• Member Since 14th May, 2012
  • offline last seen February 4th

devas


I can't believe nobody had snagged this username yet

E

Things change a little bit at the time, but they never stop changing.

When they change enough, what was yesterday and what may be tomorrow can be completely unrecognizable.

Celestia summons Twilight to teach her, first hoof, how that applies to ponies.

Written for the 16/08/2014 writeoff competition "Famous Last Words"

-Author note: If and when you find technical errors, please tell me! I've edited this as closely as I could, but I might have missed things or just not be aware of them.
I'm still learning how to rite gud, and I very much want to learn and improve. Criticism of any kind (not just constructive; I believe all criticism is valuable) is extremely welcome.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 22 )

A few errors here and there, but you did great. :pinkiehappy:
A couple of tips:
*If you're giving an example of what somepony's muttering(like if somepony's repeating "I hate you" over and over), then I've always thought it was acceptable to use no ending punctuation, but if it's a full sentence that somepony says once, use either a period, comma, exclamation mark, etc., etc.
*When starting a new paragraph to continue one pony's dialogue, you don't have to put a quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph's sentence. But that's only if the speaker changes.
*Read it until you never want to read your story again. While it's tedious, it helps to keep silly little errors away. I forget to do that most of the time, and that's why I'm unpopular. :twistnerd:

Anyways, MOAR. NAO.

4953914

Thanks!

*If you're giving an example of what somepony's muttering(like if somepony's repeating "I hate you" over and over), then I've always thought it was acceptable to use no ending punctuation, but if it's a full sentence that somepony says once, use either a period, comma, exclamation mark, etc., etc.

So,
"rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb" vs "Rhubarbs are good."

But that's only if the speaker changes.

I don't understand. You mean that if speakers change, then and only then a quotation mark should be put at the end of the paragraph?

Anyways, MOAR. NAO.

Umm...this was actually originally written as a one-shot with a word cap of 700 words for a writing competition...I'm not sure there's much else to tell, actually, I thought it was pretty much self-contained.

I guess I could expand it to show what happens afterward, and how Celestia, Luna, Twilight and the other immortals change, to give a concrete example of what the fic is referring to, but I hadn't thought of that originally at the time, when I'd written this.

"How do I split up dialogue?"

"Well a lot of people have asked this question, and many more will try to lead you astray of what it considered stylistically correct. For a concrete rule of how to accomplish this you can hit up a manual of style, or take college composition courses.
Or cheaper and easier you can just listen to me."

4954171

I AM in college! But so far I'm just learning trivial things like how to design a chemical reactor so it won't explode :raritydespair::raritycry:

Could you tell me what's your opinion on how dialogue should be split up? Since I'm guessing there are differing opinions between different people.

Ooh, was the part about Celestia making the Royal Guard anonymous one of the ones that you added in editing? That's a marvelous little piece of worldbuilding. :duck:

4953914

*When starting a new paragraph to continue one pony's dialogue, you don't have to put a quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph's sentence. But that's only if the speaker changes.

It's the other way around — if a single speaker's quote continues over multiple paragraphs, you leave the trailing quote off of paragraphs, like this:

"Five hundred score and seven years ago," Celestia said, "my sister was born. (no ending quote, because her words immediately continue after the paragraph break)

"Fifty score and seven years ago, my sister was banished." (ending quote, because next paragraph is a new speaker)

"What about five score and seven years ago?" some pony interrupted before the guards shushed him.

"Seven years ago," Celestia continued, "she returned to us."

Honestly, this is a weird and generally confusing rule. It's easiest to avoid the whole situation by keeping a single speaker's dialogue all within the same paragraph, unless they're delivering a monologue that goes on for hundreds of words.

You did a great job of fixing up all the other paragraph spacing issues, though! :twilightsmile:

4954563
xD
That was a snarky example. I demonstrated the way what's his dick said to do it. If you kick into a new paragraph without changing speakers, the quotation mark gets attached to the end of the second paragraph.

4954610
4954604

I think that for now I'm just going to do this:

It's easiest to avoid the whole situation by keeping a single speaker's dialogue all within the same paragraph, unless they're delivering a monologue that goes on for hundreds of words.

No sense in breaking my brain needlessly :pinkiecrazy:


4954604

Ooh, was the part about Celestia making the Royal Guard anonymous one of the ones that you added in editing? That's a marvelous little piece of worldbuilding.

YES! Along with her court slowly filling up with Yes-men. I'm glad you caught this!

The whole fic was actually inspired by the recent events in Ferguson, and one of the failure modes that I noticed the policemen there were engaged in was the ripping off of name tags, so as to make it harder to make them accountable for their action.

And given that the guards are indistinguishable from one other, going so far as to cover their own cutie marks (which has probably several disturbing connotations in pony culture), the connection was apparent.

Generally outside of speeches you won't need it.
Generally dialogue paragraphing follows normal rules - one paragraph until you change gears.
For instance, if I were to speak at length it would be rendered as one paragraph, until I sidetracked to ask after your sex life.

4954604 I made a mistake- I meant to say if the speaker stays the same. :twilightblush:

I'm sorely disappointed.

4958514

In...what, exactly? I thought it was poor form to edit one's story after it has been published :-\

4958637
What? No...? I've known people to completely rewrite fics.
I'm disappointed. This fic was severely overhyped, and underwhelming.

4958665

...overhyped? O_o By WHO?!?!

I didn't do anything to promote this (aside from adding it to the write off folder since, well, it came from there).

I'm simultaneously flattered and scared. In its original incarnation it didn't do well ( I think it placed 37 out of 51) mainly due to editing problems in paragraph construction and dialogue attribution.

Glad to see this posted! I really liked the idea, and was hoping to see a cleaned-up version posted here. Incidentally, I have some editing-type notes, but I'll PM those to you.

Like Horizon, I liked the guards bit, but I actually preferred the original at the concept level. In the writeoff version, Celestia felt more like a product of a different time, like a moral slaveowner or compassionate (Spanish) Inquisitor from our own history; someone doing the right thing in a time and place where "the right thing" is so far removed from our modern understanding that the terms seem, in retrospect, oxymoronic. Here, it felt more like Celestia's actions were the product of her own bad decisions, rather than a natural outgrowth of the times she lived in.

It's still a good story, and the idea that an immortal needs to be open to change still comes through, but I thought the "immortals risk being caught in the morals of a past century" angle was much more interesting. Either way though, happy to see this one come up!

I honestly can't quite see Celestia as a despot. But then, that's sort of the point, isn't it?

The ending feels a bit flat -- that may just be abruptness -- and dialog like this is a lousy approach to teach this sort of lesson, but given the context of the writing I see why you went with it. There's a lot of idea to cram in.

4969198

Yeah, the original contest had a 750 word limit, so I had to make everything fit in a small space.

I could (and should) have expanded this more, but I don't have a lot of free time and I didn't want to deviate too much from the original-in fact, if it weren't for fimfiction's own word limit, I would have just edited the story and put it up as is

4959507

Thanks! :-)

And about Celestia's decisions-what I wanted (and failed) to show was that Celestia could no longer empathize with her own past self-that she was so far removed that she'd cast moral judgement on actions which at the time were business as usual.

Unfortunately, I overbalanced in that direction and made the story lose focus on the dissonance between time periods.

Still, this is all food for thought and quite interesting :twilightsmile:

Celestia tried to hide a start

Do you mean smirk?


Um wow.

4997922

No, I mean startle, which is what I'd originally written. It's been pointed out to me by several people, though, that that would have the sentence very awkward; even if the dictionary says startle can be used as a noun, I'm going to trust other people on this site over it; language is above all a product of usage, not just a collection of rules.

Anyway, what I wanted to convey was that Celestia was distracted, she was surprised by twilight saying hello, jumped or generally had a sudden muscular movement, and tried to hide it, badly.

16/08/2014 writeoff competition "Famous Last Words"

Do you know where I can read all the entries in this contest? What made you decide on the cover art, and where did you get the picture? How did you come up with the story name?

This fanfic is really good! You should try submitting to Twilight's Library or some other site like it.

5398322

Most of the other entries (revised and expanded to fit the 1000 word limit of fimfiction) can be found at the writeoff group here at fimfic.

The actual site where the writeoffs are held, and which has all the other stories in their original forms is writeoff.me

I wanted a picture of a ship or ships for the cover art, and I did a google search to find one; the one I chose is the one I think was better.

The name of the story comes from a pun: the "ship of theseus" is an ancient greek philosophical question: if every single plank, sail, nail, if every part of Theseus' ship was replaced, is it still the same ship?

This bears on the story itself: Celestia has experienced so many new things, and forgotten so many others, that she's effectively a completely different pony from the one who subjugated her subjects under a police state hundreds of years ago; so why does she feel guilt, and why does Twilight hold her responsible?

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