I might be reading too much Tom Clancy · 8:50pm Nov 18th, 2015
Basically I was about five or six pages into a dissertation on trade negotiations, supply and demand, the needs of the market verses the needs of the nation, the problems that arise when a nation of questionable societal equality has exclusive or nearly exclusive access to a vital product, and a brief touch on the concept of economic warfare and the need for an industrializing country to ensure it has access to products which may require the establishment of overseas colonies, which of course opens a whole new can of worms...
...when I remembered that, oh yeah, I'm writing a My Little Pony fanfiction, not The Wealth of Nations, and that even if I were writing a pony version of that, I probably shouldn't pick Trixie to be my stand-in for Adam Smith.
Managed to cut things down to two pages after that.
In all honesty I am actually working my way through Tom Clancy right now, and in fact I'm on Debt of Honor (Book 8/14 and the first one to truly diverge from our timeline - the fact that the Korean peninsula unified under the South some time in the early 1990s is offhandedly mentioned), which among other things is heavily involved in economics, supply and demand, the needs of an industrial nation to have access to raw materials, and economic warfare. Tom Clancy was not a man to spare details, either, so now I am an amateur economist as a result.
Congratulations. *Hands over amateur diploma* :p
I'm sure Filthy Rich would be happy to step up and expound on the essential elements of equine economics, if Trixie has better things to do.
Coincidentally, Debt of Honor is where I think Clancy starts going really off the rails. He wrote some truly outstanding technothrillers, but he just couldn't adapt to the fall of the Soviet Union and the post-Cold War era.
I've never read Clancy, and based on this post, I never will.
No matter how engaging the rest of your story is, you do not fill pages and pages and pages with economic dissertations. If your plot hinges on having a degree in economics to understand, it's a bad plot and you're a bad writer.
Ironically, what you're describing is exactly what I went through with Chasing Smoke and some of the battle scenes. I had been reading a bunch of Warhammer Fantasy around when I wrote it, and I had to reign myself in to not let too much of that bleed into the story.
Sounds like you were channeling Mylittleeconomy there for a bit.
3551275 Debt of Honor was notable for its freaky-prescient use of an airliner as a terrorist weapon against a Washington landmark, and nothing else. Clancy is... yeah, a creature of the Cold War. His weirdness about the Japanese is hard to get past, and his post-Cold-War radical-centrist politics didn't age well.
And yeah, pony fic isn't a great fit for political economy material. I mean, I think my economic politics align pretty closely with Reality Check's, but having Celestia straight-up name-check Bastiat and Smith is... a bridge too far. Equestria probably ought to be a refuge from the real world, not a place to play out "Take That".
3551304 3551275
", but now that I'm about 80% done I can say that I have been having fun with it.
Actually to be completely honest I'm much enjoying Debt of Honor, and Clancy in general. I mean, don't get me wrong, the basic premise of Debt - a war between Japan and America - had me going "...what?
I did keep a little of the economic dissertation since it fit the scene, though as usual I feel it necessary to state that the views stated by any of my characters are not necessarily in line with my own views.
I've warned people about what comes from reading Clancy; it looks like I finally have proof to show them.