McPoodle Kibble #3: The New Lunar Republic · 5:42am Dec 20th, 2015
This was to be the masterpiece of Luna’s set of reviews included along with At the Inn of the Prancing Pony and was to be a complete deconstruction of the kind of ridiculous conspiracy theories I had to put up with on a daily basis at one of my previous places of work. Unfortunately, writing really good paranoid ravings turned out to be much harder than I anticipated, so I ended up going with Doctor Who episode reviews instead. Anyway, here’s as far as I got:
Luna Reviews: The New Lunar Republic
In the months leading up to Nightmare Moon’s climatic battle with Celestia, she was quietly laying the ground for widespread rebellion. Her identity as Princess Luna was covered up by speaking from the shadows in multiple locations in quick succession, making so many appearances per night that there was some suspicion by law enforcement that “Nightmare Moon” was in fact a conspiracy made up of dozens or even hundreds of ponies instead of being merely a single individual. Ponies with grievances against the Diarchy were approached by this mystery pony and enlisted into an unlikely coalition, with the goal of completely dissolving all government cohesion at the critical moment and making the defeat of an isolated Celestia all but inevitable. Luckily for Equestria, the vast conspiracy fell apart at the crucial moment, undermined by government spies that faithfully performed their duty, without ever realizing that the “Nightmare Moon” they were fighting against was one and the same as one of the diarchs they were sworn to protect.
There was, of course, no chance that Nightmare Moon would have ever honored any of the promises she made to any of these groups if she had succeeded in her plans. For one thing, the conspiracy included members with goals diametrically opposed to one another, containing within it some of the most virulently breedist of unicorns, pegasi and earth ponies. Perhaps a few of the more ruthless criminal gangs might have been set loose upon a recalcitrant city during the initial reign of terror, but that was about the extent of what these groups ever would have been able to accomplish. The Nightmare’s aims after all were simple: to keep her (at this point willing) host’s emotions unbalanced, and to feed on the suffering and death throes of an entire planet.
In the wake of Nightmare Moon’s banishment, the members of her coalition by and large slunk back into the shadows from whence they came, deferring their impossible hopes of warping Equestria to their will for another day. But one group refused to accept defeat, and as the first Summer Sun Celebration to follow the defeat approached, this group made an audacious bid to overthrow the remaining princess, and convert all ponies in the nation to their cause. They called themselves the New Lunar Republic.
The roots of earth pony republicanism reach back to the dim prehistory of the earth pony tribe. Most ponies only know of the deliberately farcical figure of Puddinghead from the Hearth’s Warming Eve play, not realizing how much of her public character was a deliberate feint. She had been a doughty fighter for the rights of her constituents for decades, outsmarting her unicorn and pegasus foes at every turn, until her prejudices eventually got the better of her. In the end, humbled by her failure, she surrendered earth pony independence to the new Unification Council alongside Princess Platinum and Commander Hurricane. This act was accepted as valid by nearly everypony. But rather crucially, she had not put the matter to a public vote as specified in the earth ponies’ unwritten constitution. And that meant that, legally speaking, the Earth Pony Republic had never ceased to be.
The Earth Pony Republic had a long history in the centuries that followed. As was traditional among earth ponies of this period, this history was entirely unwritten. As part of her election as president, and the renaming of this state-within-a-state to the New Lunar Republic, a brief version of this history was recited to Nightmare Moon. Her memories of them are unfortunately even hazier than usual to me, but I will attempt to give them some justice, as it appears that I am their final repository in the present day.
Wow; this's the best-ever version of the New Lunar Republic! I really like this version of Puddinghead, and see fruitful ground for conspiracy theories. (Why did Puddinghead betray the Republic? Was there ever any Equestria-wide election that could be seen as ratifying the Unification? Does it matter that the Constitution was unwritten?)
And... what's more...
What hath Genevieve's pencil wrought?