The Princess Diaries · 7:46pm Aug 30th, 2014
So I have:
Come into possession of a copy of The Journal of the Two Sisters, by Amy Keating Rogers*. I suspect some of you might be interested in the contents of this book, but not fifteen bucks interested, so I'm gonna spill the Princesses' secrets right on up in here, as a free bucket of chum for the FiMFiction shark tank.
To avoid spoilers on your feed page, and avoid a stupidly long blog post, I'll put up a brief review here, and then provide a GDocs link to all the good stuff.
First off, it's a pretty little book, in the same hardback format with a half-cover jacket as the Elements of Harmony series guide. Take off the outer slip and it's a nicely decorated, cheerful little grimoire; to some it may be worth cover price as an ornament or prop alone. It's not hard to imagine it as a book on Twilight's shelf, albeit printed in plain English rather than odd blobs of blocks.
The first half of the book is devoted to alternating journal entries by Celestia and Luna, from some time prior to Nightmare Moon. There's not very much of a plot; it's more a string of incidents told in summary -- sort of like a retrospective of episodes that happen not to exist.
No matter, as the story isn't the star anyway, but the backstory. The first half of the Journal is just as dense with interesting new information as you might hope, though for many, it may not be what you would hope.
This part's awesome, and for every reader who agrees with me, another five will think I'm insane. As one might expect from the publication of a royal diary, this is guaranteed to ignite pointless controversy all over the poniwebs, but then, so is a twenty-word tweet. I like it, at any rate.
The latter half, "The Journal of Friendship", isn't nearly as interesting. It's a recap of season 4, via journal entries by the face characters. It's cute, amusing and attractively designed, but there's not much new here. Even the illustrations call on a terribly familiar old cast of vectors. You'd think by now they could've gotten someone to DRAW A NEW PICTURE once in awhile.
Overall score: well worth the money, I'd say. Some may end up hating the content with the fury of a thousand impotent sons, but even so, it's guaranteed to make you think; like it or hate it, it's the single biggest pure infodump yet released in the franchise, and whatever side of any stupid little argument you fall on, this book will come in handy as debate fiber.
With that all said, here's the doc where I've summed up pretty much everything from the book that I thought would be of interest to fanfic writers. Do note that I've done my best to just stick to what's said in the book, with a bare minimum of interpretation or commentary; I'm not here to go full Linkara on the book, nor to sell t-shirts for the Keating Rogers fanclub. I just figure that this would be useful for fic-writers to know, whether they intend to make use of any of it or toss it aside with great force.
* winks to AugieDog
Whoa shit, this is amazing.
I need to get this fucking book. :D
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I know, right?
I think it's a good investment for ficsketeers. At the very least, I think more people ought to be aware of its contents -- ever since I read it, about a week ago, I've been noticing all sorts of discussions and comments around here to which knowledge from this book would be relevant.
Are you the "Take Walker" commenting on the Gdoc, btw?
Actually Celestia says in one of her confrontations with Discord that she's protecting equestria and her subjects from him at some point doesn't she?
Wait they built their castle in the everfree forest for some personal space?
Holy shit, did they really need to be surrounded by dangerous creatures to get some privacy?
That's like the President of the US deciding to make his second home in the middle of a volcano because he wants some space...
Well I guess it's easier to move a satellite than a fucking star, makes sense.
Where the hell did he find out this spell?
This is terrifying, what if some other ponies find out how he got the spell?
Griffon wars...cool
Well that's a more humorous way to brush over a potential inter-species war i'll give it that.
I had a mental image of the unicorns on a giant wheel, slowly rotating.
Anyways yeah that's quite a big thing for our pony mythology. Basically the ponies really do need the Alicorns in order to make the sun and moon...move?
Wait. how did it move before they figured it out?
I thought the unicorns could control the weather for sure, but the sun not even moving is kind of a species wiping event...So presumably the planet was created by Alicorns I guess?
I mean
Suggests the Alicorns came from fucking somewhere, and they aren't created as fully functioning creatures with access to the full potential of Alicorn magic.
What i'm getting at is, how on earth did the sun and moon move before the Alicorns? Maybe the whole thing is made by them or maybe Jim the turtle kept it going by Turtle power alone.
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I think so, yeah. I'm also fairly sure she has been referred to as the "ruler" also. I suppose it's possible that at some later time, the precise nature of Celestia's authority changed -- or she just got more used to the idea of calling her little ponies "subjects".
It seems that a dark scary forest full of monsters is Luna's idea of a good time.
When I read about the eclairs, my first thought was that it gave an interesting historical background to the Appleloosans' plan of throwing pies at their enemies.
That's a real good question, all right.
It does say that Star Swirl had read some kind of myth about what would happen if an Alicorn moved the sun or moon, which pretty strongly implies that it had happened before, but there's nothing here to indicate just how long the Unicorns had been burning themselves out doing it. Nor how long Star Swirl had personally been involved.
For that matter, if it used to be done by Alicorns, who's the one who decided "Eh screw it, I'll just let these Unicorns permanently disable themselves doing this instead"? Dick move that!
I guess Turtle Power is as good a theory as any...
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This video is amazing. c.c
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Hehehe, I figured that searching "my little pony bitch" would produce good things.
I got no idea where the audio comes from but it works quite well.