• Member Since 12th Aug, 2017
  • offline last seen May 24th

chris the cynic


Someone who doesn't know how to describe herself, is always struggling with debilitating depression, and won't stop hanging onto the hope that happy endings are possible.

More Blog Posts26

Sep
13th
2019

The state of CHS and such in No longer Necessary · 7:33pm Sep 13th, 2019

The technical term for the viewpoint used in No longer Necessary is "third person limited" of the "deep" sort. How you combine those words depends on precisely whose version of the terminology you're using. I first encountered the term as "third person limited, deep penetration" but I have feeling that would get some puerile giggles, others call it "deep third person limited", or even "third person deep" without the "limited".

What "deep" actually means can be set aside, because it's not what this is about. Have a footnote.* Most people know what third person means: instead of Sunset and Wallflower telling the story, we're getting a story from a hypothetical narrator who happens to be neither of them.

It's the "limited" that matters here. What appears in the story is limited to what the character in question sees, hears, otherwise senses, thinks, remembers, and feels. While the story ping pongs between whether the character in question is Sunset or Wallflower, meaning we aren't limited to the perceptions of a single character, the scope of what appears in it is still pretty small.

One result is that, since neither Sunset nor Wallflower will be giving the other or themselves an "Of course you know, Bob" speech (not even in the privacy of their own minds), it means that there's never going to be an exposition dump of what happened before the story started. Also, since both of them are very much living in the now, no one is going into any kind of background in any detail.

Another result is that a lot of ongoing story stuff isn't going to appear either because they simply don't know what [whichever character] happens to be doing at such and such time.

tl;dr:
There's a lot of stuff happening in the world of No Longer Necessary that won't appear in the story itself.

I know that there are people who like to know such things anyway, so here's a random info dump.

Obviously this is based off the Equestria Girls Holiday Special comic. Obviously this story begins after that's gone completely off the rails. How that happened is simply that Wallflower and Sunset met before the part where Sunset re-reads the words "Find your family" and sprints to Sugarcube Corner / the Sweet Shoppe. That scene wasn't just the thing that led to Sunset's last ditch effort to convince the Rainbooms she was innocent, it was also when Apple Bloom realized what Anon-a-Miss was actually doing to Sunset. Without crying-reading-running Sunset in that scene, the reason the CMC had for confessing never appears.

So we don't get Sunset and the Human Five reconciling, and we do get Anon-a-Miss continuing beyond the bounds of the original comic.

That being said, this is not an escalation story. Sunset is the victim of ordinary high school bullying of a primarily emotional sort. (Which is nothing to scoff at; that stuff's brutal.) By the standards of high school bullying it's only extreme in that she has practically the whole school against her.

That in itself can make people suicidal, and Sunset's sort of primed for it given her volatile emotional state at that point. She only started behaving as though she mattered and had worth in Rainbow Rocks. Not too long afterwards, Anon-a-Miss took that away, she crashed and burned, and by the time the story starts she's also been ground down by the fact that it's an ongoing thing.

In line with the "not an escalation story" thing, the Rainbooms aren't any more terrible here than they are in the comic. They turned on her because of what they thought was solid evidence, shouted at her (using mean words) until she was crying on her knees, assumed the tears were faked, left her there, and then left her alone.

There'd be glares, and they'd basically be shunning her, but given that they believe Sunset tried (successfully) to hurt them, that's actually pretty reasonable and involves no malice. (And, obviously, they wouldn't consider it "shunning" to avoid someone who hurt them.)

If you want a story where they're monsters instead of people who had one massive fuck up that they failed to realize was a fuck up, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Celestia and Luna are working on the problem, but cyberbullying is notoriously difficult to deal with.

Spreading gossip and embarrassing secrets isn't actually cyberbullying in itself. (It's just being an asshole.) It needs to be a sustained campaign against someone to qualify, so (because it's indiscriminate) Anon-a-Miss doesn't look like cyberbullying. The only person it's a sustained campagin against is Sunset, but it hasn't made a single post targeting her (and it's never actually said "I'm Sunset Shimmer") so that's kind of hard to prove.

That means that Celestia and Luna can't get the cops involved. They can try, but they'll be shot down. School administrators going up against a well established social networking site on a matter of digital privacy are going to lose. They can't get the user info, so they're stuck with what Anon-a-Miss releases, but since it's crowd-sourced from everyone it doesn't actually point to anyone.

They're left putting out fires instead of dealing with the problem at the root.

Princess Twilight is in contact and aware of the broad strokes of the situation. She would come over to help if Sunset wanted her to, but Sunset doesn't. She's also dealing with the events of Season 5. That, however, pales in comparison to the simple fact that Sunset's been holding back in her letters; Twilight knows that things aren't good, but she has no idea how bad they are.

On the CMC themselves, they've got their noses to their phones to such a degree that they're completely oblivious regarding the real world effects of their actions. Without an angry mob emotionally battering Sunset in front of one of them (as in the comic) they're not going to figure out anything on their own. They're too focused on the online world to notice the real one.

Everything is happening all around them whenever they're in school, they're too tuned out to notice.


⁂ ᠎ ⁂

* What "deep" means is that we're getting the view from inside the character's head. The character isn't telling the story (since this is third person), but their perceptions are shaping the narration. You get things like:

Everything was dulled, blunted, muffled. The colors were washed out, the sounds were distant, she could still feel the world around her but . . . it was like she was only halfway there, the rest of her stuck somewhere else, and so whatever she felt was only half a feeling. Part of her wondered if, maybe, this was how things had always been, and the more colorful world were just--

Wait.

She saw [insert name here]. The world came crashing in in the best of all possible ways. Everything was vibrant, every sound was full and rich, she was here. Fully here. And could feel everything: the wind on her face, the way her hoodie, unbalanced and off center as always, hung from her body, the texture of the hemline she was suddenly rubbing between two fingers.

instead of

While the world hadn't changed, she felt as though things had been dulled, blunted and muffled. She thought that the colors were washed out and the sounds she heard were more distant than they actually were. Her sense of touch was acting in much the same way, and she imagined that it was because only half of her being was actually present, and so she could only feel half of any given feeling. She began to wonder if this was how things had always been, with her normal perception of the world being an imagined experience.

Those thoughts were cut off when she saw [insert name here], for when she did, her perception of color, sound, and touch returned to normal. She now believed that she was fully present in the here and now. She noted the feeling of the wind on her face, and the weight of the hoodie that she wore which hung off center as it often did. She started rubbing the hemline of her shirt between two fingers, and noted the feeling of its texture.

Those are both third person limited, and they describe the same events,** but they are so very different. They both have their uses. I tend to go gravitate toward the first. (An argument can be made that my use of the word "here" in the first was incorrect and rule breaking.)

** Well, they potentially describe the same events. The first version doesn't, for example, specify which hemline she's rubbing between her fingers. The possibility is open that it's the hoodie's hem. That possibility doesn't exist in the second.

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