"Moments" revisions re. asteroid & Discord · 6:04am Feb 3rd, 2014
I thought the story was going to be over at the end of chapter 6, but while thinking about complaints about the asteroid, I had an idea for chapter 7. I made the asteroid smaller in order for chapter 7, which I'm releasing now, to make sense. I also had Twilight explain why Luna couldn't have just moved the moon in front of it. (Because it would just break off pieces of moon and rain them down on the planet.) Excruciating and inconclusive math is linked to at the end of this post.
EQD says they'll take it if I explain what Discord was doing. This may require a rewrite of the entire story and take days or weeks. Or I may just stick a few lazy lines in chapter 1, which I hate to do because they'll disrupt the flow. Or ask for a "season one compatible" disclaimer.
One idea is to rewrite the whole thing so Twi is talking to Discord the whole time. She blames him for the asteroid at first, just on principle. But by the end she comes to realize that Discord is a personification, not a person, and she's the one with free will while Discord has none. Also, that the karmic cause of the asteroid was the ponies' attempt to tame Discord and create a society of perfect order and stasis.
I like this last idea, but I can't see how to address the theme of order vs. disorder in the middle chapters. I don't want to just throw it at the reader in chapter 6.
Some info about asteroids:
Earth Impact Effects Calculator: I used this to experiment with asteroids of different sizes, to find out how big they had to be to get the devastation the story required.
The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and probably created the Chicxulub crater was estimated to have 130 million megatons of energy. The effects I described in the story are pretty close to what parts of North America experienced during that impact. It is thought by some to have created a world-wide firestorm (the atmosphere getting hot enough to catch on fire and not go out until it burned out). But others dispute this. This debate seems to have been going on for some time; the refuting study is from 2009, while the supporting study is from 2013.
The energy needed to knock the moon out of the sky and onto Earth was estimated as 10 billion to 10 trillion megatons of TNT.
The energy to blow up the moon to infinity was calculated as 30 trillion megatons. However, that requires blasting the moon up so violently that all the fragments reach escape velocity from its own mass, which is something that doesn't happen even to supernovas. The energy to fragment the moon and spread its pieces out just enough that some get caught by Earth's gravity and fall on it, is much much less, but no one seems to have tried to figure out what it is. It's not trivial.
Because knocking the entire moon out of its orbit might only require about 100 times as much energy as the dinosaur-killing asteroid had, and because the largest vertical impact craters on the Moon are smaller that that asteroid would have produced had it hit the moon, I think our dinosaur-killer was within spitting distance of splitting the moon. Close enough for a ponyfic. My original thought was to make the collision something like the interplanetary collision that supposedly created the moon, but now I've scaled it back enough for chapter 7 to be semi-plausible.
I do not understand the reasoning behind EQD's request. Discord does not need to be in this story. It works fine without him. You could rewrite it completely to make Discord fit, as you propose, but simply working him in with a few lines in the first chapter would do your story a disservice, I think. Discord is a big character. He has a tendency to take over stories, or, if he doesn't, to really feel like he ought to.
Personally, faced with that request, I would probably write Discord out in one line, simple as possible, right when you first mention the Princesses being dead:
", and Discord had simply vanished without so much as a snap of his fingers."
Or, if you want to add a little more causality, ", and when they died, Discord simply vanished in a flash of magic, without so much as a snap of his fingers."
Or maybe you would prefer if he did snap his fingers--that makes rather a lot of difference.
But that's me.
Obviously Discord slept through the whole thing. Put him in the afterword.
Seriously -- that's their objection? You didn't account for $random character?
Huh.
I'd stick the lazy lines in and gloss it over as lightly as possible. (I've read that first chapter.) To start rewriting the thing DEFENSIVELY with an eye to every possible loophole or critic risks undermining the whole tone. This is an emotional story, not a puzzle story, and you cannot begin writing it defensively. Ya gotta present the premise and then let it follow that premise.
Silly EqD. Way to balk at the very premise of the story, guys.
yes, you CAN go 'and Pinkie Pie opened the fourth wall and dropped the asteroid through the hole in the fourth wall!' but that's not what the tone of the story is about…
*read*
HUH.
Well, never mind—it didn't start as a puzzle story but as soon as it gets into those tiny follow-up chapters, it is. By all means follow out all possible outcomes in tiny chapters but this is a far weaker story than chapter 1 as a one-shot. That was a gripping emotional moment, and this is an intellectual exercise, a conceptual slot machine that dispenses ungainly monkeys rather than candy. Ya turned an emotional pang into a magic trick and shaggy God story.
'least you saved her trees. I still got some near where I live, even.
I suspect in your weighing of reader approval, slightly more reader ponies will like the complete story with all its little follow-up chapters and its twist ending… but for all that, you've removed something, not just added something. Oopsy.
I'm totally with Applejinx on this one. Stick to your guns, friend.
That cannot be right. You want momentum not energy for this anyway. A quick look at wikipedia tells me the orbital momentum of the moon is 7.3477 x 10^25 Kgm/s. It also has an orbital energy of 3.67 x 10^28 J, which is, admittedly, only 87380 times more than the Chicxulub impactor (as estimated by this page http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/Chicxulub.html). I assume you were thinking that hitting the moon with any old object with this energy would de-orbit it.
The page also gives an estimated energy of 5.34 x 10^23J and speed of 20,000m/s, which implicitly gives us a mass for the object of 2.71 x 10^15kg. This gives it a momentum of 2.715x10^19 Kgm/s. More than a million times less than the moon's.
Let's assume a fully elastic collision (the most efficient way to transfer momentum, but totally unrealistic) and the most favourable impact angle. The asteroid delivers 2.715 x 10^19 Kg m/s of momentum to the moon, which slows the moon to 0.99999926 of its original speed. Or, a reduction of 0.73mm/s. That's... still way more than I would have guessed, actually.
Of course, there's another possibility, which is, quite simply, that they're wrong. Their technology is considerably less advanced than ours, and they lack computers. They may not well understand the motions of planetary bodies. If that were the case, they may not realize that, you know, they COULD use the Moon like that.
Another thing, incidentally, that I thought about regarding this is that the moon orbits the Earth around the equator, and moving it off of its normal course may be impossible - or at least require an impractical amount of energy. If that's the case, then an asteroid coming in from an angle far enough away from the earth's equator would simply not be possible to crash into the Moon.
Uhm, not to put to fine a point on it, but the Equestrian sun revolves around Equestria, not the other way around.
THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTAAAAABLE!
THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTAAAAABLE!
THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTAAAAABLE!
THE...wait, what?...
...down the hall? 7B?...oh, terribly sorry...
1791336 You're not trying to stop the moon in it's tracks, but to knock it sideways, possibly perpendicular to its orbit. I don't have the calculations. They were done years ago, when the US was thinking about doing nuclear testing on the moon. See the link.
1791304 My intent was to take that tragic story and turn it around into a heroic one. That final scene in chapter 6 is supposed to be inspiring, not the solution to a puzzle. The chapter 7 coda is also there for emotional impact, not as a twist. To say that Twilight succeeded, and that she was correct, saving life was worth it.
1791702 YOU are tellin' ME my tastes are too morbid?
1791353 Yes, that was option 2, to have Luna explain it was impossible to move it there.
1791817 Well, I'd like to figure out why it struck you the way it did. Were chapters 2-3 too confusing, sending you into puzzle-solving mode? What could have made chapter 6 seem heroic and inspiring to you? Do you have a grudge against ungainly monkeys?
And now we know just how much juice a Kamehameha packs (and that's a prototype Roshi's version of it; think of the super Saiyan version that could blast away entire planets).
Just slap an Alternate Universe tag on it; solves all your problems. Where's Discord? Alternate Universe, he doesn't exist. I mean, you could certainly try bending over backwards to please some prereader over at EQD, but personally I don't think it's worth it. But the call is up to you.
And goodness grief the moon. For one, talking about its orbit doesn't really work here, because it doesn't have an orbit--not like our moon. If it did, Luna wouldn't have to raise it. We also know that she isn't faking, since in this season's premier, we saw both the sun and the moon stationary in the sky at the same time. So it's safe to assume that both bodies just don't move unless otherwise made to. As for how it moves across the sky at night (though we technically don't know this either, Luna could just raise it up and then take it down from the same spot), perhaps Luna just gives it enough of a push to make it across.
You stated in the story that the asteroid was bigger than the moon, which, by the way, can be any size you the author want it to be, since we know so little about the Equestrian moon. Maybe the moon isn't solid rock, but more a ball of tightly compacted space dust (or magic dust!). Maybe it's hollow. Either way, it could have some structure that would render it useless as a wall against the asteroid.
But, if it was solid rock, and since it doesn't have its own orbit and therefore momentum, the best shot at using it would be to wait until the asteroid is close enough, and then swing the moon around with all your might like a baseball bat and take the thing out. And again, since the moon doesn't have a fixed orbit, you could technically launch it from a variety of angles. It doesn't have to hit the asteroid on its side; perhaps closer to the front.
But anyway, you said it was bigger than the moon, which makes the success of this less likely. But most importantly, Celestia and Luna are dead. They tried to tamper with the asteroid directly, probably thinking it was safer, and lost. A bad decision, one that likely cost them Equestria, but that's how it goes. People make the wrong decisions, and it costs lives. Celestia and Luna are not above this at all. And Twilight, not being as powerful as either of them, simply can't use the moon in this manner. Perhaps she can barely budge it.
So really, the moon could be very capable of stopping the asteroid and saving Equestria. Too bad the only ones who could use it died. And honestly, that makes the whole thing more gut wrenching. At least for me. Knowing that there IS a viable solution, but the only ones able to pull it off made the wrong call and are dead? That's painful. It would also play into Twilight's sense of helplessness and guilt, because she would totally blame herself on not studying enough or gaining more power over her life to be able to move the moon.
Case in point: I don't think you need to change anything else, other than perhaps add some clarification to those who want it--and even then you're not obligated.
See what he did here, folks? He did what people do for every show episode: He imagined a possible explanation for what happened, instead of blaming the writer because he could imagine a way that it could have not happened.
I know writing should be plausible, but too many fans take it too far, lambasting the writing if what he writes conflicts with their personal head-canon, plus a host of assumptions about what the characters would have done in that situation (like that Luna knows accurately whether or not the asteroid can break the moon). Yet they don't hold the show to the same standard!
Now, the chapter 7 objections, yeah, I'll take the blame for passing over big parts of the fossil record, because I'm moving things into the real world, and different criteria apply. But the pre-chapter 6 shitstorm was crippling. It gave me the only kind of writer's block that I get, which is the feeling that it doesn't matter what I write because people aren't going to see it the way I see it anyway.
My feeling about the story now is "I gave Twilight a great heroic redemption, and readers don't care and are arguing about a fucking ROCK. And the readers thumb-bombed it after the last chapter because they would rather have a miracle and a happy ending than epic heroism."
Seriously, WTF is going on with people saying "meh" to chapter 6?
(I retconned the "bigger than the moon" twice. It was smaller than the moon in the original, then I changed it to bigger because of all the flak over "Luna could stop it with the moon!", then I changed it to smaller in order to use the chapter 7 ending.)
1791461 I don't get this reference, but it's still funny.
No offense to anyone who made this argument, but...people seriously made this argument? They complained about this?? Sigh. Equestria is a young earth/Equestria is an old earth are popular head canons--I've seen them employed in fics many times, and in popular ones too. If you wanna go by the fossil record, then obviously the whole thing just falls apart. It's pointless to address it, unless you hate that particular head canon and are trying to illustrate why you think it's dumb. But, it IS called 'willing suspension of disbelief' for a reason, because in order to make most stories work, there are some things you just have to ignore. Like us not having fossil records of Equestria.
And another thing: such an argument rests on the assumption that the earth which Equestria is a precursor to is a realistic earth, as opposed to a fictional earth. Bad Horse no more has to follow the rules of reality by going the early-earth route than he would otherwise. Why couldn't it be the earth where Superman exists? The earth from the star trek universe? Or, most simply, just an earth where there would be fossils of Equestria. People are assuming it's OUR earth, and that's just not guaranteed to be the case.
So no, Bad Horse, you do not have to take the blame, because there is none. I'm sorry that some readers haven't received the story in the manner you wanted them to, but here's my two cents: just ignore them. Take seriously only the people whose opinions you respect, and see what they say. If they're picking it apart too, then think critically about whether you think they're right or wrong, because they very well may be wrong. And if you think they are, then don't listen to them either.
On the other hand, if they like it, then let that be all that matters. I mean, I got second to last place in the writeoff, and some people outright stated they hated it, or that it was boring. But, because one dude (I'll let you guess who) really enjoyed it, none of that mattered.
You can keep trying to tweak the story until everyone's happy, but I think it's better to move on; the experience you've gained from everything here will, I think, be more useful moving forward than it will be in trying to fix the story in the here and now.
But again, your choice.
1791833
I just felt that chapter one ended with an emotional gutpunch that was its own excuse. I don't need more than that to call it art. You yourself say "You can still read it as a complete, very dark story, but I wrote more chapters that take it in a different direction."
What I like about it is, it's very bleak but it's not heavy-hoofed about it at all. I really 'get' Twilight's eternal state of mind. It's such a strange existence, and she's so brave and good about it (albeit flawed). Something about that is true to the character, where your resolution and 'fix' of the situation is vaguely true to the show yet far more overwrought (not in tone, but in the reality of what happens: they're all destroyed, and Earth is born from the ashes!)
I like the standalone version and the original direction far better. It doesn't answer a thing, but the spirit is there. Not all stories have or need endings, much less 'justification for all the details to the pedantic'.
I'm sorry it makes you sad that you weren't able to go for mass approval with chapter 6 and the whole sequence of little 'what happened next' chapters, but the ending of chapter one is THE most poignant encapsulation of Twilight's time-loop situation I've ever seen, and you will not shame me for insisting in its worthiness. I am not scared of saying something is a great story. Chapter One standing alone is a great story because of the emotional depth and truth to character it shows in Twilight, and the clarity and force of the image of her setting out to do her lonely work for the jillionth time.
I'm not sure I'd call that hell. She is being the best of what she is—forever. In a strange way, that is some kind of beautiful thing, and she may know it.
1792092
Yes, the lay palentologists among us did, I'm afraid. I would have excepted the story as was, right up until the point where Bad Horse tied it to Earth pre-history, at which point my engineering and palentological senses completely dismantled my suspension of disbelief. I know I'm bringing engineering into what is supposed to be a sort of philosophical piece, but that's what happens when you engage the engineering bit of my mind (as I said to Bad Horse, unfortunately the story itself did not grasp me enough to bolster my suspension of disbelief.)
(But I should also note I don't like catgirls, so I have no concern whatsoever how many I kill when engaging in physics debates with regard to magical fiction... I am evil, after all...)
@Bad Horse - by your own research above, the K-T impact crater was 130 million (130 000 000) megatons and the energy required to knock the moon into the Earth was 10 billion to 10 trillion (10 000 000 000 to 10 000 000 000 000) megatons.
That's not a hundred times the impact energy of the Chicxulub impact, as you intimated in your closing paragraph, that's three to six orders of magnitude - one thousand to one million times larger. That is, I'm afraid, not even close to the spitting distance you suggest.
The Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin crater, while not a direct impact, is 2500 miles in diameter (ten times the size of the Chicxulub), with effects as deep as 200km.
A quick google search revealed some better data that the wiki page, namely that the impact of that asteroid, though not a direct impact and (comparatively!) low-velocity, was from an asteroid 170 km in diameter and a thousand times more powerful than the Chicxulub impact. So I think the middle-upper band of the proposed "moon=> Earth" energy is more likely, as the moon has already survived an impact of the energy of the lower level. Chicxulub could have hit the moon and would have done really not much at all on a cosmic scale, even from exactly the right angle. (Though it would doubtless have ruined the day of all the whatever-they-weres from the MLP comics on the surface...!)
(Though again, I thank you - looking up this sort of information is always interesting... And sad as it may be for you on an artistic level, I think I'm enjoying sciencing around the story more than the story itself. Sorry, that's just what happens when you engage both my engineering AND natural history facets, and don't make me laugh hard enough to not care...!)
1792063
THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTAAAAABLE! refers to an incident at an SF convention where Larry Niven was a guest.
Niven wrote a Hugo-winning novel, Ringworld, about a giant ring-shaped space habitat that revolved about a G-class star. It went completely around its sun at a distance roughly that of earth from Sol. Centripetal acceleration gave it about 1g surface acceleration, giant mountain-walls at the edges kept an earthlike atmosphere inside, and the interior surface was terraformed with oceans and continents and billions of square miles of living space for any oxygen-breathing species its builders had come across.
isnerd.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/ringworld.jpg
(the inner ring is a series of sunshades and open spaces that create "day" and "night" on the surface)
There was just one problem:
The Ringworld was (...are you ready?) unstable.
See, if it was rotating fast enough to put 1g on its interior surface, it was rotating too fast to be in orbit around its sun. Things in orbit are in free-fall, after all, right?...no, not "zero-g," because the gravity of whatever they're rotating around is what keeps them in a stable orbit, so long as they don't go too slow and fall down, or too fast and...
So basically this Ringworld construction was not stable, which meant that it couldn't maintain its nice earthlike distance from its sun without some sort of active stability system. This fact was discreetly brought to Mr. Niven's attention by a pack of drunken nerds chanting "THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTAAAABLE!" over and over again with give-us-Barabbas fervor outside the author's hotel room one night at the 1971 WorldCon.
Its relevance to the argument at hand is that just like those fans in 1971 you guys have a point but, jeez, you're kinda overdoing it.
I would have gone for something more topical but somehow EQUESTRIA EXISTS IN AN ARISTOTELIAN COSMOOOOOOS! lacked the same punch.
If, in the end, the crowd will catch on about the end's near and you, the only being able to change that last moment, doesn't but relives it, then that person is morally conflicted. But only if that person's intent is to give everybody possible a respectful end to their life, to let there be shared supporting dignity instead of unified mad dash for oneself. Or at least that's how I sees it.
Twilight was selfish; thank her for that, or barren would be the byword for the planet. But that's just an by-product, unintended and unforeseen by her when she first throw her memories back into her younger body. So she can't be forgiven and given a pardon for her wast egotistical and warped reasoning for wanting to give everybody a last moment of happiness by jaunting back in time and trying to 'distribute' happiness like some overzealous economical meliorist.
It becomes worse when she foist herself on Big Mac, demanding and taking something he isn't willing to give; going against her first initial intent about happiness. Apparently too strong is her need to satisfy one secret and, to her, opprobrious wish. For that, she's willing to sacrifice the happiness of someone she secretly holds tender in her mind. It's beyond shame. She admits to something she wouldn't ordinarily confess to: that she's just as everybody else and, too, needs closeness and that which defined her interior self was and would never be enough in the end. Something which she thought to be above. This enforces her selfish needs further and further with each revisit, pushing away her aim of redemption and acceptance, alienating their possibilities. And her own salvation gets hard to obtain.
That she manage to comment on that moment quiescence to change and still doesn't try to change that moment, by simply going against after the first or why not five hundredth play, feels as if she doesn't want to. I believe, yes, I assume, that this would mark Twilight's digression into flat out denial about the fact. As anybody she can't believe it. Akin to a reality-block forced on by over an mind overwrought by stress, she escapes backwards and suffers.
Well...
perhaps I've not understood much about the situations depicted in your short-story but no one can claim I didn't try. But it is a story mighty beautiful.
Check again.
10 000 000 000 / 130 000 000 = 76.9
That's within spitting distance because I don't need to knock the moon out of orbit--I need Luna to think that it might knock part of the moon out of orbit. I can surely get one order of magnitude out of each of those caveats.
2500 km in diameter. I did look into that first, but there are issues with it.
First is that I'm skeptical--129 miles wide? That's not 100 times as large as the Chicxulub asteroid; it's 33,500 times as large! There are 5 known asteroids that large in the solar system, according to Wikipedia. An asteroid of that size and speed would have about 10^27 J of energy!
Second is that it's thought to have struck a glancing blow (which is not what is shown in the page you reference with the videos).
Third is that it very well may have broken off large pieces of the moon that fell to Earth. Even the Chicxulub asteroid is thought to have ejected 70 billion kg of rock from Earth past escape velocity.
Fourth is that the Moon was brand new around the time of that impact, so the moon may have been less solid.
I think I actually agree that I liked the first chapter better as a stand alone thing. The rest of the story is alright, and it makes her into a hero... but I think the first chapter was alright as well, and that the greater length of the story didn't actually strengthen what was good about the story, but diluted the goodness over more words, as well as weakening what the first chapter did. The middle chapters felt kind of weak, and it was only really in the end that goodness started to shine through again... but even there,
Maybe some of the people really are getting annoyed over the twist ending, but I think part of the problem is that the story kind of loses them partway through. The first chapter is pretty gripping, and already has a twist ending. But the story keeps twisting as we go through, but in a less interesting way.
And I think that's the problem, really. The best part is the start, and while the end is alright, it isn't as strong as the start, and the middle is much lower. Rather than a gradual increase in tension and interest, it only really becomes all that interesting again at the end.
Sure, there are a lot of plotholes with the ending... but I think that's not the real problem. Not that it works realistically - it doesn't - but that people are noticing it and focusing on it honestly makes me feel like the real problem probably wasn't the ending, but that everything that lead up to it failed to make them really get sucked into it, so it more obviously stuck out and was something they could find fault in, rather than the story itself failing to keep them sufficiently engaged to really get annoyed with it.
I think focusing on and arguing over said plotholes is pointless, because the problem isn't the plothole, but the fact that the story wasn't engaging enough that the plothole really bugged us. I mean, why did they have to fly down the trench in Star Wars on the Death Star when they could have flown in from above? It makes no sense, but I can't think of anyone who watches that movie immediately jumping to that. That's how they had to do it, clearly! It doesn't matter that it makes no sense.
If my first thought on reading the end of your story is "but apple trees didn't exist back then, and modern birds and mammals certainly didn't", then that probably means something went terribly wrong somewhere. But the problem is not likely to be the anachronisms.
Man. Instead of "Nibbled to death by ducks" I think the phrase is now gonna be "gnawed to gnothing by gnerds,"
1793688 You may be right. Any idea how to make the middle more engaging?
That bugged me when I saw Star Wars. I realized later why they did it that way: That entire scene in Star Wars is lifted from a World War 2 movie, "The Dam Busters". The trench emulates the low flight path without fighter cover through enemy defenses that the bombers had to make, for reasons that made sense (and were part of the plot) in The Dam Busters but are absent in Star Wars.
1793781
I think the "trapped in a loop" thing just doesn't add anything to the story; it is a digression, but it isn't much of a conflict and it isn't long enough for us to care about it. We only have a few hundred words to believe it... but we don't, ever, really.
So why bother? It isn't a bad idea for a story, some looper stuck in a time loop because they believe they can't change anything, then coming to the heroic realization that they can and just haven't been trying, but I think it is a bad idea for this story.
I think Chapter 1 is right, and it could easily be a stand-alone story. I think the problem comes in that the rest of the story is a fundamental condemnation of chapter 1, so that's what needs to happen.
The change, here, is that you're changing her from "trying to make everyone happy with only stolen moments" to "trying to actually truly make the most of the time she has left".
Chapter 2 should be a dark reflection of chapter 1 - she's doing the same things, but recontextualized. She has become bitter about it, because it is the same thing, over and over again for her, and it is all utterly pointless, and she can't stop herself from recognizing it. The note about infinite happiness is I think something that is a very interesting thought here, and it leads to the absurdity of the situation - nothing she does actually matters, because it all gets reset and never does happen, and with an infinite number of loops, it really doesn't matter at all as any one loop deviation is meaningless in the grand sense. They're only happy for the briefest of moments anyway, and it is all pointless, empty, hollow as there is nothing that comes afterwards. So chapter 2 should have her dwelling in her bitterness, and then come to the epiphany that she is just doing the same things over and over again for no good reason and she should change (maybe even recognizing her own unhappiness, and how she is lying to herself about snatching her happiness?). This can be one loop of its own; you already do this, but across more loops.
Chapter 3 can be the conversation with her friends, and her realization that it isn't all pointless - that there are things which can be done, things which can be saved, but that she's been thinking too small. Again, this could be a loop of its own.
Then chapter 4 is the end, the final loop, her actually saving what she can with what little time she has left.
I think this is the core of the story - the initial chapter, the betrayl of it, the revelation that there IS something heroic she can do, and the end, where she does what she can even in the face of impossible odds and certain death.
I mean, that's really what the story is already - it already follows this arc, more or less - but it is more broken up, into two additional loops. I think you only need the four loops to tell the story you're trying to tell, so that's how many loops there should be, and that the rest is a distraction from the arc you're telling.
That being said, I'm not sure if the longer story can ever be as focused as just the first chapter is.
Frankly I think all the rest - Discord, Luna, Celestia - are distractions which should be brushed aside if you're going to address them at all, and not really important compared to what you're really doing.
1793947 Chapter 4 is important: The first attempt after learning, resulting in failure and the need to try again. Sounds like you're saying to combine chapters 2 and 3. Implicit is cutting out the stuff about the theorem.
1794121
Why is what is presently chapter 4 important, though? What does it add to the story?
Maybe I don't understand the story you're trying to tell. But to me, while failure can be valuable, that chapter doesn't really add anything to the rest of the story. It doesn't actually do anything for the story you're trying to tell about Twilight, and the story seems to be about Twilight going from a hedonistic awareness (trying to make everyone happy) to a higher sort of "good". Her failure there isn't really consequential to the rest of the story at all; I don't see how it matters. If you cut that out, what difference does it make?
I've only ever read the comment section for two of your stories, and I've regretted it both times. It's like slogging through an /mlp/ episode thread on a bad day.
I thought this story was fantastic, and that it was far better than the first chapter alone. As I see it, Chapter 1 shows hopeless resignation to ones "duty". Twilight is bound by her theories of morality, goaded onward by her immediate desires, and she suffers for it horribly. The general problems are those of of preferring theory over experience, and the curse of desires. They're beautiful problems, but I've spent far too much time thinking about them for them to be all that interesting to me. My reaction after this chapter was something along the lines of "She should just let it end." I had no attachment to Twilight after this chapter. It's sad, but it's just the regular kind of sad.
But then you turned the whole thing on its head with Chapters 2 and 3, and you did it fantastically. All of my issues with Chapter 1 were resolved, and Twilight's newfound lucidity actually made me interested in what she was doing. I thoroughly enjoyed learning with Twilight through Chapters 4 and 5, and I started hoping that Twilight would find a way through this.
And then Chapter 6. God damnit, Chapter 6. It's not something I would have thought to do, and it's not something I would care to do even if I thought about it. It's a kind of sad and proud realization. I can understand what motivates Twilight, and I can recognize her goal as something that can be considered worthwhile, but I just wouldn't be able to push myself to do it. She's good, she's intelligent, and she's respected for all the right reasons. The world tried to squeeze every bit of good out of her that it could, and it got nothing less than an ocean. Twilight is Good. Twilight is better than me. The worst thing about it is that I can only know this because she's going to die having proven herself. It's sad, and it's not gut-punching sad. I don't think I could be more proud of her.
Chapter 7. There are no words (pun retroactively intended). Not only is she everything good, but her being good beyond my capabilities is what allows me to be selfish. That realization just overwhelms me with guilt and embarrassment. It makes me hope that, seeing the world as it is today, Twilight would regret her decision to save life, and it just makes me feel worse knowing that she wouldn't.
Congratulations, you made me sad in a way I haven't felt before. I'm going to go loop Pinkie Pride until I can feel something else again.
I realize that I should have probably said something on topic.
I'm against the first option because it would cause readers to think that Discord might actually have a role to play here. I agree with Pearl Dawn here. Once Discord is in a story, he doesn't leave. If you have him disappearing without a well-defined reason, people are just going to complain about it.
I'm also against the second option since it puts blame on Twilight for the disaster. I think the story is much stronger ending with a perfect Twilight, and Option 2 precludes that. I'm against making this a Season 1 canon story for the same reason.
I don't think it's worth catering to EQD in this case. There are plenty of other outlets now, and their requirement would just make the story worse. Putting that into perspective: that's the opposite of what they should be doing. Going by the comments here and on the story page, it's not a stretch to let the readers fill in Discord's position.
I'm confused--this implies that you don't think that's what chapter 2 already is?
Which is "the first option" and "the second option"?
BTW EQD rightly pointed out it can't be season 1 as Twilight is a princess.
1797203
That's pretty much what the extant chapters 2 and 3 are. My suggestion was more or less that it should be a single chapter, not two. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
I have apparently mastered the art of sounding like I'm disagreeing with someone when I'm agreeing with them. Now all I have to do is master the reverse and mind control powers will be mine.
BE IT RESOLVED: that in atonement for his offenses against Kepler 's Laws,
Bad Horse Shall write a new Fetlock Holmes story,
With a particular villain,
The title of which shall be On the Dynamics of an Asteroid.
(And I've got Arty Morty's introductory number right here:)
[youtube=http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9nns7A8Adec]
1797207
Option 1: Adding in lines describing what Discord was doing or why he's not there.
Option 2: Discord's reformation causes the asteroid.
There's also an issue with Twilight "realizing" that Discord has no free will. I suspect that any evidence in support of it will make the same mistake as the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem*.
--
* That was a nice reference and counterargument, by the way. I planned a fic whose entire purpose was to teach proofs, loopholes, corner cases, and counterarguments like that, though it was quickly trashed due to my lack of patience with writing. It's nice to see it in other fics.
1794158 Chapter 4 is there because it's bad practice for your hero to succeed the first time they try. I think the problem isn't chapter 4, but that there's something missing between chapters 4 and 5, and 5 and 6.
1797802 I'm glad someone understood that was a counterargument!
The theorem is correct, but usually misapplied. People don't realize there's an ethical assumption hidden inside it.
The head-canon I'd draw on is that Discord is not a person, but a personification, something like Shiva. Reigning him in is not allowed by the laws of Equestrian theophysics.
1799665
Wasn't Discord as much responsible for being reformed as everyone else was for reforming him? In the end, it could only have been him that made the decision to stick with Fluttershy since there was nothing to physically or theophysically coerce him into doing so. If it was the threat of being turned to stone, shouldn't Equestria have been fried when Celestia took the crown? Or when Twilight and friends friendshipped him the second time?
Was it the fact that he had a choice and picked the wrong one? That violates the idea that he has no free will, though he's forced to always pick chaos or die. It makes sense in the common headcanon that Discord and the Tree are playing a game against each other. In this case, the Tree won and the board reset. I'm not sure how the season 4 opener fits in with this.
I need an appropriate headcanon battle emote...
I loved the heroic redemption, myself. I have quibbles about the final "chapter", but no quibbles at all with any of the rest of it. (Including the fucking rock).
Honestly I think it is amazing, wonderful, even genius, that you managed to make me feel triumphant exultation at the destruction of every single character in your story. But that really is how it feels to me. After going through a personal hell, and after being selfish, and after failing at everything, the way Twilight then pulls all the ponies together and succeeds is an absolute triumph. It's a wonderful redemption.
I am honestly a little baffled at people who didn't like it. I guess because it's not a fluffy, episode-style, everything is fixed and perfect happy ending, it's not okay?
I do still think that making Equestria equal Earth is... meh. It invited scientific pedantry, and it has nothing to do with the story you're telling. I don't feel it matters that Twilight saved us the readers. It could be some incomprehensible bunch of alien beings she saved by making sure some life survived, and it'll still be the same story. But I've said that already so I won't harp on about it.
1802384 As far as canon, we've already seen that Discord wasn't reformed, at least not past the end of Keep Calm & Flutter On.
1824351
I thought you were suggesting "Discord was reformed, therefore asteroid" as a possibility for Moments. I just realized that I missed a word when reading your original post.
1825084 Oh, right. I'm imagining, in that quote, that Discord is a personified force of nature, so taming his personification causes chaos to manifest elsewhere.
>>1825892
It could work, though I imagine it's not going to be easy getting that through the reader's suspension of disbelief. The way you describe it, it sounds like the universe itself is almost sentient and getting revenge for what a few of the ponies did. I realize that forces of nature don't themselves make decisions, but in this case it seems like the universe has a few parallels with petty human behaviors.
I'm still favoring my earlier stance that having Discord's reformation cause the asteroid would weaken the story since it puts blame on the reformers. It opens up the possibility that Twilight feels guilty about causing that kind of destruction, and her actions towards saving Life would be easier seen as "She's did this out of guilt," rather than "She's did this for us."
I really think this is a case where less is better. There's no consistent headcanon about Discord or his place in Equestria, and Moments is far too short a fic to explore that without detracting from the main story. I don't see a way around this while still writing in Discord unless you deliberately keep his reasons and actions vague.
Maybe if something happened to the Tree, it would be reasonable for Discord to vanish without further explanation. Maybe the Elements burned out somehow. Maybe the ponies thought Discord was the cause of the asteroid and turned him to stone (or did something else profoundly stupid). Anything that can be left almost entirely open-ended.