• Member Since 11th Oct, 2013
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alarajrogers


Okay, I admit it, I'm probably not your mom. But odds are I'm old enough to be. Now with Patreon account (under alarajrogers) and short stories on Amazon (under Alara Rogers).

Sequels1

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Episode filler for "Princess Twilight Sparkle". Discord considers whether or not to help or hinder the ponies in fighting his plunder vines. In the end he decides to be helpful. Mostly. Though Celestia might not agree. Faint hints of prior Dislestia ship but they're not exactly pals anymore. Takes place in the universe of "Last Draconequus" and "Elements of Opposition", not the Discord-is-Q fics.

There is now a series page: Princess Twilight Sparkle Endcaps

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 19 )

Wow, fantastic characterization of Discord!

How accurate is Discord´s perspective about the Tree´s true intentions for Equestria?

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Not very. The Tree had an episode, before he was born, before the windigos, of getting totally out of control, which is one of the reasons he exists as he does, and Discord sees that potential within it, but it's genuinely no longer the Tree's intent to go overboard, now that it has active partnerships with ponies. The story I wrote as an episode tag for the same episode, "Detente", gets a tiny bit more into the Tree's actual intentions, not filtered completely through Discord's bias.

They *have* genuinely been at war with each other for a long time -- Discord and the Tree are each other's antitheses, and long before Discord got out of control the Tree was scaring the crap out of him -- but they can't really help being each other's opposites or perceiving each other as evil for that reason. The Tree is older than Discord and has learned to moderate itself better than he has.

I figured in "Princess Twilight Sparkle" that Discord was miffed by Fluttershy's rather lukewarm defense of him, which is why he pretended to be unsure as to her name and identity. :pinkiesmile:

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Yep. When I get to the next story, that's exactly what it was.

"I've got a funny joke for you, Celestia. What's the difference between an alicorn being dragged off by plunder vines and a draconequus who's just been turned to stone by the Elements?"
"Discord, please—"
"The stone draconequus can't yell, 'please, let me out of this,' no matter how much he wants to!" Discord guffawed ostentatiously, and then pretended to sober up. "Oh, wait. That's not funny, is it?"
"I'm sorry! We didn't want to do it, but you left us no choice!"
"Yeah, yeah, you told me that ad nauseam. I could hear you, you know. All those times you came out to the garden and cried and told me you were sorry but I gave you no choice, blah blah. It got really tedious around the four hundredth time you did it."

My thoughts on the turn to stone is that its not that you can't do anything for that long as so much as the fear you would feel. That fear would drive the most hardened beings insane. The fear to never be alive again to breath and to be able to see and all that would just tear me apart.

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Discord is a spirit of Chaos. He is manic, constantly in motion, using his powers to change things perpetually, and he wants a lot of attention. He's always grandstanding and getting in ponies' faces and trying to rile them up. So for him, I think the absolute worst part is silence, isolation and immobility. He wants attention, he loves to talk, he's always moving and he's always changing things... and for a thousand years, he couldn't talk, he couldn't move, he couldn't change or influence anything, and no one paid any attention to him except to stare at his statue, and sometimes Celestia.

The fear would be bad, but at some point it would likely have given way to total despair. Once you become convinced that no, you are never going to get out, you stop being afraid and essentially give yourself up for dead. At that point you may stop even trying to hold onto your sanity. But what would disrupt your sanity primarily would have been the isolation and immobility. Sensory deprivation and solitary confinement drive humans insane, and Discord's not that different from a human, mentally.

3795832 Thats why I think the fear is the worse part. The fact it would be the first thing to break you. You would snap like a twig after the first couple of days if not the first couple of weeks if you're really strong willed. The mind can only handle so much fear before you turn to mush.

Wow. I like to skim the "longer" stories here on FimFiction, but this one had me focused on certain parts. Great sarcasm on Discord's part! Although, next time (if there IS one), don't make Celestia so breathless. I mean, even in her confrontations with Nightmare Moon, Evil Discord, and Tirek, she kept her cool, but here she kind of freaked out...

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Watch in Return of Harmony... she's totally panicking. For Celestia-values of panicking, admittedly, but she's actually showing her "little ponies" how upset she is. She shows fear, anger, anxiety, a near-Twilight level freakout when it turns out the Elements aren't where they are supposed to be... because Discord gets to her emotionally in a way that no one else does. Yes, she faced off against him calmly enough in the past, with the Elements, but how many times do you think she might have faced him previously before finally finding them? She doesn't respond that way to any other threat-- the ponies never see her reaction to Nightmare Moon, but Tirek and Sombra, we see her show Luna how afraid she is, and then she totally has it together by the time she sees Twilight and friends. Only Discord gets an emotional reaction out of her that she can't hide from Twilight.

Also, she's having a hard time breathing. The vines are draining her strength, and she's coming close to passing out.

Okay, I understand now. Thx 4 clearing that up.

This makes sense, except for one thing: since when do the vines feed on magic? I mean, the tree kept them underground with its magic - if they really did, then they would break out as soon as they sprouted. I'd assume that the vines more block magic - as in when they wrapped around the tree, they were physically blocking it from stopping them, and it was so weak that it couldn't resist. I'm getting off topic, though - the only time the vines actually messed with magic, to my recollection, is when they locked Rarity's horn near the start - and that could still just be part of their nullifying fields which I mentioned earlier. However, the biggest problem? I admit my memory's a little fuzzy, but I swear to god, I explicitly remember Twilight shooting magic beams at the plants, and they didn't grow or suck in her magic. The only reason the plants got the drop on her at all was because of knockout gas.

But whatever. Btw, there was one really good line from this fic:

What's the difference between an alicorn being dragged off by plunder vines and a draconequus who's just been turned to stone by the Elements? ... The stone draconequus can't yell, 'please, let me out of this,' no matter how much he wants to!

That... that really shook me, I'll give you that.

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They really couldn't have disabled Celestia and Luna if they didn't eat magic.

Not all magic is "edible"; if someone is pelting you with tomatoes and pies, you can't eat them, and it may well drive you away. Magical blasts, and the magical field of Harmony suppressing chaos magic, subdue the vines, but if the magical field of Harmony weakens enough that it can't subdue them, then they can start eating it. Likewise, alicorns can zap the vines, but the vines can eat alicorn magic. MLP has clearly demonstrated that just because an entity eats a form of magical or emotional energy doesn't mean they can handle all forms of it, or that it can't be weaponized against them; look at the Changelings being blasted by love energy.

6990736 If you sneak up on a guy with a machine gun, you can knock him out. It's explicitly shown in the episode that the vines got the drop on Celly, and we can assume they got it on Luna as well. In addition, it's shown that they have some biologically produced knockout gas shit, which is even shown to work on alicorns. Keep 'em tied up and pumped full of that shit, and the duo are taken care of without a single spell cast. Biologically, paralyzing/knockout drugs make a lot more sense than "they eat magic" - and please don't use the "it's a magic world" excuse. If that were the case, then all creatures would have the ability to eat magic. Admittedly, the plants were created by DIscord, with the explicit purpose of countering alicorns... I think I just countered my own damn argument. Curse me.

Sorry to be so argumentative, it's just... is it wrong to say that arguing headcanons with you is fun? :twilightsheepish:

This is an interesting take on Discord and his Plunder Vines, although I'm not sold on the idea of the vines "eating" magic, like Smoker said. It's been at least a couple of years since I watched that episode all the way through, but I got the sense that the vines were interfering with magic (especially the different expressions of pony magic) and making it more unpredictable.

I have to say, I hated that episode. It felt like it repeated lessons and dragged character development backwards and spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. Your fic made me look at it in a whole new light. I absolutely adore how you showed us Discord's constant existential struggle toward the beginning, and then showed us how he's actually been trying to save Equestria by fighting the Tree of Harmony this whole time. Whether that's accurate or Unreliable Narrator view, I still don't know and that delights me. This is a lovely fic, fabulously written. Hats off to you.

Reading those author notes again gave me an idea for an insane fanfic where Pinkie Pie in G3 is trying to figure out why something feels very wrong about her Pinkie Sense, and suddenly realizes that Twilight gave herself to Mattrise and killed Discord and effectively locked them in a static world without meaning or real substance, where all the emotions they're allowed are Hollow. While the tree is dead, Pinkie Pie is still the element of laughter, and she's the only one who is able to sense that something is very wrong. I don't know how it would end, but Pinkie Pie would probably have to kill Twilight in that scenario, or at least leave her as a hollow husk once it's purged, considering what Mattrise does to her in Elements of Opposition...

He had turned the inside of her home into a zero-gee field with all the inanimate objects phased partially out of reality so they couldn't be harmed, given her bouncy hooves (and applied the traits of bounciness to most of the bodies of her animals), and they'd had a hilarious time flying around the inside of the house and bouncing off the walls and ceilings, literally. He had made her into various animals, at her request, because she wanted to see what it was like to live from the perspective of the creatures she cared for. He had miniaturized them both and taken them exploring her living room when it had become a vast and bizarre plain with near-unscalable furniture mountains scattered throughout.

Writing a fic about this right now, took me a bit to figure out where you'd mentioned it...

*Me shouting to the Mane Six, etc, fighting the Vines*
Can I get a waffle??
Can I PLEASE get a waffle?

There’s no escape from the Vine, though it may be dead..

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