Review - A Mighty Demon Slayer Grooms Some Ponies · 1:05am Aug 18th, 2014
From D G D Davidson comes a remarkably dark take on the outcome of G1, which achieves this while being fundamentally true to the G1 Canon.
On our side of the Rainbow it's five years later; on theirs it's five thousand years later. Megan Williams is 18 years old when the sky opens and emissaries come to Oklahoma in the USA from Equestria. The plan is for Twilight Sparkle and her friends to demonstrate their reality at a horse show. Megan, whom everypony remembers from the legends of the foundation of their civilization, volunteers to groom them. Megan, Danny and Molly get to know Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy -- and Megan must confront the good and the bad aspects of the legacy she left their world.
This story manages to be at points very sweet and funny while unblinkingly confronting the dark sides both of Human and of Pony nature. I don't want to go into the details and spoil the story -- because it is a truly amazing story, one with strong attention to compliance with both G1 and G4 canon -- but it is a story that will stick with you when you read it. And in the good way. I think, because it's on hiatus -- I urge the author to complete the work. Let me just say that there is a definite downside to a friendship between two natural killers.
After I read this story, I realized with great relief exactly why things couldn't have worked that way in my version of the G1 verse. Which, considering that my Wind Whistler, after Alex Warlorn's Wind Whistler, winds up trapped inside Discord's mind, is saying a lot. IMO Wind Whistler is best G1 pony, which ... well, you'll see.
Read it. It's excellent. Maybe if we comment on it a lot the writer will finish it, too!
It is a great story... except for the original ending. Saying that that was controversial is a rather massive understatement. Still, I do hope D G D makes a new ending for it at some point. Just... not that one.
Also, you may want to include a link to the story in the review.
how can we comment on the story when those massive walls of text are present?
Eh, DGD's stuff is always very well written, but I find this storylines to be almost unbearable.
Somehow, he always makes Equestria sound incredibly loathsome, which isn't much fun.
2378444
Are you talking about Megan killing Wind Whistler? That was horrible -- but built up logically from everything that happened in the tale. Which made me so so happy that my version of Wind Whistler had a normal (for Time of Extermination values of "normal") romantic background (namely, she had been in love with a Big Brother but he fell to predators, which is "normal" for the tragic Time of Extermination) and thus would have very politely, very logically, and very firmly explained to my Megan why any such idea would have been a very bad one, rather than gone into near-Nightmare state due to going along with the plan
2378474
Um, referring to my comments?
2378484
Never read the others. Though I did find it hilarious that the code of law and morality which actually did work for Equestria came not from Megan and Wind Whistler's ruthless utilitarianism, but rather from Megan's two drunk younger siblings at an after-wedding party. This is to say, from two drunk pre-teens who had themselves only the foggiest concept of either law or morality, but understood it well enough to help a great civilization be founded by it.
2378506 just giving you a hard time
Isn't this the one where Celly and Luna turn out to be Tirek and Gorgar in disguise?
2378504
I'm referring to what 2378554 mentioned. And to answer Alex's question, that particular chapter has since been redacted due to a rather massive case of reader backlash.
2378576
Good. As far as twists go, that one feel horrifically arbitrary. It's right up there with "the sky above Equestria is an illusion" BS that a fan comic that shall not be named used.
2378576
Yeah, the ending is crap, and the author acknowledged it. Apart from turning pretty much all of Equestria on its head, it destroyed two of my favourite pones completely.
2378554
Well, that would make absolutely no sense, so I'm glad he changed it then!
2378576
This is a joke, right? I mean, that idea about Celly and Luna's "real" identities in-story?
2378601
The interesting thing about that comic is that they were essentially living in a single magically-maintained pocket of life in a Universe essentially like my Shadowverse -- the continuum from which the Shadows are attacking.
2378937
Davidson believed that it made perfect sense and that he had foreshadowed it rather well. Quite a few of his readers disagreed, myself included.
That being said, if you haven't read the story, don't let that dissuade you. As I previously stated, that chapter's been removed, and the rest of the story is a fascinating blend of world-building, generation combination, and deconstruction of the child hero. And quite a bit on proper horse grooming. Davidson does his research.
2379502
I read the story and I totally don't see it, unless one is willing to argue that the monsters all represented Queen Majesty's self-destructive urges. The problem with that is that Celestia was never hostile to the Ponies, and Luna only was when she was insane.
2379502
(*nods*) One of the major points of the story is how very much Megan was out of her depth attempting to construct an entire culture for the Ponies. This was of course necessary because this version of the G1 Ponies had no real history; they were just emanations from the mind of Queen Majesty, and as such had very stereotyped personalities, quite vulnerable to infection any bad ideas coming from anyone they trusted..
The reason why this didn't happen to my G1 Ponies is that they had a history before the Time of Annihilation. They were Uplifted to sapience from basal horse stock hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Great G'marr (heavily derived and advanced Voormis), then further modified into the Kinds many tens of thousands of years ago by the High Eldren (the Moochick's race). They have had plenty of time to complete their biological evolution through natural means, and to develop their own cultures.
Consequently, they did not need to be told by an outsider how to mate and reproduce, with potentially-disastrous emotional and psychological consequences to the Ponies since said outsider, being a 13-year-old girl herself only grasped such a process theoretically as it applied to sapient beings, and made a very bad decision based on a false analogy with the non-sapient equids with which she was familiar. The problem my G1 Ponies had was not that they did not know how to reproduce naturally, it was that their predators were killing them faster than they could reproduce.
His version of Wind Whistler, being derived from Queen Majesty's rationality had a particularly limited emotional development and hence was highly-vulnerable to bad sexual advice. The tragic thing was that this Wind Whistler was the only one of the Ponies to accept Megan's advice in its full destructive awfulness, because she was the only one who had formed no previous romantic preferences; and because she trusted Megan the most out of any of them. Also, this Wind Whistler was the only one of them with such a poorly-developed emotional nature that the shock of mating with somepony she didn't love basically shattered her ability to feel normal emotions, driving her insane (specifically, what I'd term in my world "Lone-Mad" -- she felt so alienated now from other Ponies that she thought it reasonable to rule them as a totalitarian despot). And she now rejected Megan, because her damaged subconscious was blaming her for everything, rather than grasping that Megan simply had no idea what she was talking about when she was giving this advice. That last part led inexorably to what would have been a tragic conclusion regardless of which of them won that fight in the barn.
My version of Wind Whistler, in contrast, came from a culture which already had concepts of friendship, love, sexuality and reproduction. She had a fairly normal love life (for the Time of Extermination) before she ever met Megan -- specifically, she had fallen in love with her best male friend and mated with him (her culture had mostly lost the concept of marriage, because of the death rate among the Big Brothers). He then fell to predators, which was the key event setting Wind Whistler's determination to learn how to fight back against the predators.
Wind Whistler's culture was more fatalistic than ours regarding the deaths of loved ones, because they happened so frequently, but it had the concept of romantic love. My Wind Whistler was a complete personality, though an exceptionally intelligent, courageous and violent one by the standards of her species. She would have responded to really bad romantic advice from Megan by explaining to her why it was bad advice, not by taking it; if Wind Whistler had taken it, she would have felt bad afterward, but not bad enough to decide to abandon all positive affect and set herself up as a totalitarian dictator over all Ponykind.
So, basically, I conceived of the G1 Ponies as more robust than did D G D Davidson. Which avoided such tragic consequences.
2379502
Thanks for the recommendation. I remember reading part of it some time ago, and the sections on proper horse grooming really caught my eye.
Thanks for the review. I appreciate it.
I hope you do more of these reviews in the future, Jordan.
Very solid stuff and I second the vote to see more reviews from you.