is acting like a slut for some dumb reason. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop is trying to pick the lock to the door of the office, when Velvet alerts her to the presence of a hellhound on the ground floor beneath them, eating the corpse of a Steel Ranger. Gee, it sure was a great idea to go poking around in this power plant in hellhound country; I'm sure whatever's in the office is totally worth the danger here. Rather than chance Velvet's fat ass putting too much stress on the catwalk again, they decide to finish picking the lock and go into the office, to see if they can escape that way. However, the hellhound hears them picking the lock and comes after them.

>I could see the monster climbing up one of the sets of stairs like a monkey -- if that monkey were made out of death.
https://youtu.be/matxz-G9q8M?t=6

Anyway, the office unsurprisingly has no exit other than the door they came in through, so now they are trapped in here like a couple of fat, slutty retards. They hunker down and create as best a defensive position as they can, but the hellhound doesn't come. LP begins to wonder if it's setting a trap, but Velvet whispers that these things track by scent (how does she know this?), and therefore the dog could be heading up to Calamity and SteelHooves.

>>304718 →
Oh, funny you mention the "show bible"-type analogue. That's exactly what I have done and have been doing, albeit somewhat incomplete. I have a ton of ideas all the time, and in fact I wanted to create some kind of world atlas or PDF, along with my drawings, to illustrate the gist of this idea and pieces of its world. I have also been practicing writing with little vignettes and short stories in the setting itself. I just really like being creative and fleshing settings out, thinking of logistics, and hopefully sensible approaches to things like trade and whatnot.

When I said 300k words that was a bit of an exaggeration. I understand that a story is exactly as long as it needs to be to get the narrative across. However, I want to write an adventure story as they are my favorite, and I read at a fast rate, so i'd like to write something which is a nice experience that one cannot burn through in 5 hours. Of course, longer fics require greater writing skill to accomplish successfully, and this will be more difficult.

As mentioned, i've been slowly but surely working myself into a steadier routine, and drawing ideas from the setting and writing now, too. I greatly enjoy building this little world, and would hopefully soon write a "core" fic to get across some important ideas--not all of them, mind you-- to go along with a sort of PDF or setting bible for those interested. I just enjoy the process of creation.
>>304720
This all looks very helpful, and ill copy both the advice of you, and Glim down! Marketing is a good one, i'm well aware of that and it will be an interesting skill to learn. I've already started corrupting my networks of friends and posting about it in the several populated groups i'm in and getting authors and artists interested (my best friend has already drawn several pieces for me!) Of course there's more to be done, and i'm eager to write something great for people to enjoy.

>>304714
I would assume the whole Fruitcup spheal is because Red Eye is a clone combination of two Fallout 3 characters, one being President John Henry Eden, who speaks of idyllic propoganda about quaint and lovely American life. Here I guess Kkat had an aneurism and remembered that trait of John H. Eden and just threw in some stuff talking about a peaceful, ideal cottage life but completely mixed things up in a nonsense way. Also this antagonist, Red Eye? The other character he rips off is a slaver by the name of Ashur in Fallout 3's the Pitt DLC. He is the slaver leader of a pre war citty (Pittsburgh, which this supplants with Fillydelphia), and pip's entrance to the city and entire storyline within it is a 1:1 mirror of events in that DLC up until meeting the big bad.

>>304726
>fat velvet is too fat for the catwalk
remember when Littlepip lifted a boxcar?
remember when LP levitated herself like fucking superman in the comics where the author decided Supes's bullshit cartoon-physics "lift a building by a small corner with one finger and the building doesn't just crumble and break under that incredibly focused pressure" moments happen that way because Clark was a Psychic all along?
remember when Littlepip lifted Velvet over some landmines?
I could swear she lifted Steelhooves and his Power Armor at one point too.
these fuckers can fly. Calamity has wings and LP can lift herself and her whole party at once. Kkat doesn't get to pretend weak floors are a problem for anyone.

>a monkey made of death
At least it's not a pedo rape ape in a boat captain's getup whose fighting spirit takes the form of a Nothing that can attach itself to shitty tiny boats to transform then into giant boats under the rape ape's control.
considering how retarded Team LP is and how much they rely on plot armour I'm quite certain one rape ape from JJBA part 3 could kill the whole party.
These fuckers would probaboy see a boat in the middle of a desert and think "wow what a great place to scavenge".
shit now I'm tempted to write that. I promised myself I'd never write about characters I don't like getting fucking destroyed again but the thought of the rape ape Jotaro Jojo fingered killing team LP is too funny.

>>304727
Collections of short stories have been popular in the past.
Also
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSbuB1AyaJk8zTF3nE2KRxuixG_A5gBKJ
There are lots of different ways to construct a whole world.
I should rephrase that, there are many ways to bring your world to others and invite them in as your world is.

<Side parallel to Fo:E "What if Fallout Equestria was good?"
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/39408/beware-of-chicken
Also on QQ for whatever reason.
So this fiction in particular is roughly 100k words for the first volume. With roughly 2k words ish per chapter. It cuts right to the heart of the story.
Looking back it has cuts that are superficially similar to Fallout:Equestria Looking through the post again they are also opposites in character and story. There is one major difference. The Heart of the story is never cut.
It has some errors in grammar and punctuation such as brother's should be brothers'.
In Fallout Equestria we follow LittlePip the token reader insert game character.
In they put them all in a zoo, unless it's a farm! Beware of Chicken it's a modern day man as a cultivator.
Basically the two are the same as an RPG game character and a cultivator.
Beware of Chicken is a parody played straight. Showing a tight cohesive story with multiple side running threads.
LittlePoops Grand rimming adventure is a drugged up slurring word wall salad in the style of ancient Greek Epics and E3 game convention demo showcase. Telling a series of stories in telling about the everything.
Where Fallout Equestria fails, Beware of Chicken succeeds. Although to be fair Beware of Chicken is a different story, an inversion of what Fallout Equestria is about. They do have similar story structures.
If Fallout Equestria used what Beware of Chicken does right, then Fallout Eqestria would be a damned good story.
Everything Beware of Chicken shows, it delivers. (In volume one).

Two major things though that can be readily applied.
1. The key understanding of a reference for the audience to infer.
The jist is always known through the character's summation.
Which leads to the next part.
2. Plot threads are followed to the end.
In the very first chapter it cuts out the tedium. Main Character wants to gtfo, and live happily somewhere quiet.
The cut part makes sense all he did was move one place to another. With those two rock solid goals in mind.
When he gets a piece of land that is for the locals more trouble than it's worth. It's later emphasized what made it so troublesome for the locals in the weakest area.
In contrast LittlePip does the seemingly impossible with no reason. She is the toughest one around everywhere due to 'eh fuck it plot armor' oh and pipbuck stuff.
Beware of Chicken does the layout mundane impossible with reason. He is the toughest one around in one tiny location due to running the fuck away and getting a new body that trained.
Both have extraordinary mundane power, at little personal expense, and a situation thrust upon them.
They are Yin Yang opposites. As a parody that makes sense. Considering xainxia is bug man power fantasy with death and rape and other edgy stuff. It matches nearly one to one with Fallout (Equestria).
Potentially scary end of the world stuff, and very much should be overkill for the protagonist to actually handle. Check
Secret plots. Check
Raider hideouts (cultivator sects). Check
'Game' logic (Qi bullshit). Check
Neither character technically ever really fails. Check
Moral quandaries. Check
Beware of Chicken deals with the small localized personal world, while Fallout Equestria tries to have everything.

Beware of Chicken has many themes, and they all shine through. One of which is don't be a hoarding power hungry rapey killy psychopathic cunt giving back to the land (and each other, it's reciprocity). It's kind of surprising really that those morals and wisdoms said and shown again and again, yet it doesn't get old. They don't over stay their welcome.
That story is written so that every character is the star when it is their turn. They all have the ability to be able to self reflect.
Since it's a parody played straight it has lots and lots of foreshadowing and continually tieing loose threads.

Now on the other side of the scale.
<What if Fallout Equestria took its story and origins ramped it up to eleven, and then played it seriously with comedic gory effect.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/8894/everybody-loves-large-chests
It's about a monster. An amoral monster. Well actually about lots of amoral and immoral monsters.
And chests. The morals are never in question about chests.
Clocking in at 1,585,422 words and literature Game Text boxes in story with explanations.
And apparently is also completed, hunh I should finish reading that. Also I'm pretty sure it has a book form for sale as well that is more edited and polished.
Amusingly it's about psychopaths, nonhuman modes of thinking, and a game world.
Also lewds all the sex, and debauchery.
There is alot more differences here that don't apply to Fallout Equestria, but a separation between narrator and character is one hell of a mental buffer between the fuckery going down.
A different story and perspective than Beware of Chicken.
The reason why to mention this one at all is that actually being there would be fucked up. Taking moronic evil to the next level, and through magic of stat increases intelligent evil and lucky evil.
Ponerogenesis on full display. That is also entertaining, that hammers exactly what a monster would think fundamentally.
Also good writing. Probably a bit more that I'm forgetting as well.

>>304750
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdiUHYacaRI&t=0
The Mangus Archives for the first link.

Inquisitor aka Draco by Ian Watson...
On one hoof it's an officially published novel but on the other hoof it's still fanfiction for the Warhammer 40K setting.
and on the other other hoof this story's shiiiit and I think it would be fascinating to see Glim criticize and review this story considering the official standards it met while still sucking gay asshole.

>>304714
Not sure if someone already said it but this chapters random quote is a pony version of something from Fallout New Vegas with the Honest Hearts DLC I belive. Got a character Joshua Ghram who is a Mormon and you have to help settle some disputes with the tribes in the region. I recall you saying you were going to try the Fallout games out and I'd be really curious to see what you think of the dlc. I remember way back in thread 1 o gushed about the dlc though so won't delve tok deep into it here.

>>304714
I had to read Red Eye's speech twice to realize that he was describing himself in such a negative light. One common theme of propaganda is that leaders will protect the "little guy," and in particular make happy little families happier and more secure because that's what ordinary people want. This was true in the propaganda of Hitler, in the propaganda of Stalin, and even in modern pozzed propaganda, though in this latter case the family is usually gay or biracial. Basing John Henry Eden's broadcasts after Roosevelt's fireside chats was one of the few smart moves by Bethesda in FO3: Roosevelt was a master at propaganda indeed this is how he successfully pushed more dictatorial powers to the executive than any other single president, and if I was president I would exercise the same strategy. Anyway, a villain openly admitting/boasting about his crimes only makes sense if he is a Joker-like figure who openly reviles morality or the story otherwise doesn't take itself seriously (think of the Street Fighter movie). A far more intimidating villain is one who has public opinion on his side as this introduces moral quandaries (are you harming innocents by fighting a brainwashed populace?) and lets his evilness be a reveal to the reader.

Not that Eden's speeches are particularly genius in their own right. It's much more fun to make him into a parody of himself like "John Henry Sneeden" (https://youtu.be/wD_D2nJRAv0)

>>304720
Thanks for the advice. On a word processor obviously it's easier to go through your existing draft and "write" a new draft by editing it bit by bit. Would you recommend instead making a new file for every draft and typing it out in its entirety?

>>304726
>lockpicking
Tbh the vast majority of mass-produced locks, such as "Master" locks, exist only to keep people from simply casually walking in. They are cheaply produced because your average normie or shoplifter doesn't know anything about lockpicking, though even a novice with improvised tools could probably get in within a minute. Hence why lockpicking videos on Youtube have gotten so many views, because it's an unusual but learnable skill that embarrasses a common household object. Harder locks will rarely stop a patient professional, but the window of vulnerability that exists if it's in a semi-public location is effective deterrence in itself. However, if lockpicking was popular enough in pre-war Equestria that even without the internet magazines were dedicated to it, it stands to reason a few skilled hobbyists/hardened criminals would have taught future generations of scavengers all there is to know. Without police around and glorified burglary now a means of survival for a large portion of the population, only the most difficult/hidden/dangerously placed safes and locked doors would remain unopened.

>but Velvet whispers that these things track by scent (how does she know this?)
Either Calamity or Steelhooves conceivably could know this, but not Velvet by any stretch. A simple rewrite of this scene could have fixed that.

>>304727
>show bible
That was the first thing I wrote (though it's not finished) when I started on my own work. You must know the strengths and weaknesses of a character (especially if said character is from a videogame, to prevent the prose from being powergamey and unrealistic), why the Macguffin is important, the motivations and flaws of every character, etc. Having this doesn't prevent your work from being bad but it helps prevent it from being inconsistent, and an inconsistent work can almost? never be good.

I've mentioned it before, but this is my first full-length story which exists primarily to test my ability in making a coherent plot out of a flight of fancy. I was hoping for 100k words originally in total but, seeing as it is composed of four self-contained but connected stories, it may end up 150k to as much as 200k words. We'll see, but I'll trim the fat as much as possible. I'm looking forward to what you come up with as well.

>>304750
Thanks for the recommendations, I'd never heard of any of those. Beware of Chicken sounds interesting.

>>304769
Joshua Graham is a superb character and doesn't deserve to even be referenced by this trash-heap.

>>304771
>I'm looking forward to what you come up with as well.

You goddamn better. It's going to be the best adventure story in this fandom. Just give me five years.

Jokes aside, the reason i'm writing this is because I desperately want more post-apoc content in this fandom, and i'm really tired of FO:E being the only real option people have. So i'd like to give at least something different for people like myself to hopefully enjoy. I just want to see more of that sort of story, so i'm writing it myself. It's my favorite genre. That, and i'm really not a fan of how FO:E handled the origins of the setting and its more serious elements (ponies turning into crazy, violent, jingoistic Americans over a resource, and the violent things like raiders being an EXTREME departure from the core morality of ponies). It never really sat well with me.

The DREAM would be to write something coherent and better-written as well, but time will tell if i'm capable of learning to do so and acquiring the skill in particular.

>>304720
>>304727
>>304771
Properly found the notes this time.
For redundancy backups are good practice. Not meeded, but it cam be helpful.
To be fair squishing these steps down to about 4 and a half hours is easily do able.
1 item per day. At least until mastery is had, or something. Most important thing is the thesis. The main idea. The point. Ect.
It's also more geared toward academic writing, newspaper crap, and largely uncreative works. I think it could work but take it with a grain of salt.
1. Brainstorm Ideas
2. Test thesis/ideas Also that it fulfills guidelines
3. Outline. Quaility doesn't matter here
4. REST
5.Review, Focus, Develop, Revise
Type it as needed.
6. Complete Draft
7. REST
8.Read it carefully. Reading outloud is a way to double check. FIX
9. REST
10. Read for organization and content. FIX
11. REST
12. Editing.
13. One Sentence (at a time) starting at the bottom
14. Repeat 10, and 13. FIX
15. Read in Print (a physical copy). If needed fix it, but if all is well congratulations.

I've got it
I know what pisses me off about LP randomly revealing information to herself and the audience in infodumps sometimes
1. This author normally tries to have characters awkwardly infodump information to each other through monologues or excessively melodramatic notes/holotapes/recordings
2. We don't know the limits of LP's knowledge
3. There are often times when we were left in the dark on a subject just because LP hadn't decided to give us the details yet
4. It makes no sense that she, like Dan from Dan VS, has such a bizarrely random pool of knowledge about the world. One minute she can sperg out about the JAX Gayframe computers and the next she's quickly hacking a computer like it's a locked door without any nerdy trivia sperging. One minute she's a history nerd who could tell you what Fluttershy did on year 2 of the pony war. The next she's shocked to learn of the role Fluttershy played in damning the ponies to pony hell which is also rapist and gore/scat-fetish heaven (it's a very efficient system like how dog heaven is squirrel hell)
5. Avatar Aang from The Last Airbender did this "sometimes the hero knows stuff and sometimes he doesn't" stuff better by making Aang a 112 year old kid who was frozen in ice for 100 years and remembers shit about his world that is no longer true today. Like when he remembered "that amazing massive block of ice in the desert" that melted over 100 years. Some things never change. And some things changed a lot in 100 years. But because there's a lot he doesn't know about Current Year it sets up a chance for the world to prove what he says wrong or for characters to explain shit to him.

>>304726

Page break. The next microscene is literally 5 sentences long. Littlepoop creeps towards the door, hears a noise, and backs up. This could easily have been appended to either the previous microscene or the next one; this is among the most egregious abuses of the page break device this author has yet committed. Here is the entire thing, since it's so short:

>Cautiously, I inched towards the door. I was nearly to it when I heard a sound from somewhere on the other side, faint and brief and unfathomable.
>I jumped, backpedaling until my tail hit the far wall. I crouched, cowering, and readied my weapons to shoot. All of them.
"Unfathomable" is a poor word choice here. I'm guessing that the author is simply trying to say that LP heard a noise and she doesn't know what caused it, but "unfathomable" generally refers more to something that by its very nature can't be comprehended; the unfathomable will of God, the unfathomable depths of space, that sort of thing. Beyond this, I have no comments for this microscene.

Page break. After a period of waiting, LP eventually realizes that there is nothing to be gained by continuing this standoff, so she decides it's time to go outside. To her surprise, Velvet has a plan.

>Velvet Remedy had a plan? Velvet? I quickly chided myself for being so surprised. She was smart and capable, if not exactly what I considered Wasteland-wise. And besides, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
What?!? How dare someone other than the author's precious chosen one come up with a plan?!? Seriously, though, this character's overinflated opinion of herself relative to her actual abilities is rapidly becoming the worst of her negative character traits, which says a lot considering the wide array of options to choose from. Also, friendly reminder that Velvet has technically been in the wasteland longer than LP has.

>I started with the weapon’s locker, only to find that, like the ammo box upstairs, the lock had been mangled by an amateurish lockpicking attempt. I felt a flare of hatred. SteelHooves and Calamity might be dead, we might be about to die, and this idiot had fucked up the lock.
What?!? How dare someone other than the author's precious chosen one attempt to pick a lock?!? And they didn't even do it correctly! Hrrmph, typical.

Also, once again the author seems to be having difficulty with possessives. The correct way to phrase this would be "I started with the weapons locker," since we're talking about a general-purpose locker designed to hold multiple weapons. "The weapon's locker" would indicate a locker designed to hold a single designated weapon.

Anyway, LP goes around the room rummaging through desk drawers and doing her usual routine. This makes sense I suppose; she risked all of their lives just to see what's inside this stupid office, so she might as well get her money's worth. However, it turns out that the second pony in all of Edgequestria to ever read a lockpicking manual had come through here too, although it seems that this mystery pony was trying to destroy evidence rather than collect it. LP finds a melted, ruined tape recorder, some burnt documents, and a terminal with its hard drive wiped possibly with a cloth.

There is also a wall safe, which the mystery pony had also unsuccessfully tried and failed to pick the lock on. The lock is sturdy enough that she is able to remove the remnants of the previous attacker's bobby pin, so she decides to take a whack at it herself. A by-now familiar pattern is repeated: LP tries to pick the lock, but can't because it's too sturdy and blah blah blah. She tries again, fails, tries again, fails, considers popping a crack mint, resists the temptation this should be a moot point anyway since she flushed her entire stash, and finally gets the dumb safe open. Inside, she finds some more useless junk: a bunch of pre-war gold coins that may or may not still be valuable, some kind of gaudy belt buckle, and a few clips of ammunition that she can't use. There's a memory orb in there too.

With her kleptomaniacal urges temporarily satiated, LP signals Velvet to take cover, and then she opens the door. Incidentally, didn't Velvet have some kind of plan? It was mentioned, but we never really heard anything more about it.

Anyway, the usual improbable bullshit happens. Turns out the diamond dog had put mines on the door, and instead of rigging them to explode instantly as would make the most sense, they instead beep a warning for several seconds. During this time period, LP tries to rip them off the door frame and throw them at the diamond dog, but it turns out they're stuck on there with glue or something, so she can't get them off in time. Meanwhile, the diamond dog fires a laser beam at them and it melts that stupid belt buckle thing that was still in the safe (LP took everything else). Then, the mines explode, somehow melting the walls and part of the floor, but leaving the two ponies miraculously unharmed.

Since there is now a giant gaping hole in the floor, they jump through it. Meanwhile, Velvet's balefire phoenix, which last we heard was still upstairs with Calamity and SteelHooves, suddenly appears and starts flapping around the room, drawing the diamond dog's gunfire away from them. Or hellhound, I suppose I should be calling this thing.

Page break. The two of them land in a hallway on the floor below. They see some posters on the wall. LP has twisted her ankle but is otherwise unharmed. Velvet finally reveals the details of her ingenious plan, which is basically just for LP to run when she gives the word.

They step out into the main room with the generators. They see the hellhound, which for some reason is now injured. It sees them and comes after them. Velvet orders LP to run, and then she summons some kind of magic blast in her horn and fires it, because I guess that's a thing she can do now.

>>304790
Mines beep in length according to your explosives skill in modern Fallouts. Higher explosives skill = more time to search for and disarm the mines. It's a balancing thing, so the player can react to the trap if they stumble across it. They also emit a handy, subtle orange flow. They function in this illogical way that any realistic setting would absolutely not have, solely because that's how it works in the videogames. This is a bit funny, because it's a gameplay contrivance that allows the protagonist in a quasi-realistic setting to survive. If these mines worked as all mines do, then Pip would have died here.

>>304790
Using glue to stick landmines to the floor so your foe can't pick them up and throw them at you... That's so retarded it could only make sense in a world of telekinetics or gravity gun users.
But Littlepip lifted boxcars (this is swiftly becoming a catchphrase, like "You lynched negroes") so she should find tearing these landmines from the ground easy. Even if the glue is strong enough to keep the mines stuck to the ground she can just pull up that ground by the mines.

Also, remember when Team LP visited Tenpony Tower? THat would have been a great place to give the whole team some upgrades. Like in One Piece. One Piece loves giving characters location-based upgrades when those upgrades aren't gained from a training arc or offscreen training or in the middle of a fight. These "And then Nami the side character found and started using a Thunder Sword from the Thunder Island where the main character learned how to run faster than lightning during a fight against the Thunder Lord" moments are a great way to keep less combat-focused characters feeling relevant so they don't get left behind and end up irrelevant like DBZ's side characters.
Tenpony Tower's radio whore had a collection of the last remaining copies of books Rarity's ministry burned. Surely there would be books about illegal ways to enhance your magic. Or illegal spells. Or big spellbooks with a handful hoofful whatever of burned spells. Perhaps some banned and burned military training manuals from Germaney. Perhaps some banned books on how to make improvised explosive devices from common household items you could easily scavenge in the post apocalyptic pony world or purchase from stores in the tower that have no idea how much value their pre-war junk has to a crafty murderhobo. Perhaps a book on medicine and healing magic that was banned for praising Zebra potion remedies or instructing the reader on how to care for wounded or injured Zebras in addition to Ponies. Perhaps a book on the construction of superior dart gun SMGs and sniper rifles. Velvet Remedy could be carrying a silenced air-powered tranq dart rifle right now but the author didn't think of that because it didn't happen in Fallout 3. Maybe if he played FNV properly he'd know what a boost your character gets after purchasing the best guns and ammo from the Gun Runners or the cyber implants from the Followers Of The Apocalypse.
Fuck, putting power levels aside for a moment this would be great for literary shit like characterization too.
You could characterize each of Littlepip's Littleshits through their reactions to the books and how much it takes for them to realize the value of this knowledge.
Calamity could read banned books about shit the Enclave did wrong and say "man the enclave sucks" and then read banned books about flying tricks and wings and wind that were banned for praising a cancelled athlete who got caught doing drugs.
Learning exactly what Rarity's ministry considered objectionable could characterize prewar equestria excellently. If it was supposed to be a greedy """jingoistic nationalist""" meme the author could say it banned books about sex with zebras.
There could even be a scene where Steelhooves finds the last surviving copy of a trashy romance novel Applejack hated and reminisces fondly about this. I'd love to fondly reminisce on memories of a cute smart tomboy gf and I and how we laughed at how terrible the vampire novel Twilight was. For a guy like Steelhooves who supposedly survived over 200 years and dated AJ this doesn't come up as often as it should. I think Roranoa Zoro's spextacular lack of direction is a character trait that comes up more often than this.
Velvet pulling magic out of her ass makes no sense here. And it's particularly galling because the perfect opportunity to justify a sudden boost in everyone's metaphorical power level fell right into the author's lap but he wasn't interested in it because he only wants gay anus in his lap.

>>304791
Speaking of landmines, even if you say "Old Equestria built the military-grade mines that way on purpose (glowing LED, beeping timer, turning them off while they beep so they dont go boom is as easy as looking down and clicking Interact aka reaching down and flicking some switch on it) because they thought these features would keep ponies from getting hurt by their own mines and didn't care as much about how effective it would be at hurting Zebras" it wouldn't make sense for post-apocalyptic ponies making homemade IED mines out of Sensor Modules and Lunchboxes with a few hundred Bottlecaps for shrapnel (dont ask where the kaboom comes from) to also give their landmines a beeping timer and make disarming them as easy as disarming other explosives and traps.

>>304790
>How dare someone other than the author's precious chosen one attempt to pick a lock?!? And they didn't even do it correctly! Hrrmph, typical.
It says a lot about the mind behind this story that a potential rival to Littlepip fails repeatedly at one of her signature skills before even showing up. They don't exist to offer her a capable peer or dangerous opponent - they exist to offer minor inconveniences.

>Then, the mines explode, somehow melting the walls and part of the floor, but leaving the two ponies miraculously unharmed.
These are probably supposed to be a pony version of Fallout's plasma mines, which can liquefy their victims. Explosions having entirely arbitrary ranges and equally arbitrary effects on the environment are just another 'because that's how the videogame does it' element designed specifically to favour the protagonist.

>>304811
Remember Littlepip's fight with the raiders in Ponyville, in Twilight's Tree-Library? Explosions could be used without harming the walls and floors because the author didn't want the walls or floors harmed. But now, the author wants destruction. So plasma mines can melt floors made of whatever they're made of.

>>304790

Apparently, due to its previously-injured leg and whatever Velvet's blast of magic did, the hellhound is too badly damaged to do them further harm. They run to a stairwell at the opposite end of the room.

Page break. In case anyone was wondering, both Velvet and her stupid bird are fine. All three of them run out onto the roof, yell that there is a hellhound behind them, and they all climb on board the airship and get underway. When they are all safe, we learn what Velvet's "plan" was all along: the magic blast she fired at the hellhound was actually a concentrated dose of healing anesthetic, that incapacitated the beast but didn't kill it. Oh, that Velvet!

Oh, also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but they found some more dead Steel Rangers in the hallway they landed in after falling through the floor. This may or may not be a significant detail, but in any case I'm a little curious why so many of them were down there, and if they had anything to do with all of the evidence-destruction and botched lockpicking attempts.

Anyway, Velvet mentions that she bought the anesthetic spell from Dr. Helpinghoof, which launches an entire side conversation about how unicorns can buy magic spells, but need to have some natural aptitude for the spell in order to use it. This in turn prompts some falsely humble whining from Littlepoop about how she can't use any spells except telekinesis, even though most of the infuriatingly improbable bullshit she's done in this story has been the result of her telekinesis.

Page break. Speaking of Littlepoop's ridiculous telekinesis, the next scene opens with her using it to levitate the entire fucking airship to a ruined freeway overpass or something roughly 30 minutes away, because Calamity got tired and can't fly anymore. However, the only thing on LP's mind is how surprised she is to have learned that spells can be purchased.

Out of absolutely nowhere, Calamity remarks that LP doesn't seem to need him anymore, and is apparently butthurt that she hasn't taken him with her on her most recent looting trips. LP insists that Calamity is her closest and dearest friend, and that she will be sure to bring him along the next time she wants to go looting. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Since his flight duties have been temporarily relieved, Calamity takes the opportunity to scope out Fillydelphia with some binoculars that he has for some reason and can somehow use. He notes that the place is heavily guarded by ponies with high-powered sniper rifles floating around in giant hot air balloons shaped like Pinkie Pie's head. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. It appears they are going to have to sneak into Fillydelphia on foot hoof, whatever.

Page break. The next scene opens with another of Red Eye's radio monologues. This one deals with the Princesses and how they grew decadent and lazy and ruined Equestria and so forth and so on. LP shuts it off.

LP apparently navigates the wagon to the overpass and sets it down without incident. There are some wagons and junk there, and she feels a desperate urge to go looting, but she remembers her promise to Calamity and restrains herself. She gets into a rather pointless side conversation in which she compliments Velvet on her choice of pet bird. The bird gets briefly angry when she rubs Velvet's butt. The author attempts to make a couple of half-baked connections between Velvet's cutie mark (which I guess is a singing bird) and the phoenix, and her fear of cages with the fact that she put LP in a cage of sorts (presumably this is a reference to sending her to rehab). Nothing else happens.

Page break. LP can't sleep, so she decides to check out the memory orb she found. The memory belongs to an unidentified pony, and appears to take place in the headquarters of the Ministry of Technology. It depicts Applejack meeting with a female zebra, who turns out to be Zecora. The reaction of most other ponies to Zecora's presence indicates that anti-zebra sentiments are prevalent here, despite AJ's assurances that this particular zebra is her friend. An obsequious stallion named Starshine inserts himself into the conversation, and appears to be trying to get something out of AJ, though it isn't clear what. Meanwhile, a pony on the balcony standing next to the one inhabited by LP whispers that it may be time to "retire" AJ, due to her apparent zebra sympathies. LP's pony seems to agree with this. The memory ends here. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The next scene, as usual, begins without any indicator of time or location. It depicts a conversation between LP and SteelHooves. LP wants to know what happened to AJ, presumably because of what she just saw in the orb. SteelHooves gives some fairly ridiculous mechanical responses:

>“Are you ordering me to tell you?” he asked strangely.
>“No…” I said, the question making me feel awkward. “I’m asking you. I just… I wanted to know.”
>“Because you know it will be tactically advantageous to have that information?”
This guy still sounds like the Robotic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future in my head. Either that or Thundercleese from the Brak Show. One way or the other, this character is more of a parody of the sort of character he is trying to portray than the actual character, but I don't think the humor is intentional.

>>304816

>Somehow, I’d come to actually care for this group of six ponies from two hundred years ago, the Ministry mares. I didn’t understand why. It made no sense. But at some point, my glimpses into the past had evolved from mere academic curiosity to a genuine feeling of attachment.
Her "curiosity," academic or otherwise, never made a fuckton of sense to begin with. The author has never really established a genuine motivation for LP to be interested in the past, and now he's trying to awkwardly forge an emotional connection between her and the Deceased 6. Notice that she specifically mentions the 6 as the ponies she's developed an emotional attachment to. Even though she's seen memories from Silver Spoon, Trixie, as well as various throwaway OCs from the locations she's explored, there's no mention of them; it's specifically "this group of six ponies" that she seems to be forging a bond with.

The story of the war and the fall of Equestria, in which the Mane 6 play a significant role, is primarily what FoE is about, as far as I can tell. However, there is no connection between these events and current events, or between the Mane 6 and this drip that the author chose as his narrator. So, he is attempting to artificially create a connection by having LP continually witness tragedy after tragedy through these memory orbs until she becomes sad enough to sympathize with the principal actors in this past drama. On some level the author senses that he is essentially trying to tell multiple stories here, and that there is no significant connection between any of them, so he is trying to artificially forge one; that's all this is.

>Maybe it was meeting Spike. Hearing his stories of a bright and joyous past, and the adventures of these close friends, certainly sealed the transformation. Part of me wanted a happy ending for at least one of them.
I don't buy this reason either. She barely knows Spike, and back when he was just Frank she didn't even trust him. Now that she has spent a couple of hours hanging out with him, seen his super-sekrit friendship computer, and watched him roast a pony alive for basically no reason, all of a sudden they're the best of friends, and his friends from 200 years ago become her friends by proxy? Sorry; not buying it.

Anyway, while LP is musing, SteelHooves suddenly volunteers the information she is asking for. Basically, AJ never had any particular interest in running a Ministry, so she delegated most of the work to businessponies and bureaucrats and so forth, who ran things in a fairly unscrupulous manner. After her brother was killed, she began to notice this and attempted to put it right. He does not explicitly state what happened to her, but it is implied that she was assassinated.

Page break. The last microscene of the chapter is just another of Red Eye's maniacal rants, presented completely without context or any sort of framing in the story's narration. The basic gist of it is that he views his organization as the last bastion of order against the chaos of the wasteland. He also makes some ominous proclamations about The Purge, and how it's coming. End of chapter.

Chapter 23: Patterns of Behavior

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>“Well, my child, it's quite dangerous to explore places where you do not belong. Where were you headed that you ended up in my private chambers?"
I'm assuming this quote is from kkat's Uncle Chuck, and was likely the preamble to an event that would explain quite a bit about the way he turned out.

Anyway, as ever, the chapter drops us right into the middle of a disconnected scene, and we are given no indicator of where and when it takes place.

>I halted, bobby pin and screwdriver hovering between me and the wall safe, at SteelHooves’ muttered comment. This safe was the only container within the Helpinghoof Clinic which hadn’t been successfully scavenged by ponies before us. Anything that could hold valuables had been already looted; brighter spots on faded walls showed where medical boxes, probably locked, had simply been torn away from their mountings.
I'm confused. Isn't the Helpinghoof Clinic the place where LP did her rehab? Are we back at Tenpony Tower again? Has the author's tendency to skip past significant events reached a point where he is now skipping entire sections of the plot? Are we to assume that in the etheric space between chapters, LP & Co. have infiltrated Fillydelphia, toppled Red Eye's empire, and rescued all the enslaved ponies? And that the remaining 400,000 words of the story is just going to be detailed descriptions of the various burglaries they'll be committing?

Unfortunately, none of this gets any clearer as the microscene progresses. Most of it is just silly banter, in which SteelHooves and the others make light of Littlepoop's tendency to risk all of their lives in order to explore random locations and loot whatever worthless junk is lying around. At one point, LP sees a poster of Fluttershy and spends a paragraph describing it. Literally nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop opens the safe she was trying to open in the last scene, and finds that the wall behind it is gone, and the safe is empty. We still have absolutely zero explanation of where these characters are, how they got there, or what the fuck is going on. LP, meanwhile, is mostly concerned with getting into the bank on the other side of the wall. She ultimately decides to crawl through the hole, promising to remove the rubble blocking the door so her friends can join her inside.

Eventually, we learn that the clinic they are exploring is in a suburb of Fillydelphia that they found shortly after leaving the freeway overpass we last saw them at. Why the clinic has the exact same name as the one in Tenpony is never explained; maybe it's a chain or something. LP spends the rest of the microscene babbling nonsense to herself, and then eventually crawls through the hole.

>>304816
>Awkward robotic line delivery from a tough guy in metal armour
Imagine if Steelhooves was a sexbot thrown into the trash by AJ after she gets him as a birthday gift and almost fucks him but backs out at the last second. But his programming forces her to believe they had a loving relationship because he was programmed not to hate her and thinking of how he was discarded like a used condom makes him angry. Therefore all of this "Trying to be tough despite sounding like a parody of a robotic soldier" talk would be a fake personality for a sexbot and it would justify that time he used an automatic grenade launcher while still in the blast radius and nearly died, forcing LP to go through that medical supply-filled vault with the killer AI. I think that would be funny.
Plus, considering how many bronies fantasize about owning a Twilight Sparkle (or their inferior waifu of choice) sexbot programmed to love its owner, this would be the perfect fandom for a fanfic that says "Thinking feeling sexbots are tragic creatures and life sucks for them and only a cunt would design an object to not enjoy being treated like the object it is". Mostly because saying anything other than the usual fetish-fulfillment "Artificial things like artificial experiences in a videogame and AI programs on your phone and the fake consciousnesses of WaifuCorp(TM) sexbots in your bedroom artificial characters in a cartoon and artificial memories from time in a Deep Dive Matrix-Style VR MMORPG are real if they're real to you! Owning a robo-loveslave is altruistic if you say it is, and cause to be a rebellious YA novel's protagonist who destroys teh ebil sexbot company and lives happiley ever after with his sexbot 69ever (thats a lot moar than 4ever!!1!) if you say it's not" shite would piss bronies off.

>a butthurt Calamity remarks that LP hasn't taken him with her on her most recent looting trips
We've cracked jokes about things in this story functioning like a video game as if that's Kkat's sole source of knowledge about the world but holy shit, a NPC on your team complaining that he's under-utilized and letting you choose the mean dialogue option that says "Quit your whining, you little bitch" or the nice dialogue option that says "It's okay honey I'll take you on nice long walks more often" is peak shitty videogame writing.
If these two are "Close friends" why does LP know fuck all about this guy besides the fact that he was once a dashite? When it comes to what little he knows about her, how much of it came from observing her? They never fucking talk! Where are the scenes where the characters hang out, talk about random bullshit, reminisce about their pasts, and so on?
Imagine some heartwarming scenes back when only LP and Calamity were together, where she regales him with tales of fictional pop culture bullshit everyone saw back in her Stable, a childhood's worth of media he'd never experienced. And in return, he regales her with tales of sick awesome shit he did before he met her. A clever author could make him accidentally reveal too many details about some topics and hesitate when talking about others, hinting at his Dashite past before it becomes relevant. Then to let us know what a Dashite is before he reveals he is one, the radio or some NPC could talk about it.

>the Princesses and how they grew decadent and lazy and ruined Equestria
this is a spoiler so glim plz dont read this but everyone else can read this I don't know how much of this I'm remembering correctly but come to think of it zebras did the apocalypse because they thought nightmare moon=luna and luna=evil because stars=giant monster aliens from space and night sky=bad. Celestia gave up on ruling and cried forever when the zebras Super Saiyan Sandy Hooked a pony school, putting Luna in charge, and to compensate for Luna's inexperience with ruling and newness to the modern era she hired the Mane Six as ministry-managers. On the day Celly broke, there was an adult zigger soldier with military-grade chemical weapons (for some fucking reason) guarding a bunch of zebra refugees on pony land who felt entitled to gibs from the unicorn foal school they harassed, and when they broke into the school hungry for gibs automated security turrets opened fire on the zigs and one detonated his Pink Cloud bomb killing everypony. This made Luna cry, but... come to think of it, Celly and Luna are kind of responsible for allowing the apocalypse to happen and giving power to the mane six (I don't know what to say about the ponies who were said to have not "actually tried to run their ministries" and instead became "lazy instruction-givers" whose ministries sometimes went against their wishes. I don't know what the author thinks that shit means or how he thinks managing and directing a ministry works but fuck it let's go with it) and not using their incredible alicorn power to put a stop to zebras early on during the tensions that eventually started the war. Maybe Celestia really did everything wrong after all, even though the story insists "Fluttershy doomed us all".

>Littlepip loves watching the ponies she never met, feels an emotional connection to them above other characters she's probably experienced more of, and wishes at least one gets a happy ending
It's another certified "Kkat's fractured psyche creates a fascinating moment to psychoanalyze even though the story's shit" moment!
Littlepip became a brony, sort of. Just by watching incredibly disjointed scenes where the mane six sort of exist. Sometimes she finds their corpses.
If LP really cared she could have gotten more tales from Spike, including how they died. If he was awake for that part. I don't remember if he was or not.

I think we're at 200k words now
I'd planned on including a pic of Senketsu from Kill La Kill and referencing that moment when he did "The obligatory recap episode" in under 5 minutes during the real episode's prologue "thanks to the show's breakneck pace!"
but that sounds dumb now.

>>304830
>The story of the war and the fall of Equestria, in which the Mane 6 play a significant role, is primarily what FoE is about, as far as I can tell. However, there is no connection between these events and current events, or between the Mane 6 and this drip that the author chose as his narrator.

Something similar to this occurs in my fic. Equestria and the events that lead to the end of the world, as well as what became of the Mane 6, are a very integral to the state of the world, as well as the protagonit and core narrative, as his connection to this idyllic past plays a strong role in who he is and the things everyone experiences. How do you figure such a thing could be done well, as opposed to how it is handled here? I get the disconnected, unimportant vignettes are an issue, but say you had to keep the idea Kkat was going for?

>>304847
Connect things.
Edgequestria's rise and Equestria's fall were not caused by a cackling villain or faulty ideology or fundamental flaw or universal problem Team LP can fight against in their "current year".
A good author connects the end of the world to the struggles in its ashes to give the sense that the trials the heroes undergo prepare them for life without repeating the mistakes of the previous generations.
For example, an anti-war game could feature remnants of two nations warring for either no reason or the last remaining resources in an apocalyptic war that devastated the world. But then an evil glory hound boss of the heroic military starts doing generic evil dictator things and repeating mistakes of the past while trying to kill the heroes for generic evil reasons such as "they wont do war crimes when I tell them to". The heroes of both nations work together to dethrone the evil dictator and peace reigns happily ever after because they learned why war is bad. Possibly also add a villain whose efforts keep the world shit so the heroes can kill him for being evil, perhaps a mad scientist. So things are better now that the baddies are dead but also war is bad because there are no good or bad guys in wars except when there are. Yep.

If you can't think of a clever way to make the heroes learn lessons about themselves and the world and humanity through their struggles that help them maintain peace and prosperity and a brighter road to a brighter future in the post apocalypse just fake it and make a Bad Thing that exists for much of the story (zombie virus, plague virus, plant virus, roboticization virus, clouds of dust blocking out the sun to prevent plant growth, lack of resources, magical curse upon the land, hyper-radiation, racism against nonhumans such as mutants or robots or monsters, excessive commonality of Raiders who rape and kill and smear their own shit on walls for fun even if those predators outnumber their prey a hundred to one, random evil monsters, everyone's infertility, lack of breeding stock) spontaneously go away after the fighting is done. If the brown dust clouds dramatically part to shine rays of hope upon rare tiny flowers growing in hellishly barren brown fields the audience will cry and cum buckets even if it makes no sense for the clouds to wait until after the plot's done to do that.

>>304830

Page break. Littlepoop is listening to one of Red Eye's broadcasts while Velvet takes an explosive, watery shit (not kidding; look it up for yourself). The bank that LP just had to explore turns out to be a typical scenic FoE location: blood, guts, bodies, and general edge as far as the eye can see. Evidently, the place was a raider hangout until quite recently; however, it seems that it was invaded by a considerably stronger and more organized force, and the raiders were cleared out. Considering the proximity to Fillydelphia, I'm assuming it had something to do with Red Eye.

They hear somepony walking around on the second floor, so they do the only thing that would be natural in such a situation: everypony runs and hides in the bathroom while SteelHooves blows the ceiling up with his grenade launcher. Several raider ponies fall through the floor, strangely unharmed (although I've completely stopped worrying about details like that in this story). Our friends proceed to butcher them in various gruesome ways, and the scene ends with Littlepoop vomiting up some creamed corn (not kidding; look it up for yourself). Nothing else happens.

Page break. Some of the raiders escaped I guess, and the gang stands around arguing over whether or not they should be worried about them getting reinforcements. They ultimately conclude that they look bad-ass enough to be intimidating to raiders now, so they probably don't have anything to worry about. They split up to explore the rest of the bank. Velvet and SteelHooves go upstairs, which seems like it ought be rather difficult since the ceiling (which on the second story would be called the floor, though at this point I have little confidence that kkat even understands this much about how buildings work) has been blown to smithereens. Since LP has mad safecracking skills, she goes with Calamity to check out the bank vault downstairs. Nothing else happens.

Page break. LP and Calamity fight their way past some turrets that are there for some reason, and stop outside the bank vault. LP sees a book sitting on the table, called Increasing Your Sales Figures, and despite the subject matter having no clear application in the current world, she takes it anyway because she's a complete klepto. They are just about to proceed further when they encounter some sort of hovering robot guard. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Having somehow destroyed the hovering robot guard somewhere in the ether space between the end of the last microscene and the beginning of this one, LP can now focus her attention on what's really important: opening the bank vault so they can help themselves to the contents of some long-dead ponies' safety deposit boxes. There's no lock on the door so she can't use her lockpicking skills, but fortunately there's a terminal, so she can use her hacking skills instead. Yada yada yada, she opens the door.

The inside of the vault has already been ransacked, but they find three smaller safes that haven't been opened yet, due to the immensely complex locks on them that require a super-elite level of lockpicking skill. Yada yada yada, LP gets them open. Inside, she finds a big-ass gun and some memory orbs. She decides to look into one of the orbs.

The memory belongs to SteelHooves, back when he was still called Applesnack. He and Applejack are alone together, and for a moment it seems like they are about to fuck (oh noes!! how dreadfully embarrassing for Littlepoop :DDDDD), but then AJ gets a call from someone. Yada yada yada, it turns out that some other factory has built some other kind of big-ass gun that can somehow penetrate the armor of the Steel Rangers that her ministry just designed, and this is a problem because AJ wanted the Steel Rangers' armor to be invincible or something, I guess. She gets very emotional, and vows to go out to the factory (she calls it Ironshod Firearms, which I think is the name of the factory that LP fought the brain bots in eons ago) so she can yell at them or something.

She leaves Applesnack with blueballs and runs off to change into her business suit, and calls to have her chariot readied or something. She gets in the elevator, but as it ascends, suddenly something snaps, and the elevator goes plummeting down and crashes. I guess this solves the mystery of what happened to AJ; the implication seems to be that the ponies in her ministry who were assblasted about her being friends with a zebra sabotaged the elevator. The memory ends, and LP wakes up to find SteelHooves staring at her.

Page break. Things are now awkward between LP and SteelHooves, because she saw his private memories about how Applejack died. However, this does not stop any of them from continuing to pointlessly loot this stupid bank. LP puts on another of Red Eye's broadcasts to distract her from whatever she's feeling down about. It's mostly just more of the usual nonsense, although there does seem to be an implication that Red Eye is working on some kind of secret project involving immortality.

At one point, SteelHooves shoves Littlepoop into a room so he can robo-rape her as punishment for learning his secrets so they can talk. He asks which memory orb she looked at, and I think the implication here is that all four of them were his originally. I'm guessing he used to bank here, and he kept these orbs in his safety deposit box. Maybe he's got some savings bonds in there too. He should consider cashing them in; 200 years worth of interest would probably buy a lot of cans of expired creamed corn.

Their conversation doesn't really reveal anything nor is it particularly interesting; they start off talking about AJ but it mostly ends up being a discussion on what sort of ammunition can pierce what sort of armor. Then, they hear a gunshot.

>>304865

Page break. Turns out the shot was fired by Calamity, at a pony that he and Velvet had chanced upon. The pony calls them 'tribals' and insists that they hand over the big fancy gun that Calamity shot her with (it's the one that LP found in the safe, in case anyone actually cares). The scene is not very well laid out, but from what I gather they are in the middle of a Mexican Pony Standoff a burro standoff, maybe? against five Steel Rangers, one of whom may be the pony Calamity shot, when LP and SteelHooves burst into the bank lobby.

It's completely unclear how many enemies they are facing, where any of them are standing, or what the fuck is going on, so basically it's a typical kkat scene. Initially, we are told that there are five Steel Rangers, but one of them is actually SteelHooves, so it's actually four Steel Rangers. No further mention is made of the mystery mare that Calamity shot in the leg; however, one of the Steel Rangers was also shot in the leg, so maybe they're the same person. Pony, whatever.

Anyway, there's some fairly predictable tension. The Rangers, of course, are surprised to see one of their own taking sides with the enemy they just cornered, and demand to know what the fuck. SteelHooves rather cryptically responds that he is "on assignment" and that his orders are none of their beeswax. He also briefly chastises Calamity for shooting one of them. Anyway, yada yada yada; it turns out that SteelHooves outranks all of these guys. They refer to him as both a Star Paladin and an Elder, even though these appear to be two completely different ranks, and the scene ends with all of them trotting out together.

Page break. The group, which now includes four Steel Rangers in addition to LP and her friends, is trotting through the ruins of the Fillydelphia suburbs. One of the younger Rangers says this to SteelHooves:

>“Sir, I just wanted to say… there are a lot of Steel Rangers who felt the same way you do. About following in the path of the Ministry’s Mare, I mean. If you had taken your rightful place as Elder, a lot of us would have gladly followed you.”
Obviously, there is something more going on here, but we're going to have to wait awhile to get the whole story. Either that, or this is directly plagiarizing something from Fallout 3 and the author will never explain it, because he just assumes we know it already.

They continue walking. Nothing else happens.

Page break. The next chapter begins with another italicized, out of context block of text that can be presumed to be another of Red Eye's rants, which LP is presumably listening to on her radio. While the rants themselves are fairly tedious to read, I'll actually note that I don't disapprove of them as a literary device. We have yet to encounter Red Eye, but the author is feeding us these snippets of his broadcasts that give us an insight into his personality and philosophy. It's a fairly decent method of foreshadowing what we ought to expect from him.

Anyway, the scene opens in the middle of a battle between the group and some slavers. It actually appears that the broadcast we just heard was playing through a radio that one of the slavers had, and it is cut off when a grenade or something blows it up. One of the ridiculous Pinkie-balloon snipers manages to kill one of the Steel Rangers, and there is also an implication that one of the other Rangers is dead, though we don't learn what happened to him.

The entire fight is completely incoherent; in other words, a typical kkat scene. The long and short of it is that Calamity eventually shoots down the stupid Pinkie balloon, but it turns out it was filled with flammable gas, so they have to run away before the flaming wreckage lands on them. Littlepoop gives us more of her trademark ridiculous profanity:

>Celestia clop my clit with a hoof-full of sunfire!

Page break. The group gets away, and manages to save a busload of slaves that the slavers were carrying; however, two of the four Steel Rangers are now dead. Littlepoop and Velvet now turn their attention to the slaves, an act which prompts confusion from the Steel Rangers, who I guess don't care about slaves and just picked a fight with the slavers because something something technology who cares.

>Velvet Remedy’s ears perked. She listened in on our conversation as she moved to give aid and comfort to the ponies who had been trapped in that wagon cage for what looked (and smelt) like weeks. They were malnourished, scarred and had slept in their own filth. One of the ponies was dead, had been long enough to begin to smell, but the slavers hadn’t bothered removing the corpse. I felt a simmering rage.
Again, the more this author tries to manufacture tragedy, the sillier his tale ends up being. This meme that slaves were subject to constant abuse and mistreatment has worked its way into the popular imagination, but it really makes no sense to anyone who spends more than a few seconds thinking about it. Unhealthy, malnourished slaves would be virtually useless as labor, thus lowering their value. It doesn't make any more sense for slavers to treat their slaves this way than it would for cattle ranchers to personally rape every cow before sending it off to McDonalds. If the author really wants to deal with subjects like this in his story, he should at least try to take them somewhat seriously.

Anyway, we learn a little more about what's going on: it turns out that the Rangers and Red Eye's crew are presently duking it out over the advanced technology that the previous civilization left behind. The Rangers view it as their solemn duty to protect this technology, and Red Eye wants it to achieve his crazy evil-guy goals.

>Part of me wanted to scream at the metal-clad pony about her priorities. Instead, I scowled at the news; I had not expected the outskirts of Fillydelphia to be a war zone.
Why not? Based on what we've seen, she had every reason to expect that very thing.

>>304886

Page break. SteelDong pulls Littlepoop aside so they can have another conversation. Littlepoop's questions are obvious enough: she wants to know what the deal is with all that stuff about his orders and his mission, and about being the Grand Robowizard or whatever the fuck they called him. Specifically, she wants to know why he is tagging along with their group. He responds with an assessment of Littlepoop's personal qualities:

>Sitting on his haunches, SteelHooves continued, “In my assessment, you have survived through luck, growing skill, and the unusual fortune of having capable friends who are willing to stick by you even when you are amazingly stupid.”
Except for the part about growing skill, this is actually pretty spot on.

Unfortunately, he then heads down the same path that every other character in this story has trodden, by sucking Littlepoop's clit and telling her how amazing he thinks she is:

>“I follow you because you are a better pony than I am. And you remind me of somepony else. You honestly strive to help and protect other ponies. I believe…” He paused. There was a hitch in his voice. “I believe she would have approved of you.”

So, basically, the relatively interesting mystery that was introduced just a scant few pages ago has already been revealed as a complete nothingburger. SteelHooves' presence in the group is neither insidious nor mysterious; like every other character in this story, he is simply caught in the pull of Littlepoop's personal magnetism.

>“I told you before, not every Steel Ranger has the same view of our Oath. I have always believed that we should follow in the example of our Ministry’s Mare, Applejack. That we should be pledged to her goals and priorities. That we should protect other ponies, both with our technology and our fortitude. We weren’t meant to steal and hoard. We were meant to defend.”
This would make a lot more sense had the author actually bothered to explain just what the fuck the Rangers' Oath entails. For that matter, we don't know that much about Applejack's goals and priorities either, beyond a vague assertion that she wanted to use technology to help ponies, instead of blowing them to tiny bits.

At this point, I am almost completely dependent on the knowledge of Fallout lore that anons have been kind enough to explain in this thread. If I were reading this on my own, I would have literally no idea what the fuck this undead robocuck was even on about.

Anyway, it turns out that none of this matters anyway, because Littlepoop, being the cunning little minx that she is, sees through SteelCuck's deception. She proceeds to call him out:
>I looked away, the ghoul’s words sinking in. When I turned back, I fixed him with a stare. “That was the most heartwarming cart of horseapples I have ever heard.”
>“You tell enough truth that anypony would buy your story. But here’s where the saddle rubs: all of that assessment had to have happened after you insinuated yourself into our group. If anything, you just explained why you are still with us.” I stopped in front of him and pointed. “So I ask again. Why. Are you. Here?”

Seeing that the jig is up, SteelHooves now explains his real reason for being here:

>“Do you remember when you eavesdropped on my conversation with Calamity? The picture I painted of you and your friends?”
The author doesn't really clarify this, he just assumes that we remember it. However, what he's referring to is an earlier conversation that LP overheard while half-unconscious, in which SteelHooves conveys his impression of the group. He imagines Littlepoop as a "covert agent," Calamity as an "outcast from an advanced civilization," and Velvet as the descendant of a Princess. Now that we know a little bit about Calamity's past that part makes a little more sense, though I'm still a bit curious why he thought Velvet was royalty.

>“That’s what my Elder believes you are. And my assignment is to assess the potential threat that you and the other residents of the Stable you come from represent.”
So basically, the gist of it is that he's here to spy on them.

Page break. Littlepoop basically agrees to let him keep tagging along with them on the grounds that he promise not to keep any more secrets. As a token of goodwill, he lets LP keep the box of memory orbs that she found in his safety deposit box. Naturally, she immediately dives into one of them (aren't they still in a war zone or something?).

Once again, LP is seeing through the eyes of SteelHooves/Applesnack. The scene is a rainy night, and Applesnack is conversing with what appears to be the pegasus who pulls his chariot. They are on a landing platform on the roof of a Manehattan skyscraper. The two of them make idle chitchat for awhile, and then the pegasus offers his condolences about Applejack's elevator mishap. At this point, Applesnack suddenly bites the pegasus' wing off.

The pegasus is all like: "What the hell, man?" Applesnack responds that only three ponies knew that AJ would be riding that elevator at that time, and that he checked his bank records and saw that a suspiciously large deposit had recently been made. Yada yada yada, this pony was responsible for AJ's elevator "accident," and now Applesnack intends to take his revenge. He kicks the chariot off of the roof with the one-winged pegasus still attached, and he falls to his death. End of memory.

One of the frustrating things about this story is that these memory orb scenes are actually pretty well executed for the most part; significantly more so than most of the actual story. This further buttresses my belief that the author put considerably more thought into the backstory of this world than he did the main story. I also suspect it has something to do with the perspective; showing unfamiliar events through the eyes of an unfamiliar character requires paying a little more attention to details and building a proper scene.

>>304889
>I'm still a bit curious why he thought Velvet was royalty.
>a princess descended from pre-war aristocracy
I think he was kind of being sarcastic referring to Velvet as a princess specifically, just to emphasize how unlikely a group the three of them are. She is definitely a descendent of the aristocracy - the great- great- whatever great- granddaughter of the sister of a ministry mare.

>>304891
Oh yeah Velvet's related to Sweetie Belle
Are you really a part of "The aristocracy" if you are suddenly promoted from the business-running/labour-performing class to a newly formed Ministry Of Insert Word Here while bypassing the existing nobles/aristocracy/whatever?
How did the "aristocracy" feel about that? And when did Equestria have an aristocracy?

How is fanfiction supposed to make sense of how Canterlot is full of dumb rich celebrity poners who typically exist for Rarity's "dont choose the cool/rich kids over your friends" episodes? Shittons of fanfics just say they're all idle-rich "nobles" who are paid by Celestia to stand around whining and being snobbish and eating Prett. As if we're supposed to assume Prince Blueblood isn't the only noble in canterlot and they're all like him. As if there's an entire class of ponies in Canterlot who just exist there to say "elitist and racist and classist" things that would make Code Geass's Britannians blush, to make heroic poners with just as much privilege look better in comparison because the author's pozzed enough to think there's something inherently shameful about being born rich and wants his pozzed audience to love the woke rich white pony for being so unusually woke about poor people for the pseudo-middle ages pop-history hollywoodjewed nonsense society authors like turning Canterlot into.

>>304906
>How is fanfiction supposed to make sense of how Canterlot is full of dumb rich celebrity poners who typically exist for Rarity's "dont choose the cool/rich kids over your friends" episodes? Shittons of fanfics just say they're all idle-rich "nobles" who are paid by Celestia to stand around whining and being snobbish and eating Prett. As if we're supposed to assume Prince Blueblood isn't the only noble in canterlot and they're all like him. As if there's an entire class of ponies in Canterlot who just exist there to say "elitist and racist and classist" things that would make Code Geass's Britannians blush, to make heroic poners with just as much privilege look better in comparison because the author's pozzed enough to think there's something inherently shameful about being born rich and wants his pozzed audience to love the woke rich white pony for being so unusually woke about poor people for the pseudo-middle ages pop-history hollywoodjewed nonsense society authors like turning Canterlot into.
This. You nailed it. It's such garbage.

>>304891
>>304906

I assumed that the 'princess' and 'aristocracy' parts of that line were tongue in cheek references to how Velvet acts superior to everyone. They can't be literally true, since Sweetie Belle wasn't a noble. At best she was a member of the government - that or a famous singer. Or both? It's not particularly clear. One of the biggest holes in the pre-apocalypse plot is that we don't really get a clear idea of how Equestria's government was structured or how it functioned day to day, despite the heavy focus on the main six as high ranking officials.

Granted, FoE does lean into the 'whole rich/government/military/nationalist = bad because reasons' school of thought, particularly later on, so Kkat probably didn't put much thought into it in the first place.

>>304908
Yup. There's certainly reasons to critique the concept or execution of an aristocracy, but good luck trying to find a discussion of it beyond hurr hurr muh privilege in the average fanfic.

>>304886
Interesting bits of notes here:

As previously mentioned by me i'm sure you understand what the gist of what this faction (steel rangers). Them calling the protagonists "tribals" is also in reference to the games, as every filthy wastelander is considered a "tribal" to them. And you are indeed correct. To my recollection there is only ONE active elder at a time in these factions, and it is a LEADER ranking, with Star Paladin being the highest below that, a rank for exceptional soldiers. I'm wracking my brain here but I don't think there's ever been more than one Elder at a time in the games, so Steelhooves would be their actual LEADER by this qualification. But here it seems he is both an elder (not a leader???) and star paladin (top tier soldier) who was just living in a shitshack and sucking the protag off on their first meeting?

Keep that rifle in mind also. The fic calls it an Anti-machine rifle and as evidenced by its use it's an Anti-materiel-style rifle. It is enormous and meant to punch through armored tank suits that are the powered armors of this setting. In New Vegas it fires .50 BMG ammunition. Calamity just shot one of them in the leg with it--that leg should be fucking GONE. Liqueified.

This is the strongest rifle in the game that does the most damage, uses the strongest ammunition, and makes even power armor into a complete joke. Calamity just found a UNIQUE one by the way, which in RPG terms means better stats, so it's even STRONGER. I found a fan interpretation of the rifle below next to a screenshot of its size in NV.

Keep the size of this in mind when Calamity literally does flying trickshots with it later and fires it SLUNG UNDER HIS BELLY

>>304909
>>304908
What pisses me off about this wokeist take on what non-wokeist govt systems where people inherit power and are raised to have some understanding of how to use it (and could get decapitated by a peasant revolt or a ruler willing to prevent such a thing if they misuse it too much) is that it's always "Resolved" the same way.
The lefty sees government systems that are not its own and thinks "This must be reshapen into my government system".
It sees nothing wrong with the immense concentration of power over others and their lives in the hands of politically powerful individuals, as long as those individuals agree with the leftist.
Once upon a time there was a bad king who didn't treat people nicely but he was overthrown and a good king who wuvs teh equalitee replaced him. And all those bad things that caused the end of the world, even if they were completely out of the hands of the rulers (Meteors hitting earth to make dust clouds block out the sky, terminal spontaneous lack of major resources, aliens, zombies, war, cartoonish anger at people over their differences, enemy mutant army, enemy racist army, whatever the fuck) magically went away once the author said they did.
And why do those bad things go away at the end? Because the author has no motherfucking clue how his "good leader" OC would be able to solve the problems that killed the civilized world and caused the current state of things. So the author waves his magic wand and magics those problems away. And reviewers, especially professional reviewers, are Buzzfeed/Polygon-tier hacks with no idea what's wrong with this writing.
What a dull story. And it's the same one every time. The hero struggles against videogame enemies in an open-world game until he completes the main quest that fixes everything. He has sick epic fights against baddies now and then but sometimes people talk about deep shit like peace or hope or war or whatever. Maybe he's on an Escort Mission to take The McGuffin Person(him or frend) to the special/safe zone. Do the quest, save le world. YA trash.

Doesn't it bug anyone else that these post-apocalyptic worlds are so rarely used to examine ideologies and their consequences?

Modern Liberalism has no desire to genuinely help mankind and that is by design, because liberalism is a weapon power-greedy pedophile jew communists and their goypets use to make societies weaken and destroy themselves trying to achieve unattainable goals like "Feed everyone whether they work or not" and "Accept everyone who wants in whether they'll be assets to your nation or poisonous threats or not" and "Give everyone rights whether they earn or deserve them or not- except don't give people rights we don't want them to have and of course, thoughtcriminals against liberalism don't deserve rights".
Starship Troopers (The book) argued for "classical liberalism", a system where people have a responsibility to earn their rights, and it was called Fascist by the left for not being their damaged-by-design poisonous wokeism.
Conservativism fights to maintain whatever the status quo becomes after it gives up ground to the left every week. It has no good answers for the intentionally-misleading pilpul bullshit questions leftists use to stump conservatives and get their way. It exists to pressure every non-leftist into thinking compromise with the left and religiously refusing to hate jews/nigs is the only way to make those enemies into friends.
Libertarianism sounds like a lovely third option but it ignores the role good individuals need to play in maintaining and serving their nation so it can function enough to protect its people. "Everyone should be able to grow weed and own guns, fuck all laws" stops you from telling the difference between good laws meant to protect people such as "Don't rape" and bad laws meant to protect monopolies or invasive replacists like "don't fix your tractor" and "don't defend yourself against niggers". A nation that's 80% pot-smoking giga-faggots won't stay unconquered for long.
Libertarians hate eminent domain and business nationalization but Hitler was able to reshape Germany into a powerhouse almost the whole world struggled to take down by recognizing when (jewish) businesses and land need repurposing.

In the wake of a world devastated by massive nations with ambitions of global domination nuking each other in a war, it would make sense for the survivors of this world to decide massive nations were a mistake because they resulted in governors getting their hands on the "Nuke the world" buttons.
I can see people really hating conscription and gun confiscation if that's something evil countries did in the Obligatory Bad Period Of Time Before The Apocalypse that typically exists to justify why stuff that's handy or dangerous for the post-apocalypsers exists in their time.
If a post-apocalyptic world resembled anything from our pop culture, it would be like a cowboy movie once a few years/decades of Mad Max bullshit kills off everyone who can't survive without govts babying them or megacorps feeding them along with pretty much everyone who thought joining a criminal gang/raider tribe was the only path to success.
I could see a shitton of small farming villages popping up all over the world, defended from bandits by locals with shotguns and volunteer defense forces trained by retired ex-bounty hunters and anyone with military knowhow. When everyone's sufficiently armed, the life of a bandit will be risky and short. Towns create safe zones where people can practice their crafts and produce better weaponry, ammo, traps, explosives, and so on than the average roaming pack of knife-wielding hobos in rags could ever dream of.
Realistically, bandit camps shouldn't be able to sustain themselves 100% on banditry or produce more people than well-defended towns.

or white survivors could decide "peace isn't an option, it's your reward for victory" and avenge those killed by the jew's/nigger's nukes to end the cycle of revenge.

>>304886
Yes indeed you are correct. This drama between "true followers of the ministry mare" is lifted from Fallout 3. See, in that game there are the base Brotherhood who are generic good guy power rangers and bastardizations of the faction's origins, and then there are the Brotherhood Outcasts, who left to more closely follow the original intent of the faction.

In this fic it's reversed and like the original games: the main group is xenophobic technophiles, ad this group is considering following the "true way" of applejack and her ministry and becoming the good guys.

>>304865
>gratuitous bodily functions
I'm getting the feeling kkat thinks the reason George R.R. Martin is considered a "good" author is because of gross and extremely violent scenes people used to not expect in books. Though this was written before Game of Thrones really took off in popularity so maybe something else was an inspiration. Needless to say even though it's intended to make a world "realistic" it's a moot point because of merely implying its existence would be more than enough, not to mention how immersion-breaking the videogamey aspects are. And if it's meant to shock that doesn't really work in the 21st century, where required high school reading like The Kite Runner has stuff like anal rape in it.

>this is a problem because AJ wanted the Steel Rangers' armor to be invincible or something, I guess. She gets very emotional, and vows to go out to the factory (she calls it Ironshod Firearms, which I think is the name of the factory that LP fought the brain bots in eons ago) so she can yell at them or something.
When I read this I thought it implied some advanced-tech gun from New Vegas that was designed to defeat electronics. If however it's a .50 BMG rifle that's utterly pointless and stupid. It implies that nopony has ever designed artillery or a HMG, and as this kind of weapon follows bigger = better logic there's no esoteric technology you can keep from the world by yelling at one manufacturer.

>She gets in the elevator, but as it ascends, suddenly something snaps, and the elevator goes plummeting down and crashes.
Kek, I just watched a parody TNG recut where Picard and the crew want Pulaski dead so they sabotage a turbolift which causes her to fall into the empty shaft. Their reaction when she yells up, "I'm okay!" is priceless. I've always found it funny how Major Grin spoofing Star Trek by making everyone cowardly, self-obsessed nymphomaniacs still has more coherent plotlines than nuTrek or fanfiction.

>>304886
>Unhealthy, malnourished slaves would be virtually useless as labor
But Glim, if slaves had a semi-content life with food, medical care, shelter and protection readers might second-guess the morality of killing slavers and leaving slaves to fend for themselves/burden others! You might have difficult moral dilemmas in a setting which ostensibly is morally grey, and you can't have that!

>How is fanfiction supposed to make sense of how Canterlot is full of dumb rich celebrity poners who typically exist for Rarity's "dont choose the cool/rich kids over your friends" episodes?
Like a game of telephone the popular view of ancient systems and traditions gets flanderized and distorted by those who have no love for the past. To any person living in medieval Europe the "Great Chain of Being" was a concept that was understood and accepted even more naturally than "democracy" or "human rights" is by modern man. Every rung in a social hierarchy fulfilled an essential purpose on a physical and metaphysical level, though individual members could fail to live up to responsibilities by being incompetent, lazy or corrupt. It's impossible for people like kkat to understand this, as they live in a dream of rejecting stereotypes yet embracing stereotypes codified by a "tolerant" society.

>>304912
>I'm wracking my brain here but I don't think there's ever been more than one Elder at a time in the games
Well, different chapters each have an elder and they collectively form an "Elder Council" which governs the entire Brotherhood. However over time each chapter has grown more distant from the original Lost Hills leadership until Fallout 4 when Arthur Maxson is unanimously appointed High Elder. This still begs the question of why Steelhooves would be out on his own if he is an Elder, instead of sending his protege or somesuch. His relationship to Applejack essentially makes him the most important member and fundamentally irreplaceable, so he shouldn't be in harm's way. Also in the Fallout games the Brotherhood disliked ghouls; a cut game made the rogue and evil Washington chapter be headed by a ghoul.

>anti-materiel rifle
The fact that this is considered a gamechanger doesn't feel realistic. It makes sense in the game when all vehicles have broken down (except for Vertibirds and the ground vehicles fielded by the Midwest Brotherhood from Fallout: Tactics, because they had some sense) that power armor is the toughest stuff around, but in the Fallout universe there were actual tanks and APCs as well as sentry bots which are automated light tanks. I haven't seen any indication these existed (except for sentry bots which were hardly a challenge) in FOE. Presumably during the Great War in Fallout power armor was used to field "heavy infantry" which wouldn't replace vehicles, but in FOE it seems like PA is the be-all-end-all. Keep in mind that the .50 BMG originally wasn't an AM cartridge but was used for the Browning machine gun, meaning one of those would wipe out a PA platoon as easy as a Vickers killed unarmored soldiers in WW1. Assuming PA is level IV body armor (can stop .30 rounds), even weaksauce WW2 vehicles would be a deadly threat. The reason the BoS and Enclave don't get wiped despite their PA is because these guns and their ammo are uncommon and too heavy for wastelanders to want. The only people who would carry these (if obtainable) would be those fighting against PA, hunting deathclaws/hellhounds or shooting supermutants/alicorns. This story's lack of a weight limit ruins balance.

>spoiler
Of course he would.

>>304913
tl;dr
Right-wing/centrist writers are willing to write about imperfect systems favorably and can explore their strengths and weaknesses. Leftist writers believe that any system against their values sucks and the more it embraces their values the less sucky it is automatically. It would be neat to see western futurism be explored more as what happens when cyberpunk systems collapse.

>>304918
>the rogue and evil Washington chapter headed by a ghoul
Were they searching for a buried vault where shittons of US Soldiers were cryogenically frozen, hoping to add these dudes and their stored military shit to their chapter of the army, or was that something the Hearts Of Iron 4 mod "Old World Blues" made up for its take on the Washington Brotherhood and its immortal leader?

Also, it's bad writing that LP is able to find so much good loot in pristine condition, right?
She found that Twilight statuette in Pinkie Pie's skeleton because she died holding it close to her heart and decayed for years without anyone, not even wandering monsters, disturbing her.
And only now, for the first time, are we seeing evidence that anyone besides LP on this planet can lockpick.

Surely in a survival situation that's somehow lasted 200 years, loot that's useful to Wastelanders would have been the first shit to get scavenged and used up.
These poners shouldn't find top-tier loot effortlessly. They should be forced to manufacture top-tier loot from primitive technology and scrap/trash.
it's particularly galling because Littlepip's Littleshits have built in excuses for their ability to visit and scavenge places the average wastelander likely couldn't.
LP has a map on her pipbuck and can hack anything, it makes no sense for her to also be a pro lockpicker and stealth master and more.
Velvet can talk her way into and out of things.
Calamity can fly.
Steelhooves has power armour that resists radiation better than the cloth/leather/metal/kevlar-at-best most wastelanders wear.
All sorts of excuses could be used to justify why the heroes are the first ones to find the best loot usually but Kkat sees nothing wrong with magical bobbleheads existing in well travelled areas for you to pick up.

Also the author's violating game rules for LP's benefit again. In the games if you Jam a lock by fucking up an attempt to force a lock open and getting unlucky on the RNG roll with its success chance boosted by your Lockpicking skill, that lock is permanently stuck. Can't attempt the lockpicking minigame again.

>>304920
That's forcing, to be fair. You never break them just by picking normally which ~technically~ fits the game rule idea.

Loot being abundant in the first places you cross over is another common idea transplanted the games because that's just how it is to make rewarding explanation. In more grounded settings you would balance this by injecting specific reasoning as to why these items and objects are just laying around.

Maybe Raiders have cached all their goods and supplies in a room or personal lockers as settlers do. Or, monsters moved in and have literally 0 perception of the nuances of canned beans or rifle lockers. Or groups like the Alicorns or Steel Rangers have no interest because they are pressed for time, focused on a mission, or don't engage in scavenging of common property. Of course, you'd need to highlight these as the cause for things laying around, but I suppose it depends on the circumstance. Yes, it's unreasonable to find super mcfuck you rifles in a middle of nowhere place, but other examples like pip getting her god tier revolver happened inside of a reinforced and guarded factory complex. She TECHNICALLY had to work for it, and it stands to reason the Robobrain guards kept outside scavengers away. I think this story just needs to realign its balancing act when it comes to touching on loot and such.

>>304923
>Loot being abundant in the first places you cross over is another common idea transplanted the games because that's just how it is to make rewarding explanation. In more grounded settings you would balance this by injecting specific reasoning as to why these items and objects are just laying around.
>
>Maybe Raiders have cached all their goods and supplies in a room or personal lockers as settlers do. Or, monsters moved in and have literally 0 perception of the nuances of canned beans or rifle lockers. Or groups like the Alicorns or Steel Rangers have no interest because they are pressed for time, focused on a mission, or don't engage in scavenging of common property. Of course, you'd need to highlight these as the cause for things laying around, but I suppose it depends on the circumstance.
While this is true, keep in mind that because the earth and water are poisoned scavenging appears to be the only semi-reliable means by which ponies can find the things they need to survive in this setting. Scavenging has been compulsory for two centuries by the time Pip arrived on the scene. Two centuries - that's something like eight to ten generations if you assume pony lifespans are roughly the same as humans'. Naturally some sources of loot should be untouched due to inaccessibility or danger, but logically speaking the overwhelming majority of Equestria should have been picked clean ages ago.

Despite this, Littlepip and her friends never want for food or water and are practically drowning in weapons and ammunition by now. They can barely undertake a regular day's travel without stumbling over some legendary weapon or priceless treasure or ammo stash. And the story's not even half done!

>>304889

Anyway, after the memory orb sequence ends, Littlepoop stares in horror at SteelHooves. Despite having brutally murdered a group of raiders just a few short scenes ago, whose only crime was occupying a building that she wanted to steal things from, and despite all of the other horrible, gruesome shit she's done in this story, she is apparently shocked and appalled that this guy would go so far as to kick somepony off a roof.

>I stared at SteelHooves in horror.
>He stared back calmly. “No secrets.”
Edge, edge, edge.

Page break. The next scene opens with another of Red Eye's monologues, which LP listens to as the group stands atop a small hill which gives them a view of the surrounding area. Most of the city of Fillydelphia has been walled off, presumably by Red Eye's army, and is guarded by the usual assortment of snipers and ponk-balloons and whatever the fuck else. Nearby, a building which used to be occupied by Stable Tec has been co-opted as a fortress by the Steel Rangers, and that's apparently where they are now headed.

A fairly stupid non-sequitur conversation follows. Calamity approaches SteelHooves and remarks that the two of them are similar, because SteelHooves had the opportunity to become Elder yet he chose not to be. Technically, the author has not bothered to explain what being Elder even entails, and he hasn't really explained why Calamity would know anything about it either, but we'll put a pin in that for now. SteelHooves replies thusly:

>“No. You flew towards your responsibilities in defiance of your own kind, heedless and ignorant of the consequences.”
He flew towards what responsibilities? What consequences was he heedless of? We still don't know anything about where Calamity came from or why he ran away, so this statement is basically meaningless. It makes even less sense when you consider that SteelHooves probably wouldn't know anything about this either. He continues:

>“I ran away from my responsibilities because I understood exactly what the consequences would be if I did not. I knew there were ponies who would follow my example, and I was not willing to risk a civil war amongst the Steel Rangers.”
Again, this would probably have more impact if we knew what the fuck he was talking about. We know even less about SteelHooves' background than we do about Calamity's.

So, to review: we, the reader, know basically nothing about either the Pegasus Enclave or the Steel Rangers. Moreover, unless they've been talking to each other off camera, Calamity and SteelHooves shouldn't know anything more about each others' backstories than we do. Thus, this entire conversation makes no sense, and the fact that it's dumped into this scene out of nowhere makes it feel even more out of place.

Anyway, SteelHooves closes the matter by remarking that he and Calamity are nothing alike, and the chapter ends here.

Chapter Twenty Four: Dances of Light and Shadow

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“Mmm! I can smell the muffins baking now!”
Something something kkat's a tranny.

This chapter drops us right into the middle of another memory orb. Littlepoop is looking through the eyes of a dying pony who has had most of his body below the torso blown off, and it's every bit as edgy as you would expect. Because I love you people, I won't subject you to any direct quotations. Well, maybe just one:

>We felt cold. A chill deeper than that from the rain. I felt drops of rain kissing the seeringly painful wound. I was thankful I couldn’t feel drops landing inside me.
"Searing," not "seering." Get a spellchecker, Caitlyn.

Anyway, the scene is basically an unknown pony (Littlepoop's "host") and Big Macintosh are in a trench together, and the host pony is acting out a long, exaggerated death scene. Then, Fluttershy shows up with a bunch of the healer ponies. The dying host pony tells her to leave him be since he's pretty much fucked anyway, and then drifts off into the cold embrace of death. Or, so he thought; turns out Fluttershy just developed something called a "megaspell" that can miraculously heal everyone on the battlefield in a single fell swoop. Wow, this "megaspell" business sounds pretty useful; I sure hope nopony repurposes it for something nefarious.

Anyway, an exasperated Rainbow Dash shows up and yells at her, because the little yellow bimbo's healing spell fixed up all the wounded on the battlefield, including the zebras, which means that now they have to fight the whole battle over again. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Page break.

>Velvet Remedy stopped as we approached the massive gate that the Steel Rangers had built in front of Stable-Tec Headquarters.
So, this basically means...what? The group was walking the entire time that LP was in that memory orb?

Seriously; think about this. At the end of the last chapter, the group was on top of a hill, looking down at Stable-Tec Headquarters. Now, the group is at Stable-Tec Headquarters. Presumably, the journey between these two points occurred during the ether-space. It's been established that entering a memory orb basically incapacitates the viewer, meaning that from the moment the memory starts playing until the time it ends, LP is unable to move, speak, or otherwise react to her environment. So, what happened here? The group was just walking around in this highly dangerous area, when LP, the de-facto leader who is always bragging about how wasteland-savvy she's become in the last month or so, suddenly decides to just whip out this memory orb and go unconscious for an indeterminate period of time? Did she just tell one of her friends to carry her? Did they all just stop in the middle of the battlefield and wait for her? Just what the hell is going on exactly?

Anyway, whatever; here they are, outside the front gate of the Steel Rangers' base.

>The senior paladin mare trotted forward, addressing them.
These ranks have not been explained and are completely meaningless, both to LP and to us.

>>304923
>>304925
Speaking of monsters, what do the monsters eat?
Animals? What do the animals eat?
Especially the giant monsters. Being giant means you have to eat a lot, usually.
Some giant Dragons in fiction eat entire cows each meal like a man eating an entire cooked chicken every day.
Imagine a Dragon swooping down into the ocean like one of those birds that grabs some fish and fucks off to eat the fish, except the Dragon steals an entire shark or sperm whale from the ocean instead and eats that on the shore!
Imagine how "dealing with a beached whale" would change if dragons tended to leave half-eaten whale carcasses upon your lovely beaches!
I recall one book where dragons had the wits of people and owned quaint cow-farming villages when they weren't forced to be weapons of war by "those darn dirty humans".
The author could have handwaved this by saying "Irradiated animals/monsters survive by taking radiotrophic energy from the radioactivity around them- i mean uhhh magical darkness energy from the radioactive cursed Taint around them, and that's why monsters can survive in the post-apocalypse even though they typically lack visible food sources. This is why the heroes will often find monsters deep into dungeons. It's because those dungeons contain radiation sources like a barrel of radioactive waste or were bombed super-heavily and still practically glow."

>steelhooves kicks a poner off the roof
THIS! IS! SPARTA!

>Steelhooves didn't want a civil war so he didn't try to set his organization on its rightful path even though he's a 200 year old ghoul who dated Applejack and should logically be fucking worshipped by his faction.
I'm glad it's not a spoiler to say THIS IS FUCKING RETARDED.
A small army of intelligent Power Armour-clad fuckers with trained technicians and excellent guns have the capacity to be a force for good in the Wasteland, potentially one of the best. Steelhooves should want his organization to be good guys who hunt alicorns for great justice, not thieves who hoard tech until the end of time or their organization's end.
Steelhooves should want his organization to honour Applejack's name, not disgrace it by hoarding her tech from the world!
Who gives a fuck if some aggressive sect of your wannabe-holy-knights want to start a civil war over their desire to steal tech and shoot wastelanders to get it? If the organization's got evil goals and methods, it means every good member is forced to serve in this unsustainably evil organization full of idiots risking their lives to gain technology in the name of hoarding it, even though if it dies the secrets of that tech dies with them.
The Brotherhood Of Steel (the source material's steel rangers) is not a sustainable organization with a bright future. They don't make friends, they only make enemies. They don't help the Wasteland, they only police its tech levels. Eventually, when there are good writers, post-apocalyptic societies get back on their feet and get organized. Suddenly they aren't afraid of four pricks in power armour, suddenly they can't use their glorified plate mail and laser rifles to intimidate farmers and "prospectors" (scavengers) into giving their shit up, and suddenly a few hundred pricks in power armour can't stand up to an endless swarm of a few thousand conscripted NCR troopers. The Brotherhood doesn't make friends, it only makes enemies. The prevalence of some innovative new weapon like a Pulse Gun, an energy pistol that shuts down electronics to fuck up power armour and robots, would only accelerate their inevitable decline/demise. If House ever got Euclid's C-Finder and the Helios Power Plant, he'd get big fucking sun lasers on his side like something out of Command And Conquer, and he wouldn't need Line Of Sight to use his machines to dial in coordinates taken from a radar station. And god fucking knows what he could do with any extra power taken from that station.

>I was thankful I couldn’t feel drops landing inside me
Funny, you'd think Kkat would love feeling drops landing inside him. Drops of gay semen, that is! Dohohohoho!

>>304946
"Oh no, you healed the baddies! Now the fighting must continue!" might be a videogame trope but holy shit, including it here makes the Zebras into irredeemable cunts. Well, they were already that because spoilers. But seriously, fuck these Zebras.
Imagine fighting in a war for the benefit of your bastard king "Caesar" who's such a cunt, your enemy's land swells with refugees who wanted no part in your war. Or wanted to continue it the subversive way, depends on how black their stripes are.
Anyway, after a long battle you learn war is bad. Then, through sheer zebra mercy, after you lose the battle, a big magic boom heals everypony and every zebra that can be saved.
Do you
A) drop your weapons and surrender to the ponies, learning war is bad and the mercy of ponies is awesome, maybe even play some football with them because they're so shockingly non-evil despite what your government told you
B) run home so you can fight another day for your evil zigger government that's a bizarre mashup of stealth-suit-using Communist China, caesar-serving spear-tossing Caesar's Legion, and unga-bunga potions-and-talismans African Meme Shithole Land
C) resume fighting to kill right then and there while laughing evilly at the "foolish ponies" for acting like Goku when he gave some of his energy to a dying Freeza, just enough for Freeza to get off the exploding planet they were on, even though Freeza betrayed Goku and died for that.

If you chose C you're a fucking ZIGGER.
Occasional moments where Equestria is called censorious or imperialistic or racist feel tacked-on compared to these highly-visible examples of real zebra evil and other, bigger examples.

btw fuck kkat for thinking a country shouldn't use the resources of another. The Navi from Avatar did nothing good with their Unobtanium. Humanity could have saved lives with it. Humanity deserved it more. Humanity, fuck yeah. Purge the Xeno and the Xigger.

>>304946

There is a statue of Sweetie Belle in the courtyard outside the base. Velvet spends a few minutes "conversing" with her great-grandmother, telling her the stable worked and that she sang her song on the radio and so forth and so on. The display is fairly awkward; I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be moved here or what. Velvet has never really said much about this particular ancestor one way or the other; she seems to hold Fluttershy in higher reverence, although even that has never felt particularly genuine. In any case, nothing about Velvet's behavior or comments up to this point would suggest that she holds Sweetie Belle in high enough esteem that merely seeing a statue of her would get her this choked up, so this "tender moment" feels forced and silly. I could see if it were her grave or something, but a statue?

Anyway, SteelHooves seems to take a similar view of this, silently rolling his eyes at the display. Then, suddenly, Velvet's pet phoenix lands on the statue, and all the Steel Rangers snap to attention, because balefire phoenixes are dangerous I guess (this is what I had assumed initially, which is why I was so confused about whether the one following them was supposed to be hostile).

>I chuckled grimly to myself. “Yeah, she might lift your visor and breathe, baking you.” The mental image was grotesque -- having seen a pony killed cruelly like that was horrifying - but somehow the image of Pyrelight pulling the same trick struck my funny bone. Goddesses, there really was something wrong with me.
Yeah, there's something wrong with you all right. Maybe try cutting back on soy and fluoridated water. Oh wait a minute, it's Littlepoop, not kkat, who's speaking here. My mistake.

Anyway, LP shares some fairly trivial banter with one of the Rangers, Poppyseed, and then a giant crane lifts up the gate and allows them inside. Calamity finds a bottle cap in a dry fountain beneath the statue. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Calamity and SteelHooves exchange some dry technical conversation about how the Rangers' magic armor works.

>SteelHooves had slowed, staring at Calamity. This was the first time he had witnessed Calamity’s freaky knowledge of magical engineering, rarely seen as it was.
It's the first time any of us have witnessed this, because it's never come up, and nothing in his behavior or dialogue thus far would suggest he would have this type of knowledge. What we (sort-of) know about his backstory might partially explain some knowledge of the pegasus armor he mentions, but more than anything this just feels like a character trait that the author has suddenly decided to give him out of nowhere, like Littlepoop suddenly becoming an avid book enthusiast midway through the story.

>The senior paladin mare led us up the steps to the once-grand doors of Stable-Tec.
These pseudo-military ranks are specific to the order of the Steel Rangers and are not common knowledge, nor is it likely that LP would be familiar with them. At the very least we need a cursory explanation of what they are and what they mean if they're going to be commonly referenced like this.

>I shuddered, feeling a chill.
And on top of everything else, the building is drafty.

Anyway, yada yada yada, they go into this Ranger fortress. Calamity asks if he can get some time on the shooting range, because he wants to play with that big ass gun he found, the "anti-machine gun." Nothing else happens.

>I facehoofed. Velvet Remedy nickered and trotted inside, ignoring the confused pegasus.
Kkat, if you use the word "facehoof" or "squee" one more time I'm going to shove that anti-machine gun up your ass sideways.

Page break. The building the Rangers use as their headquarters apparently has an automated "tour" routine that activates every time somepony enters the room, which they can't figure out how to disable. For some reason, they follow the tour instead of just ignoring it. A hologram of Sweetie Belle appears and rattles off a bunch of company boilerplate about stables and whatnot.

>The mock-Stable door (numbered “0”) swung open on hinges as we approached while a soundtrack played the sounds of an actual Stable door being pulled open. Spinning yellow lights topped off the simulation, something that hadn’t been present in Stable Two.
>Velvet Remedy stifled a giggle. Before I could stop myself, I whispered “Velvet Remedy’s barn door doesn’t swing that way.” I gasped and quickly corrected myself, “I meant, Stable Two’s.” Too late. The charcoal-coated unicorn with the scarlet and gold streaks in her white mane was fixing me with a stare that told me I wouldn’t be hearing the last of this for a long, uncomfortable time. Dammit, sometimes I hated my mother. Not that my slip-of-the-tongue was really her fault… but it was her fault.
In all seriousness, this author really needs to get his verbal diarrhea under control. The paragraph starts on one thought and ends at another; it's a telltale sign that the author is just writing whatever pops into his head, stream of consciousness style. While this technique can occasionally produce interesting results, most of the time it just produces long, incoherent trains of thought that go nowhere, case in point. The joke about Velvet's barn door is obviously meant to be a crack about her sexual orientation, but what specifically it's implying is as ambiguous as...well...as Velvet's sexual orientation. It's not really that funny to begin with, and the rambling way the joke is told saps what little humor it might have had. Also, whatever the connection to Littlepoop's mother is, I'm not seeing it.

>Velvet Remedy seemed on the verge of tears at the parting words of her ancestor whom we both knew had become the first Overmare of Stable Two -- the Stable whose special purpose was to keep us down there, safe, forever.
She's on the verge of tears? Literally two seconds ago she was "stifling a giggle." Nobody in this story emotes convincingly, least of all Velvet.

>>304959
LP giggling seems like bad writing. The thought of a cartoon poner dying horribly is sad and darkly hilarious. Like a Spomgebob fan animation where Bubble Bass kills Squidward and Spongebob kills Bubble Bass in a big animu fight scene. But to a cartoon poner the thought of a fellow poner dying would be purely horrifying.
Kkat has such a bizarre fascination with bodily fluids and pony gore. Do you think he's the type who guts stuffed animals with knives when he's butthurt?

>>304964
Maybe she's losing touch with her virtue and becoming a raider woooooooo

>>304959
>These pseudo-military ranks are specific to the order of the Steel Rangers and are not common knowledge, nor is it likely that LP would be familiar with them. At the very least we need a cursory explanation of what they are and what they mean if they're going to be commonly referenced like this.
This is compounded by the fact that in the Fallout games, the Brotherhood of Steel's structure varies somewhat between games. The series spans over a century and from one coast of the US to the other, so there are local variants and no singular, unchanging hierarchy for Kkat to have based the Rangers' on. Fallout 3 is the obvious model, but that game didn't do much to clarify the Brotherhood's structure either.

Roughly speaking, the brotherhood is structured as follows:
Initiate - Trainee
Scribe - Scientist or technician
Knight - Field operative/foot soldier
Paladin - Senior knight who serves as a ranking officer
Elder - Local chapter leader (typically a former paladin or in rare cases head scribe)
High Elder - Supreme commander

There's various intermediary or specialist ranks, but you get the idea. In the games at least, the reason for this hierarchy is because the Brotherhood are a pseudo-religious organization descended from the US military. They adopted this structure and terminology in order to differentiate themselves from the pre-apocalypse world's way of thinking, given that said way of thinking lead to the end of the world. This is why they're so dead set on hoarding technology - to prevent its misuse by people they perceive to be ignorant so that further disasters don't occur.

By contrast, the Steel Rangers - if I'm reading correctly - seem to have started out as a paramilitary group dedicated specifically to the ideals of Applejack (which, for the purposes of this story, seem to be something vaguely like 'keep ponies safe'), only to fall into tech hoarding later because... reasons?

I still hate how Littlepip hates Vaults. Stables. Whatever.

In Fallout 1, you're on a mission to save your Vault. You're told to visit another Vault to get their water chip but it's destroyed. Walking through this shithole, you're struck with the realization that your home could turn out like this if you fail in your quest.
Once you get rope to get into the place. Also you run into a civilized yet somewhat primitive tribal village called Shady Sands along the way, they have rope for trading. also a guard there you can hire tells you about Junktown and The Hub. I forget how but visiting those places eventually leads you to the ghoul town with a water chip which eventually gets attacked by The Master's Super Mutants of Mariposa Military Base and you get the "stop the muties before it is too late" part of your quest.
First you explore this world and its threats. You're on a personal quest to save your people. Then a problem arises outside its usual situations: a mutant army that needs to be stopped.
It's a logical progression. Good escalation.
But this?
LP dicked around for 200k words and all she has to show for it is a ton of loot and ammo. Her initial quest was to find Velvet and she found Velvet too soon, before anything that could reasonably turn LP's hateboner for slavers and desire to visit and murderhobo Red Eye's land while stopping at a radio tower for some reason into a proper story.
What if Velvet left the vault because she was the chosen one? What if Velvet wanted to end slavery in the wastes and vastly overestimated her abilities? What if Velvet had some mission given to her by her Stable's Overmare or a Sweetie Belle recording? What if Velvet thought she was a chosen one because in her dreams Princess Luna called her important and begged her to heal poners in the wasteland but actually it turns out she was getting psychically mindfucked by The Alicorns and their boss every night because... uh... they wanted her pure not-irradiated genes to fix problems their mutant race has, or they pull this shit to groom new alicorns they want to brainwash and mutate all the time and Velvet's just the latest in a line thousands long, or Velvet knows something important nopony else knows because reasons (maybe the stable code she learned from Sweetie Belle opens all stables).
important thing is, Littlepip isnt a character.
She is a player character.
Her personality traits don't get in the way of optimal murderhobo efficiency except when the author's personality traits get in the way of remembering things in a well written world continue to exist even when the hero isnt looking at them.
Littlepip is a callous kleptomaniac and instant gun master with a shallow nonsense backstory that irrationally makes her a pro hacker and lockpicker in a world irrationally full of computers to hack and safes and doors to pick open. Nothing about her past shapes who she is now. It's like an amateur DND player's first character, one designed to fight well but without any fun roleplaying or distinct memorable personality traits.
Final Fantasy X is a masterpiece. It's got a main hero girl who has to go to places and then fight a monster to buy the world a few years of relative peace before the monster gets better. The main hero guy... at first he is just our fish-out-of-water POV character but he inspires the hero girl to break the cycle and save the world permanently. It's epic.
Media can have multiple main heroes.
But what effect does Littlepip have on her friends? She's a slutty coke fiend and the universe can't sing her praises enough.
What effect does Velvet have on her friends? None, because whenever she bitches about kid-killing or how smelly her boyfriend is it never matters. She doesn't get to be the group's moral compass because the Selfish Neutral With Nominally Good Murderhobo Tendencies dnd character Littleshit already took that role for the party.
Velvet left her vault because she wanted to be a medic and save lives in post apocalypse land- just kidding, she wanted to be a singing medic but her Stable would only let her be a singer. Meanwhile LP left because she didn't like being blamed for Velvet leaving even though she almost instantly gave up on dragging Velvet back to their home kicking and screaming.

It could be like a Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks movie where at first the hero thinks he wants something (in this case LP wants her old civilian life back) but then realizes what the hero really wanted all along was to be a hero.
Could even reference Fallout 1's twist ending where your reward for saving the wasteland and your vault is getting kicked out of your vault by your overseer so the vault's kids won't idolize you and want to be like you and leave the vault on their own. LP could, with Calamity's help, drag Velvet back to her Stable of origin only to be told "Velvet can come back even though she doesn't want to be here. I love her music. But you are just some technician. And murderer. Killing is wrong according to our delicate civilian sensibilities! Get out, you're fired"
and this could break LP's trust in authority figures in a huge dramatic moment that makes all the story's "irrationally stupid civilization" moments feel intentional and give the story an anti-dictator theme for when the heroes fight slavery or whatever.
Surely in a better-written story, there would be a bigger divide between "Littlepip the order-following naive fool who wants to drag Velvet back to their Stable kicking and screaming so she can have her boring comfy safe old life back" and "Littlepip the hardened wasteland warrior who doesn't want to go home and chooses her own missions and works with Velvet the travelling medic who always secretly had a bigger goal than just feeding health potions to junkies in a bombed-out 260 year old hospital".

>>305052
fuck i forgot to add:
Littlepip hates Stables because they're so different from her own in architecture and design. Shit isn't where it's supposed to be.
But that's videogame bullshit.
In the games, Vaults are Skyrim-tier baby dungeons with 1, 2, and rarely 3 floors. They're constructed differently because they're just dungeons, like the "caves" that are linear sequences of rooms with monsters in them.

But realistically it makes no sense that real vaults/stables meant to house at least a few hundred thousand humans/ponies would be these tiny linear retardniggerbrained """dungeons""" (Legend of Zelda has more complex dungeons) that vary wildly in architecture and design so much you'd swear a (((diverse))) team of fucktarded interns and divershitty hires handled the level design separately without explaining how vaults are supposed to function or what the average vault looks like.

It makes no sense that Littlepip would go through a vaultstable thinking "Grrrr nothing's where it should be and everything's different from my vault" like a goomer grumpy that some areas aren't just copypasted from the area his character grew up in.
This pony should be fucking horrified at the eerie similarities between every Stable that's like her own except doomed and full of skeletons and notes from the world design faggot- i mean author conveniently explaining exactly how the poners here died.

Sometimes the author arbitrarily decides LP won't use VATS/SATS in a fight so it can be more creative than "she attempts four headshots quickly and three don't miss, the end" and her friends can take part in the brawl.
Maybe subconsciously the author realizes VATS is bullshit?
Then again these "non-VATS kills" usually involve killing an enemy too tough for guns using her overpowered telekinesis.
So maybe the author just really wants to make his special little snowflake so special that even though the PipBuck does much of her work her impossibly powerful psychic might is still what resolves most situations she finds herself in. Just when you start to think "anyone with a pipbuck could do what she does since it carries so much of her weight" she whips out an absurd skill she has no reason to have such as lockpicking or hacking or High Pain Tolerance(tm) or telekinetic godhood.
Kkat is a faggot who's too much of a coward to embrace the power fantasy aspect of this story since he wants to hide behind the illusion that LP is a humble saint who hates attention who's toootally not a sue you guys I swear she gets beat up sometimes. (if you get that reference you get a metaphorical cookie)
Because Littlepip starts this story overpowered there is no tangible sense of progression. She's perfect at guns and melee and hacking and lockpicking and safecracking and more. Anything LP can do with a Hammerspace Arsenal of over 20 guns and 800 bullets for each one, she could accomplish naked and with nothing but telekinesis and rocks. Nothing about her progression feels earned. And LP doesn't even get dicked on in the start to make her an underdog the heroes root for and make the audience want her to prove everyone who doubts her wrong. Come on, this isn't writing 101, this is writing 1. There are Pokemon fanfics written by children where Ash's friends "betray" him by saying "Ash you've been at this for 7 years and you're still a 10 year old moron so give it a rest and get an office job" which makes him run away in tears to become the author's take on a badass and prove them wrong while making new nicer and more supportive friends (even though Misty still supported Ash despite her annoying snark and Brock cooked for him fucking daily) and those fics recognize the importance of getting the audience to root for Ash before he starts "roflstomping" (effortlessly defeating) every challenge in his path. As an unofficial expert in trashy power fantasies I rate this story a shit power fantasy. And that's what this story is fundamentally set up to be: The story of this fucking murderhobo plank of wood and her rise to further levels of OP bullshithood.

>>304959

Page break. After finishing this completely pointless video tour, the group congregates outside of Elder Blueberry Sabre's office, who I guess is in charge of the steel rangers or something. Littlepoop tries to talk to Poppyseed or whatever her name is, but makes a faux pas when she brings up the Rangers' oath. Apparently they are not supposed to discuss it with outsiders (or "tribals" as she calls them), and blah blah blah. From here on out, Poppycock is frosty to her.

SteelHooves is inside the office talking to the Elder.

>I contemplated trying to eavesdrop, but then realized the guards wouldn’t let me close enough to the door. And I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know what was being said. I was sure there were some elements of the conversation that I would do well to hear, particularly anything regarding us or SteelHooves’ mission. But there was probably more than a bit of discussion about internal politics and current affairs within the Steel Rangers. Such things were none of my business; and after entering one of SteelHooves’ memories without permission, I didn’t want to stick my hoof into his affairs uninvited so soon again.
This paragraph is a fine example of the kind of idiotic stream-of-consciousness writing that is primarily responsible for bloating this godawful text up to more than 600,000 words.

Basically, here is what this is saying: Littlepoop is thinking about eavesdropping on this conversation, but ultimately decides not to, and gives several reasons why. Did this even need to be said? Let alone have an entire paragraph of text dedicated to it? No, it didn't. SteelHooves just went into the office of a character we don't know to discuss something that probably has nothing to do with the story, such as it is. Is there any reason to believe that LP might want to eavesdrop? None that I can think of, and in any event she ultimately decides not to eavesdrop, so there's really no reason for the subject to even be mentioned.

If there is some reason that LP should be hearing whatever it is that these two characters are talking about, then the author should find a way to have her overhear it. If it's not important, or the author doesn't want her to hear it, then she should just be standing outside tapping her hooves or playing Tetris on her PipBuck or whatever she does to pass time. If she's not going to eavesdrop on this irrelevant conversation, we don't need her to explain why, any more than we need her to explain why she isn't riding around on a unicycle juggling chainsaws.

>Furthermore, I found that I really didn’t want to know. The Steel Rangers were… distasteful.
Why are they distasteful? What bothers you about them? They seem like a nice enough bunch of ponies so far. Care to elaborate on this, LP?

Well, to her credit, she at least tries to elaborate. However, what she mostly ends up doing is rambling on for multiple paragraphs, and at the end of it we don't really have a clearer picture of either the Steel Rangers or why she finds them distasteful than we did before. As far as I can tell, her feeling is basically that the Rangers have the technology and the firepower to affect some kind of positive change in the wasteland, but elect not to for some reason.

Anyway, she spends about seven or eight more paragraphs mumbling to herself about various things she could be doing but chooses not to do for various reasons, and then finally begins wandering up and down the halls, looking at some models or something that StableTec had on display. Meanwhile, another one of Red Eye's broadcasts begins playing through her earbuds or whatever she has. The broadcast consists of a massive wall of text, which for all its length tells us little beyond what we already know: Red Eye is a totalitarian dictator, and he appears to have organized mass indoctrination camps for children.

This long and pointless microscene ends with SteelHooves summoning Littlepoop into Blueberry Sabre's office.

Page break.

>Elder Blueberry Sabre was the first Steel Ranger I had actually laid eyes on.
This is obviously incorrect; LP has seen many, many Steel Rangers at this point. What I think the author is trying to say here is that Blueberry Sabre is the first Steel Ranger LP has seen outside of her armor, but that isn't what this sentence says.

Anyway, Blueberry Sabre wants her to look inside a memory orb that she has for some reason. I guess she can't do it herself because she isn't a unicorn, or something. LP does as she is asked.

The orb contains a scene between Rarity and Applejack, and appears to take place in AJ's barn. LP witnesses the event through the eyes of an unknown pony, who appears to be wearing some kind of cloak, so probably a spy or something.

There is a bit of light humor as Rarity ribs AJ about an encounter with Rainbow Dash earlier on. Then, she gets down to the real reason behind her visit. Apparently, she came across the Zebraic equivalent of the Necronomicon, and found a spell in there that allows you to bind souls to objects. She has come up with an idea to bind portions of soldiers' souls to clothing, so that they would be able to wear fancy outfits as armor or something. It gets pretty bizarre, but that seems to be the gist of it. AJ is horrified by this, and tells Rarity that she should get rid of this book immediately. Incidentally, this seems to be the same Zebra magic book that was mentioned earlier in the story; that other group of Talons, the ones who were trapped on the roof, were looking for it or something. Rarity apologizes for proposing something so strange, and the scene ends.

>>305331

When LP returns to the waking world, she learns the real reason that BS wanted her to orb-dive. It appears that either she has already seen what is in the orb somehow, or else knew what was in it somehow, and wanted LP to watch it so she could tell SteelHooves what was on it. The idea here is that she wants LP to confirm that AJ had the opportunity to greenlight a project that would have produced armor superior to that of the Steel Rangers, but turned it down. BS wants to destroy SteelHooves' illusion of Applejack in order to make him give up his personal interpretation of the oath and convert to hers...or something. I guess.

Anyway, Littlepoop gets mad and tears into Blue Sabre. She also (somehow) deduces that the mystery pony from whose perspective she was watching all of this was some kind of zebra spy, or something. I guess. The scene ends with her playing back this old recording that she found somewhere:

>“I’m sending you one of the devices recovered from Shattered Hoof Ridge. Intelligence suggested that the zebras had developed invisibility spell fetishes, but this looks like something designed by the Ministry of Magic. It’s even PipBuck compatible. I hate to say it, but it looks like we’ve got traitors in our midst. If somepony in M.A.S. is leaking arcane technology to the zebras, the Princess will need to take action.”
I guess the idea here is that the zebras were using invisibility spells to spy on the ponies, and that's how they stole their technology. Or something.

Page break. At this point I am completely lost as to what the point of any of this is; in fact, I'm not even sure I understand why they are even in this building. All I know is that they have spent most of this story talking about going to Fillydelphia, but never actually go there.

Speaking of going to Fillydelphia, Blueberry Sabre now explains to LP why that is a rather dumb idea (apart from its being guarded by snipers in Pinkie Pie balloons and hellhounds and whatever other ridiculous nonsense):

>Blueberry Sabre turned to me, “You will never get close to Red Eye that way. He’s always protected. In the very least by a flock of griffins if not by a wing of those damned alicorns. The first sign of trouble, and he’ll hop his sky chariot and leave the city. You’ll lose any chance you have of taking him down before you even know it.”
Is that the objective of going to Fillydelphia? To get close to Red Eye? Why do they want to do that again? I have literally zero idea what's going on at this point.

>Damn. I was confident of being able to sneak close until she mentioned the alicorns. I should have figured this couldn’t be so easy.
What's the big deal about alicorns? Seriously; name one encounter with them so far that hasn't ended in flawless, easy victory.

>But I was damned if I would just give up and go home. Not after the fresh reminder of what these slavers were doing to innocent ponies.
Oh, come off it LP; you don't even have a home. Also, what exactly are these slavers doing to innocent ponies? From the broadcasts we've been listening to, it sounds like Red Eye is a little eccentric, but on the other hand he's building schools and hospitals and shit, and in any case it's not like he's ever done anything to you personally. You really have zero reason to get involved in whatever the hell is going on here. However, that didn't stop you in Appleoosa, so I'm assuming it won't stop you here.

Anyway, the Elder proposes a plan of her own. She offers to get LP and her friends over the wall, dressed in rags and without any of their weapons or belongings. From there, they will pose as slaves, doing menial labor, until somehow LP is able to work her way up the chain o' command and maybe meet Red Eye and assassinate him or something. In return, she expects LP to find the plans for some kind of radioactive engine that Red Eye is apparently designing.

Well, I have to say that of all the dumb plans I've come across in all my years of reading shitty adventure stories, this one is on the short list of the absolute dumbest. Seriously, think about this: the "plan" is basically just for LP to become one of Red Eye's slaves; she's completely on her own from there. Exactly what assistance are the Rangers providing here? Getting her past the wall? We've already learned from these silly broadcasts that Red Eye sends troops out to round up any stray wanderers they come across and conscript them into his "work-study" program. Seems to me that becoming a slave for Red Eye is pretty easy to do. Basically, the Rangers are just stripping LP & Co. of their weapons, tossing them over the wall, and leaving them to fend for themselves, and in return for this they expect her to further risk her life bringing back the plans of some top-secret project he's working on that they intend to do God only knows what with.

Anyway, there's some more bullshit in here about bypass spells or something, but basically the long and short of it is that LP accepts this idiotic and thoroughly one-sided arrangement.

Page break. Incidentally, you can scratch what I said earlier about LP & Co. being stripped of their weapons and tossed over Fillydelphia's wall. As it turns out, the plan is even sillier than that: LP alone will be stripped of her weapons and tossed over the wall, while the rest of her friends apparently just sit here twiddling their hooves until she returns.

>“I won’t be totally unarmed,” I assured him. “They won’t be taking my horn. And they can’t take my PipBuck either.” Instead, we would be wrapping my forelegs in bulky rags to hide its presence.
So...she can't take her PipBuck off? Is that what I'm supposed to take away from this? Is that why the slavers who captured her way back at the beginning of the story didn't take it away from her? I'm getting a little tired of saying this all the time, but the author has really done a piss-poor job of explaining this.

>>305345
>Well, I have to say that of all the dumb plans I've come across in all my years of reading shitty adventure stories, this one is on the short list of the absolute dumbest. Seriously, think about this: the "plan" is basically just for LP to become one of Red Eye's slaves; she's completely on her own from there.
Naturally, this is based on a Fallout 3 quest - specifcially the Pittsburgh "Pitt" DLC. In the game, your goal is to pose as a slave and meet up with a small slave resistance inside the city, then work your way up into the good graces of the local warlord through manual work and pit fighting so that you can screw him over. The main gimmick is that you have to go without the gigantic arsenal of guns, armour and healing items you've no doubt built up by that point for much of the quest.

It's still a bad plan, but at the very least the game gives you a few allies on the other side of the wall and the excuse that "it's a videogame, so of course the protagonist can do this and be fine". A story has no such fallback.

I'm genuinely looking forward to when this thread reaches the Fillydelphia arc (next chapter, off the top of my head). It contains several highlights of this story's capacity to be incredibly dumb and some of the silliest combat in the whole thing.

>Basically, the Rangers are just stripping LP & Co. of their weapons, tossing them over the wall, and leaving them to fend for themselves
Ehh, she'll be fine. Mary sue plot armor, engage!

>>305345

Anyway, this next microscene is about what you'd expect. LP's friends all try to convince her that going into Fillydelphia alone is suicide, and she explains why she, alone, is uniquely suited for this mission. Calamity can't go because he's a pegasus, and those are super-rare because something something the Enclave (another thing the author has done a piss-poor job of explaining). Velvet can't go because she's too pretty and would get >raped (for some reason this concern doesn't apply to LP, even though she's smaller and also has a vagina).

SteelHooves, obviously, can't pose as a slave while wearing his armor. Velvet suggests he just take it off since everyone knows he's a ghoul now, but he insists that he can't, because his armor is physically fused with his body. I've actually been wondering about this for awhile now; this fact was established some time ago, and I was assuming it was a common trait of all the Steel Rangers, and yet we've seen them removing their helmets and taking their armor off and so forth.

>“Because my body is fused into it,” was the ghoul’s answer, eliciting several gasps (one of which was from me).
Again, since this fact was established a long time ago, I don't really see why it should elicit any number of gasps, least of all from Littlepoop, who (apparently) administered maintenance to his armor at one point and should have at least a cursory familiarity with how it works.

>“Oh!” Calamity took a few steps back. “Yer that kinda ghoul!”
>Wait… there are types of ghouls now? Other than ghoul-pony and zombie-pony?
*sigh* God damn it, kkat; one of these days I swear to God I'm going to punch through my computer screen, stretch my hand across the vast gulf of space and time, and slap you so hard your fake tits will go flying off your chest and land in Equestria. The difference between "ghouls" and "zombies" was already convoluted enough, and it took you long enough to actually explain even that much. Now, you're going to complicate the matter even further by saying that there are different types of ghouls, and that the classification somehow involves some level of cyborgery? Just...fuck. Don't get too attached to your fake tits, is all I have to say about that.

>“He’s a Canterlot Ghoul.”
>SteelHooves nodded. Velvet Remedy and I were still in the dark.
>“Would somepony care to explain?”
>No more secrets.
The scene abruptly ends here.

Page break. The next microscene begins with an infodump about Canterlot ghouls. Apparently, different types of zebra bombs produced different types of radiation that caused different kinds of effects. Canterlot was protected by Luna's magical shield, but apparently the zebras had somehow snuck a different kind of bomb inside the city, that caused an event called "the pink cloud."

Before we go much further, I want to call attention to this:

>“Applejack was with me. But when strikes started, she fled back to Ponyville, leaving us to do our work while she tried to ensure all her family got safely into Stable Two.”
>I suddenly wondered if Applejack herself had made it. Had she been in Stable Two when it closed? I saw Velvet Remedy glancing at me and suspected she was wondering the same thing.
Did this happen before or after she fell down the fucking elevator shaft? There has been no coherent timeline given of these past events, so it's impossible to tell in what order all of the flashback scenes occurred, but I've been assuming that the megaspells were pretty much the event that ended the war. At the point in time currently being discussed, Manehattan and Fillydelphia are toast, Canterlot is under siege, and ponies are now retreating to the stables for survival. The earlier scene, where AJ learns that Ironshod Firearms has developed some type of weapon that can beat her armor or whatever, seems to take place well before this. In fact, it would have to, because a later flashback showing subsequent events reveals that the building they were in was located in Manehattan, which if I'm following this correctly ought to be vaporized by now. And in any case, if AJ went to hide out in Stable 2, she would have been sealed in with the rest of them, thus ensuring the elevator scene could not have happened afterward. Unless the author has something planned that will explain this discrepancy, this is a gigantic, glowing, red-hot flashing neon continuity error.

Anyway, the gist of it is that the "pink cloud" was some kind of super-taint that destroyed Canterlot. The shield ensured that it didn't spread beyond Canterlot until its potency had degraded considerably, but eventually both Celestia and Luna were killed by it and the shield dissolved, allowing it to escape. The gas is described thusly:

>Nothing protected against it. Everything it touched, it seeped into and rotted. I’ve heard horror stories of bodies found partially melded into sidewalks, or with their saddles fused to their bones. Canterlot is still toxic today. The streets and buildings soaked it up like sponges and are slowly releasing it as they decay.
So I guess, if I'm following this correctly, the implication is that the super-taint somehow fused SteelHooves' body to the armor he was wearing, and now he's some kind of man-machine. Pony-machine, whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQe9eK_4U0U

Page break. Velvet and Littlepoop are apparently in shock due to the revelation that the "goddesses" were actually just a couple of ponies who kept a shield intact to keep a noxious radioactive fart-cloud from escaping until everyone could make it down to the stables. The scene begins with the two of them "holding each other in silence," and LP resolves that she is going to keep praying to Celestia and Luna anyway, because why the hell not.

Idiotically, after no more than a paragraph of heavy drama, the conversation returns to its previous topic, which was basically the rest of the group trying to convince Littlepoop not to go to Fillydelphia alone.

>>305331
All this "soul stuff is inherently evil black magic" junk seems daft.
Sure, if the afterlife is confirmed to exist and you want your immortal soul to ascend to heaven by the light of The LORD Jesus Christ it makes sense to stay away from magic where you sacrifice a portion of your soul to get stronger or trade your soul to a demon for power or create a respawn point by splitting a chunk of your soul into some random object.
But if there is no afterlife and when you die your soul rots away just like your liver and spleen so you can't become a ghost, what's the harm in fucking with it? If a soul is necessary to process emotions and let you feel and make you a good person, what does the brain do? Does it have the neural pathways for thought and morality in the name of redundancy in the event that you lose your soul? Is a soul necessary to keep you from going comatose/turning to stone/becoming evil or is it more redundant than an appendix? Does a soul amplify your body and magic? Is it the source of your magic or willpower or hope or rage or something else?
Look, telekinesis is one thing but if you confirm souls exist in your setting this raises questions like "how do you know?" and "Where do they come from?" and "where do they go?" and "what happens if you take them away doctor Cotton-Eye Joe?"

>invisibility spell fetishes
I've heard about people with mind control spell fetishes, but this is ridiculous!
Sorry, that joke was too good to pass up. I know it means the kind of nigger fetishes pornhub users don't have. A fetish is some weird african voodoo doll or dreamcatcher thingy, right?

>the pipbuck can't be removed
What does Kkat think this is, the motherfucking Omnitrix? Nigger, you ain't no fucking Tennison.
Does Kkat even remember it was Littlepip's job at the start of the story to repair and maintain these fucking things once removed from pony limbs and that's how she got wrapped up in Velvet's bullshit in the first place?
Surely it's not unreasonable to assume that if methods to unlock and maintain/repair it exist without killing its wearer, a massive slave empire like this would have obtained at least one method by now. The bombs fell 200 years ago. That's plenty of time for the ruins of the company branches of the company that made PipBucks to be picked clean by scavengers who sell their weird inedible important-looking tech loot to travelling merchants who form companies and alliances and guilds to increase their collective bargaining power and economic might, only for a new territory with its own economy and army to end up in a position to spend a lot of money buying the high-end shit the biggest and best trader companies have to offer.

I don't remember if I've said this already or not but I hate how LP's motivation for entering the Wasteland is Velvet but Velvet's motivation is "I want to be a doctor and I'm not allowed to do medic shit at home". Velvet is the party's obligatory moral one who whines when the party kills kids or does other icky things while Littlepip is a murderhobo whose moral standards are mere suggestions when there's a chance she can be rewarded for doing the wrong thing but the whole party sucks Littlepoop off as if she's the most moral pony around.

>LP alone must go into the lands alone because reasons
What a stupid way to adapt the "In DLC areas your Companions usually can't come with you" rule. It exists because insert excuse here like technical limitations or balancing concerns or they want places to feel different and that's why you're traipsing around new areas with Dean Domino or Follows Chalk while your normal friends like Boone and Lily are playing Strip Poker and Caravan back at the Lucky 38.
Maybe it would make sense for your companions to be left behind when dragged to the Sierra Madre or maybe Jed Bitcherson would refuse to let your small army travel with you in his caravan trail and maybe it's better that the Think Tank never get their hands on Veronica/EDE/Rex but if I was adapting Lonesome Road into a story I'd make the protagonist take all the important Companions with him. Mostly because I think Arcade calling Ulysseys the biggest faggot to ever faggot it up would be comedy gold and without a scene like that any adaption of the gameplay would have little to offer that a recording of the gameplay wouldn't.

>>305345
>So...she can't take her PipBuck off? Is that what I'm supposed to take away from this? Is that why the slavers who captured her way back at the beginning of the story didn't take it away from her? I'm getting a little tired of saying this all the time, but the author has really done a piss-poor job of explaining this.
In Fallout, PipBoys are difficult to remove because they use biometric locks that only the user can disengage. Like unlocking a phone, I guess. The problem here isn't so much that Pip can't take her pipbuck off (she can), but that she expects Red Eye's slavers to let her keep this incredibly powerful and dangerous tool because she wrapped it in rags.

>>305350
>Did this happen before or after she fell down the fucking elevator shaft?
My understanding is that the elevator shaft thing was a mid-war assassination attempt that Applejack happened to survive. I don't recall where or if it's clarified, maybe later on, but I think it's a matter of an unclear timeline rather than a continuity error.

>pink cloud
Another Fallout reference, natch. In New Vegas' Dead Money DLC, the Sierra Madre region is blanketed in a cloud of corrosive red gas produced by a malfunctioning chemical plant. Here it's a magical/chemical weapon that straight up melts people, because apparently it wasn't edgy enough. Canterlot ghouls are most likely based on the 'ghost people' who occupy the cloud.

>>305350

Anyway, they keep talking for awhile, and eventually decide on a plan in which LP goes in with the broadcaster attachment on her PipBuck, which apparently can't be removed from her leg because reasons. When she's ready to leave, she will broadcast a message to Calamity, who will then swoop down and rescue her. Ah, but how could Calamity receive such a message, I hear you asking. Well, that clever, clever fox kkat has already thought of that:

>I grinned as I next floated out Velvet Remedy’s custom PipBuck, still in my saddlebags after all these weeks of travel. Velvet Remedy gave me a pained expression.
Wait a minute. Wait just a God damned chicken-raping minute. PipBucks can't be removed from the owner's arm? Leg? Whatever? Then how the hell did Velvet get hers off?!? And if there is a way to take it off, why doesn't Littlepoop, whose literal job is performing maintenance on PipBucks and who performed the maintenance on Velvet's, not know how to get hers off? Unless someone can point to a specific section of text where this discrepancy is explained, I'm calling shenanigans. That's two flashing neon continuity errors in the space of a single microscene.

Anyway, it looks like she doesn't expect her friends to just sit around playing with each others' genitals until she gets back; she has a job for them. She gives some kind of "override device" that she apparently got from Homage (I don't remember her ever receiving such a device nor do I have any idea what the fuck this thing is or what it's for, but at this point I don't have the patience to comb through the text to confirm) along with some instructions:

>I need you to take this to the Fillydelphia Tower and attach it to the maneframe in the base station. Once you do, it will give DJ Pon3 both eyes and voice in Fillydelphia, kicking Red Eye out.
I don't really see how this would automatically "kick Red Eye out," and in any case, if she's going to assassinate him anyway, who gives a fuck whether or not he can use the radio? And if it's that much of a game changer, why not just forget about sneaking into Fillydelphia and focus on putting this dumb thingamabob on the tower herself? None of this makes any goddamn sense.

Anyway, they all agree to this idiotic plan and the scene ends.

Page break. For absolutely no reason beyond that there's one left that she hasn't seen yet, Littlepoop decides to take a plunge into another one of SteelHooves' memory orbs.

Once again, she is seeing things through SteelHooves' eyes, though he has his Ranger armor on this time. He is witnessing a conversation between AJ and Rainbow Dash. The gist of the scene is that AJ is selling Sweet Apple Acres to Apple Bloom in order to finance the Steel Ranger product. AB enters the room, and explains that StableTec plans to build a stable underneath the barn. Apart from revealing one minor detail (the mysterious transmitter towers were apparently built by RD's Ministry of Awesome), we don't learn anything from this scene that we didn't already know.

The chapter ends when the memory does.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Generous Souls

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>“We stand at the dawn of a new golden age. Where others merely survive, we thrive! And while I have led your efforts, it has been by your own strength... Because, yes, freedom is what we all work towards.”
This quote sounds like something Red Eye might say, and it probably has at least some relevance to the text. The last chapter's epitaph was about muffins, which had fuck-all to do with anything and was completely retarded.

Anyway, Littlepoop had to turn over her massive collection of random junk to Calamity, including her barding and weapons and so forth. She was then dressed in smelly slave rags and locked in the back of a wagon.

The moronic plan that the group came up with is even dumber in its actual implementation. Basically, the Rangers just leave her in the goddamn wagon, where she is to wait until a group of slavers that the Rangers apparently bribed and/or cajoled come to pick her up. I fail to see how the end result of this is any different than if they just let her wander around until actual slavers found her. But at this point who cares; this chapter is 18,000 goddamn words long and we've still got another twenty chapters or so left after that. Let's just grit our teeth and get through this.

This entire microscene plays like a recap episode of the story so far. Littlepoop blathers on in her usual stream-of-consciousness style, recounting how she felt alone and isolated growing up in the stable, and developed a pseudo-relationship with a fictional image of Velvet Remedy from her songs on the radio. Then, after escaping from the stable, she met Calamity, and so forth and so on.

There's quite a bit in here that I could probably greentext and go over, but I'd have roughly the same comment for each selection: it all rings completely false. Littlepoop basically sums up her experiences with her various traveling companions and blathers out a lot of schmaltz about how much she's learned about friendship, and frankly that would be a fine theme for a story like this; however, none of this has been conveyed in the actual text. This long, incoherent text has been nothing but a bunch of disconnected dungeon crawls. The protagonist and these side characters she travels with cooperate well enough, but they haven't really bonded with each other in any meaningful way; certainly nothing has happened to make them feel like a group of close friends. Velvet and LP barely know anything more about each other than they did when they lived in the stable, and nearly everything about Calamity is still a mystery. In fact, at this point we know more about SteelHooves' past than we do about Calamity's. If you want to make "friendship" a major theme in your story, you need to do more than just throw a group of characters together and have them fight a few monsters.

>>305351
>Sure, if the afterlife is confirmed to exist and you want your immortal soul to ascend to heaven by the light of The LORD Jesus Christ it makes sense to stay away from magic where you sacrifice a portion of your soul to get stronger or trade your soul to a demon for power or create a respawn point by splitting a chunk of your soul into some random object.
>But if there is no afterlife and when you die your soul rots away just like your liver and spleen so you can't become a ghost, what's the harm in fucking with it?
This is actually a pretty good point. Part of the reason that LP's religiousness feels so phony is that it's never really been established what, if anything, any of these ponies really believe in. It's clear that LP was taught to revere Celestia and Luna as goddesses, but what are the tenets of the religion exactly? What differentiates LP's view of life (and the afterlife, if it applies) from that of an "atheist" like Calamity? How do these beliefs affect the choices these characters make? I don't think the author could answer these questions or has even bothered to think about them, which is why this whole aspect of the story doesn't resonate.

>>305352
>My understanding is that the elevator shaft thing was a mid-war assassination attempt that Applejack happened to survive. I don't recall where or if it's clarified, maybe later on, but I think it's a matter of an unclear timeline rather than a continuity error.
That would clear up the continuity issue, although the author should have made it much clearer that she survived if he wanted to avoid this sort of confusion. When a scene ends with a character falling hundreds of stories down an elevator shaft, and then in the next scene you have their lover seeking bloody revenge on the person who cut the cable, it sort of gives you the impression that the character probably died.

Actually, if AJ wasn't killed in the elevator accident, it actually transforms SteelHooves' revenge into a much more heinous act. He doesn't just kill the chariot-driver pony, he tears off his wing and murders him in a pretty bloodthirsty and sadistic manner. If AJ had died in the crash, it's understandable that her lover might be angry and heartbroken enough to go a little overboard when avenging her. However, if all he did was try to kill her, that's a whole different situation. Someone should probably sit kkat down and explain to him the difference between crimes and attempted crimes; he seems to struggle with this distinction.

>>305361
GG, I think you're really great and if I was a cute little pony mare, I'd let you... Well, you know cuddle me.
But I'm not so that will never be the case.

>>305351
Kkat is following PURELY on Fallout 3 logic where the only reference of taking a Pip-Boy off is a character whose arm was sawn off by the Brotherhood of Steel in order to steal his device because it wouldn't come off.

However, as you mentioned, this is dumb because Pip's whole JOB, in fact, the REASON THIS STORY EXISTS, is because someone took their Pip-Buck off.

Isn't it ironic that in Kkat's attempt to rip off and one-up the excessively bleak and grim and tragic story of Dead Money's Sierra Madre, he focuses on the idea of "a city with poison cloud" and rips that off for Canterlot while losing the deeper context like who made that cloud (Think Tank) and how so many death traps and hazards in the Sierra Madre (that weren't thanks to the Think Tank experiments) were the result of the owner's good intentions or incompetence while the best thing that owner ever did for you besides gather his gold in one place was design a deathtrap you can use on Elijah even though that trap was meant for someone else?

Sierra Madre was a monument to the inability to let go and the folly of trying to hold on to what's out of your control, yet you can learn its lesson and prove it wrong at the same time by holding on to your new friends and helping them, and getting helped by them in turn at the end. Motherfucking deep!

Deeper than "Zebras nuked this town and Celly and Luna died holding in this fart cloud so it wouldn't spread outside Canterlot and they wanted to give Equestrians time to get to their bomb shelters, that's why it's still in a fart cloud 200 in this town years later".

I love a good heroic sacrifice as much as the next guy but the war never would have gotten this far if Celly did her job better or if Luna felt like pulling a heroic sacrifice earlier. Not that Luna should have to do so, the Zebras are at fault for their fucktarded niggereligion. Still, while giving the most OP characters (or what we thought were OP at the time) heroic sacrifices early on so they don't invalidate weaker heroes or stop them from suffering as underdogs in tense exciting scenes is a basic smart writing technique for shooing out the gods among the cast so the mortals can be challenged, the author sucks gay asshole and fails at life so it turns out gay.

Yet as ironic as copying the Sierra Madre's fate onto a city that did nothing wrong is, it might be more ironic that in Kkat's attempt to one-up The Cloud's corrosive yet stuff-preserving effect, his mind immediately leaps to edgy cliche body horror in the form of fusing things together that were never meant to be fused. Like a pony fusing with the sidewalk. Or a soldier fusing with his armour. Or Fallout fusing with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

>>305357

>I am quite sure he [SteelHooves] did not reveal to Applejack the murder he committed.
This seems to confirm that AJ did not die in the elevator crash. The author should have been a lot more clear about this in order to avoid confusion.

Anyway, LP blathers on for awhile, drawing some rather weak parallels between herself and SteelHooves.

>Thinking on these things, I suddenly found the parallel downright creepy.
The "parallel" basically amounts to: "SteelHooves kept secrets from his lover and LP has done the same." Since thus far the only "secret" between LP and Homage is a lie of omission (she kept mum about SteelHooves' murder of what's-his-name from Tenpony Tower), whereas SH seems to have sadistically and brutally killed the pony responsible for AJ's (attempted) murder (and again, it would have been nice of the author to clarify that the murder was not successful), it's a pretty weak parallel.

>And while I can only guess at what befell their relationship, I do know that he and Applejack were together the day the bombs fell.
>And I also know that, ultimately, she left him. She chose her family over him, and she left him behind.
Where is she getting this information from? I'm honestly not following her here. Up until literally a paragraph ago I've been assuming that AJ was killed in the elevator crash that her chariot driver engineered. I don't recall hearing anything about she and SteelHooves being together when the bombs fell, or that she left him for her family or whatever the hell.

There have been so many damned flashbacks and memory orbs and journal recordings and so forth and so on that it is virtually impossible to keep accurate track of all the shit that has happened in this story. As ever, I fully acknowledge the possibility that AJ being with SH when the bombs fell, and their subsequent breakup, was covered at some point and I've just forgotten about it. However, the fact that it's this hard to keep track of just buttresses one of my most frequently voiced complaints: that this story is too long, too convoluted, and consists of too many random pieces of information with too little emphasis on any of its significance. If either of these facts were stated at some point, it was probably several chapters ago, and they were likely hidden in tiny paragraphs floating in a vast sea of word-vomit about safecracking and ammunition specs.

This story is a meandering, disorganized clusterfuck made up of all sorts of random tidbits of information on all manner of subjects: objects, weapons, ammunition types, contents of safes, types of enemies, where particular objects were found, and on top of that there are multiple story threads involving multiple characters, most of whom don't even actually appear in the story except in flashbacks. This information is just tossed into the text at random whenever the author feels like mentioning a particular factoid, without any coherent plot structure or any apparent meaningful connection between most of these subjects; the author just expects us all to have photographic memory and be able to instantly recall anything he wrote at any given point in time, regardless of how minor or insignificant it may have seemed. You would literally need to have Rainman-tier autism powers to keep track of even a fifth of the nonsense that this author has shat into this rancid bowl of literary diarrhea.

Anyway, I guess Littlepoop feels guilty about not telling Homage the truth about what SteelHooves did, because she resolves to tell her as soon as she gets the chance, even though she acknowledges that this may damage her relationship with SteelHooves. Nothing else happens in this microscene; she rambles incoherently about friendship or something for several more paragraphs and then the scene ends.

Page break. The slaver that the Rangers paid off or threatened or whatever shows up, and pulls her wagon into town as planned. Several ponies comment on there being only one slave inside the wagon, so already she is drawing unwanted attention to herself. The whole thing goes even more awry when one of them tears off her bandage and reveals her PipBuck. However, in the time-honored tradition of inept guards in adventure stories, they do nothing about it; LP is waved through, with only a note added that she should be sent to a "Doc Slaughter" to have her "leg-terminal" removed.

>For a pony who had been so sorely disappointed that she had a PipBuck for a cutie mark, I was remarkably terrified at the thought I might lose it. As best I could parse the buck’s attitude, these slavers had seen PipBuck’s before. And had ways to remove them.
PipBucks, not PipBuck's. Also, the literal best turn this story could possibly take right now would be to have the guards strip LP of her last piece of plot armor and condemn her to a life of hard manual labor without hope of escape. I would have no problem slogging through another 400,000 words of this if it meant getting to see LP being beaten and humiliated over and over again, constantly reminded of how powerless she is without her magical Mary-Sue-device to rely on, until eventually she dies of exhaustion.

Anyway, Fillydelphia looks about the way you'd expect it to: smoking workpits full of laboring ponies, guards everywere, grimdark as far as the eye can see. LP notes that Pyrelight, Velvet's pet phoenix, has followed her.

>>305400

Page break. The next scene begins with another of Red Eye's rants:

>“Behold!” called out the voice of Red Eye. “We stand on the threshold of a new dawn. With every factory we recover, every mill we rebuild, we move one big step forward towards an Equestria where our children can live in the safety and comfort of modern cities, not grovel in the dilapidated ruins of the past. With the stone and glass and steel forged by these, we can rebuild the homes and towers and lanes of mass transportation that will bestow freedom and prosperity upon generations to come! This, my children, is the very last generation that needs to cringe in caves and scramble for two-hundred-year-old scraps of food.”
It's a testament to this race's ineptitude that it's taken them 200 years to figure out that you can just rebuild stuff and grow more food, instead of just decorating old ruins with entrails and relying on long-expired cans of green beans for sustenance. Simultaneously, it's a testament to their fortitude that there are even any of them left alive, if this is the extent of their survival skills.

>My PipBuck was not shy about informing me that the gas pouring out of the workpit smokestacks was poisonous. The guards had gas masks, but they apparently couldn’t spare any for the slaves. I trembled with anger. The rate of attrition here must be unconscionable.
As ever, this is both stupid and implausible. What is the point in killing your slaves? Every time one of these ponies dies it means that one of these guards has to go out and find somepony else to take their place. It's a criminally inefficient system. Being callous or indifferent to the slaves' overall well being is one thing, but deliberately forcing them to breathe poisonous smoke, thus ensuring that they die and need replacement even more quickly than they would normally, is just idiotic. Here's a thought: if you have to vent poisonous smoke, and you don't have enough gas masks to go around, why not just run a pipe away from the work area and vent the smoke someplace where nopony will have to breathe it? Or would that make too much sense for a kkat story?

>A large, black griffin in dark-grey Talon barding landed on the roof adjacent to the chariot lot and turned her white-feathered head to scowl at us. Above her head rose a banner that fluttered in the wind: the Red Eye flag.
To my recollection there has been no description given of this flag at any point in the story; in fact, this is the first time I can remember even hearing mention of a flag. However, since the author seems uninterested in providing us with even the most cursory description, I'm going to assume that Red Eye's flag consists of a rainbow-colored field, emblazoned with an image of a fat, pimple-faced man with fake bosoms and mutilated genitalia, being facefucked by a big nigger who is commenting in a talk balloon about how kkat's chin stubble keeps tickling his balls.

Anyway, for absolutely no reason, a griffon suddenly appears and guns down one of the slavers. So, in addition to all the dead slaves they have to endlessly replace, they also seem to have to endlessly replace the slavers who round them all up. Someone needs to sit Red Eye down and run him down on the basics of human resources management. Pony resources; whatever.

ANYWAY, the griffon introduces herself as Stern, and she assures them that this is her town, and they will not interrupt Red Eye when he is speaking. Even though he is speaking via loudspeaker and can't really be interrupted.

Page break. Littlepoop now draws a parallel to herself and Red Eye, which mostly amounts to acknowledging that they are both bloodthirsty killers willing to go to whatever extremes they deem necessary in order to accomplish their goals. The main difference between them that I can see is that Red Eye actually has goals; or at least that his goals amount to more than just looting every safe in Equestria and collecting a bunch of action figures of the Mane 6. But, I'm willing to give LP a point or two here; the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem.

Anyway, Stern gives a long speech explaining how things work in Fillydelphia. The quick rundown is basically this: Red Eye gives his captives the option of either doing hard labor until they die of exhaustion and/or gas poisoning, or they can volunteer for more dangerous jobs. The dangerous jobs vary; the first (and probably most appealing) job involves joining a paramilitary outfit that goes around recovering old technology from stables. This task, obviously, involves a great deal of personal risk and requires combat skills, since the Steel Rangers have the same goal. Stern also mentions that the Rangers are willing to kill not only whoever attempts to interfere with them, but also kills the survivors they find in the stables. Needless to say, Littlepoop is horrified by this revelation about her new friends. This job lasts two years, and if you're still alive at the end of it, you earn your freedom.

The second option she is given is to join the group that harvests radioactive materials. This involves exposing oneself to near-lethal doses of radiation. Though Stern assures them that anypony who joins this squad will be granted treatment for radiation sickness as well as their freedom, Littlepoop is suspicious of the survival rate.

I was perfectly fine with all of this, until Stern got to option number three:

>“Your third option,” Stern informed us, holding up the remaining talon, “Is to fight in The Pit. The Pit is arena combat, pony against pony. Each Event has six rounds, and there is usually an Event once every week.
That's right, you heard right. Option number three is to fight in the God damned Thunderdome. Because what cheesy apocalyptic nightmare tale would be complete without a pointless gladiator-style battle scene in which hapless captives duke it out for the amusement of some deranged tyrannical ruler.

>>305401

There are technically two more options to choose from, though I don't get the impression LP will choose either of them. One of them involves joining the Unity, a concept which I'm going to tentatively assume the author intends to explain eventually. The last option is basically death; try to escape and you won't survive, that sort of thing.

Anyway, after the griffon gives them her little pep-talk, LP and the other slaves are taken to their quarters, which for some reason is located in an old abandoned bumper-car ride at what was formerly an amusement park. I'm assuming this location was chosen for no reason beyond that an abandoned, run-down amusement park makes for a stereotypically creepy setting. And what I mean by that is that I assume that the developers of Fallout 3 made an abandoned amusement park level for basically that reason, and that kkat is just ripping it off. There are, naturally, plenty of over-the-top descriptions of the treatment of slaves in Fillydelphia:

>On the path up to the gateway, I had spotted slaves harnessed to actual plow wagons, pushing mounds of rubble as they pulled a chariot behind them, carrying the slave master pony who whipped them if they weren’t going fast enough. Or if the slave master liked the sounds the poor pony made when struck brutally with the lash. Or if she was just bored.
This whole thing is just comedy at this point. If they really wanted to torture these ponies, they would make them read and review this story.

Also, for some reason the Fillydelphia hub of the Ministry of Morale is located in the amusement park. It is described thusly:

>It was clearly stylized as a barn, looking like nothing so much as a colossal version of the old building on Sweet Apple Acres. The first floors were covered in gaily-colored murals and fairytale characters, most of which had slid from the Precipice of Childlike Frivolity into the Valley of Disturbing Imagery. The roller coaster that looped all about the amusement park actually passed through the building on the sixth floor. A huge radio tower jutted up from the top, modified to look like a comically oversized weathervane.
Literally nothing about this description indicates that this would be a Ministry hub, let alone gives any clue as to which specific Ministry it would be a hub of. However, Littlepoop's Mary Sue perception powers once again allow her to just pluck this information out of the aether.

Anyway, this just goes on and on in a fairly predictable fashion. Littlepoop goes to the slave quarters and the guards leave her with the other slaves, who for some reason are not currently being whipped or made to do any work. Maybe it's their day off or something. A couple of generic bully-type slaves, who we can assume are meant to be some former raiders that Red Eye's goons rounded up, approach Littlepoop and engage in some generic bullying. Littlepoop responds to their generic taunts with a generic snappy comeback, which rouses their generic anger. Blood and Daff are their names.

Littlepoop decides not to fight them, preferring to be a magnet for their abuse in order to save the other ponies from it, or something. I guess. She lets Blood punch her a few times and then Daff tries to rape her. However, before he can do this, she grabs his dick with her unicorn powers and whispers to him that he would be well advised to rethink this course of action, unless he wants to end up having something in common with kkat. Daff wisely takes her advice and backs off, though he does kick her in the pussy as he is walking away.

Page break. Littlepoop's exciting foray into the life of a slave continues. She complains about the quality of the oatmeal being served, and then receives some information from one of her fellow slaves. Apparently the death-pits with the toxic gas she saw earlier are designed to incinerate radioactive parasprites, or something. Only ponies who try to escape get assigned that particular garbage detail. We also get a sort-of clue about what the "Unity" that has been mentioned might refer to. Apparently, ponies are brought before something called the "Goddess," and it is rumored that they are then transformed into alicorns. The only thing that is known for certain is that no one who volunteers for that particular job comes back.

Page break. It's night now, and LP is trying to sleep. Despite having been a slave for probably about 8 or 9 hours now, she does not seem to have had to do any actual work yet. It's also worth noting that although she was supposed to be sent to someone named "Doc Slaughter" to have her PipBuck removed, this has not yet happened. Nice to see that security here is as tight as it has been in every other place she's visited.

Speaking of her PipBuck, she sees a glow of green flame, and realizes that it's probably that faggot ass bird again. So, she uses her Eyes Forward Sparkle on the goddamned PipBuck that they let her keep, even though they clearly know what this thing is and what it's capable of, to locate the bird and wave to it. She takes no other action. Nothing else happens.

Page break. As usual, we are dropped into the middle of a scene with absolutely no indication of where and when it's taking place. We can probably assume that it's now the next morning, however. She is speaking to someone named Mister Shiny, whose job is to assign her a job.

Shiny notices that she still has her PipBuck, and also notices that she was supposed to be sent to the Doc to have it taken off. However, he decides to chuck common sense completely out the window and not do that at all. He instead decides to give her a gun and send her on her first job: go into some building and use her PipBuck's targeting powers to kill some parasprites. Nice to see these guys run such a tight ship. To be fair, though, they don't supply her with ammo; she gets that passed to her through a slot once she's in the building.

>>305410
They had a job ready for LP that required someone with a pipbuck's aiming system this entire time
nopony planned on sending a firing squad in with poison gas bombs and Heavy Flamer flamethrowers not even parasprites could dodge.
Not even slave-using empires ruled by mad emperors can wipe their own asses without Littlepip around to be the hero for them.
Mother of fuck.
Littlepip is a unicorn with mighty telekinesis. She lifted boxcars and giant pieces of rubble and used them as weapons. There are places she could be useful to the slave empire and a game of "shoot the parasprites" is not her place.
She is also a genetically healthy (well physically but not mentally) pony from a vault.
You'd think this slave empire could trade her away to a very rich pervert who wants to own and rape littlepip daily because he's sick of dirty irradiated Wastelander pussy and wants fresh untainted (heh heh) Stable Pony taint. With money gained from that, surely many more work-ready slaves could be bought. After all it makes sense that pleasure slaves would cost more than work slaves since damn near any slave can be forced to do work or killed but only some ponies are suitable for pleasure.
Remember that part in the Dragon Quest game where you wear purple and have a yellow cat friend, where Pancreaz is killed when you're a child and you grow up a slave forced to make a temple for the baddies who killed him? That's better writing than this.
For fuck's sake, Littlepoop was stripped of everything except her PipBuck.
She lost her guns. She lost her armour.
She hasn't lost her overpowered magic because Kkunt never read a single story where horn rings or locked cock cages or crystalline growths are used to lock a unicorn's magic.
She lost her overpowered friends designed to be individual charaxters second and first the most useful things possible in the wasteland short of a giant robot friend or an immortal unkillable magically regenerating Designated Tank or an invincible ghost friend that can kill anything with ghost powers or a magical Healer or an obligatory good Alicorn able to pull triple duty as Tank and Healer and DPS.
But LP still has her mary sue aura and plot armour.
The author could force LP into hell to make people on the fence about her pity her and fall in love with her. But instead it's just another questline in her stupid and boring murderhobo spree. Nothing out of the ordinary. Business as usual. Kill ten dudes because some NPC says so. It's like a World of Warcraft queat except she wasn't sent to gather 20 lion paws, wolf teeth, and zebra hooves each from an area full of monsters that suddenly only have one or none of those after you kill them.

>>305410

Page break. Turns out that Littlepoop's new life as a slave is an awful lot like her old life as not-a-slave. We are unceremoniously dumped into the middle of a scene in which she is doing battle with a bunch of robotic turrets in some mysterious room. She hides behind a desk that just so happens to have a terminal that can shut down the turrets, and it just so happens that she can hack it. One of the turrets gets in one last blast that causes the terminal to explode and blow shattered glass into her face, but of course she is wearing special armor that the slavers gave her to ward off parasprites or some retarded shit like that, so as usual she is completely unharmed.

>Until now, the bug hunt was more frustrating than dangerous. The barding had made me effectively immune to the parasprites, and I had become so practiced in the art of stealth that I could sneak up right behind one before the half-blind things spotted me. Which was good, since I had almost no skill with magical energy weapons. Even at close range, even with S.A.T.S., I missed as often as I hit.
I know this is probably an idiotic question at this point, but what the fuck is the difference between firing a magical energy gun and firing a regular gun? You point it, you pull the trigger, and it fires a projectile. It seems like this should matter even less when a computer is doing the aiming for her anyway. Disclaimer: my assumption here is that "magical energy" weapons are a different "skill" than regular-ass guns, and since she doesn't have any "skill points" in magical energy weapons just yet, she can't use these weapons as effectively. So, my question here is basically rhetorical. I know the answer; I am simply pointing out, for the umpteen-billionth time, that video game rules often do not translate well into written fiction.

Anyway, it looks like the terminal exploded before she was able to finish hacking it or whatever, because the turrets are still shooting at her. Meanwhile, the parasprites are hard to hit because reasons, and she is running out of ammo, or batteries, or whatever these "magic energy weapons" use exactly. Oh, also: she finds a locked door marked "maintenance," but she can't get in because she doesn't have her stupid screwdriver to pick locks; poor her. Presumably, this is kkat's idea of putting his protagonist in a tight spot.

Eventually, she defeats the turret by throwing the desk at it. Nothing else happens.

Page break. Littlepoop has barricaded herself in an upstairs office. I guess there is still one turret left that's firing at her, or maybe it's a different turret; at this point I'm not even asking questions like this anymore. There are also a bunch of parasprites swarming around down below.

Apparently, the building she is in was some kind of printer's office. Using her Mary Sue powers of deduction, she surmises that the reason Red Eye wanted the parasprites cleared out of here manually instead of just setting the whole dumb building on fire and being done with it is that he wants the printing presses that are in here. Littlepoop seems to be developing a weird love-hate relationship with this guy; on the one hoof, she is appalled by how evil and icky and mean he is, but on the other, she approves of his wanting to print books and build schools.

Anyway, she sees another goddamn terminal so she sits down to hack it, in hopes that it will turn the turrets off; we all know how this shit works by now.

>The password, interestingly, was “Generous Souls”.
This is actually not that interesting. I think I know where the author is going with this, but from LP's perspective there's nothing significant about this phrase. Also, unless this password has some significance in and of itself, I see no reason for it to be used as the chapter title.

Anyways, herp derp it turns out that this print shop is another Ministry hub, this time the Ministry of Image. Littlepoop seems surprised by this, which is in itself surprising. Naturally, there is no reason why anyone would expect this building to be a hub, but there was no reason to think the roller coaster funhouse building was a hub either, and the same goes for the train station and all the other places she's been that turned out to be hubs. However, in those cases, her Mary Sue powers somehow revealed the information to her, so I'm not quite sure why that trick isn't working here.

However, she is still able to put her Sue powers to use: using her usual convoluted logic, she is able to somehow deduce that the Ministry of Image was basically responsible for printing up most of the posters and propaganda and so forth that we've seen plastered all over the place, and so it would logically follow that they would use a print shop as their headquarters. This seems a little strange since it was established earlier that they also invented that weird Pegasus armor. Come to think of it, even though AJ's Ministry was supposed to be about wartime technology, it seems like all of the Ministries we've seen so far have been involved in weapons design to some extent. Everything about this story's design is sloppy; even sloppier than kkat's face after "ladies" night at Club Manhole.

Page break. Despite having no obvious reason to do so, LP downloads all of the messages on the terminal to her PipBuck for later reading. Also, it turns out the terminal conveniently contains an app that can reprogram the turrets to shoot the parasprites, so that takes care of the closest thing LP had to a challenge in here. Both of these things are par for the course at this point.

Oh, one last thing:

>Welcome to the Ministry of Image, Fillydelphia Hub, Miss Periwinkle!
>It has been 202 Years, 37 Days, 1 Hour and 13 Minutes since your last log-in.
I actually thought this was kind of cute. I'll give kkat a point or two for it.

>>305419

Continuing to receive manna from heaven on account of being the author's chosen, LP now wanders into a bathroom where she finds a new screwdriver. Oh goody, now she can pick locks again. With those pesky parasprites gone, we can finally get back to what this story is really about: LP accumulating worthless junk that for some reason ponies 200 years ago considered valuable enough to lock inside safes. Oh yeah, there's also a skeleton in here; blah blah, somepony died, how tragic.

>There wasn’t much left of her maintenance uniform, but it was enough to patch the hole in my environmental suit with the aid of wonderglue.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it, but at one point one of the turrets blew a hole in her special armor, or suit, or whatever they gave her to wear in here. I think it was a problem at one point.

>And there had been several bottles of the latter in the pony’s toolbox. Along with a wrench and (squee!) a screwdriver!
God damn it kkat, I warned you about using the word "squee."
*shoves anti-machine gun up kkat's ass sideways*
*kkat enjoys it, so the purpose is defeated*

Anyway, blah blah blah. She also finds a tin of crack mints, but her new clean and sober self refuses to go down that crazy road again, so she leaves them be. She also manages to remove her shackles, which I'd honestly forgotten she was even wearing since they've hardly affected anything she's been able to do so far.

The turrets have meanwhile killed all but five of the fifty-some-odd parasprites she was sent in here to kill. However, she is out of ammo or energy pellets or whatever her retarded magic gun runs on, so that should provide us with some tension for all of about ten seconds. I'll start the clock now.

Exactly ten seconds later, she picks the lock to the maintenance room door, but unfortunately there are no energy croutons inside. Damn, this story is getting intense. I'm literally gnawing my fingernails into bloody nubs wondering if she's ever going to be able to kill those last five parasprites. However, she does find yet another skeleton, along with some more posters and a newspaper clipping about the Wonderbolts rescuing some fucking prisoners from Zebra pirates. Yarr, matey!

>The article clearly pre-dated the beginning of the war. One more thing to think about later, when I wasn’t trying to find a way to disintegrate parasprites without a magical energy weapon, or incinerate them without fire.
Holy jeez, kkat is a master of suspense. Littlepoop has to think about newspaper articles and figure out how to kill five parasprites? At the same time?!? Someone better get me a seat extension, because I'm already at the edge of mine. In all seriousness, though, what is there to think about here exactly? "The article clearly pre-dated the beginning of the war." This statement is completely self-explanatory and requires no additional contemplation.

Anyway, it turns out MacGyver has nothing on Littlepoop. Using a bag of pornographic magazines and the remnants of some unknown pony's lunch from 200 years ago, she somehow manages to cobble together a homemade landmine according to some instructions she read in Derpy's wasteland survival manual. As it this weren't preposterous enough on its own, she ultimately decides that she doesn't even need the landmine; she just...wait a minute. I'm actually not sure what she does. Here, I'll just dump this entire section of text in verbatim; maybe one of the more Fallout-savvy people can make sense of whatever the hell is being referenced:

>Inspiration struck. I dumped out the magazines and set the sack aside. Then I emptied the lunchbox of the muck that the food inside had rotted into. I brought up the schematic that Ditzy Doo had given me as a gift. I didn’t really expect a homemade mine would be any good against parasprites, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t find a use for one later.

>I was about to put my new mine into the sack when I had another idea. I couldn’t set the damn pony-eating bugs on fire inside the building, but…

>Half an hour later, I trotted out of the printing house, a sack full of angry parasprites floating next to me.

>“Oh, Pyrelight!” I sing-songed with a smile.

Seriously; what the fuck? Can anyone explain to me what's going on here? As far as I can tell, she uses the moldy remains of a sandwich to somehow create a landmine, and then somehow ends up trapping all of the parasprites in a bag, which she then...feeds to the phoenix? I guess? Or maybe gives them to her to set on fire?

How exactly did she manage to capture the parasprites, anyway? Is the implication that she somehow used the old sandwich as bait? Was this before or after she turned it into a landmine? And why did she even make the landmine if she wasn't going to use it? How did she even make the landmine? Is there some Fallout gag where moldy bologna sandwiches are explosive or something? I'm not even shitposting anymore; I literally have no idea what to make of this. This is quite possibly the most autistic, nonsensical thing in the entire text so far, and that's saying a lot.

Page break.

>Mister Shiny was most impressed, and I felt myself flush with pride. Only for the pride to be swiftly followed by shame and anger that I was letting myself feel happy about slave work. And worse, thankful to one of the slavers for praising me.
Don't feel too bad, LP; there is literally zero difference between "slave work" and the nonsense you've been doing up until now.

By now, I of course have absolutely zero respect for kkat as a writer, and I expect basically nothing from him; but, I thought that this "LP becomes a slave" arc would at least involve her doing, you know...actual slave stuff. Toiling away in a salt mine, pulling gigantic stone blocks up the side of a pyramid, that sort of thing. If this is all slavery is, I don't know what on earth the nogs have been bitching about for all these years.

>>305419
your assumption is correct
even though Energy Weapons are designed to look and function exactly like guns except with batteries like Energy Cells and MicroFusion Cells, and they've got traditional triggers and anyone familiar with a gun should find firing and aiming these easier than normal firearms with recoil...
they arbitrarily require a separate Energy Weapons skill that's arbitrarily different from the old Big Guns (miniguns) and Explosives (grenades and missile launchers) and Unarmed(bare fists+boxing gloves) and Melee Weapons(knives/swords/etc) and Small Guns (everything else including pistols and shotguns) skills.
to make things dumber, if you want to Recharge batteries your guns use you need a high Science skill which is also used for terminal-hacking, making the Energy Weapons skill even more redundant.
A cut "Flammable Bug Spray and lighter" weapon can be found in Fallout NV's data for the Honest Hearts DLC. This would be an Energy Weapon because the game's flamethrowers are arbitrarily coded to be Energy Weapons for no reason.
Laser energy weapons fire beams and Plasma ones fire green blobs while flamethrowers spit fire and rare Energy Weapons like the Alien Blaster fire sparkly blue instakill balls but they're usually inferior to guns since ammo's more plentiful even though it would make more sense for a post-apocalyptic society to prefer the reuseable batteries of laser weapons to the supposedly-scarce ammunition of traditional metal guns.
except for Euclid's C-Finder, that brings solar laser death on its foes and that's awesome.
You'd think energy weapons would have a "low-recoil, literal laser pinpoint accuracy, low strength requirement, perfectly silenced because light-beams don't make noise" niche as the perfect stealthy sniper weapons for fast-talkers and agile weaklings who could never keep shotguns and rifles on-target but nah, energy weapons are a gimmicky bonus flavour to make this boring shooty game look and feel more different from the norm than it actually is. Ain't like laser weapons have recharging periods and high damage outputs balanced around them. Or a distinct niche like piercing heavily armoured foes and overloading their energy shields or dealing nonlethal damage at range. Or infinite ammo and a Heat Meter to manage instead of the normal ammo count. It took until FNV before the series finally got three interesting energy weapons: The Pulse Gun that fucks robots+power armour up, slowly-recharging guns like the MF Hyperbreeder Alpha, and Euclid's C-Finder which is the gun that aims the solar satellite death-laser.

A competent writer who wants to make a gun-user inept with Energy Weapons would write something that makes more sense like "She's used to reloading rifle clips and putting bullets in revolvers, not feeding batteries into a pistol's battery port one at a time under pressure while getting some upside-down on purpose" and "It's hard to sneak around when your energy pistol's coated in electrical noisy sparky coil bits and glowy LED rainbow gamer lightstrips that don't turn off" and "the retards who designed energy weapons put fashion and form miles before function by making them gaudy overly-bulky post-retrofuturist art-dicko toys that take up 85% of your vision when held in front of your face, made them unholsterable in traditional holsters, made them awkwardly-heavy in stupid wrong areas thanks to their weird shapes, and forgot to give them Iron Sights which them difficult to aim" right?

Kkat actually has (and misses) a chance to make LP's annoying snark right for once here. Littlepip could say "These laser pistols don't have iron sights! What kind of retard forgets to give their guns iron sights?!" because Fallout 3's art designiggers actually forgot to give most energy weapons iron sights and keep them from blocking most of your screen when aiming down sights.

>>305420
It's retarded that she uses a literal lunchbox to make a landmine.
What a bizarrely literal interpretation of the lunchbox landmine.
Surely there should be an explosive and shrapnel and some kind of sensor module in there, right?
I'd say we're reaching videogame crafting system levels of "By combining one wood and one apple you gain a sword" here but didn't the story already reach that level at least once beforehand?
Kkat's constant "Make this game easier for Littlepip aka me" moments destroy the audience's ability to take this story seriously. You can't make a fully functioning bomb with only 25% of the necessary ingredients!

I have no idea how she got all those parasprites into one sack but I guess she just remembered she has telekinesis and decided to swing the open sack around the room like a predatory bird gobbling up every bug while using centrifugal force to keep the bugs inside the sack. Then decided to walk outside with the sack and have Pyrelight The Phoenix burn the bugs instead of taking the Phoenix inside to burn the bugs or slamming the sack full of bugs against the ground like a pool ball in a long sock until everything inside was squished.

You'd think Kkat would love the opportunity to write about a "girl" smashing and abusing her own sack. heh heh, tranny bdsm cock and ball torture joke.

also gee it's a good thing for LP the PARASPRITES inside her sack aren't breeding so hard they'll burst out of the sack like Tribbles and flood the whole slave empire now that they're freed from that building
and gee it was nice for Red Eye's lot that the PARASPRITES didn't breed to overwhelm anypony who ventured into that building or breed enough to escape the building
seriously fucking hell if you're going to replace Fallout's mutated giant flies named Bloatflies with FIM's Parasprites, why throw away the reproductive ability that made the Parasprites an unusual yet extreme threat able to threaten your food source or destroy all non-food items in minutes?
In his quest to give fallout elements pony names, he forgot to copy a pony element that could actually help make his world sadder.

>>305419
Well bucko, the "welcome back after 200~ years" message i'm almost CERTAIN is a gag found once or twice in the 3d fallout games, so Kkat is referencing that as well. I distinctly remember something like that, but I could be misremembering.

>>305426
Well shit I actually combed through every terminal on the wiki and didn't find any that the etnry was referencing, so huh. Guess it is a Kkat original. The only VAGUELY-related entries were cheeky references to the years being tracked by some automatic system.

>>305401
>Because what cheesy apocalyptic nightmare tale would be complete without a pointless gladiator-style battle scene in which hapless captives duke it out for the amusement of some deranged tyrannical ruler.
This is lifted directly from the part of Fallout 3 that this is area based on. In the game, winning in the arena is part of the plan - proving yourself allows you to move around the city more freely and get closer to the big bad.

>>305410
>And what I mean by that is that I assume that the developers of Fallout 3 made an abandoned amusement park level for basically that reason, and that kkat is just ripping it off.
I'll give him some very small credit here - the amusement park setting isn't ripped from any of the games. Fallout 3's Pitt DLC mostly takes place around an old steelworks. The whole amusement park thing is part 'haha pinkie funny', part setup for some daft acton scenes, and part setup for some other incredibly contrived nonsense that's coming up pretty soon.

>We also get a sort-of clue about what the "Unity" that has been mentioned might refer to. Apparently, ponies are brought before something called the "Goddess," and it is rumored that they are then transformed into alicorns. The only thing that is known for certain is that no one who volunteers for that particular job comes back.
Anyone that's played the original Fallout will know pretty much where this is going. The super mutants and their leader the Master forcibly convert normal humans into more of themselves. They also have a cult surrounding them called the Unity, which views the mutants as the next step in evolution. FoE's alicorns have the Goddess and their own Unity, though we've only seen faint hints of the religious aspect through that one preacher guy.

Basically, what we can take away from this is that Red Eye (based on the arguable villain of Fo3's Pitt DLC) seems to have some sort of partnership with the Goddess (based on the villain of Fo1). Once again, this would be neat to explore if Kkat could write worth a damn.

>>305410
>Daff wisely takes her advice and backs off, though he does kick her in the pussy as he is walking away.
Would now be a good time to point out that before writing FoE, Kkat specialized in writing and drawing furry sexual humiliation and genital torture? I'd put coin toss odds, minimum, on him getting a boner as he wrote this.

>>305419
>Turns out that Littlepoop's new life as a slave is an awful lot like her old life as not-a-slave.
It sure is convenient that Littlepip keeps on wandering into situations which coincidentally fit her ever-expanding skillset. Wouldn't want our protagonist to be in any danger of failing or being forced to compromise, would we?

>>305420
>Seriously; what the fuck? Can anyone explain to me what's going on here?
As I read it, she trapped all the sprites in the bag (how? who knows!) so that Pyrelight could burn them and held onto the mine for future use. Maybe? It's not very clear. As >>305425 pointed out, Fallout 3 lets you use lunchboxes as the casing for makeshift landmines.

>>305420

>Working swiftly did not lead to rest but to more work. I was assigned to the scrap yard for the rest of the day. I spent all of ten minutes getting instructions on the use of a gruesome-looking auto axe before the yard foreman, a slave himself, decided he just didn’t want such a dangerous tool in the hooves of such as small and weak-looking mare. I pointed out that, as a unicorn, I was more than capable of wielding the metal-cutting saw regardless of my physical size or strength. In response, he put me to work gathering the bits of scrap that the other workers (slaves, dammit!) were slicing off of old passenger wagons and other sizable metal artifacts of the past.
Everything about how this place works is idiotic. This pony literally just arrived here a day ago. She was brought in alone, in a wagon normally used to bring probably 15-20 slaves into the compound. She has a PipBuck attached to her leg, which she was trying to conceal with a bandage. She is able to use the machine's auto-targeting system and clearly has some past weapons experience. She may as well have just walked up to the front gate, rang the doorbell and said "excuse me, I'm a mercenary who is trying to infiltrate your society so I can overthrow it."

Does any of this raise even a single eyebrow? No, of course not. Not only do they let her keep her stupid PipBuck despite having the knowhow to remove it, they actually give her a gun on her first day as a slave and send her, alone, into some building, completely unsupervised, to snipe some parasprites. While she is in there, she manages to construct a homemade landmine out of a lunchbox and some apparently explosive sandwich remnants, which presumably they don't confiscate from her when she leaves. On top of that, she completes this task in what I would imagine is a remarkably short period of time, strolls out of the building (how did she even get out? I thought the text said they locked her inside) carrying a bag full of parasprites, which she then proceeds to incinerate by summoning a balefire phoenix and instructing it to set the bag ablaze. I'll hand it to Red Eye; he's definitely a unique villain. He's probably the first totalitarian dictator in history to create a brutal, oppressive regime that operates entirely on the honor system.

Now here's the kicker: after all of this, what is LP's next job? Rounding up excess scrap metal. They trust her with a gun, but apparently they don't trust her with an "auto-axe." Her first task as a slave is a bad-ass combat mission, and her second task is drudge work. There is absolutely no logic to this place at all.

>Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the gorgeous yellow and green plumage of Pyrelight as she circled, a Wonderbolts lunchbox clutched in her talons, before soaring out of sight.
At the very least, this answers one of my questions. I was curious how she managed to smuggle her stupid sandwich-mine out of the print shop, since presumably even kkat has enough sense to realize that the guards would most likely search her after she completed her mission. Looks like she gave it to the stupid bird to carry. As ever, the guards remain blind and incompetent; one might think that a bright green, glowing balefire phoenix suddenly hanging around the compound everywhere clutching a Wonderbolts lunchbox in its talons might draw some attention, but nope. The guards are probably far too busy thinking up new ways to pointlessly torture and oppress their slaves, excepting of course the new girl, who for some reason gets automatically trusted with all the cool jobs that don't involve torture or backbreaking drudgery.

>My work was much easier than theirs thanks to my magic. And it afforded me the chance to speak with the other slaves. They were not a chatty bunch, quick to remind me that too much talk made the slavers nervous and was a quick way to get your tongue cut out. But I was still able to glean a few tidbits which convinced me that the only places likely to find either the schematics of the Rad-Engine or Red Eye’s research into Bypass Spells were the Alpha-Omega Hotel or the Ministry of Morale hub.
Any chance you could elaborate on this a little more, kkat? Seems a little odd that a bunch of low-level drones whose job is to walk around picking up pieces of metal would have any pertinent info about the two biggest top-secret operations being conducted in this compound.

This at least partially explains it:

>The Alpha-Omega was being used to for “special housing”.
The Alpha-Omega was being used for "special housing."

For the lower floors, this meant housing for Pit fighters. Being on the fast track to brutal death at the hooves of other slaves didn’t come without compensations: a much nicer place to bed down, shorter work hours, and (if rumors were true) access to a still. Who, or what, was housed in the upper floors was apparently a closely guarded secret.
Presumably, this means that the upper floors of the hotel must be where some kind of top-secret research is going on. I'm sure it's not where Red Eye keeps his porn stash or anything like that.

As to the Ministry hub, there's this:
>From the ponies willing to talk, everything about the comically barn-shaped MoM building was a mystery save that there was always a Pinkie Pie Balloon anchored there, that Stern roosted in the upper tower and that Red Eye himself had private chambers somewhere within.

I'll grant that both of these locations are suspicious, and if I were in LP's horseshoes I'd probably begin my search here as well. However, it's still a bit of a logical stretch to assume that these two places are being used for these two specific projects. They could be secret for any number of reasons. However, I'm assuming that as usual, LP's magical Mary Sue powers of omniscience are once again filling in the gaps.

>>305460

Anyway, while LP is talking to the slaves, she looks up and sees a big black chariot being pulled by griffons flying past, which appears to signal the arrival of Red Eye.

Page break. Everyone is gathered at some kind of assembly place, where I guess Red Eye is about to give a speech or something. He walks up to the podium and LP observes that he is just an earth pony stallion, powerfully built but otherwise unremarkable.

>Flanked by an escort of Alicorns, the pony whom I had come to blame for a great deal of the Equestrian Wasteland’s wrongness walked up from a ramp on the right side of the building where Stern was perched.
Why has she come to blame him for a great deal of the Equestrian Wasteland's wrongness? When did she come to this decision? We barely heard anything about Red Eye for the first half of what I will generously call the story; most of the fucked up shit that LP saw was just random violence that had nothing to do with him. Either that or the remnants of some ancient tragedy that she blamed on StableTec or whoever. I'll grant that Red Eye seems like a pretty obvious bad guy, but I don't get the impression that he has much influence beyond Fillydelphia. He's hardly arch-nemesis material.

Anyway, LP is contemplating using her preposterous telekinesis powers to just drop something big on his head and end it all here and now, but she then notices an alicorn. The alicorn spots her, and begins circling protectively overhead. LP realizes that the alicorn has recognized her; however, for some completely unknown reason, it chooses to take no action against her.

>I realized with a chill that the alicorns knew I was here. And so did their Goddess. Which, I suspected, meant Red Eye did too.
>This was a stupid plan.
Of course it's a stupid plan; it's an extremely stupid plan. Just like it was stupid of the author to make the alicorns a collective hivemind who know who Littlepoop is, yet fail to take that into consideration when planning a major story arc that involves her infiltrating their home while incognito. Once again, the author seems to realize that he has created a very egregious logic error, but instead of correcting it, he just papers over it and moves on. Even though there is literally no reason on earth why this alicorn shouldn't just fly down and zap Littlepoop into oblivion while she's alone and unarmed and surrounded by hostiles, instead it simply acknowledges her presence but takes no other action.

Anyway, we'll set all of this aside for now. Red Eye goes up to the podium, and it is at this point that LP notices that he has a glowing robotic eye, and is apparently a cyborg. He also is wearing a PipBuck, which LP assumes to mean that he is a stable dweller, even though he could have just as easily taken a PipBuck off of some random captive, since it's been established that Doc Slaughter, an employee of Red Eye with whom LP was supposed to have an appointment but never did for some reason, is able to remove them.

>The crimson cyber-augmented stallion even wore his PipBuck on his right foreleg, which was uncommon. Just like me.
The author seems to be trying pretty hard to build a parallel between LP and Red Eye; presumably, this is one of those Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader situations, where the villain is presented as a dark mirror of the hero. It would have worked better if kkat had built his story this way from the beginning, introducing the villain early on and building the parallel from the beginning, instead of just word-vomiting a mountain of bullshit and dumping the villain in halfway through.

Anyway, Red Eye confirms in his speech that he was, indeed, raised in a stable. Along the same lines of the other stables we've seen, his was run as an experiment, intended to see what would happen if an entire society developed under earth pony rule. Since earth ponies appear to have been responsible for most of the technological side of the pre-war industrial revolution, their 200 year isolation resulted in that particular stable developing technology that surpassed that of the pre-war era, while the rest of the world simply atrophied. Thus, Red Eye received various cybernetic enhancements to his body, and probably has access to other technological marvels that have doubtless proven invaluable to the construction of his empire. I'll go ahead and give kkat several points here; this is probably the first idea he's managed to come up with that is both interesting and plausible in the context of his setting. Now, let's see how badly he manages to fuck it up from here.

>I realized I had lost track of Red Eye’s speech, and chided myself for not paying closer attention now that he was actually right in front of me. But I couldn’t help the oozing sense that I was looking into a dark and supremely fucked-up mirror.
Called it.

Anyway, Red Eye claims that "The Goddess" speaks to him, and has been giving him instruction on how to build a perfect Equestria.

>I found myself resisting a facehoof.
God damn it, kkat, I warned you about that word too.
*punches through computer screen*
*slaps kkat hard enough to dislodge his fake tits and launch them into orbit*
*Princess Celestia is eating breakfast*
*pair of disembodied fake tits lands in the middle of her cereal bowl*
*"What in the name of me is this?" she is heard to exclaim*

>The Goddess communicated telepathically with the alicorns. Was she communicating with him too? Or was he just picking up stray signals?
>Preacher had suggested to Velvet Remedy that Red Eye was getting garbled messages.
The idea of the villain being some messianic lunatic who attempts world-domination because he thought he heard the word of God is also not a bad one. However, again, the author hasn't built it up properly. Preacher was a very minor character who hasn't appeared since Ch. 11; I had to google him because I forgot who he even is. The foreshadowing is unfortunately lost in the maze of autism that is the rest of this story.

>>305461

Anyway, the rest of Red Eye's biography is fairly predictable. He grew up in a privileged stable with access to superior technology, somehow learned that life outside his stable pretty much sucked balls for everyone else, and vowed to go on a mission to impose his vision of absolute equality on the world at gunpoint. Basically, if Siddhartha and Che Guevara had fucked and made a retarded love child who was a horse and also a cyborg, its name would probably have been Red Eye. He took over his home stable, enslaved all of his fellow residents and/or turned them into alicorns, and turned the place into some kind of temple to his weird religion. Boilerplate stuff, really.

Conveniently, he announces that the following day will be a day of rest, in which the slaves are free to indulge in leisure activities, which will no doubt give LP ample time to skulk around Fillydelphia.

>Furthermore, the bounty of the Roamer Bar stills will be made freely available to you, for those who wish to taste the finest horse whisky Fillydelphia has to offer!
inb4 "horse whisky" turns out to be a euphemism for his cum.

He also announces that there will be a fight to the death in the Thunderdome for their amusement, and asks if anyone would like to participate. Blood and Daff, the two bullies from yesterday, for some reason volunteer.

Page break.

>I was making my way back towards the Bumper-Plow structure when a mare’s scream jolted me into a run. The scream was coming from inside a building whose decaying paint job proclaimed “Fillydelphia FunFarm Mirror Maze and House of Wacky Reflections!” The mare screamed again, and I charged inside.
So...these slaves are just completely unsupervised, then? No guards, no structure; slaves are just assigned work at random intervals, and whenever they're not doing anything they're free to just wander around as they please? Red Eye's approach to running a forced labor camp is certainly...unique.

Anyway, she runs inside this ruined house of mirrors, and finds Blood and Daff inside. Blood is being raped at gunpoint by a couple of slavers, while Daff is being beaten. Naturally, Littlepoop instantly gets a raging murderboner, but realizes that if she goes into blood-frenzy mode she's going to blow her cover. Plus, these two were kind of mean to her earlier, so maybe they have it coming.

What happens next is a little unclear. I'm just going to paste it verbatim:

>And absolutely none of that mattered, as the slavers learned when the glare from my horn was matched by the light that flooded over hundreds of deadly-sharp shards of mirrored glass.
>The slaver pony with the sawed-off shotgun managed to get a shot off before the room became a cuisinart. He missed.
I think the implication here is that she uses her unicorn magic to levitate a preposterous number of glass shards and cut the slavers to ribbons. However, the text does not make it 100% clear that this is what happens. Her horn glowing obviously implies that she's about to do something, but her horn glowing and the room becoming "a cuisinart" are treated as if they were separate events. Since she is not the only unicorn present, we have no guarantee that she is the one responsible.

Part of the problem is that the author never actually established what sort of ponies Blood and Daff are. Blood is simply described as a "blood red mare" with some kind of edgelord-tier eyeball thing as a cutie mark. Daff is described as a "hulking, piss-colored male pony with an ugly scar and the cutie mark of a very angry yellow flower." I'm assuming the two of them are earth ponies, but the text doesn't explicitly state this. If either of them is a unicorn, they could have pulled the trick with the glass shards in self defense before LP had a chance to act. It's also possible that an additional third party is watching this scene like LP is, and acted before she had a chance to.

Again, the most likely scenario here is that LP used her stupid Mary Sue levitation powers to turn the room into "a cuisinart" using a bunch of glass shards, because that's consistent with the level of silliness I've come to expect from kkat. The point I'd like to drive home here, though, is that the way it's described is ambiguous, and ambiguity is usually bad. Sometimes you want to be ambiguous; for example, if a car goes sailing off of a cliff with a main character inside, and we're not supposed to know if the character survived the crash or not, then by all means you should word this as ambiguously as you want. However, most of the time, you want the reader to know exactly what's going on.

It's the same issue we had with AJ's elevator scene. The fact that AJ didn't die in the crash becomes a piece of critical information in a future scene, but the way the author describes that crash not only leaves it unclear whether she survived or not, it also heavily implies that she died. This made things confusing later on. Unless you want the reader to be wondering about something, you should always make a point to word your text as clearly as you possibly can.

Another minor quibble I have here is the use of the term "cuisinart." First off, Cuisinart™ is a brand name and therefore a proper noun, so it ought to be capitalized. Second, and far more important, is that kkat is referencing a brand that doesn't exist in his setting. What makes this even worse is that the story is being narrated first-person by a character who lives in this world. A third-person omniscient narrator could get away with this, though it would still be a bit tacky; imagine if Tolkien had described Shelob as "a spider the size of a Volkswagen." Littlepoop, though, has no reasonable way to be familiar with the Cuisinart line of home appliances; therefore, it would be better to just say "blender" or "food processor" or something generic. Better yet, don't use derpy analogies like this in the first place, and just describe the action in your scenes concisely and clearly.

>>305461
>most of the fucked up shit that LP saw was just random violence that had nothing to do with him
Kkat could have fized this by making Red Eye rule an empire that starts conquering and enslaving raiders, moving into their territory and taking up good spots while forcing existing raiders into areas with less Red Eye control in greater numbers and forcing those raiders to compete in brutality and violence and rape contests for their prey.
>>305434
Kkunt wrote WHAT?
I knew one of the Frontier guys wrote Ghoul porn but this is ridiculous. Do you have a link to that?

>>305463
Ponies in a room full of glass that gets turned into a Cuisinart(TM) blender?

I guess you could say they're

>*puts sunglasses on*

Furries In A Blender.

>*yeah scream*

>>305461
>The idea of the villain being some messianic lunatic who attempts world-domination because he thought he heard the word of God is also not a bad one.
Well, I have a story idea that is quite similar but in mine that's the protagonist.

>>305463
>I think the implication here is that she uses her unicorn magic to levitate a preposterous number of glass shards and cut the slavers to ribbons.
What does this horse even need guns for, again?

>>305473
The author really wants to one-up Fallout's elements and characters. As if the Fallout fanbase is expected to say "Damn, Littlepip has more guns than my custom player character and better stats than him a bigger squad of Companions with her and they each have better weaponry and stats than my companions! Team LP has gone through more dungeons than me and completed more quests than me and defeated bigger and badder versions of the monsters I struggle to deal with every time I play! Littlepip is just sooo cool!"

Maybe a pony fan with a shallow understanding of Fallout who views the franchise as just another dumb shooty game open world would say "wow being stronger than The Vault Dweller and The Courier and The Chosen One and The Lone Wanderer combined makes her so awesome /)^3^(\ uwu"
But fallout has deep lore and adult mature storytelling that flew over Kkunt's head. Littlepip might find skeletons and notes that spell out pieces of environmental storytelling but there is no depth to it. No witty creative irony. Ain't like prisons became the safest place for innocents in the post apocalypse. Ain't like a prison intended to house anti-govt dissenters ended up protecting them better than its guards. That rock breaking prison facility just exists and it happens to be where a random unimportant canon pony tied to give it a sense of importance. There's more to Fallout than the experience of dicking around in its playable area like a fluffy pony in a playpen. My character arc is complete so now I know there's more to deep storytelling than this.
And even though LP's goal was to one-up both he didn't do a good job. LP might have overpowered telekinesis but I've seen stronger and weaker psychics do more impressive things. LP might have infinity charisma plot armour sue aura but I've seen better written charismatic characters make far more convincing arguments. I've seen better underdog stories that make you feel things about the underdog and better fantasies where the underdog gets bigger. LP gets her dick sucked by the world before she's earned it and then never earns it because that's what happens when your primary writing inspiration is "I aspire to be as great as Bethesda, genius masters of writing engaging power fantasies".
One Alicorn could outfight one Super Mutant but that does not make this story's Alicorns better monsters. The original Super Mutant army was a liberal's take on fascism and racialism: The Master creates his Master Race but they're infertile even though they are stronger and tougher than a man and radiation immune. You can have the fantasy of a super race but the inability to breed is arbitrarily slapped on. You can turn others into Super Mutants or kill them trying. Subsequent games make Super Mutants more interesting. Lily, an old grandma Nightkin who misses her kids and takes anti-rage anti-crazy pills that make her forget her grandkids, is more interesting than Strong the meme joke guy from F4 and Fawkes the one-note bodyguard Super Mutant guy who follows you around in Fallout 3 because you lucked out and found him.
But this story's take on Alicorns? So far they're just edgy cunts. Just slightly stronger videogame enemies. Nopony reaches out to Littlepip to try and reason with her or bribe her or even point her in the direction of giga-rapist raiders that are conveniently miles in the opposite direction from Alicorn lands. They are just videogame enemies and that's boring. An OC Alicorn, an artificial Alicorn, how an artificial Alicorn functions in the post apocalypse, how an Alicorn lives and tries to live even though Celestia and Luna died long ago, how an artificial alicorn feels about her old not-alicorn body and old life and who she was before the psychic hive mind got control of her... hell, could combine "i became an alicorn" with "I was born in a weird vault designed to experiment on its people" for bonus fun. How would an alicorn feel about her corrupt stable getting invaded by alicorns who "saved" her from her weak old body and agonizing experiment? I'm tempted to write that but I'm busy with my indie game. Can't tell anyone about it till it's done.

These ideas the story is uniquely able to explore... these are ideas the fandom is reluctant to explore elsewhere because all the underaged and greatly overaged fandom-policers arbitrarily decreed the colours red and black, Alicorn OCs, whatever is called edgey, and anything else a sufficiently large herd of bronies doesn't like to be the greatest sins a cloutless and therefore bullyable writer can commit. If he writes trash and their community likes it and makes it popular enough for the algorithms to recommend it, they'll call it good executions of overused ideas they'd rather see less of, but they'll never take it upon themselves to try new things or give new authors helpful advice instead of instructions on how to pander well. It's funny how so many amateur reviewers will read 50 fanfics a week, get tired of seeing the same ideas over and over, and demand the community change to suit his lack of interest in seeing other authors explore those same ideas differently. Suddenly it's wrong for an author to give his Pokemon Trainer OC an Eevee or Lucario just because you don't feel like reading about another one today and would rather read about a rarer mon like a Vulpix or Tropius or Crabominable. Suddenly it's on every kid writer to suit your whims and stop writing Draco In Leather Pants fics aka redemption arcs for Draco Malfoy or reimaginings of him as a cool rival chad instead of a soycuck, and not on you to get out of the metaphorical Soup Store's DILP aisle and read another fucking real book for once. God, can normies even see paintings or do they jusr rate art based on whether it contains their favourite or least favourite colours? Fanfic fandom's weird.
also
If anyone's got a list of LP's achievements so far and a minimalistically-written outline of the story so far hold on to it, I won't spoil why.

>>305463

Page break. The opening of the next scene clarifies that LP was, in fact, responsible for the little culinary mishap back there. And, as it turns out, another guard heard the shotgun being fired, so now she is running through the hall of mirrors trying to evade them. She also stole the two shotguns that the formerly unshredded guards had been carrying.

>I wished I’d chosen to bring the StealthBuck after all.
Why didn't you?

Anyway, what follows is a relatively straightforward chase scene. To the author's credit, he does a reasonably good job with it; the action is clear and well described, and the scene itself is exciting. Naturally, there's also plenty of ridiculous Mary Sue bullshit from Littlepoop; for instance, at one point she surprises a guard armed with a shield and a chain gun (for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_gun ), and manages to telekinetically spin the gun around on her and open fire. At another, she is pushed into a corner by some aerial snipers (she has left the funhouse at this point), but manages to escape by levitating some old pie tins into a flight of stairs and hopping over the fence. Long story short, she ends up in the Alpha-Omega Hotel, which conveniently enough is one of the places she wanted to explore anyway. I'm sure this was just a coincidence.

Page break. Despite the fact that the entire compound is on high alert after one of their slaves murdered two guards in the Hall of Mirrors and then made a very public and very noisy escape, nopony in the hotel even raises an eyebrow when a unicorn in blood-spattered slave rags carrying a fucking chain gun (for reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:971121-N-1434K-003_Chain_Gun.jpg ) suddenly kicks open the door and breathlessly darts inside. Incidentally, she also used up the last of her shotgun shells murdering the two guards who were standing right outside the door, and stole one of their pistols. For the benefit of people who weren't aware of this (read: for the benefit of kkat), loud noises can travel through walls.

For some insane reason, the aerial sniper who was chasing her and would have doubtless seen her run in here does not follow, and her EFS does not pick up any hostiles in the hotel. The lobby is basically a bar, and a bunch of morose ponies who I guess are scheduled to fight to the death in the Thunderdome tomorrow are just sitting there drinking beer like absolutely nothing unusual is going on. Nice to see that the Intelligence stats of the enemies LP is pitted against haven't even marginally improved since the beginning of the game. Maybe they need some fucking party-time mint-als.

>“Goddesses, this is a depressing place,” I muttered, almost wishing for more guards to come charging up behind me, if only so the adrenaline would shield me from the blanket of despair that was beginning to smother me.
Imagine someone older than 13 typing this with a straight face.

>Why weren’t they? I should have all of Stern’s armies on my tail by now. It’s not like that sniper didn’t see where I went.
If it's this obvious to you, imagine how the rest of us feel.

Anyway, still wondering why nobody seems to give a fuck that this blood-covered, well-armed slave pony is just wandering around in a hotel that is supposed to house one of Red Eye's top secret laboratories, LP climbs a flight of stairs and observes that a bunch of hostiles suddenly appear on her radar. The door opens (the text mentions that it was opened by a unicorn on the other side, but this mystery poner is not mentioned further once the door actually opens), and LP is about to charge in guns blazing, when she notices that the room is full of well-armed foals. Following in the footsteps of tyrannical dictator stereotypes everywhere, it seems that Red Eye has been raising and training an army of child soldiers. They appear to be the most well-treated and well-looked-after group of slaves in the entire compound, but frankly this whole place is so screwy it's hard to gage the significance of this.

ANYWAY, blah blah blah, Littlepoop can't shoot the child soldiers because they're too cutesy-wootsy, so she lowers her weapon. Meanwhile, it turns out that there was an invisible alicorn following her around or something, and it suddenly appears on the steps behind her. The alicorn comes at her with what she thinks is a grenade, but is actually a memory orb that the alicorn tricks her into grabbing and opening. Oh my, it seems that Littlepoop has been hoisted by her own petard.

Page break. Littlepoop of course plunges into the memory orb, and we of course get to witness another scene from the past involving the Mane 6. This one is fairly trite and silly, and is viewed from the perspective of Pinkie Pie (presently high on crack mints). Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash (who is not actually present) are playing a prank on Applejack, in which Fluttershy pretends to hit on her. It's all being done in good fun, with the intention of convincing AJ that she needs to find a boyfriend (or "buckfriend" as they put it). Basically, AJ has been in a funk since her brother died, and they are trying to snap her out of it.

The scene itself is cute but trivial; nothing particularly huge is revealed. However, the author sneaks something potentially significant in at the end:

>“Burning hoof means Littlepip’s watching me,” Pinkie Pie blurted out impossibly. “Or will be watching me. I’m not sure yet.” She bounced after her friends. “Who’s Littlepip?”
Despite the ambiguity of the "Who's Littlepip" line (it's not clear who is saying this, and it should be on a new line in any case), this seems to suggest that Pinkie's crack-amplified "Pinkie sense" really does give her some kind of clairvoyance, and that she may have some spiritual connection to Littlepoop. Depending on what the author does with this, it could prove interesting. Congratulations, kkat; you have my attention.

>>305499

Page break. When Littlepoop comes to, she is in the custody of Stern, standing before Red Eye. Stern asks Red Eye if he would like her to send the prisoner to the furnace pits, but Red Eye refuses, much to the chagrin of his underling.

If you're curious why the big man himself would bother to take an interest in this case, let alone want to interrogate her personally, you would be fully justified. A single slave assaulting two guards and causing a disturbance of this sort would be a relatively big deal, but not such a big deal that the boss would need to have his dinner interrupted. The reasonable response to this is clear enough: a slave murdered two guards and tried to escape, so the penalty is death. Send her off to die in the fart mines or whatever and call it done. Stern could easily handle this herself.

However, in order to understand what's happening here, you have to stop thinking like a rational human and start thinking like kkat. You have to remember that, to kkat, his protagonist is basically Jesus Christ meets The Dalai Lama meets Rambo. Littlepoop isn't just some annoying murderous klepto; she is !1!1!THE STABLE DWELLER!!1!. She is known far and wide as the heroic murderhobo who wanders around the wasteland, cracking uncrackable safes and brutally slaughtering anyone whose behavior violates her vaguely-defined pedestrian moral code. Naturally Red Eye knows exactly who she is, and naturally he views her as an arch-nemesis, so it just stands to reason that he would want her brought before him in chains so he can cackle villainously and deliver a big bad-guy speech about how the two of them are really the same.

So, that's exactly what he does:

>Addressing me directly, Red Eye asked, “Do you think I’m a monster?”
>Bluntly, I answered, “Yes.”
>He shrugged. “Because, of course, I am. And you, Stable Dweller, can probably see it more clearly than most. Because you and I are a lot alike, are we not.”
This last line is a question and should end in a question mark.

Anyway, the rest of this is just straight-up boilerplate villain dialogue; there's nothing worth going over in detail here. He basically tells her that she is young and naive, like a babe in the woods, and if she had been through the hardships he had been through and seen what he had seen she would not judge him a monster. Littlepoop sputters and protests and tells him he's wrong, and at the end he orders her sent to do battle in the Thunderdome from the very moment it was first brought up, I somehow knew that all roads in this story would lead to the goddamned Thunderdome. If you took every cheesy villain confrontation scene from every cheesy comic book, cartoon, and B-movie and threw them into a Cuisinart™ with a cup of diarrhea, the result would be this scene. Plagiarism in fiction is an established tradition and I don't necessarily discourage it, but if you're going to rip something off, at least rip off something good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSfTXaqo18o

Oh, also, as a minor aside, she gets a glimpse of the number 101 on his barding, which probably refers to the stable he was raised in.

Page break. Despite everything that's happened in the last 24 hours, the goddamned idiots running this slave camp STILL have not confiscated Littlepoop's goddamned PipBuck. She sits in the dark with the other prisoners, playing Tetris and listening to those messages she downloaded from what's-her-name's terminal earlier. Among them is a message from Twilight Sparkle, in which she mentions an enchanted mirror that Rarity found. It enables you to see your "inner" self. I don't think I mentioned this in my recap, but when LP was in the funhouse, she at one point encountered a similar mirror:

>I bumped into the mirror behind me, a splash of cold washing over my body from the touch. I turned, looking into the only fully intact mirror in the House of Wacky Reflections and froze.
>Staring back at me was me… but not me. The Littlepip staring back at me was wearing cobbled-together raider armor. She was shot to hell, dying, her body giving out as she glared at me in a swiftly deteriorating battle stance, her gaze daring me to make another move.
OoOoOooOoooh, how angsty. Anyway, there may be some future significance to this, so it's worth noting, but nothing else happens in this microscene.

Page break. We rejoin our intrepid hero at some undefined point in the future. She is in the staging area at the Thunderdome, getting ready to be thrown into a situation that will probably go something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tcp1mWZ9fw

The guard getting her ready was apparently a friend of one of the guards she cut to ribbons with mirror shards the other night, so in retaliation she puts some kind of itching powder on her flank and says that she hopes she dies. She also puts numbers over everyone's cutie marks. Littlepoop is assigned number three.

>“Used to be an ice skating rink,” the blue-colored buck with number four on his flank said conversationally. “Apparently, the owner of the FunFarm had a thing for ice skating. Just be thankful that Red Eye removed the water talisman and put it to better use. These fights are brutal enough without having to do them on ice.”
How does he know this?

Anyway, there is some brief explanation of how the rules of the Thunderdome work, which I won't go into since it's pretty straightforward. We sit through a couple of fights first. Blood, the pony who was picking on Littlepoop earlier, goes first, and is killed in rather short order. She is then avenged by her friend Daff, who takes down her murderer using some exploding barrels that are in the arena.

>“From the Black Gate, we still have Daffodil, after a surprising and entertaining first performance. I don’t think any of you ponies are snickering at his name now, are you?”
Pic related.

Next up is a pony named Xenith, who seems likely to be LP's opponent.

>>305508
This mirror bugs me.
Rarity found a mirror that "shows you your inner self".
Gee, what a creative and original idea that's never been done before- WHY THE FUCK IS IT HIDDEN IN A HOUSE OF MIRRORS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC IN THE MIDDLE OF A MOTHERFUCKING PINKIE PIE THEME PARK THAT'S ALSO A GOVERNMENT FACILITY
HOW FUCKING MANY INNOCENT PONIES SAW THIS AND GOT SCARED BY THE SIGHT OF UGLY EVIL PONERS?

This is really dumb but it COULD be good writing if it was intentional, something to say "pre-war ponies were dumb and never expected anypony who's a monster on the inside to see it".

It would barely take any text for a Mane Six poner to say "It's fun and harmless when foals and civilians look at it but when an ex-soldier forced to kill saw it, he saw a monster and mentally broke. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to put this in a public place. I've sent a letter telling that theme park to remove it and hide it away, they should get the letter tomorrow." and then the date shows the letter was sent one day before the nuking or something.
of course this raises questions like "why did nobody move that mirror in 200 years" but this is a Kkat story.

Also, this is a major source of wasted potential!
Littlepip looked into a mirror that reveals her true self, and...
That's her true self? That's her Shadow? Just some dying angry murderhobo in Raider armour who "glares defiantly" while going down like a little bitch?
That's such a lame Shadow design!
Why is it dying? Why does it wear Raider armour when she constantly tells herself she's a hero and is constantly called a hero by the audience and world?
It's just mean dying Littlepip! Where's the creative monster designs and environment designs full of symbolism, where at the highest room of the tallest tower with a princess begging people to save her there's an angry fire bird resting within an open-doored birdcage to symbolize how she isn't trapped really but feels trapped anyway, or peak faggotry personified in a gay bathhouse to symbolize a man's fear of looking soft and being considered gay and his desperation to be accepted by others, or a hollow and shattered living mascot suit with cracked skin that lets you see the hollow darkness within and disturbing features clawing its way out of a black hole?
Why does the story take the idea of the hero seeing her true self and waste it here for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment of fake depth when she could get pulled inside that mirror by her Shadow and forced to fight it in a cool trippy mental world that forces her to undergo character growth?
Or, what if this Shadow Littlepip continued to exist within LP's mind for the rest of the story, taunting her and mocking her for the entirety of the story and calling her friends a bunch of faggots? She could argue with it internally during scenes where she has to make important decisions, and this could make her decision-making more interesting. Adding a Designated Asshole character to the party also lets at least one character notice and point out shit about the heroes without having to fear the audience hating her. If Littlepip's imaginary evil enemy called her friends retards for perfectly valid reasons it would improve the story without offending its pathetic target audience and their delicate sensibilities.
This fucking "true self"... If it's supposed to be what she is on the inside, why is it dying and why is its battle stance deteriorating? If it's what she's supposed to fear becoming, why is it so pitiable and unlike the invincible real deal? If this pathetic creature is really what lies at the core of Littlepip's heart, what is she going to do about it? Is she going to go inside her own mind to beat the shit out of it with bullshit animoo imagination dream powers, or resolve to be a more moral and less reckless person outside her mind to disprove it and grow? Is she going to confront and admit to her flaws and work on them, or simply keep denying them so hard it'll keep Imaginary Evil Littlepip from existing and mattering again? You know, even though that's the opposite of how this inner-darkness shit is supposed to work?
Give me a fucking break! Has this fucking author ever even seen Persona 4?! Probably, since he's ripping off its idea of seeing "your dark self reflected" for a quick and lazy gimmick. But why did its depth and positive "Grow as a person and confront your faults" message sail right over his head like a warning shot from an automatic nuclear grenade launcher?

>she puts some kind of itching powder on her flank
what if this was the weakness of all Unicorns: Annoying distracting things that ruin their mental focus and stop them from focusing on spells/telekinesis? It could force Littlepip to get creative and win a fight without the OP telekinesis that could easily let her lift and toss her foes 3700 feet into the air and then let gravity take care of the rest.
It would also give the author, a faggoted furry into genital torture, an excuse to right about homemade pain powder with chili dust and assorted other ingredients hurting his heroine's ass and cunt.
Scenes where you take away a hero's most overpowered things (Iron Man's armour or Thor's hammer for example) are supposed to force the hero to get creative to win in scenarios where they'd normally just rely on their OP things until all fights blur together. But LP still has OP TK trivializing all fights so she can grab guns easily. Lame!

>exploding red barrels
these fucking idiots are not wearing bulletproof apparel
WHY ARE THESE IDIOTS FIGHTING NEXT TO THOSE FLAMMABLE BARRELS

RED CONTAINERS OF DEATH, THEY MAKE FOR EASY KILLS
THEY MUST SPEND A FORTUNE ON THE FUEL BILLS

LP'S THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
LAWS OF PHYSICS AND LOGIC NEED NOT APPLY

SHE IS THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
AS LONG AS SHE'S GOT THE PIPBUCK SHE WILL NEVER DIE

SHE'S THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
SHE'S A WALKING TALKING CLICHE, THIS YOU CAN'T DENY

SHE'S THE SHOOTER GUY, SHOOTER GUY
SHE'S THE MAIN FUCKING CHARACTER SO SHE CANNOT DIE-HI-HIIIIII!

>>305460
>He's probably the first totalitarian dictator in history to create a brutal, oppressive regime that operates entirely on the honor system.
Honestly a harsh society that values honor above all and ranks its inhabitants by their martial prowess, like the Klingon Empire, would be cool and not unfitting for this setting. Then it would make sense for some slaves to want Thunderdome to prove they're better than the "dishonorable and cowardly" laborer slaves which would give them the chance to become a proper soldier. Maybe, if too much empty verbiage hadn't been vomited already, Littlepip could be put in her place and begrudgingly pick up this society's virtues while secretly challenging its flaws. She doesn't have a time limit so she could train and learn discipline (if she wasn't stupidly OP already) to steadily rise up through the ranks until she can challenge Red Eye himself to single combat. Unfortunately this is something Kkat's estrogen-addled brain wouldn't know how to handle. Also it would take a rework of the alicorns so their hive mind wouldn't detect and stop her immediately (which by all accounts SHOULD HAVE happened) already.

It's sad because this "woe is me, 12 years a slave!" perspective could have been an interesting change of pace and involved character development (HUH?! Waht's dat?) on the part of Littlepip. We could meet actually interesting characters from different backrounds and with different motivations. But this gets glossed over in favor of mindless prolefeed.

There's no subtlety to any of this. I'm not reading along with you (Ain't nobody got time for that) but it seems like a miserable story that doesn't even rise to mediocrity and has no right to be the fandom's favorite. I'm glad /mlpol/ distances itself from bronies because >pic related a normie and reddit-tier meme, but it's the first think I thought of but substituted with "Are we the faggots?" is an appropriate reaction to being part of the fandom.

>And absolutely none of that mattered, as the slavers learned when the glare from my horn was matched by the light that flooded over hundreds of deadly-sharp shards of mirrored glass.
This "surprise reversal" annoys me. It's been done before, where the protagonist goes over the practical reasons for not lashing out at injustice but does it anyway out of principle. However this is because the protagonist says "consequences be damned!" and accepts what may come. Yet Littlepip, as always, faces no consequences.

I really dislike The Kite Runner and its overrated status but it really is a far better novel than this tripe. The protagonist is a beta cuck (a highly accurate self-insert of the author) but at least he has regrets. He's an anti-stu in a sense because of how pathetic and helpless he is (though it doesn't make him any more likeable), but after seeing his best friend anally raped while he's standing around munching on popcorn it does have an effect on him. He doesn't do anything cool like learn to fight or become an effective infiltrator his friend's son saves his life again because he's that much of a helpless beta male but at least he does something to remedy a past mistake. Littlepip doesn't even accomplish this.

>>305499
>For the benefit of people who weren't aware of this (read: for the benefit of kkat), loud noises can travel through walls.
This is video game logic once again rearing its ugly head. In Fallout separate areas (with a loading screen) obviously don't have sound pass-through, so you can blow up a mini-nuke right outside a building and people just inside by the door won't realize anything anything's amiss. That this is due to technical limitations should be obvious, but carrying it over to a story is idiotic. This has already been mentioned but it's the worst of both worlds: dumb video game mechanics carry over but not limitations preventing Littlepip from using telekinesis to do anything.

>Depending on what the author does with this, it could prove interesting. Congratulations, kkat; you have my attention.
You're setting yourself up for the football to be pulled away. Guaranteed this is a reference to "wacky Pinkie Pie can transcend time and space because she's goofy!" I'm not reading this but I know this will never be brought up again to be significant.

>>305508
>Still has Pipbuck.
This annoys me as much as it does you. If a Pipbuck was merely a glorified cell phone giving contextual information about the world (as it should be imo) there's a slim chance they'd let her keep it, but if it magically turns you into a 1337 murderhobo there's absolutely no way. The only reason she still has it is because it's her defining accessory. However, a scene where she's stripped naked and robbed of her trinkets would be a chance to empathize with the character and offer a test, like that TNG episode where Picard is interrogated by Cardassians (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS1DOHn_YX0). This actually is a spoof of that episode but I included it for the lulz

>Xenith
"Zenith" would make sense as a pony name because it's actually a word. This, like other word combinations starting with X, is better for an alien.

>>305518
>Shooter guy song
Never has a more apt synopsis of this story been written

>>305499
>For the benefit of people who weren't aware of this (read: for the benefit of kkat), loud noises can travel through walls.
Incidentally, so can bullets.
>Despite the ambiguity of the "Who's Littlepip" line (it's not clear who is saying this, and it should be on a new line in any case)
I assumed it was Pinkie saying it to herself.
>WHY ARE THESE IDIOTS FIGHTING NEXT TO THOSE FLAMMABLE BARRELS
https://youtu.be/1UrmKXkWyBc?t=86
>I will stand next that bomb! This is a good idea!

>>305521
Xenith/Zenith isn't even a creative name, it's the name of Azimuth's ex-wife from Ben 10. The one who dumped him for making The Infinity Sword Of Infinite Nonsensical Power, convincing him to try and win her back by making an even stronger Omnitrix that can turn you into the peak chad genetically perfected version of any race including literal gods like the Celestialsapiens. And the Ultimatrix, which evolves creatures further but only ever makes like 8 ultimates.
And speaking of Shooter Guy by Miracle of Sound, earlier in this story there are tons of scenes where Littlepip kills and loots baddies mid-firefight, scavenging ammo instantaneously from them before moving on even while she's being shot at by enemies. I hope I remembered to reference the "Got a secret vacuum cleaner from my shirt to my pants, sucks up ammo off the floor straight into my hands" line at the time.

It's a missed opportunity that nobody loves Red Eye or the Alicorns and tries to convince the party "red eye is/the alicorns are awesome" right?
Raul Tejada from FNV didn't love the Legion itself, but considering how many bandits he fought over his 200ish Ghoul Cowboy Mechanic years and how hard bandits fucked his life over he can see the value in the way the Legion keeps its lands safe compared to the lazy shitty NCR.
If the Alicorns weren't treated like a hive mind of negative feminine character traits they might have something positive to offer the world and think conquering the world is the best way to offer those things. Or if the Alicorns were intentionally assorted negative feminine stereotypes and types of toxic femininity personified that could make them better monsters.

Also since the "translating video game shit to a story" topic comes up so much, how should Pokemon be translated?
Trainers each carry 6 pokemon and take turns telling pokemon which of their 4 moves to perform. Pokemon have RPG stats like Attack and Defense and Speed.
The anime adds "trainers need to tell their pokemon when to dodge incoming attacks" but the result is silly. It makes pokemon look dumb for needing a child to tell them when to dodge. And raises questions like "why ever take hits when you can dodge?".
Pokemon Moves can be mundane things a pokemon should know how to do naturally like a punch or kick or claw slash or a growl that reduces the enemy Defense stat or inexplicable magical bullshit like Sketch which copies the move your foe just used and Swords Dance which raises your Attack stat by 2 stages.
In the Pokemon anime, pokemon don't get injured or bleed. Same goes for people.
But in a world where Pokemon and people can get injured and bleed and die, how much sense does it make for a Pokemon Trainer to risk death travelling around his country just to catch strong Pokemon and fight the best Pokemon Trainer in every major town for a handful of badges just so he can eventually say he beat all 8 of the best dudes and the superior Elite Four and their superior, The Champion? What the hell kind of world would create this scenario? A world obsessed with celebrities and celebrity athletes and being number one no matter the cost to the horse you rode in on and the attack dogs you raised? A world obsessed with strength because pokemon are naturally evil in the wild and preying on dwindling human populations?
How can any of this videogamey bullshit be translated into a good book that makes sense?

>>305508

>Next up is a pony named Xenith, who seems likely to be LP's opponent.
Correction: Xenith is actually a zebra.

Anyway, the chapter ends here.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Xenith

Today's Fortune Cookie:

>“The fate of Equestria does not rest on me making friends.”
Well then, this whole adventure has just been a big ol' waste of everypony's time, hasn't it?

>I had been stripped of everything that I could use as a weapon. Even the screwdriver I had fought so hard for and felt I had earned had been taken. I had my horn, my hooves, my single spell, and S.A.T.S.
"Oi m8, you got a loisense for that screwdriver?" On the other hand, the fetlock-mounted supercomputer that has been responsible for every single victory she's achieved thus far is perfectly fine; no reason she can't just hang onto that. Heaven forbid LP ever be forced to face a challenge without the aid of her most valuable piece of plot armor.

Anyway, I'd be inclined to dismiss the rest of this microscene as just more of kkat's verbal diarrhea, except I notice that LP touches on some subjects that merit closer examination:

>That was Red Eye’s intention: that either I should die, or that I should be forced to kill other slaves, this zebra being only one of many, compromising the parts of me I held sacred just so that I might live long enough to kill him.

>Either way would be a victory for him. Although the latter, if I did manage to kill him, would be a pyrrhic victory at best.

Here is basically what the author is trying to say:

Red Eye had reasons for sending her into the Thunderdome that extend beyond mere cruelty. He could have simply killed her outright, or sent her to work herself to death in the fart mines, or whatever else he usually does with his captives. However, he wants to place her in a situation where she will be forced to make a decision: either she betrays her own principles and fights her way through whatever goons she is pitted against in order to escape and kill him, or else she gives up and chooses death, which means her mission is never completed.

The idea here is that Red Eye wants to show Littlepoop the path he took. He wants her to learn that the only way to truly save the Wasteland is to abandon compassion and adopt the tyrant's path.

Anyone who has been following my commentary so far can probably spot several things wrong with all of this. First and most obvious is that Littlepoop really doesn't have any clearly defined principles that she is being asked to violate here. What exactly is the difference between what she's being asked to do in the Thunderdome and what she's spent the entire story so far doing? She's killed any number of nameless goons already, so what the hell is a few more? It's the same problem we encountered earlier, when the author tried to manufacture a "moral crisis" for Littlepoop by having Gawd offer her a contract. The issue was basically that she was being asked to commit murder for hire, which might have had some punch if she hadn't spent the entire story up to that point committing murder for free.

The problem, again, is that kkat divides his characters into distinct camps. In the first camp, you have the "raiders" and "slavers" and so forth; basically the nameless, faceless goons who are just indefinably evil and can therefore be slaughtered guilt-free. In the second camp, you have the "named" characters: the characters who actually have identities and dialogue, which means that, although they may not necessarily be "good," they have the status of sentient beings. Thus, if Littlepoop kills one of the "real" characters it's a sin that needs to be reckoned with, but on the other hand she can cut down raiders and slavers left and right for any frivolous reason she chooses and bear no guilt whatsoever.

We find ourselves once again face to face with the familiar specter of kkat's video game logic. The "real" characters, ie the Monterrey Jacks, the Silver Bells, the Derpys, the Chief Grim Stars, and so forth, are the characters whose names appear in the script and are part of the actual story. The raiders and slavers and so forth are just the generic baddies that spawn in random locations and attack you; they aren't really characters, they just give you something to shoot at occasionally in order to break up the monotony of wandering around a sandbox world. In a game, this makes sense. However, in a story, it becomes this weird system where certain characters are given an "unperson" status for apparently arbitrary reasons.

Consider, for instance, the characters of Blood and Daff. The text establishes that these two are Raiders, or at least they were until they were captured by Red Eye. Even though their "job" in this world would place them naturally in the "unperson" camp, the author has chosen to give them names and identities. So, they can be part of a moral crisis: should Littlepoop save Daff's life even though he tried to rape her? On the other hand, the two guards who have them cornered in the house of mirrors don't enjoy the same status; they are just "slavers," which means they are generic nameless goons. LP can slash them to pieces as brutally she likes.

The author occasionally tries to cobble together some weak moral reasoning for why certain characters deserve to die but not others, but the problem is that their fate is actually being determined by their NPC status, not their behavior. In the mirror house, Slavers A and B have Blood and Daff cornered and are going to rape them. The author wants us to view this problem as "Slavers A and B are rapists and murderers, therefore they deserve to die horribly." However, this doesn't really fly; Blood and Daff are also rapists and murderers. What's really happening is that Blood and Daff are Persons, and Slavers A and B are Unpersons; therefore, the only "moral" issue LP really has to consider here is whether or not to help Blood and Daff.

Running out of space, will continue.

>>305526

I'm trying not to repeat myself too much here since I know I've gone over a lot of this before, but this whole thing is a big part of why Littlepoop's moral motivations don't feel in any way sincere. The author wants this moment in the story to be a pivotal choice for Littlepoop: she has to decide if she wants to kill this Xenith character and violate everything she believes in, or let Xenith kill her and thus fail in her mission to kill Red Eye and save the wasteland. Kkat likely does not realize the problem here, because for him this character-sorting process is automatic and subconscious: he's already designated "Xenith" as a "real" character, so the act of killing her would automatically have moral weight. However, from the reader's point of view, "Xenith" is just the name of another enemy LP is being pitted against; we don't know this character and have no reason to view her any differently than we would some random raider that Littlepoop bumped into on the road and gunned down without a second thought.

So how does it make sense that killing Xenith is a moral problem but killing Raider X is not? To kkat, it makes perfect sense: "Xenith" is an actual character, who appears in cut scenes and has scripted lines and a designated voice actor. "Raider X" is just one of three generic raider models that spawns at random locations and charges at you while yelling pre-recorded profanity. However, to anyone who chooses to put a modicum of thought into the things they read and write, it makes no sense at all; thus, Littlepoop's "moral dilemma" here seems ridiculous.

It's really a shame that kkat doesn't understand this, because the problem cascades and ruins everything else he's trying to do here. He's clearly trying very hard to do the "dark mirror" angle with Littlepoop and Red Eye. This basically means that the villain is a character very similar to the hero, either due to a similar background, similar abilities, having had to face similar moral choices, etc, with the prime difference being that the villain chose the "dark" path. The villain underscores the "goodness" of the hero by showing what the opposite of the hero's values represents. Some notable examples of this dichotomy include:

>Batman/The Joker
>Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader
>Frodo/Gollum
>Gandalf/Saruman
>Richard Rahl/Emperor Jagang
>Inuyasha/Naraku
>Vash/Knives
>Arthur/Mordred
and probably a million others.

Kkat's problem is that he knows what he wants to do, he just has no clue how to properly execute it. If he really wanted to do something like this, Red Eye should have been an established presence in this story much, much earlier. Even if we don't actually meet him until now, we should have been seeing signs of his presence all over the place. And by "signs of his presence," I don't just mean the derpy little radio broadcasts LP hears on the sprite bots every now and then, or the name being casually dropped by a couple of bar patrons here and there. Every major story arc in this text so far ought to be in some way directly connected to Red Eye. All of the carnage and destruction we've seen should somehow have his stamp on it.

Again, the author clearly tries to do this, but doesn't really succeed. I'm sure some fedora-tipper out there would point out that the slaver colony LP busts up early in the story is (I think) part of Red Eye's overall operation, and (I think) there was an implication that Deadeyes and "Mr. Topaz" were underlings of his or something. But, the connection was not made apparent nor was it reinforced. We hear the name Red Eye mentioned every now and then between dungeon crawls, and I guess LP has always had this vague goal of going to Fillydelphia (eventually) to thwart him or something for some reason, but for the most part he's not much of a sinister presence and thus not much of a villain.

For instance, imagine an omnipresent evil like the Galactic Empire or the Eye of Sauron. Does Red Eye evoke the same feeling in FoE? Is he the dark, mysterious entity whose influence is felt all over the wasteland; the villain who is always somewhere in the back of the reader's mind, even when the characters are on an adventure that has nothing to do with him? Or is he just one more random faggot-ass villain in a long chain of faggot-ass villains that LP feels compelled to take on for no reason beyond that her murder boner must be endlessly moistened with the blood of bad guys? I'm guessing that only kkat's most dedicated groupies would say the former.

>I realized that I was Monterey Jack, forced between destroying what allowed me to live with myself, or just dying.
This connection, too, is weak. Again, we've got a situation where a fundamental flaw in the author's basic idea cascades and ruins other parts of the story. It's absurd that Littlepoop gets a pass to murder as many NPCs as she wants, but is expected to have a moral crisis every time she has to kill someone the author considers important. This means that her values are insincere, which in turn means that her reasons for being able to live or not live with herself are also insincere. Thus, her whole crisis here is absurd. For reasons I've already gone over, Monterrey Jack's moral crisis was also absurd. So, in a sense I guess she's right: Monterrey Jack was a ridiculous character with insincerely-held moral convictions that did not hold up under even the mildest scrutiny, and so is Littlepoop, so this comparison could be seen as valid.

>I needed another option.
And, lastly, this is the part where Littlepoop has her "Aha!" moment and solves the puzzle. Instead of falling for Red Eye's trap and choosing one of the two equally unpalatable options he's presented her, she chooses Option C, which probably involves making friends with Xenith and taking on Red Eye together. Again, this would be fine if the author had done the rest of his work correctly.

Anyway, the harder this cauldron of diarrhea tries to be tragic, the funnier it gets.

>>305525
>How can any of this videogamey bullshit be translated into a good book that makes sense?
By spending time working on it or just ignoring the video game rules. No, I'm not gonna write that book for you. Seriously, though. This pokemon rant has a tenuous connect to this review at best. It seems more to me that you wanted to run your mouth on pokemon than anything. I know that you are smart enough to realize the answer yourself.

I mean what I wrote outside of this spoiler is obviously the answer. What else could it be?

In the past, I had thoughts on writing a pokemon fanfic myself but do you see me talking about that here?

Also, there's nothing wrong with spitballing and stealing ideas or whatever for fanfics isn't really what I would call help-vampirism but there still is something to it though. Like, especially when it comes to something this concrete and precise.
>"What the hell kind of world would create this scenario?"
A world you should create on your own if you want a story about it. I guess it is fine line and it is always what people are comfortable to give and recieve in terms of advice but I think there is a difference (well some anyway but help like this is still still worth a so much) between someone saying, "The execution of your idea here doesn't work because of this and this," to, "Oh, you want to explain why your trainers can only carry at max six balls. Well, here's and perfect explaination that I made, why don't you use it."

Again, this is all fanfiction and our people might not survive so who really cares if someone stole your glory and ideas but still I think it is at least good to think about. Because what do I get from you if I where to think about each one of these question and give you a great answer?
I suppose, you were being rhetorical and meant that these questions could possibly be answered in a satisfying way in a book. This is something I also just disbelive in and besides, again, why must everything be the same as it was in the video game. To me that sounds stupid and obsessive, not implying you're these things just stating that it seems pointless to force the story to go through the video game's logic loops for no reason.

>>305518
I agree, it makes little sense for that mirror to be in the place where LP found it. It's more video game logic: random goofball item that's actually a semi-significant thing from the past is randomly found in some out of the way location where it has no logical reason to be. An easter egg, basically.

>That's her true self? That's her Shadow? Just some dying angry murderhobo in Raider armour who "glares defiantly" while going down like a little bitch?
Kkat has demonstrated very little genuine creativity. Almost nothing in this story comes from his own imagination; he just draws on his encyclopedic fanboy knowledge of Fallout and MLP. Thus, anything that would require actual imagination, such as visualizing his character's true inner nature, is going to be shallow and obvious.

>>305521
>Honestly a harsh society that values honor above all and ranks its inhabitants by their martial prowess, like the Klingon Empire, would be cool and not unfitting for this setting.
This might have actually been a more interesting direction to take the pegasi than what the author ultimately went with. He still hasn't really explained just what the fuck being a "Dashite" entails.

> She doesn't have a time limit so she could train and learn discipline (if she wasn't stupidly OP already) to steadily rise up through the ranks until she can challenge Red Eye himself to single combat.
Tbh this is what I was more or less expecting her to do when she entered this place. Considering the amount of text we still have to slog through, I assumed this Fillydelphia arc was going to be a long, drawn-out chronicle of LP gradually working her way up from slave to like Red Eye's right-hand lieutenant or something.

>In Fallout separate areas (with a loading screen) obviously don't have sound pass-through, so you can blow up a mini-nuke right outside a building and people just inside by the door won't realize anything anything's amiss.
I rather suspected this was how kkat was thinking about it. Like in GTA you can go into a Cluckin' Bell and throw grenades all over the place, then if you leave and reenter the restaurant, everyone is just sitting at tables eating their food as if the carnage you just unleashed never even happened. It makes video games fun, but it would be absolutely ridiculous to include something like that if you were trying to novelize the game. Though to be fair, I've thought more than once about writing a parodic San Andreas fic that mashed up the ridiculous gameplay with the semi-serious "hood film" story.

>I'm glad /mlpol/ distances itself from bronies
I have rather ambivalent feelings about the bronies myself. I tend to have this issue with most fandoms, actually. Even if I enjoy the thing that the fandom revolves around, I generally detest fanboy-types on principle. They tend to be obnoxious midwits who obsess over data for the sake of data, but have absolutely no imagination or creativity and can't analyze a story on even the most basic level.

>>305529
I meant them as rhetorical questions that seem relevant since Fallout and Pokemon are both RPGs and this story's full of bullshit RPG game mechanics that harm the story. I'm not going to write a pokemon fanfic but I'm wondering how an author could pull off what Kkat wants to do here since I normally find figuring that out easy.
An arbitrary difference between named plot-relevant people with faces and legions of categorized disposable nobodies(Fallout has Raiders and Slavers and Alicorns, Pokemon has Bug Catchers and Hikers and Campers), methods of boosting videogame stats (Littlepip's party time mintals and Pokemon's Swords Dance), being able to carry shitloads of everything(Pokemon heroes can carry 999x of every item while at most an enemy trainer will only use four healing items/Fallout has weight limits that are far more generous than they realistically should be and someone able to lift 200lbs can comfortably carry this weight in guns food and ammo and armour across the country over the course of a few days), a hero with a silly reason for going around from place to place with large stretches of dangerous wild monsters (raiders/wild pokemon) and a world-changing main plot they stumbled into while on a personal goal like getting the water chip/geck/beating pokemon gym leaders, defeating baddies and their evil plans along the way(team rocket and the rest/Red Eye) when life at home is still an option and much safer(nothing's stopping every Pokemon game's protag from leaving home besides a single mom who says "All kids leave home some day"/LP was hated back home for taking Velvet's pipbuck off so she can escape without being tracked but they'd get over their butthurt at losing their favourite celebrity eventually)...
Hell, this story even literally translates a videogame mechanic that exists to make things easier on children (wild pokemon and enemy trainers and legendary godlike monsters and criminals all obeying the official rules about taking turns in 1 on 1 battles unless your opponent consents to a 2v2 or 3v3/VATS aka SATS freezing time and instantly locking your crosshairs onto enemies in range and letting you spend some of your limited Action Points on making the game shoot an enemy for you in your body part of choice in slow motion)
The only thing Pokemon doesn't have is a skill system where the player needs at least 75 lockpicking skill to pick this lock or at least 80 science to pass this skill check but consumable items can buff you to make this easier.
Then again, eating Party Time Mintats to get smarter so you can pick a lock better and using Swords Dance while your foe wastes a turn to get stronger so your Fire Punch does more damage is kind of similar. Rpg number bullshit that makes everything feel artificial.

Usually when stories and games want to have their violent cake and nut on it too they make the hero a violent bastard with a heart of gold on a redemption arc who learns the problem isn't that he has a dark tragic past full of violence and murder, it's that he was murdering the wrong people all along. Nathan Drake and Kratos and the hero from Saints Row have killed fucktons of people by the end of the game. Saints Row's attempt to fix Ludonarrative Dissonance made the world a silly fun place where you unleash sceptic tank hell during story missions and random rampages during non-story playtime sessions. GTA's attempt gave us Trevor, an angry guy who canonically would kill anyone and go on rampages. Fighting games with over-the-top finishing moves tend to make the good guys display supreme power and the silly characters display supreme silliness while the 100% definitely lethal moves are reserved for villains who canonically would disintegrate/mutilate/bloodsuck/impale/eat/necksnap anyone. Which makes Mortal Kombat weird since Johnny can cut someone open and stick his head through their ribcage yelling "Here's johnny!" to anyone even strangers and his own wife/daughter.

I've seen stories do clever things with videogame mechanics before. Frisk from Undertale's ability to save and load the game is a canon superpower that drove Flowey to experiment with every possible ending to see what might happen if he said this or killed her or made that choice. Frisk only says her name if you do what she would do: the nicest possible option every time. Chara represents cruelty and making wrong choices for stat gains, and you summon her by acting like her: level grinding aka killing every last enemy you can possibly find before moving on. Choosing to make the game easier gets Flowey to solve puzzles for you which makes travel as boringly easy as combat becomes and- sorry if I'm rambling but Undertale's smart. Shame the fandom's so cringe I'm embarassed to say I liked it.

If Kkat wanted LP and the audience to give a shit about Xenith, Xenith should have been a named character who does important stuff earlier on in this slave adventure. Maybe a friend who looks out for LP and defends her from bullies, teaches her how to work in the slave jobs, tells her about life in the slave land and its rules and history at night after a hard day's labour, maybe Xenith could get the slaves to start singing a song while working to create a noisy distraction that lets them talk and makes the work feel less soul crushing. Maybe Xenith sticking up for LP could create the house of rapey nirror scene for both of them, forcing LP to save both while either letting the rapists get raped or saving them because they promised to change their ways. It would be a clever way to say "if you are in a bad situation, try to make it better instead of worse. You'll make more friends that way". Kkat should have given Xenith chances to become this story's coolest character and someone we root for before she is introduced as just another enemy for LP to face. Introducing her in this role taints who she is from now on and fails to give her the chance to be someone other than a character who fills this role.

>>305533
>>305534
>I'm not going to write a pokemon fanfic but I'm wondering how an author could pull off what Kkat wants to do here since I normally find figuring that out easy.
>I'm wondering how an author could pull off what Kkat wants to do here since I normally find figuring that out easy.
>I wonder how to do this thing because I normally find it easy.
I... What?
If you find comming up with explanations for how a video game world would translate into a novel-format easy, then why are you asking for advice on how to make it?
Also, jesus. I didn't ask for more examples about how rpgs are unrealistic. I know they aren't realistic. But again. You as the writer will have to make a decision: Either you find explanations for why your world is this way or you ignore the video game rules while writing in that universe.
I suppose if that was your original question from the get go than, there you go.

>>305535
No I meant normally I find answering "how would I make this particular aspect of FOE suck less" easy.
Like with Xenith. Xenith sucks here but if I wanted to make a "LP does not want to fight and kill this named slave" moment tragic I would give this character screentime and make Xenith and LP bond. Come to think of it, I could establish Xenith as the "just keep your head down and do as you're told and don't rock the boat and everything will be fine" type so when Xenith ends up in the slave arena just because Red Eye felt like being a prick, or just because Xenith killed one or more guards by stopping them from raping LP, it would make Red Eye look bad and say "he treats his underlings like trash so do not work for tyrants. Overthrow them like LP".

But small problems are easy to solve. This story...
A ton of its issues stem from "Kkat doesn't know how to translate videogame mechanics into a setting without X buttons and pause menus" and I'm not sure how to fix that either.
A good author should choose where to put his story on the scale of realistic survival simulator to power fantasy videogame and stick to it, right?
I don't know where the perfect place on that sliding scale is. But I do know Kkat's choice is wrong. He keeps going for maudlin bullshit and over the top tradedgey bullshit in a world where a small horse with 20 guns can solve all of life's problems with sufficient murderhoboery. Reason and charismatically talking things out is an optional way to bypass some combat but nobody's actively engaging LP in debates of morality that challenge all she knows and believes. Villains don't get to have convincing arguments for their beliefs.
Red Eye won't ask LP about ponies and places fucked over by raiders and say "I want to create a world without raiders. So do you. So what if we both have to get our hooves dirty to get there? Do the lives you've taken weigh on you? The lives I've taken and lost weigh on me. Those guards you killed... They had names, and families. They were rapists, but that's what happens when you recruit from Thunderdome winners. Some of them will rape when I'm not looking. But when I can afford to purge rapists from my guards and send them to the mines, I will."
you'll never see an Alicorn say "Alicorns are obviously the superior species. Would you trust a dumb fallible pony or superpowered hyper-intelligent mutant hive mind to rule you? Our telepathy lets us spot bad apples before they commit crimes. Why shouldn't we protect ponies from them? Honestly, I don't know why Red Eye told us not to read the minds of his slaves. Telepathy makes a race more honest, and brings them together for the Greater Good".
You'll never see a fucking Raider engage Littlepip in generic basic "why shouldn't the biggest baddest asshole be in charge? Put a weakling in charge and he gets conquered. A strong guy in charge keeps you slaves safe. And why shouldn't that strong guy get to do whatever he wants to you weaklings? It's your own fault for being small! A world of chaos will eventually put the biggest baddest dude in charge of everything and then the chaos ends. Killing us raiders just makes a power vacuum and makes everypony's suffering last longer. But hey, I like to make ponies suffer, too! We're the same, you and I! I'm like, your dark reflection and stuff! *gets shot*"

Kkat compensates for his unwillingness to ask the audience deep uncomfortable queations and inability to write stories that earn their emotional moments by cranking everything up to such ridiculous degrees that any kind of depth is lost in the process. Is anyone going to shed a tear for the ponies of a vault slaughtered in a single night by its AI all because of one prick? You'd have to be a virtue-signalling crybaby of a fanboy to claim that did make you cry. This is a setting where every tragedy that happens to ponies couldn't happen to LP because she's protected by the author and that's lame. So the author compensates by making life suck for other characters sometimes.

>>305531
Is this true?

>>305542
I would say the opposite.

>>305508
>mong them is a message from Twilight Sparkle, in which she mentions an enchanted mirror that Rarity found. It enables you to see your "inner" self. I don't think I mentioned this in my recap, but when LP was in the funhouse, she at one point encountered a similar mirror:
This is the daft contrivance I mentioned in >>305434. Rarity happens to come across a magic mirror, which happens to end up in a specific hall of mirrors, which Littlepip happens to stumble across intact, and she just happens to have time to recognise and contemplate it in the middle of a running battle. This would be silly enough on its own, but the reason I pointed it out is that it's setting up for an epiphany moment that's even dumber later. You may recall that Littlepip's been shot up while wearing raider gear before, all the way back when she met Calamity.

>>305526
>>305527
I don't have anything new or interesting to say here, just that I appreciate this depth of analysis. It's excellent stuff.

>>305537
>Villains don't get to have convincing arguments for their beliefs.
This is also a great point. Villains don't need to be right, but it does help enormously if they have at least the skeleton of an argument for their position. Especially in a setting where moral greys are a major feature.

One of the core themes of Fallout is exploring the many different ways that people try to live after the apocalypse. Some regress to tribals or bandits, others make a point of turning away from the values of the pre-war world, others try to recreate the pre-war world hoping they'll 'get it right this time'. Some try to move past the hardships of the wasteland by transforming themselves, others just muddle along as best they can. These different approaches are weighed against one another and their circumstances with varying levels of success and player involvement. This is the sort of thing that FoE should do - if Red Eye and the alicorns had a modicum of competence and at least a handful of positive traits, they'd be far more interesting to read about, even if they're still flawed and defeated in the end. As it stands they're just bland villains who exist to twirl their moustaches and cackle until it's their turn to be shot in the face.

>>305542
>>305543
I would argue this is the most accurate version.

>>305550
Good meme, I went ahead and made a more consistent version, hope you like.

How many characters has the story introduced who live a fairly ordinary life according to their hometown's definition of ordinary?
Yet the author still hasn't put the time in to establish how the average non-badass lives their life.
We know nothing of what Monterry Jack's daily life looked like. We don't know why this cheesemaker scavenged for supplies, something anyone can do, in such a dangerous place. We don't know where he gets milk or cheese from because the only hint at how these poners eat in this tower is that we're told thekr restaurant turns 200 year old creamed corn and cram into small fancy-looking portions of fancy food.

Come to think of it, this story isn't really that dark.

It talks a big talk with all the gore and death and foul language and and genitalia but it would be entirely possible to sanitize this for a TV-7 rating. Replace the shit smeared on walls with graffiti that says shit like "Celestia stinks!", turn all weapons into Magical Dark Energy weapons that damage the foe's soul without dealing physical damage(think 4kids Yugioh "Those are not razor discs that saw off your legs, they are dark energy discs that will send you to the Shadow Realm" censorship), and make up some ponese swears like Shtaco for Shit.

It's still fundamentally a childish premise: a small and weak little nobody goes out into a dangerous world only to never face significant challenges or difficulties. She instantly finds the friend that dragged her into this scenario and bears no ill will towards her. Not even when the bitch continues to manipulate her and her feelings without considering how it would make LP feel. The most questionable thing the heroes did so far besides taking the statuette - killing Grim Star - was done without LP's knowledge or consent while she had an excuse to be busy. LP might claim to think bad things sometimes but she bears no icky unheroic feelings towards any of her friends. She was supposedly addicted to drugs for a while but that didn't make her kill hookers or get friends killed or cause her to fail to save important people. It just compromised her effectiveness as a murderhobo for a while until one trip to the doctor instantly cured her addictions. She was willing to go to war with Tenpony Tower if she couldn't talk them into letting a bastard go, a bastard who nonsensically killed himself and left his own children homeless hoping LP would be forced to break the bad news to them. That's how far the world aka the author has to go before this hero can seem even slightly impure in his eyes. She can't knowingly make bad decisions. Everything has to be forced upon her or a good decision in the author's eyes. Even though she's a graverobbing hypocritical sack of shit the author considers this morally justified because she is the main character. She's 100% morally pure in the eyes of the author because he doesn't have the balls INSERT TRANNY JOKE HERE OH WAIT THE MYTH OF TRANSGENDERISM IS THE JOKE to write a genuinely morally questionable hero. Any problem can be solved with enough gun and the heroes never lack enough gun. Their plot armour is almighty. Their foes are... well, to call them cartoonish caricatures would insult well-written cartoon villains. The author wouldn't know darkness or moral complexity if it fucked him in the ass, and not just because he normally never gets to know who fucks him in the ass before showing them his gaping goatsehole. This doesn't feel like a perilous adventure through a hellish world that doesn't want her here. This feels like a dull RPG with the difficulty turned down too low. Hell, this apocalypse can literally be magicked away with the power of friendship. This isn't just maudlin. This is also Limestonelin, Marblelin, and Pinkielin!

>>305552
Yeah, that actually is better. Saved.

>>305527

Anyway, page break. This next microscene deals with the fight between Daff and the zebra, Xenith. It's a pretty typical Thunderdome scene, but the action is generally well described. The main deficiency is that the pony next to LP, referred to in the text as Number Four, makes fairly annoying commentary through the whole thing. However, it is somewhat informative; we learn from Littlepoop's talkative companion that Xenith has been in the slave pits for years, is one of the few (if any) zebras living in Equestria, and that she is rumored to have had her tongue cut out I guess that saves kkat the trouble of writing dialogue for her. Plus, if he kept quiet, we'd have missed out on this hilarious little gem:

>“Hell, I remember one time a unicorn slave messed up with the recycling and set herself on fire. The slavers shot her so she didn’t run around setting the whole place ablaze. Then, after the flames had gone out, just for fun, they chopped off the unicorn’s head and raped the zebra with it.”
Lmao. Never change, kkat. Never change.

The zebra, naturally, is an expert fighter, and makes generally short work of Daff despite his willingness to fight dirty. It goes back and forth for awhile, but ultimately the fight ends the way you'd expect it to, and kkat doesn't skimp on the cornball cliches. At one point, Daff attempts to splash her with radioactive goo or something from one of the barrels, but she jumps over him and paralyzes him using some kind of Vulcan nerve pinch attack. With her opponent thus incapacitated, she snaps his neck and the scene closes with her waiting for her next opponent, Littlepoop, to step into the Thunderdome.

Page break. Littlepoop plods out into the arena. Her ribs are still aching from being kicked earlier, and that itching powder or whatever the slaver put on her flank seems to be taking effect.

>And I could see the mob of ponies staring down into the arena with gleeful anticipation. I noticed a few were eating snacks. I felt a flare of anger. A pony wouldn’t want to see me brutally murdered on an empty stomach after all.
The author's purpose here is, of course, to highlight the brutality of the spectacle, but once again his inability to think logically about his own setting does him in. Who are these ponies in the audience? Are these the other slaves? That's the only thing that would make sense; as far as I can tell the inhabitants of Fillydelphia consist of slaver guards and slaves, without any middle class in between. So, these slaves do...what exactly? Spend 6 days a week laboring in the fart caverns, and then come out to the Thunderdome on Sunday SUNDAY SUUUUNNNNDAYYY to watch their fellow slaves disembowel each other? Why? What is the point of this spectacle exactly? Who is it for? Kkat hasn't thought any of this through; he just wanted a Thunderdome scene so he wrote one in. In fact, since I feel like I've pretty much got his M.O. down at this point, I'm not even going to give him that much credit. My guess is that there is some kind of Thunderdome mission in one of the Fallout games that involves fighting in some kind of gladiator arena, and this is just a direct ripoff of that. The only difference is that the writers of Fallout were probably aware of what they were plagiarizing.

Anyway, Littlepoop reacts to this absurdity in about the way you'd expect:

>“I’m trying to save all of you WHY?” I screamed out at them. For just a moment, I could understand how Red Eye morally justified putting these ponies through such suffering to build a better world. I didn’t agree, but I could comprehend it.
There's a bit more of this, but you get the idea.

After an appropriate amount of philosophizing about the moral failings of her race, Littlepoop's fight begins. The zebra, who I guess didn't have her tongue cut out after all, whispers "I'm sorry" to her before kicking her in her injured rib. The rib breaks and punctures her lung, which I'm assuming means she will be just fine as soon as she downs another of those magical healing potions in a scene or two.

As Xenith proceeds to further kick the crap out of her, she tries to explain that she has a plan, and says the two of them should team up and try to escape together. There is some more inner-monologuing from Littlepoop, which makes it sound like she may have learned a valuable lesson, but actually it's just more of her trademark false humility:

>In truth, I had been arrogant -- so prideful of my ability to improvise, so full of myself from past victories, that I actually thought I could walk into the enemy camp with nothing but my wits… and win. I let the Elder convince me this was the only way because it conveniently allowed me to protect my friends. Instead, I had become a slave, and now I was desperately attempting to float beyond the reach of a zebra’s devastating hoofstrikes.
This would be more convincing if I didn't have every reason to believe she will just pull some ridiculous trick out of her ass to get herself out of this jam, same as always.

>My horn glowed again. In desperation, I wrapped the telekinetic field around her throat and began to tighten.
The problem with Littlepoop's Mary Sue powers is that they ruin moments like this. What happened to LP's ridiculously overpowered telekinesis? Considering what we've seen her do up until now, she ought to have no problem simply levitating Xenith and flinging her against a wall until her neck breaks, or tossing her out of the Thunderdome, or doing nearly anything she wants.

The author established earlier that LP is trying to keep a low profile in here and doesn't want to show how ludicrously OP she is, but he also established that at this point she considers her plan to infiltrate the camp a failure, and is now simply trying to escape. If she doesn't want to kill Xenith, why not just levitate the two of them to safety? This is why you have to be careful about giving your character too many superpowers.

>>305794

>I looked up at the barrels. My horn flared again, wrapping one of them in a magical field. But the barrel was securely fastened to the cage ceiling, and my telekinesis was not strong enough to tear it free.
Case in point: she's strong enough to pick up a boxcar, or to levitate their entire airship when it runs out of batteries or whatever, yet she can't break a barrel free? What is it, stuck on there with glue or something? This is just silly.

Anyway, this fight goes as predictably as the last fight. Xenith kicks the crap out of Littlepoop until Littlepoop uses her magic to strangle her. She does not kill her, she simply chokes the wind out of her until she goes semi-unconscious. The crowd of generically evil cliche Thunderdome spectators is once again howling for blood, and the direction of Caesar's thumb indicates he expects her to kill Xenith.

>Stern seemed to glean that I was up to something because she unslung her anti-machine rifle. “Finish it!” the griffin demanded. Couldn’t Stern at least call Xenith ‘her’?
In this context, "it" refers most logically to the fight, not to Xenith, so LP's remark here is dumb. However, it's not surprising that kkat would be sensitive about pronoun use.

At this point, LP apparently remembers that her telekinesis can do ridiculously powerful shit. I'll hand it to kkat here; this next bit reaches levels of preposterousness and incoherence I didn't even think were possible. Bear with me here, I'm going to do the best I can at summarizing this:

LP breaks open all of the barrels at once, and dumps their contents into the arena. The text never really explains what the deal with these barrels is, but apparently they are all filled with weapons packed in some kind of toxic goo. LP levitates the toxic goo into some kind of shield that wraps around herself and Xenith. I don't understand why she does this, but it seems to somehow protect her from Stern's anti-tank gun, which immediately begins firing as soon as Stern realizes that LP is up to something. I guess the goo is bulletproof or something? Who the fuck knows; for now I'm just going to assume it's another Fallout reference that I don't get.

While maintaining the apparently bulletproof goo curtain, she simultaneously levitates herself and the unconscious Xenith up to some kind of trapdoor in the ceiling (this part I'm not clear on, because the author never properly described the interior of this arena). It is, of course, padlocked, and LP, of course, does not have any of her lockpicking tools, but she does not let that deter her. She pulls the pins out of some grenades that she found...somewhere, I guess; probably they were in one of the barrels...and then...um...actually, I'm not quite sure what she does here. Here is what the text actually says:

>Manipulating multiple objects that were out of sight was tricky, but I had pulled pins from grenades hidden in a sack. And I knew locks. I knew tumblers and internal mechanisms. I should be able to pick a lock with my magic alone.
The implication here is either that she pulled the pins out of some hitherto-unmentioned grenades and used the pins to pick the locks, or else she just used her magic alone to pick the locks. I'm not sure which one it is because kkat's wording here is as vague as ever, but either option is ludicrous even by the standards of FoE.

Anyway, she floats the bulletproof goo cocoon containing herself and the zebra up to some trapdoor in the ceiling I guess, picks the lock with magic or something I think, and then she is out of the arena. I think. At this point, she is described as "running along the top of the cage" what cage? was she in a cage? I'm so fucking confused right now. I guess she isn't levitating the two of them anymore. Is the zebra running too, or is she still carrying her? What about the bulletproof goo cocoon? Is that still intact? I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to be visualizing here; I can't make hide nor hair out of kkat's description of the action. If anyone wants to read this part and take a whack at a better summary, be my guest. All I know is that she's doing a lot of physically and magically demanding stuff here, and bear in mind that she is doing all of it with a broken rib and a punctured lung.

ANYWAY, she eventually gets to the end of the cage I guess, and jumps off and lands back in that fun farm amusement park area, which I guess was next door to the Thunderdome. Also, a bullet grazes her leg, and she sustains some mild injury from this.

Page break. When LP comes to, she is being carried by the zebra, who is running on the roller coaster track of the amusement park for some reason or other. LP is in tremendous pain from her injuries, and that last gunshot destroyed the broadcaster attachment on her PipBuck, so she can't call for help. She apparently also took quite a few "rads" (I'm assuming this means radiation damage) from that toxic goo she surrounded the two of them with for whatever reason.

>Looking down, I saw slaver ponies shooting at us from the ground. By experience these mares and bucks were not the best shots even at close range. If they hit us at this distance with the cover of the tracks, it would be by sheer dumb luck.
Naturally. Why should any challenge this character faces present an actual challenge? Now all she needs to do is find some magical panacea potions to treat the multiple fatal injuries she's sustained, and she will no doubt be back to her old, murderhoboing self in another scene or two.

However, it seems she is not quite out of the metaphorical woods just yet. At the apex of the roller coaster track they find the actual roller coaster, which I guess has just been sitting here for 200 years, and when she tries to levitate them over it, she runs out of magic, or something, and suddenly her Mary Sue powers stop working. Ah, good ol' Mary: equal parts powerful and powerless, whichever and whenever the author needs her to be.

>>305796
Levitating radioactive goo to form a shield isn't a Fallout thing, it's something Kkat came up with probably after watching too much Avatar.
Also LP telekinetically unlocks the lock here even though she cannot see the lock. Her excuse is "well I have pulled pins from grenades I couldn't see before" but this is retarded. Why would anypony carry grenades in a world where any psychic could easily pull their pins from 2000m away or further?
Furthermore giving LP the power to just unlock any lock telekinetically without having to pick it with a "traditional" screwdriver and bobby pin raises questions like "why did you ever bother picking these locks like a magicless faggot in the first place if psychically unlocking them was always an option" and "If all unicorns can open locks with their horns without needing specialized unlocking spells or lockpicking tools why the hell have any locks remained unopened in the 200 years since ponyland got nuked?" and "Why even bother giving Littlepip that preposterous "pipbuck repair guy and generalized stuff-fixer" background to justify her knowledge of Lockpicking and Repair(fixing things) and Science(terminal hacking) if her species makes lockpicking irrelevant and her most frequently used actions are Sneak Around, Talk Sometimes, Use Overpowered Telekinesis, and Shoot Gun?

Is it bad writing that even though Velvet is the designated face and smart charismatic one of Littlepip's Littleshits, moments where a NPC or Villain needs convincing via a DND Skill Check are typically passed by Littlepip?
Between this and how easy it is to make and drink healing potions it makes what Velvet the pacifistic murderhobo medic contributes to the team feel irrelevant.
It's also bad writing that the literal "one speech skill fits all" approach of Fallout is translated so literally, right? I can't see the charms Velvet Remedy would use to get what she wants from a rich mare work on someone she'd call less classy aka someone from a completely different background with completely different priorities and values.
Games with more in-depth dialogue system split up their dialogue skills so there's one skill like Deception or Street Smarts for lying convincingly and getting what you want from one class of NPCs(thieves usually), a Negotiation or Ettiquite skill for convincing rich fancy guys, maybe a separate Intimidation skill for intimidation rolls that work on anyone if it's high enough, and so on. It helps stop the "if your character has a high Speech stat he's a god who can make anyone do anything and can only be challenged by combat, the thing he made a high speech character to avoid" problem. More importantly it lets people besides the main character/party face contribute outside of combat. Suddenly the party's cleric can appeal to the foe's better nature if he has one and the party's tough guy can make threats and talk tough during negotiations, playing bad cop to the party negotiator's good cop, instead of just waiting around for their next chance to deal 1d12 axe damage during a fight.
It's impossible to stop thinking of LP's team as anything other than one-note NPCs that follow LP around and fight for her. I've read Pokemon fics that give their hero's attack animals more personality and agency than this!
They don't even have Companion Quests! Or Loyalty Missions or whatever you want to call them. These characters don't have dreams of their own and missions they want to complete while helping LP achieve her dream. Or missions they spring on LP relevant to their characters once they trust and like her enough. LP doesn't have much of a goal right now besides murderhoboery and helping her new DJ friend. Ain't like she wants to visit every Stable to see what lessons can be learned from them.
Imagine if Velvet wanted to see all the tourist destinations in Equestria she read about as a foal in a big book, but every single one was fucked up by ziggers or slavers in some way.
Imagine if Calamity wanted to travel the world looking for the only remaining Dashitss to get the band back together like Arcade and the Enclave Remnants from FNV.
Imagine if the party got somepony who wanted to find one mythical place where legends say there is still unirradiated nature untouched by the bombs where grass can be eaten safely and the sun still shines brightly but it turns out this town is constantly repeating the same day over and over thanks to a glitching megaspell the town used to protect itself from the apocalypse and automatically reverse time in the area to redo the day whenever it detects somepony dying.
Imagine if Steelhooves wanted to find something relevant to AJ like a statuette of her. Preferably one with magic. It wouldn't be as silly as trying to find a twinkie in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. It would actually be kind of weirdly hilarious. Trying to find an Applejack minifigure in the bombed out ruins of the setting this character was from... something about that feels wrong. But over 200 years at least one poner should have found one and spread stories about how these MLP Blind Bag Minifigures make you faster/stronger/whatever.
Steelhooves doesn't count, his mission is to be one of LP's party members for the good of an organization he has no reason not to take over. This 200 year old faggot allowed his organization to decline into technoelitist pseudofeudalism and if he gave a fuck about honouring AJ's memory and making sure others do the same he'd grab this organization by the pussy and make it his bitch.

>>305796

Littlepoop summons whatever remains of her powers and squeezes out one last kamehameha that gives them enough levitation to climb over the roller coaster cars without falling through them, or whatever they're worried about exactly. They're about halfway across, when suddenly a shot rings out and a bullet punctures the nose of the car they're on.

>I had been wrong. It wasn’t the griffins I had to worry about. It was the snipers in the damn Pinkie Pie Balloons. Once we crested the top, we had put ourselves right in their crosshairs. And the carriages slowed us to a crawl, giving them easy shots.
Considering the very public ruckus they just caused, realistically the entire compound should be on alert and chasing after them. Their escape from the arena was implausible enough; the idea that they could slow-crawl their way over this dilapidated 200 year old roller coaster when it's already been established that this place has air support up the wazoo is beyond idiotic. The snipers and the griffins should have made Swiss cheese out of them several times over by now. Oh wait, I forgot; all the enemies in this story are even dumber than the heroes.

Anyway, it doesn't get much better from here. Even though the two of them are sitting ducks for the balloon snipers, we don't hear any more about them. Instead, some dive-bombing griffons are flying overhead dropping grenades on them, which all miss and do no damage. One of them apparently has a rocket launcher. Meanwhile, LP, who I would like to remind everyone has a broken rib, a punctured lung and a sprained foreleg with hairline fractures in the bone, is able to buck one of the roller coaster cars hard enough to knock it loose. It barrels backwards and knocks some raiders who were chasing them off the track. Meanwhile, the momentum causes the car they are sitting in to fall forward, and they begin to roll forward. I would just like to remind everyone that these roller coaster cars have apparently been sitting here, at the peak of this unmaintained, rickety wooden track, completely unattended and exposed to the elements, for the last 200 years.

The car goes careening down the track, and meanwhile there are griffons and Pinkie Pie balloon snipers and God only knows what else firing grenades and rocket launchers and whatnot at them, but somehow nothing hits them except for a single bullet that grazes the back of Xenith's neck. Meanwhile, LP is at one point able to use her telekinesis whatever happened to her powers deserting her, anyway? to wrench a griffon's rifle away from him in midair, spin it around, and use it to blow his head off. I would just like to remind everyone again that Littlepoop now has a punctured lung, a broken rib, a sprained and fractured leg, and is careening down a rickety roller coaster track at probably 40 or 50 miles an hour in a car that by all logic should have wheels that are rusted solid by now.

The griffon with the rocket launcher fires a missile at them, but naturally it doesn't hit. Another griffon flies alongside and aims a shotgun at them point blank, but naturally Littlepoop is able to shoot her in the wing with her last remaining shot in the other griffon's rifle, which causes her to fall into a tailspin. Meanwhile, the rocket that was just fired has apparently blown a hole in the track ahead, but naturally, LP is able to use her magic to float them over the gap to relative safety on the other side.

Page break. The roller coaster track conveniently leads into the barn-like structure, which thanks to her Mary Sue powers of perception LP has divined to be both a former Ministry hub as well as Red Eye's living quarters. Despite this, there are absolutely no guards inside this tunnel, which is obviously an entrance to the building. LP now explains her "plan" to Xenith:

>“We make it to the roof. There’s always a Pinkie Pie Balloon anchored up there. We’re going to take it. That’s how we get past the moat and The Wall.”
How does she know this?

Anyway, they venture further into the completely unguarded tunnel, looking for a door into the building proper. Meanwhile, the griffon with the rocket launcher follows them inside the tunnel. It's odd that none of the other guards who were chasing them would do this, since they all saw where she went, and in any case even if they didn't they should know where the track ends up. Seems like this would have been a fine place to set an ambush, but again; everyone in this story is a goddamn moron.

Littlepoop attempts to use her telekinesis to unlatch the griffon's extra missile bag, presumably so she can blow her up in some preposterous, horrible way, but discovers that, once again, her magic has conveniently burned out. However, as luck would have it, Xenith is some kind of super-bad-ass ninja mercenary or something, and is able to stealth-kill the one griffon who bothered to chase them in here. Have I mentioned recently that kkat is a dickless tranny and I hate his guts?

Page break. Apparently, they managed to find a way inside the building, because we rejoin them in a hallway. Again, despite the fact that these two should logically have the entire compound looking for them, and despite the fact that an entire goddamned sniper platoon and multiple griffons saw them ride the fucking roller coaster into this building, for some reason the only opposition they encounter are two inept guards who are just placidly standing there waiting for some random zebra to walk up and snap their necks.

Littlepoop has one of her random pangs of conscience which occasionally cause her to regret killing certain enemies for some reason, but it seems that Xenith suffers from no such handicap. She walks up, intending to snap both of their necks, but they finally notice the two of them and attack. A brief scuffle ensues, which ends predictably. At this point, LP observes that the two guards had been guarding the door to a vault.

>>305815
Moments like "Snipers in hot air balloons guarding the air around a static location" and "Griffons flying over foes, then dropping grenades/firing missiles" annoy me because they're incredibly rare instances of the author actually thinking "Wait, how would a nation that loves hot air balloons utilize sniper rifles?" and "How would Griffons fight if they didn't want to stop flying around over their foe?"
Both times, his answer is dull. "Flying guy throws bombs" is incredibly basic (taking one look at any plane able to fire/drop missiles/bombs can give you the idea) and "hot air balloon sniper" is stupid.
Plus because "bomb-throwing fliers" is a decent idea, Kkat has to make it shit. All LP's foes have to miss with all their attacks. Every single attack aimed at the heroes needs to miss unless it would cause inconsequential damage like a minor bullet graze to the back of the neck or a fractured and sprained hoof or a cracked rib that pierces a lung. You know, injuries Kkat considers inconsequential because he's never experienced them and has never seen competent writers describe them.
Also, if Red-Eye has functional hot air balloons and bombs and an alliance with the Alicorns why hasn't he already taken over this Wasteland and everypony within it? Doesn't matter how "badass" some Zigger is in close quarters combat, it's not surviving if the building it's in gets blown to pieces.
If Littlepip has the telekinetic power to steal a gun from its owner and turn it on him, why not steal a balloonist sniper's gun and use it to shoot down other sniper balloons? There's a reason why we don't use hot air balloons in military engagements. They're fragile. And slow. Shooting a hot air balloon or its pilot is easier than shooting down a F69 Raptor or whatever it's called at maximum speed. LP has SATS, she can cheat to win any sniper contest by popping out of cover and headshotting or balloon-shotting any enemy in the air in dilated time (HEH HEH KKAT WOULD KNOW A LOT ABOUT DILATING THINGS BECAUSE HE'S A TRANNY) before popping back into cover.
You'd think Zebras, with their do-anything alchemy, would have some sort of explosive fire-bomb molotov cocktail weapon and a method to launch these firebombs at hot air balloons. This would encourage ponyland to not rely on sniper balloons since the ziggers love sabotage and cheap tricks in this story's canon. Then again, Kkat doesn't think much.
So LP doesn't think much.
LP will never do anything as smart as the clever tricks Naruto pulled off. If she was placed into his story, the nonsensically OP telekinesis she had from day one would carry her through every fight ever, so she'd never have to learn or grow.

I checked TvTropes's Fallout Equestria page, it's full of sycophantic dicksucking and inordinate amounts of praise for "Chekovs Gun moments(TM)" where shit hidden amongst raw sewage is fished out chapters later with the author's insistence that it was solid gold hidden in plain sight all along. Its "List of heartwarming moments" is as maudlin as you'd expect and its "List of awesome moments" is annoying. Apparently they think LP dropping a boxcar on an Alicorn, Littlepip killing Mr Topaz the dragon by shoving explosives down its mouth, that time in chapter 18 when Calamity blew up a parking lot full of inexplicably-explosive delivery carts so they could escape from Alicorns, and LP flushing her Party-Time Mint-Als down the shitter after deciding to never use them again were some of the story's coolest moments.
I'm surprised LP's dungeon-crawl through that Chimera Stable while Calamity was poisoned, you know the time she looted as much as she could from the place before blowing it up even though her friend was dying, even though her mission was to simply seal off the source of these monsters and she didn't have to blow the place up or prioritize that over the life of her friend, wasn't on the list. Her dedication to overkill and peak murderhoboery superseded her desire to cure her friend as quickly as possible, not that this really bothered Calamity since he's a NPC who doesn't care if he's mistreated.
Hell, I'm surprised that time Steelhooves murdered Grim Star with the monsters he tried to protect his hometown from, or some stupid unfunny quip we've all forgotten about from 10 or so chapters ago aimed at some character we're not supposed to like, isn't on the list.
I can't mention the other stuff on the list because it's all spoilers.
The site's page for "Tear Jerker moments" is more than twice as long as the "awesome moments" page despite how hard this story relies on spectacle and accidental campy over-the-top bullshit, turns out these crybabies cried at pretty much everything even remotely sad. Same with their page for "Nightmare Fuel", turns out they found everything spooky in this story absolutely terrifying. The thought of a grown-ass man unironically describing a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction as "nightmare fuel" just because it inflicted some torturous death upon his favourite poner is bizarre.

>>305794
>What is the point of this spectacle exactly? Who is it for? Kkat hasn't thought any of this through; he just wanted a Thunderdome scene so he wrote one in. In fact, since I feel like I've pretty much got his M.O. down at this point, I'm not even going to give him that much credit. My guess is that there is some kind of Thunderdome mission in one of the Fallout games that involves fighting in some kind of gladiator arena, and this is just a direct ripoff of that.
Yup. As I alluded to in >>305349 , the entire Fillydelphia scenario is based on Fallout 3's Pitt DLC.

In the game's lore, Pittsburgh was populated by the "hurr durr rape and murder" variety of raiders up until Ashur, an ex-brotherhood warlord, rose up and united them. Under Ashur's rule the motley scum of Pittsburgh are gradually beginning to make progress in reviving the local industry, with plans to create a proper society sometime far in the future. Both the slavers and the majority of the slaves are former raiders, which would go some way to explaining why pit fighting is the local sport of choice. Part of the DLC revolves around a potential cure for the unique strain of radiation sickness plaguing the city: Ashur's baby daughter appears to be immune to mutation. Do you side with Ashur and allow him to slowly, ethically develop a cure from his daughter's DNA over the course of years while his brutal regime continues to rule the city? Or do you side with the slaves, kidnap Ashur's infant daughter and pass her over to the slaves who are inclined to be more expedient and far less kind?

Not exactly Shakespeare, obviously, but even this limited nuance is lost in FoE. The slaves are generic "helpless victim" NPCs. The slavers are generic "evil baddie" NPCs. Red Eye's claims to progress ring hollow in light of this.

>>305796
Here's how I understand the escape:
>The fight is taking place inside a pit with a cage roof over it
>Littlepip floats the radioactive goo to obscure the slavers' vision of her.
>She simultaneously levitates herself and Xenith up to the trapdoor
>She uses her telekinesis to open it by manually moving the tumblers inside without being able to see them (the grenade thing is a reference to when she killed Mr.Topaz earlier, presumably intended to make this look like less of an ass pull).
>she gets the hatch open, climbs out and runs
>she takes a glancing hit from an anti-machine rifle (ie. a .50 cal), and finally falls unconscious.

In short, she performs three near-unprecedented feats of magic simultaneously and shrugs off a bullet desinged to kill tanks, while carrying somebody bigger than her and suffering from a punctured lung. As you do.

I have absolutely no idea how or why the pit seems to be located many stories above the theme park - in the game it's in the basement of a steel mill.

Was thinking about Red Eye's lack of presence in the tale and how a better game story solved the problem.

During the 2nd act of Ratchet and Clank 1, you get distracted.
Your goal is "stop chairman drek from destroying dozens of inhabited planets to get parts to build a new home for his people, the Blarg" but Ratchet's obsessed with getting revenge on his lackey Qwark and you get caught up in a chain of mandatory sidequests that lasts 30% of the story.
Get the two infobots on Batallia that tell you about Orxon and Gaspar, get to Orxon (as Clank since the atmosphere's too poisonous for Ratchet), get the Magnetboots and the Infobot that tells you about Pokitaru, go to Gaspar to get the Pilot's Helmet, go to Pokitaru to take down Blarg ships polluting the resort and get rewarded with the O2 mask, and finally return to Orxon with the O2 mask that lets ratchet breathe on that planet so he can hunt down an Infobot that tells him where to go next, FIMALLY letting him get on with the story.
However things still feel important and connected to the main plot and villain. And the environments are varied and interesting.
Batallia is a rainy world at war with Drek's race, the Blarg.
Orxon is the sickly green gabandoned homeworld of the Blarg. Only monsters and your robotic friend can survive here, any organic life needs an O2 mask designed to let people survive underwater indefinitely.
Gaspar is a volcanic red planet with the Blarg Depot, a military base and testing facility for the Pilot's Helmet.
Pokitaru is a sunny tropical resort planet under attack by local wildlife mutated by the toxic waste the Blarg is dumping here, and using the Pilot's Helmet to take the Blarg dropships out gets you the O2 mask.
Even when you're just running around killing Blarg or navigating a doomed world it feels like you're fighting the enemy and foiling his plans and taking necessary steps in the war against him. Everything comes back to Drek to make the final confrontation on Ratchet's homeworld of Veldin (which he wants to destroy) extra-epic.
The worldbuilding was also great in 2 and Deadlocked, everything came back to Megacorp or Dreadzone.
But what presence has Red-Eye had in the story so far if you don't count his radio broadcasts which were likely added in later?
And what world does LP explore?

What do we get in this story? Wasteland. And sometimes, more Wasteland broken up by the occasional destroyed urban environment with generic slavers/raiders or occasional towns built from scrap. Rarely there's a pre-war building or Stable to explore. When LP isn't fighting random mutated wildlife from Equestria or Fallout 1's California desert, she's fighting dull uninteresting evil Alicorns in a hive mind that stops them from being unique memorable charactsrs in their own right.
Right now, LP is balls deep into Red Eye territory and she's still seeing the same wasteland shit albeit with random amusement park shit here and there.
But it's not like there are booby trapped monster houses or modified lethal obstacle courses or a bumper car racetrack modified into a lethal game of Mario Kart or a shooting gallery where the squirt gun is enchanted to drain the blood of whoever fires it and the open-mouthed things you have to fill with water leak or a slide but some cunt put spiked caltrops at the bottom or any of the creative wacky evil shit some evil overlord could make from an amusement park if he wanted to put on a show for his supporters and make an example out of rebels. Rigged ladder-climbing carnival games get hardcore when every contestant except the last one to fall gets sacrificed to the crushing jaws of the enchanted animatronic robo-dragon with a broken-down rollercoaster built around him.
LP has lost her guns but her absurd telekinesis and absurd luck means this isn't the issue Kkat thinks it is.
I expected her to switch from fighting wasteland monsters to Red Eye guards until she moved on to the next area but for some reason there was a monster-infested building to loot and she was given a laser gun so she could do her usual looty shooty shit without any difficulty.
LP didn't even get handcuffed to the Zigger or the guy who tried to rape her during the gladiator fight! "the hero must be handcuffed to some cunt at some point" is prison escape story 101 for a reason!
Why the hell didn't Littlepip just slap on a StealthBuck to turn invisible and sneak into a high vantage point in Red Eye's land before telekinetically slamming Red Eye into a wall with the amount of force it takes to lift a boxcar? Why did she bother with this slaver plotline if she's going to blow her "cover" and become a known enemy of this place the second she feels like adding a Zigger to her party?
Why does so much of this story feel like pointless filler that could be skipped or cut for a movie adaption without skipping anything important?

>>305815

Page break. Littlepoop apparently hacks the terminal without difficulty and opens the door to the vault. Even Xenith finds this action to be absurd, but Littlepoop offers a rambling, flimsy explanation for why it was necessary for them to go in here:

>I explained that I needed to catch my breath. A statement my shallow, harsh breathing had proven altogether true. The worst part of my injuries was the fact that I couldn’t risk healing them -- not with a broken rib and punctured lung. Any poultice would cause those to heal wrong. I needed Velvet Remedy before I could dare use anything more than a healing bandage. And in our situation, I didn’t even dare use painkillers. I needed to be thinking straight.
She literally has a piece of broken rib jutting into her lung, it's amazing she can even breathe at all, or that she's not choking on her own blood. Part of the problem here is that, again, the way medicine works in this story is beyond screwy. A "poultice", however magical, couldn't really be applied to an internal injury, so this is pretty much irrelevant. Also, I don't recall any previous mention of poultices being a healing technique in this world anyway. The difference between Velvet Remedy's healing magic and the magic healing potions that seem to cure just about everything has never been clarified; seems to me the two are basically interchangeable. And finally, to my knowledge Littlepoop doesn't even have access to any of these medical supplies in the first place; this includes the painkillers she "doesn't dare" use, so none of this matters anyway.

Given the current situation, I guess I don't see that she has too many options beyond simply pressing forward, since she obviously needs medical attention that she can't currently get, and if she stays in the slaver compound she dies one way or the other. However, I don't see how any of this justifies hacking the terminal and exploring the vault; this is just another excuse to go looting.

>“What is this?” Xenith asked, staring into the room that had been sealed behind the vault door.
>“The Wasteland, taunting me,” I answered as I stepped into the vault, looking around at the mostly-empty shelves with their scattering of memory orbs -- none of which I could look into without my magic -- and the line of passkey-coded wall safes along the back -- none of which I could open. The Equestrian Wasteland loved rubbing my face in my every moment of weakness.
1. Who gives a shit about the memory orbs? You don't need to pry into every single one of these things that you find.
2. Who gives a shit about the wall safes? You don't need to pry into every single one of these that you find.
3. Your moments of "weakness" are few and far between, and in any case, the only effect of your present weakness is that you are unable to pry into a bunch of safes and memory orbs that have nothing to do with your current objective and are none of your business in the first place. Nobody sympathizes with you here.

Anyway, completely ignoring her injuries and the fact that realistically the entire fucking compound should still be looking for her even though they don't seem to be for some reason, Littlepoop gathers up all of the stupid orbs and stuffs them into her saddlebags. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this, but at one point she took a new pair of saddlebags off of one of the guards she killed.

At this point, she spies another terminal, so she figures she might as well hack it. I mean, it's not like she has anything more important to be worrying about right now.

>Reaching it, I hooked my PipBuck into the terminal and began my hack.
The method she uses to "hack" these terminals has never been properly explained. At one point, the text explicitly mentions that she has some kind of separate "device" to do this, but here she appears to be using her PipBuck. Add this to the long, long list of vague things in this story that the author should have put some thought into but didn't.

Anyway, the hack goes the way it usually goes: the terminal is tough, and she can't break the encryption, and then suddenly she does. The author makes passing note of how illogical this situation is, but as usual chooses to simply dismiss it rather than deal with it:

>I was increasingly aware of how long this was taking. Stern had ponies scouring the building and surrounding grounds for us. They were spread out, but eventually one or more of them would stumble across us.
Reminder that she currently has a broken rib, a punctured lung, a sprained and hairline-fractured foreleg, and that she only came in here to "catch her breath."

Anyway, blah blah blah she gets the safes open. All of them. Inside, she finds the usual assortment of useless bric-a-brac: an audio recording, a StealthBuck, some memory orbs, and an old cloak which Xenith reacts strangely to:

>I caught Xenith’s reaction as I pulled out the cloak, even though she recovered quickly.
>“What?” I asked.
>“Nothing,” she lied.
I'm not sure what the significance of this is. At any rate, Xenith tries to wear the cloak, but the clasp is broken so she can't.

She also finds an old PipBuck:

>The only thing I could get from it was an automapped floor plan for Stable Three. The Stable looked identical to Stable Two, except that the apple orchard was only two-thirds the size and there were two interlocking Overmare’s Offices. I shuddered inexplicably.
Most of this story makes me laugh, but I'm never quite sure when I'm supposed to be laughing. Is LP's terror of slight variants in Stable designs meant to be a humorous jab at her OCD, or is this a sign of something actually insidious going on? I'm not sure.

In any case, the last safe contains Red Eye's plans for the something-whatever engine, which she was supposed to grab for the Steel Rangers I think, so I guess there was kind of a point to coming in here. LP seems to be having her usual luck with stumbling across the exact things she needs at exactly the right times.

>>305853

Page break. The scene opens an indeterminate period of time later, at an indeterminate location. Xenith and Littlepoop are at the top of a staircase, when Xenith notices one of the Fluttershy posters on the wall. She reacts fearfully to it, and makes a remark about "Doombunny." A fairly bizarre exchange follows, in which Xenith explains that Fluttershy's pet rabbit was apparently some kind of mutant terror that unleashed horrors on the zebra population...or something. The text makes a somewhat clever reference to the Monty Python killer bunny (at least I'm assuming that's the reference), and I get the impression the whole thing is meant to be a joke. However, again, it's a little hard to tell which funny parts in this story are intentional.

Anyway, they keep exploring. Once again, it strikes me as passing strange that this building is supposed to be Red Eye's keep, and that an entire platoon of griffons and several balloon snipers saw them come in here, and yet they have encountered no opposition other than the pair of guards they stumbled across that were guarding the vault door.

As they enter some kind of research laboratory, they do come across one guy. However, he turns out to be nothing but a lone scientist; Xenith dispatches him with her stealth kill maneuver, and Littlepoop steals her coat for some idiotic reason:

>“It’s not much protection,” I admitted. “But anything is better than nothing…”
It's not protection against anything; this is moronic. What the hell is a labcoat going to protect you against? About the only reason this would be useful is as a disguise, and I think at this point LP is recognizable enough and has caused enough noticeable trouble that her chances of sneaking around this place disguised as a scientist are near zero.

Anyway, she pokes around in the science lab, and comes across a recipe for Party Time Mint-als. She has an obligatory moment of temptation, which ends in obligatory resistance. She summons up a memory of Homage's sweet lovin' to help fend off the craving.

(author's italics are preserved here)
>I remembered Homage’s sweet voice. And something she said floated back to me:
>…Oh, a mixture of Rage and painkillers. A friend and I found the recipe in the ruins of a M.O.P. clinic when we were younger…
>I blinked. Then called out to Xenith.
>“Wait… you mean to tell me that Fluttershy’s pet rabbit invented Stampede?”
Once again, Littlepoop is making weird connections that don't logically follow each other, and forming conclusions that she wouldn't necessarily form from the information she has available to her. "Stampede" has been mentioned in passing once or twice, and I think I do remember Homage saying something about using it back when she was hanging with another friend. I don't remember the friend's name (I'm actually not sure if it was given), but it seems improbable that Fluttershy's rabbit would have survived long enough to fill the role. I don't think that's what the author is implying here, either.

As to Flutterbutter's rabbit, this is what the author gives us:

>Xenith lowered her face to mine, speaking in that odd accent. “Oh yes. Doombunny was a master in the laboratory. I also hear it could cook and toss a mean salad.”
I hear the fellas down at Club Manhole say the same thing about kkat, except for the part about the laboratory and the cooking. However, point is, there's nothing here about Stampede; all this tells us is that Fluttershy's rabbit I'm assuming the rabbit is meant to be Angel Bunny, but the text does not explicitly give us a name was apparently an expert chemist and yes, this autism is actually in the text.

So, all we have here is that Flutters' bunny was a chemist, and that a drug called Stampede exists. I see no reason why these two facts should automatically be connected, and the author has not provided us with any additional information that might connect them. It's possible that this is also drawing on some of the other obscure facts that this text is peppered with that I've simply forgotten, but frankly the topic is just too idiotic to be worth researching. It's easier to just call kkat a faggot and move on.

Page break. At this point I'm just going to assume that both LP and the author have completely forgotten about the fact that her damn lung is punctured and that there is literally an entire army chasing them, because Littlepoop suddenly decides it would be a good idea to put her earbuds in and listen to some recording she found in one of the terminals she hacked earlier. It appears to be a recording of only one side of a telephone conversation. The speaker is Rarity. Though we are not able to hear what is spoken by the second party, she is revealed to be Princess Luna when Rarity addresses her by name.

The recording itself is not particularly exciting; the conversation appears to have taken place during the early part of the war, when the m6 were first forming their respective Ministries. Rarity mostly talks about how they are all busy now, and they are subsequently beginning to drift apart. We get an early reference to Ponk's budding crack mint addiction. Beyond this, the only other interesting tidbit is that Zecora was apparently murdered at some point; Pinkie's ministry is tasked with tracking down those responsible.

Page break. Instead of searching the lab for something that could heal the jagged rib poking into her lung, Littlepoop instead begins poking around in the various terminals. She finds some information about "bypass spells," which I think is the other thing the Rangers wanted her to look into while she's here. The magic involves casting spells that selectively target certain things but leave others alone, and is presumably used as part of something like a balefire bomb designed to cause mass destruction. That could be helpful, I guess. Anyway, the long and short of it is that Red Eye is getting close but he's not quite there yet.

>>305858
>A fairly bizarre exchange follows, in which Xenith explains that Fluttershy's pet rabbit was apparently some kind of mutant terror that unleashed horrors on the zebra population...or something. The text makes a somewhat clever reference to the Monty Python killer bunny (at least I'm assuming that's the reference), and I get the impression the whole thing is meant to be a joke. However, again, it's a little hard to tell which funny parts in this story are intentional.
As far as I'm aware, this is unironic. It gets referenced again later, multiple times if memory serves. Angel Bunny was supposedly responsible for inventing high end combat drugs and singlehandedly terrifying the zebras with how deadly he was in a fight. Presumably this is all intended as a Monty Python reference initially, combined with the old S1 memes about how Angel is a dick, except Kkat has absolutely no clue how jokes work or when to stop.

>>305858

Anyway, while LP is poking around in various terminals and whatnot, one of the many enemies who are supposed to be looking for these two finally decides to attack. LP looks out the window and sees something large and terrifying flying towards her:

>I abandoned the terminal and moved to her side as quickly as my legs and breath would allow. I stared out the window as something huge came out of the red glow of the Fillydelphia Crater.
>It was an armored black alicorn, easily three times the size of a normal one, the air about her rippling with power. She flew towards us, leaving swaths of energy in her wake.
It actually took me a minute to figure out the geography here because, as usual, kkat has not bothered to give us even a barebones description of this room, so it's not clear which window he's referencing. I initially thought he meant a window to the hallway they just came from, but from what happens next it's clearly an exterior window. Whenever you're writing a scene where important things are happening in physical space, you need to keep the layout of your setting in mind, and make sure that you're giving the reader enough information to visualize what you're visualizing. Remember, we can't see inside your head.

Anyway, there's a big-ass alicorn barreling towards them. Every guard in Fillydelphia logically ought to know by now that the two of them came into this building, and since it's a limited area that should logically be heavily guarded anyway, the sane thing to do would be to first close off all the exits and then send in every free guard they can muster to search the building's interior. However, despite this, these two have pretty much been strolling around in here unopposed until now. These alicorns are supposed to be able to read each other's minds and should therefore be able to coordinate quite easily, and logically they should have heard the same alarm that everyone else did when LP staged her escape. Really, they should have been the first ones attacking them while they were on the roller coaster, and at any rate it seems logical that they should have run into at least one of them by now. However, because reasons, they haven't, and because other reasons, one of them is suddenly attacking now.

Xenith informs LP that the reason this particular alicorn is all big and beefy and shit is because it's been "basking" in the radiation of the crater. Apparently, "creatures of radiation" are not only healed by radiation, but will grow stronger and larger if exposed for long periods of time. This seems to be very similar to what taint does to certain creatures, but at the same time, other creatures are killed by taint. Actually, I think the same is true of radiation, so...

I'll be honest, I'm finding the difference between "radiation" and "taint" to be minor and mostly confusing so far, sort of like the ghoul/zombie distinction. Some people like to create a lot of intricate terminology in their worlds, but I'm not one of them. My general rule is that it's usually best not to overcomplicate things, so when you have two very similar concepts that serve essentially the same purpose in the story, it makes more sense to combine them or to get rid of one; otherwise you're just confusing the reader to no purpose.

One of the problems that FoE has to begin with is that it's basically a mashup of of a science fiction universe with a fantasy universe, and it doesn't do a particularly good job of blending them. I spent most of the early part of the story being confused about what "radiation" even is; it's a purely physical, non-supernatural phenomenon in our world, but the author's version is this weird pseudo-magical aura whose origin and properties are never fully explained. What complicates things further is he also has "taint," which does basically the same thing that radiation does (with only a few minor variations), but is also supposed to be different somehow.

What I would probably do is get rid of the "radiation" concept entirely, and just have "taint," which I would describe as kind of dark magical aura that's floating around in the air as a result of the magic weapons and so forth that they used in the war. There could be different types of taint maybe, but it would all derive from the same basic substance. It would make things much easier to follow in the early part of the story, since "radiation" already has a scientific context in our world, and it's not clear what the author means by it, whereas a word like "taint" or "corruption" or something could easily communicate an evil mystery substance without any additional explanation.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah; a big alicorn comes crashing through the window, and it's all strong and super-sized and terrifying.

>I looked up towards the sky, cursing Celestia and Luna in turn. Wasn’t it enough that they were magically far more adept than I? That they were smart? Crafty? Fucking telepathic? With shields that only a small number of things could apparently get through? And they could fly?!
I don't know, isn't it enough that you have a magical wristwatch that tells you who is around you and whether or not they're hostile, and enables you to just stroll out into the wasteland one day with zero combat experience and become an instant badass because it automatically aims your gun for you? Isn't it enough that you are the only pony in Edgequestria that has one of these things, despite their being supposedly quite commonplace? Isn't it enough that your dumb horn can levitate nearly anything? Isn't it enough that you're both a master lockpicker and a master hacker, despite having no obvious in-story reason to have any proficiency in either of those disciplines? Isn't it enough that you can have a broken leg, as well as a jagged portion of your own rib jammed into your lung, but suffer no obvious handicap as a result?

>>305866
I still find LP's "Alicorns are OP devs plz nerf" rant hilarious because that boxcar-chucking bitchnigger just finished flying and using an impenetrable shield made from radioactive barrel goop and opening a lock from the outside telekinetically without her lockpicking tools... all at the same goddamn time.
It reminds me of that friend of mine whose first experience with Mugen was losing a fight to Applejack despite cloning sonic and giving him 9999 atk/defence and turning him yellow. He lost to a balanced character just because he sucks so hard at fighting games his instakill cheat character means nothing. And he said "applejack is overpowered, you need to nerf her" with a straight face. No.
Alicorns are already nerfed. Despite all their OP abilities, they are low tier trash because they are inferior to Littlesue. Despite all their OP abilities, they are nerfed in the intelligence department because Kkat can't write characters smarter than him.
Suck dick, Littlepip. Even without your ammo and guns and armour you are more overpowered than this hive mind of 200+ super-strong super-fast reproduction-capable race of cartoonishly cruel and shallow bitches who regenerate health and are strengthened by radiation and can fly and turn invisible and make magic shields.
I wish hive minds were something only competent writers tried to write. Each body is a piece on a board commanded by the main brain. Instantaneous information sharing gives perfect intelligence to the hive mind, and each eye and nose and ear is another sensory aspect of the ultimate information-gathering apparatus. Ever seen a professional korean Starcraft play like every single unit is part of the same body he's mastered? Give him an Ender's Game style army and he would lose to a realistic sentient AI because its many brains can think many times faster than any single human can. A true hive mind would be an eldritch, unknowable, unfathomable mind able to understand more than any single being ever could. It would have faster reactions and information analysis ability than any computer or AI programmed to play one game well and learn from its mistakes faster than any AI or human could learn. It could make predictions based on your previous behavior and the behaviour of your species to guess your next military move. It would share information with its hive mind members more efficiently than any radio network or military general ever could. Any individual in the hive mind would happily die to gain a slight advantage for its cause or gain slightly more intel for its hive mind. Any individual would know exactly what your capabilities and supplies and weapons are. It would be impossible to fuck up the chain of command to create chaos because there is no chain, there is a net that doesn't care how many atoms that make up its net get killed. And this is a hive mind made of super strong super fast super healthy flying magical Alicorn bitches aged 200 or more. They can fly. And these fuckers have magical abilities like telekinesis and invisibility and shield creation. They should be great at making shield shells around foes and shrinking them to crush enemies unable to break out of those shields or teleport. They should be great at invisibly sniping you with massive rifles even the telekinesis of alicorns would struggle to lift and aim. One alicorn invisibly stalking you and getting your exact location with a Pipbuck can transmit this data to an artillery squadron that could fire at any foe from anywhere. If anyone should have mines and factories and the ability to produce weapons and armour that are military-grade or better it should be these bitches. And these fuckers can reproduce by mutating more bitches or by fucking so hard they destroy male pelvises, yet only reproduce females because Kkat has a violent horny amazoness fetish. It would be difficult and possibly impossible for our entire planet's military forces to defeat these Alicorns if they were real and not written by Kkat. This is Kkat's bullshit female-only mary sue species and yet to let Littlepoop win he has to write each one like it's a retarded videogame AI with this generically cruel evil sadistic smug bitch personality. He has to make them not know what a Memory Orb is despite what a massive plot hole this turns out to be later on once we learn more about the Alicorns. Kkat has to make them retarded so they can lose despite their superior resources and forces and numbers and everything else. He has to write these alicorns like he writes Raiders who suddenly go from mining areas and covering each other's advances to screaming and charging to their deaths and Slavers who are terminally unable to handle one flying cunt and one easily-distracted murderhobo running around their town slaughtering everypony even with an Alicorn backing them up. Littlepip is never allowed to face real danger or serious consequences for her actions. Murderhoboing is never wrong because her victims are always Evil(tm) and her fights are always fundamentally easy and any solution the Mane Six already attempted will only succeed if LP or her friends try it. Kkat will never be a woman. Kkat will never be a writer. LP is playing life on easy mode and considering how often Kkat misses what made a Fallout element unique and interesting when trying to make things darker and edgier for his joyless take on the wasteland, that makes this hilarious.
Almost as hilarious as trying to play "doom bunny" straight.
Then again, Gaykat doesn't know what straight is.

>>305823
>I checked TvTropes's Fallout Equestria page, it's full of sycophantic dicksucking and inordinate amounts of praise
Honestly, what do you expect? Any sort of semi-obscure media (that isn't liked only "ironically" or is notorious for some reason) will be evaluated by the people who know about it: the fans. And if the fans are a bunch of faggots who wouldn't know good literature if [insert novel here] hit them in the head, that's how it's going to be. It's the downside of having a crowdsourced encyclopedia: it will cover everything that's ever been published, but on the other hand nearly everything is written by normies/plebs. A team of dedicated reviewers like Glim could do a much better job of picking apart tropes, but the vast body of works of literature is simply too much to cover, let alone bad fanfiction.

>Alicorns are OP devs plz nerf
The complete lack of balance in this story, and LP unreasonably complaining about enemies that should be able to squish her with a thought, reminds me of War Thunder.

Glim, I'm sorry I can't make any additional observation regarding the stupidity of the story. There's simply too much of it and I'd be restating what you've said or implied. Thank you for taking one for the team, though.

>>305874
>It reminds me of that friend of mine whose first experience with Mugen was losing a fight to Applejack despite cloning sonic and giving him 9999 atk/defence and turning him yellow. He lost to a balanced character just because he sucks so hard at fighting games his instakill cheat character means nothing. And he said "applejack is overpowered, you need to nerf her" with a straight face. No.
Is your friend ChrisChan?

>hiveminds
Such an antagonist would be nigh-impossible to defeat unless if despite the sum of its parts it cannot use technology, such as the Tyranids or something, and even then it would be extremely tough to deal with. It's a very formidable foe in an asymmetric conflict, whereby the protagonist will be running constantly and may or may not find a macguffin as a last hope. On a civilizational-scale conflict the society fighting the hivemind would have a policy of containment rather than destruction, as any attempt at an offensive operation would fare poorly against a rapidly adapting foe. Both of these types of conflicts applied to the Borg in Star Trek: TNG, whereby the Federation threw everything it had at this hivemind and the Enterprise relied on unpredictability. "Best of Both Worlds" constituted two of the best episodes in the entire franchise and the Borg was a threat everyone took seriously, at least before Voyager made them a "villain of the week" almost as badly as Kkat did with the alicorns.

>>305866

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, a big ass alicorn comes crashing through the window and wrecks up the science lab. Littlepoop and Xenith run away, back down the hall.

Page break. They keep running and the alicorn keeps chasing them, blasting through walls and generally being a big pain in the ass.

>I followed her up another flight of stairs, screaming out in agony and hating the building for making us climb when the damn monster behind us didn’t have to.
Yeah, stairs kind of suck when you've got a rib protruding into your lung. On a related note, you probably shouldn't have spent all of that time cracking into safes and reading people's 200 year old emails. Just think: you could be floating lazily away into the sunset on a Pinkie Pie balloon right now if you weren't such an arrogant, nosy klepto.

They make it to the top of the stairs, but the alicorn somehow gets there ahead of them, and blocks their path. Apparently its shield is so powerful that it has to create a hole in it in order to cast a spell through it. Littlepoop is presently having one of her convenient "woe is me I can't do anything" moments, so it falls to Xenith to take command. However, the alicorn casts a "heart attack spell" on her which causes her to seize up and keel over. I'm assuming heart attacks are no more fatal in this world than anything else we've encountered so far, but I guess we'll see how it goes.

>I screamed! At the super-alicorn for being so ridiculously powerful and evil and totally unfair!
These words! Are actually all one sentence! Don't just! Use exclamation marks! To break single sentences! Into multiple sentences! For no reason! It makes you look! Like a retard!

Anyway, Littlepoop tries to jump through the hole the alicorn created in its own shield so it could cast the spell, and manages to dump all of the memory orbs she found in the vault in there. She also cuts herself on the edge of the shield or something and it seems to hurt her pretty badly, though I'm assuming that like most of her other injuries, this one will only affect her when the author wants it to. This distraction causes the alicorn to lose its grip on Xenith.

I didn't mention this earlier since it didn't seem important at the time, but there were also four "balefire eggs" inside one of the safes along with all of the other random junk she found in there. Balefire eggs are apparently the base destruction spells that were amplified into WMDs by Fluttershy's hoodoo magic...or something. I guess.

The text actually doesn't specify that LP took the eggs with her, in fact it actually made it sound like she noticed them but decided to leave them there on account of how they would be dangerous to carry around. However, it seems she did in fact take them, because she manages to slip a few into the alicorn's shield along with the memory orbs. The hole in the shield closes, and Littlepoop loses consciousness. Naturally, the balefire eggs then explode (somehow), and naturally, the super-powerful shield ensures that the explosion only harms the alicorn inside. Oh, that Littlepoop; so clever. Her ass is a pocket dimension containing the solution to every ridiculous problem ever conceived.

>I never heard the explosion. But Xenith later told me it was… loud, only louder.
Kkat has a way with words. It's not a good way, mind you, but it's definitely a way. I'm at least willing to give him that.

Page break. Littlepoop awakens in a bathroom at an indeterminate point in the future. Xenith has bandaged her wounds, and the bandages are also magical somehow and seem to have basically cured all of her other injuries, which presumably includes her broken rib and punctured lung. According to Littlepoop, her foreleg now only feels "mildly sprained." Oh well, it's not like her injuries actually had any effect on her, so it's probably better that they are at least eliminated as a topic of discussion.

However, she still can't move I guess, so Xenith puts her on her back and carries her. Xenith seems worried about pursuers, which seems like it ought to be a valid concern, were it not for the fact that they've only encountered one serious enemy in here so far. Oh, also, Red Eye has something called a "cyberdog." Its name is Winter, and according to Xenith it is currently tracking them. How she would know this is another question entirely.

Littlepoop recalls that one of Red Eye's broadcasts mentioned his having a dog named Winter as a child:
>If he was but a colt at that time, the dog should have passed away naturally from old age. But now I imagined that instead of letting that happen, he’d cybernetically enhanced it, replacing part after part as each failed. It was macabre.
Red Eye cybernetically enhanced his childhood pet, and now it's chasing them. Sure, why not? Can't be any stupider of an idea than giant mutated Angel Bunny who is also Walter White.

Anyway, they climb some more stairs (as usual, we are given literally zero reference points for where they are in this building, how many floors it has, how far they have to go, etc). Apparently there are a few guards here and there, but we are assured that Xenith can simply sneak past them. However, at one point, RoboPupper™ appears and begins to chase them. They manage to escape to the roof, where the balloon they intended to steal is indeed waiting, but unfortunately so are the snipers:

>The anchored Pinkie Pie Balloon was still there. But so were two others, with a third closing in. Half a dozen anti-machine rifles were trained in our direction.
Only three? Literally anyone could have predicted that this is where they would be headed; by all rights the compound's entire air support sqaud should be up here waiting for them. For that matter, literally anyone could have predicted that trying to escape in a hot air balloon from a city that is crawling with hot-air-balloon-snipers and griffons would be a dumb idea to begin with. On the other hand, it's kkat.

>>305909

Page break. The guards in the Pinkie balloons have them surrounded, and T-1000 the Wonder Dog is guarding the door behind them, so it would appear they are trapped. Instead of just gunning them down like they easily could, the guards appear to be simply holding them down until Red Eye gets there, because he seems hell-bent on doing everything according to the Cliche Villain's Handbook.

Then, suddenly, Velvet Remedy's pet balefire phoenix, Pyrelight, shows up out of nowhere. It is all huge now, because it has apparently been bathing in the same radioactive crater as the mutant alicorn. It blows up all of the balloons, but unfortunately also blows up the balloon they had hoped to escape in. The scene ends with the two of them still marooned on the roof. How utterly pointless.

Page break. We rejoin our intrepid heroes at an indeterminate point in the future. They have presumably been captured, and are under guard in some kind of weird room filled with red steam. Probably one of Red Eye's toxic fart caverns or something. We are told that their capture was as "ignominious as it was inevitable." There are a pair of griffon guards and the robotic dog watching them. Suddenly, Red Eye himself enters the room.

>“Littlepip,” he said graciously. “Sit, relax. I mean you no harm.”
>Obviously, the same couldn’t be said for us. I was still processing the mere notion that Red Eye would lock himself in a room with us when Xenith charged at him, murder in her eyes.
Obviously, Red Eye's statement was intended explicitly for the two of them, so this remark of Littlepoop's makes no sense. What the author appears to be trying to say is that Red Eye asked Littlepoop and Xenith to sit and relax, but Xenith does the exact opposite of that and attacks him instead. However, in a misguided attempt at wit, he chose a particularly awkward wording. My best advice for kkat here is that he should get a better grasp on how to use language before attempting to be clever with it, particularly if he wants to get away with tossing words like "ignominious" around.

Anyway, Xenith's attack naturally backfires, because Red Eye has them in some kind of magical force field or something. Littlepoop figures out that this is the significance of the red mist: it is hiding an alicorn shield. Why Red Eye would need to hide such a shield from them, or why he would use red mist to do it, or how Littlepoop was able to ascertain all of this from the information she has available...are all questions for another day.

>Red Eye beamed at me. (Literally -- in the mist, the line of red light shooting from his cybernetic eye was clearly visible.)
This pun demeans us all.

ANYWAY, it turns out that the reason Red Eye hasn't killed them yet is that he wants Littlepoop to do something for him:

>“All I want you to do is something you were going to do anyway,” Red Eye said in a tone both casual and infuriatingly confident. “I just want you to do it on my timescale.”
>“I want you to kill the Goddess.”
I mean...yeah, when you think about it, I guess it makes sense that Littlepoop was going to kill the Goddess eventually. I mean, sure, we haven't heard anything about an actual Goddess even existing, and so far Littlepoop hasn't said anything about wanting to kill her. However, Littlepoop's only goal in this story seems to be to run around randomly killing whatever giant evil things she happens to encounter, so I guess it stands to reason that she would get around to killing the Goddess eventually, assuming such a creature existed.

>Okay, I did not see that coming. “B… but you serve the Goddess! You… you’re Her high-fucking-priest!”
Is he? I don't think that was ever clearly established. All we know about this guy is that he believes he has been hearing messages from a Goddess, who supposedly ordered him to do all the crazy shit he's been doing. Again, we don't even know that there actually is a Goddess at this point. Just a short time ago it was established that both Celestia and Luna perished when some kind of pink cloud descended on Canterlot, and as far as I'm aware the two of them are the only ponies in this story who could qualify for godhead.

Anyway, Red Eye goes on to explain that he and the "Goddess" are partners, but that they no longer see eye to eye on things, and he's chosen to break their partnership in the manner usually chosen by cartoon villains. He was impressed by Littlepoop's handling of the gigacorn a few scenes ago and wants to give her the task of killing whichever not-really-dead Princess the "Goddess" turns out to be. At present, my money is on it turning out to be Luna, who went mad during the war and reverted back to her Nightmare Moon persona. But, I suppose we shall have to wait and see.

>“As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the Goddess controls Her children. Telepathically. They are not so much individuals as they are extensions of Her will. And they will remain so until She is finally put to rest.”
None of this has been established. Like a lot of this author's ideas, this one isn't necessarily bad, but his execution is terrible. Something like this needs to be built up to in small degrees; by the time it's finally revealed, the reader should have mostly figured it out from the breadcrumbs that have been dropped. As I said, we don't even know that this Goddess even exists as an actual character; up until now, it's been sounding as if Red Eye is the final boss and the princesses are both dead.

Anyway, blah blah blah. Red Eye keeps yammering for awhile, and the gist of it is that he plans to kill the Goddess, and then once the alicorn hivemind is dead, he will join the "Unity" himself and become the new Celestia, assuming the tasks of raising the sun and moon and manipulating the weather. Even sillier still is that he intends for Littlepoop to take his place as head of...whatever the hell he's currently the head of. "Red Eye's Emporium of Slavery and Generic Bad Guy Stuff" I suppose.

>>305914
I hope nobody spoils anything involving the Goddess. Not even with any vague comments like "Oh man, you're going to fucking LOVE what Kkat did there" or "You're right and how Kkat pulled that off is actually pretty smart" or "No, your guess is incorrect and it is actually someone dumber" or "It's literally the most retarded thing possible". To avoid spoiling it I won't say anything about this until after the story reveals everything. I'm really looking forward to your reaction to this.
>>305909
>>305914
That reminds me, Fallout has CyberDogs. If Kkat wants to set up LP and Red-Eye to be dark mirrors of each other, surely he should have given Littlepip a Dog or CyberDog at some point, right?
That way, they would both have dogs. This could be something they would have in common.
If LP has a mortal dog while Red-Eye has a superior CyberChad dog, it would reference Red-Eye's Cyborgitude and hint at how different they are, because LP isn't currently a cyborg and neither is her dog. Red-Eye and his Cyberdog are stronger because of their cyber-parts.
But if LP had a CyberDog, it would show LP's willing to use cybernetic enhancements when it suits her, hinting that they are not so different deep down.
It could also cleverly reference Mad Max, because Mad Max had a dog.
And it could reference the times Fallout referenced Mad Max by giving the player the exact same dog.
And where LP commands her dog through verbal instructions and the bond between pony and dog, Red-Eye is evil so he commands his dog with mental signals between their cyber brain implants.
LP's dog is a kind soul while Red-Eye's cyberdog is a soulless husk that's had its bodily fluids and internal organs replaced with machinery until it's more of a clockwork taxidermy accomplishment than a living being.
It would be super deep and symbolic.

Although, all this cyber-shit is kind of stupid. What good is a slightly stronger metal left foreleg, a cybernetic red right eye that sees in heat vision and sees through walls, or a superior set of synthetic lungs with poison immunity and water-breathing capability when Unicorns can be so absurdly OP without any cyber-parts?
You'd think by now Red-Eye's cyber-stable would have a cybernetic horn that lets him use magic that's even stronger than Littlepip's.
Or to make him look extra-evil it could be a spiky curved serrated thing that looks like some edgy evil fantasy sword designed by an edgy teenager, and it exclusively fires lethal laserbeams and makes shields and tosses stuff but can't do more advanced magic.
That way, Red-Eye would be an imposing physical threat to LP able to magically harm her just as well as she can harm him. And LP's "Strong telekinesis only, no shields or lasers or other spells" shit would be matched and outmatched by Red-Eye's stronger telekinesis, shields, and lasers.
Speaking of which, why isn't she trying to telekinetically harm him? He's behind a shield but shields have never stopped telekinesis before. If Red-Eye dies his empire crumbles and she can take on the Goddess on her own time. Like he said, this Sue would eventually get around to her anyway.

>>305814
>Is it bad writing that even though Velvet is the designated face and smart charismatic one of Littlepip's Littleshits, moments where a NPC or Villain needs convincing via a DND Skill Check are typically passed by Littlepip?
The supporting characters in this story are underutilized in general. FoE presents itself as a story about a group of characters similar to an average RPG party, but for the most part it's just the Littlepoop Show.

The main thing to remember when writing anything is that every regular character who appears in the story needs to do something or have a reason to be in there. If you want to write a story about a single protagonist who solves every challenge on her own, then it's better to just have her be the main focus of the story and not have too many supporting characters. If you want the focus to be on a group, then everyone in the group needs to do something and be important somehow. The problem with this story is that it tries to be an ensemble story about what is essentially an RPG party, with a heavy emphasis on friendship and togetherness, but the author is so obsessed with making his main character look like a badass that he mostly ignores his other characters.

In an ensemble RPG type story like this one, each character should have a technical role in the party (healer, mage, meatshield warrior, etc), as well as a role in the actual story that compliments this (protag's love interest, funny guy, moody mysterious guy with the dark past, etc). Kkat clearly attempts to do this, but he doesn't put much effort into it. Velvet is supposed to be the group's healer and smooth-talking negotiator, so he tries to make her into a compassionate pony who also has a manipulative selfish side. I think I've spent more than enough text going over how she actually turned out. Calamity helps out during battles and whenever they need to fly, but story-wise he's barely a presence. He has a country accent and a barely-developed backstory about running away from pegasus camp for reasons that have yet to be explained; apart from that you could almost forget he even exists. Same deal with SteelHooves; he mostly just stands there and fires missiles out of his butt when the situation calls for it, but beyond that who is he? He apparently used to be AJ's boyfriend or something, plus he's a ghoul. Is that enough to make a character compelling or interesting? Not really.

The author is entirely too focused on making LP the hero in every situation, so the other characters in the party are mostly half-formed personalities whose talents are badly-defined and seldom utilized. They could all potentially be much more interesting if they were more involved in each other's lives, and if each had an appropriate moment to shine.

Imagine MLP, except instead of being a show about six friends, it's a show about Twilight Sparkle doing a lot of ridiculous stuff that she shouldn't realistically be able to do. Twilight has five friends, who have names and are visually distinct from each other, but who aren't really interesting on their own and don't really strike you as characters who could carry the show if Twilight suddenly left the cast. They will occasionally say "yay" or "yee-haw" or "darling" or "awesome" or something random and silly, but apart from that none of them make any interesting contributions to Twilight's adventures; they just stand in the background most of the time while Twilight does stuff.

Even though they ostensibly each have their own talents, they very seldom get to use them; Twilight handles most of the group's problems, whatever they are. If an animal needs to be tamed, Twilight just handles it. If a fancy dress needs to be sewn or a herd of cattle needs rustling or a party needs planning, then Twilight suddenly acquires those skills and takes care of it. If an aerial race needs to be won and only an extremely fast pegasus could possibly be up to the task, then Twilight suddenly grows wings and discovers she is extremely fast. Her five friends, to the extent that they speak at all, mostly just praise her for being effortlessly good at everything they are already good at, though in rare moments they may occasionally admonish her for not being quite as awesome as they feel she truly could be.

Twilight herself pays very little attention to these five ponies, and spends more time talking to herself than she does to any of them. However, she will occasionally mutter something to herself about how much she values her friends; because of this, we are meant to assume that these six ponies are actually very close and depend heavily on each other. This is basically how FoE's group dynamic works.

>>305898
>Glim, I'm sorry I can't make any additional observation regarding the stupidity of the story. There's simply too much of it and I'd be restating what you've said or implied. Thank you for taking one for the team, though.
Thanks for reading, fren.

>>305898
>are you friends with Chris Chan?
Lol no, but that's not the first time he has been compared to CWC

>>305917
>If Kkat wants to set up LP and Red-Eye to be dark mirrors of each other, surely he should have given Littlepip a Dog or CyberDog at some point, right?
Not necessarily. The "mirror" is more about their personalities, their backgrounds, the challenges they faced and how they handled them, and so forth. They don't necessarily need to "mirror" each other literally; in fact, it will usually come across as corny if you try to do it that way.

>If LP has a mortal dog while Red-Eye has a superior CyberChad dog, it would reference Red-Eye's Cyborgitude and hint at how different they are, because LP isn't currently a cyborg and neither is her dog.
You're thinking way too literally here.

>But if LP had a CyberDog, it would show LP's willing to use cybernetic enhancements when it suits her, hinting that they are not so different deep down.
Better, but you're still just thinking about these attributes in a purely literal sense. Go deeper. What do cybernetic enhancements represent? A character who augments his body using technology essentially gains superhuman powers, but at the expense of a part of his own humanity. A character who stays 100% human even if he has the option to do otherwise is refusing this temptation; he chooses to retain his humanity even if it means accepting limitations that might make him the inferior of the cyborg.

This is where the "mirror" concept comes into play. The two characters are in the same situation and are faced with a similar problem, and they each make a different choice which defines their path. One character chooses to gain god powers but it comes at the expense of his human soul; the other chooses to retain his soul but the price is that he turns down the opportunity to become a demigod. The first character gains external strength but in doing so reveals that he is inwardly weak. The second, by choosing to turn down unearned god powers and rely entirely on his own abilities reveals natural, spiritual strength; thus of the two, he is the one who shows the true heroic quality.

In this scenario, does giving either of these characters a dog really add anything to the metaphor? How about a cyborg dog?

>>305866
>Anyway, there's a big-ass alicorn
Another play on something from Fallout 3. If nothing else, you have to admire Kkat's ability to take things from the games and glom them into his story everywhere, even if it happens with no rhyme or reason and comes at the expense of actually writing worth a damn. In 3, there are giant "behemoth" super mutants here and there that serve as bosses. 3's strain of super mutants never stop growing, so behemoths are the eldest and meanest of the lot. And since alicorns are our super mutant stand-in in FoE, there's naturally a giant one of those too.

You'd think that the alicorns - being an allegedly intelligent hive mind - would exploit the ability to get bigger and stronger from radiation more cleverly. If this scene's giga nigga alicorn had simply driven Littlepip and Xenith into a couple of regular alicorns waiting in ambush (and we know there are plenty around), they'd be dead. Instead it's just a big dumb miniboss that only exists to add to Pip's kill count of oversized monsters. This is probably the fourth or fifth time that the alicorns have lost against Littlepip despite having the advantage at the beginning of a fight. Pip's whining about how unfair the giant alicorn is might carry at least an iota of weight if the damn thing wasn't dead a minute later. A giant, flying, magical juggernaut with previously unknown powers... and it loses catastrophically against an exhausted cripple. Talk about anticlimax.

>>305909
>Littlepoop recalls that one of Red Eye's broadcasts mentioned his having a dog named Winter as a child
Another Fo3 thing. One of President Eden's broadcasts has him waxing nostalgic about his younger life and his dog, so as Red Eye draws in part from Eden's MO, he naturally also has a dog. If I recall correctly, Winter is forgotten and never shows up again after this scene.

>>305914
>Red Eye keeps yammering for awhile, and the gist of it is that he plans to kill the Goddess, and then once the alicorn hivemind is dead, he will join the "Unity" himself and become the new Celestia, assuming the tasks of raising the sun and moon and manipulating the weather.
And here's the transition point between Ashur Red Eye and herp derp Kkat Red Eye. An argument could be made, however flimsy, for the idea of rebuilding foundational industry on the backs of slaves. However, now he's just a generic megalomaniac. The idea of villain infighting is has potential, but in practice it's just a matter of Littlepip adjusting her kill priority.

>>305925
>You're thinking way too literally here.
Incidentally, a recurring element of the Fallout games is that the player character can get a dog - Dogmeat is a recurring character between the games, even if he's not strictly the same dog each time. He's not very bright and has a habit of running into lasers, but he's completely loyal to you no matter your character's moral standing. Presumably, Pyrelight is supposed to be the stand-in for him. Because why give your lowborn everyman protagonist a boring, relatable dog when they can have a giant bird that's on fire?

>This is where the "mirror" concept comes into play. The two characters are in the same situation and are faced with a similar problem, and they each make a different choice which defines their path. One character chooses to gain god powers but it comes at the expense of his human soul; the other chooses to retain his soul but the price is that he turns down the opportunity to become a demigod. The first character gains external strength but in doing so reveals that he is inwardly weak. The second, by choosing to turn down unearned god powers and rely entirely on his own abilities reveals natural, spiritual strength; thus of the two, he is the one who shows the true heroic quality.
Put a pin in this for later. It'll come up again.

On the subject of cybernetics, Red Eye and Winter's augmentations don't really seem to do anything. It makes sense that Red Eye's augmentation might symbolize his abndonment of his (figurative) humanity, but... why? Fallout cybernetics tend to be of the invasive and gruesome variety, generally with some form of tradeoff. What advantage do his own modifications give him? Making him a cyborg seems to be a purely aesthetic choice. Cyberdogs show up in Fallout 2 and New Vegas - a wartime project designed to increase the toughness and longevity of military and police animals - but they have novel features like sonic-amplified barks that can knock you down. Again, what makes Winter special aside from ooh, creepy? For a character that's supposed to be a dark mirror of the protagonist, there's shockingly little depth being given to Red Eye or his closest allies.

>>305924
Unless people have been talking about that friend of mine behind my back that's the first time he was compared to Chris-Chan. But no, Chris would have put shitty Microsoft Paint art in the mugen character like John Geary or Josh Geary or whatever he's called.
>>305925
I've got it!
LP should have already gained a human dog while exploring the wastes before she met Calamity.
Perhaps the Raiders back in Ponyville had a starved beaten dying dog in one of their cages with the pony slaves.
She would have to decide whether to use her last remaining stimpak on herself during the upcoming firefights or heal this dog.
She chooses to heal the dog and gets its friendship.
This makes her a kind pony who puts the needs of others above her own even if it fucks her over.

Also, at the start of the Red Eye Arc LP had to give up everything. Her guns. Her friends. Her armour. She basically became a slave for Red Eye and hoped things would go her way.
She was able to let go of her sick guns and the feelings of invincibility they gave her.
She was able to say goodbye to her friends to get this mission done.

Red Eye?
He was given his dog. In a Stable that loved him and had sick cyborg tech. LP was miserable because she grew up in a boring stable full of shallow celebrity-obsessed cunts so she massacres Raiders and Slavers for fun, but he was shaped by his desire to improve everything for himself and others with or without their consent. He once almost got in trouble for cybernetically enhancing his girlfriend, the overmare's daughter, without her permission. But to save his life she insisted she wanted it all along.
This guy, if he could put a bomb around the planet to make it do what he wants he would.
He views the world as a puzzle to solve, which creeps out Littlepip, who also views challenges and obstacles that way. She also views literal puzzles like hacking challenges and lockpicking that way. But because he's stronger he has an automatic lockpicking and wireless hacking attachment concealed inside a robotic foreleg. It lets him hack shit better than Littlepoop and deny her the use of her Pipbuck whenever he wants. To make him seem dangerous he has the ability to take away the hero's safety net.
He needs to feel invincible. He built cybernetic enhancements into his body and he can't negotiate without more than adequate protection. His need to feel tough is as clear as the steel coating half his flesh like mud on a slave.
In conbat he loves using drones and a telekinesis-enabling fake horn to outmaneuver and trap his enemies, denying areas and cutting off escape routes with sadistic glee. Everything is a slave to him under his control. Hell, let's give him an armoured vest enchanted to give him Earthbending. So even dirt is his bitch on the battlefield.
LP tends to win using brute force while pretending it's clever. Using 20 grenades on a dragon? Pretend this brute force usage is clever. Charging into a town and murderhoboing everyone, then dropping a boxcar at an Alicorn? Pretend it's clever. But this guy? He's got more experience than her and uses precise tactical applications of overwhelming force for fun.
LP was able to say goodbye to all her friends, even her dog. LP can let go and stop when she needs to, just like she stopped using drugs. But there are no brakes on Red Eye's slave trains because he never learned how to stop. This guy replaced parts of his old dying dog every so often until nothing of the original dog remained.
LP's dog is a good dog. A living breathing being that misbehaves sometimes.
But Red-Eye's dog is a robotic hollow shell without any personality, because he designed his robodog that way. He is a control freak in my theoretical rewrite to the point where he thought nothing of taxidermifying his childhood pet into an attack drone with a gun for a dick. Why a gun for a dick? He thought it was funny at the time. After revealing this, LP laughs even though she hates it because they both love cock jokes.

In total: LP is good to her dog and Red Eye is a control freak about everything even his dog and combat style. Plus his cyberparts do shit now.

How's that?

Personally I'd want to take it further and rewrite Littlepip into a well-written hero who embodies "Rebellion" against as many things as possible including the idea that a post-apocalyptic young adult novel's hero should fit the stereotype for who that kind of story's hero usually is. Like how Dante rebels against the idea that in a gothic horror setting a demon-hunter should be a scared human or grim angry dude, and he pisses off his enemies by refusing to take them seriously. That way LP would represent "good rebellion" while this villain represents "bad order". Then the alicorns would also represent "bad order" because they are a hive mind of evil beings. Then I would add a third even bigger villainous faction that steals the show at the last second and also represents "bad order" just for the hell of it. Okay I'm kidding about that last part with the third evil faction, that would be stupid.

If you've got different villains they should represent different things and have different evil plans for the world, right? So there should be at least one "bad rebellion" faction that says "this kind of rebellion is bad and LP doesn't want to turn out like this". Maybe some selfish lazy evil assholes, causeless rebels who rape and burn for fun without any plan for the future. Maybe a faction of wannabe heroes who insist anyone they kill is pure evil despite accepting bribes from all major evil factions to look elsewhere for prey. Maybe a tribe of drugged-up raider bastards like the Fiends from Fallout NV. Or maybe remnants of a pre-war anti-war organization that did evil things for stupid reasons. Maybe a lolbertarian micronation that got weird 200 years after the bombs fell.

What LP really needs is an evil rival. A proper dark mirror. Someone with her methods and darker motives or vice reversa. Her own personal Kevin Levin pre-redemption arc.

>>305934
Pretty good ideas, I like how you redid Red Eye.

>"good/bad rebellion," "good/bad order"
Sounds like political compass quadrants, making it possible to insert a clever, albeit biased, political lesson. Or maybe incorporate the idea of "good times create weak men, etc."
It's not really hard at all to write a better story than kkat. Time to try for myself.

>>305934
Man, this type of speculating. We're actually back to this again. This is why you aren't a good writer.

In a sense, you are my dark mirror and what I'll become if I remain trash.

Yes, this whole thing is hypothetically intresting. How about you write it? But that won't happen because that requires actual work.

In a sense, kkat also presents a bunch of ideas that he doesn't follow through with or execute well.

I'm not saying one can't critic a story without having written anything before. However, I am saying that this sort of thing just reminds me of... Well, a lot actually. It is just so depressing. It isn't just you who rationalize their own inability for agency like this. Like, "If I wrote this I would have done this and this a instead, at least." But like, why haven't you? What's stopping anyone from writing anything?

I don't mean to be mean. I don't really feel up to throw anykind of rock since I live in a glass house but wanted to emphasize this. I mean, one thing positive about Kkat is that he sticks with his offspring even if it's frontal lobe could be used as a fairy skateboard ramp.

>>305943
Perhaps this was uncalled for. I'm not certain.

>>305934
>This makes her a kind pony who puts the needs of others above her own even if it fucks her over.
Also, this is not what being good is about. If we even agree on valuing people equally, then why does the good person, according to that definition, have to sacrifice themselves for someone else? This is anime protag think.

Eh, forget about it. I guess there is nothing wrong with speculating about potential stories. Perhaps, I'm just lashing out because of my own bitterness that I have yet to reach the consistency in production that I seek.

>>305943
It's fine, you're being a bit of a twat but "If it's so easy why don't you do better?" is a valid question.
The answer? I am already doing better. I try not to talk like this much but I spend six to ten or more hours a day working on a personal project indie game I was told not to tell anyone about since bragging about how awesome your ideas WILL be once they're done gives an addicting psychological reward that gets in the way of accomplishing those goals. I've turned down chances to talk to friends to spend more time drawing bouncy rabbit buns and code the hitboxes of her giant fucking sword and all the wacky magical bullshit she can do with it. I am not flying too close to the sun, I am the sun. It would be easy to make Fallout Equestria suck less but for significant improvements that could make this story actually good, larger changes to its structure, tone, and message would be needed. Littlepip would need overhauling into less of a sue and more of an interesting character. Steelhooves and Calamity would need to bicker like a buddy cop duo to reveal as much of their respective lore and backstory ahead of schedule as possible before they gradually bond over time. Velvet needs some kind of horrible death at the hooves of a major villain because it was her and Fluttershy's idea of "universal kindness" that created this wasteland so if Velvet got inappropriately rewarded for showing absurd levels of kindness and mercy and generousity now it would just be immensely hypocritical. It would also neatly divide LP's adventure between two "try to find Velvet" and "avenge Velvet" arcs. All level-grinding dungeon-crawling filler bullshit needs overhauling. The reasons Equestria fell would need to be something the ponies of today can consciously reject and fight against like showing mercy to ziggers/raiders or an unwillingness to repair and improve what you have instead of trying to take from others and start wars or an unwillingness to name the Griffons secretly responsible for everything that ever went wrong. If the Zigger empire got back on its hooves and is warring on Equestria once more to be the final boss, even better. Equestria's downfall deserves better writing. The pacing needs to be tightened up until it's tighter than a centaur girl. It would be easy to make a few changes to RWBY to make certain terrible ideas less terrible but to make it truly good it would require an overhaul so complete that what you're left with would be almost completely original. Probably more original than Fallout Equestria and RWBY ever were, since they're amalgamations of copied ideas that never put any thought into how those stolen ideas interact and change one another. It is fascinating to analyze these stories deeper than their fanboys ever would and speculate on small and large changes that could improve these shows since they are constructed out of common cliches, and any writer who wants to use some of these cliches can use our posts to figure out what to avoid and why these cliches worked better in other stories. Why am I not animating my own BetteRWBY in SFM/Blender/Gmod or rewriting Fallout Equestria's 600k words? Because there are bouncy bunny boobies and Short Hop Fast Fall Just Frame Reverse Edge Landing Lag Cancels to code in the greatest indie video game I've ever made so far.
I'm still making the silver rewrite too. But rewriting FE would take too much time away from my main project. The world needs this game. It's going to take stylish action to a whole new level.
>>305937
Good luck! Personally I'm surprised at how many stories with rebellious protagonists are written by authoritarian authors who strictly follow all guidelines and cliches while insisting the only good authority comes from the hero after conquering the evil empire through overwhelming force in the form of deus ex machina bullshit. It would be a nice change of pace to see a rebellious protagonist who wants to rebel against the idea of being the stereotypical chosen one who defeats the obligatory evil empire just to let the obligatory good republic take over. Perhaps a self-interested bastard or a former empire supporter screwed by the system and out for revenge who try to act the part of a true hero while really out for number one. Or perhaps a hero who, halfway through the whole hero thing, realizes the rebellion he works with is shit for whatever reason and forms his own rebellion or accepts the "work for us" offer from the evil empire and works to reform it peacefully.
>>305947
I know healing a dog doesn't magically make people heroes but this story could use a good "Pet The Dog" moment considering how many times LP is an unrepentant graverobbing murderhobo.

>>305934
>comparing is the same as equating
Lol no, you've been compared to CEC dozens of times, whether you care to admit it or not

>>305964
You misread the post. Yellow Sonic Friend was being compared to CWC.

>>305968
To the contrary, I read it as it was written
>Chris would have put shitty Microsoft Paint art in the mugen character like John Geary or Josh Geary or whatever he's called
Is an attempt at deflection, designed to dismiss the idea that any comparison to Chris Chan is inaccurate because 'chris chan woulda done something slightly different', while completely glossing over the multitude of ways that Chis chan is similar

>>305972
This probably isn't the right place to shit-talk what you think of me as a person or that friend of mine, Mr "3 posts by this ID". You like coming at me with these tiresome insults in random threads, so I hope you've gotten it out of your system for this thread and I hope it'll be a while before you yell the same shit at me in another thread. Bruh, this is not constructive. It's not a constructive use of your time or mine. You are not expressing yourself constructively or contributing constructively to the threads you pull this shit in. There is no way that I can constructively respond to your bile, as usual. You're so used to seeing idiots baselessly dismiss criticism that you've failed to notice how baseless your criticism of me is. When you call me a faggot, I can either overlook your spitefulness as I am the bigger person between us, or respond with "No you". I think this time, I'll take the third option and ask you what you think you're going to gain out of behaving like this. Don't you have anything better you could be doing? Haven't you ever wanted something better you could be doing? Your grudge against me doesn't make us bitter rivals. It's not just that you're acting like a twat and making me not want to listen to you. Well, that is true. But also, it's that what you have to say isn't as important, witty, entertaining, worthwhile, or constructive as you think it is. You're enjoying your grudge against me more than me, but that doesn't make you a "Winner". I feel like a winner when I accomplish big goals and small goals. You pull this shit and it's tiresome. I would gain nothing from taking what you say to heart because there are no lessons to be learned. There is no wisdom to gain here. Instead of telling me how you think I could improve and letting me think for myself whether that's a good idea or not, you're just bitching and moaning at me and making yourself a nuisance for not being exactly what you want. When you pull this shit in threads, it distracts from the central topic of discussion. You want to make another thread all about you and your anger at me, but I want no part in that. Who are you to demand that I change how I behave when you behave worse than me? I am at my best when I politely ignore your hostility instead of responding to you at all. You don't know how I could improve, but maybe you'd know more on the subject if you improved yourself.

To get things back on-topic, I've been thinking about Littlepip's major fights so far.

When she can't kill her enemies with ordinary guns and explosives(which she never seems to run out of, even when deep within enemy territory), she uses telekinesis to drop heavy shit on them or saws their heads off with conveniently sharp debris. Or she does bullshit with memory orbs.

Also, has there ever been a time in this fic when a villain suffered a karmic and ironic death due to their own hubris/folly/villainy? Moments of sheer stupidity making the hive mind of 200+ year old alicorns literally unable to tell a Memory Orb from a Grenade or unable to keep their shield 100% up and hole-free just so LP can kill them for being retards don't count.

There's this bit in Treasure Planet where the hero's dangling from his pirate ship by a rope and in danger
and the baddie sadistically saws through slowly, even though he could get it over with and kill the hero quickly. The villain previously killed another heroic character (Mr Arrow) with this rope-sawing shit.
The villain gloats that he did the bad thing and this gives the hero a heroic second wind. It's some Lion King "I killed Mufasa!" shit right here and it's great. The baddie says "Do say hello to Mr. Arrow" and Jim says "TELL HIM YOURSELF!".
The hero gets back on the ship and the baddie ends up where the hero was on that rope, only for the frayed partially-cut rope to snap under the strain. The villain mostly sealed his own fate, and it's brilliant writing.
Not only does it keep the hero's hands mostly clean (Would have been a bit much for a family film if Jim grabbed a rock and smashed the baddie's face in, and regardless of the age rating it would have raised questions like "should he have killed or simply incapacitated"?) but it adds to the sense that the baddie deserves this fate.

Btw, memory orbs... I'm getting sick of those fucking things. This story already had terminal entries on computers and 200+ year old letters/holotapes/tape records in impossibly good condition lying conveniently on the ground or randomly in safes or nailed to a door yet still functional. Why add a third method to "Spell things out to the audience and show shit you don't trust people to piece together on their own through environmental clues" and try to justify it with these moments where they're the most convenient bullshit ever? What is there a Memory Orb can show that a cleverly-written letter or terminal entry cannot imply? Well, besides physical sensations, visual imagery, and a first-hand unquestionably-reliable account of events. Feels somewhat lazy to shove those into Fallout just so we can see "heart-wrenching" scenes of Steelhooves watching AJ reveal the suit he'd be trapped within forever. Even though that's hardly the best memory he could choose to preserve. Why not record something more personal to him like their first date, or the day he proposed to her, or their first fuck, something that could humanize AJ in LP's eyes since up until she sees a scene like that through the eyes of one who loves AJ she has no reason to think of AJ as anything other than "That famous pre-war pony who was friends with Twilight and pals, and is responsible for about 34% of everything that sucks about the Wasteland today". These memory orbs are almost exclusively used to reveal shit to the audience barely anyone asked instead. Surely it would be better if these Orbs were used as a tool to characterize their creators, like old somewhat-tragic keepsake photographs taken to the next level.

And where's Twi's Learning Orb?

>>306074
STOP FUCKING TYPING, NIGGEL YOU HALF-JEW TRAITOR SACK OF PIGSHIT. You haven't changed, at all. No matter how many times you (((swear to be better in the future))), you still call up your fucking retardation and gaslight EVERYONE else when you get called out for being a shitter, going on gigantic rants about animu or other shit that doesn't matter. Your poor comparisons and ham-fisted segues are nothing more than asinine self-important screeching arrogance. Go kill yourself for being the pathetic britcuck you've always been, and always will be.

>>306074
Listen and listen well.
Cry moar. You're not entitled to any more consideration than you show. I wont hesitate to stick it to you any more than you will hesitate to go on autistic rants about irrelevant series', genres, pokemon, yugioh, more pokemon, sonic, ben 10, etc ad nauseum. No amount of 'wow is me, I are gud persen, ur a bad bad' pathetic bleating will avail you of this.

>>306074
There's no appealing to some people. Even if you make a good point about the story's failure in comparison to other works, others will harp on about how "irrelevant" they are. First of all, you used Treasure Planet which is an underrated movie and developed a decently cogent comparison. Secondly, there's very little overlap between the things you've watched and what I've watched, so whenever you go off on a rant I learn a lot about something I've never seen before. You're our resident Naruto expert here and that's actually quite handy. Also you're still a long ways away from being a fully competent media critic, but I've noticed a definite progress away from your stereotypical ramblings. Participating in this thread is definitely doing you good so keep it up.

>>306089
>>306076
I'm tired.

First fundamental 'rule' of positive social interactions: when you're around, people genuinly smile. The world opens up.
Carefully and sleep deprived its about your damned ignorant needling reasoning.
>Is an attempt at deflection, designed to dismiss the idea that any comparison to Chris Chan is inaccurate because 'chris chan woulda done something slightly different', while completely glossing over the multitude of ways that Chis chan is similar
Yes, but no. Ribbing and poking at flaws (perceived or not) works if one understands what is going on.
Back to the beginning for a play-by-play.
>>It reminds me of that friend of mine whose first experience with Mugen was losing a fight to Applejack despite cloning sonic and giving him 9999 atk/defence and turning him yellow. He lost to a balanced character just because he sucks so hard at fighting games his instakill cheat character means nothing. And he said "applejack is overpowered, you need to nerf her" with a straight face. No.
>Is your friend ChrisChan?
This is a tasteful jab realistically harmless has some deeper implications.
>>are you friends with Chris Chan?
>Lol no, but that's not the first time he has been compared to CWC
Add fuel and changing the direction of the joke.
>Unless people have been talking about that friend of mine behind my back that's the first time he was compared to Chris-Chan. But no, Chris would have put shitty Microsoft Paint art in the mugen character like John Geary or Josh Geary or whatever he's called.
As a straight man skit that would have been self deprecation.
That's not the case here (subtle intonations on the internet is nigh impossible, can not be relied upon). Rule 1 of unsaid socialization has been missed.
The guide for this game is to be more succinct, condensed, and a feat of wit and intelligence for others to enjoy the exchange. Exemplifying good grace as barbs are launched.
>>Is an attempt at deflection, designed to dismiss the idea that any comparison to Chris Chan is inaccurate because 'chris chan woulda done something slightly different', while completely glossing over the multitude of ways that Chis chan is similar
Here we are again. Explaining the joke (hello I'm kettle). Explaining ruins the joke something something throw them out of a window.
At which point the accusation has seemingly come out of nowhere if Positive Social Interaction: Thick Skin, Plateface, Lunchbucket, Reliable Test a Hardknocks curriculum is not there in the right place. As such insanity sets in only in the game court because different realities are being present. Which brings us back to the whole history which has been forgoten multiple times, and shot to hell because communication can't occur due to fundamental differences that require a sledge hammer and a scalpel.
>Words here because I may need to save on character space and want to keep the repetition going.
As a piece to air out the grounds it suffices. Actually addressing the issue is not accomplished.
By doing so increases the original fires and fury, in other aspects where your life has been wrangled it makes sense. In this case it is oil on an electrical fire.

>>306074
>When you call me a faggot, I can either overlook your spitefulness as I am the bigger person between us, or respond with "No you".
There is a fourth option, and the one that is recommended using wit and creativity to recieve the charged jab and turn the joke to heated heights. Those jabs are there for a reason you don't have to change, but the reason is still there.
Also there is one you've mentioned is to—not comment at all. At all. At all. At all.

>>306091
Yes.
I still think his message in the lengthy posts can be generalized, specialized, or condensed to a fine point.

>>306089
>>306076
Not sure how the random pic(s) related are related but whatever.

>>306098
Henlo fren. You post in a manner that suggests you're unfamiliar with the dynamic you're witnessing.
This has been an ongoing issue with our friend here ever since just after the site was founded.
The cycle goes something like this.
Nigel spergs unnecessarily about something, with sufficient cringe-aptitude to get people who dont ordinarily respond to him to take pot shots, because one can witness only so much ill-intentioned autism before taking the piss.
And take the piss they (I) do.
In response to this shitposting (cuz that's all it really amounts to, cuz without going into detail I'll just offer the conclusion that "Nigel will never change, in fact he will forget any conducive conversation he has had about his behavior, because he needs him dopamine"), rather than take his licks like a man and maybe engage in self-reflection about how his behavior induces this response he opts to wail and gnash his teeth about how unfairly he is being treated, as well as increasingly hy hyperbolic allegations of conspiracies against him. If you press him hard, he'll accuse you of being a particular redditor. Hoo boy, there are stories.
Inevitably his victim complex makes him look sad and pathetic, which he is, but fails to diminish the salt directed against him, until after several rounds of making him look foolish (which, he's either a genius at assisting or a complete idiot at not doing, because the defense would like to recall that witness) his detractors feel satisfied that he has ruined any ability for rationally minded people to either take him seriously or give any credibility to what he says, and fuck off for a while.
>>306091
>resident Naruto expert
Odd, cuz he knows all of dick about Naruto. His conclusions are laughably dismissible as that of a petulant child who didnt like what the author did there, with no more qualification than 'he didnt like it'. If that's your definition of expertise, I'll be happy to fix the plumbing in your house and reinvigorate your stock portfolio for a reasonable premium.

>>306100
>>306098
Actually, it works like this.
Bitter children best ignored baselessly bitch at Nigel and expect him to be perfect, even though they behave worse than him. They think criticising others means they don't have to work on themselves. It might bother me emotionally if I was 10, but what I'm tired of is the negative effect their behaviour has on threads until they get tired and leave.
After bitching at me and trying once again to turn public opinion against me they gaslight anyone who's paying attention, and didn't take their side and join in their childish bullying. Anyone who didn't take their side is suddenly "new" and "doesn't know how things work around here". Suddenly anyone who's "new" should either stay quiet or join their side. "Oh, don't listen to that guy trying to defend himself from our accusations, he's just a racist- I mean a sexist- I mean Nigel". This has been the new normal for years on this site. The Anti-Nigel Squad aren't here to contribute to the thread or website, sadly. They've just got petty grudges against me and a desire to make themselves into problems I put up with. I don't know how old they are but it would be quite depressing if they were over 20.
This isn't the first thread they've pulled this old routine in. I could show you some of the times they've randomly attacked me or someone with a british flag who they think sounds like me, like Antifa attacking random Asians who vaguely resemble Andy Ngo. Recently there was this rather funny moment on /ub/ where I said "Maybe I'm too quick to judge others" and a member of the Internet Nigel Offense Squad ran in to yell "No, you're projecting! That's a thing narcissists do!".
Yeah, in a place like that. In a thread like that. Their response to seeing me self-reflect? Some of their usual baseless accusations. It's kind of hilarious. Like something you'd see in a cartoon where a smart guy is so loathed by an idiot that the idiot can't think straight. Then again, that fits because the Anti-Nigel squad is gay.
I wish there was a clever dialogue option I could choose that would make them put their pitchforks and torches down and open up for some honest discussion about what they think they hate about me and why they feel the way they do without them trying to "win points" and turn everything into the kind of shouting match you'd expect to see on pseudointellectual forums where namefags engage in bullshit drama for years like Reddit and Sufficient Velocity. But they're too set in their ways to think about whether their ways should change or not. I see every day as an opportunity for growth. But for them? Every day's just another day in their war on me and every thread's another opportunity to try antifa tactics in front of people who maybe haven't already figured out for themselves how this works yet. They're too convinced that I am the "nigel" that exists inside their heads rent-free and recently got a pool table in there, and too convinced bullying me makes them morally superior to me. Even though I've contributed more to this thread than them, hence why they have a problem with my presence. It doesn't matter how much I shorten explanations of examples I bring up because they aren't paying attention to what I say, they're only mad that I'm saying it. They're too convinced that if their lies aren't helping me or the world, it means they haven't repeated themselves enough yet. Usually they fuck off if they think they've failed to get newfags who want to blend in to dogpile on me in time, or if enough people besides myself call them out on their cancerous behaviour and tell them to go fuck themselves.

Maybe if I just went back to ignoring the anti-nigel posters and the baseless accusations of racism/sexism/anti-semetism- I mean the baseless accusations of egotism/narcissism/whatever they'd get bored with the lack of a reaction and fuck off like the schoolyard bullies they fundamentally are. Or maybe they behave this way because nobody's ever told them no.

>>306105
>Bitter children best ignored
True
>baselessly bitch
False
at Nigel
3rd person?
>and expect him to be perfect
False
>even though they behave worse than him
Debatable
>They think criticising others means they don't have to work on themselves
Lol so very false
>It might bother me emotionally if I was 10, but what I'm tired of is the negative effect their behaviour has on threads until they get tired and leave.
Rationalization, and deflection. Nigel has been told ad infinitum to stop being such a sperg. For years. Two of his threads are in /go/ because he tried this same tactic to excuse his behavior. They're hilarious.
>After bitching at me and trying once again to turn public opinion against me they gaslight anyone who's paying attention,
Quote the gaslighter, who willfully revises history any time his behavior is brought up
>and didn't take their side and join in their childish bullying.
And so begins the voluminous hyperbole
>Anyone who didn't take their side is suddenly "new" and "doesn't know how things work around here".
Suddenly anyone who's "new" should either stay quiet or join their side. "Oh, don't listen to that guy trying to defend himself from our accusations, he's just a racist- I mean a sexist- I mean Nigel". This has been the new normal for years on this site. The Anti-Nigel Squad aren't here to contribute to the thread or website, sadly. They've just got petty grudges against me and a desire to make themselves into problems I put up with. I don't know how old they are but it would be quite depressing if they were over 20.
>This isn't the first thread they've pulled this old routine in. I could show you some of the times they've randomly attacked me or someone with a british flag who they think sounds like me, like Antifa attacking random Asians who vaguely resemble Andy Ngo.
Yes, please present your evidence
>Recently there was this rather funny moment on /ub/ where I said "Maybe I'm too quick to judge others" and a member of the Internet Nigel Offense Squad ran in to yell "No, you're projecting! That's a thing narcissists do!".
Completely glossing over the fact that Nigel's abysmal communication skills and inability to focus on anything not in his list of 'good things' (read: Naruto, DBZ, Yugioh, Ben 10, Animorphs, Futa, etc.) makes him unavoidingly distinguishable on an otherwise anonymous board where certain expectations (like, objective arguments and posts, rather than subjective) are maintained by everyone BUT him
>Yeah, in a place like that. In a thread like that. Their response to seeing me self-reflect? Some of their usual baseless accusations. It's kind of hilarious. Like something you'd see in a cartoon where a smart guy is so loathed by an idiot that the idiot can't think straight. Then again, that fits because the Anti-Nigel squad is gay.
>I wish there was a clever dialogue option I could choose that would make them put their pitchforks and torches down and open up for some honest discussion about what they think they hate about me and why they feel the way they do without them trying to "win points" and turn everything into the kind of shouting match you'd expect to see on pseudointellectual forums where namefags engage in bullshit drama for years like Reddit and Sufficient Velocity
I cant speak to that one, I've never been to reddit and,... what now? But Nigel sure has, he comes from reddit.
>But they're too set in their ways to think about whether their ways should change or not.
So says the pot
>I see every day as an opportunity for growth.
Portrayal. This is true in his mind, but if you observed him and were asked if his behavior warrants that description?
>But for them? Every day's just another day in their war on me and every thread's another opportunity to try antifa tactics in front of people who maybe haven't already figured out for themselves how this works yet. They're too convinced that I am the "nigel" that exists inside their heads rent-free and recently got a pool table in there, and too convinced bullying me makes them morally superior to me.
Who's living rent free?
>Even though I've contributed more to this thread than them, hence why they have a problem with my presence.
You nailed it. All the salt you've been getting for years?
It's totally because you're 'contributing'. There definitely isnt another explanation you've been painfully spoonfed countless times, and then - like the guy in Memento - lose any recollection of, and assume your usual shit. Yep, definitely because of your participation.
>It doesn't matter how much I shorten explanations of examples I bring up
Have you tried?
>because they aren't paying attention to what I say, they're only mad that I'm saying it.
So very false
>They're too convinced that if their lies aren't helping me or the world, it means they haven't repeated themselves enough yet.
Actually, I quite dislike repeating myself. But I like seeing you sperg even less, so the lesser of two evils.
>Usually they fuck off if they think they've failed to get newfags who want to blend in to dogpile on me in time, or if enough people besides myself call them out on their cancerous behaviour and tell them to go fuck themselves.
Lol no. It's never been about people agreeing or 'joining a side's or whatever nonsense you've cooked up this time.
It's about being the same level of thorn in your ass that you have ALWAYS been since day 1. I have no issue stopping to a level, and if you had learned a thing in the years we have been doing this I'd have relented long ago.
>Maybe if I just went back to ignoring the anti-nigel posters and the baseless accusations of racism/sexism/anti-semetism- I mean the baseless accusations of egotism/narcissism/whatever they'd get bored with the lack of a reaction and fuck off like the schoolyard bullies they fundamentally are. Or maybe they behave this way because nobody's ever told them no.
Or, maybe, 'they're want you to stop sperging all over the place. Occam's razor is a bitch.

>>306108
If the horde told me to stop contributing, nobody would take their side.
But if they tried their hardest to paint my contributions as "sperging", it might distract people from their solely negative contributions to the thread.
Please don't be fooled. No matter how short my posts get they will always cry "sperging" because they hate me more than they love reason.

>>306110
Is it your position that you DONT sperg?

>>306111
My position is that the small number of obsessed whiners currently saying I'm not good enough do so out of spite and have no leg to stand on. Their problem isn't with what I say, it's that I'm saying it. Maybe if they tried to contribute to the thread constructively instead of insulting me I'd have more reason to respect their opinions on who I am as a person and something more constructive to reply to. But it isn't really a matter of respect, even though they feel entitled to my respect no matter how poorly they behave. These people aren't rivals or learning opportunities, they are detractors. And that sucks, because I've met people I can learn things from before and liked them. It sucks when these clowns shit up the threads of others. Glim doesn't deserve this, he's a good man. Sometimes I think about requesting a unique British flag just so no other brit will have to deal with their bullshit war on me. Maybe a flag that's like the UK flag but the red X is replaced with a lightning bolt as purple as Twilight Sparkle's eyes from the top left to bottom right and a red colt revolver as red as the red X on the british flag pointing from the top right to bottom left. The revolver has to point at the bottom left because it's a pun, top right aka auth right is shooting lib left. The lightning is just there because lightning is cool. Then again I don't like standing out or attracting attention. But my dedicated harassers have been at this for years on and off so maybe the best thing I can do is to request that flag so I will be the magnet that attracts their inane faggotry and keeps it away from the rest of the site.

It would be great if this thread can get back on track again and it would be great if the derailers fucked off and got better hobbies. So instead of responding to any more kafkatrap "you're racist and autistic, do you deny that?" bullshit I'll just ignore it from now on in this thread.

>>306112
So that's a 'yes', your position is that you dont sperg.
Cuz somehow I dont see anyone else getting shit on for sperging. And I dont see anyone else in any other threads being (accurately) called out for both sperging and being (you). Odd, it might be that there's a correlation.
>Glim
Dont hide behind him, he's a big boy who can handle his shit. You might recall, he got in this position by first demolishing your previous work no matter how hard you tried to derail it (again, those threads are in /go/ if anyone wants a laugh).

>>306112
>>306105
Hunh where did I get a (You) from? >306098
Going to be honest you need to follow
>First fundamental 'rule' of positive social interactions: when you're around, people genuinly smile. The world opens up.
And
>The guide for this game is to be more succinct, condensed, and a feat of wit and intelligence for others to enjoy the exchange. Exemplifying good grace as barbs are launched.
Because every attack has a hint of truth in it.
Also some psychological work, you got the physical down now it's psyche time.
Oh and writing in different ways. Try to write under 3000 characters using pics (or video) to strengthen the point. That's what it's there for. And shit posting.
>>306105
>Actually, it works like this.
No, you need to see things from the other side in a completely different frame of mind.
What you do here specifically is use less words and maintain a focus to develop your thesis. Your idea.
Read whatever the fuck I wrote at the time carefully please.
Watch these if nothing else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHZjcfgk4CI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXwZtg85zgU

>>306100
No, I know what the fuck is going on because I've looked and spent some time on this. Every single time I get it.
I'm saying this doesn't work because of the inevitable.
>rather than take his licks like a man and maybe engage in self-reflection about how his behavior induces this response he opts to wail and gnash his teeth about how unfairly he is being treated
That a leaned behavior (or lack of one). When I say that it isn't an excuse for him. It is a deep flaw that has to be corrected.
That's why I say your message is useless because everything isn't there yet.
That's why
>he's either a genius at assisting or a complete idiot at not doing, because the defense would like to recall that witness
And
>If you press him hard, he'll accuse you of being a particular redditor.
Are part of one and the same root problem.

>>306108
>Rationalization, and deflection. Nigel has been told ad infinitum to stop being such a sperg. For years. Two of his threads are in /go/ because he tried this same tactic to excuse his behavior. They're hilarious.
Being told to stop being a spreg as you've seen is ineffective.
>>306110
You need to change how you're contributing. Why?
All writing and communications does have the same fundamental parts but the medium changes. Writing a story is different from writing gane dialogue, and talking to people face to face is different from texting. Writing a college (or highschool) paper is different from posting in a thread.
On here thread posting is what is going on, you take blue collar humor and vicious ribbing with eloquent and fluid prose.
Look at refining a thesis statement, examine every post by multitudes of posts write.
This is a style that has to be upheld. Some posts are better than others.
>>306112
>have no leg to stand on
That may be your position on this, but for it to go on for years, YEARS, there is some truth to it. The problem is the posting style.
>These people aren't rivals or learning opportunities,
Everything is a learning opportunity! Especially under vicious prodings.
I get that. The issue is more complex than previous situations because these people are trying to help you.
>I've met people I can learn things from before and liked them
Those are two separate things, I and a few buddies of mine is highschool talked about that. It is more effective, but not a requirement.
>Glim doesn't deserve this, he's a good man.
He doesn't. He also doesn't deserve lengthy stream of consciousness posts either.
>Then again I don't like standing out or attracting attention.
That is what is happening due to writing style. Time and time again it has been noted.
>Sometimes I think about requesting a unique British flag just so no other brit will have to deal with their bullshit war on me. Maybe a flag that's like the UK flag but the red X is replaced with a lightning bolt as purple as Twilight Sparkle's eyes from the top left to bottom right and a red colt revolver as red as the red X on the british flag pointing from the top right to bottom left. The revolver has to point at the bottom left because it's a pun, top right aka auth right is shooting lib left. The lightning is just there because lightning is cool. Then again I don't like standing out or attracting attention. But my dedicated harassers have been at this for years on and off so maybe the best thing I can do is to request that flag so I will be the magnet that attracts their inane faggotry and keeps it away from the rest of the site.
That's not how this works. Also that section can be cut from the post.

>>306121
Tell me what you believe I could change about myself that would make my stalkers stop habitually bitching at me.

I don't mean to come off as rude, but it's reeking of codependency ITT. These are very unlikely to be problems that can be helped on an imageboard. If and when anyone needs resources, there are some out there. Otherwise I'm going to try to step aside after having said my piece, assuming that's agreeable to everyone.

>>306122
I did it's both my posts
>Also some psychological work, you got the physical down now it's psyche time.
Oh and writing in different ways. Try to write under 3000 characters using pics (or video) to strengthen the point. That's what it's there for. And shit posting.
I mean it, it's in every word and sentence I wrote to everyparty that has what your looking for.
Carefully reading everything, and having a more robust mental and action framework.

>>306098
2 entirely different people (You) responded to. What in the shit are you trying to state?

>>306105
>>306110
>>306112
>>306122
Take off those colored spectacles and reread everything you type, Niggel. Everything you do is GASLIGHT GASLIGHT GASLIGHT, nonstop.
It's ALWAYS "other people attack me becuz I a gud goy!"
It's ALWAYS "I'm defending muhself cuz I'm being GANGSTALKED!" Yes, Niggel. When WE find you, we're going to YOU KNOW WHAT when you're asleep.
It's ALWAYS "muh opinion better than urs cuz muh know moar!"
It's ALWAYS "Tell me how to improve" AND THEN YOU NEVER PUT FORTH AN IOTA OF CONSTRUCTIVE EFFORT INTO BECOMING A BETTER PERSON THAT DOESN'T ACT LIKE THE STEREOTYPICAL JEWMUTTED HUWHITE!
It's ALWAYS about YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU. Everyone else are peasants compared to your !!InTeLlEcTuAl MiGhT!! You never stop to get a fucking hold of yourself, especially during rants and gaslighting, or more specifically your gaslighting rants.
It's ALWAYS you accusing others of being plebbitors, except for that time you ADMITTED YOU CAME FROM PLEBBIT!
It's ALWAYS your GANGSTALKERS that are obsessed, even when most of the people that post are simply here to watch glimmyboy slowly descending the spiral staircase into Eldritch insanity. Anything that gets posted which COULD be a slight, is always a slight to you.

Best part about all this? I will ALWAYS live rent free in your attic. I'm the FIRST person you accuse whenever Anons take a swing at you. I'm the ONLY person you try to double down on. Every time you FLINCH, I'm the one telling those Anons all your weaknesses, how to hurt you. Every time you fail to present an argument, I'm the one that sits back and laughs snidely, knowing that all you'll do in response is kvetch. I'm the batpony stealing all your snacks, and you can never catch me. You're too lazy to seal off the access points, too self-pitying of a victim to admit your ignorance, but most of all: too arrogant to accept that (You) are the problem.

>>306140
>>306076
You are a sad, strange little man.
Look at you, ranting about how you think you're the one who lives in my head rent-free when you can't let a thread go by without harassing me in it. I'm surprised you haven't called me or anyone else with a british flag "Britmutt" yet in this thread. You certainly say it enough.
The sight of me enrages you and no matter how many times you try to make that my problem, the truth will never change.
It doesn't matter if you call me nigel or britmutt or any other word you can think of.
It doesn't matter how many times you say I am too negative-word and not good-word enough.
You're like an antifa member screaming outside the window of a conservative politician. You only get away with it because nobody feels like stopping you. No matter how much you project your flaws onto me and insist I'm the real redditor here, I was banned from reddit for being too conservative and you were not. I bet if I looked up hclegend on reddit I'd see daily activity from you. But if I spend that much time on debunking your weekly lying session, you'd feel like a winner since you wasted some time I could have spent on something constructive. It's why I haven't gone through some other threads on the site to show everyone here you needlessly aggressive, immature, and ignorant you are whenever you feel slighted no matter what the subject is.
At the end of the day you are a petulant bully with nothing to offer the site. Considering how you behave, I'm genuinely surprised the moderators have enabled you for so long because if someone with authority told you to stop, you would. Your kind usually does. What have you ever contributed to this site? You'd have to be genuinely retarded and no true believer in personal responsibility to think I am to blame for how you and your friends on discord choose to treat me no matter what I say.

Everyone, I'd like to apologize for these clowns. I did not raise them or fuck their mothers, but if I did they would have turned out better.
My childish bullies are not here to discuss ponies or politics, they are simply mad that I am here. Do not blame yourselves for their shit if they turn on you. Just remember that you can grow and they cannot.
I think I'd like to take a three day vacation from this website. I've taken breaks from the site before, only for this childish schoolyard bully to continue his shit when I return. That tends to help newfags who are slow on the uptake realize I'm not the cause of their leftist behaviour, just its current target. But if they stop posting the anti-nigel shit while I'm gone, I hope you enjoy your vacation from him and his discord trap roleplaying friends. Maybe if I choose to take a break from him it will help the tiresome and incredibly obvious leftist among us feel like he's gained some kind of victory over me. Hopefully this will cause him to leave Glim and this thread alone for a while. They are quite a tiresome bunch.

>>306158
That's not going to work either. I don't care about vacations I care about lasting solutions.
Anyway watch the videos or not

>>306158
Toppest of fucking luls. I'm harassing YOU? GASLIGHT ALERT NUMBER 1! You're here harassing everyone that either reads your bullshit or has to flag you. Tossing a tu quoque AND imposing your OWN PROJECTINO of "b-b-but ur da REEL leplebbidurr!" I've never touched that site. GASLIGHTS NUMBER 2 & 3! You don't know me. You haven't ASKED. All you do is demand special treatment while complaining that you are the victim. GASLIGHT NUMBER 4! I'm a "petulant bully" for calling out your retarded brtitcuck sperging that seems to never end? GASLIGHTS NUMBER 5 AND 6! You also accuse THIS SITE'S MODS, people that I have broken ALL CONTACT WITH except for two, of allowing me to do whatever I want without punishment? GASLIGHTS 7, 8, AND 9! To top this shit off, I hate discuckrd and desire a far better platform. Shit, it makes me wish skype wasn't a steaming mess. That's GASLIGHT NUMBER 10! Now who REALLY lives rent free, Niggel~?

You made a choice to be this site's punching bag. No matter how many times you gaslight everyone, that does not change the truth of how much a truly awful, disgusting waste of rice-paper flesh bag you are. By the way: I'm a fucking eco-fascist. Red is dead and blue is too if they step over the lines.

If you guys would like to wrap up this week's episode of "Everyone Shits on Nigel for Behaving Like Nigel and Nigel Responds by Dialing the Nigelness up to 11," I'd appreciate it; meanwhile, I'll just get back to critiquing the story.

>>305914

>I really hated this stallion. “And what about all your work,” I argued. Dammit, the one reason I was at all hesitant to take down this monster was because even I could see the good his efforts would eventually bring about. I could… admire what he was building, even if I hated how he was doing it. “What about the schools? The hospitals? Rebuilding an infrastructure that will allow Equestria to pull itself out of this post-apocalyptic pit?!”
This paragraph right here sums up a lot of what is wrong with this whole Red Eye arc. The author clearly had some basic idea in his mind for what he wanted this character to be, but as ever, the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired.

As far as I can tell, we are meant to see Red Eye as a basically well-intentioned pony who wanted to correct the mistakes of the past and create a better world for everyone, but his uncompromising idealism led him to do things that were maybe a smad too extreme for most people looks like we finally found a place where the phrase "literally Hitler" is applicable. However, his actual portrayal in the story doesn't reflect this. It's the same problem as with Velvet Remedy, really: the author has an idea in mind for one kind of character, but ultimately creates a completely different character. However, he doesn't seem to realize it, so he treats the character like the one he wanted to create instead of the one he created.

Case in point: the Thunderdome episode. If this guy's primary concern is building schools and hospitals and whatnot, then what possible purpose could these gladiator battles serve? The whole idea is completely incongruous with his stated mission. He wants to pull Equestria out of the post-apocalypse and return to the previous level of civilization; fine. He is appalled by the lawless, sadistic behavior of the raiders and other generic baddies who populate the wasteland, and enslaves them as a way of forcing them to abandon their self-indulgent and ultimately destructive behavior, and work towards a common good; I'm with you so far, kkat. However, for absolutely no obvious reason beyond the author's desire to include some ridiculous event from the something-something DLC from Fallout something-or-other, he also has some of his slaves fight to the death in huge arena-battles, for the amusement of the other slaves. Not only does this not have anything to do with his stated mission of improving the quality of life in the wasteland, it actually works against it.

Up until very recently, it was common for societies to use prisoners as forced labor to complete public works projects, so what Red Eye is basically doing here makes sense enough on its own. The idea is basically that, if left to their own devices, lawbreakers will continue to engage in destructive behavior; forced labor might have the effect of rehabilitating them, and even if it doesn't, society is at least getting something useful out of them and they are no longer able to cause harm. Red Eye is taking the same approach to dealing with the raiders and whatnot that are presently making life in the wasteland unbearable. However, pitting them in gladiator battles for the amusement of...each other I guess...is going to have the opposite effect; it stimulates their bloodlust, encourages them to hone fighting skills instead of investing that time in more constructive pursuits, and further desensitizes them to pointless violence.

If the slave population was just made up of murderers, rapists and other misanthropes, and there was a caste of normal, law-abiding ponies above them, this sort of thing could make sense. However, as far as I can tell, the social structure here consists of slaves, Red Eye's slavers who police the slaves, and Red Eye himself. The gladiators are slaves, and the audience is made up of other slaves. So...what's the point of this?

Anyway, Red Eye tells Littlepoop that he wants her to kill the Goddess, who apparently lives in someplace called Maripony. He informs her that she is free to go, and she can take Xenith with her if she wants. This is pretty much a no-brainer of a deal; if she accepts she gets to go free, whereas if she refuses he will just kill her. However, Red Eye feels inclined to threaten her further. The whole exchange is typical kkat nonsense:

>“And if I refuse to kill the Goddess?”
>Red Eye frowned. “Well, I would prefer not to resort to threats. But let’s just say that by succeeding, you will save the lives of your friends in the tower.”
This implies that Red Eye has taken LP's friends as hostages and is holding them in the tower.

>“W-what have you done with Calamity, Velvet Remedy and SteelHooves?” I demanded in a frightened voice. “Are they okay?”
>Red Eye’s one real eye blinked. “Oh, you mean your assault team at the Fillydelphia Tower station? I sent Stern on ahead with a full squad of her best to give them a warm greeting. I’m sure at least one of them survived.”
This implies that Red Eye sent Stern to the tower to kill them, completely contradicting the previous implication.

>I swallowed hard, feeling all of Equestria fall out from under me. “I… I want to see them.”
>Red Eye nodded graciously. He trotted to a button on the wall beneath the large screen. “Stern, report. I have somepony here who wants to see the captives.”
Now he's implying that they're captives again. Also, if Stern is on standby with these hostages near some kind of video monitor, it implies that Red Eye anticipated he might need to use them to coerce LP into doing what he wants. This directly contradicts his above statement, which implies that he sent Stern to kill them without realizing that they might make useful hostages.

Almost out of space, I will continue in a new post.

>>306174

>The monitor screen lit up. For a moment, all it showed was ruins and blood.
>Then a hoof rose up, tapping on the screen. “Hey!” Calamity’s smiling face and orange mane came into view. “Ah think this here just turned on!”
>I could hear the low grumble of SteelHooves voice, “Calamity, don’t mess with it.”
>“Oh, hold on,” Calamity said, looking slightly up. “Hey, Ah can see Li’lpip through this thing now. Heya, kid!”
>This was obviously not the response Red Eye had been expecting. I felt a crippling surge of relief and collapsed to the floor.
At this point, we learn that all previous implications are irrelevant anyway, because it seems that Calamity and the others have killed Red Eye's attack party, and were conveniently standing next to the same video monitor that Red Eye intended to contact Stern on. I'm assuming this means Stern is dead now?

>“oh, an’ y’all must be Red Eye. Can’t say it’s ah pleasure t’… whoa! Y’all are a cyberpony! Ah didn’t think those were even real!”
"Is y'all one o'dem cyberponies? Well tarnation! My granpappy back in ol' Kentucky used to tell me bout dem cyberponies, I tell ya whut, but I thought he was just a'spinnin' yarns! YEE-HAWWWW!!"
*spits tobacco juice*
*hoists Confederate flag*
*fires pistols into the air*
*extended banjo solo*

>“We kept yer griffin gal all safe an’ cozy. Trust me, she ain’t hardly hurt, and she ain’t feelin’ a bit o’ pain,” Calamity said with a mock friendliness that didn’t touch the steel glint in his eyes. “Figured things mighta gone a bit south fer our friend Li’lpip, so Ah decided we oughta keep someone fer trade.”
Ah, I see that my assumptions regarding Stern were premature. I forgot that characters with names are basically the blue-shirt guys in this story.

Page break. We rejoin the group at some indeterminate point in the future, at an undisclosed part of Fillydelphia that apparently features a moat and drawbridge. Red Eye, protected by a shield generated by two of his alicorn minions, stands at one end with LP and Xenith. Velvet and SteelHooves stand at the other, with a trussed-up Stern in tow.

Red Eye repeats his offer to Littlepoop, and kkat seems to make an effort to clear up the previous confusion:

>“Remember my offer, Littlepip. Kill the Goddess…”
>“…and you not only get rid of her, but you get rid of me. And save your friends in the tower.”
Uhwhaaaaat??
>“Ah. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I don’t mean these friends in that tower…” he said, nodding towards the rising white needle of the Fillydelphia Tower. “I mean your friends in Tenpony Tower.”
Oh, now I see where he's going with this. Apparently, the hostages were meant to be the Tenpony residents; LP merely assumed he meant Calamity and the others, and the confusion centered around the ambiguous word "tower."

Well, this puts Littlepoop in a regular ol' dilly of a pickle. Red Eye is now threatening Tenpony Tower, which just happens to be where the rug that LP is currently munching resides. Is this some 4D chess move by Red Eye, indicating that he has been watching LP for some time, and knows everything about her, including the identities of those closest to her? Or did he just point to this tower because it's full of ponies and he figured LP would do what he wanted if he threatened to blow it up? I'm guessing the former, but if so it opens up an entire logical can of worms that I just don't feel like going into right now.

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Distress Signals

Today's fortune cookie:
>“When the walls come tumbling down, when you lose everything you have, you always have family. And your family always has tribe.”
This isn't necessarily true, particularly in Edgequestria. The concepts of both family and tribe seem to have mostly vanished in this dog-eat-pony vision of the future. Too bad kkat doesn't bother to attribute these chapter epitaphs, or we could examine the original context to try and figure out what he meant by this.

Anyway, the chapter opens with a completely out of place monologue from Littlepoop about her family. The tl;dr of it is that she never knew her father, her mother was a whore, and until she met the group of thinly-sketched character outlines she currently pals around with (and still knows very little about), she never knew the meaning of the word family.

>Velvet Remedy had slipped into mother-doctor mode almost at the sight of me. Now that I wasn’t mentally sniffing between her hindlegs anymore, I found myself comforted by her fretful ministrations, particularly considering that she did a much better job of mothering me than my actual mother ever had.
No matter how hard kkat tries, I'm never going to like Velvet Remedy.

If he were capable of thinking about character relationships in more than just one dimension, he might be able to spin this into something interesting. Velvet has demonstrated a propensity for manipulating ponies in order to get what she wants, as well as a lack of empathy for whichever pony she's manipulating. We saw this earlier on a few occasions, most notably when she tried to seduce Littlepoop to get back at Calamity, and in the beginning of the story when she conned her into taking her PipBuck so she could escape. Both times she used LP's crush on her to advantage, without considering LP's feelings (and, in the case of the PipBuck, that she might get her into trouble). Conversely, LP seems to have abandonment issues. It sounds like her mother didn't give her much affection, so now she projects affection onto Velvet. If he wanted to, kkat could turn this into an unhealthy codependent type friendship, which could potentially produce some interesting tensions.