• Member Since 1st Feb, 2012
  • offline last seen Oct 22nd, 2016

Aquillo


Scootaloo is the bestest and greatest crusader. Sweetie Belle is nothing but a dog's chew toy--one of the squeaky ones--given life, and Apple Bloom just sucks.

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Source

"I’m not a unicorn anymore: ‘With the marks of our destinies made one, there is magic without end.’ Without end. How can you tame the infinite? How can you reduce the irreducible?”

A failed drabble about alicorns and omnipotence. Written because alicorns and immortality is so last season's fashion choice.

Tangentially related, in a thieving manner, to Princess Luna Guards a Field. The name Leoquillia is stolen without permission from NumberNine99's Tail: A Story of Time and Forgiveness.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 17 )

I almost hate to tell you, then, that I enjoyed reading it, mostly because its premise, given Twilight's background, is utterly plausible.

I will understand if you give this one up, but I hope you don't.

3066423

I'm glad it's plausible: Twilight being a grade A worrier is a pretty integral part of how I see her character. I trace Celestia's blase reaction to both Nightmare Moon and Chrysalis as her having been inured to it over a good while.

I'm not sure what you mean by give this one up. Do you feel it was incomplete?

3066594
I was hoping it might spawn a sequel. (Which is my way of saying that I didn't notice the Complete tag until after I'd posted that.)

And given Twilight's level of angst, this could go on virtually indefinitely.

i actually don't think the problems you put in the author's notes are indicative of the failings here, but i'm much more mechanically oriented than i am big picture oriented.

the bit that felt off for me was that neither character sounded like themselves. your personal voice is very identifiable and it leaked through the characterization quite strongly. i didn't believe i was reading either Twilight or Celestia saying anything, though in parts their sentiment seemed personable and understandable.

i also felt your description was a tad over the top, but i suspect that's a stylistic thing and i could no sooner change it than change the rising of the moon at the end of the day. it bled into some 'telly' sections though, specifically a section where you said Celestia 'delighted' at something - what indication should we have of this, as observers or readers?

i think the conceits of the dialogue were worth addressing, though a more material analysis of the problem that spurred the conversation in the first place would have been nice. a less detached relation to the subject matter would have hammered the impact of the conversation home as well.

in short, worth reading, but not something i quite felt a tangible connection to.

also, when did you change your avatar? cut that shit out.

Celestia smiled. “A thousand years is enough time to tire of anything, Princess. Even regret. What is the second?”

Worth reading for this alone.

I think I know how you feel with this one. (My own "On Alicorn Fiction" felt the same.) It's a wonderful scene, but as an author, it doesn't quite feel like it wants to cohere as a standalone story with a beginning and middle and end. As a reader, though, it was still a good read.

3066915

Sweet, analysis. Was not expecting that: cheers, darf.

Fair cop with the character voices: I am admittedly terrible when it comes to dialogue and getting the characters to sound like the characters. I've tried the usual techniques of reading it with the character's voice in mind, but that doesn't appear to be working. I'll spend some time scouring for extra help with that.

Overwrought description's my other heel. I'm never quite sure whether I'm drifting into purple prose or not: I've written lines which I'd call purply that have gone unmentioned and vice versa. I'd say the worst part of the story's at the top, where it's description heavy.

The delighting part looks like it was me either being lazy or trying to make sure the reader got the importance of Twilight looking at Celestia. I have an equally large problem with making sure people get what I'm trying to say.

I like to think I'm better with forging tangible connections through action than dialogue. No real idea, though.

I changed the avatar shortly after posting. It's a revision to the one I had before I decided to use Best Princess's face after she turned Fluttershy into underwear.

And you can talk, mister changes to just his name and then changes back to his name in pony form :duck:

3066994

I wouldn't even call it a wonderful scene: it's really just a scene in which two ponies talk. The cohering problem was definitely one I felt, though: there's a lot of fumbling around for some form of a resolution even after the whole "there is no resolution" bit.

2 out of 10? Oh, come on. This is good stuff.

1) Story does not really know what it's trying to say, and so spends a lot of time dancing around separate points in a helpless muddle
3) Twist works by switching focus from Twilight to Celestia last second to form a comparision, but doing so makes most of the rest of the story redundant

Well, we never learn how Celestia deals with this problem, how much of a problem it is for her, or even whether she really believes what she said to Twilight. I would probably do something like this:

1. Instead of Celestia telling Twilight that she doesn't think she will break, she tells Twilight that she will break. All immortals break eventually. Discord broke. Luna broke, but she was fixed. It's just a matter of how long they can hold out, and whether they can be fixed.

2. Twilight goes into denial, and says she won't break as long as she has Celestia's support. Celestia is not pleased by this answer.

3. Celestia introduces some other topic, some state business, a difficult moral choice that must be made, and proposes a solution to it that appears to be the wrong one. She states her intention to push forward with this. Twilight seems dubious. Celestia cows Twilight into acceptance, somewhat OOCly.

4. After transitioning to Celestia's viewpoint, Celestia watches Twilight depart, and hopes that the harm Celestia is going to inflict on innocent ponies with this deliberately bad policy will be enough to prove to Twilight that she, Celestia, is flawed. She hopes that Twilight will be able to turn on her, as Luna and Cadence aren't strong enough to overpower her on their own. (Possibly some opinion on which side Discord will take--did she free him to oppose her? Or as the first step in her approaching breakdown?) Then she looks at the moon, grips it in that way Twilight described, squeezes just a bit--just a bit, leaving a tiny new crater on its surface--and smiles.

What is the cardinal rule that is broken?

3066915 Yeah, description just a bit over-the-top in the opening paragraphs. Mainly because they're the opening paragraphs. I started skimming: "Yeah, yeah, sun, grass, flowers, but what's the story here?"

3067689

I'm coming round to it, mainly over the amount of criticism it's generating.

I tried to go for something similar to the points you listed but in my usually vague way: I'd hoped that "Celestia telling Twilight she wouldn't break if she stayed worried" + "Celestia telling Twilight she'd stop caring about anything after enough time" + "Celestia telling Twilight she hadn't thought about breaking for a while" would be enough to set alarm bells ringing.

The "OCC" moment was the pseudo-freudian slip of "You do not hate them for their weakness, but worry for them because of it." Twilight mentions nothing about her hating them, and so that's meant to be taken as Celestia projecting.

Failing that, I'd hoped the symbolism of Twilight walking away from the edge and Celestia jumping over it would be enough for people to get who was breaking.

My cardinal rule has become that a story musty satisfy its reader, as in, not leave them thinking "I wish that could have gone differently".

3070005 I tried to go for something similar to the points you listed but in my usually vague way: I'd hoped that "Celestia telling Twilight she wouldn't break if she stayed worried" + "Celestia telling Twilight she'd stop caring about anything after enough time" + "Celestia telling Twilight she hadn't thought about breaking for a while" would be enough to set alarm bells ringing. The "OCC" moment was the pseudo-freudian slip of "You do not hate them for their weakness, but worry for them because of it." Twilight mentions nothing about her hating them, and so that's meant to be taken as Celestia projecting.
Oh. I missed all of that.

3070050

But you got the part with the cliff, right?

Getting a little better all the time :ajsmug:

3070188 But you got the part with the cliff, right?
...no. Maybe I should have. It seems obvious now that part is saying something, but I probably just said, "Oh, Aquillo is being descriptive again." Maybe I read too fast.

3070224

:applecry:

Right. I am launching operation obvious. This has gone on for too long.

3070188

What I got:

From the part with the cliff was the idea of letting yourself break in small and not-terribly-destructive ways to avoid a big, explosive break...sort of like the way the tiny earthquakes that rumble around here every year will relieve the pressure on our local faultlines and avoid temblors in the upper reaches of the Richter scale. But maybe that's just the southern Californian in me... :pinkiehappy:

So, yes, I rather liked the piece.

Mike

Yeah, it's got some rough spots, but I think the intended feelings and concepts came through anyway. To me, that's what makes a good story. I felt I went somewhere else, if just for a moment.

3070005
I'd missed pretty much all of that.

I'd written off the first one as an inconsistency, the second as an assumption on Celestia's part about hypothetical-evil-future-Twilight's motivations (an extension with frustration over peoples' actions that Twilight did describe), and interpreted falling-then-flying as indicating that Celestia had had troubles in the past but was now okay (to the extent that I interpreted it as anything at all).

This piece mostly came across to me as experiments in descriptive writing wrapped around slice-of-life fluff. I fail at reading subtext. :twilightsheepish:

That said, the description of the setting was very interesting. Are you by any chance a painter? The way the field was described sounded like you were focusing on composition and colour theory rather than objects themselves (which was nifty).

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