/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

Reposting my text from the previous thread for consistency.

Chapter One: Why is there a Time Portal in the Backyard?

The text starts off with a long portion of italicized text, that appears to be a prologue and/or framing device, probably set after the events of the story we're about to read. It's easier if I just paste some of it in:

>"Well, I have the first chapter done," the lavender alicorn pony sighed. "I'm still not sure why you picked me to write this, Scoot."
>"You're the best writer I know, you're good at research and you're unbiased. I trust you to tell people the real story, not the sugar-sweet censored-up thing everyone in two different worlds expects." The orange pegasus smiled. "Also, you write faster than anyone else I know and the advance from the publishing company is enough to live on while you wait for your fellowship to start. Even guest professors need to publish something."
>"Publish or perish, yes. It's partly what left Starswirl the Bearded to languish in obscurity for so many years. If he had just thought to hire a proofreader…"
We are literally three paragraphs into the text, and I already hate the dialogue in this as much as I hate Hell, all Montagues, and OP.

Anyway, holy jeez; this shit just keeps going and going. I can already tell this one is going to be an...interesting experience.

On some level I have to say I'm a little impressed. Most of the authors we've looked at have managed to rein in the severe autism for at least a couple of pages. Past Sins, for instance, I remember actually having a pretty well written opening scene, and the rest of them managed to at least fool me into thinking the book might not be absolutely terrible for at least a chapter or two. This one, however, is just insane, babbling autism right out of the gate. I don't even know what the hell I'm reading here.

As far as I can tell, what we are witnessing is a conversation between Twilight Sparkle and (a possibly older) Scootaloo. There appears to be some sort of connection between Equestria and the human world; as far as I can tell, both Scoot and Twilight reside here, and Twilight appears to be a professor or something. Again, the autism pretty much fires off a mile a minute here, so it's hard to tell exactly what the fuck they are talking about. However, I think the basic gist of it is that Scootaloo is asking Twilight to ghost-write her autobiography, or something like that.

I'm not even going to attempt to do a detailed summary of all of this, but here is a brief summation of what we learn (or can infer) from the prologue:

>Scootaloo appears to be adopted, and her adoptive father is an engineer of some kind
>her adoptive parents appear to be human (this is partly inferred from what I already know about this story's premise)
>Pinkie Pie has written a cookbook that is apparently giving JK Rowling a run for her money on the bestseller list
>Rarity is now a "gay icon" (not making this up), and there is a hit broadway musical about her
>Applejack is some kind of venture capitalist or something; apparently she sells brand-name cider or something
>Rainbow Dash has entered into some sort of unholy partnership with Gatorade
>for some bizarre reason, the ponies now celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, and Hearth's Warming

Anyway, apart from this, the main thing I would like to call attention to is that the dialogue in this is fucking atrocious. Anyone already familiar with either of these characters will immediately note that they don't sound even remotely like themselves; everyone else will simply note that they don't sound like anybody else, either. This isn't a conversation that would ever take place between anyone, either human or equine; this is a massive expository infodump about characters we haven't met thinly veiled as conversation.

ANYWAY, after this, there is a page break, and the story proper begins. The implication seems to be that the text we are about to read was written by Twilight.

The story opens with yet another massive infodump, this one about the David character who was referenced in the prologue:

>David Jayne Martin had grown up in a God-fearing family, attended church and even at a young age, wanted to know all about how things worked. When he worked on machines and computers things worked out well, and at a young age he earned the reputation as the go to kid for any and all computer problems.
The phrase "at a young age" appears twice in succession and feels redundant.

Anyway, we learn that David (presumably human), is a thoroughly dull, cookie-cutter urban liberal with a pretty standard backstory. In all likelihood, he is a thinly-veiled self-insert for one or both of the authors (this appears to have been co-written by two people). To save time, I'll sum him up neatly:

David Jayne Martin was a bright, curious lad with a predilection for science, who is also gay. He was raised in a conservative Christian family, with all of the usual baggage that sort of thing entails for this sort of person. His parents sent him to a private Christian school, where he got good grades, but he soon realized he wasn't like the other boys and blah blah blah; all of that shit. He then grew up, enrolled in a more liberal college that his parents disapproved of, explored his gay side, and blah blah blah; all of that shit. Eventually he met another faggot, and they fell in love.

We are now given the other faggot's extensive backstory, which I will cover in my next post.

>>331345

Faggot #2 is named Kevin Wilkes, and he also has a fairly standard backstory. Kicked out by his natural parents when he was 15, he was raised by his foster parents Mary Claire Bridget Scott and Ibrahim ben-Salim Ayhan-Scott, who were 2013's runner-ups for the coveted "Most Ridiculously Named Couple in All of San Francisco" award they ultimately lost to Samantha Treespirit Freewilly Goldstein-Goldsteinberg (xhe/xhere/xeraereoamareo) and Mtumbu Israel Smegma-Jenkins "Potato-Salad" Nosebergstein (pronouns cannot even be spoken in a human tongue) of the Castro District.

>The couple had fostered many children over the years, and they welcomed Kevin with open arms.
>Kevin soon gratefully accepted them as his parents and they as one of their many sons and daughters, the ‘foster’ being a prefix that tended to just sort of fall off along the way.
Daily reminder that most families who take in foster kids are scamming the government and treat the kids like stray animals; the rest are usually sexual predators. If you don't believe me, ask literally anyone who has had direct experience with the foster care system.

Anyway, continuing to prove that the actual text of this story will probably be more ridiculous than anything I could think up to make fun of it, we learn that Kevin's foster parents were apparently an "Irish-Catholic Turkish-Muslim" couple, as well as "hyper-tolerant Unitarian Universalist hippies," whose "loyalty to the traditions and values of Tolkien ranked higher than their original religious or ethnic affiliations." I am literally not exaggerating anything here; this is actually in the text. Also, it's probably worth mentioning that Tolkien was a strict traditional Catholic and a monarchist, and that the autism present in only the first few pages of this book would have probably been enough to give him a fatal aneurysm.

ANYWAY, it just goes on and on and on like this. The long and short of it is that Kevin and David (who apparently goes by "Jayne" for some reason) met in college, discovered that their personalities and interests complemented each other, and became a couple.

>Kevin referred to the Scotts as his superior ‘aftermarket’ parents and thought of his old ones as crummy ‘OEM’ ones that ‘the manufacturer should have recalled'
The level of projection here is off the charts.

>On the day of graduation, Jayne got to meet Kevin's ‘aftermarket’ parents2 for the first time
>The Irish-Catholic/Turkish-Muslim family1 had earned a sterling reputation of patience and understanding
At first I thought these were typos, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is some actual significance to appending a numeral after the words "family" and "parents." The lefty buzzword lexicon changes with the wind, and it's rather hard to keep up with it, but this seems like the kind of thing they would do.

The text starts to go off the rails a bit from here. Apparently faggots 1 and 2 both graduate from college, and then there seems to be some minor drama over how they can stay together if they end up living in different places. Jayne goes back to whatever small town he came from, where he proceeds to work odd jobs and probably annoy the crap out of his parents with his sanctimonious faggotry. Eventually, I guess they get an apartment together in a nearby city or something (no precise locations are given, but I get the impression these two move around a lot), and through a mutual friend become interested in a show called "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." They are both immediately drawn to it because it teaches values of friendship and tolerance and blah blah blah; all of that shit.

Eventually, they wind up getting gay married and change their last names to Kevin's foster parents' family name, "Scott." Seriously, that's what the two of them went by? Just Scott? Ibrahim had no problem dropping all of that abu ibn al-jazeera ben-shapiro crap that was attached to his name, and just adopted his wife's last name? Isn't that a little dismissive of his proud Islamic Turkish-Irish-Whatever heritage? Why not go for broke and just hyphenate the whole damn thing? As far as I can tell, in lefty-land, the longer your last name is the more points it's worth.

Anyway, like I said, it just goes on and on and on like this. There's not even really a narrative to summarize; it's just more projection about how intolerant and bigoted the author's Faggot #1's parents are, some token complaining about how hard it is to find a job and pay for housing and so forth, and a lot of autismo gushing about how the couple's interest in MLP provided some kind of "safe space" for the two of them that got them through the tough times. I seriously can't even believe someone actually took the time to write all of this nonsense down; it's like reading a stranger's blog.

>By now, several years after graduation, most of our friends from school had children of their own, and their lives revolved around the new additions to the family. They posted adorable pictures and heartwarming stories of the little ones playing, learning, growing. We both wanted children so, but due to state law, it just wasn't possible.
Yeah...state law, and the somewhat inconvenient fact that neither one of you has a uterus. Damn Republicans.

>I enjoyed my office job, but it wasn't easy being the only one who didn't watch football and NASCAR, the odd one out on any team.
>Our student debt and home loan meant we had very little left over each week, but through it all we would come home every night and watch the ponies in their world without hate, without debt and dream; if only.
The projection levels in this story have already left Earth's orbit, and we're not even through the first chapter yet.

Anyway, at one point, the narrative switches from a clumsy third-person infodump to a clumsy first-person account, which is apparently an excerpt from Jayne's memoirs. It is at this point that the vague outline of an actual story begins to slowly take shape.

>>331362

There is a quick page break, and then, finally, stuff starts happening. We're still in Jayne's memoirs, so the story is still first-person; not sure if this is permanent. Since the names in this are kind of a point of confusion, I'm just going to start referring to them as Faggot #1 (David/Jayne, the engineer) and Faggot #2 (Kevin, who is apparently a designer or something).

For no apparent reason, Faggot #1 wakes up with a nervous, apprehensive feeling one night. He looks out the window and sees a weird shadow by the car. Probably assuming that a bunch of guys in MAGA hats are here to beat him up and tell him that this is Trump Country™, he gets dressed and picks up the baseball bat that he and Faggot #2 keep in the bedroom for..."some reason."

>The fence that separated the garden had a six-foot section missing, the bare wires hanging limp on either side, and the grass in a circle around the light got progressively shorter as it got closer to the light, with a patch of bare dirt directly underneath the light that seemed to have gotten bigger in the several minutes we had been watching.
This is some of the most autismo description I've ever read. I had to read this like nine times before I could figure out what the hell the author wanted me to visualize here.

Anyway, the gist of it is that there is a big hole in their fence for some reason, and some kind of weird optical illusion going on in the space it created. There is some long, confusing, and very awkwardly written autism about the two of them going out to inspect the fence-hole. Eventually, they start throwing rocks at it.

>"I have my old spade in the shed.” It was silly of him, but even though the garden tool was past use, he’d hung onto it when we moved because it’d been a present from Claire and Ben when he first came to live with them.
Is there any particular reason we would need to know the detailed history of this rusty shovel? It's out of the story literally two seconds later.

Anyway, for no apparent reason, they throw the shovel at the hole in the fence, and somehow conclude from this that the hole is some kind of time portal. I'm not even going to bother asking the obvious here; I'm just going to roll with it. Something tells me this story will break my brain if I think too hard about it. They stand around having a ridiculous, poorly written conversation (the dialogue in this is still absolutely dreadful), and then decide that the thing to do is to set up a camera to record video footage of the time portal, leave it running, and go back to bed. Righty-o.

The next morning, Faggot #1 wakes up and sees Faggot #2 sitting on the edge of the bed, cradling something wrapped in a blanket. It turns out to be an "orange and fuchsia Pegasus who squirmed in her sleep and yawned adorably." Faggot #1 immediately recognizes this as Scootaloo, a cartoon character from the television series the two of them both enjoy. Righty-o.

Faggot #2 explains that he'd gone outside to check on the camera, and had arrived just in time to see this small cartoon horse emerging from the time portal. The portal had closed up immediately afterward. Instead of asking any of the hundreds of obvious questions that they would be well within their rights to ask, they decide to just roll with it and keep her. Righty-o.

Though it's not really clear from any of the barebones description we've been given, "Scootaloo" appears to be an infant, and does not appear to have any direct memory of the place she came from. It's not yet clear whether or not she can speak or communicate in any way.

>Amy, a clerk with Down’s syndrome who knew us well since we shopped there a lot was there when I came up to the register with the ticket for the large items in back and the bag of toys I’d picked out for Scootaloo.
This is one of the silliest run-on sentences I've come across since...well, since Fallout: Equestria. The author probably should have asked "Amy" for help writing this; she probably would have done a better job.

>It was so strange, but of all the places and people in town, sweet girls like Amy and places like Goodwill were the most understanding. Still, if word got around that we had a child staying at our place, alone with two gay men, well… people would not only ask questions, but it’d attract a lot of attention we really did not want.
Yeah, I'm sure the fact that you're two gay men raising a child would be the first thing people would want to ask about, and totally not the fact that your "child" is a goddamned cartoon horse for crying out loud. Seriously, the projection in this is just...oy vey.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that the two courageous faggots, who must bravely stare down bigotry and oppression every single day, are understandably worried that the lynch mob of huwhite Christian hillbillies, always dogging their every move, will soon catch wind of their new child-pet. They are also concerned that the little downy, bless her innocent heart, might inadvertently blab something about them. So, they decide to lie and say that they have a niece visiting.

There is some more rambling autism in which the downy girl upsells them some books; the long and short of it is that they buy some toys and books and shit, and then go home.

>The twin-size mattress and simple bed fit surprisingly easily into our eight-year-old Toyota minivan. We'd bought it only two weeks before as a $1700 Craigslist bargain in an attempt to have something Kevin and I could use for larger items and Home Depot runs. We’d worried that it might be too much car for us, but our old Civic was aging badly since the vandalism and a van would let us make bigger junkyard runs to keep it and whatever would ultimately replace it going for less money, to say nothing of how much we’d save on pickup-truck rentals now that we were homeowners and sometimes needed to bring home bulky supplies for our humble fixer-upper abode.
Is there any particular reason we would need this information?

>>331365
It's strange that a story could be so awful from the synopsis, and still manage to get worse with every sentence.

>Our new place was small but without the leaking pipes and sagging floors of our old apartment. I dove into my work, but the town was tiny and Kevin had a hard time finding...
This was just a random thing I saw skimming, but I'd like to point out. Probably the main issue with people writing in first-person narrative is using first-person language to describe a third-person view of the story. I had this problem, and I've come across many others who couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with their fiction that had the same problem as well. It is a rather illusive issue if someone does not know what to look for.
This one though is particularly bad. Contexts are being changed mid-paragraph, often several times, without changing verbiage

>We cut our spending down to next to nothing by eating ramen and spending Christmas with the kind and accepting teenage staff of a fast-food place...
cutting spending down does not mean going to a fastfood restaurant for anything. Probably the cheapest stuff is beans, rice, and potatoes. Add meat when you can afford it.
I've been through the college system, I'm quite aware of every shortcut that can be conceivably be made. This reminds me...

One or two of the faggots finished college at some point, though I don't see graduation in there anywhere.
>"I've been talking with Mary and Stephanie from our college days – Mary's working on her residency at a hospital across state lines not far from here, and Stephanie got her degree and works in a vet's office within driving distance. We have to tell someone, and they have two kids of their own already. I think if we asked them to, they would help us."
Not sure who is talking, as that block is in a paragraph all by its self. It suggests college days are over. One of them has at least some amount of engineering college. How are they not getting any amount of money more than minimum wage? Only a faggot can screw up that bad.

>Scootaloo shows up and everything magically gets better
What a faggot.
They will always hold on to the idea of somebody else swooping in and saving their ass from themselves. In this case, this faggot author is using sacred pone as a means to not let go of their huge series of failures.
"Don't worry, we got pone now! Everything will be fine from now on!" sounds a lot like the same mindset for "We just have never never tried true communism on earth before!"

I jumped around in the chapter for this, probably getting a bit ahead of Glim here, but fuk it. This fiction jumps around so much I don't think it matters what order the paragraphs are read in anyway.
Sorry Glim. I'm sorry for suggesting this one and exposing you and others to some horrifying shit. I've read worse honestly, but I think this one is probably among the actual worst because the author is trying to take things seriously. Not only trying to be serious, but the thumbs up/down ratio is quite high. Pretty sure this fiction was circle-jerked around between the (actual) faggot rainbow horse community.

>>331345
Do you think homosexuals keep attacking Christianity because it's safe, because their favourite TV and Movie characters did so, because their delicate feminine egos can't handle the thought of someone considering their hedonistic bumcum sluttery disgusting, because they don't want people (especially kids) to listen to christians about what's right and wrong, or because they fear Islam enough to feel the urge to serve it? I think it's a mix of all of them.
also
>David Jayne Martin
>Kevin Wilkes
These names are extremely homosexual. Jayne's a girl's name and Wilkes sounds like Willies. What did they do for David/Martin/Kevin, name these characters after their favourite gay porn stars? And why do none of them have names like "Esteban Julio Ricardo Montoya Dela Rosa Ramírez"? Giving the two gay couples mostly-white names isn't very """progressive""" of the author.
And "Mary Claire Bridget Scott and Ibrahim ben-Salim Ayhan-Scott"? When did they take up the Crazy Cat Lady tradition of combining random names Warrior Cats OC style? Giving a woman a man's name for a last name is already pretty homosexual but the Arabomb Kidfuckistani name won't get less retarded if you stick something normal like Scott on the end of Achmed's name.
>Parent1 and Family2
I hear some retards give numbers to their 2 daddies or 2 wineaunt lesbian "mothers", so they name them Dad1 and Dad2 and their respective in-laws inherit the number to reduce confusion. It's a stupid answer for the joke question "If you have two lesbian moms, won't you get caught in an endless loop of "go ask your mother"?".
>FIM obsession
If this author was born 5 years earlier this fic would be about Blue Avatar and Pandora. If the author was born 5 years earlier it would be a Pokemon fic. If the author was born 5 years earlier it would be LOTR. Something tells me this story is going to suck the homosexual humans off while making ponies into an afterthought, just a set of names and appearances ripped off and used as window dressing for the sake of cynically and exploitativistically advertising this story to fantards even though the story's never truly about ponies or ponyness.

This seems like an excessively homosexual and inefficient way to introduce the audience to these characters. Surely if the story is about Scootaloo, who happens to be adopted by faggots, we should be introduced to the homoshreksuals- I mean beliebers- I mean gleefags (what was their fandom called? begleeviers?)- I mean bronies only once Scootaloo meets them.

And why Scootaloo of all the fucking ponies? Oh right, because we hadn't met her onscreen parents yet and she's so connected to Rainbow Dash, star of My Little Dashie, which is the load of maudlin dogshit this story rips off for the sake of homosexually fellating homosexuals.

>homoshovel
This story sucks gay balls because the author's got the narrator's telling you shit like "The shovel was a gift" instead of showing the characters expositing shit like
>"I told you to get rid of that rusty shit shovel before you get Tetanus and AIDS and pass it to me"
>"No way, it was a housewarming gift from our bisexual transgender Pilates teachers Ben and Claire"
>"I still haven't worked up the courage to ask them which one's supposed to be Ben and which one's supposed to be Claire."
>"The one in the pink dress is probably Claire."
>"But he's the bigger buffer one! That's gotta be Ben."
>"Maybe, but if he's bigger than you. If he says he's called Claire, call him Claire or he'll kill you then rape you. Plus it's polite to accept people's headcanons where I'm from."
Haha, I'm good at this. I crammed even more bullshit exposition and made it okay by making it funny.

>time portal experiments
gay. they should try more shit. like tossing something rustable into the portal, seeing if it decays. then sticking something rustable into the portal, and pulling it back. trying the same with organic matter such as food. Sticking an unimportant small chunk of finger in there to see if the portal chops it off or rots it away. Tossing something bouncy into the portal with a spinning motion so it'll bounce back out of the portal. Sniffing the portal to see if it leads to anywhere that smells poisonous. Testing it with a Geiger counter, electromagnetic ghost scanner, infrared goggles or some other unusual sight, checking if it looks different on cameras, and so on. Putting on whatever passes for protective gear. Getting a disliked expendable friend to hop through the portal to see what happens. These fags aren't scientists.

>a clerk with downs syndrome
WHAT THE FUCK i'm writing this as i read this and this is now officially beyond the point of parody. Why just dump this here if she's not going to be a major player in the story? Does the author just want credit for shoving someone with downs into the background of the story like an author making sure the books in the background of a random scene have blink-and-you'll-miss-it joke titles? Why does everyone in this story have to be either a dice-rolled set of unusual traits or a demonized NASCAR-loving cell of a matching herd organism the gay protags hate? At this rate I'm surprised we haven't been introduced to one neighbour in a wheelchair and interracial relationship with a 500lbs feeder and a redneck neighbour with a shotgun who thinks the four basic food groups are beer, bacon, beans, and hating niggers. (That last one's food for the soul!)

>homosexual car shit
their car taste is homosexual. How can their other car "still be vandalized"? Did someone spraypaint "You are niggers homos" on the side or smash its windows with baseball bats? Don't these niggers know how to fix shit?
Also I forgot, what do these faggots do for a living again?

>>331367
if youve already read this heres a spoiler question: Why was scootaloo sent to these fags? Did Discord do it? Did scoots just wander into a portal Twily forgot to close while babysitting the CMC? Did a spell intentionally send Scoots to "pure hearts"? Or is it luck?

>>331367
Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out how to approach actually critiquing this. The issue here is that there's just so much wrong with it I'm not even sure where to begin. If this story were an apartment, the leaking pipes and sagging floors would be the least of its problems.

There's varying degrees of bad writing: Sun & Rose was bad in an "it's bad, but the author has a good idea and you can tell he's sincerely giving it his all" kind of way. FoE was bad in a "this is so unforgivably terrible in such an excessively pompous way that I actually take pleasure in tearing it apart and exposing its myriad flaws" kind of way. Friendship is Optimal was bad in a "this barely qualifies as a book; this is basically an extremely long Reddit post" kind of way. This is...I'm not sure.

It's probably closest to Friendship is Optimal, in the sense that the person writing it clearly does not have even the most rudimentary understanding of how to approach telling a story or putting a book together, and there is probably very little practical advice I could give him. The story is basically Tumblr: the Novel so far, and the author's writing skills are at or below the level of your average Tumblr blogger.

>cutting spending down does not mean going to a fastfood restaurant for anything.
Tell me about it. When I was poor, I went to Burger King on payday; the rest of the week I lived on store-brand value-pack boxes of macaroni.

>Not sure who is talking, as that block is in a paragraph all by its self. It suggests college days are over. One of them has at least some amount of engineering college. How are they not getting any amount of money more than minimum wage? Only a faggot can screw up that bad.
This whole section is especially badly written and is very confusing; there are quite a few points in here that are ambiguous or badly explained. I'm going to delve into it in detail in the next post.

>Sorry Glim. I'm sorry for suggesting this one and exposing you and others to some horrifying shit.
Don't worry about it. I don't think there's going to be much actual writing advice I can give here beyond "literally everything this author does is bad; don't do any of it," but so far it's shaping up to be a pretty hilarious read. Every time I think I've finally plumbed the absolute bottommost depths of pure autism, this fandom manages to surprise me.

>>331368
>Do you think homosexuals keep attacking Christianity because it's safe, because their favourite TV and Movie characters did so, because their delicate feminine egos can't handle the thought of someone considering their hedonistic bumcum sluttery disgusting, because they don't want people (especially kids) to listen to christians about what's right and wrong, or because they fear Islam enough to feel the urge to serve it?
Homosexuals (or at least this particular sort of activist homosexual) are like any other group of SJWs. They attack Christianity because:

A) they're drama queens,
B) their entire sense of identity revolves around perpetual victimhood, and
C) it's basically a toothless enemy at this point.

Christianity's influence has been in decline for the better part of two centuries now, and it hasn't had any serious political clout (in America at least) since the 1980s. The Christian mainstream these days mostly either cucks to the LGBTQ crowd, or else buries its head in the sand and tries to avoid the issue entirely. Christian groups that vocally oppose homosexuality, like the Westboro Baptist Church, are pretty rare and are mostly seen as fringe extremist groups that normies shun.

The left deals almost entirely with symbols and narratives and generally ignores reality; thus Christianity is the perfect enemy for them. It symbolizes oppression, but has no actual power to oppress, so they can attack it as often or as much as they like, without having to worry about it ever fighting back. The "oppressor" can only commit symbolic acts of oppression (calling someone a fag, refusing to bake a wedding cake), that can't do anything except hurt the recipient's feelings. However, the supposedly oppressive acts carry a risk of actual real-world consequences (guy who said "fag" gets charged with a hate crime, baker loses his entire business) against which the "oppressor" has no recourse.

>Also I forgot, what do these faggots do for a living again?
Faggot #1 is an engineer, Faggot #2 is a designer. As to their actual jobs, I'm not sure. As far as I can tell, Engineer Fag has an actual engineering job, though it's never clarified what specific field he works in. Design Fag is basically a typical underemployed 20-something jerkoff wtih a useless degree: he works dead-end retail jobs and bitches about how expensive his student loans are; that's about it.

>>331368
>spoilers
Sorry. I only read up to the second to last chapter. There were no plot resolves or anything that suggests why scootaloo randomly shows up. I would not be surprised if that never gets resolved even in the last part of the series (book 3)
Its possible there was a hit or two buried in the mounds of trashy text, but honestly I put up mental blockers as much as I could.

>>331369
>closest to friendship is optimal
lul
At least FiO guy knew the topic he was writing about, with a clearly defined plotline. I didn't like it because of how extremely humanistic it is and for some reason nobody wanted to live in the real world.
But I digress.

I wouldn't even say Our Girl Scootaloo is one big tumblr blog. It's more like the guy is writing about how ponies can save a faggot from the cruel world, implement communism, and save the rest of the faggots in the world with ponies and communism. Except that's not what the author faggot is trying to write about, so it comes out a garbled mess with all the grace of trying to catch water with a sieve.

One of the things I find interesting is from this chart
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/stats/91215
There have been no thumbs down since 2015 but quite a few thumbs up since then.

>>331369
Will you judge the story's gayer moments by how effectively or poorly it pulls off attempts at homosexual propaganda? Demonizing football and nascar-loving southerners, making gay or disabled chars morally superior to straight ones, demonizing Christianity, that sort of shit seems like shit this fic wants to do.
at the very least unless it's an anti-gay comedy mocking the idea of 2 gay dads it's going to depict these 2 gay dads as great parents only "silly bigots" wouldn't want raising adopted kids of their own.

for example the movie Paul was gay anti christian propaganda. Comicon-loving nerds help an alien who cures the sick and replaces Jesus for an attractive christian girl converted into loving aliens and weed and fake nerd shit, and the heroes are chased by an evil Christian man who thinks the alien is a "Demon". But a dipshit I know didn't even notice it was anti christian until I spelled it out for him and broke the antichristian spell by reminding him Islam tosses gays off buildings. As a movie it's just boring stoner comedy with shallow nerd appeal but as a piece of propaganda to get christians subconsciously loathing christian men and lusting after christian women it's effective. It couldn't magically turn an atheist towards hating christ, but as one more droplet in an ocean of antichristian films it certainly won't hurt that cause.

<s>This might be off-topic but isn't the Westboro Baptist Church like 100 guys, mostly the extended family of a democrat and their friends? I've never heard stories of them going out and hurting gays, or doing anything to inconvenience them, they just show up sometimes at events with unconvincing signs. No QR codes that lead to sites full of Hate Facts. No posters with statistics. Just an unconvincing slogan like "god hates gays" or whatever.</s>
>>331371
Humanistic? What do you mean?
FIO's fake equestria gives the Materialist everything he could ever want: certain death for himself plus a paradise of a safe space for his third-rate AI-simulated copy.
The Materialist would happily die for heaven though he would never fight for it. This fulfills his values, by letting him get his brain tossed in the trash and his body tossed into an incinerator once CelestAI takes a photograph of his brain before using this data and guesswork to create a knockoff of each "Equestria Online Uploader".
The author is a materialist with little understanding of those outside himself so everyone uploads or dies before they can. Except for the last man alive, a muslim who chooses his fantasies of having 42 virgin children to himself over sending a copy of himself to live with copies of family members or any other loved ones he might have.

Also, aren't these homosexual characters too similar?
I heard some writing advice that said characterization works best through contrast.
Pair the cautious one with the reckless one and these characteristics are more likely to stick in your mind, especially if they argue. One should be the cheerful optimist, one should be the sarcastic cynical one. It even lets you give characters arcs where the buddy cop duo becomes more like the other if writing them to respect and appreciate and work well with the other is too hard. Main characters need to bounce off each other but these two homos seem way too similar.
What if one homo was straighter and able to act normal and make straight friends, appreciating his neighbours and coworkers and housewarming gifts, while the catty lispy queer who judges others by their favourite opera can only grumble about how others are taking time he can spend being homosexual with his homolover away from him?

>>331365

>"She went right in the houseplant! Let’s just hope she can learn to go outside, I don't think they make diapers in her size," he explained. I laughed and told him I loved him, then went to see what could be had for a tiny pony.
Let's all just pause for a moment, and reflect on the sad fact that an actual human being deliberately sat down and typed these words.

>Again, I had to tell a white lie to an inquisitive retail worker, but as white lies go, ‘I’m looking after a pony for my friend Kevin,’ really …wasn’t that untruthful. Kevin is my best friend as well as my husband, and we were definitely looking after a pony. It was really more of a need-to-know-basis gloss-over than a lie. And the associate, whose name I don’t think I ever caught, took the unspoken implication that I’d never looked after so much as a Pekingese in my life (maybe it was my business-casual work attire?) and proceeded to tell me just about everything I’d need to know about babysitting a wee pony.
Seriously; this is pretty much what this entire book has been like so far. if we don't babysit the wee ponies, who will?

Anyway, fuck. It looks like I might have spoken too soon about the story taking shape, because so far this has been nothing but unfiltered nonsensical word vomit. I'll do the best I can to summarize it.

In a move that clearly emphasizes how this tiny horse from an alternate dimension is the equivalent of a human child and everything about this situation is completely normal and healthy, Faggot #1 builds a fenced-in enclosure in the backyard for their daughter-pet to romp around in. They also buy her some horse treats and a toothbrush with Pinkie Pie on it.

For a few weeks, they live what I am going to very generously call a normal life, playing with what I am going to very generously call their daughter, and trying to teach her to speak. Eventually it dawns on them that they can't maintain this...situation...forever. Though they seem to have enough of a tenuous grasp on reality to comprehend the potential danger of showing their...eh..."daughter"...to anyone in a position of authority, they also understand that they can't just keep her hidden in the backyard forever.

So, they do what any sensible pair of delusional autistic faggots trying to adopt a baby cartoon horse would do - seek the counsel of some friendly and sympathetic lesbians:

>"I've been talking with Mary and Stephanie from our college days – Mary's working on her residency at a hospital across state lines not far from here, and Stephanie got her degree and works in a vet's office within driving distance. We have to tell someone, and they have two kids of their own already. I think if we asked them to, they would help us."
This is where it begins to get a little unclear. The way this paragraph is written implies that Mary and Stephanie are a couple, in the same way that Faggots #1 & 2 are a couple. The general tone and timbre of the story so far would suggest that this is probably the case as well. However, a couple of paragraphs later we have this:

>"You have a child? Congratulations!" Mary said as she hugged me. "I'm so happy for you! But I thought this state didn't allow… Oh." She finished as the realization sunk in. "But they'll come and take her if you stay here!"
There are a couple of ambiguities here. First off, though it is never actually stated, there seems to be an implication that the state these people all live in doesn't allow same-sex couples to adopt children. This basically explains the problem the two faggots are having: they want a baby, but they can't physically have one and they're not allowed to adopt. However, in the earlier paragraph, the text also implies that Mary and Stephanie are a same-sex couple, and that despite having the same problem, they do in fact have children.

There are a couple of possible explanations for this situation. The first is that I misunderstood what the text was implying about Mary and Stephanie; it's entirely possible that they are not a couple at all. All we know about these two characters is that they are old college buddies of our two faggots; thus, it's entirely possible that they are both heterosexual, both married, and both have natural children of their own. The other possibility is that they are a same-sex couple, but live in a different state than the one in which our two faggots presently reside; thus, they would be able to adopt children, while our two faggots could not. Since this is our first time meeting these characters, and since the author hasn't given us enough information about them to go on, we have no way of knowing which explanation is correct. Thus, we have an ambiguity.

The second issue here is more unnerving:

>"I'm so happy for you! But I thought this state didn't allow… Oh." She finished as the realization sunk in.
What exactly is Mary realizing? Think about it: Adam and Steve just told Mary that they had adopted a child. However, Mary is aware that this particular state does not allow same-sex adoption. So the implication is...that these two autistic wack-jobs kidnapped a baby and are keeping it illegally? Since, again, the author doesn't really give us enough information to go on, we can't really be sure if that's what this is really saying or not; however, I don't see any other explanation that makes sense. The really unnerving part is in her reaction:

>"But they'll come and take her if you stay here!"
Your two gay friends from college invite you and your lesbian soulmate and/or heterosexual married friend to bring the kids over for a friendly visit. Once you're there, they confess to you that they have kidnapped a baby, and need you to provide medical care for her under the table. Do you:

A) call the police, or
B) advise them to leave the state in order to dodge authorities

These characters all seem to think B is the reasonable answer, which only strengthens the view that leftism really ought to be considered a mental illness.

>>331414

Anyway, whatever the fuck the deal is with Mary and Stephanie, the two faggots take them out back and show them the crude holding pen where they store their freakish child-pet from a dimension beyond the stars. Needless to say, the two carpet-munchers are a bit surprised.

After some confused babbling, the two faggots hand the two carpet munchers some pamphlets that they helpfully printed up (yes, this autism is actually in the text) to help them understand the situation.

>It took most of the afternoon, but the moms were eventually able to accept what their children had without question. Kevin and I had a baby cartoon pony, were raising her as our own, and needed their help to gather medical data so when her story inevitably got out, all the data anyone wanted would already be available, and no one would have any reason to try to steal her away.
Everything about this is completely reasonable and natural. The authors are clearly two persons of sound mind, and there is absolutely no need for them to be institutionalized and studied by a team of trained professionals.

Anyway, from here, quite a large amount of time is glossed over in a couple of paragraphs. Mary and Stephanie agree to provide off the books medical care, and a process begins in which Scootaloo is periodically brought to the hospital after hours incidentally, is there even such a thing as "after hours" at a hospital? My understanding is that most of them are 24/7 operations. In addition to normal medical care, they also conduct DNA sequencing and run some other weird tests on her; the results are mailed off to some official organization or other. This seems like kind of a weird thing to do since they are trying to keep her a secret, but something tells me that asking questions like that with this story is going to be a bad idea.

A full year passes. Not knowing when she was actually born, they decide to have a birthday party for her on the anniversary of the day that she mysteriously floated into their lives through some sort of weird time portal. Eventually she learns to speak, and can now communicate with her "parents" using rudimentary baby talk. Meanwhile, despite this entire epoch of Scootaloo's life being handily dealt with in the space of a couple of paragraphs, the authors dedicate like two and a half pages to an autistic conversation in which Scootaloo and Faggot #1 argue over whether or not she's allowed to drink Diet Coke. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Just so I don't have to suffer alone, here is a sample:

>She stared sadly at the now-empty box.
>“…No drink. Scoo’loo no drink.” And with the saddest, most piteous expression I had ever seen, Scootaloo clopped pathetically back to the window and watched Kevin resume mowing the lawn. And then she let out a little sigh.
>It was unbearable.
>“Scootaloo, you cannot have Diet Coke,” I explained. “It has caffeine.”
>“Caffeine.”
>“Yes.”
>“What caffeine?”
>“It…it’s a currently licit drug in the stimulant family.” Blank pony stare. “It…it makes you jiggle and run around.”
>“Scoo’loo like caffeine?” she asked hopefully.
>“No, Scootaloo, you may not have caffeine. We don’t know if it might make you sick, or if it might make it so you can’t get to sleep at bedtime.”
>“Papa like caffeine!”
>“Papa does like caffeine, because Papa is a horrible influence,” I trailed off under my breath. “Papa is also a grownup. When you are a grownup, then you may have caffeine.”
>“When Scoo’loo grown up?” she asked, gesturing at my height with her hoof.
>“Yes. When Scootaloo is grown up, then she may have caffeine.”
>“Mm’kay,” the little filly replied, before going off to play with her dolls.
This isn't even the entire conversation. And yes, this is pretty much what all of the dialogue in this story has been like so far.

Here's a bit more:

>“Well, my Miss Manners book says that this is a big part of how children learn. They imitate adults.”
>Just then, Scootaloo let out a rumbling, resounding belch which actually knocked one of the dollies down.
>“…I think you may want some more books on manners, then,” I observed, reddening.
>“Or you can stop drinking the root beer before it’s even cold!”
>“It’s good at room-temperature!”
>“You once burped the entire alphabet with it despite being the designated-driver. Is that ladylike pony behavior for our daughter?”
>“…Well, if she grows up to play for Rainbow Dash’s team…”
>“Jayne! Regardless of whether she grows up to date human boys, pony girls or a one-legged transgender kangaroo, burping like a field hand is not proper etiquette!”
"Field hand?" Das raysis, yo.

Anyway, holy jeez; it just keeps on going. Despite glossing over roughly a year of this poor mutant's life in the space of a few lines, a significant chunk of text is for some reason dedicated to this long, essentially pointless scene in which she is introduced to caffeine-free soda, burps, and has a tea party with her deranged queermo parents.

After this, they begin teaching her to read and write. Apparently she picks up reading quickly enough, but writing proves a challenge, what with the whole "lack of opposable digits" and all. Eventually, Faggot #1 orders some kind of combination robot arm and speech-recognition tool that (I guess) writes out whatever she dictates to it.

>Scootaloo loved the speech recognition tool, and soon caught up on her writing practice, learning spelling along the way, but it was the headset and arm she really liked. I used the software on the headset to drive the high-end toy robotic arm through a cheap laptop, and Kevin sewed together a saddle bag to hold the battery and laptop on her left side, and the arm on her right. The whole thing buckled on and, after a few halting attempts, she was able to move the arm! Inside of a week she was wearing her new prosthetic arm everywhere (getting into places she never did before!) and having a blast being able to manipulate smaller toys like Legos for the first time.
I have literally no idea what's going on anymore.

>>331417
Presumably the headset is the controller for the robotic arm? How?
Also I thought these faggots were poor. "barely scraping by with ramen" I think was the last thing mentioned about their financial situation.

>>331417

More time passes. They apparently find some kind of home-school pod that will accept cartoon horses (???), and Scoot is enrolled. Things go more or less well for about two years (???), and then, suddenly, the DNA profile of her that they mailed off to some scientific organization or other (???) is analyzed by some scientists or something (???), and the origin of this mystery file (???) is suddenly the subject of widespread scientific inquiry. This is quite literally the best summary of this section that I am able to offer.

>"I don't understand, so she has new DNA, doesn't every animal have different DNA?"
This line is just dumped into the text out of nowhere. Absolutely no clue is given as to who is meant to be speaking here.

>"You guys don't understand; normal DNA is evolved, it changes slowly and randomly from generation to generation, but any change that doesn't kill the animal gets passed on to the next generation. There is no larger plan, just 'did it kill the animal?' yes/no If no then it’s in the offspring." She took a breath and looked around conspiratorially. "This DNA is designed!" she hissed. "We are only beginning to understand it, but there is definitely equine and human DNA in there, and its assembled in a coherent, thought out way. There are several extra chromosomes and big sections of code we have never seen in any other plant or animal. We even found something that looks like a goddamn 'read me' file!"
I'm beginning to think that one or both of the authors might have a few extra chromosomes as well. In any event, what I gather from this jumbled mess of pseudoscience is that Scootaloo was genetically engineered...or...something. I think.

>"We don't know! We can tell its text of some kind but it not in any known language! This is big guys, this would be like someone in 1890 opening the hood of one of the first automobiles and finding the hybrid electric drive train from a 2014 Toyota. We can only write a few lines of basic DNA, and even then it takes enormous effort to make man made code function properly. This isn't a few lines, this is fucking ‘War and Peace,’ it's the Windows 7 operating system of DNA!"
Close your eyes for a moment, and try to imagine an actual human being speaking this paragraph out loud, as part of an actual conversation.

Anyway, I guess the big takeaway from all of this is that their lesbo friend wants them to go public with Scootaloo, because whatever the deal is with her DNA, it amounts to some kind of huge scientific breakthrough that needs to be shared with the world. Or something. I think. Ultimately, they agree to go along with...whatever their lesbo friend has in mind. I guess. Anyway, that's the end of the first chapter.

There is a small author's note at the bottom:
>Author's Note: I've been told by my beta reader that "if 'My Little Dashie' is a Nicholas Sparks novel, what you're doing here is like what'd happen if Isaac Asimov were a brony." So that's what it is, I suppose.
I wouldn't even know where to begin deconstructing everything that is wrong with this statement.

Ch 2: A Slimy Ghost

>I got a job across state lines in the big city, and we moved into modest house on the opposite side of the city.
I'm not sure if the author is being intentionally vague about the setting, but in this case I think a little more detail would help. Even something as simple as what state they are in, or what city they are in proximity to. These characters move around quite a bit, and it's difficult to keep track of where they are supposed to be at any given time. The problem is a bit like what we experienced with FoE: the setting consists of multiple specific locations, but we are given no clues as to where these locations are in relation to each other.

>In this state we could adopt a child, and we soon had the paperwork filled for our adopted daughter Scootaloo.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Which state is this? Where is it in relation to the previous state? Is this the state you went to college in? Are we talking one or two states over, or was this like a cross-country move? Even setting aside bloody obvious questions like "what kind of lunatic state would allow two deranged faggots to legally adopt a horse from another dimension?!?" oh, who the hell am I kidding? We all know it's California, we still need more information than the authors are giving us.

Anyway, it looks like everything they are doing is more or less legal now, so...that's something. I guess.

There is a page break, and in the next scene Mary is showing the three of them an MRI scan she did of Scootaloo's brain. The author makes no attempt at setting a scene or giving us any indication of time and place, but the same can be said for just about every other scene we've witnessed so far. I can't really make hide nor hair of this autism, but I think that, on top of all the other ridiculous ideas we are being expected to swallow, Scootaloo is also a robot. Or something.

>Scootaloo looked puzzled. “Does that mean I’m some kind of Borg pony?”
>Stephanie raised an eyebrow. “You let her watch Star Trek?”
>I smiled as Kevin got down on his knees and made a show of looking Scootaloo over before pronouncing “Nope, you 100% pony. Know how I know?” She shrugged her right arm “Because Borg ponies aren’t TICKLISH!”
Let's all just pause for a moment, and reflect on the sad fact that an actual human being deliberately sat down and typed these words.

Anyway, here is the situation, as far as I can tell. The robo-arm-thingy mentioned in the previous chapter is apparently some kind of medical prosthetic that she can control with her brain. I'm not going to even ask how two poorfags managed to afford this kind of sci-fi technology, because I probably don't want to know the answer. In any case, it looks like Scoot's mutant DNA is somehow causing her brain to fuse with the robot arm. Or something. I think. Seriously; I have no idea what the fuck is going on anymore.

>>331429
>...an actual human being deliberately sat down and typed these words.
>Anyway
you seem to be using those two phrases a lot. It's like you read a chunk, can't decide what to think, read it again, maybe once more, then kinda wave it off with an "uh, anyway"
Are you going to do that for the entire thing? lol

>I'm beginning to think that one or both of the authors might have a few extra chromosomes as well. In any event, what I gather from this jumbled mess of pseudoscience is that Scootaloo was genetically engineered...or...something. I think.
there are quite a few body organs and functions that can be missing and the body would still survive. This author has a serious bone to pick against christianity.

Later on scootaloo makes it to... gradeschool or highschool and the topic of her DNA comes up as being superior because she never gets sicker than the sniffles once every five years or something. I don't exactly remember when, but that is how I remember it.

>>331429
It's hilarious how so many "Scifi Bronies" simply take the iconography of stereotypical scifi stories - DNA tests, people being robots, genetic engineering, scientist characters, omniscient AIs, artificial equestrias, virtual reality Matrix dreamscapes accessed via not brain uploading but by getting a copy of you added to the matrix before you are killed and presumably sent to hell, nanomachines, hurr durr straights bad, hurr durr governments and militaries bad, and so on - and proceed to tell a non-story with it all before calling themselves "The Issac Asimov of brony literature". They have learned nothing from science fiction. They have no great yearning for knowledge or adventure. No desire to raise interesting questions about personhood. They would rather guess at uninteresting answers for the questions out there and insist upon them with their self-insert wish fulfillment fiction. Scootaloo is an artificial life form according to this story because the author felt smart when he typed that. Her DNA contains redundant unused information including a ReadMe file, and at this rate I'm surprised it doesn't also contain the source code for Doom. It is like when Rick and Morty uses science words while ripping off Jurassic Park and other "classic" films. These authors are not doing anything interesting with the scifi genre's creativity, possibilities, and potential. No, they are just taking the iconography of science - big words, robo-arms, DNA - and regurgitating this cumvomit all over a My Little Dashie ripoff.

Authors like this obesely sit upon the shoulders of giants and think themselves intelligent as they shit themselves.

>>331431
>you seem to be using those two phrases a lot. It's like you read a chunk, can't decide what to think, read it again, maybe once more, then kinda wave it off with an "uh, anyway"
>Are you going to do that for the entire thing? lol
I tend to repeat myself a lot, sometimes intentionally for comic effect, and sometimes because I don't realize I've already made the same joke. Let me know if it gets annoying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPBTE0wlZF4 [Embed]

Unfortunately, sometimes a story is bad to the point that there's not much actual writing advice or lit analysis I can actually provide; sometimes all I can do is say 'holy shit this is terrible' and keep moving. This is unfortunately shaping up to be one of those stories so far. However, I've probably read enough at this point that I can provide some deeper notes about how the story is constructed and what the author did wrong, which I will likely go into in the next couple of posts.

>>331392
>This might be off-topic but isn't the Westboro Baptist Church like 100 guys, mostly the extended family of a democrat and their friends?
I don't really know that much about the details of the Westboro Baptist Church; the impression I have is that they are sort of like the Ku Klux Klan at this point. That is to say, they are a small group with very limited membership (probably about half of which consists of undercover Feds reporting on each other) that makes bold public statements but has virtually no widespread public support and no influence within the machinations of government. In other words, a paper tiger that gay activist groups can pretend to treat as a serious threat in order to take real, repressive action against people with far milder views.

A tiny pack of wack-jobs standing on a street corner waving "God Hates Fags" signs poses no tangible threat to homosexuals, but at the same time the image is visually repellent to normies and makes for great propaganda whenever "hate crime" legislation is being debated, or some cake shop is getting sued for politely declining to do business with someone on religious grounds. Basically, the left cries out as it strikes you. As I said, I don't know that much about the church itself, but my assumption is that probably about half of its membership consists of glowies and their informants, and the rest are just dumbass evangelical trailer-trash boomers who have sincere beliefs, but don't understand optics or politics at even the most rudimentary level. Not only do they contribute nothing of value to the debate over homosexuality, they actually hand their enemies the ammunition they need to take them down.

>>331393
>Also, aren't these homosexual characters too similar?
>I heard some writing advice that said characterization works best through contrast.
This is correct. I think in the author's view, the two characters actually do contrast each other: one is a scientifically-minded engineer, and the other is an artsy-fartsy designer. The trouble is he has done basically nothing to develop either of these characters. He's given us reams of backstory about both of them, but as actual characters they're basically just crudely drawn paper dolls that are completely indistinguishable from each other. Again, this story reminds me a lot of Friendship is Optimal in this way. The author gives the reader plenty of information about who his characters are, what their backstories are like, what they do for a living, etc, but they have no actual personalities or behaviors or distinguishing traits that would allow the reader to tell them apart. They're just puppets with different names, who all speak in the same voice.

>>331476
If the author tried harder these gay guys would be one dimensional. The scientist could act like the author's idea of what a scientist is and the artist guy could act like the author's idea of what an artist is. The artsy guy could be the Heart one and the science guy could be the Logic one. Spock and McCoy. Surely he's seen enough Star Trek to rip that off.
"This is not logical," says the logic one. "We should turn this filly in to the government so she can get the care she needs. What if she took otherworldly diseases here with her or dies from the common cold? If we can't send her back to wherever she came from we must give her to those who can take care of her."
"But muh feelings!" Yells the heart one. "We can take care of her! We must be nice parents to this filly and adopt her in secret because the government would surely cut her up on an operating table for science! If the USA could, they would send nukes into Equestria to steal their oil! I don't believe in coincidences, or god, but my vague belief in a replacement deity like fate or luck or the universe clearly chose us to be parents!"
"Your head isn't on straight! We must be smart people!"
"Nothing about me is straight! And we must be people! Ask yourself what Jesus would do!"
"We're gay and we hate Jesus, remember?"
"Oh right. Uh... What would Celestia do?"
He sighs. He looks so massive next to the small faggot. And so weary, next to the hopeful optimism that made him fall in love all those years ago. "Fine! We will adopt the filly. And we will raise her intelligently. Ensuring she eats a balanced breakfast every day while obtaining the optimal amount of exercise. I will buy a treadmill tomorrow, and some exercise videos. We're not walking Scootaloo like a dog at the local park."
"We must also make sure she is free to creatively express herself! Buy all the movie DVDs you can! And buy a lot of paint. Especially pink, my favourite colour, because I am gay!"
"I am also gay. I want to creatively express myself with some white paint. Inside you. Kiss me, faggot!"
and then the manly engineer one chases the girly artsy one upstairs to their gay pink bedroom or whatever while Scootaloo drinks extremely purified water from a dog bowl or something, I don't know any gays but that's probably close enough to how they talk.
Anyway if the author tried harder these characters could be one dimensional. But right now they are zero-dimensional. They all blend together and lack meaningful consistent character traits. Why do so many incompetent authors make this mistake, especially with their original characters? They know Rarity goes "darling" and they know Applejack goes "Yall" and they know Fluttershy goes "um" but they never figure out a meaningfully distinct voice for any of their characters. I'm not asking for One Piece levels of "everyone has a random weird laugh and verbal tic for no reason" but surely, a book can only be improved if you can read a line of dialogue and know exactly who said it without needing the book to tell you.

Plus, I don't like the way this story divides the homos from the town. We are told the town is bad and then they are a background element like drapes.
A character should be introduced to represent the town. The homos interactions with him should reveal their characters. Both homos wish they werent in a town where being gay is illegal but one grumbles in the corner while the other seeks to make it less awful for himself. Perhaps the homos have a straight man (in more ways than one) roommate who likes nascar and beer. And the homo engineer could fix cars at his garage for a living. That garage could be where the heroes get a car during a sick chase scene involving FBI vans. But then the gays save his life or some shit. Then later the whole town finds out about Scootaloo and they want to turn her in but the man whose life was saved says "No, don't do that, these fags saved my life" so they don't. Yeah, that sounds like it would make the homoshit better at being homosexual.
Perhaps if there was a scene where the two gays attend a straight man's party they were invited to. How the town treats them could be revealed. I'm sure audiences would be heartbroken if the guy who tried so hard to get along with everyone ended up with a bucket of fake blood dumped onto his head or some similar piece of high school prom movie shit. If the author tried hard enough to make the audience like the gay couple instead of expecting us to swoon at the sight of them.

I like the phrases you use. It’s a consistency that helps tie everything together throughout your reviews.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gz6iI_mtagI&t=16 [Embed]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rTSngMLbI&t=20 [Embed]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUZihWETS9c&t=12 [Embed]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3NGrD7kbNzA&t=14 [Embed]
[YouTube] Totally Legit Recap: The Beginning of the End (Part 2) Season 9 Episode 2 [Embed]
Just like this guy. It has a style to it.

I changed my mind this story should NOT be gay
because FUCK GAYS
fuck figuring out ways to make the story more effective and the gay characters less annoying
It should be straight.
This tale should focus on a straight male becoming a straight man.
Just a straight man's story focusing on his growth into a father figure for a major pony like Rainbow Dash. We only know who Scootaloo is in relation to the CMCs at this point in the shows life.
We could enjoy watching him go from flabby fag to healthy chad as life with a pony inspires him to give up weed and vidya and booze and masturbation and even move out to the countryside so she can fly in a remote forest and fly low around an empty farmer's field.
That would be better for a Pegasus than living in a cage being fed by faggots in some filthy urban city. Or wherever these fags are. I forget.
And there could be a female human character in the man's life but only through pony can he find the strength he needs to impress her and propose to her, making her his wife. Like Alvin And The Chipmunks only less homosexual and no chipmunks.

Is it right for me to say "This story would be better if it was not homosexual" or would that go against the spirit of the story and the author's desire to write such a toxically homosexual non-story?
The author of this story is a faggot because in this story the homosexuality of the protagonists comes before characterization and plot.
Glim is going to have so much fun with Chatoyance's work. Chatty seems like a true believer in leftist bullshit. Certainly worships vaccines. But hilariously it seems he's another leftist who noticed leftism only works "On spherical cows in a vacuum" as the expression goes, and lost faith in humanity upon realizing humanity will never be as "perfect" as those spherical cows.
If humanity was so perfect that it could survive and thrive together despite the best efforts of leftism's faulty social structures and inherently corrupt government, there would never be a need for any government or social structures. Leftism is weaponized confusion and weaponized misinformation so any who believes in it will naturally be misinformed. No ruler can rule intelligently without a solid understanding of the facts. A retarded ruler just smart enough to understand "to solve a problem I should find someone more qualified to handle this than me and pay him to handle it" would be a better choice than anyone willing to lie to themselves or others for the sake of leftism or pleasing leftists.
It's funny how these smug "futurists" simply fantasize about a "perfect" world where everyone enjoys being unquestionably dominated by the "futurist's" ideology and leaders, and this world can only function if all the issues with humanity (negativity bias, desire to rape, desire to be top dog, hedonic adaption, need for sustenance) and all that the author sees as issues with humanity (race and religion and all ideologies besides the author's) are simply """done away with for being spurious notions""" as a retarded grifter trying to sound smart might put it. What fundamentally separates fantasies about a world of slaves loving its glass and ivory spires under the boot of globalist universalism apart from fantasies about a harem of slaves loving their place as harem slaves in a castle twice the size of America? They're about as realistic as each other.

>>331972
What would be 'right' is for you to not try and establish what would be 'right' on superficially conceptual grounds.
It would be 'right' for you to observe that no matter how bad any of the stories presented are, (you) are unable (as evidenced) to improve the stories in any way with your lazy caricature-laden methods and tropey/cartoon-eqse portrayals that manage to be worse than the source material.
It would be 'right' for you to observe - with exhausting levels of corroboration - that even amidst this cesspool of 'talent' (read: the greater fanf8c community) you are out of your league.
Tl;dr It would be 'right' for you to realize your own incompetence and decline to post.
>inb4 reee, that doesnt improve my writing
To the contrary. Every bit of writing you DON'T do would be an overall improvement.

>>331982
Of all the flavours, you choose to be salty.

>>331983
Because of all the flavors, you chose shitty, and keep subjecting everyone to it no matter how many times you're informed that 'the previous times were not a fluke, its shit'.

>>331984
Have you ever wondered what backflipping feels like?

>>331987
>comepletely ignoring and changing the subject
Anything to avoid having to consciously admit that you're wasting your own life and everyone else's time eh?
You will never be a real author.

>>331988
I ask because I backflipped your mom last night.

>>331990
Really nigger?
After coming out of the gate swinging, full of spite and salt and fury while expecting a response with more effort than "your mom lmao", you're going to pretend I am the one who needs to take YOUR bullshit elsewhere?
Stop blaming me for how you choose to treat me and learn about personal responsibility.
I'm going to filter your posts out in this thread. Maybe that will help this thread get back on topic despite your best efforts. I don't even care if you try to pretend this is some sort of "victory", you're exhausting and I do not value your opinion any more. I wish you were a cool anime rival I could measure myself and my skill growth against, but we don't even work in the same fields.
Keep your hateboner towards me confined to the off-topic thread instead of trying to drag me into your drama.

>>331993
>>>/sp/19372 →
Stop derailing
Filters? Srsly? You think I havent figured out how to get past those? You will never be a real author

>>331972
>Is it right for me to say "This story would be better if it was not homosexual" or would that go against the spirit of the story and the author's desire to write such a toxically homosexual non-story?
Tbh, if Littlepip we're straight, the story would still suck, but her being a man-hating dyke didn't help.

>>332020
Hes talking about current fic, FoE is over and done

>>332031
Whups

>>332020
I think you're right about FOE but where LP's homosexuality was just another calculated piece of bronybait meant to make the story's target audience love her(and nothing about the story's true focus, LP's murderhobo misadventure through a pony-painted shooting gallery, would fundamentally change if the heroine lusted after horsecock instead of horsepussy), the homosexuality in this story is the entire point of the narrative.
My Little Dashie was about a guy adopting a filly Rainbow Dash, not about Filly RD herself because the story focused more on him than her. He was the star of the show and she was a mcguffin that came out of the blue to, just like in the typical crappy animated family film, "turn his life upside-down". But this story is fundamentally about homosexuality because the homosexuality of the two faggot authors comes before anything else.
Before we see how the protagonist men treat each other, and before we see how they treat ponies, we are told they are very gay. The author tries so hard to sell us on the typical oppression-fantasy, no effort goes into the actual story of Scootaloo or any of these one-note cardboard-caricature humans. I don't forsee any of them growing as people or overcoming any significant flaws. I only forsee the author vomiting up a sequence of words about two robots in a world of robots doing what the author thinks is objectively correct for the cardboard cutout of a filly.

>>331429

At this point, I would like to call a brief time out from the story itself, and take a look at how it's written. I haven't been able to give much actual criticism in this thread so far, mainly because this story is so atrociously constructed that I wouldn't even know where to begin. Honestly, this barely even qualifies as a written work of fiction; it has pretty much been pure stream-of-consciousness rambling from the time it began up until the present. But I'll do my best.

One thing probably worth calling attention to is the graceless way the characters have been developed so far. The characters I have termed Faggot #1 and Faggot #2 have not been properly introduced to us at all. We have no meaningful sense of who these people are, what they are like, how they behave, and so forth; the author has, however, supplied us with an ample amount of backstory on the two of them, and seems to regard this as sufficient introduction. The separate infodumps on each character constituted most of the previous chapter.

This is a very common amateur writing pitfall, and it's easier if I explain what's wrong with it by using examples. Here is a sample of Faggot #2's biography from the previous chapter:

>Kevin had been kicked out of his home at age fifteen, and had spent the last years of high school with his adoptive foster parents, Mary Claire Bridget Scott and Ibrahim ben-Salim Ayhan-Scott, who generally went by ‘Claire and Ben.’ The couple had fostered many children over the years, and they welcomed Kevin with open arms. The Irish-Catholic/Turkish-Muslim family1 had earned a sterling reputation of patience and understanding among the social workers and after his previous home life, Kevin soon gratefully accepted them as his parents and they as one of their many sons and daughters, the ‘foster’ being a prefix that tended to just sort of fall off along the way.
Protip: if your text is starting to read like the "early life" section of a wikipedia article, you're doing it wrong. The above blurb would be fine as a character summary for the author's personal notes, but this kind of passage shouldn't appear anywhere in the text itself.

You don't want to burden the reader with biographical trivia about a character before you've even introduced the character to them. Think about how meeting people in real life works. When you first meet someone, that person is a total stranger to you. You know absolutely nothing about them; all you can do is make observations about how they behave, how they appear, what phrases come out of their mouth, and so forth. However, that person didn't just materialize into thin air in front of you; they have lived an entire life up to the point that you met them, and the person standing before you is the sum total of those experiences. Every attitude they hold, every quirk of behavior, and every mannerism they display has an explanation, you just don't know what it is yet.

When writing, it's best to think of your characters as real people that the reader is going to encounter throughout the course of your tale. When you first mention a character, you are introducing the reader to a person whom they have never met. So, how do you introduce them? Do you hand the reader a dossier containing a summary of everything that has happened in your character's life up until that point? That's a little boring, and it's not very believable or realistic; most of us don't have access to that level of information about the various strangers we encounter throughout the day.

When you meet a person for the first time, you know nothing about them, so you just make observations. Sally has a scar over her left eye; David has a weird superstition about crossing bridges; Terry is noticeably fond of the expression "pardon my French." Each of these things has an explanation: Sally had a bicycle accident when she was twelve and cut her forehead; she had to get stitches. David's father died when a bridge he was crossing was washed away during a flood, so he's leery about crossing them. Terry's friend in school used that expression and it stuck. All of these quirks and traits are part of these characters' backstories, but the reader, as a stranger meeting them for the first time, would not be aware of any of it.

Stories are generally told in scenes, and you introduce your characters to the reader by showing them how they behave in different situations. As the story progresses, the reader will gradually acquire the information needed to understand that behavior, and thus the character. Also, you only need to give the reader the pertinent info. If Sally's bicycle accident was a pivotal moment in her life that has bearing on the story, we'll need to learn about that event at some point. However, if it isn't, that scar over her eye can remain a mystery for the entire length of the tale if you want. It's up to you. However, if you give the reader her entire biography up front, it's no fun.

Anyway, where the fuck were we? Oh yeah; Scootaloo is at the doctor's office having her DNA examined, or something.

They give her an MRI, and there is some goofy autism about her wings alternately hurting and not hurting. Eventually, they figure out that the reason for this is some kind of metal she apparently has in her wings (???):

>Stephanie joined us and pulled the door closed “I looks like you are growing some kind of pattern with metal parts in there.” She said as she knelt and stroked a wing. “And metal can heat up in an MRI scanner – its because of the magnets. It doesn’t look like an illness, the pattern is the same in both wings, but until we figure out what is going on I think you and your Daddy get to skip the monthly MRI.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQWksKNrJm0 [Embed]

Seriously though; I'm as confused as you. As far as I can tell, Scootaloo is some kind of genetically modified robot from an alternate dimension. If that isn't where the author is going, then I have no idea where he's going.

>>332623
Author is a faggot for inserting "The fantasy characters are ACKSHUALLY scifi genetically-engineered biomachines created for a specific purpose" headcanons into a story that should consider questions like "What is Scootaloo?" irrelevant compared to questions like "How is Scootaloo?" and "Who are these faggots?" and "How is parenthood going for them?".

>>332623

>An hour and one full body ultrasound later found us herding our little one into the hospital shower. “OOOHHHH! I am a slimy ghooooost!” she wailed as she slid into the shower and I helped her set the water temperature. Kevin waited outside while I wondered about the wisdom of letter her watch Ghostbusters. A passing janitor mopping the floor looked up at Kevin as an enthusiastic rendition of ‘sponge bob’ rang loudly from the shower.
At this point, I am less concerned about reviewing the story, and more concerned about whether or not the authors have gotten the mental help they clearly, desperately need.

>With pressure mounting from Mary, we made some discreet inquires into the only news outlet we felt could safely release the news of our little one to the world – NPR radio.
Liberals, amirite? Also: the acronym NPR stands for "National Public Radio." Calling it "NPR radio" is redundant; basically, you're saying "National Public Radio radio."

Anyway, these two fudge-packing whackadoodles go public with their mutant daughter-pet, and predictable chaos ensues. "Scootaloo" becomes the subject of widespread news coverage and scientific inquiry. So far, this story is shaping up to be some kind of weird crossover between E.T. and My Interracial Gay Dads Gave Me AIDS.

In addition to whatever problems the two of them had before, it seems they now have to also deal with people driving by their house and screaming things at them. To remedy this situation, they hire a group of biker thugs, some kind of gay version of the Hell's Angels I guess, to guard their house for them. I really wish I could say I was making this up, but I assure you that this autism is actually in the text.

>Then next month was a roller coaster ride of publicity, stress and interviews. The days were stress and travel, and one amazed person after another as we traveled to the major television studios on the east and west coasts. In the evenings we spent at the hotels, we tried to keep up some sense of normalcy.
Do these guys just not even have jobs anymore? Or are questions like that even worth asking? Last I remember hearing about it, money was tight and they were having trouble keeping up with their mortgage.

>Keven and I had always been fans of Judy Garlin, and our daughter had grown up around her work, the Wizard of Oz being her favorite movie.
Jesus H. Christ, where to even begin? First of all, Faggot #1 somehow manages to misspell his gay lover's name in his own diary. Second, The Wizard of Oz is the title of a movie, and needs to be italicized. Third, the actress's name is Judy Garland. If you're going to go out of your way to reference an actual person in your text, at least take the fraction of a second required to google it and make sure you spelled their name correctly, ffs.

>She was still little enough to be scared of the flying monkeys, so we fast forwarded through those parts, just aw we did some scary parts in other films, but she had the main song memorized, and the cowardly lion was her very favorite character. Most evenings after a long day of travel we would all wind down to one of her favorite movies; she would hold still so we could un-strap her prosthetic, remover her pickup hat, and then she would climb into her bed for the night with her cowardly lion stuffed animal clutched in her mouth.
Seriously, faggot. Get a spell-checker. Get Grammarly. Get psychiatric help. Get something.

Anyway, this subchapter, which starts off as some rambling autism about bikers and news interviews, now derails into some other kind of rambling autism about a stuffed animal Scootaloo plays with, until eventually, for no apparent reason, it ends in a page break. After that, Scootaloo goes on the Ellen DeGeneres show. I really, really, wish I was making this up.

>The kind lady knew our daughter very well, partly through having mentored a few of the younger newscasters coming up in the business whom we'd already met, and partly because, well, she's Ellen, and I got the impression that she really just is that nice.
This sentence doesn't make any sense. How do either of these things explain how Ellen DeGeneres would already know their daughter? Unless the implication that Scootaloo is now a newscaster, Ellen's having "mentored younger newscasters" has no bearing on whether or not the two of them would have met. That Ellen is Ellen is completely self-explanatory, and her being nice has nothing to do with anything.

>Favorite cartoons (both preferred She-Ra, Princess of Power to Strawberry Shortcake,) favorite foods, and especially favorite movies came up during their conversation.
Stronk, independent wammen like Ellen DeGeneres and (apparently) Scootaloo disdain things that conventionally appeal to girls, and prefer stronk wammen role models like She-Ra. However, if a young cross-dressing boy wants to enjoy Strawberry Shortcake, that is also stronk and independent. The key to being stronk and independent is to carefully and consciously defy whatever stereotypes you imagine you are being held to; whatever you perceive the norm to be, just do the opposite of that and make sure everyone sees you. You must always signal how unique and independent you are, just like everyone else.

Anyway, much like the downy Goodwill cashier we met earlier, Ellen is presented as a noble, pure-hearted character who is able to see past the unconventional in this unconventional family, and just focus on their being a family. Or something. I suspect this is going to be a recurring theme.

>As it happened, Ellen's present for the audience that day was a new make of portable Blu-Ray player suitable for the car (a fine choice, given the demographics who made up her typical audience,)
I'm not sure what this is implying. Who is Ellen's "typical" audience? Are we to assume this mystery demographic spends a lot of time watching Blu-Rays while driving? The author doesn't elaborate.

>>332625
Sometimes I wonder if gays notice the irony in how their persecution delusions clash with the state-capitalist tax-subsidized jewish megacorps with sweatshops full of foreign labour and establishment puppet mainstream media voices.
These faggots got sucked off by the radio. By Ellen DeGenerate. By luck. And when their house got vandalized, they felt police protection wasn't enough so they hired a private militia with nothing better to do. The police had no problem with this. And they had no problem affording this or hotels despite all that bullshit about how they're "so impoverished they have to eat out". Faggots are the first ones to claim they're oppressed by the system but when they feel threatened or disrespectsd they're the first ones to call upon the system's force to get their way. Such shameful herd behaviour, such a dishonest affectation. They don't even have the decency to admit their victims are victims, because they'd rather steal the idea of victimhood and wear it like a trendy hat they can take off at will whenever they want to stop acting like victims of imagined oppression and resume acting like the parasites that infest their anal rings.

>>332630
You will never become a man.

>>332703
He has a point. You don't need to post every thought that pops into your head.

>>332625

>As it happened, Ellen's present for the audience that day was a new make of portable Blu-Ray player suitable for the car (a fine choice, given the demographics who made up her typical audience,) and, since Scootaloo was present, a brand-new copy of the special anniversary edition of 'The Wizard of Oz' to go with it, as well as copies of the original book by L. Frank Baum to go with that for the audience, Scootaloo, and a lucky elementary school somewhere in America.
I don't have any additional comments here; I just wanted to point out the fact that this jumbled stream-of-consciousness word salad is all one sentence. Literally the whole text reads like this so far.

Anyway, the Ellen bit wraps up, and the text segues into yet another anecdote about yet another TV interview. Unlike the warm, friendly Ellen DeGeneres show filmed on the enlightened West Coast, this unnamed program is filmed in the desolate cultural wilderness of the Midwest, home to vile barbarians who say things like this:

>“YOU FAGGOTS ARE GOING TO BURN IN HELL, ALONG WITH THAT GODLESS ORANGE FREAK!”
It's like he plucked the words right out of my head before I could even post them in the comments section.

Anyway, the rest of this goes about as you'd expect. Crazy Republican Stereotype #4357 is hauled off by security, continuing to froth at the mouth about liberals and spaghetti and so forth and so on. Scootaloo, in a moment of pure sadness porn that would probably make even Peen Stroke cringe, breaks down in tears on national TV, asking heartbreaking rhetorical questions like "am I a freak?" and "why does that man hate my daddies?"

At this point, for some reason, the CIA gets involved. The author's rambling, incoherent style makes this next bit a little difficult to decipher, but as far as I can tell, the government is now interested in whatever value Scootaloo might have as a scientific specimen, and is protecting her from the various crazies that (I guess) keep crawling out of the woodwork to hassle this grotesque parody of a family. Scoot now has her own guardian angel in the form of Agent C.A. Tyler.

>An ersatz delivery person with a box of Cowardly Lion dolls had managed to get past studio security, but when Agent Tyler met him at the door of our dressing room with her gun drawn, handcuffed him, had the Lions removed by another agent, frisked the man, background-checked him with someone on the other end of her earpiece and then proceeded to give him a very stern lecture about bringing things to be autographed without requesting clearance first, even if they were for the children on the cancer ward where his residency was underway and what did they teach you oncologists nowadays, really!
Seriously, this is all one sentence.

>We got word over Agent C.A. ('Cassandra, if you must know,') Tyler's earpiece that we were needed in Los Angeles urgently. Scootaloo was on the plane the next morning, surrounded by an extra detail of agents, one of whom made remarkably good coffee and another of whom had enough of T.S. Eliot's cat poems memorized to keep our daughter exceedingly entertained while the inexplicable private jet landed.
Seriously, the whole goddamned book is like this.

Anyway, next, they go back on the Ellen DeGeneres show, this time so Ellen can replay the clip of Wacky Deplorable #8945 shouting about corn muffins or whatever, and give her audience their Two Minutes Hate. After allowing for an appropriate amount of booing and hissing, she informs Scootaloo that it's okay to be different, and then turns the subject to the robo-prosthesis Scoot uses for interactions requiring opposable digits. In spite of the absolute dearth of information the author's given us about what this device is, how it works, or how Faggot #1 was able to procure something so technologically advanced on his shit salary, we nonetheless learn that Ellen has purchased a large number of them from...somewhere. In a gesture of magnanimity comparable to a bored park patron flinging bread crusts at a flock of hungry geese, she announces that she will be handing out these prostheses to children at some cancer ward somewhere. Much like the geese, the crowd begins honking excitedly.

This is basically the end of the chapter.

I don't want to get too sidetracked by politics, but there are a couple of things worth going over here. Obviously, the specific situation this story deals with is preposterous, but I've seen this sort of kabuki theater playing out in real life before.

If I had to come up with a simple working definition of Leftism, I would say it's a thought process that elevates pleasant delusion over reality. On a grand scale, Leftism is basically a collective willful denial of reality: everyone who participates agrees to affirm whatever delusions the other participants believe in, and in return they get to have their own delusions affirmed. Are you a square-jawed, broad-shouldered man in drag? Congratulations; you are now a brave, stunning woman. Are you a vain, neurotic, wine-guzzling cat lady who has lately come to regret some impulsive decisions you made in college? Congratulations; you were "raped." Are you a morbidly obese person frustrated by the consequences of your lifestyle choices? Congratulations; it's everyone else's fault.

The point is, if everyone affirms everyone else's delusions, then everyone gets to believe their fantasy world is real. Everyone's delusion is made real through external confirmation, but if any delusion is denied then the spell is broken and reality sets in. Thus, any time one leftist's delusion is threatened, the other leftists all circle the wagons and come to their defense.

Running out of space, will continue in a new post.

>>332731

What we have in this case is a pair of homosexuals who have renounced their middle-American upbringing, yet still crave a normal family life on some level. Since they can't actually have children, they have chosen to "adopt" a strange alien creature that wandered into their backyard through a wormhole, and raise it as though it were their actual human child.

In and of itself this is...at least understandable on some level, and there is some precedent for it. In principle it's not that different from an unmarried woman adopting a dog as a surrogate for a baby. Though the author hasn't been clear on a lot of the details, I don't get the impression that the two faggots have encountered any significant legal obstacles in "adopting" Scootaloo. Adopting a creature from another dimension is pretty much uncharted waters, and as a general rule, if it hasn't occurred to anyone to pass a law against something, it's legal by default. Thus, the adversary for this couple is less the law, and more societal norms and the potential hostility that others might feel towards their...I'm going to be generous for now and call it a "family." Angry Hillbilly Stereotype #9773 is a good example of this hostility.

However, that guy's outburst is precisely why I find it curious that these two would want to parade their "daughter" around on television in the first place. If all they wanted was to live an ordinary family life, and there is nothing tangibly preventing them from doing so, then why draw unnecessary attention to themselves? I can understand the impulse to share their discovery with the scientific community, but the situation could have been handled discretely; if anything, scientists interested in researching whatever Scootaloo is would probably prefer to keep things quiet until they know more about what they are dealing with. What purpose does dragging Scoot all over the Jerry Springer circuit serve? I don't see how it's beneficial to anyone, from either a family or a scientific perspective; it's just going to complicate everyone's lives unnecessarily. To understand their actions, you have to understand that leftists are people whose sense of happiness depends on having their fantasies externally propped up through mass acceptance.

Objective reality does not require confirmation of itself in order to exist, nor does it alter itself on the basis of what others believe. A person who lives in reality doesn't need to have their worldview externally confirmed. A person who lives in a fantasy, however, needs continuous external affirmation of that fantasy, or else the whole thing starts to unravel. For example, an actual woman does not need to be told that she isn't a man; she just knows, for the same reason she knows that she isn't a moose or a fox or a school bus. A "trans woman," however, needs continuous reassurances of femininity.

In the same way, it's not enough for our two faggots to simply live quietly as a "family" with their mutant outer-space freak daughter. They need others to see what they have, and to acknowledge it as a family. Most importantly, they need whatever theoretical naysayers might exist Christians and Republicans and Nazis, oh my! to be compelled to acknowledge it. Anyone who would question the legitimacy of this family needs to be publicly castigated for their doubt.

This author is not really capable of subtlety or nuance, so it's not that hard to pull this story apart and get at the core of what he's trying to say. Ironically, his themes are much easier to analyze than kkat's, despite his story being objectively worse. So far, the characters (apart from the two faggots and Scootaloo) have been morally evaluated based on how they react to this concept of a "family," and to Scoot herself. The purest and most noble characters are the ones who have no questions or objections at all, and just accept the situation at face value. In this category, we have:

Mary & Stephanie's children:
>I lead them around to the back yard where their son and daughter were romping and playing with our Scootaloo as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

The downy Goodwill clerk:
>It was so strange, but of all the places and people in town, sweet girls like Amy and places like Goodwill were the most understanding.

The recurring theme here is innocence; the two children and the downy girl represent a pure, untainted state of humanity free of adulthood's prejudices.

We also have:

Ellen DeGeneres:
>Instead of the usual “and what is it like to have four legs?” or “Do you like it here with people?” (as if Scootaloo were some kind of alien space pony,) Ms. DeGeneres talked with her exclusively about matters of great cultural importance to little girls.
The significance here is that Ellen, despite being a worldly adult and thus not having the advantage of a child's innocence, is still enlightened enough to see that Scootaloo is a perfectly normal little girl, and to treat her as such.

Mary & Stephanie:
>It took most of the afternoon, but the moms were eventually able to accept what their children had without question.
The two lesbian moms, though less enlightened than their pure children, are still enlightened, "good" adults. As I mentioned earlier, I suspect we will be encountering similar characters at future points in the text.

The key theme here is the fundament of the leftist worldview: that whatever fantasy the leftist adheres to in place of reality is actually reality itself. A false reality (social construct) has been erected by various oppressive forces in order to suppress the truth, and it is up to the forces of good (those enlightened enough to embrace the leftist worldview) to educate and enlighten others. Thus, dragging poor Scoot around to various talk shows is necessary, because they need to show the world that all of this is normal. Scoot is a normal girl, Adam & Steve are a normal married couple, the three of them together constitute a normal family.

>>332730
I get that saying something in my defence would get them pissed at you too but outright agreeing with them and pretending how they choose to treat me is my fault encourages their childish outbursts. They're looking for external validation.
>>332769
How do you think this "Scootaloo on TV" "story arc" could be improved?
I think choosing Scootaloo for this story was a mistake. Laziness on the author's part. If it had been Filly Twilight, it would make sense for her inventions or her magic to make her a celebrity even if she doesn't want to be known for being a horse. But Scootaloo is only a celebrity because of her unusual species, and people only know of her existence because the idiots taking care of her decided to give nerds her DNA and put her on Ellen's show. Nobody seems to be thinking "damn maybe it is a bad idea to expose our daughter to the outside world in an uncontrolled environment, especially the artificial pseudo-reality of a goddamn reality tv show".

>>332773
>How do you think this "Scootaloo on TV" "story arc" could be improved?
The only way anything could be "improved" in this story would be to scrap the whole thing and have the author commited to an institution. There is not one good character, idea, scene or sentence in this story. It's by and for reddit shitlibs, and bad even by that standard.

>>332773
>I get that saying something in my defence would get them pissed at you too but outright agreeing with them and pretending how they choose to treat me is my fault encourages their childish outbursts. They're looking for external validation.
I am neither attacking you nor defending you. I don't care who gets pissed off at me one way or the other; the childish metadrama on this site is completely beneath me as far as I'm concerned. I am, however, getting tired of all of my threads derailing into this same pointless side argument, always revolving around you and your meandering screeds about everything and nothing. My suggestion was meant to be taken completely at face value: you don't need to post every thought that pops into your head. It's good advice, and the fact that you keep hearing it from multiple sources over and over again means it's probably worth listening to.

>I think choosing Scootaloo for this story was a mistake.
The choice of Scootaloo actually hasn't factored into the story that much. The character in this story so far hasn't done anything that uniquely brands her as Scootaloo; you could pretty much swap her out with any other character from the show and it would be the same thing. From what I can gather, she's meant to be at roughly the same mental age as a human four year old right now, so maybe she'll develop into more of a character as the story progresses. Based on what I've seen with the other characters, however, I don't expect her to.

> But Scootaloo is only a celebrity because of her unusual species, and people only know of her existence because the idiots taking care of her decided to give nerds her DNA and put her on Ellen's show. Nobody seems to be thinking "damn maybe it is a bad idea to expose our daughter to the outside world in an uncontrolled environment, especially the artificial pseudo-reality of a goddamn reality tv show".
This somewhat overlaps with what I cover in the post I'm currently writing.

>>332790
Hey!, noob here, am sorry to further interrupt your bread, but...i've seen some of your posts, and they are pretty darn good, i think you are among the best analysts in the fandom.

So, i was wondering if you had time to read my shitty fic, thus far there's only two chapters at the moment.

>>>/mlpol/329330 →
First one

>>>/mlpol/332689 →
n' latest (this one is more relevant i think)

No problems if you don't, but i would truly appreciate if you do give it a shot, and give me some feedback, besides that I have the impression you are a busy poster, so...even if it's slow moving, that's perfectly fine don't worry.

>>332799
Sure, I'll take a look. I can't guarantee a time frame, but I will read it at some point in the relatively near future and let you know what I think.

>>332769

We can immediately see what is absurd about this, namely that if something is normal, you don’t need to point out the fact that it’s normal. The only reason to intentionally call attention to the normalcy of something is if it’s abnormal, and you’re attempting to normalize it. Reality defines itself; fantasy needs to be continuously defined.

Ironically, "normalcy" is one of those few areas where the term "social construct" can be legitimately applied: what's normal in one culture might be abnormal in another. However, the consistent strain in leftism is that it always attempts to normalize whatever is considered abnormal by the mainstream culture, and to create false equivalencies between things that are not in any way equal. In this case, we have a pair of homosexuals trying to prove that their weird stitched-together family-style unit is the same as any "normal" family, and that their "daughter," who is as far as I can tell is some kind of space creature from an alternate dimension, is the same as any "normal" little girl.

Again, the thing to keep in mind is that reality does not require proof of itself; it simply is what it is, and it exists regardless of whether or not humanity perceives or acknowledges it. It still exists even if humans choose to deny it. If Scootaloo really is "just a normal little girl," it shouldn't be necessary to call attention to this fact. If this "family" consisting of two gay men and some kind of weird interdimensional pony creature were really interchangeable with a normal family consisting of a man, a woman, and their biological child, it wouldn't be necessary to point this out.

I'd like to clarify that I'm not taking an ethical stance on the specific issue of Scoot's adoption one way or the other; that's an entirely separate conversation. Do two gay men have a moral right to adopt a cartoon character from an alternate dimension and raise it as though it were their own child? I have no idea, and for the sake of my own sanity I hope it's not an issue that will ever need to be debated in real life. However, to even debate questions like this, you first need to cut through the various false equivalencies that leftism tries to create.

Women and trans-women are not the same thing; if they were, we wouldn't make a distinction between the two in the first place. Scootaloo is not the same thing as a normal human girl; they may share similar qualities, but the fact remains that Scoot is of a completely different species and of completely different origins than a human child. This man-man-horse grouping may function like a family to some degree, but it's not the same thing as a family. Equality between unequal things is a leftist delusion incompatible with reality, any attempt to force equality between unequal things is merely an attempt to enforce this delusion and deny reality, and any debate on these types of subjects needs to begin with an acknowledgement of these simple facts.

Anyway, I'm way the fuck off topic. Where the hell were we in this shitpile anyway? Oh yeah:

Ch 3: Not a Big Chicken

The autism continues. Scootaloo continues to grow and adapt, and the "family" receives free medical care for her from Mary's hospital in exchange for allowing them to conduct research on her.

>We also made it a point to locate a sympathetic city judge who declared Scootaloo to be a full person in the eyes of the law.
When the closest thing to a potential conflict that exists in your story is resolved in a single sentence just three chapters in, it's not exactly a sign that you're on the right track.

>Our daughter’s most lasting memory from this time was probably her trips to see the professional prosthetic engineers who worked with her to design a set of two better stronger arms.
I'm still not exactly clear on what this prosthesis is or how it works. At first it sounded like Faggot #1 bought this thing from somewhere; then it was starting to sound like he built it, or bought and then modified it, or something; now it sounds like she has a team of professional robotics engineers working for her. How is this piss-poor "family" able to afford all of this stuff? Is access to advanced cybernetics technology part of their deal with Mary's hospital?

Anyway, whatever; time passes, Scoot keeps growing up, the publicity seems to die down a bit, and they enroll her in school. Wait a minute, didn't they already enroll her in a school in the previous chapter? How old is this kid supposed to be, anyway? The specific time frame the text gives us is four years, so logically she should be four years old. However, it's not clear if she is developing at the same rate as a human child, nor was it ever made clear how old she was supposed to be when she first passed through the wormhole. I'm probably overanalyzing things a bit, but this is the kind of shit that bugs me.

>As summer began to wane we made arrangements for her to begin attending school for a few hours a day, and after the hubbub had passed, she enrolled for half days in the forth grade.
If you've managed to enroll in the fourth grade but aren't able to spell it, it's not exactly a sign that you're on the right track.

>Of course things did not always go smoothly, but the children were actually more accepting than some of the teachers.
The "le innocent children are more le tolerant than le jaded adults" theme makes yet another appearance.

>It took a few stern talks about fairness, equality, and the average amount of punitive damages awarded for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and/or the free and appropriate education laws, but we were able to establish a supportive school environment for our daughter while she continued her home-schooling in the afternoons.
Condescending lectures about fairness and equality, and the threat of punitive damages: the most powerful weapons in the leftist's arsenal.

>>332832

Aaaand the autism continues. Scootaloo continues going to school. Apparently, she is in the fourth grade now, so I guess she is at roughly the mental level of a ten year old. In addition to this, she takes a trip to the mall and goes swimming. Seriously, it just goes on and on like this.

>“I know we didn’t think Scootaloo would ever fly in our world, but it looks like we were wrong.”
What exactly is the reasoning? In fact, I'm not even sure what's being implied here. Is this saying that they thought Scoot would to be able to fly in her world but not this one? Why? They still don't even know where she came from.

>“Because they don’t have high voltage power lines in Equestria.” I intoned forcefully. I let that sink in; “or guide wires holding up cell phone towers, or gray glass buildings that disappear into the fog on a cloudy day. If she can fly we have to train her how to do so safely. The leading cause of death among young birds isn’t snakes or cats, its immovable objects.”
Again: how do they know any of this? How do they know that there are no power lines in Equestria? How do they even know that Equestria is actually where she's from? So much important shit has been flat-out ignored in this story. Literally all the text has to say about her origins is that she fell through a wormhole one night, and it was established early on that Scoot herself has no memory of her life before this.

Anyway, whatever; they decide to get her flight lessons I guess.

Page break. No matter how ridiculous this story gets, it keeps finding new ways to be even more ridiculous. As it turns out, when they said they were going to get her "flight lessons," they weren't talking about developing her actual innate ability to fly. No, they have signed her up for literal pilot lessons at the damned airport. Scootaloo the pony is now being taught how to fly a single-engine Cessna. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

>“Jayne? Do most parents have to worry about flying skills of their fifth graders?”
She's in fifth grade already? That was fast.

Anyway, even though her fourth birthday was only a few short paragraphs ago, it is now her fifth birthday. So she's...five now? But in fifth grade? How is this meant to be interpreted? Does she age at a faster rate than normal children? Was she already like five years old when she fell through the time portal? Does the deranged faggot who wrote this not understand that school grades don't correspond to the actual number of years a child has lived? This author gives us absolutely zero information about any of this; I have no idea what I'm supposed to be imagining here.

>She had also expressed some concern about being the school’s only nudist, and Kevin was only too happy to teach her how to sew.
literally what?

>On one and a half incomes we wouldn’t normally have been able to afford the flying lessons and rides, but the airport manager had agreed to shoot a few commercials with Scootaloo, and it worked out as a win for everyone.
was the nudity an issue here as well?

>And it was on her birthday that she revealed she could fly! She disappeared from the party just before the cake was to be cut, and we found her arms lying under one of the folding tables. We were just starting to worry when she came sailing down the runway on her own two wings and stumbled to a landing in front of Kevin and I.
so...if she can fly on her own...the purpose of the airplane lessons was...zuh? literally what the fuck is going on right now?!?

Page break again. Now, she is all of a sudden in sixth grade, which I guess in Loony Autismo Faggot Land means she's six years old. She can apparently fly quite well now, and she decides to fly over to a friend's house. However, on the way home, she gets lost in fog. Probably should have taken the Cessna.

Page break yet again. This event is probably the closest thing to an actual scene the author has written so far. Scootaloo is still lost in fog. When she doesn't return home, her "parents" become worried, and call the home of the friend she was visiting. The friend's mother informs them that Scoot has already left, and was planning on flying home. When Adam and Steve look outside and see the fog, they put two and two together.

Page break, and the perspective switches back to Scoot. She has fallen and landed in some kind of field; her wing appears to be broken.

>She spun as she hit and felt herself hurdling through tall grass, where she eventually rolled to a stop, bruised and hurting, in a mud puddle. She lay still for a few minutes trying to catch her breath before she struggled to her feet. “Ow!” She winced as she looked at her right wing which was bent in a direction it was not supposed to bend. Around her was grass over her head as far as she could see… no, not grass, wheat. “I must have landed in a farmers field…”
This description of her surroundings only reminds us that we still don't even know what general region of the country she is supposed to be living in. Are they still living in the same place they were living the last time a house was mentioned? And where was that exactly? We've literally breezed through like six years in the space of a couple of pages here, and we've been given almost no useful information about these characters' lives or circumstances.

>She followed the boarder between the crops for half a mile, then a mile.
She followed the border between the crops.

Anyway, whatever; looks like her wing is broken now, and she is lost and needs to find her way home. She wanders around for awhile, and eventually comes across an old shed with a gutted deer hanging outside sacrebleu!. This frightens her, so she doubles back around until she comes across a farmhouse. Then, suddenly, a pickup truck drives up, and drops off a teenage girl who is apparently the daughter of the farmer. Scoot, who I guess is hiding or something, witnesses a fight between the teen and her parents.

>>332824
That's perfect!, Thanks fren!

It would have been easy for the author to write "Scootaloo's charm and honesty made everyone she interacted warm up to her"
but no
it takes the threat of force to provide the stick and nonsense speeches about what a "tolerant person" Scootalovers are to provide the carrot.
this is a motherfucking power fantasy. A baby wanders into the back yard of two faggots who aren't legally allowed to adopt and they proceed to be such amazing parents to the baby mutant foreigner nonhuman that liberal media is impressed and makes celebrities of them all while their only detractors are cartoonish redneck alien-haters.
The story is focusing more on the newfound importance and "clout" and power of the main leads than actually raising the child as she ages because this fantasy doesn't truly involve any ponies and it never had any real reason to be a FIMfic besides the large target audience.

>>332840

>“I’m lost and need help, but when I saw the deer I thought you might shoot me too.” Scootaloo sniffed. “You just showed me you are good people who care, but I didn’t see that until after your daughter left.”
I'm actually glad that there are very few spoken lines in this story; the dialog is beyond atrocious.

Anyway, the farmer's name is apparently either "Gerald" or "Jerald" (the author uses both spellings in the space of two paragraphs). He seems to be a nice guy who is totally not a murderer at all, and he invites Scootaloo to come down to the basement come inside where it's warm. There is a page break, time skips forward to 1:12 AM, and the story wraps up with Adam & Steve making the trip out to the farm to pick her up. This is literally how the chapter ends.

There is also a small author's note appended:

>Author's Note: If you're interested in learning more about general aviation, or in learning to fly yourself, the Aircraft Owners' and Pilots' Association, or AOPA, is a wonderful resource for beginners, human and pony alike. It's a wonderful way to travel, and can be done much less expensively than most people realize.
Critic's Note: If you're interested in learning more about how to write a book, please consult literally anything other than Our Girl Scootaloo by Cozy Mark IV and some other crazy faggot.

Anyway, fuck. Next chapter.

Ch 4: Silver Spoons

Undaunted by her recent brush with the ground, Scootaloo returns to her flight lessons and eventually gets her pilot's license. I'm still unclear on whether she is supposed to be licensed to fly a plane, to fly with her wings, or both, but at this point I think I'm just going to stop asking questions like this. I probably won't stop, actually, but I at least acknowledge that I really ought to.

>And so off they flew again, this time with her unable to see anything outside the plane. To pass her ‘Instrument Flight Rules’ license she had to be able to fly in total darkness and fog, just like what she got stuck in, and navigate using only the plane’s flight instruments. She persevered though, and with her healing wing an ever-present reminder, the same November afternoon I earned my pilot’s license, she earned her IFR license.
This just raises further questions. Also: if she has to depend on the plane's navigation instruments to get her out of this situation, how is this supposed to help her when she's just flying on her own (ie: without the use of a plane)? What lesson is she supposed to have learned here?

>I took what I was learning along with a lot of self taught aircraft engineering design knowledge to the prosthetics professionals who built Scootaloo’s arms, and working with her we designed a proper flight system/suit.
This may or may not be an answer to the question. Apparently, since Faggot #1 is an engineer of some sort (it's never been clarified what type of engineer he is or what specific type of work he does), he has the knowhow to build some sort of advanced robotic flight suit. Presumably, this suit will be equipped with whatever instrumentation a plane has to assist the pilot in fog or darkness.

Anyway, once again I have no idea what the fuck is supposed to be going on in this story. As far as I can tell, Scootaloo now has some kind of rocket-powered flight suit and special goggles that serve the function of an instrument panel. After this, it's suddenly Christmas do faggots actually celebrate Christmas? I thought lefties called this time period "the holidays", and Faggot #2 gives her a new coat.

Page break. Scootaloo comes home from school inexplicably grumpy one day, and this behavior persists for about three more days. Adam & Steve deduce that she must be having her first period. Do horses even get periods? Does an alternate-dimension-cartoon-pony qualify as a horse? This story is making me ask questions I would never have even thought to ask. That isn't necessarily a good thing. Anyway, they take her to see the two lesbians, who put her on some kind of birth control medication.

Page break. Scoot is now in middle school and has joined the track team.

>Scootaloo could hit 30 mph on the ground, and a track member who could be pulled over for speeding in residential areas was great for moral
Was great for morale.

At this point, we also learn that Scootaloo has become the victim of bullying.

>Kevin talked the whole thing through with Scootaloo until he understood. Most of the clique turned out to be little princesses who loved to be the center of attention, and that seemed to fit the plan he worked out.
I'm sure there is absolutely no projection going on here at all.

Anyway, each of the girls bullying Scoot are anonymously mailed a silver spoon, along with a letter informing them that they have been admitted to something called "the Silver Spoon" club:

>The letter told each recipient how great they were, and how the fancy silver spoon we enclosed symbolized the wealth and fame they would no doubt go on achieve. With Scootaloo’s help we mailed them out gradually over a week so they became a symbol of pride ‘I’ve got mine because I’m special and you’re not’. That alone seemed to help, as the in-fighting it caused proved a temporary distraction, but we weren’t done yet. Each letter directed the recipient to a web site and encouraged them to enter a picture and the phone numbers of friends and people they admired so everyone could learn about their acceptance into the SS club.
>Just as the silver spoon club hit its peak of popularity the text messages went out to everyone the recipients had entered. Each one featured a gif of a girl stirring a bubbling cauldron of brown ooze with a big silver spoon and their picture crudely pasted over the face. The title heading read “Because of her dedication to lies and backstabbing, NAME has been accepted into the Shit Stirrers Club! Congratulations!”
I'm sure there is absolutely no projection going on here at all.

>>333292
Horses do not get periods. Sorry if that was a rhetorical question. FIM hasn't ever included any jokes about ponies being on their period or in heat as far as I'm aware so they're likely realistic in that regard. And there was a joke in the show where a big dog was about to piss on something but didn't so genitalia exists canonically.
Pastebin's copy of this old https://pastebin.com/g4VpEg4f [Embed] "anatomically accurate clop" guide is locked, does anyone on this site have a copy?
Also, birth control medication that prevents healthy periods cannot be healthy. Don't those cause brain damage to the female brain's logic parts? If true how would anyone tell the difference?
Also sending letters and fucking with kids like this and getting their names and faces and other personal info and that of their friends with a fake website designed to trick them sounds sus. Faggot sus.
The leftoids already gloated about their ability to threaten people and schools with the Equally Disabled Act of 1488 or whatever it's called, so this retarded fantasy about "totally getting one over their haters" reads like something retarded a preteen would think up. Even if the kids cannot be sued, the school can, giving teachers a reason to punish bullies before the victim decides to bring a gun to school. But if Scootaloo did bring a gun, it would have to be ergonomically redesigned for horse hooves. Only a retard would give her a robotic mechanism for holding and aiming guns for her instead of redesigning small firearms to suit the equine experience.

>>333296
>birth control medication that prevents healthy periods cannot be healthy. Don't those cause brain damage to the female brain's logic parts
Technically speaking, it hijacks a females hormonal balance, but since women are dominated by hormones, the effect is the same.

>>333292

After the text goes out, informing the friends and acquaintances of the "Silver Spoon Club" that its members (I guess) enjoy stirring feces with spoons, the other shoe suddenly drops. A girl named Brittany, who was one of the girls bullying Scoot, begins self-harming, and at one point attempts suicide. It is subsequently discovered that she was being molested by her stepfather, who was also sending her threatening text messages to try to keep her from talking about it. Scoot now feels bad about the "Shit Stirrers Club" incident which, you will recall, was Faggot #2's brainchild and not Scootaloo's, because apparently this was the incident that sent her over the edge and made her start cutting herself.

Her "parents" sit her down and explain to her that, actually, it was a good thing that the two of them helped her conduct an elaborate ruse in which several middle school girls were duped into posting personal information about themselves on the public internet, so that Scoot could humiliate them in front of their friends and family. The reason for this is that, if she hadn't pushed this particular girl over the edge and made her start cutting herself, it would never have started the chain reaction that eventually led to her stepfather's abuse being discovered. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. The chapter ends abruptly here.

Zoinks, Scoob. Well, let's take a break for a moment and analyze some of this.

There's not much that could be done to improve this story, other than Ctrl-A + Backspace, but I do have a couple of suggestions. For one, this isn't so much a story as it is a rambling series of very short anecdotes, that gives us the broad picture of Scoot's childhood without really going into significant detail about any of it. Most of it is just rambling nonsense, interspersed with the author's own opinions about various social issues, but believe it or not there are actually a couple of gems floating around this steaming cup of diarrhea perhaps a silver spoon could be used to fish them out.

This latest episode, as well as the earlier one in which Scoot gets lost in fog and has to find her way home, could both work as self-contained tales, either as separate short stories or as chapters in a larger work. Let's take a look at both of them.

Scoot's fog-flying mishap can be summarized thusly:

>Scoot has recently learned how to fly
>eager to try out her new abilities, she flies to her friend's house
>by the time she leaves, fog has set in
>she was advised by her flight instructor not to fly in fog, but she is overconfident and wants to try anyway
>she gets lost, spirals out of control, and injures herself
>now lost and injured, she attempts to find her way home on foot
>she ends up at some farmer's house
>the farmer, who seems to be having some domestic troubles of his own, takes her in and treats her injuries
>from here, she is able to contact her "parents" and return home

Here we have a situation where a character embarks on a journey, has an unexpected mishap and a short adventure, eventually makes it home safely, and learns a lesson about accepting her own limitations. There is basically a complete story arc here: there's an exposition, rising action, a climax, falling action and a resolution. Again, this episode would work nicely as either a dedicated chapter, or even as its own short story. As I remarked at the time, it is also the closest thing to an actual scene we've yet witnessed in this rambling clusterfuck.

However, the author doesn't really follow through with the idea. He just sort of rushes through it, gives us the broad strokes, and then moves on to the next autistic anecdote. Also curious is that the author goes to the trouble of introducing three new characters: the farmer, his wife and his daughter, as well as a story thread about some apparent conflict between the farmer and his daughter, and never follows through on it. Gerald/Jerald appears to get angry with his daughter about something, it's revealed that this is an ongoing problem and that the farmer is concerned about it, and then...that's it. We never hear another word about either of them.

This most recent episode about bullying is an even better example:

>Scoot is enjoying her school life, when she is suddenly targeted by a group of bullies
>the ringleader is a girl named Brittany, who is particularly horrible to her
>with the help of her deranged faggot parents, she cooks up a revenge scheme
>the plan goes off without a hitch and embarrasses the bullies
>however, it turns out to have been a bit too successful
>the event drives Brittany over the edge, and she attempts suicide
>Scootaloo now feels batman
>investigation into Brittany's suicide attempt reveals that she was being molested
>Scoot learns that bullies are people too, and that Brittany was probably bullying her as a means of coping with the abuse she was experiencing

Once again, we pretty much have a complete self-contained story arc, that could have been developed into something much better than what is actually in the text. This would work either as a long short story, or if it were part of a larger work like this, it could probably be its own arc spanning at least two or three chapters. However, the author doesn't go into any detail about any of it; instead of giving us the full story and letting us watch events unfold, he simply has Scoot sum up what happened in a couple of paragraphs of clumsy dialogue.

>>333305

Also, I'm inclined to agree with Nigel that it was irresponsible of the faggots to involve themselves in the matter in the way that they did. This sort of crude revenge scheme, appealing to the bullies' elitist instincts by convincing them to join a club and then publicly humiliating them, would be one thing if a kid came up with it, but an adult ought to know better. This story overall seems to be trying to make the case that gays are capable of adopting and raising children, but this display of irresponsible parenting doesn't do much to support this position. Again, this seems like the kind of revenge scheme a kid might cook up on their own; an adult shouldn't be getting involved in this way. If Scoot's "father" wanted to help, the appropriate response would have been for him to contact her teachers or guidance counselors and get involved in that capacity. Alternatively, he could respond by teaching Scoot that dealing with bullies is just an ordinary part of life and that she should learn to fight her own battles. Either way, getting directly involved in a scuffle between children on the same level that a child would is pretty irresponsible behavior imo. Worst case scenario, they could be opening themselves up to be sued or criminally prosecuted.

Also, it's not a good idea from a storytelling perspective. The protagonist here should be Scootaloo, not her parents, so she ought to be the one primarily dealing with the conflict. If I were writing this, I would probably have Scoot initially try to deal with the bullying on her own. She comes up with this scheme to trick the bullies into joining this "Silver Spoon Society" or whatever the fuck, and then embarrasses them once they sign up and provide the required info. Then, when the scheme backfires and this Brittany girl tries to kill herself, Scoot would confess what she did to her "parents" and seek their advice. They would advise her to go to her teachers or counselors, possibly reprimand her for not having done so in the first place, and confess everything. When she does this, it sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Brittany's abuse coming to light, the deed is atoned for, and Scoot learns a valuable lesson.

The problem with the way it's currently structured is that Scoot ultimately learns the wrong lesson. The plot I just described would basically conclude with an afterschool-special-style moral, more or less in line with the values of MLP: bullies are often victims themselves, and it's better to deal with a bully by reaching out to them in friendship, rather than meeting aggression with aggression. It's a bit corny, and not entirely realistic perhaps, but again, it's pretty much in line with the values of the show. In fact, if you subtract all the risque stuff about sexual abuse and self-harm, it could easily be the plot of an actual episode actually, I think it may have even been the plot of an episode.

In the author's version, however, Scoot learns a bad lesson if she learns anything at all, and her parents behave badly without receiving any comeuppance. Scoot is being bullied, she goes to her parents and complains about it, and for whatever the fuck crazy reason they decide the appropriate response is to trick these girls into signing up for this silver-spoon club so they can be humiliated. The stunt prompts this Brittany girl to attempt suicide, and in the course of dealing with this, her counselors uncover the sexual abuse. Faggot #1's justification of his gay lover's actions when everything comes to light is actually worth quoting directly:

>“This is why you need to use what Kevin taught you responsibly. Some people harass and bully because they don’t think or know any better, but for some of them, they're hurting others because they've been hurt so much that hurting is almost all they know how to do. They've been beaten down and victimized for so long, that the only way for them to feel better at all is to hurt someone else. And now you know exactly what you can do with this. You are smarter than a lot of kids your age, and you have to strike a balance; it would be so easy to bully others with what you know now. Alternately you could be a doormat and lose your friends to others who bully...or, you could learn to look at people very closely, try and guess why they're being the way they are, and instead of getting even or just dealing with their nonsense, you can confront them with empathy and show them they aren't alone, and when you need to, get an adult involved.”
This is actually pretty fucked up when you think about it. Faggot #2 really didn't know anything about what was going on; all he knew is that Scoot was being bullied by some classmates. Instead of contacting her teachers, contacting the parents of the students bullying her, or taking any number of other possible actions, he elected to help her exact petty revenge on the bullies themselves.

That Brittany was simply acting out because she was being abused is not something that Faggot #2 could have known in advance, nor could he have known that Scootaloo's actions would ultimately bring this information to light. That everything ultimately turned out okay was more a matter of chance than anything else; things could have just as easily gone south. For instance, what if Brittany wasn't being abused, what if she was just a run of the mill teenage bitch? What if Scoot's prank had still pushed her over the edge, and she'd wound up actually killing herself?

What's essentially happening here is that Faggot #2 told his "daughter" to do something reckless and irresponsible, and by sheer coincidence everything worked out for the best. Now, Faggot #1 is trying to spin this as part of some kind of life lesson. Even sillier is that he admonishes her to use "what Kevin taught" her "responsibly." What exactly is she supposed to learn here? That any reckless action is justified as long as everything works out okay in the end?

This is all part of the fantasy, and that's really fucked up.
While some bullies are undoubtedly driven by their own personal inadequacy or a tragic home life or both, the idea that they are all driven by this is pure leftist copium.
After the faggot gets mocked for his faggotry he fantasizes about each boy that hurt him or his feelings getting beaten by secretly-alcoholic parents or raped by strangers or suffering in some other way, and he feels better. He fantasizes about them "failing at life" and becoming drug addicts or worse(in the faggot's eyes), mcdonalds employees.
This isn't just a story arc about Scootaloo going to school.
It's a childish fantasy about Scootaloo "winning" high school.
The fantasy that if you turned around and bullied your bully he or she would "break" instantly and attempt suicide is part of the fantasy.
Being the most important child in a thousand mile radius while getting top grades in all her classes by being a hyperintelligent alien while outsmarting and humiliating all her high-school bullies so hard that the leader attempts highschool seppuku. It's all part of the fantasy.
The faggoted self-inserts help the child Scootaloo with this childish and retarded prank because being responsible parents who tell teachers to handle shit isn't part of the bitter high-schooler fantasy, "winning at high school" is. Scootaloo humiliates a girl so hard she tries to kill herself over a really weak prank nobody should have fallen for in the first place or tried in the first place, and Scootaloo is told what the bully did as a result of Scootaloo's actions isn't her fault.
Libtardism is the result of arrested mental, emotional, and personal development. It takes a faggoted failure to fall for lies anyone can debunk with basic maths like the six gorrillion jewish fauxlocaust, simple observation like the lie that niggers are equal to humans, and the simple logic needed to see through the lie of government-given "equality" of outcome.
This retarded narcissist power fantasy has no relevance to ponyland and no reason to be a ponyfic. Children wrote "Sonic The Hedgehog at High School" fiction more mature than this.

>>333309

All in all this story isn't really fiction in any proper sense of the word so far; it's basically just wish-fulfillment writing. The biggest indicator of this is that, thus far, the author has made absolutely no effort to explain where Scootaloo came from or how she made it to our world, nor has he indicated that it's a mystery he intends to resolve later. This suggests that this isn't meant to be a story about anything in particular; the author just had some kind of autismo fantasy about raising Scootaloo as a daughter and decided to write it out. Practical matters like where Scoot came from and how she made it here just stand in the way of the fantasy, so the author either papers over them quickly or just flat out ignores them.

Other than some token sputtering from the two lesbians earlier, every character in this story has pretty much just accepted Scoot's existence without question, and there doesn't seem to have been much serious controversy over her legal adoption by two homosexuals of no biological relation to her. I actually find the latter bit surprising, as one might expect that a story advocating for gay adoption rights would want to ham up the controversy and the adoption struggle as much as possible. However, again, I'm not actually sure the author even put that much thought into this; I suspect this was just a fantasy of his that he felt like writing out.

In and of itself there's nothing wrong with jotting out your fantasies as an exercise or for fun, though I don't recommend publishing whatever you write as it's not likely to be interesting to anyone besides you. I remember when I was a kid I wrote out this long-running story where the characters from Darkwing Duck moved into the vacant house down the street from my family, and I would go on adventures with them and shit. However, the key difference between this author and me is that I was like ten when I was thinking shit like this up.

Anyway, whatever; let's move on to the next chapter. I think I'm going to try to move a little more quickly through the summary portion of this, since there doesn't seem to be much actual story content and we've got a total of 21 chapters to get through. If I come across something that's worth analyzing we can stop and spend some time on it.

Ch 5: Our Girl is Growing Up

Scoot continues with her flight training, and eventually attracts the attention of NASA, who wants to conduct tests on her.

>Over a lavish lunch she asked one of the lead researchers what they expected to get out of all these tests.
>“Well frankly Ms Scootaloo, we want to know how you can fly. There is no question that you can, but at the same time, there is no way aerodynamics alone could ever lift you.”
>“What are you talking about? I’m a Pegasus, of course I can fly, why shouldn’t I be able to?”
>He seemed unsure if he should keep going, but decided to forge ahead. “It’s a function of your weight and the size of your wings. You are not yet full-grown, and already weigh 210 lbs, yet your wing area is smaller than the world’s biggest birds, the heaviest of which is only 40 lbs and has a 9 ft wingspan. So you are lifting more than 5 times as much weight, and your wing span is only about 4 ft max, and less than half the area.
More evidence that this is not a serious writing project. Is there any story-relevant reason to devote page space to pointless speculation about the physics of pegasus flight? No, but this is the kind of autismo conversation topic that spurs massive multi-thread discussions online. The author is just using fiction as a vehicle for sharing his personal theories about how it all works, and while this might be interesting to a certain type of autist, it's not really something the reader needs to know in order to follow the story.

Put another way, if you're writing a story set in the Star Trek universe, all the reader really needs to know about space flight in your world is that warp engines make the ship go fast, and they are powered by dilithium crystals. Star Trek nerds have spent more than half a century trying to work out how this fictional technology might actually work, and you, as an enthusiastic fan, might be tempted to dump your own 700 page dissertation on the subject into the text of your fanfic. Personally, though, I'd advise against it. Keep your story focused on what it's actually about; save the nerdy techno-babble for the chat rooms or whatever the kids are using to talk about Star Trek these days.

Anyway, Scoot goes to NASA and they run some tests on her. Tl;dr, they find out that her flight ability has something to do with magnets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GyVx28R9-s [Embed]

>Scootaloo gave her a hard look and she applogied.
Seriously; what the fuck do people in this fandom have against using spellcheckers? When you type up your story, skim over each chapter before posting it. See those little red lines the computer draws under certain words? Those are meant to call your attention to possible spelling errors. Just take the extra five seconds to double-check them and make sure you spelled the word correctly; it's not hard. Jesus H. Christ.

ANYWAY, they also find out that Scoot's weird DNA is currently being used by medical researchers to cure diseases, or something.

There is a page break, and then we rejoin Scoot and her fag parents in an undetermined location, at an undetermined time, being shown some kind of video by some government researchers or something, which was taken at an undetermined time for an undetermined reason. Turns out they somehow managed to catch another time portal on tape, and the video shows another pony entering our universe. In spite of the established fact that Scoot has no knowledge or memory of the world she came from, she somehow instantly identifies this unknown pony as Rainbow Dash, and demands that everyone go and search for her.

>>333443

Believe it or not, this shit gets even more preposterous. As it turns out, the video of Rainbow Dash is actually from a different universe. For the sake of my own sanity, I’m not even going to bother asking how the government obtained a video taken in an alternate universe. The key takeaway here is that Rainbow Dash materialized in alternate-universe Detroit, which probably means that she was kidnapped and sold for crack within minutes of her arrival.

>What we can say with some certainty is that Ms Scootaloo is not one of a kind: rather she is a member of a species, and that what we thought was just a children's cartoon has some basis in fact.
The evidence just keeps piling up. Literally the only reason this text exists is because some deranged faggot wanted to write out his autismo fantasy about Equestria being a real place that exists in the multiverse somewhere. Cozy Mark IV owes us all an applogie for even wasting our time with this.

Anyway, tl;dr Equestria is real, and for some reason ponies from that universe are entering other universes through time portals.

Page break. We learn that Scootaloo has a crush on some throwaway character named Brad. As if this story weren't cringe enough already, we are now forced to sit through a long drawn-out conversation about safe sex, complete with a song about IUDs. I'm not even making this up. Tl;dr, they talk about masturbation and order her a vibrator and some condoms over the internet. Yes, all of this autism is actually in the text.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O16sRIaIW3c [Embed]

Anyway, they follow up the big 'sex' talk with the big 'drugs' talk. Even though Scootaloo expresses no interest in using drugs, the two butt-buddies posing as her parental figures give her some kind of hippie drug manual from the 1970s and encourage her to think about experimenting with drugs when she gets older.

Page break. Scootaloo attends some kind of NASA demonstration, and gives a speech in which she reveals that Rainbow Dash is actually alive in an alternate dimension somewhere. Apparently, this information was supposed to be top secret classified government info, and she wasn't supposed to blab it to the press, but other than getting a grumpy phone call from the Department of Defense, she suffers no consequences. Yes, this autism is actually in the text. As an aside, it also sounds like doctors are now using her DNA to cure cancer, or something.

Page break. The "family" rents an airplane and flies to Oshkosh b'gosh for some reason or other. They talk about buying an airplane of their own, and the two fags make out in front of everyone. Literally nothing else happens.

Page break. They attend some sort of airshow that Scoot is performing in. Nothing else happens.

The chapter ends here. One might expect that a chapter called "Our Girl is Growing Up" might focus on the character's growing pains: all of the little triumphs and heartbreaks and ups and downs that make adolescence the tumultuous period that it is. However, it seems that the author had other ideas. Scootaloo learns proper condom and drug use, and I guess as far as Cozy Mark IV is concerned, that's about all that growing up entails. The remainder of the chapter is taken up by random sperging about physics and airplanes.

For some reason, the author felt it was important to include a long author's note at the end of the text. It mostly expands upon the earlier discussion about drugs what appears in the text is basically just a thinly-veiled lecture on his own views, and there's some more shit about airplanes in there as well. I have no idea why he felt it was necessary to include this.

Ch 6: That Poor Table

>Susan spoke up: “So, who else is going to try out for cheerleading in the fall?”
Who is Susan? This character has not been introduced.

>“I hope they pick me for the squad,” Melissa replied wistfully.
Who is Melissa? This character has not been introduced either.

Ctrl-F reveals that the names "Susan" and "Melissa" do not appear anywhere in the text prior to this chapter, yet they are being treated like characters we should know (technically, Melissa is mentioned once in Chapter 1, but she is only namedropped by Scootaloo during the prologue; I have no idea if this is even the same character). In the previous chapter, we are told that a couple of nameless friends of Scoot's accompanied the family on their trip to Oshkosh; we can probably assume that these two characters are named Susan and Melissa.

Anyway, the conversation goes on for awhile. The author doesn't bother to set scenes any more than he bothers to introduce important characters, so it's hard to tell what's going on exactly, but from what I gather they are all flying in Scootaloo's plane while they are talking. I don't know if the two faggots are on board or not. I think technically they would have to be, since as far as I'm aware the narration is still supposed to be taken from Faggot #1's journal.

>Melenie shook her head.
>Josie spoke up from the back.
More characters whose names have never been mentioned. Apparently, there are at least four teenage girls riding in Scootaloo's single-engine Cessna.

Anyway, whatever; the tl;dr is that Scootaloo and her friends plan on going out for cheerleading.

Page break. Scootaloo's fudge-packing legal guardians, who in the last chapter ordered condoms and sex toys for her over the internet and encouraged her to drop acid, apparently draw some sort of line at Scoot's wanting to be a cheerleader. The reasons seem like more projection from the author: it's "objectifying," and the football jocks are icky and mean.

Page break. Later that night, the two fags talk about their daughter's desire to try out for cheerleading as though it were some kind of serious issue requiring debate.

Page break. The two fags announce that they have reached a compromise: Scoot can be a cheerleader if she works harder at academics. Well, I'm glad we got that all sorted out.

>>333468

Page break. It's apparently summer now. Scoot does homeschooling, because I guess that was part of the deal with her becoming a cheerleader, and learns how to work on engines in her spare time. While performing some awkward work on their car, Scoot has an idea: what if she had the same scientists who designed her robot arms design her a robot tentacle? I'm still not 100% clear on who exactly designed those arms, how they were paid for, or how much advanced technology is supposed to exist in this setting, but at this point I can't really be fucked to care. I officially give up on trying to take this seriously as a critique; from here on out I'm just going to shitpost the living fuck out of this incredibly silly book.

>We let Scootaloo explain the idea to the engineers at the prosthetic design company, and I swear, their eyes lit up with glee.
A supple young filly walks into a room full of lonely nerds and says she wants them to custom design a robotic tentacle for her, along with some "special attachments" she can use. Gee, what could they possibly find exciting about that?

Anyway, they build her the damn robo-tentacle.

Page break. It seems that the one-off farmer character from a couple of chapters ago is back, and his name is officially confirmed to be Gerald, not Jerald. He calls them up one day, because apparently they stayed in touch, and tells them that he wants Scootaloo to help him steal the Declaration of Independence track down some thieves that stole some diesel fuel from him.

Scoot agrees, and she and her friends Josie and Susan, who I guess are supposed to be important characters now, head out to the farm. I'm not entirely clear what the fuck is going on; apparently these thieves stole the fuel from a big tank that Gerald has, and Scoot's job is to (I guess) just hang around the farm indefinitely until they show up and try it again. Then, she is supposed to fly after them and tell the police where they go. Or something.

Anyway, she and her friends pass the time by learning to ride horses. The author isn't any clearer about how or why Scootaloo would ride a horse than he was about how or why she would fly an airplane, but I can't imagine anyone reading this actually cares. She's apparently ridden a bicycle (somehow), too. A few days later, for some reason, there is a flood, but nothing really comes out of it.

>Scootaloo couldn't eat the meat, but the warm feeling of comradely and belonging seemed to make everything okay.
"Camaraderie" is the word the author is thinking of here.

Eventually, the stupid alarm goes off, and Scootaloo flies off to chase the stupid thieves as they abscond with some more of the stupid farmer's stupid diesel fuel. Tl;dr, the thieves are caught and the day is saved, thanks to the Powerpuff Girls some wacky cartoon horse and a couple of her loony friends. As a side note, much like the two previous episodes I mentioned, this bit also could probably be spun into a proper story, if the author ever felt like wiping the spooge off of his chin and learning to write properly.

Page break. Scootaloo learns how to drive, and is advised not to drive drunk.

Page break. I guess summer is over now, and Scoot goes back to school. She tests out of 8th grade into 9th, and makes the cheerleading squad. There is some minor autism over whether or not Scootaloo should be allowed to use her flight powers in cheerleading, because it might not be fair to the other squads and yada yada yada blah blah who cares. The teacher decides to play it safe and train her in standard non-flying cheerleader moves, and Scoot gets assblasted about it, and yada yada yada blah blah eat the pudding.

Page break. Time once again lurches forward by some preposterously huge undefined increment. It has now been weeks and/or months. Presumably the business with the cheer squad got settled somehow, because we don't hear anything more about it.

>She also brought home her first boyfriend for us to meet: Steve Brown.
Whatever happened to that Brad kid, anyway? Last we heard she was ordering condoms over the internet; I was led to believe things were getting pretty serious.

Well, unfortunately, we never get to find out what happened to Brad, and it would seem that Steve ain't so such-a-much either, because they are literally broken up a fucking paragraph later. The rest of the segment is just a conversation between Scoot and her friends, where they discuss what happened: apparently her boyfriend wanted to put a saddle on her and ride her like a little horsie. It wasn't even sexual, he just wanted to literally ride around on her. I almost feel bad for the guy; that was probably the most reasonable action I've seen anyone take in this story so far.

Anyway, page break. Scoot has her first pep rally, and ends up breaking her arm during some kind of botched cheerleading stunt. Not her actual arm, one of her ridiculous robot arms. That's about all that happens. And, once again, the chapter just sort of ends without really concluding anything (not that there was really anything to conclude; this whole thing is just one long rambling mess of pure autism).

Ch 7: Unnatural

Scoot now has her first cheer competition. However, she learns that she is going to be disqualified because of her hair color. Not her prosthetic robot arms, not her wings, not the fact that she is a goddamn horse for crying out loud, no. She is disqualified because her hair is fucking purple, and that isn't allowed. So, they dye her hair some other fucking color. Or at least they try to, but it won't dye for some reason, so it looks like Scoot is out of luck. Then, they figure out a solution: if the whole team dyes their hair purple, it bypasses the restriction because instead of being an "unnatural color," the dye is part of the uniform. It turns out that this is technically correct, which is of course the best kind of correct, and Scoot is able to compete.

>>333481

This cheer competition scene is pretty ridiculous and probably merits some quick comments.

The whole thing plays out like the plot of some cornball 1980s teen movie, where the heroes are a team of plucky young underdogs and the villain is some stuffy competition judge. For reasons that the author never even makes an effort to explain but I'm sure have something to do with bigotry or prejudice or whatever, this judge seems to have a bone to pick with Scoot's team specifically, and uses an obscure rule to keep Scoot from competing. As hokey as this premise is, the author could probably make it work if he wanted to; this is yet another episode that could probably be drawn out over a couple of chapters and turned into a legitimate story arc.

Here's the part where it starts getting ridiculous, though. The precedent that allows them to incorporate an otherwise-forbidden hairstyle by making it a part of their uniform was set in a previous year by a team called the Barracudas. The situation there was that one of the girls had cancer, and thus had a bald head. The same judge apparently disqualified their team because "shaved heads" were considered an unnatural hairstyle.

This is just several shades too silly to be credible. For one thing, no middle school cheerleading judge in his right mind is going to disqualify a girl with cancer for having no hair; that's just retarded. The backlash for something like that would be out of this world; the guy would lose his job for a stunt like that. Second, cancer patients lose their hair as a side effect of chemotherapy, which is a very draining and debilitating thing to go through. Cheerleading is a physically demanding sport, so it's highly unlikely that a cancer patient who is at the hair-loss stage of a chemo treatment is going to be physically well enough to even compete in the first place. Third, if it was really that big a deal, couldn't the bitch just put on a wig? Most chemo patients, especially females, tend to be kind of self-conscious about their hair loss, and it stands to reason that this would go double for a middle school girl.

This whole episode is just more silly projection from the author. Le justice, and le celebration of le differences, and le standing up to le prejudice, and so forth and so on. Honestly, shit like this is why everyone hates SJWs. Overcoming actual adversity is one thing, but when you have to go around seeking out adversity, or worse yet manufacturing it, just so you can be seen standing up to it, its just a bridge too far.

Anyway, whatever; their team competes. They don't make it to state, but they place or something. Also, if anyone cares, it turns out that cancer girl from the Barracudas is one of the patients whose life was saved by whatever kind of wacky treatments science has managed to create out of Scoot's DNA. So, it looks like she gets to stand up to adversity and not die. Good for her; if that doesn't justify a Diet Coke break, then I don't know what does.

Page break. On top of all the robotic tentacles and whatever other wacky shit they have, it seems this sick parody of a family managed to build their own private aircraft on their spare time. They use it to fly around and attend comic book conventions and other soy-grade activities.

A paragraph later, Scoot is suddenly in tenth grade. In addition to her normal course load, she signs up for some college-level courses and continues with her cheerleading. It is around this time that we also learn that Scootaloo is apparently made out of nanobots, or something equally autistic. Also, it turns out that she was biologically engineered, and comes from the future in an alternate-reality timeline. The author goes off on several tangents here in which he explains how this might be possible. None are really worth going into.

>"Sorry, I was just saying that without millions of years of evolution to work out the bugs, the synthetic cells in your body act as an intermediary. Most of your systems can work without them... for a while, but when we removed them in the laboratory, problems soon show up. Cells attack each other, bones and muscle grow where they shouldn't -somehow your synthetic biology holds all your systems together, and it looks like its... programmable. Like whoever built your species gave it their best shot, and once they had a working Pony they fixed future problems by programing the synthetic cells instead of doing a complete redesign of your DNA. It would be like the difference between sending a mechanic to fix a car versus tearing the car down to its individual nuts and bolts every time they found a problem."
"And then, *SNORTS*, the dilithium crystals harness the power of cognitive radiation from the sun, *COUGHS*, and when this is ionized in a hydraulic radiation chamber, *CLEARS THROAT*, the positively-charged neutrons form a dense field, *PUSHES UP NERD GLASSES*, which envelops the ship, *PUFFS ALBUTEROL INHALER*, and allows warp speed travel at a factor of 1.7 million nanometers per second..."

Nobody fucking cares about your troll-science explanations for your autismo headcanons. Just tell the story, you deranged faggot. Anyway, this conversation goes on for like forty forevers, and most of it is just more of the same.

>More than a million people around the world owe their lives to treatments derived from you, and its continually impressive to me that someone whose work has healed more sick people than Jesus did in his lifetime still lives such a normal life.
You just couldn't resist taking that little extra swipe at Jesus, could you?

Anyway, as a result of all this autism, Scootaloo decides that she wants to be a doctor when she grows up.

>>333482
This story doesn't even have good pseudoscientific explanations.
Good stories only have them when they're necessary for understanding something that comes later. If Rainbow Dash wins a race due to Thermals, explaining them before the climax instead of during it helps the pacing.

An enjoyable splurge of pseudoscientific sperging has enough basis in reality to be understandable. It's like showing your work to prove you did your research on topics relevant to the story. So you can look at it and say "Yeah, it makes sense for this planet's sky to be that colour because instead of Chlorofuck plants here rely on Cumassholium to photosynthesize" or "Oh so in this setting Ghastly are not the vengeful spirits of dead men but retarded bats that coat themselves in hallucinogenic fart gas, that raises fewer questions about the afterlife" or "Yeah that sure is a good explanation for what the fuck Chargestone Cave is supposed to be. Naturally forming crystals similar to batteries, electric coral in the lakes, and electric algae attracting electric spiders? I like it."

But this right here is pure fantasy. Alien bioengineered horses with nanomachines? There is no science here to appreciate. This isn't hard scifi or soft scifi, this is a fantasy story wearing scifi's underwear on its head.

You can speculate on the environmental pressures that could cause an alternate universe's canines to become nocturnal and develop venomous fangs and gigantism, making them pack animals and mounts for battle. But a horse that could be chlorokinetic or horned and psychic or winged and capable of flight despite being over 200 pounds? That's too alien for real-world science to have anything to say on the matter.

If it's necessary to explain how Scootaloo flies just get this over with ASAP and say "Ponies are naturally psychic, it manifests differently depending on pony race. Unicorns make improbable but possible things happen through willpower and Earth Ponies stimulate plant growth. Pegasi levitate themselves freely via their own willpower and their tiny useless baby wings only move as if they were lifting the horse due to bad habits."

It's Battle Saddles all over again. That story dedicated too many words to pointlessly overexplaining the functions of something that never mattered and never needed explaining too. If Kkat juat stated the ponies use Battle Saddles without explaining exactly how they work we'd be free to speculate on better designs. This story's magnetic pegasi are HOMOSEXUAL.

>>333482

>It was a warm March evening and Scootaloo was helping Christina with Chemistry 101 at the kitchen table when we heard the booming of an overblown car stereo. The car pulled to a stop outside and a moment latter Christina's phone rang.
Christina is apparently another of Scootaloo's friends. Her name was first mentioned at the end of Chapter 5. Like all of Scoot's other friends, we know absolutely nothing about her. Also, it should be "later," not "latter."

"Hello?... Brad, calm down... I'm kind of busy just now... Okay! Calm down, I'll be right out." She finished in a frustrated tone.
Brad? Wasn't that the guy Scootaloo was dating a couple of chapters ago? So...he's dating her friend Christina now? Whoever that is?

>Scootaloo looked nervous as Christina got up from the table. "Its my boyfriend, I'll be back in a minute."
Yep, that's what it sounds like.

One of the largest of this story's many problems is that it contains a lot of characters, almost none of whom have any meaningful roles or any distinguishing features besides their names. Scootaloo has any number of friends who seem to wink in and out of the story like ghosts, and we are never even given the most basic information about any of them. Even the main characters offer us very little to distinguish them from each other. Scootaloo herself has very little genuine presence in this story, even though it revolves around her. She bears little resemblance to her counterpart in the cartoon show (apart from her physical appearance), and the author hasn't really bothered to give her much of a personality or any distinguishing characteristics, beyond that she apparently likes airplanes and cheerleading. The two daddies, as well as the two lesbians who help the family out from time to time, are basically just paper dolls with names and occupations attached; ditto for most of the other semi-important recurring characters. Everyone else is just a name attached to absolutely nothing.

If a character isn't particularly important, or is only going to appear once in the entire story, it's okay to just gloss over them and give the reader whatever barebones information they need about this person in order to understand the scene. Here are some examples:

>Jeff was a tall, muscular boy with a cruel-looking smile.
>Amanda was a buxom young strumpet, who had a strange way of getting people to do whatever she wanted.
>Cozy Mark IV had little talent as a writer, but he could deepthroat an entire eggplant in four seconds flat.
And so on.

When you have multiple characters who make multiple appearances, and you don't give the reader any information about them besides their names, it can get very confusing. Is "Christina" in this scene any different than "Susan" or "Josie" or any of the other faceless girlfriends that orbit around Scootaloo? If so, what sets her apart? How does Scoot know her? Is she a friend from cheerleading, did they meet in a class, or is this someone she knows from outside of school? What does she look like? Is she blonde, brunette, a redhead, what? Does she have long hair or short? Is she fat, thin, average sized? How big are her tits? We don't need to know literally everything about these characters, but it would help if we had something more to go on than just a name.

When you start recycling names between faceless throwaway characters, it gets even more confusing. This Brad guy is a perfect example. "Brad" is a common enough name, so are we talking about the same Brad who appeared earlier in the story, the one Scoot was (presumably) thinking about giving her virginity to? Or is this a completely different Brad? We don't know, because the author has given us absolutely fuck-all to go on.

Anyway, whatever. It looks like "Christina" is planning on breaking up with "Brad," and he doesn't seem to be taking it very well.

>We drew the curtains back and could see him yelling and waving his arms as Christina stood her ground, arms crossed. I looked at Kevin and he nodded. We both walked slowly and deliberately out to where they were arguing and took up positions on each side of Christina, and this seemed to bring 'Brad' back to reality.
Don't mess with Scootaloo's two daddies; they know all the tough-guy dialogue from West Side Story by heart.

Anyway, nothing really comes out of this. Christina tells Brad that it's over, and Faggot #1 offers him some comforting platitudes to soothe his broken heart. None of it really means anything, since again, we have no idea who either of these characters even are, and know absolutely nothing about their situation beyond that they were dating each other and now they're not anymore.

Once again, the chapter just sort of ends abruptly without resolving anything.

As usual, there is an Author's Note:

>There are some words and ways of thinking that are unproductive at best and integral to pseudoscience and hate speech at worst. When you hear words like 'Natural' take a moment to carefully examine the message being delivered and the motives of the person delivering it.
The chapter title, "Unnatural," suggests that the focus of this chapter was meant to be the controversy over Scootaloo's hair at the cheerleading competition earlier. Presumably, the message here is that it's okay to be different, bee yourself, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and a slew of other standard lefty platitudes about identity and self-expression. As I observed earlier, the author could have probably taken the arc he set up and spun it into a decent enough story illustrating this point, but he couldn't be bothered to, so it's moot.

As to "pseudoscience," if he's concerned about that, he should consider culling some of his ridiculous troll physics about Scootaloo's flight powers, since it adds nothing of value to his story.

As to "hate speech," I would like to add the following comments:
>Fuck niggers
>Fuck kikes
>Fuck spics
>Fuck faggots
and
>Fuck jannies

That is all.

>>333578

Ch 8: Cold Steel, Zombies and Girl Scouts

The chapter opens with an anecdote about Scootaloo visiting the gynecologist, so it's already shaping up to be a great read. Her usual gynecologist isn't there that day, so she has some strange guy filling in. There is negative chemistry between them right off the bat; they have a rather silly and pointless argument over what sort of speculum he ought to use, and Scoot demands to see a different doctor. From here there is a lot of back and forth between various characters. Very few of the lines are attributed so it's difficult to tell who is speaking, we don't really know how many characters are supposed to be in the room to begin with, and all of the characters in this story sound exactly the same anyway, so all in all it's a little hard to tell what is going on.

Anyway, Scootaloo is assblasted at the visiting doctor because he isn't being nice to her. She demands to see another gynecologist, and also demands that the first gynecologist be strapped into a gynecology table so he can see what it feels like to have a gynecology exam. At least, I think that's what happens. I'm honestly not sure what the fuck is supposed to be going on here, or why the author felt like including this bizarre scene. In any event, I'm fairly certain that the doctor ends up having a stainless steel speculum shoved up his ass at one point, so I'm assuming this is probably just some kind of gay fantasy for the author.

Anyway, whatever. The scene ends abruptly, and a paragraph later we learn that Scootaloo has joined the Girl Scouts. Her friends tell her about an event they attended, and she thinks it sounds like fun, so at their insistence she signs up.

Her first scouting event involves a hike in the wilderness. She shows up late, but since she is flying, she is able to find the troupe when some of the girls use their compact mirrors to reflect sunlight and signal to her.

>Scootaloo found some honeysuckle and was about to enjoy a big bite when one of the tiniest little eight-year-olds reminded her that Scouts 'take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints,' at which point Melanie showed the girls how to drink the nectar from the tiny blossoms and mentioned a ranger's report that honeysuckle is technically considered a pest species in some areas, including the National Park they were visiting.
All of this autism is one sentence.

Anyway, they hike and goof around and have fun in nature. After that, they settle in to camp for the night, and cook their dinner. This segues into a long and irrelevant conversation between Scootaloo and Faceless Girlfriend #4335 about whether or not Scoot can eat meat.

>"I'm still hung up on you being able to eat meat –how do you know you could?"
>"Mary figured it out a while back. I can eat the same hay and grain that a horse can, but they spend most of their day eating and re-grinding their food because it has so little food value. You know I don't spend 7 hours a day eating, and that's because I can process higher value foods like grains, fruits, nuts, oils, sugars and probably, meat. I tried some protein supplements once for a study and, provided I didn't have to taste them, I could eat them without problems."
Have you ever met two teenage girls who sounded like this in conversation? The dialogue in this is an absolute nightmare. Also: do we really need any of this information?

>Just then, the little Indian-American Ladybug who had reminded Scootaloo of the no-picking-flowers rule appeared with a soft-cooler lunchbox.
>"Miss Scootaloo, if you don't eat meat, you can have some of my veggie burgers! I brought enough for three people."
>"Thank you, Lalitha! I really appreciate that!" Scootaloo used her arm to get something out of her own backpack. "Would you like some of these trail mix bars I brought? My Dad made them with honey, oats and raisins."
>"Yes, please!" the little Hindu scout accepted, happily nibbling a bar and telling Scootaloo about how these veggie burgers were the bestest kind because they had more mushroom and no green peppers, at which point she and Scootaloo began to discuss the relative merits of various vegetarian delicacies...and, of course, ketchup.
Obligatory digressive mention of a token diversity character's ethnicity. However, I'm going to give the author half a point here, since this is literally the first time in this entire text that he's bothered to give one of his throwaway characters any distinguishing characteristics at all besides a name.

Anyway, it just goes on like this for awhile. After dinner, the girls gather around the campfire to toast marshmallows and tell ghost stories. Scoot tells a story about zombies, and uses her wacky robo-arms as a prop. Apparently, she has some kind of wireless remote control for them now.

After this they all bathe, and there is some discussion about tit size that sounds like it could have been lifted directly from the script of a harem anime. Then they all settle down into their sleeping bags, and talk about their crushes and whatnot. We learn that, despite her degenerate parents' best efforts to buy her condoms and get her laid, Scoot is still a virgin. One of her friends suggests she try dating a boy named Conner (who has not been mentioned at all before now, despite his apparently living down the street from her and being one of her close friends). This is the end of the chapter.

All in all, apart from that ridiculous gynecology thing at the beginning, this actually wasn't a bad chapter. The camping trip is probably this author's first decently-executed scene. Nothing much happens, but since this is basically a slice of life episode that doesn't really count against it. Unfortunately, the dialogue is still terrible, and these interactions would feel a lot more meaningful if the author had actually bothered to develop any of these characters. However, considering what the rest of this story has been like, I'm inclined to be generous here.

>>333591

Oh, there's also this:

>Author's note: A bully is a bully regardless of age, race, gender or title.
Not sure how this relates to the chapter we just read. Maybe the rude doctor was the bully? I have no idea. I'm seriously starting to wonder about this author, though. I joke around a lot, but I'm beginning to suspect there really is a long and tragic story that explains the way this guy turned out. Possibly one that involves a speculum.

>Please review!
Be careful what you wish for.

Anyway, let's keep going. As silly as this is, it's been a quick read so far.

Ch 9: Midnight Sun

It sounds like Scootaloo's crazy DNA is now being put to all kinds of wacky science-fictiony uses. Scientists have now figured out some kind of advanced space flight technique by reverse-engineering her flight ability FUCKIN MAGNETS, and used it to build some kind of outer space computer factory. Or something.

>But out of all the changes going on, the one nobody expected was Sunbeam. Much like other silicon valley start ups, they started small with a handful of engineers and dreamers, building basketball sized satellites and booking even cheaper flights for them by cramming them into any leftover space on the orbital flights. Once in orbit, the satellites unfolded thin reflective foil several football fields across, creating an enormous mirror with the tiny baseball sized core at the center. The tiny core of the satellite was made from cheap off the shelf parts –all it did was aim the mirror with gyroscopes and communicate through a tiny antenna. Even the solar power cells were barely bigger then a laptop. But despite all their frailties, the little satellites were cheap to mass produce, and within months Sunbeam started selling sunlight.
I literally don't even know what the fuck anymore.

Anyway, this autism just keeps going and going. As far as I can tell, the basic gist of it is that this Sunbeam company figured out a way to reflect sunlight back at the dark side of the Earth using tiny satellites, so that there's always daylight and street lamps are no longer needed. Even setting aside the obvious devastating impact this would have on the local vampire community, this sounds like an absolutely terrible idea to me. Seriously; I would be mad as fuck if I were sitting on my porch enjoying a nice starry night, and all of a sudden it turned into high noon. I really don't understand what possible application a technology like this could have, nor how a company like this would even make money.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Scootaloo asks that Conner kid out on a date. It turns out that he is also a vegetarian; however, unlike Scoot's natural vegetarianism, this kid is a giant pussy who abstains from meat on moral grounds. Since presumably this means that 90% of the protein in his diet comes from semen, I'm guessing Scootaloo is barking up the wrong tree.

Anyway, whatever Conner's views on meat might be, what's truly inhumane is the dialogue in this story:

>"A truly alien intelligence would be instantly obvious as different by its behavior, its thought processes, its biology and physiology. Well, more than half my DNA is copied unmodified from normal homo-sapien DNA. Mentally? I'm an above-average human woman, though when it comes to spelling, I'd question the above-average part."
Seriously, imagine a teenage Scootaloo saying this out loud. Imagine anyone saying this out loud.

>She leaned back against the booth. "Sorry, I'm just a bit touchy on that subject. So many people can't even be bothered to understand what they are, let alone who they're talking to."
I think what little-miss-above-average-intelligence meant to say here was: "So many people can't even be bothered to understand what they are, let alone the person to whom they are speaking." :^)

Anyway, good God; this is unironically one of the worst conversations I've ever read in a work of fiction. Seriously, I would rather listen to Nigel's OC talk about flying skateboards. Much like the spoken parts in Friendship is Optimal, this is really not so much a conversation as it is the author voicing his own autistic opinions on various random subjects, using his characters as crude sockpuppets who mouth the words.

Since not a single goddamned word of it is relevant to anything that's going on, nor is any of it especially interesting to read, here is a quick list of the topics they cover:

>monkey rape
>the rule of 150
>reasons why men and women perceive colors differently
>reasons why food tastes good
>the metaphysics of being a cartoon pony
>sewing
>whether or not Scoot is into human cock
>big sexy deer antlers

Anyway, the main takeaway here is that both of these characters are completely insufferable fuckwads who are physically incapable of shutting up about their ridiculous midwit opinions. In other words, they're a match made in heaven. So, when Conner asks Scootaloo if she would like to join the volunteer fire department with him, it should come as no surprise that her answer is an enthusiastic 'yes.'

Time randomly skips forward again; now it is the end of the second semester of...what grade is she supposed to be in? Tenth? Eleventh? Whatever; she's taking college classes now anyway. From here, the author veers off into some pretty hilarious projection about how his own Faggot #2's life turned out after college. When it finally wraps up, we are jarringly dropped back into what I will generously call the scene. It's the last day of some kind of college-level biology class that Scoot is taking, and the professor is showing an optional after-class video for anyone interested in the next level course.

>By this point, those with no understanding of theory, such as creationists, have ether learned or failed out, much as would happen to a mechanic who thought cars were pulled by invisible horses.
Oy vey, he just won't stop. I grouse, but this is seriously some of the funniest shit I've ever read.

>>333603

>The question I want an answer to is simple enough that a competent sixth grader could answer it with a bit of thought if they understood basic theory could think for themselves.
This is not a sentence. If you want to sound smart, start by learning how to proofread.

Anyway, here's the situation: this professor teaches an advanced biology class, that only the best of the best will have the science chops to pass. In order to even be considered for admission, interested students will need to answer a single question, and the best responders will be enrolled in the class:

>"The question I want an answer to is this: Why do we grow old and die?"
https://youtu.be/oRhiDJtbaHg?t=37 [Embed]

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter. Apparently, the author considered this one significant enough to include two author's notes gee Bill.

>Author's note: Many wonder who they are, but how many know what they are?
I think I have a pretty good idea what this author is.

>Authors note: Dr Moselle is based on a brilliant biology teacher I had in middle school, and this question was one of her favorites. If you think you know the answer, PM me before reading the next chapter.
I'm legitimately curious if anyone ever took him up on this. I notice that while the first chapter of this story had a fairly long comments section, the number of views and comments gets progressively smaller with each subsequent chapter. I'm guessing that even on fimfiction, relatively few people were actually masochistic enough to sit and read this thing in its entirety.

Anyway, fuck. The camping chapter was decent; it was very rough and the dialogue was terrible, but I'll give the author some credit for at least attempting to build a real scene and humanize his characters a bit. However, this chapter pretty much obliterates whatever tiny shred of potential the last one created. The levels of sheer midwittery on display here are just off the fucking charts. Well, whatever; next chapter I guess.

Ch 10: Steel Toes at the Ritz

Since I'm sure you have all been biting your nails in anticipation since it was last brought up, I will go ahead and relieve your anxiety: Scootaloo does indeed take Conner up on his offer to join the fucking volunteer fire department. We are told that this event takes place in late spring.

>She showed up after dinner to ride with the night shift and was greeted at the door by Linda.
Who the fuck is Linda? I don't know why this is so difficult for you to grasp, Cozy Mark IV, but you need to introduce characters before you start casually tossing their names around as if the reader ought to know them already. Seriously, I checked; there is no mention of anyone named Linda anywhere in the text prior to this sentence. If this is her first appearance in the story, then treat it as her first appearance and tell us something about her. If you can wrap your head around subjects like troll pegasus physics and tiny satellites that redirect sunlight, I'm positive you can master this simple concept if you try.

Anyway, whatever; Scoot goes on some kind of ambulance ride-along. I'm not sure if this "Conner" faggot is present or not; he doesn't seem to be. The enigmatic Linda explains the ins and outs of being a volunteer paramedic to Scoot, and in the middle of the lecture, a call comes in. They go racing off to save some kid who fell out of a tree or something.

>They soon pulled up the house and everyone piled out of the back, two of them carrying the stretcher between them around to the back of the house where a boy, probably about ten years old, was laying on the ground in the deepening twilight.
Was he laying down the law?

Anyway, the kid has a broken arm but seems otherwise okay. However, it turns out that he had been climbing the tree in order to save his pet cat, who is still trapped up there. The rest of the scene goes about how you'd expect: Scoot flies up using her magnet-wings, and saves the goddamn cat. After that, they all have lunch. Or rather, they are about to have lunch, when they get another call. This one turns out to be a teenage girl who was shot in the stomach or something. They get her to the hospital.

I'm beginning to see a pattern with this author. When he wants to knuckle down and put effort into building an actual scene with actual characters participating in it, he can more or less do so. It's crude, but it's a scene. His problem is that more often than not he just writes out his thoughts as they pop into his head, resulting in verbal diarrhea that barely qualifies as a story. Most of the book so far has been this type of verbal diarrhea, but there are a couple of scenes here and there that suggest he could churn out something decent if he put his mind to it.

His other problem is that he seems at times to be less interested in telling a story than in lecturing the reader. This is where the similarity to Friendship is Optimal is most evident in this text. He veers off into these long tangents about theoretical technology he's dreamed up, or his beliefs on religion or various social issues, and all of it is just reddit-tier midwit nonsense; you'd pretty much have to be as insufferable a person as the author himself to actually want to sit down and read all of this.

So, basically, this author has three writing states that he switches between. The first state is meandering verbal diarrhea; this is basically his default state. For an example of this, read the entire first chapter. The second state is scene-building; this is when he manages to knuckle down and actually write proper scenes that could theoretically be strung together into a real story. Examples of this would be the camping scene, and this ambulance-riding scene we're on, right up to the part I'm about to cover. The third state is lecturing; this is where he is at his most insufferable. Examples include most of Ch 9 and the conversation in this chapter that we're about to cover.

>>333684

What we have so far is a scene, with characters actively participating in the events of the scene, and interacting with each other in the context of those events. As with the camping scene, it's a little clumsily written and the dialogue is clunky and unnatural, but it's still a scene. The reader can visualize what the characters are seeing and doing, and follow them around as they take actions and communicate with each other.

However, as soon as the injured girl is brought to the hospital, the author takes off his writer's hat and puts on his pseudo-intellectual douchebag's hat, and things go south rather quickly.

It starts off well enough. The girl was shot and is in critical condition; they do what they can for her in the ambulance. Once they get her to the hospital and the doctors take over, "Linda" is no longer occupied and can answer Scoot's questions. Scoot asks if the girl is dead; Linda hesitates and says: "Maybe." All of this is fine so far; it's gritty, it's human, it's real. However:

>"Maybe?" This unsettled Scootaloo more than the answer she expected. "Maybe?! How can she be sort of alive?"

This question, though still in line with the sort of innocent question a naive teenage girl witnessing serious violence for the first time might ask, provides the author with an opportunity to launch into one of his long-winded sockpuppet lectures. It proves too strong a temptation for him to resist.

Here is Linda's response:

>"You asked how she could be 'sort of' alive. Scootaloo, tell me where you are. What organ is the entity called Scootaloo with whom I am talking?"
First, if you want to be grammatically correct, it should be "with whom I am speaking." Second, this is not human speech. Literally no one would say something like this in a normal conversation.

It gets worse:

>"Good, I don't have to explain that any more. When that poor girl was shot, it disrupted her life support system. It tore into her lung, interfering with her ability to put oxygen in her blood, and it ruptured all kinds of blood vessels leading to a rapid fall off in blood pressure -she was losing blood faster than we could put it back into her. As her blood oxygen level fell along with her blood pressure, she went into shock and lost consciousness. Eventually, without enough blood to pump, her heart shut down. All though this we were trying to keep oxygenated blood flowing to her brain, to her, but we can't just jack in an external life support system and disconnect her own."

>"We couldn't replace her body, but we could attempt to pump the blood for her with CPR, and we used ice to cool her body and brain to slow the oxygen starvation. When the life support system is damaged that badly the brain will die without help, but it takes time, usually several minutes to go from 'alive' though the levels of increasing brain damage to 'dead'. If we're lucky the surgeons were able to put her life support system back together enough before she died completely. That's what I meant by 'maybe'."

If you asked Linda to sum up what was going on with this girl she just rescued, and gave her some time to process the question and formulate a written answer, you might get statements like these. However, nobody would just produce this sort of answer on the spot, particularly not if they were just stepping out of a stressful situation. This is not natural human speech, this is a prepared statement that the author has written and is having his character read out loud. This is what I mean when I talk about "sockpuppet" dialogue. This character is not actually speaking; the author is speaking through her. Or, rather, the author has composed what is essentially a small essay on a complex topic he wants to discuss, and in order to get it into the text somewhere, he simply puts it in quotes and has one of his characters say it out loud. The author is basically narrating his own thoughts, while his character simply moves her mouth up and down like a sockpuppet.

There are three reasons a writer will want to avoid doing this. The first is that it's incredibly obnoxious; nobody likes being condescended to by a fictional character. Second is that it breaks the suspension of disbelief; if the character's spoken lines don't sound like something that the character would naturally say in a given situation, it no longer feels real. Third is that, unless you are someone exceptionally smart or interesting protip: you're not, and neither am I, the odds are that your "profound thoughts" on a given topic are nowhere near as profound as you think they are. The result is that large portions of your text come across as long-winded reddit posts, and you get called a faggot. By me.

I want to call attention to this, because it's something I see amateur writers doing all the time. Nigel did this a lot in his book muh extreme gear :DDD; in fact that entire Starlight Glimmer chapter was mostly dialogue like this. Friendship is Optimal was basically nothing but sockpuppet dialogue; that whole text was like the Dialogs of Plato for midwit pseuds. If you find that your characters are routinely speaking in huge block-paragraphs that read like miniature philosophy lectures, odds are you're writing sockpuppet dialogue.

This scene is a perfect example. The essential information covered in this exchange between Scoot and Linda could be condensed into a few quick lines. All we really need to know here is that the girl is in critical condition and might die, or end up a vegetable.

Anyway, the exchange wraps up, and Scoot watches the doctor give the news to the girl's mother and father. The mother loses her shit and tells the father she never wants to see him again; the father looks completely devastated. When Scoot asks about this, Linda informs her that the girl's father accidentally shot her when she was sneaking into the house after a date, because he mistook her for a prowler. Hurr durr muh gun control.

>>333689

Anyway, Scoot goes home, and stays up all night with her fag parents crying and talking about the horror of it all. After this, the text abruptly changes gears, and segues into a new arc about Scoot going to prom.

Since she is still (I guess) in tenth grade, she shouldn't be eligible to go to prom, but since Conner is (I guess) a grade above her, he can go, and he invites her. It seems that Scoot's fag parents don't know the two of them are dating yet.

At one point, Scoot, Conner, and their friend Christina are sitting around making dresses for prom. Christina is feeling a bit down:

>Christina was glad to be spending time with her friends, but she still looked sad as she watched Conner and Scootaloo working together.
>Scootaloo noticed and spoke up. "Don't look so down Christie, we couldn't have done this without you. I've made some of my own clothing, but I don't have your natural talent for this." She smiled as she looked at her own dress taking shape on the table. "The dresses are coming out fine, and in yours you'll be fending them off with a stick."
>She smiled weakly. "Yeah, with a stick..."
This is a fine example of why it's a good idea to actually develop your characters, instead of just telling us their names. What exactly is going on here? The literal situation is obvious enough: Scoot and Conner are a couple, Christina is jealous of them and wishes she had a boyfriend, or at least a prom date. But what else is going on here?

From previous scenes, we know that Christina broke up with a boy named Brad (who may or may not have been Scootaloo's ex) a short time ago. However, we don't really know the details there either, and we know almost nothing about Christina herself or Brad, for that matter. Or any other character in this story, for that matter. Why exactly doesn't she have a date? Is it due to the breakup? Is she unattractive? Shy? Autistic? For that matter, what does Christina look like? What kind of person is she? How does she dress? What kind of music does she like? High school is usually a byzantine maze of social cliques and hierarchies; how does Christina fit into all that? If we knew, we might have a better idea what is really going on in this scene, beyond the obvious and superficial. If you make an effort to develop your characters into actual humans with lives and personalities, even mundane scenes can turn into significant moments in a story.

Anyway, Conner suggests that Christina date his friend Curt. Lots of 'C' names floating around; hope we can keep track of them all. Apparently, Curt is a "bad boy" type, complete with facial piercings and a skateboard. This is...appealing to Christina? Not appealing? She and Scoot both hesitate when this is brought up, but again, since we know basically nothing significant about Christina or Scootaloo, for that matter, it's hard to gage what exactly this reaction is supposed to mean. In any event, she agrees to date him. Meanwhile, it seems that Scoot doesn't know how to dance, so Conner shows her how.

Page break. It's the night of the prom, and Faggot #2 is helping Scootaloo get ready. In the course of their conversation, Scoot finally tells him that she and Conner are an item. Faggot #2 is opposed; damn opposed. He tells her that she will get her heart broken if she keeps dating him. There seems to be something else going on here, and I have a suspicion about what it is, but I'm going to hold off on making predictions for now. Anyway, before they can argue about it further, the little vegan dweeb himself shows up, and they leave for the dance together.

>Jayne heard the door slam and the car pull away as Kevin walked unsteadily down the stares and met his gaze across the room.
"Stairs," not "stares." Jesus fucking Christ. Also, this is something that's been bothering me off and on for awhile now. This story is ostensibly being written by Twilight Sparkle in the future, but from roughly the second quarter of Ch. 1 onwards, we are told that everything is pulled directly from Jayne (Faggot #1)'s memoirs. Most of it is written in a first person style, suggesting that Jayne himself is the narrator. However, we have directly witnessed several events in the story where Jayne was not actually present; he should not be able to give a direct account of such events. Also, the author seems to occasionally forget that he's even supposed to be writing in the first person. The above passage is a blatant example of this.

We ran into this same issue with Fallout: Equestria. Oftentimes a writer will arbitrarily choose to write from a first-person perspective without fully appreciating how confining this point of view can be. If everything important that happens in your story can be directly witnessed by your narrator, there's no problem; however, if you need to move the "camera" to another character for whatever reason, even if it's only for one scene, you can very quickly run into trouble.

Some authors come up with creative solutions to this problem. Dracula, for example, instead of using a single narrator, is presented as a series of letters and journal entries written by the various characters. Thus, even though most of it is written in the first person, the point of view can easily be switched to different characters as needed. Unfortunately, Cozy Mark IV is nowhere near this clever; in fact, half the time he doesn't even seem to remember he's supposed to be writing from Jayne's point of view at all probably too busy dreaming up fake inventions and huffing his own semen-soaked farts. This is very, very bad; you don't want to do stuff like this.

Honestly, if this faggot ever actually solicited my advice on this story for whatever strange reason, one of the first recommendations I'd give him would be to drop the wacky framing devices and just write this as a conventional third-person-omniscient story.

>>333689
I know I shouldn't defend my old shit story and I certainly could have conveyed the vital information better but knowing how the hoverboards work was vital for a later scene many chapters later where a board's components are fucked with.
Something tells me none of this shit involving blood and brains and oxygen is going to matter at any point in the story after this. The author just thought forcing the hero to deal with the aftermath of a retarded gun mishap would make the audience hate guns and gun rights more.

>>333710

Now they are at the prom. Scoot and Conner find Christina and sk8rboi, and they grab some munchies at the buffet.

>While everyone ate, Curt's skater friends started passing cell phones videos of various tricks and epic flops. "Check this one out: flip, spin the board, then – Ooh!"
>"That did look pretty awesome, right up till the end. Did you break anything? I mean that looked painful." Scootaloo added.
Scootaloo befriending this kid and learning to skateboard would have made a lot more sense for her character than pairing her up with this Conner dipshit, and making her a biology whiz and a cheerleader. In any case, it would have been more consistent with her canon personality than anything we've seen her do thus far.

Other than her appearance, the Scootaloo in this story bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the character we know from the show. It's an original story, and Scoot has no memory of her time in Equestria anyway, so the author could probably get away with taking some liberties with how he portrays the character. If he did something original and interesting with her, I would personally have no problem with it. However, the issue is that he not only stripped her of her canon personality, he hasn't bothered to put an actual personality in its place; this character is as robotic and unconvincing as everyone else in this story.

For readers who already know this character, it's jarring to hear her speaking lines like this:

>"Hmm.. A concern yes, but I'm a vegetarian by genetics. My body can handle meat with no problem, but my genes change how I perceive it: it tastes and smells so awful I can't touch it. If I can't taste it, like protein powder in milk or if its baked into something like eggs into a cake, then it doesn't taste like meat and I can enjoy it without a problem. If I had a choice in the matter? I don't know."
Can you imagine the Scootaloo from the TV series ever saying something like this? I certainly can't.

Just for fun:
https://voca.ro/1e16leGvWzmH [Embed]

For as many faults as this story has, the premise actually has some potential. Human-in-Equestria is common enough in these fanfics, but Pony-in-Humanland seems to be less common. Both premises can be fun if handled creatively; it's all about which characters you pick and how you use them.

For example, in that Dale Gribble green I wrote, pretty much all of the entertainment value comes from the transposition of a character like Dale into an inappropriate setting like Equestria. The humor is in all of the endless misunderstandings that pop up between Dale and the ponies: Dale thinks everything is aliens and conspiracies, meanwhile the ponies just want to be his friend, but can't make sense of his erratic behavior. I think in one of my previous reviews I don't remember which thread, but I think it was in the FoE review somewhere I explain my selection of characters as well; there was a reason I paired Dale up with the CMC instead of Twilight or AJ or one of the other grownup pones. However, if I had just written him like a generic human, without any of his Gribble-esque qualities, and paired him up with some randomly-selected pony, it wouldn't have been the same.

Unfortunately, that's basically what this author has done with Scootaloo. Nothing the Scootaloo character in this story has said or done so far really fits the character we know from FiM; she's just a generic (and very badly written) teenage girl, who happens to also be a pony named Scootaloo. You could swap her out with literally any other character from FiM and nothing about this story would need to be changed. Seriously, try it; save the text of the story, use Find & Replace to swap out "Scootaloo" for "Twilight Sparkle" or "Rainbow Dash" or "Derpy" or pretty much any other pony, and see if it makes any serious difference.

For that matter, nothing else from FiM has really made it into this story either. Nothing from Equestria other than Scootaloo made it through that time portal: she has not brought any of the values or traditions from that setting, none of her experiences or memories came with her, she doesn't remember any other characters from that setting. You could actually take the above exercise and carry it a step further: swap out "Scootaloo" for the name of literally any cartoon character you can think of and see if anything important changes. I'd be willing to bet money that you could replace Scootaloo with Spongebob Squarepants and it would still be the same terrible fucking story.

Actually:
https://voca.ro/1fKAI5ErCF8C [Embed]

At any rate, the way to approach something like this is to start with the character and build the story around their personality. The premise is Scootaloo travels to our world. Okay; how would Scootaloo behave if she came to our world? Not just a pony from Equestria; Scootaloo specifically. Even if she doesn't have her memories or her friendships or anything from her old life, she would still have the same basic personality, and would probably develop similar interests to what she has on the show. So taking that into consideration, how would you transpose that personality into our world? Would you make her a super-genius for some reason, who is inexplicably talented at biology, and walks around spouting robotic-sounding monologues about gender equality? Or would want to make it...oh, I don't know...good? You know, like something a writer would do?

This author has basically done the opposite. Instead of building the story around the character, he's trying to wedge the character into a story she doesn't belong in. Moreover, he's completely stripped her of everything that makes her character unique. Basically, this is a story about a generic blank-slate pony character who wanders into an alternate dimension for no reason one day, and gets adopted by two fudge-packing degenerates. The fact that the author can't shut the fuck up about airplanes and social causes isn't exactly helping his case, either.

>>333720
So some background information. The writer who wrote My Little Dashie ROBCakeran53 is throughly sick of being called that guy who wrote My Little Dashie.
https://www.fimfiction.net/user/2538/ROBCakeran53/stories
I would recommend his stories for a better than average reading experience.

>>333721
The short Last Stop, Equestria is about as straight foward as possible.
Without knowing the source material the actions are solid but the logic seens of the rails.
watch?v=54vWUybZkMU
It's almost a written greentext story.

>>333711
I've probably dumped more than enough shit on your old story at this point, but honestly I can't help myself; it's just too much fun to do. I'm afraid that I will likely never tire of making fun of Silver "you can literally toss a hula hoop into my asshole and watch it bounce away into the darkness" Star and his ridiculous adventures.

Anyway, if the information is actually important to the story then fine; put it in. What's at issue, though, is the way you present it to the reader. You shouldn't convey technical information by writing it out in huge block paragraphs and dumping them into the text as spoken dialogue; there is absolutely no situation where that is ever appropriate. Information should be doled out in manageable chunks, when and where it is needed.

Consider Fallout: Equestria. Remember how the story opens with a gigantic infodump about PipBucks? Technically, all of that information is relevant; I think just about everything she covers in the prologue comes up in the story at some point or other. However, it's still a badly-written opening. The reader might need to know this information eventually, but they don't need to know it yet. Basically, all that Littlepoop needs to tell the reader at the beginning of the story is that she has a portable computer thingie on her arm, it's called a PipBuck, and it can do a lot of crazy things. What specifically it can do can be saved for later, to be brought up at moments in the story in which those functions are specifically important. Dumping it all on the reader at once is self-defeating for two reasons: it's boring as fuck to read, and the reader probably won't remember most of it by the time it becomes important, so you'll end up having to explain it to them again.

Similarly, in your story, you have a scene where Silver "I can't even remember the last time I had a gag reflex" Star is showing off his hoverboards to the Mane 6. Just because some details of how these boards operate are going to be important later doesn't mean those details are relevant at that particular moment. Thus, you don't need to do anything in that scene except mention that the boards exist and move on. You can then have the boards make additional appearances at later points in the story, and in each appearance you would reveal some new relevant feature. Eventually, you would culminate all of this with the final scene in which everything the boards can do comes together at once, and at that point you won't have to explain anything, because by then the reader is intimately familiar with the hoverboards.

It would basically go like this: first you have the store scene, where Dash asks what those hoverboard-looking things on the wall are, and Silver "you're going to need more fingers than that" Star simply informs her that it's a hoverboard. Dash says "oh, cool, I'd like to try that sometime," and the scene moves on. Then, maybe later, you have a scene where Silver is riding one of those boards, and you can have him casually demonstrate its precision cornering ability. Then, later still, you could add a scene where a pony in town has purchased a hoverboard and is riding around on it. Maybe he gets distracted by a pretty mare, loses control, falls off, and faceplants right in front of Silver "abandon hope all ye who enter my anus" Star, who helpfully informs him that he can upgrade his board with an optional dildo attachment designed to hold the rider in place a feature which, ironically, does not work for Silver since his company does not currently make a large enough dildo. And so forth and so on, until eventually you have the big hoverboard-racing scene, in which all of the features are used at once.

Doing it this way serves two purposes: first, it breaks the necessary information into easily-digestible chunks, and presents each bit of info at a moment when it is specifically relevant to what's happening in the story. Second, the repetition continuously reminds the reader that the hoverboards exist, and subconsciously informs them that they are an important detail to remember. That was a complaint I had about FoE as well: a lot of the confusion in that book could have been avoided if the author had simply repeated important details at various points throughout the text in order to emphasize them.

>>333721
>>333722
I actually don't know anything about My Little Dashie, though it sounds like this story might have been based on it or inspired by it or something. I'll skim through those at some point.

>>333724
If the exposition is given out over time, won't the audience feel like I'm just making this stuff up as I go along?

>>333725
Maybe if it's something too big, you need to foreshadow it a little bit, i dunno...

>>333725
They're going to know you made it up one way or the other, so who cares? Are you trying to provide the reader with essential information they need to understand an important moment in your story, or are you trying to convince them that the hoverboards in your story are a real thing?

>>333730
>>333728
Makes sense. By the way this story is a soulless ripoff of My Little Dashie, which was parodied by the Mentally Advanced Series guy.

>>333730
True, i think i confused it with something else...do not want derail tho, so...
Carry on good sir

Mysterious transmission from Starlight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b32IX2WebO4 [Embed]

>>333720

>"Hey, I've been meaning to ask you about that." Curt interrupted. "Not to be rude, but on the show you're pretty fly on a scooter. I know that's not you anymore, but, I don't know, have you ever tried skating? You sure have the gymnastics skills for it."
It almost feels like a waste of time pointing this out, but once again, we have a situation where a story assumes the reader's familiarity with the MLP TV show and references details from it without explaining them or putting them in proper context. This author actually managed to take this common mistake and make it even worse.

As I mentioned above, the Scootaloo character in this story bears virtually no resemblance to her counterpart in FIM. Moreover, this story complicates itself by adding a metafictional component: the FiM TV series actually exists in this setting, and the Scootaloo character in this story is actually supposed to be the Scootaloo from the series, inexplicably transplanted from her world into this one. Not only has the author failed to provide the reader with enough context about the show to understand who Scootaloo is supposed to be, he hasn't really explained how much any of the characters are supposed to know about it either. Has Scoot herself even seen FiM? We don't know; literally all it tells us about the show is that Adam & Steve used to watch it when they were in college together.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that Scoot has never really tried skateboarding before, but her new friends talk her into it. She agrees to try it out sometime. Meanwhile, she and Conner go out onto the dance floor and strut their stuff. After watching a dancing couple get tossed out by the chaperones for dancing too provocatively, she makes a clumsy move on Conner and is rebuffed.

>Conner looked a bit shocked at this sudden advance, but pulled himself together quickly. "Are you sure that's what you want?" He replied in a serious tone.
>Kevin's words still stung in her ears as she whispered. "Yes, I do want this. I've burned though enough double A's to power a car over the years, and I'm ready now. I know what I like, and if you're willing, then I can finally say I know who I like as well."
This author sure knows how to write sultry dialogue.

Anyway, we've been given some pretty blunt hints that Conner is probably gay; however, Scoot hasn't quite figured it out yet. However, the matter is suddenly forced when a couple of generic jock-types suddenly appear and start harassing him, calling him "gaywad" and "faggot," and insinuating that his kind ain't welcome 'round these here parts. Scoot predictably comes to his defense, and sprays the jocks with a can of grape soda.

>Scootaloo completely ignored his rage and calmly regarded the crushed can in her hand. "That's one of the draw backs to prosthetics. Sometimes I just lose track of how hard I'm squeezing."
She wore her fucking robo-arms to the prom? Designing a prom dress that would fit a horse would be challenging enough; how doe the cyborg arms fit into the equation? Seriously; try to visualize this shit.

Anyway, the confrontation is formulaic enough that it doesn't really need to be gone over in detail. The jocks are temporarily thwarted by Scoot, and they retreat, angrily shaking their fists and vowing that they will get Gadget next time.

At this point, Conner confesses that he has had run-ins with these kids before, and that they routinely pick on him. Apparently he has had to enlist Curt (the skateboarder) to help him fight them off in the past. Just as they are worrying that they might have to fight their way out of the prom, the Principal suddenly appears, and informs them that the whole exchange was caught on video, and the jocks will be dealt with accordingly. Well, glad we got that all sorted out.

The scene ends on kind of an ambiguous note. It seems to be implied that Scoot and Conner leave the prom and get a hotel room together, but I'm not 100% on this. I'm still not certain if Scoot realizes that Conner is gay, or if Conner is even supposed to actually be gay, or what. Anyway, fuck it; we'll just keep reading.

Page break. We are suddenly and abruptly dumped into a new scene, in which Scoot appears to be having another of her routine medial exams. She is introduced to a new doctor, named Gregerson, who immediately launches into a long, autistic rant about Scoot's wacky DNA. It's not really worth analyzing; it's just more autism. The tl;dr is that Scoot has some kind of specialized immune system and metabolism, and ¡SCIENCE! has figured out a way to inject it into humans. The result will be a dramatic reduction in disease, obesity, etc etc. The only tradeoff is it's going to turn everyone into vegetarians. Yes, this autism is actually in the text.

Anyway, the autism just keeps on going. There's something about improving her robo-arms using some kind of demented pseudoscience, and this will somehow be used to cure blindness or something; I can't quite follow the autism here.

>Kevin crossed his arms. "I'm still not comfortable with cutting holes in you or putting things into your body."
>"Papa, how many piercings do I have? You know, ears, nose, nipples?" Scootaloo ran a hoof down her belly drawing attention to the twin rows of nipples, and Kevin squirmed in his chair looking even more uncomfortable. "And how many tattoos do I have? Skull and cross bones, curse words in other languages?"
So Scootaloo has obscene tattoos and nipple rings now? When did this happen? You'd think a detail like this would be worth mentioning.

>"Okay, okay! You're right, you've never gotten into any of those things. I... I just want you to be safe."
Wait, so she doesn't have tattoos and piercings? Then why was it even brought up in the first place? There is a lot of ambiguity here.

Anyway, whatever; they give her some kind of weird surgery and the chapter ends.

>>334436

Ch 11: Red Dots and Coffee

This chapter begins with a somewhat confusing note:

>guest chapter by my Editor and Collaborator, JanMcNeville

Apparently, this Jan McNeville, who apparently co-wrote Ch. 1 and has been a "collaborator" on the rest of it with Cozy Mark IV, wrote this entire chapter for some reason. The "story" is by the two of them together. I'm not quite sure why the author decided to use a pinch-writer for a single chapter, nor am I sure why something this poorly written would even require two authors to churn out in the first place. In any case, this chapter is about 17,000 words long, which is itself unusual since the chapters have been averaging about 4,000 words apiece. I can't say I'm looking forward to this. Well, whatever; let's sally forth I guess.

The most immediately jarring thing about this chapter is that it's written in a completely different style from the rest of what we've read so far. The next most jarring thing is that we are suddenly dropped into a very strange scene, without any indicator as to where or when any of these events are taking place.

Apparently, Scootaloo is being threatened by some kind of religious terrorist who has a bomb strapped to his chest. Three of her friends are with her for some reason. Still no indicator as to the time or place of the scene, or how it connects to any of what we've read so far. Also unclear is whether or not we are still supposed to be in Faggot #1's journal, or if this is the start of a new narrative.

>Worst of all, her friends were with her. Josie was shaking half-hysterically, Christina had burst silently into tears and Melissa, brave, fearless Melissa, had gone deathly pale.
Is Melissa brave and fearless? More so even than Josie or Christina? We know absolutely fucking nothing about any of these characters, because so far all the author has told us about any of them is their names, so I'm not sure how to react to this.

Anyway, as the scene keeps rambling on, it becomes apparent that this is taking place at a mall. Presumably Scoot and her friends were out shopping one day, when some lunatic inexplicably confronted them with a bomb strapped to his chest. As Scoot is standing there, trying to figure out how to use her sweet karate moves to take down the terrorist, she sees a "red dot" I'm assuming this is the targeting laser of a sniper rifle on the guy's hand. The narrative then launches into a flashback.

It appears that Scoot received a check for some kind of weird research being conducted on her, and decided to go to the mall with her friends to buy a pair of headphones. The text drones on for literally six paragraphs about which headphones she intends to buy.

>"…But I love Fleetwood Mac," Josie pointed out. Josie, of course, was a classic-rock fan who once charmed a teacher into giving back her confiscated mp3 player early after pointing out just which of his favorite albums were on it and letting him copy a few files.
Josie likes classic rock; noted. So far Jan McNeville is turning out to be almost as dreadful a writer as Cozy Mark IV, but I'm willing to give him and/or her a bit of credit for at least attempting to flesh out these cardboard characters a little, and making a haphazard effort to build an actual scene.

Unfortunately, his dialogue is just as dreadful as Cozy's:

>"I've been reading about evolutionary theory and I think parents really might be genetically programmed to complain about our music and think our fashions are stupid," Scootaloo observed. "Apparently, in chimpanzee groups, the only way to prevent inbreeding is for the teenagers to become rebellious and somewhat annoying to the elders and for the elders to become less tolerant, which causes the teenagers to strike out on their own, find other groups of teenagers and, well…breed."

>"I can respect the desire to keep your Victoria's Secret Compartment crumb-free, but a little bit of purely decorative cleavage does not a floozy make. Frankly, I don't think any of us but Melissa are even equipped to flooze," Christina sighed.

>"You'd have to machine them out of solid aluminum, engineer the ergonomics for quadrupedal perambulation and you'd need at least quarter-inch-thick treaded rubber for the soles, but it could be done," Josie announced, pulling out a notebook and indicating some drawings and calculations. "See?"

Seriously; this is supposed to be casual mall conversation for a group of teenage girls.

Anyway, they drone on about music and fashion and a few other topics for a while. The conversation makes little sense, has no internal continuity, and goes on for far longer than it has any right to. Also, I would like to once again emphasize that the dialogue bears no resemblance to ordinary human speech and is actually physically painful to read.

However, I will once again give Jan McNeville a tiny (microscopic) amount of credit for at least attempting to breathe some life into Cozy Mark IV's paper-doll characters. He establishes Josie as kind of a nerdy smart girl, who seems to be some kind of math prodigy and likes classic rock. Melissa seems to be more of a girly-girl type, into fashion and boys and all that. Christina appears to be a bookworm, who likes reading mystery stories and writes a little. All three of them are apparently cheerleaders, which (finally) explains how they all know each other.

Anyway, holy shit; this just keeps going and going. The conversation in this 17,696 word chapter is quite literally responsible for about half of its word count. To make matters worse, most of it is just the author projecting and inserting his own reddit-tier opinions on economics, religion and politics into the text. Wasn't this chapter supposed to be about Scoot and her friends facing down a terrorist or something?

Just to spite this faggot, I'm not even going to bother summarizing this. Tl;dr, the girls walk through the mall yammering about bullshit for like 100 forevers, and then suddenly a wild redneck appears.

>>334438
>Ride the Tiger
That's a good one.

>>334438
How many more chapters of hell do you have ,glim?

>>334438

"Freaks! Filthy genetic abomination and teenage slut!"
With this line, the scene abruptly transitions from a conversation about MP3s into what is presumably the scene from the beginning of the chapter. Some random filthy hobo approaches them out of nowhere and starts yelling at them for some incomprehensible reason. He then rips open his coat, revealing that, for some equally incomprehensible reason, he has a bomb strapped to his chest.

>She could kick him. She could kill him. Break his neck with one hoof and stop his heart through chest-impact shock with the other. If she did it quickly, she could still stand a chance of getting the switch with her prosthetic before he let go. She tensed her muscles, original and robotic, and took a breath to do what she had to do to protect her friends.
Would anything we've read so far suggest that Scoot would be capable of any of this? I don't remember reading anything about her studying martial arts.

Anyway, believe it or not, it gets even more ridiculous from here. The mysterious "red dot" suddenly appears on the guy's forehead, and he naturally assumes there is a sniper aiming at him. He starts freaking out, and then is suddenly tased from behind. Turns out that the CIA agent that follows Scootaloo around (you may or may not remember that this was briefly mentioned several forevers ago) had used one of the mall's round surveillance mirrors to redirect the laser sight from her handgun. She had used this to distract the guy while she snuck up behind him and tased him. Also, it turns out the bomb he had for whatever reason wasn't even real. Glad we got that all sorted out.

>"That isn't a functional bomb, nor was the switch capable of anything but some very realistic blinky lights."
As opposed to unrealistic blinky lights?

In any event, the threat of the random hobo, who wanted to blow up Scootaloo for some reason or other, has been thwarted. There is some rather silly conversation, the basic gist of which is that this CIA agent, who protected Scoot briefly when she was younger, has once again been assigned to watch over her. This is the closest we get to an explanation:

>"Honestly? At the moment you only have the four serious threats. This was actually one of the minor ones. And considering the primary threats are either under surveillance, in other countries or both, I don't expect we'll be dealing with this sort of thing that often,"
So...Scoot's life is in danger for some reason, but also not really? Did I get that right?

Also:

>"So I wouldn't say so much that threats to your life, independence, liberty or well-being are back so much as that the situation so happened that you had cause to become aware of one for the first time in several years."
Has you really been far even as decided to use even go want to look more like? Seriously; this is one of the most grammatically ridiculous sentences I've ever read. I'd just like to remind everyone that, according to the author's notes, Jan McNeville is supposed to be Cozy Mark IV's editor.

>Her slight case of what might be ADD seemed to be helping her recover unnaturally well, and Scootaloo thought of Pinkie Pie.
Would Scootaloo even know who Pinkie Pie is? There's so much shit in this story that the authors haven't even attempted to clarify.

>I will, in the next few forty-eight hours, arrange for some sort of suitably impressive de-briefing with each of your families, in which they are reassured of your safety, reminded of how very valuable classmate connections with someone like Miss Scott can be to various later career paths and if necessary, I will imply that scholarships and other advantages may be yours if they manage not to be complete twits about the whole inconvenient affair.
All of this nonsense is one sentence. Seriously: this faggot is supposed to be the editor of this shitpile.

Anyway, whatever; the CIA agent gets them some fucking coffee I guess, and drives them home. Then...Jesus Christ. I literally have no idea what the fuck I'm reading anymore. I'm just going to paste this next bit in:

>i Web address: /forbes-400/list/
>Just type the http, slashies and three W's into your browser, then copy-paste any footnoted address, the bit after 'Web address' and the colon, after the dot in triple-W dot. Or just highlight them, right-click, and 'open in new tab' or 'Search Google for' option may work, on some newer browsers. And yes, feel free to steal Melissa's research for your own homework. Never let it be said that fanfiction isn't a perfectly valid use of study-hall time.
What?

>ii Web address: /Hourly-Pay/Walmart-Stores-Wal-Mart-Cashier-Hourly -Pay-E715_D_KO15,
Who?

>iii Web address: /papers/just_how_progressive_is_the_u.s._tax_code/
Zuh?

>iv Being not only Scootaloo's friends but teenage girls, they were all very well aware of 'My Little Pony' and its' related tropes. Speculation on what their cutie marks would be, were they also equine, was a standard topic of discussion even for girls their age who did not have the privilege of an actual cartoon pony on their cheerleading squad. Scootaloo found it highly amusing and occasionally offered extremely witty suggestions as to what various teachers and public figures would have on their proverbial flank, which generally cracked everyone up laughing.
'kay...

>v Plus, if you used a dollar bill to get each refill, you could use the quarter you got back for some fruit candies from the big Gumball Machine Mountain near the toy and weird-gadget stores. This mall had the unspeakable elegance to offer Runts, Red Hots and other choice little-kid delicacies sorted separately by flavor in the machines, and dropping a handful into one's lemonade had the lovely effect of turning it into a strawberry, a banana or even a sour-apple lemonade just as one was getting bored of plain lemon taste.
Uhhh...

Seriously, are these supposed to be footnotes or something? This nonsense is just dumped into the text with absolutely no explanation.

>>334447
Ten, I think.

>>334457

From here, it gets even more bizarre:

>Scootaloo, of course, had been going halvsies on a handful of strawberry and banana Runts with Christina since seventh grade, because Strawberry Banana Lemonade, especially done with Runts, was to them an improbably splendid beverage and one of the great Epicurean pleasures of mall-going. Scoot's Daddy had seen them do it once and thought it was the most horrible diabetes-inducing thing he had ever seen since That Time With the Giant Pixy Stix At the Fair, but Papa actually took watermelon Runts in his lemonade and gave his husband a cheeky smile every time he did it. So at least atavism could then be blamed by the Philistines, like Daddy and Christina's Mom, who did not appreciate Runts at all.
Literally what the fuck is this faggot talking about? Is this the start of a new scene? The continuation of the previous scene? Did he just accidentally hit Ctrl-V and paste in something from another browser tab? I literally have no idea what is even going on in this story.

>Melissa did not approve of such indecorous behavior as dissolving Wonka products in a citrus solution and always ate her Runts separately, savoring first the candy itself and then sipping the lemonade to enjoy the subtleties of their contrast; exactly how her much-admired and wonderful grandmamma enjoyed peanuts with her Saturday evening Scotch, the one indulgence of a lady who had worked hard for fifty years and didn't intend to let a thing like being sixty-three stop her.
At this point, I refuse to believe that a human being actually sat down and wrote this. This is like something an AI bot would generate.

Anyway, this utter nonsense just keeps going and going; I have no idea how to even attempt to summarize any of it. Some long, crazy bullshit about pop rocks and Josie's brothers or something, I guess.

>vi It took a 'tardy' slip at school to persuade Melissa that collecting random strangers from a bus stop and dropping them at their places of employment on her way to her destination so they could get there faster and skip a fare, while awesome and very kind, was not always the best idea. Still, the fellow whose Jaguar was in the shop had given her a fifty for gas money and several stock tips that turned out to be really good, and more importantly, the waitress on her way to a job interview at a better restaurant always comped Mel a Cherry Coke after she got the job.
Okay, I think I understand what's going on here. I think these actually are supposed to be footnotes: the i, ii, iii, iv and so forth are meant to be read as Roman Numeral headers. Moreover, I think all that long, insane bullshit about Wonka Runts or whatever the fuck was part of a single footnote, because the person who wrote this is literally that autistic.

I went back through the text, and noticed this:

>She pulled a small ID wallet from her pocket and flashed a photo-ID cardvii with a badge the diameter of a Coke can, not including the eagle on top.
I had assumed that "cardvii" was a typo. I had noticed a couple of similar typos at various points in the text, but didn't think much of them. However, I think this is meant to be read as the word "card," with the Roman numeral VII appended to it.

I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who isn't a complete mental patient, but I'll spell it out anyway: this is a terrible way to handle footnotes. There is nothing in the text to indicate that these weird little typos are actually meant to designate footnotes; a better way to handle it would be to use odd characters; asterisks and so forth. Like so:

>She pulled a small ID wallet from her pocket and flashed a photo-ID card*.

I'm assuming the author did it this way is because FimFiction doesn't have a built-in method for including actual footnotes, so he had to improvise. That's all well and good, but if you're going to do that you have to make sure the reader can understand what they're actually looking at. If you see a * or a † or something after a word, that clearly isn't meant to be read as part of the text, it suggests the presence of a footnote. This is an accepted practice in print media. Also, it allows for the reader to easily look up the footnote using the "search" function, since the † character isn't likely to appear elsewhere in the text.

Conversely, using Roman numerals, particularly lower case Roman numerals appended to the words without spaces or special characters, signifies absolutely nothing. Moreover, it makes it next to impossible to actually find the footnote that goes with the passage you're reading, because the numerals are also letters that appear in normal words. For example, searching for "vi" in this chapter, in an attempt to locate the passage that the "vi" footnote goes to, yielded 93 results, most of which were just words that had the characters 'v' and 'i' in them.

To make matters even worse, the author did not include any kind of visual cue to indicate that the chapter had ended and the footnotes had begun. This is the last line of the chapter:

> They all smiled. "Seriously, Josie?"

Then, this appears immediately on the next line:

>i Web address: /forbes-400/list/

How is a normal person supposed to interpret this? At least put a dashed line or something; fuck.

Anyway, the lesson here is pretty simple: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T DO SHIT LIKE THIS. It's bad enough that this story is the most rambling, autistic pile of absolute loony bullshit I've ever read; the fact that it's also a formatting nightmare is just rubbing salt into the wound.

What makes all of this even worse is that these footnotes do not add anything of value to the text, nor do they clarify any of the passages to which they connect.

>>334459

Here's another protip. If you are pacing your story well, you'll find that most of your chapters will end up being roughly the same length. Some will be slightly longer or slightly shorter, but most of the time they'll average out.

With this in mind, if most of the chapters in your text are averaging out to about 5,000 words, as is the case with this text, it should be an immediate red flag if you suddenly have a chapter that is more than three times that length. Another red flag is if the actual events in your chapter are not complicated enough to justify this high of a word count.

Despite how long it is, the events of this chapter can be summed up pretty succinctly:
>Scoot and her friends go to the mall to buy headphones
>they walk around bullshitting and chatting for awhile
>suddenly they are attacked by a crazy homeless person
>Scoot's personal CIA ninja intervenes
>they all have coffee and go home

Nothing about this event suggests it would require as many as 17,000 words to recount; if you gave this to me and told me to spin it into a chapter, I'd probably have difficulty just padding it out to the usual 5,000.

If we examine this chapter a little more closely, we see that the overwhelming bulk of its high word count is dialogue. This is yet another red flag. We find our last red flag when we examine the dialogue itself, and we find that most of it is just huge block paragraphs of irrelevant bullshit that has nothing to do with the events of the chapter or the story at large, and doesn't need to be included in the text at all.

In post >>333689 we discussed the concept of sockpuppet dialogue. The dialogue in this chapter is an even better example of this concept than what I quoted earlier. This chapter is basically just a long, rambling, incoherent essay detailing the author's personal views on economics and politics, with a few potshots at religion thrown in here and there as well. None of it reads like ordinary human speech, none of it has any bearing on the actual events of the chapter, and none of it is in character for any of the speakers. Here is an example, pulled more or less at random:

>"It's the most elaborate kind of insider trading," Melissa agreed. "Congressmen on the Energy committee agree to vote a certain way so the Congressmen on the Education committee will vote the way they agree with, meanwhile Energy's got money in a textbook company and Education is in bed with coal. What's best for the country, be it environment, education, medicine, science, even social policy…none of it matters as much as keeping the people in power not only in power, but richer than any of us could ever dream of. It's really unfair."
This wall of text is meant to be a single line of dialogue, spoken by a sixteen year old high school cheerleader in a casual conversation with her friends. Have you ever met a sixteen year old girl who speaks this way? This is not ordinary human speech, this is a mini-essay which the author composed and then jammed awkwardly into the mouth of this character.

What makes this even worse is that none of what is written here is especially profound or original, nor is it interesting to read; it's basically just some midwit college dweeb ranting about politics. Again, this story falls victim to the same pitfalls that Friendship Is Optimal did: the author is more interested in writing long-form essays about his dumbass reddit-tier opinions than he is in writing fiction, so large portions of his text consists of these giant block-paragraph arguments dumped into quotes.

It's probably getting old by now, but I'm going to once again pick on Nigel's Silver Star thing. I'm sure we all remember his infamous Starlight Glimmer chapter; it was the event that kick-started this review series in the first place, after all. The situation is virtually identical: a single chapter with a preposterously high word count is wedged into the middle of the story. As is the case with this Jan McNeville chapter of Our Girl Scootaloo, the actual events of Nigel's chapter can be summarized easily and succinctly:

>Silver goes on a date with Twilight
>after the date, he goes to a party
>Starlight Glimmer, a character who has not appeared or been mentioned in the story up to that point, is there for some reason
>Silver tells her she sucks, beats her up, and throws her into an alternate dimension
>the end

Again, nothing here justifies a 30,000+ word count; almost the entire chapter consists of dialogue. Moreover, the dialogue is mostly incoherent block paragraphs, all of which are just the author's personal opinions being gracelessly vomited out through the character's mouth. As with McNeville's chapter, very little of the dialogue is relevant to the story overall, and none of it is especially interesting to read.

Sockpuppet writing is a huge, gaping pitfall that, for whatever reason, a lot of amateur authors tend to fall into. No matter how badly you might want to use your story as a platform for lecturing the reader on whatever subjects you are most passionate about, literally nobody wants to read the goddamn Melian Dialogue in a story about ponies. I'll say it again: nobody enjoys listening to fictional characters lecture them about politics/economics/religion/whatever. Moreover, even if they did, odds are your views on these subjects are nowhere near as interesting or profound as you believe them to be. If you want to write your story as some kind of political allegory or fable that's one thing, but just straight-up dumping an essay about progressive economics into your characters' mouths is bad, bad writing.

To put it simply: DON'T DO SHIT LIKE THIS. EVER.

Anyway, that's the end of this chapter. This one was even more pointless than usual. I'm not sure why it was included, particularly since it wasn't even written by the same person who wrote the rest of the text. The only actual writing advice I can give to Jan McNeville here is Ctrl-A + Backspace.

>>334476
I have a geniune question for you. Do you get a sadistic pleasure from reading this? I'm asking because I can't even get through the first paragraph without feeling like ending my life. I hope you are skipping through some text. Only some kind of a masochist would put up with reading this shit in full, let alone reading some sentences again and again just to understand what is meant to be taken from that.

>>334479
The way I look at it, I'm suffering through this dreck so that you guys don't have to. I wouldn't say that I get pleasure from reading it, but I do get some sadistic enjoyment from tearing it apart and shitting all over it.

I try to be more or less thorough most of the time, but in this specific chapter I did end up skipping quite a bit of text. When the three girls launched into that horrendous conversation, at first I was reading attentively, then I was skimming, and finally I just started skipping over entire paragraphs until the actual story resumed. I don't get the impression I missed anything essential.

>>334488
>I do get some sadistic enjoyment from tearing it apart
But, like you said, it varies from fiction to fiction. It's one thing when we all enjoyed you sticking it to that fat dick kkat. But this ungoing fiction is just hurtful to ridicule for what it's worth. This time it's not some popular faggot tripping his balls like he's a biblical prodigy of pony fanfiction. I get an impression that the guy behind "two gays, one scoot" novelty is a closeted mentaly impaired individual who cannot write for shit, even if all of his 7 neurons in his head lit at once. Ridiculing this fic is like laughing at a comatose 90 year old man pissing himself in a wheelchair. Sure he says some funny shit at times but given his conditions that's to be expected.

>I don't get the impression I missed anything essential.
Man, you won't miss anything essential if you'll just skip the whole thing. But I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. Well, good luck with that.

Also, just for fun, check out the author's notes in the epilogue chapter:

>And so ends a three part, nine year long odyssey. The story that got me into fanfic in the first place upon reading 'My Little Dashie' and thinking "I could write this better".

>I could write this better.

>I could write this better.

I hope this gave you a little spark to tear it up harder by now. Anyway, have fun.

Does someone else wanna tackle these, or should I?

Something something on topic, fanfiction author's usually display their psychological and metaphysical makeup in writing less its an emulation of another psychological metaphysical makeup.
>>334504
Let it stew. But frankly I don't have any effort so whatever. It's another post for the ongoing tisms.
>>334500
>>334503
If words could only express the soul aching tiredness...

>>334504
I'll leave it to you, i'm playing vidya.

>>334506
>>334507
Nah, we're not there yet.
For the record though, this is the point I would delete the posts, quote the posts at Nigel in DM, and then demand he actually make a fucking effort instead of being a goddamn drain on the site, and the remaining goodwill from the remaining anons.
Thats the 'bullying' Pupper was so on about.

334436
I'm sorry, "twin rows of nipples"? When did Scootaloo get more than two nipples? Are we talking four nips, six nips, maybe a breast centipede? Did the author mean to write "A twinned set of nipples" or "a row of twin nipples"? Nigger thinks he's ready to write about humans becoming literal GMOs forced to be vegans but he doesn't even know what words mean.

And how the fuck is Scoot supposed to help anyone "cure obesity"?
Nigger just lift some weights and switch your Cucka Cola for some Protein Shakes.
Is it a genetic treatment for the rare percentage with water weight problems and shit metabolisms? Or is it some kind of metabolic procedure where the body recognizes it's carrying too much weight and proceeds to consume and shit out excess body fat even if the body isn't doing enough exercise to burn it all naturally?

Also the author's a faggot who loves writing characters who use false equivalencies to win arguments.
Having your body used "for science" is NOT the same as getting some cosmetic modifications to your body. Nipple piercings, tattoos, those who do these for a living have experience doing this sort of shit. But curing blindness with pony DNA or whatever the fuck this story's talking about? No scientist has ever done that before. How dangerous will the procedure be? How repeatable and sustainable is it? How will humanity obtain this genetic fuckery? In pill form? Through surgery? A virus that modifies specific DNA sequences? A big campy unscientific scifi fucking raygun? Fuck this gay author for jacking himself off with this pseudointellectual usage of Scootaloo as a consensually exploitable resource. Scientists exploit her to cure blindness, the fags exploit her to become a celebrity, all we're missing is some other third thing. Comedy comes in threes and this author cums in man ass. Maybe Scooter's faggot boyfriend could be trying to exploit her for sex, bringing her into the bedroom just to check if horsepuss can help him get it up for someone besides Chris Hemsworth despite lacking any true emotional bond with her. This story isn't about characters, it's a story about the author's overwhelming desire to exploit ponyland and the facade of homosexuality in a culture that fetishizes and overzealously protects it.

I bet if the characters argued more about their tastes this could reveal characterization. Everyone "Good(tm)" is always so obnoxiously buddy-buddy in these stories and never willing to tell the designated heroes no. Any token argument against what the heroes want is only used as an excuse to make false equivalencies.

Also, why do so many faggot pseudointellectual stories do that thing where humanity has some kind of deal like "do science to get healthier but become vegan" on the table?
Offering background humans the "Become vegan but get a cure for obesity or a better immune system or whatever" adds nothing to the story.
It's not like the two faggots are going to argue over it intensely enough for it to potentially split them apart, making Scoots stressed out over it.
The faggot author just wanted to feel like a god as he offers his retarded take on humanity this retarded fictional faustian bargain.
Why else would any of this shit work this way? Is the author some new-age "magic vegan" faggot? Maybe if veganism was actually healthier than normalcy people would have noticed over the past 2000 years and embraced veganism to prosper more back when society cared about prosperity. Veganiggers really take 69 pills a day for the vitamins they're missing out on and call this "natural".
Plenty of herbivores can digest meat just fine, they're just built for plants. Have you ever seen a deer eat a bird? Nature doesn't give a fuck. Horses can eat meat. Why make ponies into vegans?
This story is gay nigger dogshit with AIDS. What were they thinking? It's like they were on drugs or something. What a shitload of fuck. How the fuck did this take nine years to make?

I went through my post and removed whatever seemed to be off-topic. Did I do a good job?

>>334509
Reiterating, it would be 'bad' to delete all this cancer, and to demand a rewrite. Per Pupper, who knowest all and deviseth all, lest us worldly mouthbreathers deign to contest.

>>334476

Before we move on, I just wanted to call attention to a couple of things I found in the comments section for Chapter 11. This comes from a user named chukker:

>It seems a little surprising, however, that the cartoon hasn't made a bigger appearance in the story. It's mentioned a couple times, and clearly Scootaloo knows she's a cartoon character, albeit a different one from the show, but her dealing with that seems like it would be a bigger part of her life and character development.

We also have this from a user named Rubystars:

>This story seems to be mostly a political diatribe rather than a pony fanfic so far

If even your diehard fans are picking up on the things you're doing wrong, it's worth paying attention to.

Anyway, moving on:

Ch 12: Meet the Parents

It is apparently summer now, though I have completely lost track of how many years are supposed to have passed in this story. I think Scoot is still a Sophomore. Anyway, after some brief autism about Scoot's robotic arms, we learn that her two fag parents have finally decided to accept her relationship with whatsisname:

>She and Conner had continued dating, and Jayne and Kevin had talked it over and decided it was best not to object.
From some hints that were dropped earlier in the text, my assumption has been that Conner is a closet homosexual, and that Scoot's parents initially objected to their relationship because they don't want her developing feelings for a boy who isn't actually interested in her. This scenario would be consistent with the story's subject matter thus far, and it would also make sense that Adam & Steve would have better gaydar than Scoot would. This would also explain some of the treatment that Conner received during the prom scene:

>"Hey gay wad, what the hell are you doing here?"
>"Shut up faggot, this is our dance and you aren't welcome here."
>"Yeah, clear out you gay fuck, we didn't give you permission to show your face around here."
These kids have obviously picked on Conner in the past, and his sexuality seems to be the central issue.

From all of this, I extrapolated that the situation here is that Conner is gay, and Scoot hasn't realized it yet; presumably the revelation would turn out to be some kind of story twist. However, it's now looking like this may not actually be the case:

>Jayne spoke up. "We talked it over, and decided you're right. Conner isn't going to hurt you or get you into drugs or such. We wanted to apologize for judging, and remind both of you that you are always welcome in our home."
This seems to imply that Adam & Steve have some other objection to Conner, but it's not really clear what. Nothing we've seen thus far indicates that he might be dangerous, or that he would cheat on her, abuse her, etc. The drug angle makes even less sense; Scoot's parents were actively encouraging her to experiment with drugs earlier in the story. There is also this:

>Kevin managed a laugh. "Yes, we don't mind; in fact we would prefer you bring him home when you want to have your way with him."
This seems to imply that carnal relations between Scoot and Conner are a given.

Anyway, whatever; point is, the two fags had some mysterious problem with Conner earlier, but now they don't anymore.

Due to the influence of Conner's skateboarder friends, Scoot has been learning to skateboard herself. Her flight ability seems to give her some unique advantages when performing tricks. On one particular afternoon Scoot and her friends are out skating, when she notices two old acquaintances standing nearby: George and Betty Gregersen. I don't remember exactly who these characters are, but they seem to be among the many doctors involved in whatever sort of weird experiments are being conducted on Scootaloo. The name sounds vaguely familiar.

Anyway, whatever; these two seem like a couple of complete degenerates. As usual, the text just sort of meanders from here. To save time, here is a brief list of topics covered during their long and entirely pointless conversation:

>Scootaloo getting stoned
>monkey bar fights
>Vietnam
>Woodstock
>the group of jocks that beat up Conner at the prom
>the Tour de France
>whatever the fuck kind of weird science Scoot's stem cells are being used for

The scene abruptly terminates in the middle of the conversation, and then we are suddenly dropped into a completely new scene at some undetermined point in the future. Conner has brought Scoot over to his house so she can meet his parents. Their names are Michael and Nancy, and like most of the characters in this story, we don't learn much more about them than that, beyond that Michael is a gun enthusiast. Unsurprisingly, the conversation veers off from here into a discussion of Scoot's (read: the author's) views on gun ownership. Thankfully, it doesn't drag on for too long. Nancy reenters the scene (because she left apparently), and informs them that dinner is served.

>As they all took a seat at the table, Scootaloo took an appreciative sniff of her dish. "Oh, that does smell good! Conner has told me what an excellent cook you are."
>"Oh, why, thank you, dear! I don't normally cook vegetarian food, but Conner told me all about your dietary needs, so I made that just for you."
It was established earlier that Conner is a vegetarian. If this is still the case, wouldn't it stand to reason that his mother would be accustomed to cooking vegetarian food?

Anyway, dinner proceeds. Conner's parents are mild-mannered Christian people with an interest in guns, so naturally the author portrays them negatively, and Scoot is uncomfortable around them. The conversation veers off into a tedious back and forth about premarital sex and abortion that isn't even remotely worth going over. We also learn that the bullies from the prom scene earlier were members of their church.

We also learn offhand that the pastor of their church, Pastor Gray, is going to be taking over as the new principal at their school. Oh goody, I'm sure this will be a fun storyline.

Who thinks the author missed a trick by not making these retarded political rants more central to the contents of each chapter?
Of course I'd prefer a removal of the political rants. I was pushing it when my character argued about communism with the commie horse. Which proceeded to swallow up the entire chapter. And what was with that ending where Silver gives out some kind of punishment sentence like a wannabe deity? The story hadn't built up to or earned a scene anything like that. And even if it had, a scene where Glim chooses for herself to try and make things up to the Our Town ponies would be a happier end for her character than getting kicked out of Ponyville or even the whole universe directly.

>>334872

After dinner, they all sit around having mousse, and we are given a little more background info on Conner's parents. They are a completely normal, entirely unobjectionable couple: Michael is a blue-collar worker who never finished college, and Nancy wanted to be a teacher but gave up on college when she became pregnant. Naturally, the author's take on them is completely even-handed:

>Scootaloo's worked to keep her expression pleasantly neutral. "You mean you gave up your degree to have Conner?"
>Michael answered for her. "Well of course she did. A good wife must be submissive to her husband."

Anyway, that's the end of the scene.

After a page break, Conner drives Scootaloo home. Unsurprisingly, they spend most of the ride grousing about how politically incorrect Conner's lame parents are.

>"Arrgg. What a night. I hate it when Randy Milholland is right about something." Scootaloo grumbled.
Who? This is the first time this character has been mentioned. From context we can probably assume that Randy is one of their classmates, but what exactly was he right about?

>"I know it was hard, but we made it through, and Dad didn't kick you out of the house. It could have been worse... Wait, right about what?"
>"Oh, he did a famous eight page 'something positive' comic and my Dads have it framed on the wall. It's online, started October fifth, 2006.
Oh, I see; it's a reference. I had to google this guy, but apparently he's a real person. From Wikipedia:

>Randal Keith Milholland (born November 25, 1975[1]), better known as R. K. Milholland, is an American webcomic author. His works include Something Positive, New Gold Dreams, Midnight Macabre, Classically Positive and Super Stupor.
I guess he's some webcomic author. Can't say I've heard of him. Anyway, this seems to be the crux of Scoot's remark:

>The punchline is 'The only time anyone's admitted they were a Christian before was when they were busy telling me why they're better than me.'
Part of me wants to scold myself for even taking the bait here, but this kind of shit is exactly why everyone hates wokies.

Even with the author's obvious effort to portray Michael and Nancy as negatively as possible, they don't come across as unlikable characters. Frankly, they're among the least objectionable people we've met in this story so far. For instance, George and Betty from the previous scene were a pair of insufferable, gross aging hippies, who openly bragged about their past debauchery and drug use to a group of teenagers.

As was the case with FoE, this story is far more interesting as a psychological profile of its author than it is as a work of fiction. Here, the author inadvertently reveals his own hypocrisy. Michael and Nancy are basically just an ordinary blue-collar couple: they go to church, they own guns, they have conservative beliefs. They're outspoken about their beliefs, but they aren't obnoxious or condescending about it. They are polite and respectful to Scootaloo, and they don't raise any apparent objection to their son dating her, despite the fact that she clearly doesn't share their values and the fact that she is a horse for crying out loud. Scootaloo, however, is far more condescending and judgmental towards them than they are towards her: so far they've invited her into their home, served her a meal (catered to her individual dietary requirements, I might add), and have done absolutely nothing to provoke her. By contrast, she has done nothing but complain about them.

Now, it's possible that the author is setting things up this way intentionally, in order to have his character learn a lesson about tolerating the beliefs of people you disagree with, but somehow I doubt this is the case. From what we've read so far, this author does not seem capable of even the most basic levels of subtlety or nuance; this whole story has been nothing but blatant projection so far. Most likely, he assumes that these two mild-mannered normie Republicans he's written are unlikable characters, simply by virtue of their being normie Republicans, and that the reader will automatically dislike them as much as he does. Conner's father owns guns! Sacrebleu! His family says a prayer before they eat! Mon dieu! His mother gave up a promising future making $26,000 per year as a teacher so she could raise her child! Quelle horreur!! At the risk of sounding like an afterschool special, I think we found out who the real bigots are. inb4 democrats are the real racists

Anyway, they bitch about his parents for a few more paragraphs, and then Scoot decides that she can tolerate their silly backwater beliefs and put up with them, because they are Conner's parents, after all. How very noble of her.

Then, suddenly, without any sort of warning, things get extremely weird:

>- Nine years later in Equestria -Dashie's homecoming – picks up where 'My little Dashy' leaves off.-
Presumably this is meant as a title header; however, nothing in this title relates to anything we've read about thus far. "Equestria" is a place we've only heard about in passing, we have no idea who "Dashie" is, and "My Little Dashy" is the (misspelled) title of a completely different and wholly unrelated story, written by a different author.

>The huge castle chamber was empty but for two palace guards standing silently by the door and the palace doctor aimlessly trotting about. The Princess and her five companions had departed several hours ago on a dangerous mission, and those who seen them off were in other rooms of the castle, anxiously waiting for word of their return.
Now all of a sudden we're in a castle? And it's nine years later? Literally what?

Anyway, it's clear enough that the scene has changed, and we're witnessing a completely different set of events concerning a completely different set of characters. I'm not really clear on what the fuck is happening, but since I'm almost out of space I'm just going to save it for the next post.

>>334895

I honestly have no idea what the fuck is going on in this scene. In some of my other reviews, I've bitched about the practice of writing fanfiction with the assumption that the reader is intimately familiar with the source material. Well, this author not only does plenty of this, he takes it a step further: this scene, which has just been plopped into the middle of the current story without any attempt to connect the two, seems to depend heavily on the reader's familiarity with the events of My Little Dashie, which I unfortunately know absolutely nothing about.

I feel like I shouldn't even have to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway:
DON'T DO SHIT LIKE THIS.

To make matters worse, this scene is as atrociously written as the rest of the story has been so far, so it would be hard to follow what's going on even if I could understand it in its proper context. Whatever; I'll do my best to sum it up.

As far as I can tell, this scene takes place in a castle somewhere in Equestria; probably Canterlot Castle, though this isn't directly stated. Celestia (a hitherto unmentioned character) and six unidentified ponies suddenly teleport into the room. They are greeted by another group of hitherto unmentioned characters: Luna, Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Rainbow's Father. Presumably Rainbow is one of the six ponies who have just materialized, because we are told that her father runs to her and attempts to hug her, but she backs away from him.

>The two crusaders who had missed this, and both grabbed onto her legs, but Rainbow just looked down at them, not sure what to make of this.
This sentence is bad and you should feel bad.

>As far as Rainbow could tell, this was all some kids' cartoon show, suddenly come to life and thrust upon her as her new life, whether she liked it or not.
The meaning of this is completely ambiguous. For starters, we have no idea who Rainbow even is. There was an earlier scene in which a character named Rainbow Dash suddenly materialized in alternate-universe Detroit, so we can probably infer that this is meant to be the same character. However, the author does not provide anywhere near enough information for any of this to make sense.

This would all be fine if it were the start of a brand new story, since we could assume that the author would fill us in on who these characters are and what they are doing as the story progresses. However, to have this just suddenly plopped into the middle of a completely different story without warning is beyond jarring. This is like if Charles Dickens had suddenly dropped the opening chapter of Treasure Island into the middle of Oliver Twist.

>"Okay, I've come with you, and I'm sure you're all nice ponies, but what about my dad?"
Who is speaking this line?

>Her biological father looked hurt and confused, and Fluttershy quietly took him aside to explain.
Who is Fluttershy? Who is this "biological" father? Is he distinct from the character called Rainbow's Father, or is it meant to be the same guy? For that matter, are we even still talking about Rainbow? Jesus Christ, I've read stories written by first graders that were more articulate than this.

Anyway, whatever. "Celestia" informs "Rainbow" that her "adoptive father," who appears to be distinct from the character presently known as "Rainbow's Father," will not be able to join them in "Equestria." This news is apparently sad, because she is wiping tears from her eyes. Rainbow is apparently also sad, and wants to know why this is so.

>Twilight joined in. "After what you told us about the human world I never thought I would say this, but... I agree with Rainbow. We should invite him to come visit our world, even if he doesn't choose to stay."
Who is Twilight? To whom is she speaking?

>"Yeah, I could find space for him at the farm. He'd have no trouble earning his keep with a reach like that."
>"And making clothes that fit would be an interesting challenge. I'd gladly help."
>"Oh! And I could throw him a welcome-to-Ponyville party to celebrate!"
Who are the speakers here? These lines are just floating in the text.

Anyway, whatever; it goes on like this for awhile. Eventually, we learn that Celestia apparently can bring this mysterious human, who is apparently also the adoptive father of someone named "Rainbow," to Equestria, but she doesn't want to, because apparently humans can't survive in Equestria.

She goes on to explain that roughly 85 years ago, two groups of humans mysteriously arrived in Equestria, lived there for a couple of days, and then died of some kind of horrible illness. Celestia apparently suppressed the information and erased everyone's memories of the event because of how horrible it was.

Anyway, after a while, the story starts vaguely connecting itself to the one we've been reading up until now. Celestia tells Rainbow that yes, she can go back and visit her adoptive father from time to time, but that traveling between worlds is difficult and thus can't be done very often. She then explains that their next task involves searching for Scootaloo.

>"I'm sorry, it appears she was sent to a slightly different human world." She saw Twilight about to ask and held up a hoof. "It is complicated, but there are many close copies of the world we just visited, just as there are many close copies of our world. Under any normal circumstance it is an academic issue, but I will explain later if you desire."
I can't help but feel like the author went out of his way to make this premise several degrees of magnitude more complicated than it needed to be.

Anyway, whatever; there are different human worlds, and Celestia doesn't know which one Scootaloo is in. We'll run with that for awhile.

>"Now, Twilight, if you would please use your spell to restore Rainbow Dash's memory? I believe we are all anxious to complete our reunion."
Does Rainbow Dash not have her memory? Seems like that's the sort of thing someone ought to have mentioned.

>>334901
>Does Rainbow Dash not have her memory?

Oh wow, this passage just got way fucking worse. So, I read My Little Dashie a while ago, and as you may assume, it's a vaguely similar concept to this fic in that a show character (Dash, of course), is transported to earth as a foal and raised there by some guy. She is eventually sent back to Equestria as the final moment of feels-bait in that story. What I assume is happening here is RD is reacting as she would anyone from a different universe would: She has 0 relation or emotional connection to these new ponies she has found herself surrounded by, and asks about her dad, the human man who raised her. Twilight here seems to be stating that, somehow, she has a set of memories from Equestria that need to be "restored" despite not being raised there? What the fuck does this mean? It would be additionally horrifying if RD then forgets her entire upbringing on earth and has it wiped from her memory, replaced by memories that never really happened in Equestria. None of this makes any fucking sense.

>>334929
I'm confused. Is the author trying to combine these stories by rewriting the end of My Little Dashie?

>>334971
My Little Dashie ended with Dash returning to Equestria. The author here seems to be showing what happened AFTER she was returned to Equestria in this scene. It's not a rewrite, just a continuation that is stuck in the midst of this story for some reason.

>>334901

Anyway, from here it gets quite a bit weirder, but also becomes a bit easier to follow. "Twilight" casts a spell on "Rainbow" to restore her memories, which were apparently lost at some point, and the result is not what she expected. Rainbow's mind splits into two distinct personalities: one is the person who has apparently been living in the human world up until now, and the other is the person who, I guess, used to live here, in Equestria. Presumably this would be the Rainbow Dash we'd know from the cartoon series.

Since the present Rainbow appears to be an adult, and since we know from earlier that the Rainbow who arrived in Detroit was a filly, I'm not really sure how this is supposed to work; it seems like Rainbow has lived her entire life in the human world and should thus have no memories of Equestria. Again, I feel like the author is almost going out of his way to overcomplicate his premise, but I guess we'll see where he takes it.

This is all he offers us by way of an explanation:

>Twilight tried to think of a gentle way to break it to her, but, unable to come up with one, she just blurted out the truth. "There was an accident and you were thrown back in time to another world. You grew up there, had a father who loved you, and after fifteen long years your time-line caught up with ours and we were able to rescue you."
Maybe the adult Rainbow Dash had an "accident," and was flung through a portal into alt-Detroit, where she awakened as a filly with no memories? I have no damned idea.

Anyway, the big takeaway here is that the M6 of this particular universe are now hell-bent on finding Scootaloo and bringing her back home. The chapter ends here.

As an aside, Cozy Mark IV actually responds to the comment made by Chukker in the previous chapter:

>Thanks for the favorite : ) You make a good point about the cartoon: They know that the shows producers are getting dreams about Equestria, and using them to write the show, but no one knows how or why this is happening, or for that matter, how accurate the resulting portrayal is.
>As to Scoot? She knows the above, but without anything more than dreams, there's not much she can do to interact with anyone, and there isn't much she can learn. By this point she has grown into a character very different from the one in the show, and her attitude towards the show is one of mild irritation because of the weird misconceptions people get from it.
This is all very interesting, but literally none of it comes across in the text as written. The cartoon is barely mentioned at all, and the parallels to the Scootaloo character in this program and the character who exists in the "real" world are never addressed, so it remains a point of extreme confusion. As to the show's writers getting visions about Equestria in their dreams, this hasn't been mentioned at all, and if Scoot is also getting visions, it seems like this would be an important detail to mention. Remember: we can't see what's in your head.

Chukker responds:

>The vignette nature of the story is interesting. Personally, I found the discussion of religion in the previous chapter well done, and was looking forward to more of that. I like that you've continued it a bit in this chapter, but was looking forward to Scootaloo's reaction to church and more on her opinions of religion, and not just the other characters. I realize you do get her views a little in her responses to Conner's parents, but I'd kind of like to see a more positive/constructive viewpoint.
Welp, there goes any shred of respect I might have had for Chukker.

Anyway, let's move on. The more this story unfolds, the more I'm starting to think it's not really worth the bother of analyzing; however, I still feel weirdly compelled to finish a review once I've started it. I'm going to make a concerted effort to move through these chapters a little more quickly, however.

Ch 13: Live Long or Prosper

Scootaloo is at the doctor's office, talking to Mary. She has a question about her new boyfriend:

>"It's... My boyfriend says he loves me... He does everything right in public, but... But in the bedroom..." She had been staring at her hands and now she looked up with tears in her eyes. "He has to work to be interested in me. The few time's we managed to make it work he had to have a blindfold and a football game going in the background."
Hm, maybe my original theory about this guy was correct after all. Still doesn't answer the question of what Adam & Steve's objection to him was, though.

>She sniffed. "Mary... Am I ugly?"
>Mary finally remembered the boy Scootaloo was dating and felt relieved but a bit sad as she broke the news to her. "You're not ugly, Scoot. And there is nothing wrong with you being a pony."
This is kind of funny. Scoot didn't say anything about being a pony, but Mary just brings it up for no reason.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that my original theory was indeed correct: Conner is, in fact, a gay homosexual. It also seems like my original assumption about Scoot's parents' reaction to him was correct as well: they picked up on his latent fudge-packing tendencies, and knew immediately that he and Scoot wouldn't be a good match. However, they also assumed that since his gay-powers had not yet activated, and since Scoot would automatically reject any advice on dating her parents gave her, that it was better to just let the whole thing play out. We also learn that one of Scoot's parents (it doesn't really matter which one) had a similar issue when he was growing up; Mary was originally his ex-girlfriend, whom he was dating before he realized his own preferences. Glad we got that all sorted out.

Mary then gives a long soapbox speech about lefty values that isn't really worth going over in detail; suffice it to say the author slips in a few more digs at Conner's parents and middle-American culture in general. This ends the scene.

>>334929
I'm glad to see that it doesn't make any more sense to someone who's read My Little Dashie than it does to someone who hasn't.

>>335030

>On the first day of her eleventh year, and Conner's twelfth they sat together
This business about years has been a point of confusion for some time now. From the way time has been handled, it sounds like Scoot has been on earth for roughly eleven years, and she is also in eleventh grade, so presumably she entered first grade the year she arrived. This is a bit odd, but I'd assumed that it was either a quirk of the way ponies age as opposed to humans (as I understand it, horses grow to adulthood fairly quickly), or else it meant that she was already about five years old when she arrived in our world. However, for Conner this makes no sense at all. His "twelfth year" would mean that he is twelve years old, but is also a senior in high school. Obviously, this doesn't make sense. The author probably means his twelfth year of school, but that's not what this says.

Anyway, point is, it's the next year now. Scoot is now a junior, and her closet-gay boyfriend is a senior. They are presently sitting in the school auditorium. The new principal we've been hearing about, Pastor Gray, stands up and gives the standard "welcome to the school year" speech. He specifically mentions that he plans on cutting certain non-essential programs to improve academics; presumably this is going to become a significant plotline. Then, he turns things over to the DARE officer, who gives a boilerplate speech about saying 'no' to drugs. This, of course, elicits a boilerplate reaction from Scoot's stoner/skater friends, and the scene is over.

Page break. It seems that Scoot was able to qualify for entry into that advanced biochemistry class that was brought up a few chapters ago. The course syllabus has some unusual recommended reading:

>Some of the books made sense, biology and chemistry texts Dr. Moselle must like, but a few looked strangely out of place, and she couldn't help wonder what 'Guns, Germs and Steel' was about, and what it had to do with a class about biology.
Oh, goody. This sounds like it's going to be a fun and informative storyline with absolutely no preaching, projection or sockpuppet dialogue whatsoever.

Anyway, the teacher shows up and gets the class started. Her opening spiel is pretty standard fare: the class is hard, and only the most motivated students will be able to pass it, and blah blah blah.

>"Now that the basics are out of the way, let's start the year with a laugh. Only about one person in three did well enough on the essay to be here today, and before we wade into the first lesson, I'd like to talk about some of the answers I received, good and bad. The question was 'why do we grow old and die'"
>The screen changed to show a sheet of paper labeled in huge font 'Because god say's so'. There were a few chuckles as she commented; "The other 45 pages were blank"
Durr hurr hurr.

Anyway, the professor launches into a long lecture on the biological reasons behind death. The long and short of it is that different species adapt differently to their environments, and subsequently have different life expectancies.

>Her voice took on a hard edge. "I asked you this essay question for a reason. Too many people regard old age, illness and death as facts of life, to be accepted." She practically spat the word. "It is not okay to watch our parents slowly die as their bodies fall apart around them. It is not okay to stand at a mother's bedside and watch her die as her daughter cries. Never forget what you are really dealing with. Aging and death are evolved systems to keep animal species alive, but we are no longer mindless animals."
Lol. I think I can already tell where this is probably going. Considering that scientists are already using Scootaloo's wacky DNA to cure diseases and figure out advanced space flight, presumably this class is going to motivate Scoot herself to solve the problem of human mortality once and for all.

Anyway, the prof yaks about biology for a couple more paragraphs, and then the scene ends.

>-----------inspired by the song 'Act Naturally' by SemiSonic – Google to listen -----------------
Don't do shit like this. Ever. We don't know what songs you were listening to when you were writing and we don't care. If you really want to tell us, put it in a footnote at the end of the chapter.

Page break. Pastor Gray's administration has brought about the sort of changes you'd expect in a story like this. Apparently, the pastor was also the principal of a junior high school, and Scoot notices that the younger girls don't know as much about sex as she feels they ought to, because blah blah blah religious people are backwards and lame, and don't even understand the first thing about using cartoon pony DNA to cure death.

For some reason, human children at this school seem to regard Scootaloo, a horse, as a go-to source of information about human sexuality. One day, a ninth grader approaches her in confidence and tells her that she thinks she might be pregnant. As the conversation progresses, it is gradually revealed that the girl was actually just giving the guy a blowjob, and thought she was pregnant because he came in her mouth. Something tells me the author is writing from personal experience here. Anyway, the tl;dr is that Pastor Gray, being the backwards, ignorant religious hillbilly that he is, didn't teach sex education at her previous school, and now kids are coming into the school with all sorts of wacky ideas about sex. Scootaloo is predictably horrified.

The chapter ends here.

>>335035

Ch 14: Family Values

Now it's autumn. Scoot and her friends are hanging out skateboarding, and then they go back to Curt's house to play video games. Then, Scoot notices that a couple of her friends are doing heroin (???), and she lays into them for it.

Page break. Scootaloo explains the various pros and cons of using illicit narcotics. That's about all that happens. All jokes aside, I have to seriously question the mental health of a person who would even conceive of a story like this.

Page break. We're deeper into autumn now. Scoot's fudge-packing boyfriend finally comes out to her as the rump-ranger he is. However, since he can't come out at school because it's being run by icky meanie-pants backwards Christian people, and he can't come out to his parents because they are also icky meanie-pants backwards Christian people, he becomes depressed and withdrawn.

One day, he doesn't show up at school. Scoot goes to visit him at his house. He doesn't answer when she knocks on the door, so she uses her powerful robot arms to break it down, and finds him with a gun in his mouth instead of a dick. Naturally, his icky meanie-pants backwards Christian father is only concerned about the broken door. She gives him a stern talking to, and then the two of them leave. They flee to the safety of Scoot's house, where, in the warm embrace of proper progressive values, she is able to finally soothe Conner's icy heart with her cool island song.

Page break. It's November now. Pastor Gray has canceled sex ed, and as a result, it seems that like half the school is pregnant now. Moreover, the atmosphere of bigotry and intolerance has grown so intense that gay kids are now being openly beaten in the hallways.

>And Senora Cohen the Spanish teacher had caught someone calling someone else a faggot and proceeded to cuss them out in a blend of Yiddish and Spanish that took even the kids with the good smartphones over a day to completely translate. (Senora Cohen was the wife of the local Reform congregation's rabbi and had no patience whatsoever for 'Pastor' Gray.)
Fucking kek. The jokes are just writing themselves at this point.

Anyway, the long and short of all of this is that the school's faculty seems to have split into two distinct factions: the wise and noble Progressive teachers, who detest bigotry in all its forms, and the backwards knuckle-dragging religious teachers, who side with Pastor Gayslayer and his icky, meanie-pants backwards approach to high school administration, focusing on academics and standardized testing.

>That lasted until Josie found Mrs. Gryle giggling as a popular girl speculated that a geekier-looking one was 'probably a dyke.' At that point, the cheerful coloring-book fan lost her temper completely. She proceeded to speculate herself, at length and in cheerleading-trained ultra-loud tones to rival the Royal Canterlot Voice about what the popular girls must have called Mrs. Gryle when she was young. The hypocrisy of a frumpy middle-aged woman tolerating abuse in order to have stupid bimbos who did little but waste class time like her was quickly revealed when Gryle first asked, then shouted, then screamed and cried for Josie to stop talking, shut up and finally 'shut the fuck up, you little bitch!'
We're reaching levels of projection that shouldn't even be possible.

Anyway, this ridiculous meandering autism seems to go on forever, until eventually some teacher pulls Scootaloo aside in the hallway and asks her if she'd have a conversation with someone named Amelia Findlay.

Page break. Amelia Findlay is apparently Josie's retarded cousin. Turns out that yada yada yada she was molested by the Deacon at her church, who I guess impregnated her, and then told her that she'd been chosen by God to give birth to the baby Jesus. Now there's a cover story that's guaranteed not to raise any eyebrows.

Page break. Josie's hands are bloody for some reason; it's not clear why. Maybe she beat up the Deacon that molested her retard cousin? I'm honestly not sure what's being implied here. Anyway, she and Scoot go into the bathroom for first aid, and we are given Amelia's origin story: apparently, she used to be normal, then she was hit by a car when the two of them were riding bikes as children, and that made her a retard. Apparently, this business with the Deacon has pushed Josie over the edge:

>"And now after everything else that's happened, that chauvinist Pastor Gray and his anti-woman policies are going to put her through all this?! No. This has gone on long enough."
I'm not really sure what Pastor Gray has to do with any of this; as far as I can tell, what's at issue is that some Deacon took advantage of a retarded girl and molested her, and now she's pregnant. The Pastor's "anti-woman polices" have little if anything to do with this.

Anyway it seems like Josie has had enough of...whatever she's had enough of, I guess...and vows to do "something drastic."

Page break. They get a positive pregnancy test to prove that Derpy Sue is actually pregnant, and confront the girl's parents with the evidence. The story moves in a predictable direction from here. To save time, I'll sum it up quickly:

>the parents are members of the same church as Pastor Gray and Deacon Molestypants
>naturally, this means they are pro-life
>naturally, this means the author has nothing but contempt for their backwards beliefs
>naturally, this means that this entire storyline is just a contrived situation designed to put them in a difficult position
>they decide to have a secret abortion or something I guess
>yada yada yada Jesus-people are hypocrites

Anyway, there's a long back and forth between Scoot and her friend that might have made for a decent emotional scene had the author actually bothered to develop any of these characters and build up the event properly; as it stands, it's mostly just another tedious soapbox lecture about the author's own views.

>>335070

They are now in Scootaloo's kitchen, I guess. A minute ago they were at Josie's cousin's house, talking to her parents, and then suddenly they are at Scoot's house. The progression of time in this story is pretty surreal, and the author moves quickly from event to event in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, without really bothering to set scenes. Anyway, it seems that Scoot's butt-burglar boyfriend is now living in her house for some reason; I guess his parents kicked him out for being a pillow-biting donut-puncher.

Anyway, it looks like Josie wants to organize some kind of mass protest. I'm honestly not sure I understand what the hell is going on at this point.

>"I'm guessing we can probably get about a quarter to half of the high school girls to participate. The other girls who've been hurt haven't just been numbers and they're not just fellow students. I know several of them personally, and that doesn't count all the brothers and sisters, cousins and friends who have watched their lives fall apart around them.
Is this still about the Deacon molesting her cousin? Seems like the simplest thing to do there would be to just call the police and let them handle it; a protest just seems like overkill. Also, what is this business about "all the other girls" supposed to be? Did the Deacon molest other girls as well? Is that the implication here? As usual, there is a lot of shit the author hasn't bothered to explain.

>"If school had always been fucked up it would be harder to sell this, but our school used to be one of the best. We aren't idiots; we can see the damage being done. Scoot and I need to talk with the squad and get them to help with the recurring. Its only Monday today... Do you think we can have the sewing done in time for next Monday?"
I guess this is supposed to be a general protest about all the other shit; the gay-bashings and unexpected pregnancies and whatever the fuck else is going on in this clusterfuck. Seriously, this story has transcended pure autism; I don't even know what to call this anymore.

That's basically the end of the chapter.

Ch 15: Hard Choices

Apparently, the protest they're planning is specifically about the removal of sex ed from the classrooms. Not sure how this connects to Josie's cousin getting molested, but we'll put a pin in that for now. They stand at a bunch of entrances and hand out free condoms, until eventually the Pastor shows up and confiscates their supplies. However, he can't stop all of them for some reason, so throughout the day they manage to pass out more and more condoms, which seem to be graciously received by the increasingly pregnant students.

I have to ask: is safe sex even enough of an issue for high school kids to warrant this much controversy in the first place? The way I remember it, sex in high school was mostly a lot of time spent trying to download porn on a 56k modem. Presumably, there were some kids at my school with more active social lives than mine who were getting laid, but I never got the impression it was a gigantic orgy like what seems to be happening in this school. These kids seem to spend most of their time alternating between getting pregnant and beating the shit out of fags in the hallway; I'm amazed they even have time for mandatory Bible study. I must have gone to the wrong high school.

>Scootaloo wondered, but continued anyway. "Josie, I know we've done some good today, we've handed out hundreds of condoms, and with any luck we may have saved someone's future, but I've never seen the principal this angry! I think he meant what he said."
Here's another thing I find confusing about all of this. Despite the Principastor's objections, the girls' condom-distribution spree seems to have been a rousing success with the student body. Obviously, these kids know what condoms are, and have a use for them. So if that's the case, why are so many of them getting pregnant? It's not as if condoms are some kind of contraband that high school kids would have difficulty getting their hands on. Is getting sex ed reinstated as a class really going to make that much of a difference here?

Also, whatever happened to that business with Josie's cousin? If that's what they're pissed off about, shouldn't their efforts be focused on exposing this Deacon, or getting him arrested, or something? Very little of this makes any real sense.

>Stop and think about this. We tried talking with Gray, and he blew us off. We wrote letters and tried talking to the higher-ups in the administration, and they blew us off.
And when did any of this happen? This is why you want to build your story as, well, an actual story; you know, with scenes and characters and stuff. Instead of just word vomiting endless autism, and assuming the parts of the story you didn't bother to write will just be transmitted to the reader via some kind of Vulcan mind-meld.

Anyway, it sounds like the plan here is to get the principal pissed off enough to call the cops, so that they can get publicly arrested and thus draw attention to their cause. The text veers off into some extremely long and convoluted autism in which one of Scoot's friends, Melissa I think, explains the various legal ins and outs of getting arrested for protesting. Personally, I think she's getting a little ahead of herself here; they haven't really done anything illegal that I'm aware of. However, that's probably beside the point in this wacky story.

Presumably they don't get arrested for handing out condoms, because they spend the weekend sewing costumes together for the protest, which I guess is going to happen on Monday. We also learn that Derpy Sue has had a miscarriage, so it looks like that little problem has conveniently solved itself. However, it seems there's a little more to it than that.

>>335080
When I went to highschool in the late 2000's early 2010's, sex was a pretty uncommon thing. I know some dude fucked a girl and they were both 15, but apart from that it was mostly kids sneaking into the bushy area of the forest next door to kiss and maybe give blowjobs or something. That being said, my little sister who is 13 right now has friends who do weed and hardcore drugs, so perhaps this author is writing from a "modern" take on highschools, as i'm sure they might have become much worse than what you or I have experienced when it comes to degeneracy due to the development of society.

>fic was written in 2013

Oh nevermind, then. Perhaps they're just retarded and don't know what highschools are like, or went to a really bad one.

>>335113
High Schools are like that in the US. even in the late 2000's

>>335115
Yeah sorry, it was pretty presumptuous of me to assume, especially since my town is pretty out of the way so I wouldn't get the same highschool experience as those places.

>>335130
Not a problem. I wish they were more like the schools you described.

>>335080

So...it gets pretty damn wacky from here. Apparently, the miscarriage wasn't an accident. What happened is that Josie gave her cousin a bottle of prenatal vitamins, but replaced the vitamins with some kind of drug that deliberately caused her to miscarry. The source of this drug is unknown, but it's implied that she either bought it illegally, or made it herself.

There are multiple WTFs here, the most obvious being that this is an incredibly reckless and dangerous solution to what is really not that complex of a problem. This deacon impregnated a mentally retarded minor; just call the fucking cops and let them handle it, problem solved. Even if the parents and the church and whoever else have an interest in keeping it quiet, there's more than enough evidence to convict this guy, and the police don't need anyone's consent to investigate.

The author, of course, provides a long and convoluted explanation for why it wasn't possible to do this, which I can't make much sense out of and probably isn't worth going over anyway. As far as I can tell, the issue is that a very narrow interpretation of some very obscure laws could have potentially led to Deacon McRapeypants gaining custody of the cousin's baby, and (I guess) avoiding this outcome is why Josie felt that giving her mentally disabled cousin illegal street drugs to induce miscarriage was a risk worth taking. This whole thing honestly sounds like it could be the plot of a Law & Order: SVU episode, and a competent writer could probably spin it into something fun, if somewhat implausible. However, Cozy Mark IV is a far cry from Dick Wolf he's barely even Vagina Coyote.

What I notice more than anything else with this text is that the more this author tries to make a case for his beliefs, the more he ends up defeating his own purpose by inadvertently revealing how mentally unhinged he is. All of the "villains" in this story are basically just ordinary, unobjectionable people, who are treated as evil simply because they believe in things that the author doesn't approve of: they are all Christians, Republicans, gun owners, and so forth. Assuming that anyone who falls into one of these categories would naturally be stupid, callous, hypocritical, corrupt, perverted, and backwards, the author twists these people into these silly caricatures of inhumanity, and has them perform absurd actions that the heroes can readily put them down for. It's not that different from what kkat did in FoE, actually; just without all the gore and edge.

Consider the current situation. This church Deacon took advantage of a mentally disabled teenager, and she wound up pregnant. This kind of thing has been known to happen, so the situation is plausible enough and the Deacon works fine as a villain. However, this is also a problem that should be pretty easy for the teenage heroines to solve: all they really have to do here is tell a responsible adult what happened, and let the legal system take it from there.

No reasonable person would dispute that what the Deacon did is morally and legally wrong. There is ample evidence implicating him, and very little chance he could cover his tracks. No reasonable person would be likely to come to his defense or to shelter him. Even if the girl's parents want to keep this incident quiet for whatever reason, investigators don't need parental consent to investigate statutory rape; if anything, the parents could themselves be prosecuted for knowing what happened and not reporting it. No matter how you slice it, this case should be completely cut and dry, and the Deacon's chances of getting away with it are virtually zero.

Does anything about this situation necessitate doing something as extreme as drugging the girl, and inducing a miscarriage without her knowledge or consent? Nothing that I can see, but the author goes pretty far out of his way to cook up a half-baked justification for it; apparently, the Pastor of the church has (for some unexplained reason) chosen to cover for this guy, and the law (for some unexplained reason) is somehow on his side as well, so naturally Josie has no choice but to poison her cousin. Does any of this make any sense at all?

What's more, the progressive heroes in this story are constantly doing reckless, irresponsible shit that they never get called out on. For instance, where are Scoot's parents in all of this? I'm pretty sure she's already told them about the situation with Deacon Derpdiddler; wouldn't it stand to reason that they would have called the cops on this guy by now? It's one thing for teenagers to be reckless and impulsive, but parents are supposed to be the voice of reason in these situations. Far from discouraging their children's dangerous actions, the parents in this story are continuously egging them on. Remember that business earlier, with the "Shit-Stirrer Society," or whatever it was called?

The "good" adults in this story are all degenerate in some way, and actively encourage their kids to take reckless, dangerous actions; the "bad" adults are basically just Christian normies who encourage restraint. That tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this author's beliefs.

Anyway, that's the end of the chapter.

>>335035
I'm trying to ramble less but aging didn't "evolve", shit growing old is a part of life like entropy. Eternally living organisms would have to regenerate perfectly faster than age and wear and tear can age them. Good luck with that using anything short of magical stretchy slapstick cartoon horse DNA.
The faggot author could make this speech less shit by saying the Victorians fetishized and romanticized death via tuberculosis and consumption and other formerly terminal illnesses man has since cured because at the time they were pseudointellectuals. But now enlightened scientists will surely kill death just like they invented nuclear power because science is life and niggers huffing copium in the form of invented myths thought it couldn't be done and mankinds destiny is the future and blah blah blah, linear time is a shackle around our throats to shed like snakeskin. I don't know if that Victoran shit is true but it sounds sorta cool.
Instead it's this weird shit where an authority figure with minimal authority in love with its own opinions lectures the audience on what is and isn't "okay". Why do they love that okay/not okay phrasing so much? Standing next to a terminally ill person is tragic. And irritating because of the powerlessness felt. What weirdo would only describe it as "not okay"?

And the "gay guy who can only fuck with a blindfold and football"... what the fuck? Has this author ever spoken to gays? Everyone has a butthole. He could always bone that while imagining a kpop guy pinned under him or something equally gay. Nobody alive has a literal football fetish.

Also the bullying teacher bit stands out as hypergay.
Isn't the fantasy usually "bullied kid becomes good teacher dedicated to stopping bullies"?
Why is it so easy for anyone, even kids, to give grown adults such absurd mental breakdowns in libtard la-la-land?

Also you have the patience of a saint for putting up with this story's bullshit.
At this rate I'm surprised the rapist didn't do it because he thought God gave him a sign to do it.

>>335252

Scoot goes to school the next day, prepared to engage in whatever the fuck wacky thing that she and her friends are planning. Apparently, word has gotten around, because some random girl slips her a handcuff key. For some reason, this girl has the words "I will not tell lies" written on the backs of her hands; not sure what the significance of that is, but I assume we'l find out.

>Then, in the hallway on the way to third period, she could've sworn that one of the Goth girls winked at her and flashed a metal-horns gesture of support. A pair of girls and a boy whose campus-interfaith group had been driven to the margins by Gray matched pace with her for a second, the Jewish girl whispering something that sounded encouraging in Yiddish, the Sikh boy nodded in a meaningful way and tapped his jeans pocket, and the sole atheist girl said 'Brave thing you're doing!' in a stage whisper. They peeled off in different directions before a teacher could spot them and Scoot's next sight was of tall Demi Findlay, Josie's big brother, saying something in Klingon to Melissa. She patted his hand and Scootaloo realized that just about every clique in the school, from Literature nerds to Goths to the religious kids to even the Drama Club and the super-geeky boys from A/V were, if not on board with, at least aware of the protest.
Basically, the entire nauseating rainbow of token diversity supports whatever the fuck she's doing, is the big takeaway here, I guess.

>"All right," Josie finally spoke up. "We all know what the stakes are here."
>There were general nods of agreement, and a little enthusiasm.
>"And we all know why we're doing this. We're doing this to get that old baggage kicked out of our school."
What exactly are the stakes? Why are they doing this? Josie's potato cousin got molested by some church deacon, and somehow this is the fault of their school's Christian principal, so they have concluded that the only rational response is to hand out free condoms to students, an act which can apparently get them all arrested for some reason? This is seriously some of the most autistic nonsense I've ever read in my life.

>"We're doing this so we never have to take a friend or a sister to the abortion clinic."
You mean as opposed to just dosing her with dangerous street drugs against her will and forcing her to queef her dead baby out, assuming the drugs don't kill her as well? Yeah, you kids clearly have the moral high ground here.

>"We're doing this for all the girls whose lives he's already shattered."
Who is 'he'? The Deacon? The Principal? Other than the cousin, whose life has been shattered here? I have no idea what the fuck is going on anymore.

>"We're doing this for Amelia! We're doing this so that bastard can never rape another little girl again!"
I'll say it again: literally nothing about this situation is as complicated as you're making it. As far as Amelia's situation is concerned, a simple call to the police could have solved things in about fifteen minutes. And how the hell is giving out free condoms to a bunch of horny high school kids going to do anything to remedy this situation? This author has completely transcended autism.

Anyway, whatever. The cheer squad runs out into the pep assembly, and throws condoms into the crowd, because reasons I guess. The principal gets predictably pissed off, and orders the DARE officer to arrest them, because apparently throwing condoms at people is against the law, and apparently the school's lone DARE officer is authorized to arrest students.

The rest of the scene is, predictably, pretty badly described, and it's hard to tell what's going on exactly. The officer runs around trying to cuff the girls one at a time, I guess, and meanwhile the principal yells at them, calling them sluts and whores and what have you; naturally, a bunch of kids get the whole thing on video.

Eventually, the press shows up. I guess this is supposed to be the "gotcha" moment, where the evil religious principal is finally put in his place by the plucky teenage heroines who outsmarted him. Here's the big twist: turns out it's actually not illegal for high school students to distribute condoms to each other; in fact, it's not even technically against school policy. It seems like that's the kind of thing that both the school principal and the DARE officer would have been aware of, but we'll put a pin in that for now.

The real takeaway is that this author is so obsessed with shitting on religious people that he can't even be bothered to craft plausible villains out of them. Like kkat, he creates villains that are not only too cartoonishly evil to take seriously, but are also too stupid to even make compelling villains. This whole thing is so pitifully executed it's not even worth the bother of deconstructing; it's easier to just call the author a faggot and move on.

Believe it or not, it gets even more ridiculous from here something tells me I'm going to be very tired of saying this by the end of the book:

>Standing behind him were already over a hundred students, all of them wearing a variation on the Middle Eastern burqa that covered the girls completely from head to toe. The was no chanting, no youthful yells or jeering, just stony silence as their blank veils regarded them, and as Gray stammered and cursed, the doors of the school remained open and more and more students joined them.
I just...I have no words. Once again, this probably isn't even worth the bother of deconstructing; easier to just call the author a faggot and move on.

>They tried several times to get someone to comment, but despite their prodding, the rapidly growing crowd of high school girls remained eerily silent, only producing variations on the same message written over and over on cards or the backs of an envelops.
What is an envelops? Whatever it is, it apparently has multiple backs. What I wouldn't give to catch a glimpse of this mythical beast.

>>335258

I was reading an article the other day that somewhat relates to what we just discussed:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/on_the_alleged_moral_superiority_of_intellectuals.html

In particular, this part caught my eye (quote is from Gabriel Marcel):

>[It is said that] “Intellectuals are frivolous,” and, unfortunately, this is terribly true, the deep reason for it being that the intellectual has not to deal, as the peasant and the workman have, with a tangible a stubborn reality, a reality which resists fantasies; the intellectual works with words, and paper permits absolutely anything to be written on it.

It would be pretty generous to call the author of this silly Scootaloo thing an intellectual; frankly I'm being pretty generous just calling him an author. However, the basic idea here still applies.

The author of a fictional story operates entirely within a world of his own creation, where the characters do whatever he tells them to and events play out in any way he might like. This is why there are so many rules and guidelines that pertain to writing fiction: because you, the author, have the power to make absolutely anything happen, you paradoxically have to make your story at least somewhat plausible if you want the reader to take any of it seriously. This is also why things like wish fulfillment stories and Mary Sue characters are so widely panned: if you're too transparent about trying to create an idealized fake reality for yourself, the reader will figure out what you're doing and will laugh at what a silly, insecure person you are. Here, watch:

>Chad "Thundercock" Elway was an incredibly handsome, well-proportioned man, who was good at all the sports and got mad pussy every night. Needless to say, he was beloved by all, and nobody at school thought he smelled. One afternoon, he saw a beautiful lady with big boobs being sexually harassed by all the people who used to beat me up in gym class. So, he used his genius intelligence to design a rocket blaster that fired rape-monkeys at them, and the monkeys raped them and then tore them to shreds and also threw feces at them. After that, the monkeys went on to cure several types of cancer, and Chad "Thundercock" Elway was given the Nobel Prize for having the world's firmest balls. He and the big-boobed lady got married, and had several handsome, well-proportioned children together.
I just created this guy out of thin air. Impressed? Probably not. Since pretty much anyone can do this, the feat of creation is not all that impressive in itself. Moreover, since nothing that happens in this pocket dimension I've created has any bearing on reality, the whole thing is fundamentally meaningless. Most people are savvy enough to understand this without having it explained to them, and so anyone who abuses fiction in this way is rightly mocked.

You can write anything you want for your own amusement, but if you want to write for other people, you need to come up with something that will add some sort of value to their life, or at the very least entertain them for a short time. Likewise, if you want to use fiction as a vehicle for moralizing, you need to be able to see both sides of an issue, and provide insights that are actually worth the reader's time; otherwise, you just come off as a sanctimonious douche. This is why the kind of blatant sermonizing this author engages in is seldom effective.

For reasons that I'm sure have absolutely nothing to do with his own pitiful adolescence, this author harbors an intense, all-consuming hatred of Christian conservatives; so much so that he decided to write an entire story about it. Since it's his story and he has complete control over everything in it, he has decided to make all of the Bad People in his world into Christian conservatives. Since he has absolutely no concept of subtlety, he has also made sure that the Bad People in his story are really, really bad. Grr!

And how bad they are. These guys all do terrible things that will make the reader really, really mad; so mad that it won't even matter how little sense their actions actually make. On top of that, they are all extremely, laughably stupid. The principal of this high school didn't even realize that he wasn't allowed to handcuff cheerleaders for passing out free condoms. Ha! What a dumbass. Hoisted by his own petard.

I could go on, but you get the idea. My point is this: in the end, what has this guy managed to demonstrate to the reader with all these words? That a bunch of imaginary people he created, and placed in circumstances that are entirely the product of his own imagination, behaved in ways that validate what he imagines to be true? What exactly does this prove?

This is why I generally don't care for these kinds of political fables, and will usually discourage people from trying to write them. This story makes a particularly hilarious example just because of how badly written it is, but a slicker version of this can be surprisingly effective as propaganda; Hollywood does this kind of shit all the time the Nazis did it too, btw. In the FoE thread, I remember going off on a tangent about melodrama, and that's basically all this is. The formula is simple: pick a general injustice that would stir the base emotions of just about anyone (murder, fraud, rape, etc), and make the antagonist of the situation into whatever sort of person you want to present as bad. Then, have a hero come along and save the day, and make that character into the sort of person you want to present as good.

This simple formula can be used to validate nearly any ideology. Want to prove that blacks are innocent victims of white oppression? Write Mississippi Burning. Want to prove that negroes and carpet-baggers are destroying the South? Write Birth of a Nation. They're basically the same movie. In the end, words are just symbols that can be arranged to convey any message you want.

>>335258
>this girl has the words "I will not tell lies" written on the backs of her hands
Is that a motherfucking harry potter reference?
There was a scene late in the series where the SJW fatass bitch Dolores Umbridge made Harry write that using a magic quill that scarred those words into his hands, because as a pure evil baddie she was pissed at him for telling the truth: that the main baddie she worked for was alive.
Harry was also the victim of a media campaign that demonized him for defending himself and humans from an attack by government controlled monsters. The government had been infiltrated by rich white traditionalist extremist satanists who hated him.
And this bitch is just ripping it off because in her head this is what facing off against authority looks like: being able to safely tell everyone you meet you're resisting authority and wear it on your skin like a fashion statement only to take it off whenever you want. These situations are not even remotely comparable. Not that I'm a HP fanboy but the gay who wrote this is.

>>335258
Man I really gotta say: Why is this a pony story? This reads like some really shitty girl's highschool teen drama about "saving the school" and whatnot. How does this have fucking anything to do with MLP? Why the fuck does Scoots have robo arms anyways? This shit is the most retarded thing imaginable if you actually take a step back and think about these things for five seconds.

>>335274
>Is that a motherfucking harry potter reference?
Sounds like it probably is. I read a couple of the books a long time ago and saw a few of the movies; the last one I remember was Prisoner of Azkaban, which I think was like number three or number four. I lost interest in it after that, and don't remember the details of most of the stories. My guess is I didn't get far enough into the series to catch the bit this guy is referencing.

>>335287
I find myself wondering the same thing, honestly. Scoot bears little resemblance to her counterpart in the show, there are no other characters from the show present in this story, and most of the story revolves around human social issues. Half the time I forget that the main protagonist is even supposed to be a pony.

> Why the fuck does Scoots have robo arms anyways?
This was a very dumb and unnecessary addition to the story imo. Most likely, he did this to solve the problem of Scoot needing to interact with the human world, since a number of mundane tasks would be difficult for someone without hands to perform. However, this is kind of a non-issue, since on the show the ponies live in a world that more or less resembles ours and use a lot of the same kinds of tools, and the show's writers mostly ignore the issue. How does Scootaloo on the show open doors, use a pencil, or put her crash helmet on? For that matter, how or why did a race of ponies develop things like gramophones, sewing machines and doorknobs, instead of technology that would be easier for them to operate? These are fun questions for nerdy internet speculation, but they can become major hassles when trying to write in this setting.

If your story is heavily dependent on these kinds of interactions, and you find yourself frequently hitting the wall when trying to explain how they would be possible, it's probably a sign that your idea might be a little more complicated than its worth. If you have to do something as ridiculous as give your equine character a pair of cyborg arms, it's a pretty sure sign that you're on the wrong track. For instance, one can imagine this author saying something like: "if Scootaloo didn't have her robotic arms, how would she fly a single engine Cessna?" A sensible rebuttal to this would be: "why the fuck does Scootaloo even need to fly a single engine Cessna?"

>>335317
Do you figure you have personal tiers of tolerance when it comes to how "pony-related" a concept is? I know of people who maintain the idea that "If there's a pony in it at any point for any amount of time, it qualifies as a pony story", but personally I find myself having trouble accepting certain premises for being too contrived, bizarre, or barely-related (like this one) to consider things a pony story. A rule I typically follow is if you can swap names out of concepts or characters and nothing changes, then it's not a pony story or has a very poor connection to pony on an intrinsic level.

I was always curious as to your thoughts on this.

>>335273

I just realized I forgot to put a header in, but we are presently on Ch 16: Protest and Betrayal.

Anyway, we got a little off track, but when we last left our intrepid heroes, they were larping as Muslims because sexism or something. Makes about as much sense as anything else we've read so far.

>One reporter rephrased the question. "What were you trying to accomplish here today?"
>Scootaloo had spent a lot of time in front of cameras over the years. Her mind latched onto that question and she pushed her fright aside as best she could and answered.
Really? That's it? "she pushed her fright aside as best she could and answered"? I had more or less assumed that the reporter's question was going to be the preamble for a 20-page block paragraph speech about gender politics, shat directly from the author's ass into Scootaloo's mouth. I'm going to go ahead and give the author 5 points here just for showing a surprising amount of restraint.

Meanwhile, the icky-pants religious Principal continues to play his assigned role of blustering buffoon:

>The stony silence was unbroken, his voice the only one to be heard. "Oh, you think you can hide behind those things, don't you?! Let's just see who you are!" He finished as he grabbed a burqa and yanked it off.
Kek. This story has officially reached Scooby-Doo levels of absurdity.

Anyway, this silliness goes on and on. The principal runs around ripping the burqas off of random girls. Some of them are not wearing anything underneath, which seems like poor planning on their part. At one point, he is confronted by a younger girl who attended the other school he was principal of before moving on to this one; I guess she got pregnant because he didn't teach her sex ed or something. He continues to spew boilerplate dialogue about how the girls are all sluts and whores and so forth, at one point the girl's older brother tries to punch him, and so forth and so on; it just keeps getting sillier.

At one point, Josie's parents show up; turns out they are a couple of degenerate ex-hippies, who wanted to come to their daughter's "first protest" to cheer her on. Roughly what I would have expected.

>But before he could close the distance, a sudden flurry of motion and noise drew everyone's attention to the huge TV that adorned the front entrance of the school. The camera angle swung around, and settled on the image of a somewhat scruffy looking tenth grade girl sitting in a hospital bed.
>"Amelia, could you please tell me about what happened at your church?" Josie's voice asked.
>A few of the cheerleaders knew, but to everyone else, this was news. Silence fell as Amelia proceeded to talk about her 'special time' with Pastor Gray's deacon. As she went into detail about what the deacon had had her do, Scootaloo could see that even some of the seasoned reporters were cringing.
>"I was a little scared, but when I told Pastor Gray I was scared, he said I should pray about it. So I knew then that it was okay. Sometimes Deacon would even come visit me at school. In the special-needs classroom, there are padded..."
I think I'm beginning to understand what the author was intending with all of this. Apparently, Josie's cousin confided her abuse to Pastor Gray, and instead of reporting it, the Pastor told her to just pray, or something. The implication seems to be that the Pastor decided to protect his church's reputation instead of reporting the Deacon. He may also have facilitated further abuse by allowing him on school grounds.

This at least clears up the matter of why these girls are blaming the pastor for what happened to Amelia. It still seems like this whole matter could have been easily settled with a fifteen minute call to the police; I'm still not really sure why anyone felt that poisoning Amelia and staging this elaborate protest was in any way called for. Then again, leftists choosing pragmatic solutions over elaborate street theater is about as likely a phenomenon as a cartoon pony magically appearing in someone's backyard.

Anyway, things move predictably from here. First, the Pastor gets arrested:

>"Mr. Gray? I'm placing you under arrest in connection with the molestation and rape of... whoever that little girl is." he finished, a tremor audible in his voice.
That's some fine police work there, Officer Hogan. Incidentally, the crime you're thinking of is "failure to report child abuse."

Then, the cheerleaders uncuff themselves, because apparently they aren't under arrest anymore. There is some autism about the A/V club and someone named Demi, who I think is Josie's lesbian girlfriend or something; I can't really figure out what the hell is going on here. I think the basic idea is that the A/V club, of which this Demi person is apparently a member, orchestrated the video display of Amelia's confession.

Wait, I might have gotten that wrong; I think Demi is one of Josie's brothers. Melissa is apparently dating him or has a crush on him or something. This author has a really bad habit of creating characters that are nothing but names, and an even worse habit of making those names incredibly silly. This guy's full name is apparently "Demijohn" and he was first mentioned in Chapter 11. I guess his parents felt that naming him Fulljohn would have just been too much John for their family to handle.

>"No shit, Scoot. Thing is, if an angry teenage girl whose cousin got molested starts a school protest, that's only going to even warrant print coverage if it's a very slow news day. If a talking cartoon pony with guaranteed ratings decides to lead her sister suffragettes with pompoms and the entire school in a mass protest against an already somewhat-controversial authority figure, that's the headline. It'd take a mass shooting or a terrorist attack to beat that for the regional daytime Emmy for news coverage."
Let's all just pause for a moment, and reflect on the sad fact that an actual human being deliberately sat down and typed these words.

>>335322

A long block-paragraph conversation follows, in which Josie autistically outlines her reasons for telling the media that Scootaloo was in charge of the protest. Nearly every single word of it could be chopped at no loss. However, it (eventually) leads to a strange development:

>"Seems? It seems because it is, Josie! And you know what? I'm tired of you making the hard decisions for everyone because you're some iron lady geek-girl with everyone from Jesus to Spock behind her. Sometimes it's not about you, either! This wasn't fair and…and I don't think I ever want to see you again."
Apparently, Scootaloo is pissed off that Josie told the media she was in charge of the protest, and decides to end their friendship. This seems to be the author's idea of a dramatic twist. It's not really clear why this would upset Scootaloo so much, but whatever; we'll just roll with it.

Anyway, as if this wasn't enough, he then immediately drops this bombshell on us:

>That was it. Melissa knew there was only one way to shock Josie off her depressive jag.
>"Josie...I'm dating your brother."
>"Really? I thought he seemed happier." Josie stared at her sneakers.
Wow, it's just one exciting twist after another. Presumably, the big reveal here is that Melissa, one of the many faceless "friend" characters that occasionally orbit Scootaloo, is dating "Demijohn," a character whose role in the story is so significant, I had to Ctrl-F his name just to figure out who the fuck he is. This author is a master storyteller if ever there was one.

>"I have fucked him several times and enjoyed it in ways of which a lady should never speak. He is exceedingly capable with his tongue and we enjoy depraved pleasures which would melt Pastor Gray's brain right out his hairy ears were he to hear of them."
This is actual dialogue. Someone actually typed out these sentences, while visualizing a living, breathing human actually speaking them out loud.

>"I had to sneak into your room for more condoms out of the protest-supplies because we ran out of flavored ones. The cinnamon is our favorite. And we have frequently been making exceedingly erotic comments to each other in plain sight of others at this very school." Melissa watched Josie...still depressed. "In Klingon," she added triumphantly.
>"Oh, Jesus tap-dancing Tidy Bowl Christ on the blue water, Melissa! Did I need that mental image?" Josie put her hands up to her head as if to protect her skull from exploding with the impossible squicky yuckiness of it all.
Seriously; it's like listening to a conversation between pod people. Is this what vaccines do to the brain's speech centers?

Anyway, the big takeaway here is that Scootaloo feels betrayed by Josie for some reason, and Melissa, who is now dating Josie's brother, is trying to get the two of them to make up. This would all work much better if the author had bothered to actually develop these characters and build genuine relationships between them; as opposed to spending the first two thirds of the story yammering about airplanes and cyborg-arms and identity politics, and then trying to slap all of this drama together out of absolutely nothing. It would also help if they didn't all sound like autistic robots every goddamned time they open their mouths.

Whatever; that's basically it for this chapter. We're getting close to the end of this, thank God.

Ch 17: Among the Last of Their Kind

Scootaloo is sitting on a swing in her backyard, feeling down in the dumps because Josie apparently backstabbed her. I still don't entirely understand what the fuck they're fighting about, but I also don't care that much. As far as I can tell, it's got something to do with how Josie handled the press coverage for their protest.

Suddenly, Scoot's personal CIA agent shows up and asks her if she'd like to talk about her feelings. It's like a /pol/ meme come to life.

>"I was impressed by Miss Adams' ear camera. Too few protesters realize the remarkable defensive value of a well-placed and subtle video recorder." And to Scootaloo's surprise, the agent really did sound impressed…for a moment, before returning to officious efficiency. "Of course, in future I will expect you all to remember that redundant systems are a virtue and include button or hairline cameras as well. Miss Findlay's glasses, in particular, could easily be modified to include a small one, and given her penchant for demagoguery; I can't help but consider it a wise investment for her inevitable future encounters with both police and press."
Protip: writing dialogue for humans is different than writing technical repair manuals for washing machines. Seriously; no human sounds like this when they speak. Anyone who did would probably get punched in the face on a regular basis.

>"Why, couldn't you?" The agent's voice took on a mildly sarcastic tone. "Or have you used up all the precocity, maturity and good sense you had for the week and now need to behave like an ordinary teenage girl for a while?"
If anyone in this story is capable of behaving like an ordinary teenage girl for any duration of time, I have yet to see evidence of it.

>"When the stress has been sufficient to provoke the need for such coping mechanisms? Yes. I am particularly fond of Pop Rocks and a show called 'Animaniacs,' do you know it?" Scootaloo shook her head. "Must be from before your time. I shall provide you with an appropriate DVD of same, which may help."
Next up, Scootaloo and her friends start a band: R.W.A. - Robots Wit Autism.

Anyway, we are once again subjected to a long, ridiculous, atrociously-written conversation about absolutely effing nothing that goes on for like a thousand forevers. All I can tell you is that it has something to do with pop rocks.

>Could Tyler ever say anything like a normal person?
If anyone in this story is capable of saying anything like a normal person, I have yet to see evidence of it.

>>335319
I think the pony-connection in this story is tenuous at best. You could swap out the Scootaloo character for an ordinary human and very little of the story would change, and there are really no other elements related to MLP present; it completely fails your litmus test, and I think your test is a reasonable one. The gay parents are even supposed to be bronies, and the show actually exists in this universe, so you would think the MLP fandom would at least have some presence, but it still almost never comes up.

Of the stories we've read, I find this one most closely resembles Friendship is Optimal, not just because the writing is beyond terrible, but also because it reads like the author is more interested in lecturing people on his own beliefs than he is in telling a story, let alone a story about pones. The pony connection in FiO is also pretty weak, and it takes a similarly metafictional approach: instead of telling a story set directly in Equestria using pones as characters, it's a story set in our world, in which MLP exists as a corporate franchise.

The only significant difference is that in FiO, MLP only exists as a corporate franchise: Equestria is fictional in that world, and the whole premise of the story is that a game developer tries to create a simulation of it. In this story Equestria is a real place, but it exists as a corporate property as well. There seems to be some connection between the show in our world and the "real" Equestria, but the author hasn't really done much to explain it. In any case, in both cases, it's a metafictional version of Equestria, not the Equestria we're used to. It exists as a tangent of our world, can be observed by our world, and can presumably be influenced by it; thus it's a tainted Equestria. Look at the way Scoot's visit is described: she isn't a pony from Equestria who arrives in this world, she's a cartoon character who has been transported to our world from inside a cartoon show.

In the right hands, this kind of premise could be potentially interesting, but as far as my personal tastes go it's not my thing. I feel like it not only ruins the escapist fantasy aspect of pone, it's kind of against the spirit of the fandom. The adult MLP fandom has been called a New Sincerity movement; basically an anti-post-modernist attitude that eschews ironic detachment, metafiction, fourth-wall comedy, that sort of thing. Equestria is a nice place to read about precisely because it isn't connected to our world or tainted by it. A story where ponies can pass into our world, watch us watching them on TV, and take that experience back to Equestria with them completely ruins the pure fantasy of the setting. This story takes this already-noxious idea a step further, by taking a character from the show away from that world, completely stripping her of her personality, and transforming her into an irritating teenage SJW.

Was thinking about the movie Saved, the 2004 antiChristian "comedy" film.
It doesn't just demonize bad Christians like the main character, it goes out of its way to try and make all Christians look flawed and awful, even the ones that start out nice and only get nasty when responding to a mountain of bad behaviour from the loser "rebellious" Jewish girl and those she corrupted.

There is a chance a Christian might watch this movie and say "Yeah, some of us are pretty silly" and respect Christianity less as a whole, and feel less of an urge to protect it.

But this fic just paints all Christians as "hurr durr nascar" retarded kidfucking assholes onscreen and off. The closest it ever got to painting a Christian in a remotely positive light was unintentionally, when Scoot was eating with that family. Only for the family to say "The wife must submit to the husband" unironically, without proceeding to burst into laughter and say something like "You wouldn't believe how much shit childless career women have given me for choosing family over money over the years".

This fic is not effective propaganda. It is only tolerable for someone already too far gone into leftist delusion. And those people already agree with you, so reading the fic won't matter for them.

Perhaps if the fic started with a hardworking redneck man and his trad wife working together to raise Scootaloo in secret, then the gay neighbour spots her and helps out, effectively becoming Scoots' good uncle figure, and then the perfectly fine christian school Scoots goes to gets taken over by terrorists Die Hard style, but the gay man sacrifices himself to save Scootaloo somehow, that would make the story better at convincing a theoretical Christian audience to love gays. Of course gays would fucking hate this because "waaaaah hashtag BuryYourGays is le worst trope, me no like seeing the gay characters I project onto die".

>>335352
>it reads like the author is more interested in lecturing people on his own beliefs than he is in telling a story, let alone a story about pones
Are we still talking about the Scootaloo story?

>>335346

>"She betrayed me. All those reporters thought I was leading the protest! They treated me like the ringleader, and I was just so afraid…"
Wait, is this what they're fighting about? Was Scootaloo not leading the protest? The whole silly thing was pretty much her idea the way I remember it.

>"I am reminded of a much less traumatic but similar situation, when a colleague of mine took advantage of a certain personal attribute I have, myself, never liked in order to improve the odds of a mission's success. The details of the situation remain highly classified, and I cannot be entirely specific, but suffice it to say, I confronted said colleague in a manner not entirely consistent with departmental regulations afterward."
And the award for largest number of words spent saying absolutely effing nothing goes to...

Anyway, this back-and-forth autism continues for quite a while. The upside of it is that I think I understand what's going on with Scoot and Josie a little better now. Basically, since Scootaloo is famous already, Josie took advantage of this and threw her name around when trying to hype up their protest. She didn't do this maliciously; she was just trying to maximize press interest. However, Scoot felt blindsided, because Josie didn't tell her that she was doing it. I won't say that it makes sense, but I can at least say that I understand it.

As a side note, if anyone cares, it turns out that Agent Whoever is left-handed:

>I attended a school in a somewhat less enlightened area where the faculty did not approve of left-handedness, and was bullied for the fact. So when I found myself at a different school, I became determined to hide it. Nearly inflicted a vicious case of carpal tunnel on myself in high school, and by college…well, suffice it to say, it was not an attribute I liked, nor one I wished to use."
Jesus H. Christ, is there anything these people won't turn into a social justice issue?

Anyway, fuck; this conversation consumes the entirety of the chapter, and if anything important is discussed, I completely missed it. They yak about everything but the kitchen sink: Animaniacs, pop rocks, Agent Pumpkintits being left-handed, Scootaloo's theoretical compatibility with Josie if they were lesbians, Dungeons and Dragons...it just goes on and on and on. Naturally, the author takes the opportunity to throw in a few more digs at his various Christian strawmen as well: Agent Poopydrawers has some strong words for both the Pastor and Conner's parents, despite having no dog in either of those fights.

>"Not quite. An evil person is a person who sets out to ruin lives on purpose. I could actually respect an evil person more, because at least they are honest and straightforward. A person who thinks they are doing good, refuses to see reason or consider a different point of view and succeeds in ruining people's lives, that's way worse than just evil-on-purpose. Such a person had the trust and even the admiration of others, and if they had just set aside their ego, opened their mind, or even just listened to someone from a different…call it alignment, maybe, and they could have been wonderful . But instead they were less than mediocre. It's twice the tragedy, really."
If irony were strawberries...

Anyway, this conversation eclipses the length of the Magna Carta, but eventually it comes to a close. The long and short of it is that Scoot has decided to try and patch things up with her friend, and she and her personal CIA bodyguard understand each other better now. And...that's it. This one long, ridiculous conversation was literally the entire chapter.

I have a couple of notes about the events of the last two chapters before we move on.

The characters this author chooses to extol says as much about him as those he chooses to vilify. There is a clear pattern in the way he portrays adults and other authority figures in this story. Positive portrayals are given to adults such as Scoot's "parents," who tolerate or outright encourage libertine behavior by Scoot and her friends; negative portrayals are saved for characters like the Pastor and Conner's parents, who encourage abstinence and restraint. The central villain in this arc is a pastor whose most grievous offense was canceling a sex-ed class; conversely, Agent Tyler, a representative of the CIA, is portrayed sympathetically.

The left has a curious love/hate relationship with authority figures. They balk at being told what they can and can't do, particularly in regards to sex, drugs, and other forms of personal indulgence. Paradoxically, they have no problem with a large and intrusive government stepping in to regulate the economy, or to protect supposedly marginalized or oppressed sectors of the population.

The reason for this is because leftists have an essentially adolescent view of the world. A teenager wants the keys to the car, but doesn't want to be told where she can or can't go, or how late she is allowed to stay out. Similarly, leftists like freedom as a concept, but are simultaneously terrified of living without the protections that authoritarian government provides them. What they ultimately want is the freedom to make their own stupid decisions, but also protection from whatever consequences those decisions produce. Hence, the same people who advocate for free love also advocate for government-funded abortions.

This kind of thinking is plainly evident in this text. A religious high school principal is vilified for advocating restraint and personal responsibility. Conversely, a CIA agent, who literally performs assassinations and stages fake revolutions for a living, is humanized and presented as a tireless soldier in some clandestine fight for the greater good. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about the values of this particular author.

>>336126

Ch 18: Protecting Family

>Life at school in the days after the protest was more stirred up than anything Scootaloo could remember, save only her first few days in public school when the world was still getting used to her.
Something tells me her "first few days in public school when the world was still getting used to her" would have made a more interesting story arc than the nonsense we just read about this Principal banning sex-ed class. However, in the hands of this author, it probably wouldn't matter much anyway.

>With the principal under arrest and the higher ups still struggling to figure out what to do, day to day life continued, but without the usual direction from above.
This isn't how stuff like this works. If the principal of a high school were to be suddenly arrested, the school district would have to appoint an interim principal until a suitable replacement could be found. Presumably this role would be delegated to one of the other administrators on staff, or a teacher.

I'm actually still a little unclear on how this Pastor came to be the principal of this school in the first place. "Pastor" is an official title used to denote leadership over a congregation. If you're the Pastor of a church, that is your job; becoming the principal of a school would most likely be seen as a conflict of interest. If his church didn't object, odds are someone at the school board would have raised a fuss about it. This author's connection to reality seems tenuous at best, so I'm assuming this is just one of many things he didn't really consider before he started writing.

Anyway, Scoot is starting some kind of gay-activism club or something now. She fills out the paperwork and blah blah blah.

>Before I started signing people up I had to find a member of the faculty willing to sponsor the club; what do you think of Mr. Malcolm?
>Mr. Mallcolm the Biology teacher?
Protip: pick a single spelling for a character's name and stick with it, for fuck's sake. I could let this slide as a typo if this were the first time, but this author has done this multiple times with multiple characters, usually within the space of a few lines.

Page break. Scoot goes around and tries to get signatures for her club. Her classmates are initially hesitant to join a club called the "Gay-Straight Alliance" probably because it sounds gay as all fuck, so she ambushes her skater friends and tries to talk them into it. Enough of them are willing to join that she is able to meet the minimum membership requirements to start a club.

Page break. Now that she has her club, Scoot designs some flyers and gets up bright and early to make copies. Unsurprisingly for this story, the guy at the copy shop is gay, and applauds what she's doing.

>"On the house, Miss Scott!" the handsome, muscular copy-shop worker grinned. "About time that school had a safe place for Family."
>"Family? Oh, right." Scootaloo had nearly forgotten that one of the slang terms the gay community used was 'the Family.' It was actually kind of amazing, the way LGBT Americans who'd lost their original families had built a kind of new one for other kids.
Charles Manson did something similar, as I recall.

In addition to printing her flyers, the copy-shop faggot agrees to sponsor their club, and buy pizza for their meetings. He also agrees to pressure the local community on their behalf, by refusing service to anyone who doesn't support the "gay-straight alliance." Ain't it great, living in a country where you can just refuse to do business with someone because of a personal conviction?

Anyway, as usual, the conversation here drags on for like three thousand forevers and doesn't really go anywhere; they mostly just yak about advertising strategies for the club. The guy volunteers to print up a bunch of calendars and coffee mugs and shit for them and blanket the town with them for free. The whole conversation is basically an oversimplified manual on how to use "advertising" to subvert people:

>Thing is, if teachers see the Safe Zone logo, day after day, on the spiffy cup which contains their delicious brown teacher-crack, they're going to become protective of Safe Zone because in their minds, Safe Zone means the same thing as teacher-crack. If every teacher who completes Safe Zone training gets a complimentary candy dish for the classroom with the logo on it, and which I will rely on the Gay-Straight Alliance to keep topped up, well, every senior in the place is going to equate Safe Zone with 'delicious candy' and 'the little sugar buzz that makes Mrs. Gryle's shitty class tolerable.
What would happen if you did the same thing, but with swastikas?

Anyway, by a preposterously improbable twist of fate, the teacher Scoot enlisted to be the club's faculty adviser (whose name is either Mr. Malcolm or Mr. Mallcolm) is actually the copy-shop owner's brother, or half brother, or something.

>"Brian Malcolm." He extended a hand, which Scootaloo shook with her prosthetic. "You know, I am really digging your Borg hardware, pony-girl."
>"And a Star Trek fan, too?" Scoot smiled flirtatiously. "Is this Guardian Angels for Straight-Ally Ponies day?"
>"Make that the biggest queen since Princess Celestia showing up for corporate sponsorship!" Brian grinned, picking up a fresh, hot stack of new posters from the machine he'd chosen. "Isn't this the most fabulous thing you have ever seen?"
I don't have any comments here; I just wanted to highlight this in case any of you were on the fence about whether or not this author belongs in a gas chamber.

Anyway, she gets her posters and runs off to school. She has a long, autistic conversation with her friends that goes nowhere; horrendous dialogue abounds. The long and short of it is that her cheer friends are going to help with the club.

>In their glee, nobody noticed how quiet Christina had gotten after seeing the Gay-Straight Alliance becoming reality.
This may or may not be significant.

And...that's the chapter.

>>336155
>Pic
Thats a cute starlight.

>>336155

As usual, there is an author's note appended to the bottom of the chapter:

>Some readers have down voted this story for being too gay friendly. I had a relative in a plight like Conner’s once, but I was young, and I didn’t know then what I know now. And he had no bright orange pony to step in and save him. To this day, some of our family still doesn’t know the truth about the ‘accident’ that took him from us. I pray the tools in this story will find their way into the hands of someone who needs them now as I did then.
This story has done more to make me hate gays than anything else I've ever read. All shitposting aside, I honestly don't care that much if someone wants to take it up the ass or not; it's all the sanctimonious SJW nonsense that drives me up the fucking wall.

While it sounds like whatever happened in this guy's family that inspired him to write this was probably quite sad, the content of the story itself does very little to convey any of this feeling. "Conner" has gotten essentially no development as a character, and we've been told little about his situation beyond that we are supposed to hate his parents simply because the author does. Far from giving me sympathy for the author's views, this story makes me feel like I ought to make a donation to some gay-hating Baptist church just to spite him.

Ch 19: Any Minor World

tl;dr, Scootaloo's first club meeting is a success. Demi Findlay, a minor character who was barely in the story until he was suddenly made into another minor character's love interest, for some reason comes out as gay, or bi, or straight with gay tendencies, or some wacky shit like that. He then delivers a soliloquy which proves that, regardless of how his barn door might ultimately swing, he would be a completely insufferable human being one way or the other:

>"I'm fully aware that as a straight, white male, I'm very lucky in that I'll never be discriminated against –well, except maybe for being a raving geek. But it could so easily have gone the other way. I might have had to hide so much about who I am, to the point where I might never have been able to admit what kind of person I like aloud, let alone find someone who fit the bill. I have a girlfriend now whom I love very much, and our interests are so completely compatible. She's learning D&D for me, and I'm learning to understand post-Keynesian macroeconomic theory for her. Oh, and cheerleading. Lot more hit-points in cheerleading than I thought. We can walk down the street or the halls of this very school hand-in-hand and nobody says anything but 'aww, look how cute they are.' We need never fear teasing or violence because of who we are or whom we've fallen in love with."
If someone who is better at autistic holocaust oven-math than I am wants to get out their calculator and start crunching numbers, I'd appreciate it. Something tells me we're going to need a whole lot of ovens before this story is done.

Anyway, it goes on and on like this for a good, long while. Scoot's friend Christina comes out as bisexual, which I guess is what that bit at the end of the last chapter was hinting at, and tells Scoot that she has always had a crush on her. This is followed by an entirely-too-long bit of rambling autistic horseshit, in which Scoot spergs to herself about whether or not she's gay, ultimately concludes she isn't, and lets Christina down gently. This is followed by a bunch of rambling autistic horseshit about literally fucking nothing, and of course it goes on for about seven hundred and fifty thousand forevers. To save time, here is a brief summation of the topics they discuss:

>Ricotta cheese
>dead hookers
>snails in the bed
>goat porn
>Game of faggot-ass Thrones

After this, Scootaloo leaves. For some reason, the camera stays on her friends, even though as far as I'm aware the perspective is supposed to be...wait a minute. Is this still supposed to be Faggot #1's journal, or is that just a silly question at this point?

At any rate, Christina cries for awhile about Scootaloo rejecting her, there is some rambling autistic horseshit about gay rights that doesn't really go anywhere, and some rambling autistic horseshit about why Scoot isn't attracted to Christina that is sheer torture to read even by the standards of dialogue in this story. Just so I don't have to suffer alone, here's a sample:

>"Pretty much. You've evolved to share relationships and sex with both genders, like a super-enlightened post-Protestant bonobo-person. You could, theoretically, raise much healthier offspring with access to many more resources because your ability to mate with males and females lets you raise your offspring in a cooperative family group with multiple adults…assuming you're not completely monogamous. Some people are and some aren't. And even monogamy allows you to select from the biggest possible pool of mates, which means a larger statistical likelihood of having the strongest, most intelligent co-parent, even if you do just adopt 'em from foster care. Bisexuality isn't a problem, Christina, it's a superpower." Josie cracked a can of Diet Coke and offered it to her friend without taking her eyes off the road. "It's just rotten fucking luck that the same evolution that gave you the ability to fall for a childhood friend also coded said friend's brain to genetically lock you into the sibling-zone."
Seriously, like 90% of the dialogue in this book has been like this, even the stuff that isn't about polyamorous bisexual foster-care adoption. I think I deserve a medal for making it this far into this autism without blowing my goddamn brains out.

Oh also, if anyone cares, it turns out that Josie used to have a crush on her pastor. Not the pastor we've been reading about, though, this was a different pastor altogether. And, you guessed it, the pastor turned out to be gay. Presumably, that's how you can tell he's one of the "good" pastors.

And...that's the end of the chapter. Jesus tit-fucking Christ.

>>336208
Don't Bonobos just fuck all day bisexually/homosexually and rape each other for fun without evolving or am I thinking of a different monkey?
If bisexuality or polygamy were superior to regular sexuality, bisexual or polygamous societies would have surpassed normal societies long ago. Polygamy is great for giving the most successful men multiple wives to impregnate but that can't work in a society where fairly earning success isn't the only way to the top and females have more rights than males and their offspring. Bisexuality is only good for letting you enjoy looking at the horsecock in straight clop.

Is this thread about discussing the viability of non-traditional sexualities?

>>336390
>Bisexuality is only good for letting you enjoy looking at the horsecock in straight clop.
Thats going in a meme

>>336208

Before we move on to the next chapter, there's a comment from the author that's probably worth looking at:

>Why all the down votes?
>The story was picked up by a group of... trolls, for lack of a better word. I'm an average author, and there are plenty of errors to complain about, but the down votes are mainly political.
There's a grain of truth here. I'm assuming there are probably many people who disliked this for purely political reasons, but the author is giving himself far more credit than he deserves by claiming to be "average." He might be average for FimFiction, but all that really tells us is just how low the bar was to begin with.

Frankly, even compared to the other things I've read on FimFiction thus far, I would still call this well below average; as I've said before, I'd rank this at about the same level as Friendship is Optimal, and that's not a compliment. From the sloppy writing style, the school setting, the juvenile treatment of the subject matter, and the time period in which it was published, I'm assuming that this story was probably written by a high school kid. Even taking that into consideration, though, this is still pretty low-quality. This author has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not even understand simple, noob-level writing concepts like telling a story through scenes or writing conversational dialogue. For someone at this level to curtly dismiss his critics as political trolls not only paves over the many legitimate criticisms that can be made of this work, it indicates an unwillingness to improve.

To say that there are "plenty of errors to complain about" is also accurate, but it still significantly understates the problem. There are plenty of reasons to shit on this text that have nothing to do with politics, regardless of whether or not the critic agrees with the author's views. You can objectively evaluate a writer's talents, and the literary quality of a given work, without necessarily having to agree or disagree with whatever the work in question is trying to say. For instance, I still like Jack London even though he was a raving socialist.

What I have hammered this guy the hardest on so far is the poor treatment of Christianity throughout his text. Contrary to what the author might think, this honestly has little to do with my own beliefs. While I'm probably more sympathetic to the sort of Bible-thumping Christianity portrayed in this story than I am to the author's extreme cultural leftism, it's mostly a lesser-evil thing for me. I'm not a Christian, and for whatever it's worth I have my own criticisms of that religion. What I take issue with is the author's juvenile sermonizing on the topic. This, combined with his general lack of writing chops, has made this story absolutely excruciating to get through.

When you guys were in elementary school, and you were chewed out or otherwise disciplined by a teacher or some other authority figure, did any of you ever get "revenge" by drawing an unflattering caricature of them? Maybe you gave them a big nose, or a mustache that they didn't actually have? Or maybe you drew them as absurdly fat, or surrounded them with flies and stink lines to indicate that they smell bad? This author's handling of characters like Pastor Gray or Conner's parents is basically the literary equivalent of that: "this person is bad, because I think their beliefs are stupid and I hate them, so I drew this rude caricature to show how bad I think they are." No effort is made to humanize these characters or to understand where they're coming from.

Nigel mentioned the film Saved!, and while his actual take on it isn't really worth discussing, it's interesting that he would bring it up. He is essentially correct in that this movie was made by non-Christian leftists, with the intention of subverting Christianity by making fun of it. However, what's noteworthy is that it manages to do so without mirthlessly denigrating Christianity, or trying to discredit the idea of religious faith in general.

Is the film subversive? Absolutely; it's pure propaganda from beginning to end. However, the approach is much more effective than what this author attempts with Our Girl Scootaloo. Rather than staging a conflict between believers and non-believers, Saved! takes place entirely within the context of Christianity. The protagonist is a Christian teenager, and most of the principal characters are Christian to some degree. Through the course of the story's events the protagonist finds herself questioning her beliefs for the first time, which in turn causes her friends to reject her. She falls in with a group she and her old friends had previously shunned, and in so doing learns that friendship is about mutual love and respect, rather than simply sharing the same beliefs.

Saved! is a story about human social relationships, not religion, which ironically is why it succeeds as anti-religious propaganda. It bypasses thorny ideological issues and attacks the social behavior of Christians. While it is critical of certain aspects of Christian doctrine, it remains sympathetic to the idea of religious faith overall, and first and foremost aims to be an entertaining comedy rather than preachy social commentary. While Cozy Mark IV seems to be attempting something similar with this story, he can't get far enough past his own hatred of Christianity to criticize it effectively.

The subversion in this story is probably more comparable to something like Santa, Inc, in that it doesn't even pretend to understand what it's trying to criticize. The overall message of Saved! is that the Christian religion has more gray areas than its more fanatic practitioners are willing to admit; the message of Our Girl Scootaloo is that Christians are ugly caricatures surrounded by stink lines. Also, much like Santa, Inc, this story makes absolutely no effort to be entertaining or funny.

whew. Two chapters to go. The next one (Scootaloo goes to church) is the one that finally broke me all those years ago. Though I'm pretty sure I did a lot of skipping because nothing was happening. I hope you are not reading every single thing. I'm pretty sure one of the goals was to make conservatives kill themselves should any happen to read it. Don't kill yourself from this.

Are you planning on covering part two and three of Our Girl Scootaloo?

>>336513
I thought the "Christian heroine sees Jesus tell her to set her boyfriend straight without getting pregnant, as if brain damage is the only way one could talk to Jesus and want gays fixed and think Born Again Christians aren't retarded" and "Christian heroine makes an image of God that gets destroyed at the end and all the newly-atheist weirdos look forward to being bad influences on the kid" parts were attacks on faith.

Also the writing general hit bump limit. Do you think my FE story was laying the politics on too thick, too fast?
I get that the "fuck the original FE" talk was too abundant and randomly calling the reader's mother fat in the prose was unexpected, unfunny, and distracting.
But my story didn't have much of a focus on any one political issue.
There were many good reasons why my FE story was shit, even though Fimfic users personally disliked the story for gay dumb idiot reasons.
Abortion, white genocide, libtards, fake rebels serving the system in "smash the system" shirts from sweatshops, double standards, outlawed public gatherings(I wrote the scene where funeral visitors for the youngest kid ever get killed by cops before the Canadian Honking where cops attacked protestors), narcissistic out of control whore karens who look down on their working class servants, overly demanding female bosses, zombie businesses paid to be alive by the govt for being owned by anyone but us, divorcescamming thief women, political attempts to make impoverished wageslaves of the poor, the average woman's cruelty towards autists and towards those who don't fit her definition of beautiful like wolf girls and spider girls, fuck battle saddles, meat would be plentiful if not for libtards, and so much more. There were so many issues to cover and so little time. I don't think I spent enough time covering each one. I don't think I covered them in the right order either. By the time the reader got one thing, if he even did get it, I had already zoomed on to the next thing. There's so much to cover I don't know where to begin. You could fill a million books with all the things the average normalfag doesn't know about politics, so where do I start with chapter one?

Remember that movie with Bregna, the city with walls? Bregna sounds like pregna and the people are clones, because the cure to a virus that put scientists in charge rendered people infertile. But nature is fixing itself and outside the walled city things are great, and the evil scientist baddie is trying to cover the truth up to remain in control. The cum balloon- I mean DNA Dirigible is crashed into the wall to reveal the truth: the world outside is not a wasteland, it's fine. It's all focused on subtly questioning the "perfection" of a walled city where technocratic scientists control life and reproduction and knowledge. It's not the best movie around but it was ahead of its time. And no extra messages about the pozzed music industry are there to confuse and overwhelm the audience or make them write the story off for being too scary and dark and critical of things they like. Fimfic users found my story too dark and scary and critical of the original FE.

So do you think a rewrite of my story should have fewer political messages, and more focus on the most important messages?

>>336513

The author's comment goes on:

>As an example, when Scoot makes it to her teenage years, her parents give her access to basic sex ed information to help her stay safe. Some people who subscribe to 'abstinence only' have a real problem with that.
Again, there are plenty of reasons to object to this story arc that have nothing to do with 'abstinence only' sex education. My issue with it was that the whole scenario is completely preposterous: the principal cancels sex-ed and all of a sudden half the school is pregnant. Why? How? It seems like an unrealistic cause-and-effect relationship and an implausible basis for a story.

The author offers us this by way of explanation:

>The reality is that I live in a county which uses 'abstinence only' sex ed, and our teen pregnancy rate is > 50%.
I'm skeptical about this statistic, frankly, but for the sake of argument I'll accept it for now. However, it's not clear how exactly the author thinks the two things correlate, either within the context of the story or out of it.

One of this author's many problems is that he has done pretty much fuck-all to establish any kind of a coherent setting. Where does this story take place? Even if the location is fictitious or is being intentionally kept vague, we should still have a pretty clear sense of what kind of a setting this is by now. Do Scoot and her family live in a big city? A small town? A suburb? What is their neighborhood like? What is the ethnic composition? How religious is this area? Are religions besides Christianity a factor? Questions like this, that would directly affect how the reader understands the story, are never answered; all we have for this arc is the incredibly general setting of a high school and a cast of goofy characters, whose actions tend to make little sense.

Protip: a story is a construction of the writer's imagination, which is transmitted to the reader's imagination using written words as a medium. Words are tokens that are meant to represent things and concepts, but the meaning of a given token can vary from person to person, depending on the specificity of the author's description and on how well the reader understands the concept being described. For instance, if I said "chair," it could bring literally thousands of different images to mind, and all of them would be technically correct. If all the reader needs to know is that your character is sitting down, then "chair" will probably suffice. However, the type of chair your character is sitting in is a plot-critical detail, you need to make sure you describe the chair well enough that you and the reader are guaranteed to be on the same page.

Ambiguity in writing is like negative space in visual art: if you know what you're doing you can use subtle amounts of it to interesting effect, but if you leave too much of it nobody but you is going to understand what the fuck is supposed to be there. If your description of something is too general, the reader will fill in the details with their own background and experience, which may be vastly different from the image you were trying to convey.

In this case, the author has given us the completely ambiguous setting of "high school." Since I don't have anything else to go on, my imagination fills in the blanks with the high school I went to. My high school was in a predominantly white, middle-class area. Christianity was the predominant religion, and a fair number of kids were Christian. Some were devout to the point that you could call them fanatics, but those were a small sliver of the population. There were also a few kids who wore goth makeup and drew Pentagrams on their notebooks, but they were a minority as well. Most of the population was made up of ordinary white kids circa 1999; lots of Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and Old Navy jeans and so forth.

As I said earlier, promiscuity was basically a non-issue. Kids dated each other, presumably some them went all the way, but I didn't get the impression it was the common experience, at least not common enough that you heard about anyone getting pregnant. I honestly have no idea if we had "abstinence-only" sex-ed or not; I remember learning the dry, scientific stuff about human reproduction and not much else, so maybe that's what we had. Though I don't recall where or how I picked up the information, I knew what condoms were and how to obtain them. So did pretty much everyone else I went to school with.

With this in mind, you can see how the idea of a high school where more than half of the female students are pregnant might seem a little farfetched to me. Equally farfetched is the idea that these students could simultaneously be this knowledgable about sex yet completely ignorant about basic contraception. Even if Pastor Gray refuses to explain condoms to them, aren't any of these girls even mildly curious about why they keep getting pregnant all the time? Did the Pastor also block access to Google?

As I understand it, teen pregnancy is mostly an issue in inner-city districts, where you have larger concentrations of nonwhites, as well as a lot of dysfunctional single-parent families and so forth. If that's the kind of school the author is talking about, then the problem makes a little more sense. In that case, I would basically agree with him on the sex-ed issue, insofar as if you've got a classroom with 30 female students in it, and 15 of them are pregnant already, it seems like trying to teach abstinence would just be a giant waste of everyone's time.

However, the problem is that the author gives us little information about the setting, so it's impossible to determine what is actually causing this mass-pregnancy problem. We don't know what this school or the surrounding community is supposed to be like; we get a lot of mixed messages about it, actually. So, the whole story arc seems flimsy and improbable.

>>336567
>I hope you are not reading every single thing.
I've been skimming my way through a lot of this, especially the huge block-paragraph dialogue segments. Most of the spoken lines in this are so badly written they are nearly incomprehensible anyway, and usually the conversations don't go anywhere, so I don't feel like I'm missing anything essential.

>Are you planning on covering part two and three of Our Girl Scootaloo?
I might skim through them briefly just to see if the author's writing style improves over time, but I'm not going to actually sit down and read through them or review them; that just feels like a waste of time.

>>336599
*sigh*

I really wish you'd stop doing this. I am probably the last person on this site who is still willing to have any patience with you, but even I have my limits. At this point, I am probably going to just start treating your long rando-sperg posts like CP and other junk content and just delete them without warning when I see them, at least in my threads. If you have something to say that's worth saying, then write it out clearly and concisely and trim off the excess nonsense; if you can't do that, it's a waste of my time and everyone else's screen space. Consider yourself on notice.

Since I'm a nice guy, I'll go ahead and address your questions anyway.

>I thought the "Christian heroine sees Jesus tell her to set her boyfriend straight without getting pregnant, as if brain damage is the only way one could talk to Jesus and want gays fixed and think Born Again Christians aren't retarded" and "Christian heroine makes an image of God that gets destroyed at the end and all the newly-atheist weirdos look forward to being bad influences on the kid" parts were attacks on faith.
This run-on sentence is 74 words long, and only contains a single comma.

Anyway, as I explained above, the movie clearly intended to mock Christianity. However, the approach it takes is to lampoon the behavior of highly-strung, over-zealous Christians rather than make polemic attacks on the actual tenets of the religion. A girl hits her head and thinks that Jesus is telling her to cure her boyfriend's gayness by having sex with him; you can laugh at this situation without laughing at the idea of someone having a religious vision.

The premise doesn't address the question of whether or not Jesus exists, or even whether or not religious visions are possible; the humor comes from the girl's misinterpretation of what's going on. Ockham's razor would suggest that the simplest explanation is most likely: she hit her head, and that combined with the startling news she just received caused her to hallucinate William of Ockham was a Christian monk, incidentally; most of secular humanism's ideas are rooted in Christian thought. A Christian believer would probably also argue that Jesus is unlikely to instruct anyone to do something this reckless and silly, so the vision probably wasn't real. However, the girl, in her naiveté, immediately assumes that God wants her to fuck her boyfriend (probably something she wants to do anyway), so she does; hilarious mishaps ensue. The movie is making fun of a human misinterpretation of faith, not the object of that faith or the idea of faith itself. If a devoutly religious person thinks they saw the image of Jesus in their waffles, a more level-headed believer can call this person looney-tunes without having to renounce his own faith. My overall point is that the best way to criticize something is to first understand what you are trying to criticize.

>So do you think a rewrite of my story should have fewer political messages, and more focus on the most important messages?
As I detailed extensively in my two-post review of it, the main problem with your story is that it is completely incoherent; whatever messages you tried to include are beside the point.

If you've ever seen American Psycho, you may recall a scene in which Patrick Bateman's secretary reads his day planner, and finds all of his creepy doodles of women being decapitated. Now imagine Bateman suddenly entering the room and asking his secretary how he can "improve" his drawings in order to better convey his message. If you can imagine this, you can imagine my dilemma in trying to advise you here.

Your problem is that you have too many ideas and too little focus. As I already stated in the other thread, my advice to you would be to not rewrite this at all; I think you should set this aside and focus on simpler exercises. Practice things like basic dialog exchanges to get character interaction down. Tell a simple story using concise, well-ordered scenes.

I'd advise you to completely steer clear of politics and other complex topics, as well as things like battles and technology and other subjects that tend to make you go off the rails. Write something simple: Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash try to have a picnic, but it rains. Rarity and Twilight have a misunderstanding, but they eventually make up. Keep the premise simple and the word count short, but focus on writing natural dialogue, and telling a complete story as a logical progression of events organized into proper scenes. Once you've got that much down, you can move on to larger and more complex stories.

>>336668

Anyway, I feel like I'm starting to veer off-topic a bit. Let's move on. Actually, wait; I have just one more bit from the comments section.

This is from a user called AppleTank:
>Yep. Definitely troll voted. Scootaloo's personality has evolved, but your writing "voice" is easy on the eyes, and fun to read.
In the end, there's no accounting for taste.

Ch 20: Scootaloo Goes to Church

This is the chapter I was warned about. I have been looking forward to this as well as dreading it. It is also the second of two chapters in this book which exceed a length of 15,000 words. I commented on this a bit in the previous one (Ch 11), but I'm going to restate some of what I said there because I think it's important.

High word count is not a sign of literary virility; I've said this many times before. This is one of the most important early lessons a writer can learn, because nearly everyone falls into this trap at some point or other I have too. So, I'll say it again: high word count is not a sign of literary virility.

Moreover, if you find that your word count varies significantly from chapter to chapter, it's a sign that your novel is poorly paced. For instance, if Ch 1 is 10,000 words, Ch 2 is 1,300 words, Ch 3 is 5,000, Ch 4 is 26,000, and so forth, this usually means you're doing something wrong Nigel, if you are still interested in learning the reasons for the board's mostly panning your latest opus, there's a free hint in here for you. Some chapters are going to be longer or shorter than others, but I've found if you maintain proper pacing, your chapters and subchapters will usually come out to roughly similar lengths (this excludes things like prologues, epilogues, interludes, and so forth, which tend to be shorter). This isn't a hard and fast rule, it's just a tip I'd recommend keeping in the back of your mind: huge, schizophrenic leaps in word count from chapter to chapter can often be a sign of poor pacing, poor planning, bloated chapters, sparse chapters, or all of the above.

In this case, even though the pacing of this novel is...unusual to say the least...the author has more or less maintained an average chapter length of about 5,000 to 6,000 words each, which I'd consider healthy for a book of this size. Thus, the two long ones stick out like sore thumbs.

When I was first going through the table of contents for this book, before I'd even read a line of it, I looked at those word counts and said to me'self: "Glimmy, you voluptuous self-booping horse-nigger, them two chapters is probably worth keeping an eye on." My hypothesis was that chapters 11 and 20 would probably contain a lot of needless bloat, which could take the form of unnecessary scenes, copious amounts of dialogue, extra subplots that should be broken up and spread across other chapters, etc. With Ch 11, it turns out my hypothesis was spot on: the diagnosis was copious amounts of dialogue. To make matters worse, nearly all of said dialogue was nonsense that had little if anything to do with the story, such as it is. Basically, that whole chapter is just two insufferable characters yakking about absolute bullshit.

Based on what I've read so far, as well as the subject matter of this chapter, I'm going to make a couple of predictions here:

1. Ch 20 of Our Girl Scootaloo is going to mostly consist of long, rambling chunks of dialogue, which have little bearing on the events of the story, and mostly consist of the author's own thoughts about religion.

2. Most of this dialogue will be needless bloat that could deleted at no cost.

3. Extra Credit: the whole chapter will turn out to be so unreadable that I will recommend deleting it in its entirety (as was the case with Ch 11).

We'll see if I'm right. Anyway, that's enough preamble. Into the soup we go.

The scene opens with Josie and Scootaloo entering Josie's church. Scoot is surprised to find that classic rock music is being played instead of religious music; that's how you can tell it's a 'cool' church. By now, we should expect nothing less of Scoot's insufferable friend Josie. If anyone cares, the song being played is "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum. The bass player of the band, a hip-looking young man who looks totally dope and rad and poppin' fresh, introduces himself as "Pastor Josh." Something tells me this is going to be a long, long loooooooong 11,248 words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TsL0DO-c1E [Embed]

Anyway, the name of the church is St. Francis of Assisi’s, and it is a Unitarian Universalist church.

>"I myself lean pretty far towards Christian, but you can be anything whatsoever and you’re one of us,” Pastor Josh explained, his blond beard making him look a bit more like a hippie than a preacher of the variety Scoot was used to. “I don’t suppose you’re an atheist, by any chance? The Theists vs. Atheists softball game is coming up, and one side is short.”
"Religion is a spectrum." The madmen finally did it.

>“You might believe in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Moses son of Yocheved of Egypt or even Spock son of Sarek of Vulcan, doesn’t matter to us. So long as you’re trying to find the truth of existence and trying to be the best possible person you can, you’re more than welcome to come and be one of us.”
>“Wait…wasn’t that a reference to ‘Star Trek’?”
>“And isn’t truth potentially everywhere?” Pastor Josh shrugged. “You could be a Muslim, a Christian, an atheist, a Trekker or an observant Jew. Everyone is welcome here. We mean that. You could invite the Vogons to read us their poetry and I promise you we’d give it the college try.”
Of all the stuff in this book that makes me want to punch this author until he starts speaking in tongues, I think it's the pleb-tier "geek culture" references that annoy me the most. This author is the guy at the convention shouting "the cake is a lie!" for the umpteenth time and giggling like a fucking schoolgirl. There is not enough zyklon.

>>336708
>nearly everyone falls into this trap at some point or other
What can I say, I guess I'm one in a million, because I too lazy to write something that long.

>>336688
I don't wish to stir up much Nigel drama but when talking about stuff he could do for writing I feel like he has quite a bit of skill when it comes to programing and modifying stuff. Seen some of his game mods and for a one person project they seem pretty well put together. Not sure how much experience he has working on these sort of things but if he continues fostering those skill it could hear some fruit.

Perhaps when and if he is ready to share them he could post it in an appropriate thread on this board and gain some mutual good will with himself and our little community. He's got a lot of ideas and where you express a need for restraint when writing when it comes to coding and modeling for a game it is near impossible to implement mod ideas without working within the restraints present with the game and engine.

Obviously this thread isn't the place for it but wish Nigel the best of luck making his mods and hopefully can share them with others when he feels they are in a ready state.

>>336708
That's one of the worst chapters so far.

>>336708

>Just then, a handsome man with dark hair and a shorter beard appeared in the doorway.
>“Darling?” he called. “I found macaroni-and-cheese at the Aldi on sale, three-for-a-dollar, so I got fifty dollars’ worth. Think that’ll be enough?”
>“Every little bit helps,” Pastor Josh agreed, hopping down from the dais surrounding the altar and kissing the newcomer on the cheek. “It should be enough for many dinners indeed,” he grinned, hugging the dark-haired fellow. Scootaloo smiled as she realized this was a couple just like her Dads.
Aaaaaand Pastor Josh is gay; big surprise there. At this point it would probably be easier for the author to just let us know whenever a character is straight.

Anyway, the pastor and his butt-buddy congratulate Scoot and Josie on their recent protest. After this, the conversation turns to the church building itself. Turns out that this building was originally a Catholic church, but it went under for some reason, and was purchased by this pack of rump-bumping degenerates. As if their mere presence in this holy edifice wasn't enough of an affront to 2,000 years of beautiful tradition, they apparently felt the need to desecrate it further by replacing the stained glass:

>The pastor gestured to a window with new-looking solder that depicted a series of famous authors, including Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain and a middle-aged lady whom, from the little dimension-diagram motif near her, was probably Madeleine L’Engle.
All of these authors are probably rolling in their graves as we speak except Madeleine L'Engle, who might actually have been enough of a loony twat to approve of a screwy church like this.

Consistent with the author's M.O., the conversation completely meanders from here. Various details of how the church operates are tediously catalogued: we learn about what kind of pews they have, how they handle the concept of "penance" spoiler: they basically don't handle it, how they apparently have a bunch of Muslims in their congregation because a mosque burned down two towns over....

The Muslim thing goes on and on for awhile, and it's about what you'd expect: blah blah resist hatred, blah blah tolerance, zip zoop ba doop, yackety-shmackety, eat the halal pudding. As an aside, I would like to state for the record that I consider myself religiously tolerant in my own way. For instance, if I met any Muslim willing to declare jihad on this Church of Faggotry, and stone this pastor and his gay lover to death as apostates, I would call him my brother, and shake his hand in friendship.

Anyway, the conversation turns towards recruiting Scootaloo into the church. The pastor's sales pitch is as follows: he understands her antipathy towards religion, what with her sodomite parents and all, but he wants to assure her that his religion is so gay it barely even qualifies as a religion at all, and would therefore be perfect for her. Well, those aren't his exact words, but it's a fair interpretation. Here is how he actually phrases it:

>Just as the anti-microbial light burns away any bacteria that may exist on the safety goggles, the light of understanding and truth burns away hate and misunderstanding. You cannot fear a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian or even a Satanist when you’ve been sitting three feet away from them and praying together for a while. You cannot misunderstand your brothers and sisters when you have spoken and shared with them. What love has filled, hate cannot fit inside.
This all sounds nice and fluffy, but at its core, this "religion" is just another manifestation of the left's obsession with equality. Reducing literally everything to a single lowest common denominator is the only goal they ultimately have; everything else is just window dressing. It doesn't matter if you're talking about race, religion, gender, or virtually anything else; the idea of anything existing as its own concept, distinct from all other things, is just anathema to these people.

The author frames it as if the ultimate goal here is peace: by putting all these different religions together, they will no longer fight, and learn to love each other, and blah blah blah. It sounds like it ought to make sense, but only if you don't spend five seconds thinking about it and realize that religious conflict is mostly the result of forcing incompatible groups to coexist in the same space. For instance, Muslims and Hindus probably wouldn't give a shit about each other if British colonialism hadn't forced them to share territory.

So I don't get dragged off on another long tangent, I'll let a based Nip sum up my point. From Hagakure (the Way of the Samurai):
>“It is bad when one thing becomes two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything that is called a Way. Therefore, it is inconsistent to hear something of the Way of Confucius or the Way of the Buddha, and say that this is the Way of the Samurai. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all Ways and be more and more in accord with his own.”
t. Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Basically, what this means is that each Way is its own thing, and if you follow a Way, you should follow that Way and no other. If you're a Muslim, you should aspire to be a good Muslim and nothing else. If you don't want to be a good Muslim, why be a Muslim at all? The same goes for being a Christian, a Jew, an Odinist, a Hindu, whatever. All of these things can exist independently without necessarily having to annihilate each other, but they aren't compatible or interchangeable. Unitarianism isn't about bringing religions together, it's about mashing them all into a flavorless pulp. It unifies religions by eliminating everything meaningful in each one, and replacing it with empty, feel-good horseshit.

If anyone out there still needs to be convinced that leftists have no souls, I would urge them to read this chapter of Our Girl Scootaloo.

>>336708
I think focusing on a smaller writing project would be good for my writing skills, so I'll do that.

Still I'm confused about this "unitarian church". Is this church just a meeting hall where followers of various religions pray to their respective gods or does it get its own take on everyone else's religion, pissing off all serious followers of that religion?
are religious debates encouraged here or forbidden?
Do they believe Thor and Zeus and Odin are different names for the same guy, or different aspects of the same absolute being, or do they believe all religions are flawed accounts of real time periods? How can Christians and Demiurge-hating Satanaelfags both be right when their religions directly oppose each other? Do people get the afterlife they deserve when they die or the afterlife they want in this setting? What of meme religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster pastafarians and jonestown/georgetown suicide cults and Islam's "kidfucker heaven"? If some attendee invented the religion of Attackhelicoptersexifarianism would they have to pretend to respect it?

>>336728
peaking of limits, the story of the game is written to fit into the world's current boundaries: one building with two floors. Programming, debugging, optimization, rebalancing, these take so much time I decided to get minimalist with the world and story. Original character Professor Bigtits pulls double duty as the Region Champion to give her more plot relevance and cut down on the spriting work.

What's next on your list of reviews? I'd like to see Carlos's Rainmetal being reviewed next and he did sugguest it earlier in thread.

>>336857
That would be pretty neat, it's still the same two chapters btw, as i haven't had much time lately
>Carlos'
KEK

>>336857
>>336860

Planning to do this one relatively soon, I know I promised to do it at some point.

>>336780

It keeps on going. They discuss Josie's singing the song 'Bless the Lord' from Godspell in WalMart or something; I am not familiar with either the song or the musical being referenced and I don't care enough to look it up. The whole thing is (I guess) meant to be a preamble to the pastor's explanation of Josie's trepidation in inviting her friend to a church service:

>“‘What if homophobes show up, Pastor?’ ‘What if she thinks we’re all insane people who sing at the ceiling for no reason?’ ‘What if the kids try to ride on her? If any of my third-graders try that, then so help me…’ She’s been a mess ever since she found out you were coming to visit.”
"HOMOPHOBES could be here," Josie thought, "I've never been to this church before. There could be HOMOPHOBES anywhere..."

Anyway, the conversation meanders from here. They go on for a few paragraphs about the different cats the church has, and some other fairly silly topics. Eventually the conversation turns once again to Josie, who I guess teaches some kind of third grade sunday school class.

>“Jesus knows! That’s Josie’s class. Their big project for the year is making a special calendar of all the holidays they can find, from every faith and culture, and I must say, it’s been nice to have that many new HTML programmers in the chapel, but as for what they might be doing on any given day, well…why don’t we take a look?”
HTML is a markup language, not a programming language.

Anyway, they go into Josie's classroom and see that she is supervising children in some kind of art project about ancient Greek gods. When she notices them, Josie stops the art project and introduces the class to her friend Scootaloo. The children ask her a bunch of retard-tier questions about her stupid robot arms and whether or not she can fly. Literally nothing that happens here merits highlighting, except this:

>“Would you be open to a ‘speriment?” Wendy took out a notebook with a pretty good crayon drawing of Scootaloo in it and several different-colored arrows. “We could determine your velocity with a GPS, as well as your heart rate and caloric output, then put you into a bodysuit and have you fly at the same speed, internally speaking, then compare the external velocities to see if the reduction in drag made you go faster. And then we could measure lateral G-forces with an accelerometer.”
"Wendy" is supposed to be in third grade.

Anyway, it just drags on and on. The kids in the class ask her a bunch of questions about all manner of subjects, none of which have any obvious bearing on anything. Naturally, it turns out that many of the children have gay parents, so this tired subject is once again highlighted. Eventually, it veers back to the subject of religion, but it's just more sperging about how Unitarianism embraces all religions equally. This, of course, means that these poor kids believe in all kinds of retarded shit: there's one kid who worships Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia C.S. Lewis is no doubt turning over in his grave as we speak, another worships Celestia and Luna from MLP, and so forth and so on.

It goes on for a long, long while, but basically it's just a repetition of the general ideas behind Unitarianism: you can believe whatever you want because blah blah blah feelings. In other words, my original assessment of this religion was correct: it eliminates everything essential from every world religion, and replaces it with a lot of feelgood egalitarian bullshit.

Eventually, Scootaloo decides to say "maybe" to the existence of God, which I guess is meant to be some kind of big revelation for her. After this, it's time for her to attend whatever the fuck constitutes a "service" in this whack-a-doodle church.

They sit down, and Scoot is handed a hymn-book, which includes some Vedic chants, a Christian psalm, some Muslim prayer chants, and probably the lyrics to "It's Raining Men." Then, suddenly, she looks behind her and sees that none other than Pastor Gray has entered the church. Wait a minute, wasn't he supposed to be in jail? Last we heard of him, he had been arrested for whatever role he supposedly played in the molestation of Josie's cousin.

Unfortunately, this glaring continuity error is never addressed. We learn that the Pastor has been kicked out of his own church, and he has decided to start attending this one, for reasons that are likewise never addressed. The overall message here seems to be that the Pastor has learned a lesson about tolerance, or something.

Believe it or not, this is the end of the chapter. All I can really say about it is that my prediction was more or less accurate: this chapter consists mostly of dialogue, the dialogue is mostly the author clumsily communicating his own beliefs using his characters as sockpuppets, and almost all of it could be chopped at no loss. Somehow, though, it feels like it fell short of the already-low expectations I had for it.

Whatever; let's move on. One more chapter of this train wreck left to slog through.

>>337298

Ch 21: The Great Escape

It is now March of whatever year it is supposed to be. The school has more or less returned to "normal," though the text does not go into specifics about what this normalcy entails. We do get this:

>With more students coming out of the closet and with sex ed restored, the atmosphere under the new temporary administration was gradually shifting from suspicious or hateful to cautiously hopeful, but any innocence was gone for good.
So, I guess this means that the 50% of students who were pregnant are not pregnant anymore because sex ed was restored? I really have no idea what is going on in this author's mind.

>Josie had released the recordings of the phone calls and meetings she had had with the superintendent of schools. Everyone could see and hear what she had said, how she had tried to sound the alarm, and how she was brushed off as some dumb kid.
What recordings? What meetings? When did any of these events happen?

>After the news got hold of the scandal, the superintendent and senior members of the Department of Education did eventually change their tune, but only after several days proved that the parents really didn't like the idea of their children attending school with a principal who had sheltered a child rapist.
What role did the Department of Education play in all of this? Absolutely nothing here has been thought out. First this school had some hippy-dippy liberal as principal, then she retired for some inexplicable reason, then for some equally inexplicable reason it did a 180 and appointed this Pastor as principal. Now, I guess, they are supposed to be...wait, what is the author getting at here?

>Perhaps the most eye-opening lesson was that the community as a whole was okay with this. Even though it had taken days for the higher ups to switch from 'we have total faith in Mr. Gray's leadership' to 'we are looking into the allegations of wrongdoing' to 'Mr Gray has been asked to resign', the higher-ups all kept their jobs. When asked on camera they claimed that they had no warning and abdicated all responsibility for doing their jobs. And it worked. The community put all the blame on Mr. Gray and his Deacon.
Who are these higher ups? Who is "the community?"

Once again, I would like to point out that the author has made virtually no effort to establish the setting of this story at all. What kind of community is it supposed to take place in? What does the average person here believe in? Are there differing points of view? This is too vague to make anything out of, and it just feels like more projection from the author. Adolescence must have really done a number on this faggot.

>The girls who had become pregnant and had abortions or given birth in their teens were labeled a 'political issue', and were left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives as best they could. The gay and lesbian students who had been abused, picked on and beaten were not mentioned at all. It turned out the same treatment that would have opened up a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit against a company under the 'hostile workplace' laws meant next to nothing when only children were on the line.
Well, I guess that solves the mystery of what happened to the 50% of students who became pregnant. Glad to see they're 'picking up the pieces of their shattered lives,' whatever that entails.

The situation is actually summed up rather eloquently by Christina and Scootaloo:

>“It just isn't the same anymore, is it?” She asked looking out over the school.
>“I know.” Christina answered. “I don't know what it used to be but... It just doesn't feel like home anymore.”
"What the fuck did I just write 125,000 words about? Damned if I know."
t. the author

Anyway, the gist of this is that the author is trying to more or less wrap this up and bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. However, since the story was never really about anything in the first place, he's having a rather difficult time of it.

Scoot and her friends are now sitting around bitching about how unfair it is that they still have another year of high school to get through, and how they can't take college courses anymore because of something to do with budget cuts. However, they decide to take the GED exam and leave school a year early.

Page break. Scoot is back at the doctor's office. Mary informs her that ¡SCIENCE! has made yet another exciting discovery using her DNA. It has something to do with growing plants; I can't follow the details and I'm too exhausted with this autism to try and make sense of it. The long and short is that Scoot has somehow cured world hunger.

Page break. Their GED results are in: they all passed. They are officially no longer high school students, for whatever the fuck that's worth. They all decide to leave school and go to the mall.

Page break. Scoot is applying for college and whatever, when one day she gets a very strange letter from her old high school in the mail:

>“As you know, the new Martian colonists have just established the first permanent settlement on the red planet, and they have expressed an interest in sending several earth based representatives of the Mars team to speak at your school. We would very much like to help with this, but it will only be possible if you are enrolled as a student.
>Please send your answer within the week so arrangements can be made.”
So...Mars has been colonized? When did that happen?

Anyway, I guess the gist of this is that Scoot's high school won't let her travel to Mars unless she comes back and finishes her senior year. I don't really understand the rest of it; something about Scoot enrolling into some local college, and graduating from there instead of from high school. I am confused as all fuck right now.

This is how the book ends:
>And so their 'escape' from highschool ended better than they could have hoped as the four of them walked across the stage with the colleges graduating spring class to thunderous applause.

Wow. Just...wow.

>>337309

Final Thoughts

Usually this is where I sum up my thoughts about a particular story, add some final notes about what it did well and where it was lacking, and if applicable, give the author a few notes on how the story could be potentially improved. However, in this case, I'm not sure what to say beyond "this is absolute shit." If someone really wanted to put in the time and effort, they could probably take the base concept and spin it into something worth reading; they could even make use of some of the author's basic plotlines. As I noted earlier, a couple of the vignettes the author thought up could potentially be developed into real stories. However, taken as it is, there's just nothing in this text worth salvaging. This is a Ctrl-A + Backspace situation.

This book was clearly written by a high school kid, and there's not much you can say about it beyond that it reads like something a high school kid would write: it meanders here, there and everywhere; there is quite literally nothing in the way of a coherent plot; the author demonstrates no ability to be objective or to set aside his emotions for the sake of good storytelling; the characters are shoddy and one dimensional, and are frequently used as sockpuppets for the author's own opinons; and large portions of the text are very obvious projection based on the author's personal attitudes and experiences. I honestly feel a little bad running it through the gauntlet of serious criticism, since it feels like I'm just beating up on some 15 year old who has never attempted to write anything before, and predictably churned out something amateurish. It's like attempting to write serious art criticism about a child's crayon illustration. The main thing that keeps me from actually feeling bad about beating up on this kid is that his beliefs and attitudes are execrable.

Like Friendship is Optimal, this story's connections to MLP are sketchy at best, the writing quality is extremely poor, and large portions of the text are just the author's personal views thinly veiled as character dialogue. In this case, though, the connection to MLP is even thinner: the central character in this story bore absolutely no resemblance to the canon Scootaloo, and there were no other characters from the series who played a significant role. A weak attempt was made in Chapter 12 to connect this setting to some sort of larger story involving Equestria, but nothing further was done with it. It was also mentioned that the producers of the FiM meta-series existing in this world were having dream-visions about the "real" Equestria, but nothing was ever done with that either. You could swap Scootaloo out for any of the other MLP characters, or just make her an original character, and nothing meaningful would change.

Also worth noting is that the author initially makes use of a framing device which he later drops without explanation. The story begins with an adult Scootaloo asking Twilight Sparkle to ghost-write her autobiography (or something), and it's indicated that other canon characters now live in the human world as well. Supposedly, the text of the story is meant to be Twilight's account of events. Roughly midway through the first chapter, the text states that everything presented thereafter is taken from the personal diary of "Jayne" (aka Faggot #1). The text adheres to this format for a chapter or two, but after this the author seems to forget that he even established the framing device, and proceeds to just narrate the story in ordinary third-person-omniscient. Again, no further information on the other MLP characters mentioned in the prologue is ever given, and no attempt is made at the end to reconnect the story to the future it presented in the prologue. It probably would have made the most sense to just forget about the framing device entirely.

Since there are two more "books" in this series to go, I'm assuming the Equestria subplot gets dealt with eventually, and presumably we find out how Twilight Sparkle came to be writing Scootaloo's biography, but...I just don't have the energy to slog through any more of this shit. I glanced at Parts 2 and 3 and it looks like it's just a lot more of the same: Scootaloo goes to college, there's probably a lot of meandering dialogue where the author presents his own random thoughts about all sorts of ridiculous subjects, and very little happens in the way of actual story development. I just don't care enough what happens to any of these characters to waste any more of my time on them.

In the end, this story is probably best summarized by the first review it ever received, posted by a user named DarkAgumonRants on March 17, 2013:
>This is awful...

And with that, I feel like we've all wasted more than enough of our lives on it.