Cruel cliffhanger aside... Opposition!Fluttershy fucked up along with Opposition!Rainbow.
They forgot Fluttershy gave Discord an order to delay obeying orders from Opposition!Twilight... for three minutes, and unless I missed something, they forgot to tell anyone about it, and it still stands as of the cliffhanger.
Oh, and Opposition!Twilight is a piece of shit, aside from what she's done already, because that order includes her Spike, judging from the wording, and the fact that there's no loyalty spell coverage for him. ETA: I think that it's possibly negligence though.
Just when I though today couldn't have more chaos on it, boom, update from my favorite MLP writer. First Discord's in the new episode, and now this; wonderful.
Only one thing could make this better, the banning of cliffhangers because they hurt my SOUL (but I love the painnnn)
Also gotta say, that Discord and Fluttershy interaction? Amazing, I cried.
9551849 Thanks for the egoboo, but why is this comment posted on this story? Not the Hero is the one where I did the Fall of Equestria backstory thing.
To be specific: here's the chapter I'm referencing. CTRL + F or some equivalent for the word "obey" would help if you're in a hurry to find it.
And to be honest, I don't think I remembered "three minutes" being the specified time period before rereading that part, because I did edit my comment multiple times. I at first forgot Opposition!Rainbow was around then when that order was given too.
It's kind of darkly humorous if you think about it, Opposition!Rainbow could've instantly killed everyone herself by swooping in and giving the "kill them all" order herself, without involving anyone else.
The fact though that Opposition!Twilight could've given Discord any given order to incapacitate them in some way (banish them all to X, permasleep them, etc), and she without hesitation chooses to murder them? Yeah... there's something disconcerting about that.
9552100 I know. I was reminded of this fact just then. Plus, I haven't read that part of NTH yet since it seemed to be more about its destruction at that point in the story.
9552100 Side effect of waiting long periods of time for either story to update.
I struggle to remember older story details too. For example, right now, I'm trying to remember if it was established earlier in this story that Discord can choose to misinterpret vaguely worded orders.
Glad to see this back. Finally, the long-awaited escape is here.
"but there's got to be someplace around here they won't look for us. Spike, uh, Smaller Spike, did you end up meeting that green dragon in the Everfree in your universe as well? Did he leave with the dragon migration? Did the dragon migration even happen?"
"I don't know, I don't know, and what's a dragon migration?"
This is written strangely. The way it's structured, it sounds like Spike's giving three answers to the three questions, and saying he doesn't know if he met the green dragon, but that's probably not the meaning you were intending to convey here; if he hadn't met the dragon, he'd just answer no to that question. But then he's only answering the latter two questions and ignoring the first. It tripped me up a bit while reading it.
9554434 He actually doesn't know if he met that dragon. Dragons in general took exception to Discord invading their territory. Few of them experienced positive outcomes from this. Spike knows of a few dragons who got their ashes kicked by Discord, and maybe one of them is the one he met in the Everfree (which did happen because that was before Discord got loose.)
Interesting situation. Solvable. Twilight shields - default response; honed reflexes. Spike oversized; probably won't be covered. Discord destroys ears. Already planned, not enacted. Discord tells Fluttershy - disembowel him within three minutes, throw him through portal. Twilight forced to hold position - no dodging, no attacking. Her advantage; opposition pressed. Spike flies. Tanks FCruel and Not-Dash. Evade magic. Zone with fire. No GI tract, no crystals. Discord tags home. Magic dispelled. Checkmate.
This fic bothers me. In 2 ways actually, but the second one is continuity because I'd rather not read a compilation story with sporadic updates especially if the following stories reference large swathes of the source story. EX.Silmarillion, if the Hobbit and LotR recreated whole scenes from it.
{Just how MANY chaos avatars have there been is Discord a rarity in that he's actually survived for thousands of years how OLD is the planet if Order is SO important to the universe how'd it even come into being wouldn't Order make the rules first and then why would Chao follow}
You've done such an excellent job with Celestia's backstory that I no longer understand why Nightmare Moon is dead.
Celestia is crazy enough, and was shown to be suicidal enough the first time Luna vacationed, that I just can't buy that she would have killed her sister. Celestia laments how she treated Luna, how Luna felt shunned and unappreciated and chose to become Nightmare Moon, how she went without Luna for a thousand years and never wanted to again...yet kill luna rather than die herself?
Celestia is so apathetic that I'm not convinced the Greater Good excuse works, that their lives would be more important than Luna but OMG LUNA'S DEAD I HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR! If it made you so miserable before why'd you go through with it a SECOND time? If running Equestria solo nearly broke you why couldn't you have shattered a few moments earlier?
Part of it is probably just Canon Compliance, since Luna ceased to exist for season 1 and so fan theories run amok, possibly most pressing being 'Just what did Celestia even DO to prove she was sorry to Luna?', so her being broken up about killing Luna feels. . .insincere in some part, might be the best term.
Another part probably is having been suicidal myself I can't relate to her, and a lot of anime/video game/literary tropes that reinforce the 'A milion is a statistic vs your loved one makes it real.'
Celestia is crazy enough, and was shown to be suicidal enough the first time Luna vacationed, that I just can't buy that she would have killed her sister. Celestia laments how she treated Luna, how Luna felt shunned and unappreciated and chose to become Nightmare Moon, how she went without Luna for a thousand years and never wanted to again...yet kill luna rather than die herself?
My reading is that Celestia killed Luna to prevent her from permanently turning into Nightmare Moon, which is arguably a fate worse than death.
Also, if she had to fight Nightmare Moon without the Elements, perhaps she would've lost and then Equestria would be under Nightmare's rule forever.
It's better to let Luna live in the afterlife as herself than to risk her being permanently stuck with her mind being warped by the Nightmare.
Hm. Okay. Twilight wouldn't have heard about the attempt to insert a delay into response to her orders (and that's shaky anyway), but she's really pushing it using as amazingly vague a word as "them" (that even could include her as in the group of the "foreign others", and she did earlier kind of emphasize that her newer commands should override the original batch), and not specifying whether he is or isn't allowed to draw on magic to kill isn't ideal. Even if Discord's forced to try, he can always start with the somewhat chaos-magic-resistant large dragon. She's still basically treating him as broken; not unreasonable when the idea that it's possible to recover to even the slightest degree from any form of trauma must feel extremely foreign right now. The concept's upsetting on too many levels, both personal and modal.
It's still the natural thing for her to say. Whatever the results it gets, in the first seconds of arrival she has nothing better to be doing with her mouth. Doubtless she's casting at the same time. But she should have no real backup this time, no plan B, and I doubt plan A was well considered. Losing yourself specifically into unshakable self-confidence may clear out the hesitation and narrow your focus, but it's bound to leave you with greatly impaired judgement.
This is an interesting story. I'm not usually one for the gratuitous grimdark, but I do like realistic psychological exploration-and-handling of terrible events, and there's enough hope for a mostly-good ending to keep me going. Plus, y'know, the old guilty pleasure of 'characters have to go and rescue a character they don't particularly like, and in the process learn plenty about and generate tons of sympathy for them.'
I've soaked it up a few times, and I've come to the conclusion that the only character I actually hate here is Opposition!Celestia. Chrysalis too, but since she's just canon Chrysalis who seized on a different opportunity condition for her invasion, I don't think she counts... I'm getting what I expect with her. Don't get me wrong - the O!6 are vile and despicable beings, all capable of and willing to commit acts that go beyond horrid. Any restraint on their parts can be chalked purely to apathy. But... while this may just be compartmentalization, it seems like none of them had a choice in the matter. For five of them, their very selves got hijacked by an outward force through events they couldn't have predicted. It's said in-story that they tried to resist it for a time, but I don't think it really counts as such - instead of resisting corruption, they were clinging to the framework of behavior that no longer fit who they were, because the corruption was already there. Peer pressure, confusion, and shame were all that was holding them back; the only thing that could actually change how twisted they were was how strong the bonds were between them at any given point, and at present, that's mostly O!Twilight's fault. Point is, they could resist following through on any particular impulse, but they'd been changed into ponies who no longer wanted to, which breaks the argument of 'you could have fought harder if you'd tried.' Stacked odds from the start, if there was ever really a chance at all.
Opposition Twilight isn't much different. Her world was falling apart on every layer possible and she was desperate. She had no idea who Matrisse was or what the Diadem of Order would do to her - all she knew was that it was a MacGuffin that could tie her to the Elements of Harmony again, and once the Elements were back together, they could fix everything like they used to. At the very least, they'd have made things better, because the world was basically on fire by the time she found it. I'm sure that if that Twilight had gotten a window into the future and saw who she'd become, she'd never have touched the Diadem... but she didn't, so she did, and the second she bonded with that thing, it was game over for rational decisionmaking on the Twilight front. The only reason I'm convinced she might actually have a living quantity of Twilight Sparkle left in her is that she genuinely cares for Celestia. Part of that I can attribute to Order being focused on the leader of the nation - it makes sense for her to worship her astral superiors and oil the wheels that keep the nation moving, but her desire to give her a happy retirement and/or rule with her 'til the end of time as mother and daughter are both more personal than I'd expect from a pure avatar of Order. But whether or not a meaningful quality of the original Twilight exists in her, she's no more capable of informed choices relative to her 'real' self than the rest of her friends.
O!Discord deserved what he got, but hearing his story changed a lot - recognizing how close a character was to being a particular alternate always does, but in this case, he never evolved as a character. Every act he did made perfect sense for who he is now (or was, before he entered the Friend Zone), but spiraled out of control, leading him to make predictable and continually bad decisions. There are only two things he could have done to improve this reality that he would have done (he's Discord - I'm not expecting him to say 'Hey, I never killed Cadance' or 'I wouldn't have done this to the Changelings if they didn't try to murder me first' or 'Actually, this chaos thing isn't working out for me, can we try being friends instead?), and that's resurrecting Luna in private or booping her memories back once the Nightmare Moon thing started to get old. So he could have changed things - boy, could he ever - but he never did anything that was unexpected by his own standards... he just ended up stumbling into the worst possible chain of events and broke everything he still cared about. Even if Spike hadn't shattered him, he'd already made himself as miserable as he could get.
He made everyone profoundly unhappy, caused loads of deaths, and fucked up the timeline horribly, but I understand why he did what he did and I didn't really expect better of him at any point. Also, he only exists as a collection of tortured soul fragments unable to truly die, so I'm not left thirsting for more punishment on his behalf.
That said...
What O!Celestia went through was beyond difficult. She had to make terrible decisions. She watched the mares she fostered go mad, her niece die, her country burn, and she had to kill her little sister personally. There's no questioning that she's not in a healthy place, or that she could be expected to pull through this intact. But Celestia never stopped being herself, never lost her morals, and never had a confused relationship with morality from the start. There is not a blatant break in her psyche like there is for the O!6 and you can't blame her madness on another force. She's the one who decided she was too weak to carry on without help; she's the one who decided Luna was the only way the country could survive, and thus justified anything in the name of retrieving her from death. She decided feeding criminals to Pinkie Pie was okay, she decided torturing Discord in unspeakable ways was okay, she decided that taking a version of who Twilight Sparkle should have been, scooping her out of her body, and replacing her with Luna was okay (and unlike Discord, she still has her feelings for her personal student.) She's the one who thought murdering Twilight's friends and Spike (after promising not to) to prove her seriousness was okay. She knows better on all of this and decided she just didn't care anymore. Other characters have done much viler acts than she, quite frequently and quite graphically, but she's the only one who could have made a different choice. And that makes her much more disgusting to me than any of the caricatures the O!6 have become.
I really liked what you did with showing us Opposition Twilight Sparkle, and Rainbow Dash's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the situation they find themselves in. Will you do something similar with the others, especially the other Opposition Elements and Celestia and how and why they are different from their counterparts?
Because seeing just how and why you think they could become so twisted as to do what their doing now would be interesting. No pressure if you don't feel up to it, would rather focus on other characters, want to save it for another story, or would rather take your writing in another direction entirely. I am merely curious to see what your take on them would be.
9838530 Celestia isn't exactly the only villain here though. Consider these thought of Twilight's:
She swallowed. She didn't care about any of them the way she had back then... because now, she'd fully accepted that they were monstrous. They weren't going to change back to the mares she remembered. But that was partially her fault. With the skill in understanding and analyzing magic that the Diadem had given her, she was fairly sure she could have separated the girls from their corrupted Elements... but it would have meant either giving up the ability to harmonize with them, or giving up the Diadem. And Twilight was never going to give up the Diadem. It made her so much smarter, so much better at magic. She'd defeated an alternate self who was an alicorn with it. Plus Discord. Twice.
Given that she'd done nothing to undo their corruption when she was finally smart and skilled enough to try it, given that she wasn't going to do any such thing... could she really hold the fact that they'd become terrible ponies against them?
And Celestia knows that the Mean Six are (as they were in the past) the best means of protecting the kingdom and (with the exception of Pinkie who's been turned into a executioner for the state) none of them are harming ponies anyway, at least as far as we or her know. Discord was fundamentally unlikable and untrustworthy before Celestia got her better memories of him sucked out and that can't have done much for their relationship.
As for the deal with Luna, well Celestia is a chess master we see in Twilight's Kingdom in her willingness to sacrifice her whole kingdom to get dangerous magic away from Tirek. She's hardly in the most sane frame of mind at this point. If she thought Luna would do a better job at ruling than she has or would find a way out of the current mess that she missed? Well emotional extremes aside, she's not above doing anything to ensure the well being of her kingdom. None of this excuses her behavior, but it might go a long way toward explaining it.
I squealed for joy seeing you update and now my brain is stuck on a loop of "oh no" because of that cliffhanger. Excellent work!
Wow. Thats just sadistic
Cruel cliffhanger aside... Opposition!Fluttershy fucked up along with Opposition!Rainbow.
They forgot Fluttershy gave Discord an order to delay obeying orders from Opposition!Twilight... for three minutes, and unless I missed something, they forgot to tell anyone about it, and it still stands as of the cliffhanger.
Oh, and Opposition!Twilight is a piece of shit, aside from what she's done already, because that order includes her Spike, judging from the wording, and the fact that there's no loyalty spell coverage for him. ETA: I think that it's possibly negligence though.
Just when I though today couldn't have more chaos on it, boom, update from my favorite MLP writer. First Discord's in the new episode, and now this; wonderful.
Only one thing could make this better, the banning of cliffhangers because they hurt my SOUL (but I love the painnnn)
Also gotta say, that Discord and Fluttershy interaction? Amazing, I cried.
God I love this story. Just the casual order, man thats's heartless.
Alarajrogers: Giving Fall of Equestria more of a coherent backstory than Fall of Equestria ever gave itself.
And I say this as someone who liked that setting.
YES! It lives!
Me when I saw this updated:
YES UES YES YES YES
9551558
OH I FORGOT ABOUT THE 3 MINUTE THING. Man, I need to reread the earlier chapters...
9551849
Thanks for the egoboo, but why is this comment posted on this story? Not the Hero is the one where I did the Fall of Equestria backstory thing.
9552017
To be specific: here's the chapter I'm referencing. CTRL + F or some equivalent for the word "obey" would help if you're in a hurry to find it.
And to be honest, I don't think I remembered "three minutes" being the specified time period before rereading that part, because I did edit my comment multiple times. I at first forgot Opposition!Rainbow was around then when that order was given too.
It's kind of darkly humorous if you think about it, Opposition!Rainbow could've instantly killed everyone herself by swooping in and giving the "kill them all" order herself, without involving anyone else.
The fact though that Opposition!Twilight could've given Discord any given order to incapacitate them in some way (banish them all to X, permasleep them, etc), and she without hesitation chooses to murder them? Yeah... there's something disconcerting about that.
Aww cliffhanger, why!?
9552100
I know. I was reminded of this fact just then. Plus, I haven't read that part of NTH yet since it seemed to be more about its destruction at that point in the story.
So happy to see a new chapter of this! Keep up the good work and I hope you have a speedy recovery.
9552100
Side effect of waiting long periods of time for either story to update.
I struggle to remember older story details too. For example, right now, I'm trying to remember if it was established earlier in this story that Discord can choose to misinterpret vaguely worded orders.
Glad to see this back. Finally, the long-awaited escape is here.
This is written strangely. The way it's structured, it sounds like Spike's giving three answers to the three questions, and saying he doesn't know if he met the green dragon, but that's probably not the meaning you were intending to convey here; if he hadn't met the dragon, he'd just answer no to that question. But then he's only answering the latter two questions and ignoring the first. It tripped me up a bit while reading it.
9554434
He actually doesn't know if he met that dragon. Dragons in general took exception to Discord invading their territory. Few of them experienced positive outcomes from this. Spike knows of a few dragons who got their ashes kicked by Discord, and maybe one of them is the one he met in the Everfree (which did happen because that was before Discord got loose.)
9554960
Ah. Fair enough.
It's always a pleasure to see an update on the fic I've been following longer than any other unfinished fic at this point! And it never disappoints!
It seems with every new season of MLP, Discord and Fluttershy's intense emotional connection corresponds more and more with canon.
I'm on the edge of my seat and look forward to that next update notification! ;-)
Interesting situation.
Solvable.
Twilight shields - default response; honed reflexes. Spike oversized; probably won't be covered.
Discord destroys ears. Already planned, not enacted.
Discord tells Fluttershy - disembowel him within three minutes, throw him through portal.
Twilight forced to hold position - no dodging, no attacking. Her advantage; opposition pressed.
Spike flies. Tanks FCruel and Not-Dash. Evade magic. Zone with fire.
No GI tract, no crystals. Discord tags home. Magic dispelled.
Checkmate.
Now Discord has 2 minutes to get someone to knock him out. Or 3... I don't remember.
This is so good! Ahhhh, I'm dying!!
9566197
Mental issues suck.
This fic bothers me. In 2 ways actually, but the second one is continuity because I'd rather not read a compilation story with sporadic updates especially if the following stories reference large swathes of the source story. EX.Silmarillion, if the Hobbit and LotR recreated whole scenes from it.
{Just how MANY chaos avatars have there been is Discord a rarity in that he's actually survived for thousands of years how OLD is the planet if Order is SO important to the universe how'd it even come into being wouldn't Order make the rules first and then why would Chao follow}
You've done such an excellent job with Celestia's backstory that I no longer understand why Nightmare Moon is dead.
Celestia is crazy enough, and was shown to be suicidal enough the first time Luna vacationed, that I just can't buy that she would have killed her sister. Celestia laments how she treated Luna, how Luna felt shunned and unappreciated and chose to become Nightmare Moon, how she went without Luna for a thousand years and never wanted to again...yet kill luna rather than die herself?
Celestia is so apathetic that I'm not convinced the Greater Good excuse works, that their lives would be more important than Luna but OMG LUNA'S DEAD I HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR! If it made you so miserable before why'd you go through with it a SECOND time? If running Equestria solo nearly broke you why couldn't you have shattered a few moments earlier?
Part of it is probably just Canon Compliance, since Luna ceased to exist for season 1 and so fan theories run amok, possibly most pressing being 'Just what did Celestia even DO to prove she was sorry to Luna?', so her being broken up about killing Luna feels. . .insincere in some part, might be the best term.
Another part probably is having been suicidal myself I can't relate to her, and a lot of anime/video game/literary tropes that reinforce the 'A milion is a statistic vs your loved one makes it real.'
9566929
My reading is that Celestia killed Luna to prevent her from permanently turning into Nightmare Moon, which is arguably a fate worse than death.
Also, if she had to fight Nightmare Moon without the Elements, perhaps she would've lost and then Equestria would be under Nightmare's rule forever.
It's better to let Luna live in the afterlife as herself than to risk her being permanently stuck with her mind being warped by the Nightmare.
This made me so happy to see updated!! Never have I clicked a link so fast! Great chapter I can not wait to see how this ends!
9568259
That's pretty close, yes.
Uh oh!
This is one hell of a ride! Can't wait to see the rest.
Hm. Okay. Twilight wouldn't have heard about the attempt to insert a delay into response to her orders (and that's shaky anyway), but she's really pushing it using as amazingly vague a word as "them" (that even could include her as in the group of the "foreign others", and she did earlier kind of emphasize that her newer commands should override the original batch), and not specifying whether he is or isn't allowed to draw on magic to kill isn't ideal. Even if Discord's forced to try, he can always start with the somewhat chaos-magic-resistant large dragon. She's still basically treating him as broken; not unreasonable when the idea that it's possible to recover to even the slightest degree from any form of trauma must feel extremely foreign right now. The concept's upsetting on too many levels, both personal and modal.
It's still the natural thing for her to say. Whatever the results it gets, in the first seconds of arrival she has nothing better to be doing with her mouth. Doubtless she's casting at the same time. But she should have no real backup this time, no plan B, and I doubt plan A was well considered. Losing yourself specifically into unshakable self-confidence may clear out the hesitation and narrow your focus, but it's bound to leave you with greatly impaired judgement.
This is an interesting story. I'm not usually one for the gratuitous grimdark, but I do like realistic psychological exploration-and-handling of terrible events, and there's enough hope for a mostly-good ending to keep me going. Plus, y'know, the old guilty pleasure of 'characters have to go and rescue a character they don't particularly like, and in the process learn plenty about and generate tons of sympathy for them.'
I've soaked it up a few times, and I've come to the conclusion that the only character I actually hate here is Opposition!Celestia. Chrysalis too, but since she's just canon Chrysalis who seized on a different opportunity condition for her invasion, I don't think she counts... I'm getting what I expect with her. Don't get me wrong - the O!6 are vile and despicable beings, all capable of and willing to commit acts that go beyond horrid. Any restraint on their parts can be chalked purely to apathy. But... while this may just be compartmentalization, it seems like none of them had a choice in the matter. For five of them, their very selves got hijacked by an outward force through events they couldn't have predicted. It's said in-story that they tried to resist it for a time, but I don't think it really counts as such - instead of resisting corruption, they were clinging to the framework of behavior that no longer fit who they were, because the corruption was already there. Peer pressure, confusion, and shame were all that was holding them back; the only thing that could actually change how twisted they were was how strong the bonds were between them at any given point, and at present, that's mostly O!Twilight's fault. Point is, they could resist following through on any particular impulse, but they'd been changed into ponies who no longer wanted to, which breaks the argument of 'you could have fought harder if you'd tried.' Stacked odds from the start, if there was ever really a chance at all.
Opposition Twilight isn't much different. Her world was falling apart on every layer possible and she was desperate. She had no idea who Matrisse was or what the Diadem of Order would do to her - all she knew was that it was a MacGuffin that could tie her to the Elements of Harmony again, and once the Elements were back together, they could fix everything like they used to. At the very least, they'd have made things better, because the world was basically on fire by the time she found it. I'm sure that if that Twilight had gotten a window into the future and saw who she'd become, she'd never have touched the Diadem... but she didn't, so she did, and the second she bonded with that thing, it was game over for rational decisionmaking on the Twilight front. The only reason I'm convinced she might actually have a living quantity of Twilight Sparkle left in her is that she genuinely cares for Celestia. Part of that I can attribute to Order being focused on the leader of the nation - it makes sense for her to worship her astral superiors and oil the wheels that keep the nation moving, but her desire to give her a happy retirement and/or rule with her 'til the end of time as mother and daughter are both more personal than I'd expect from a pure avatar of Order. But whether or not a meaningful quality of the original Twilight exists in her, she's no more capable of informed choices relative to her 'real' self than the rest of her friends.
O!Discord deserved what he got, but hearing his story changed a lot - recognizing how close a character was to being a particular alternate always does, but in this case, he never evolved as a character. Every act he did made perfect sense for who he is now (or was, before he entered the Friend Zone), but spiraled out of control, leading him to make predictable and continually bad decisions. There are only two things he could have done to improve this reality that he would have done (he's Discord - I'm not expecting him to say 'Hey, I never killed Cadance' or 'I wouldn't have done this to the Changelings if they didn't try to murder me first' or 'Actually, this chaos thing isn't working out for me, can we try being friends instead?), and that's resurrecting Luna in private or booping her memories back once the Nightmare Moon thing started to get old. So he could have changed things - boy, could he ever - but he never did anything that was unexpected by his own standards... he just ended up stumbling into the worst possible chain of events and broke everything he still cared about. Even if Spike hadn't shattered him, he'd already made himself as miserable as he could get.
He made everyone profoundly unhappy, caused loads of deaths, and fucked up the timeline horribly, but I understand why he did what he did and I didn't really expect better of him at any point. Also, he only exists as a collection of tortured soul fragments unable to truly die, so I'm not left thirsting for more punishment on his behalf.
That said...
What O!Celestia went through was beyond difficult. She had to make terrible decisions. She watched the mares she fostered go mad, her niece die, her country burn, and she had to kill her little sister personally. There's no questioning that she's not in a healthy place, or that she could be expected to pull through this intact. But Celestia never stopped being herself, never lost her morals, and never had a confused relationship with morality from the start. There is not a blatant break in her psyche like there is for the O!6 and you can't blame her madness on another force. She's the one who decided she was too weak to carry on without help; she's the one who decided Luna was the only way the country could survive, and thus justified anything in the name of retrieving her from death. She decided feeding criminals to Pinkie Pie was okay, she decided torturing Discord in unspeakable ways was okay, she decided that taking a version of who Twilight Sparkle should have been, scooping her out of her body, and replacing her with Luna was okay (and unlike Discord, she still has her feelings for her personal student.) She's the one who thought murdering Twilight's friends and Spike (after promising not to) to prove her seriousness was okay. She knows better on all of this and decided she just didn't care anymore. Other characters have done much viler acts than she, quite frequently and quite graphically, but she's the only one who could have made a different choice. And that makes her much more disgusting to me than any of the caricatures the O!6 have become.
I didn't realize this updated I so happy I am gonna reread this after all these years
I really liked what you did with showing us Opposition Twilight Sparkle, and Rainbow Dash's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the situation they find themselves in. Will you do something similar with the others, especially the other Opposition Elements and Celestia and how and why they are different from their counterparts?
Because seeing just how and why you think they could become so twisted as to do what their doing now would be interesting. No pressure if you don't feel up to it, would rather focus on other characters, want to save it for another story, or would rather take your writing in another direction entirely. I am merely curious to see what your take on them would be.
Is this story still going on? Sorry for bothering you..
Not to repeat too much, but what's the status on this teeny tiny little enormous fic? DOA, MIA, KIA?
10013064
In progress. I may be around halfway through the next chapter.
10013091
Excellent.
9838530
Celestia isn't exactly the only villain here though. Consider these thought of Twilight's:
And Celestia knows that the Mean Six are (as they were in the past) the best means of protecting the kingdom and (with the exception of Pinkie who's been turned into a executioner for the state) none of them are harming ponies anyway, at least as far as we or her know. Discord was fundamentally unlikable and untrustworthy before Celestia got her better memories of him sucked out and that can't have done much for their relationship.
As for the deal with Luna, well Celestia is a chess master we see in Twilight's Kingdom in her willingness to sacrifice her whole kingdom to get dangerous magic away from Tirek. She's hardly in the most sane frame of mind at this point. If she thought Luna would do a better job at ruling than she has or would find a way out of the current mess that she missed? Well emotional extremes aside, she's not above doing anything to ensure the well being of her kingdom. None of this excuses her behavior, but it might go a long way toward explaining it.
this whole conversation is like the Doctor with a new companion or even more so its like Rick and Morty