The glass blower worked long into the evening. He worked as the tallow candles around him guttered and went out. He worked until the moon, high overhead, was the only motion in the night.
Sticks found him in the morning, staring into the corner; there lay the gathered shards of the mirror, its magic gone.
The glassblower looked up. "I have been an idiot."
Sticks nodded.
"Not merely a love-struck fool. An outright idiot."
Sticks nodded.
The glass blower looked down to the shards. His eyes furrowed.
Sticks sat, waiting for him to come out of it. The stare lasted for ten minutes.
Very slowly, the glass blower repeated himself: "I am not a love-struck fool. I am an idiot. I have been from the very beginning. Aagh! How could I have been so stupid?"
And with that, he threw on a coat and ran out the door. There was no work to be done, no more glass to blow. No time to waste.
Two hours later, he knocked on the door of Rarity's home, at the rear of the boutique.
It was a minute before she responded. Her bagged eyes regarded him with confusion, framed by a frazzled mane. Not even the cuts on her legs had been tended.
"The mirror was wrong."
Recognition dawned, and she remained baffled. He had said perhaps the one thing that could keep her from slamming the door in his face.
"I know it was wrong. You are beautiful, you are honest, and you are a good pony."
"You don't know me."
"That is just how I know it was wrong."
She stared. Then, trembling, she stepped back from the open door. "It's chilly out there."
The glass blower thoroughly cleaned the mud off his hooves on her mat before walking in.
She gestured him to one of the seats in the entry room and sat nervously in the other.
He opened, "I'm sorry about the bird."
She blinked rapidly. "What? It was beautiful."
"But what could you do? It was a trap. If you accepted it, how could you say 'Very good! Let's go to lunch and get to know each other'?"
Rarity managed a rueful chuckle.
He continued, "Maybe if I'd just shown it to you and without mentioning any tests or promises you made, asked if you'd like to get to know each other better, that might have worked. Even if it hadn't, it wouldn't have put you on the spot with an impossible choice like that. I admired your grace, and then squeezed it right out."
She shook her head, and looked down to the ground. "I... had certain requirements. Oh all right, I'll say it. You're not a unicorn. It mattered."
The glassblower could not help but notice the past tense, but tempered his enthusiasm. It had not served him well up to this point.
She, wrapped in her own thoughts, shook her head. "So, how do you think you know me so well?"
"Because you're not the only one who looked in the mirror. And when I looked in the mirror, I saw a lovestruck fool, pining after unattainable grace. I didn't see an idiot who hurt and trapped the one he admired, so she had little choice but to reject him, the only other alternative being to bind herself to a rather scary individual she didn't know."
After a moment's pause, he said, "I thought it reflected who you really are. It reflects who you are afraid you are. That's why it rang so true, and hurt so much, while also being completely wrong."
She stared, reinterpreting, for a minute.
He softly added, "If you're afraid of being dishonest and a bad pony... you probably aren't. Well, not too much."
She shook her head. "I promised to love you."
"Only because I trapped you, misused your challenge."
Her eyes widened. "Misused?"
"Yes. Your challenge didn't promise that you would love the first great craftsman who came along. But that's how I treated it, denied you the rest of your judgement."
He got up. "Well, now that I've hopefully undone what I can of the harm I caused you, good day."
"Wait!"
Having just finished reading The Glass Blower (finally): yes! Finally. This is what the characters being sensible would actually look like. There is a strange catharsis in seeing the sensible solution. Of course, if people in stories that sensible, they would be much fewer stories with things happening in them.
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I agree. Great stuff, and I'm glad I was able to add this one to the collection.
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hpmor.com
I'm sorry for your time.
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Fortunately for my future free time, I've already read it.
My past free time … alas, I knew her, Horseratio.
You... you fixed it!
I wish this was a canon sequel.
I actually liked the original ending better, but this is still a neat addition.
in the original, Rarity seems nastier -- and far nastier than she ever behaves on the Show. I've noticed that one flaw with Cold is that he (though he'll deny it) truly does NOT like Rarity. In any story of his where any of the Mane Six do anything morally-questionable, if Rarity is a character in the story, she'll behave worst of them.
Mind you, I do think that even Vanilla Canon Rarity is the darkest member of the Mane Six. (She's maybe the only one of them who will routinely and unashamedly lie, for instance). And my Rarity has done bad things, and is capable of doing worse things, and knows this about herself. But I think that this is counterbalanced by a truly=magnificent benevolence and deep sense of honor. Rarity is playing a role -- but she's doing so with heart.
Some of the ways Cold has her express her darkness are, I believe, not in character for her. I don't see any sign in canon that she's terribly bigoted against non-Unicorrns, for instance -- her two canonically best friends are a Pegasus and a Dragon. I do think she's the one of the Mane Six who most might, given an unhappier life story, be normally promiscuous (having casual or even random lovers) -- as opposed to becoming an All-Loving Orgiast (some of the alternate Pinkie Pies) or the Queen of her own little Hive composed of animal and Pony friends (my Fluttershy).
So I don't think Cold is being totally unfair when his Rarity is of less than sterling character. I just notice he focuses more on this than on the failings of other Mane Six characters.
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Surely that's an exaggeration? To pull an example off the top of my head, Completely Safe in the Reference Section. Though there's a legitimate debate about censorship of harmful ideas (and she frames one side you might disagree with), Rarity's the voice-of-reason/straight-mare throughout wrt dark magic, and regardless of her moral standing Twilight is the one making the big dubious idiot-ball decisions.
Regardless — Rarity's status as the darker one an interesting discussion, to be sure. As you note, Rarity's got a complicated character, which makes her easier to use that way. And I've taken the bait of making her the villain protagonist before, too; Hearth Swarming Eve has her as Machiavellian in a way none of her friends are, and get so caught up in the drama of her intrigues that she lies to her friends to help out a changeling plot. Social Lubricant is a more interesting case — while she's the one with the deepest kinks masked by the greatest shame and the most desperate public facade, it also shows her (arguably more so than her friends!) being a genuinely caring pony when the masks are off. (Her follow-through when Dash barfs on her in the bathroom, and her unsolicited apology that kicks off the final sequence, stand out as highlights.) But in Death by Dawn over in Writeoff-land, which is a pony murder mystery, she's innocent: victimized by Blueblood due to financial overextension from being too generous, and lies and says she killed him so she doesn't have to live with the shame of the truth getting out. (That had its own problems, but we're just talking Rarity usage here.) I'd like to think I've shown several facets of a very deep and ambiguous character.
Like you, I just can't see canon Rarity in Glass Blower. I can see how she's the end of the shortest line from canon to the OC CiG needed, though. I don't think character hatred is needed to explain his darkening of her, though — we're fanfic authors, it's our job to take a funhouse mirror to things!
(Like, I've tried repeatedly to frame a story about horse realpolitik, squaring a reprehensible Celestia with a pony utopia. I've repeatedly failed. You could point at all the stories where I've done that and make a case I hate her, similar to what you accuse CiG of. The big difference is that when I'm not struggling with that I love the stuffing out of her, and I've got a few I can point to where I let her be the genuine avatar of goodness I know she is when I'm not twisting her around to fit her role.)
This seems a bit too apologist. It would have been better for the glass blower not to put her on the spot publicly like that, yes, but he was not the one who kept saying "try again" while meaning "no." It's on him that he took her public declaration of a minimum standard as a promise, but it's on her that she went along with that misconception and led him on.