Losing My Religion
I have very mixed feelings about my trip to Griffonstone.
Oh, I succeeded in my goal, never fear. I now have a bad-tempered lionbird on my team, such as it is. She is, in fact, living here in the Grotto of Disharmony, because she couldn't exactly stroll back into Ponyville, or thinks she can't anyway. I have mixed feelings about that, too; I like my privacy and independence, so it's more than a trifle irritating to have this annoying bird taking up space in my personal sanctuary. Besides, she mostly just scowls at my jokes. On the other paw... it's actually surprisingly pleasant to have someone around to talk to. I haven't been able to have a simple conversation in...
...yikes, that's depressing. Even before I was turned to stone, few of my entourage ever wanted to talk with me. Oh, when it's time to beg your old Pizza Sundae Discord to smite bandits, or provide food to your village or make it rain potatoes (ok, that only happened once), they had no trouble talking to me, but let me try to start a conversation and I swear I've heard more talkative clams. There were a few, but they were rare... and if I exclude the ones who wanted to sleep with me, the number gets even smaller.
It's not quite the case that I haven't had a decent conversation with a vaguely friendly being since Celestia and Luna left me... but you know what, it's closer than I like to think about.
Okay, enough of that! Who wants to think of depressing things anyway? Certainly not me.
So now that I've given away the spoilers that my trip was a success, let me tell you about it.
In my day, Griffonstone didn't exist. Well, it came into existence during my reign, and I kept meaning to go there, but there was so much fun to be had in Equestria that I just never got around to it. Besides, the griffons of those days were boring. All that ferocity, all that natural weaponry,, and they wasted it on precision engineering and weapons-crafting. They didn't even go to war with the weapons! Though, to be fair, they had other threats to worry about.
See, back when I was younger—and earlier, for that matter – griffons lived solely in what is now called either Gryphonia or the Gryphon Empire, depending on who you talk to. With centaurs, ikaroi and minotaurs to the south of them and dragons to north, griffons weren't nearly as close to the apex of the food chain as they wanted to pretend. Ikaroi are flying lion chimeras much like griffons themselves, except with stronger grips and a greater likelihood of using magic. Centaurs are powerful magic users, minotaurs are ferociously strong, and dragons are, well, dragons. Take it from me and the rare few occasions I've had to try to fight dragons paw-on-claw rather than with my magic – griffon talons and claws do nothing against dragon hide. Well, not nothing – they can deliver a good scritch, which I'm grateful for every time my tail itches. But in combat? Not so useful.
Against opponents like cows, sheep and yaks, griffons are scary beasts, being chimeras of two of the world's most successful predators. Against dragons, they needed an edge. So thousands of years ago, they invented guns. Yes, Pinkie Pie owes the existence of her party cannon to griffons who wanted to defend themselves and their possessions from dragons. (Mostly possessions. Dragons aren't much on the taste of other predators' meat, but griffons are almost as greedy and materialistic as dragons are, so there were a lot of conflicts over resources, which is a polite way of saying a lot of mutual theft going on.)
With opposable thumbs, natural predator ferocity, and a willingness both to work in groups and to argue with each other a lot while doing it, griffons were able to perfect weapons such as swords and throwing-knives, and invented cannons, muskets and other implements of throwing hard objects very, very fast. Dragons are hard to kill, but diamond fletchettes fired into the eyeball will ruin any dragon's day.
So the Dragon Empire of Neighropa, while it existed, had learned better than to mess with griffons. This, in fact, was why they invaded westward, crossing the North Pole and the Marelantic Ocean to get to Equestria. Griffons were too tough; they were looking for easier prey. And while there are certainly some ponies powerful enough to kill a dragon, the fact that ponies tend to rely on magic and special talents, that they're big on harmony and try to avoid killing, and that the invasion happened long enough after the uniting of the three tribes that most ponies who were veterans of that war were dead or too old to fight, and martial ability had been discouraged in the younger ones... it may seem to you laughable now to imagine ponies overall weaker than griffons, but there weren't any alicorns then, and the population of ponies was a lot smaller.
But I digress. All that changed when I got through with the Dragon Empire. The dragons that lived, and didn't flee to South Amareica, were no longer in a position to care nearly as much about self-preservation as they had when they were sane. And just because a dozen trained griffins with the right weaponry can bring down a dragon doesn't mean they necessarily want to be doing that constantly, nor do griffon mamas and papas really want to be raising cubs and chicks in an environment where feral dragons might swoop down and carry them off for a quick lunch.
So a lot of griffons emigrated across the ocean. They didn't move to Equestria, since, like most of the boring races on this planet, they weren't great fans of chaos. But I'm not a big fan of the North. The closer you get to the pole, the more powerful the pull of Yggsdrasil's root system on the planetary ley lines becomes. The North is highly inimical to chaos magic. Even harmonic magic is hard to cast free-form up there; it's why reindeer and caribou rely on runic magic and sacrifice (reindeer employing willing sacrifices, caribou not so much.) Your average unicorn can cast telekinesis up there, aaaand that's about it. Celestia's heavily impaired, and Luna relies almost solely on mental attacks when she's fighting in the far North.
The Crystal Empire was really about as far as ponies can go to have free and flexible use of their magic... and it had that deeply annoying fruit of Yggsdrasil protecting it. While the Crystal Heart can amplify any kind of emotion (or could back before Sombra took his entire kingdom, Crystal Heart included, on a long road to nowhere), and therefore can be used by dark magic as well as light, it's harmony either way – everypony feeling despair and fear is as bad for me as everypony feeling love and cheer.
So the griffins moved to what would have been the western edge of the Crystal Empire, outside the range of the Heart, but since mostly all that lived up that far were Diamond Dogs, caribou, and yaks, I'd already more or less written the entire area off as too uninteresting to be worth my time. (Oh, I had a few yucks with yaks, but yaks are just So. Damn. Easy. It's like trying to play chess with a three year old. The slightest bit of chaos, the tiniest deviation in exactly what they expected, sets yaks off into destructive frenzies, which generally leads them to wreck everything they own, which then leads to glorious feuding and brawling, and really if their territory weren't so annoyingly cold I might have gone there for a quick pick-me-up more often... but come on. There's no artistry, no challenge. The predictability is downright mind-numbing. I get more mileage out of unbalancing a few into being relaxed and easy-going, and then watch the total confusion ensue as the other yaks can't figure out how to respond.)
But I was talking about griffons, not yaks. So! Griffonstone, settled by griffons more peaceful and less willing to spend their lives murdering crazy dragons than the ones they left behind. Griffonstone griffons made alliances with the Crystal Empire while I was unruling Equestria, and Equestria afterward, so in deference to their pony allies they entirely renounced beef, pork and mutton from their diets (go look the words up if you don't know, and then be grateful you are not a cow, pig or sheep living in Gryphonia), replacing them with earth-pony-grown fruits, grains and vegetables. Yes, griffons are omnivores, though like dogs, they need and prefer meat. (They didn't give up chicken or fish. Omnivores gotta vore omni, after all.) Also sometimes they'd fly down into Equestria to raid my meat trees. I caught a few, and was shocked, shocked, to disover that griffons squawk a lot if you miniaturize them and put them in bird cages. Who knew?
From what I gather from the books I stole from Twilight (the books were for catching up on the parts of world history I missed during that rocky period of my life; the stealing from Twilight was just to annoy her, I admit), I get the impression that Griffonstone shaped up to be something special. A center for commerce and learning, a source of precision instrumentation that didn't have to travel across an ocean to get to Equestria, iron mines (since the loss of the Crystal Empire, Equestria apparently gets all its iron from Griffonstone)... a shining beacon of civilization in the mountain wilderness... in other worlds, the kind of place I'd love to wreck. Precision instruments! Made to nanometer tolerances, in factories! Chaos preserve me, why? For the love of all that's holy, tell me, who would want such an abomination? Well, besides Twilight Sparkle.
When I got there, though, I found that someone had gotten to it before me.
Everything in Griffonstone is a total disorganized mess. Homes are ramshackle huts made from Yakyakistan-imported straw or rocks poorly mortared together. Or rubble. There were a lot of ruins of what had been large, fancy buildings once, with griffons living in the ruins. There's no real government to speak of – no king, no mayors, just a bunch of doddering oldsters that everygriff ignores. Oh, and organized crime, though it's hard to call it crime when it's the closest thing Griffonstone still has to a government.
Simply being there, doing nothing but soaking in the disharmony, made me feel like I was Pinkie Pie in a cookie factory. The griffons of Griffonstone, as it turns out, don't believe in friendship or harmony. They have a saying – Everygriff's out to backstab you except your mama, and when you're grown, watch out for her too. Griffonstone griffins pay about as much attention to the concept of fathers as we draconequui once had; nogriff trusts that a particular egg was sired by a particular griffon, so griffons turn to maternal family if they need it – and they try not to need it, since blood, though thicker than water, is considerably thinner than gold.
Capitalism reigns supreme, or it would if gangs of thieves didn't keep wrecking things and stealing bits from those who managed to get fairly wealthy. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots is huge; most griffons live in squalor and ruin, while a small few surround themselves with a mini-army to keep their wealth from being stolen. Mercs are usually fairly trustworthy, but griffons rarely believe what other griffons tell them, in Griffonstone – they don't gossip because they barely socialize. So if a merc betrays her employer for bits, it's rare for anyone to find out.
I have no idea how, exactly, it got this way. Legend claims that it was always like this until some king or other found a golden idol that instilled the griffons with pride, which spontaneously made them start behaving in socially acceptable ways, until said idol was lost. I call shenanigans. Disharmony like this takes work. I should know. My guess is that something in the emotivore food chain was allergic to that idol, and swooped in to cook itself a buffet of negative emotion as soon as it was gone. Whatever it was, it isn't around anymore, but disharmony's a gift that keeps on giving; once you do all the work to wreck a society, it usually stays at least partially wrecked unless you have alicorns trained in governance with no sense of humor around to help rebuild. Though my hat was off to whatever had done this, because this was a level of persistent disharmony that even I would have found a challenge to create.
One thing wasn't fully disharmonized: the griffons do have a strong sense of family honor. Families may not like each other, but they will band together to avenge a family member who's been murdered, raped or betrayed (so if mercs do want to sell out their employer, they either need to never get caught or they need to make sure the whole family goes down.) This is the only thing preventing the society from falling from anarchy into a murderous free-for-all. Griffons have an excellent sense of smell, so they rarely need to bother with anything remotely like a trial to determine guilt or innocence; family believe each other over non-family, and it's rare to find a griffon who didn't draw blood fighting back in the course of being murdered. (The Griffonstone griffons did not bring the guns from the homeland over, recognizing that guns would have been worse than useless against me and their existence would bother the ponies the emigrants were depending on to help them get established. This is possibly the only reason they are all still alive.) So unless the murderer destroys the body or disposes of it so well that it's never found, griffons will be able to detect the killer's scent on the victim. Of course, this doesn't work out so well for griffons who are forced to kill other griffons in self-defense; justice by lynch mob has little room for nuance. Disposing of the body doesn't always save the murderer, either; family honor often demands that the family pool their bits to hire a pony with a specialty in forensics to find the killer. Said ponies are usually quite horrified to discover that the results of their detective work are used to let the entire family, plus trusted business associates, go after the killer as a pride and tear her apart, but then, ponies are easily horrified.
Aside from that, almost any other violence is fair game. Griffons fall in love, but they don't trust their lovers, most of the time, so most relationships are nasty, brutish and short. Nogriff even uses the term "friend"; it's considered a ponyism nowadays. They cheat each other in business a lot, exploit the exploitable, and leave the weakest to starve to death. I should have loved it. I've never encountered such concentrated disharmony that I didn't make myself; even dragons, hardly the most harmonious of creatures by nature, only live together when they've figured out how to do so without fighting all the time, and those that can't manage that live alone, thus no disharmony. Everygriff out for themselves! Paranoia, mistrust, interpersonal violence! It should have been marvelous!
But it wasn't.
Even Pinkie Pie will probably get too full, and bored enough with the fare that it nauseates her to even look at a cookie, if she eats too many identical products in the aforementioned cookie factory. In my few days exploring Griffonstone, I realized after the initial rush was past that the place was interminably dull. Utter squalor and ruin is disorder, all right, but it isn't chaos. It's stable, unchanging in its degraded state. The endpoint of entropy, almost homogeneous and decidedly static.
There was no art, no creativity, no variety. The food was terrible. The clothes, where they existed at all, were generally utilitarian and dull, also poorly made. No music was allowed. Nothing was in bright or varied colors. And there was no humor to be had anywhere. Pure bullying, physical violence without even the most rudimentary of clever insults, ran rampant. No clever pranks, no witty repartee, just crude brutality. There was no heartbreak, no passion, because nogriff trusted any other enough for that. Interpersonal dealings were terribly predictable, no variety, no complexity.
I'd always thought I was needed to unrule Equestria to prevent Order or Harmony triumphing through ponies spontaneously forming governments. The condition of Griffonstone suggested that my unrule had also been necessary to keep the chaos fresh, to keep entropy from claiming the society. But I'd always thought the role of disharmony was to prevent chaos from becoming entropy. Keep the restlessness churning, keep them on their hoof-edges, keep conflict going in the system, and you'll keep the energy flowing. Keep society on a constant disharmonious boil, and the bubbles of chaos will rise to the surface and make the environment roil and change.
But what happens when the "water" all boils away?
Don't get me wrong. I haven't lost my belief in the value of disharmony. I'd better not; I have no idea what would happen to my powers if I did. The Chaos Avatar doesn't have to also be the Spirit of Disharmony; most of us are, but there have been chaos avatars who had no real interest in promoting disharmony. So it might not do anything to me to lose my connection to disharmony... or it might cripple me. Anansi and Coyote, the two I know of who didn't handle disharmony as well, never demonstrated much more power than alicorns. Was that them holding back because too much chaos is bad for harmony, or did the loss of disharmony as a power source make them that weak?
So no, I still believe in disharmony. I believe in individualism, and freedom of thought, and checks and balances. I believe in fighting the static world, the pleasant perfection without conflict, savor or meaning to existence that harmony would condemn us all to if it could. I believe in agreeing to disagree, and in the value of selfishness, and escaping the ties that bind.
But too much disharmony – too few ties that bind – resulted in Griffonstone.
Argh! I'm arguing against anarchy! How did I come to this? I don't want to philosophize or question my beliefs, I want to destroy Anon and have fun! Too much time spent with this journal is a bad idea. Gilda's not much of a conversationalist, though; I tried talking to her about it, just as a sounding board for my thoughts, since I'm basically undergoing a crisis of faith here and it's honestly her fault, and she said "Whatever, dweeb," and flew off.
Well, maybe I ought to follow her example. I know a few reliable methods for distracting myself, after all.
Ah, I feel much better now. The reasons for which are honestly none of your business, have nothing to do with Anon, and are exactly what you think they are. There's a charming little nightclub in Manehattan that caters to xenophiles, and, well, that's really all I need to say about that, isn't it? I mean, I have needs, just like most ponies do, and just because my fantasy life is capable of being much more elaborate and well-realized than yours doesn't change the fact that constructs from my imagination are completely predictable. And being able to split my consciousness into two or three bodies is loads of fun sometimes, but a draconequus can't be expected to stick with temporary clones all the time, sexy as they are.
Now, I hear you saying, "Discord, aren't you being the sort of complete idiot who thinks with his nether regions here?" Yes, I'm currently a well-known wanted criminal of very distinctive appearance and one of my opponents can teleport with her companions and one of her companions can kill me. But no, I'm not a total idiot. I went in the form of a griffon – had them on the brain anyway, and if I can't be me, at least griffons are slightly less symmetrical than ponies and their limbs work the same way as my forelimbs do, mostly. (A real griffon has less dexterity and sensitivity in their lion hindlimbs than I have in my lion forelimb, but I don't downgrade my hindlimbs in griffon form, so I just end up as a griffon with slightly funny looking back feet that are as dextrous as my foretalons.) I generally prefer having lips to a beak in an intimate situation, but you can't have everything. I mean, I may be the master of the impossible, but right now I'm trying to be the master of not blowing my cover.
Actually, I did find out a thing that pertains to Anon's Brave New World. Apparently, discrimination against homosexuality and xenophilia are now actual things in Equestria... for stallions. Mares are free to screw whatever they like, but stallions are supposed to stick strictly to mares, and pony mares at that – society doesn't even look kindly at pony stallions looking for some zebra lovin', and zebras are equines. This is new, in the sense that I know things weren't like this before Anon, but none of the poor stallions of such inclinations remember that, so they're all laboring under crushing levels of guilt and stress for having such "disharmonious" desires, given that there are not enough stallions to go around for all the mares who want one.
So I struck a blow for freedom and generously performed a good deed for a poor fellow with a passion for male griffons, helping him to express his true nature and relieve some stress at the same time. There would likely have been other types of blows involved, except, well, beak. See above. Still, there were no complaints. He wasn't new to this, but I may have been the first "griffon" to bother to reassure him that his desires aren't actually perverse, sinful or particularly disharmonious in the slightest, or point out the contradiction between the pony belief in destiny and the primacy of the true self vs. the life as a lie that he was being forced into. So I might even have fired a spark that could lead to a movement against the horrible constraints Anon has forced onto Equestria, possibly even leading to some ponies recovering their memories of how things were before. See? I'm being a good citizen. And fighting for my cause! Why, this wasn't a selfish diversion from my true purpose at all. And if I enjoyed myself, well, who says that fighting for freedom has to be dull and unpleasant?
I just wish I could take the risk of being myself. Don't get me wrong, as a first excursion back into the world of fully mutual eroticism after more than a thousand years, I was quite happy with it. But it's like the first bite of a cake; as delicious as it is, all it does for your hunger is sharpen it and make you want to eat the rest of the cake. I want to be wanted for myself, for my own body, not an illusion I created, and it galls me that even among the ponies most likely to be able to accept me and want me, I still have to hide myself, because of Anon. Who's also stirred up enough prejudice against homoerotic desires and xenophilia in stallions that even if I could be myself, the overwhelming majority of my potential pony partners would be mares; not that there's anything wrong with mares, I quite like them, but I crave variety.
I have many, many reasons to want to destroy Anon. This is just one more. But I can be patient. If I survive, if I defeat Anon, I'll get everything I want. I can survive on what I can safely get, until then. And if I don't survive, then I won't have to worry about this sort of frustration anymore.
Anyway. Before I depress myself again, let me tell you all about my success in recruiting Gilda.
It wasn't actually hard to find her. Her residence was in the capital city of Griffonstone (called Griffonstone... such originality, these griffons.) I found her in a restaurant, working as a waitress. So I posed as a customer, using the griffon disguise I mentioned above. The dive was so tiny, Gilda was the only waitress. I was also the only customer, but this did not stop her from keeping me waiting nearly half an hour before she'd take my order, which I needed to pre-pay for. Out of curiosity, I ordered the chicken pot pie (there was nothing on the menu that did not contain meat) to see how badly they'd ruin it. The answer is, even more badly than my wildest nightmares. I took a single bite, and did a dramatic spit-take before Gilda even had a chance to walk off.
"Miss, this isn't a chicken pot pie, this is an abomination! How does this restaurant even manage to create something so awful without dark magic involved?"
"I don't care," Gilda said. "You bought it. Eat it or don't. No refunds."
"What happened to 'the customer is always right?'"
She laughed harshly. "You're not from around here, are you? That's not how we do things in Griffonstone."
"No? Well, then, perhaps we need a change of venue," I said, and snapped one of my talons. (It's actually rather disconcerting to have two, if you want to know the truth.)
In a moment we were elsewhere, on the side of a mountain, and I was back in my true form. Ah, to have six different limbs again! Bliss!
Gilda stumbled – creatures tend to do that when you shift them from a flat surface to a sloped one – and flapped her wings twice to catch her balance. "Holy dragon shit. What was that?"
"Just a spot of teleportation," I said casually.
She sighed. "Like, whatever, dweeb. I'm outta here."
I raised an eyebrow. "You don't recognize me, do you?"
"Oh, yeah, sure, I know every single weirdo dragon chimera lameoid in the world. Just let me check my calendar to see whether I give a shit today." She pulled her waitress notepad out of her filthy apron. "Nope. Not planning on it tomorrow, either."
"Quite understandable, quite understandable. Ponies could hardly be bothered to teach their foals about me, when I was an integral part of their history, so why would griffons be expected to know me?"
"Don't know, don't care. I'm gone, lame-o."
She flapped up into the air. I followed her, ostentatiously not moving my wings. "And just where do you think you're going? Do you even know where you are?"
"I'll figure it out. We can't be too far from Griffonstone."
I laughed heartily. Gilda scowled, her keen griffon sense for when she was being made fun of kicking in. "Wanna bet?"
Gilda sighed, exasperated. "I shoulda known you had something to do with ponies. Rutting cockbarbs, all of them. Fine, creepazoid, where are we?"
"Guess." I grinned at her.
"How about 'no'?" She tried to fly off. I intercepted her, floating in front of her no matter which way she turned.
"How about 'not no'?" I countered. "Come on. Just guess."
She rolled her eyes. "Fine. We're someplace in pastel pony dweebland."
"That's Equestria, right? I'm having a hard time translating from the 'Repetitive-Overuse-Of-Insults-ese' dialect you're using."
"Yeah, fine, whatever. Equestria. Can I go back to work before I get fired, now?"
I had a buzzer sound off, and put us both on the set of a game show, with a convenient griffon studio audience. (Wait, you ponies don't know what a game show is. Never mind, then.) "Wrong! Best two out of three?"
"Listen here, freak!" Gilda shouted at me. "I have a job! It's not an exciting, glamorous, magical job like they have in pony princess land, but it pays the rutting bills and I need the bits, so send me back there right now before I mess up your face even worse than it is!"
Well, if I'd had any doubt before about my assessment that Gilda was a good candidate for Rage, that put them to bed in a jiffy. "Oh, very well," I sighed. "We're in the Griffon Empire."
Gilda actually squawked, flaring her wings out and fluffing them in the universal bird gesture of "what the heck just happened?" "You're shitting me."
I was fairly sure her language had been cleaner pre-Anon, though it could be that she'd been toning herself down for Ponyville. (I can view the past, so yes, I'm talking about her actual visit to Ponyville, not the version in the children's show. Not that there was a lot of difference, but the children's show is hardly a documentary, as close as it gets sometimes.) "Not in the slightest, my dear. Want to do some sightseeing and prove it?"
"No! I want you to send me back home, and then I want you to buzz off! Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying!"
"Such a shame," I said. "And here I thought you might like the power to get revenge for all the times you've been humiliated."
Her eyes narrowed. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means exactly what it says. I've chosen you, my dear griffon, to make an offer of power and alliance against certain mutual nuisances."
She took a step forward, shoving her beak upward into my face. "You talking about ponies here, or what?"
"How did you ever guess?"
Gilda stepped backward, raising her arms in the air in a double fist-pump and literally cackling. "I knew those prissy ponies were gonna piss off someone with power, one of these days!" she laughed. Then she sobered. "They ruined my rutting life, you know that? Screwed up the one friendship I thought I had, which just goes to show you, all their talk about friendship is a crock of dragon shit. When it comes down to it ponies stand with ponies, no matter what they tell you about harmony and all that crap."
I rather suspected Gilda's life had been far more ruined by her insistence on living in the collection of moldering hovels that was Griffonstone, but it certainly wasn't my place to judge. "Just to make sure we're all reading from the same playbook, so to speak... we are speaking of Rainbow Dash and her cast of brightly colored pals, right?"
"Yeah, those bitches. I'm gonna kill them, you know that? One of these days I'm gonna hunt down that pink thing that Dash threw me over for, and turn her inside out. Her and all her friends, and then I'm gonna rub it in Dash's face. Element of Loyalty, my cloc!" If you're unfamiliar with griffon slang, this is not a misspelling of a timekeeping device but a term that's short for "cloaca", and you can go look that up. Not that they actually have cloacas, having mammalian back ends, but the fun thing about vulgar slang is that it rarely makes sense.
I was a bit taken aback by her vehemence, and for just a moment, considered whether this was really a good idea. I didn't want the Bearers dead, or I could have done it myself some time ago. Hilariously ironic revenge on them for turning me to stone, quite possibly, once Anon was dealt with, but death isn't funny. Well, sometimes it is, if it's an incredibly stupid self-inflicted death like the time six ponies drowned trying to rescue a chicken from a well when none of them could swim and the chicken could; I've got to admit that's comedy gold. But the thing about hilariously stupid self-inflected deaths is that they lose all their humor value if there's any part of them triggered by an act of malice or deliberate sabotage, which makes them found humor. You can't cause a pony to die in a funny way, because just the fact that you had anything to do with their death makes their death automatically not funny.
On the other hand, making her the Bearer of Rage might actually make her less likely to do something stupidly over the top in an Anon-inspired overreaction. The Elements of Disharmony exist primarily to cause disharmony, as one might guess from the name. And the paradox of being an agent of either chaos or disharmony is that both are considerably less efficient at getting things done than their more boring opposing principles. Being a target of disharmony yourself makes you much less effective at inspiring it in others. So Bearers of the Elements are better able to resist the negative consequences of the trait they embody than non-Bearers who try to use them, or for that matter ordinary beings who embody the same trait. The Element of Rage gives its Bearers (and users) heightened strength and speed when they're angry, but for those who Bear the Element at the behest of the Disharmony Avatar (yes, that's still me; spirit of Chaos and Disharmony), it gives them the ability to think coldly and rationally during even the worst rages. (If you're wondering why the avatar of Chaos is carrying around things that make beings think more rationally... that's why they're Elements of Disharmony, not Elements of Chaos.)
Anyway, all the Elements of Disharmony confer a small degree of protection against mind control, which is strongest in their particular bailiwick. Being a Bearer of Rage wouldn't make Gilda more inclined to fly off the handle, but, if she was being influenced in her ridiculous overreaction by Anon, it would actually calm her, by reducing his influence. So no, I was right the first time. This was a good idea.
It was obvious to me that Gilda was influenced by Anon to be so overwhelmingly irritable that she hadn't even been startled by my transformation; she was too angry at me to care that I'd been a griffon one moment and a "weirdo dragon chimera lameoid" the next. She needed something to counter the wholly unwarranted and overwhelming fury at everything that Anon had saddled her with. Look at me, doing another good deed and helping out a poor griffon victim of Anon's! I'm just a regular saint lately.
"Yes, well, as it happens, that particular gang of ponies has done rather worse to me than simply break up a friendship," I said. "I could use assistance in keeping them out of my way."
"So you can what?"
"Pardon?"
"What're you after? What's your game? You want them out of your way; where're you going, then?"
I smiled broadly. "Chaos is the name of the game, my dear." I hung upside down, my face dangling in front of hers. "The name's Discord, Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony. I caused rather a stir in Ponyville a couple of years back, and in Zebrica more recently. Perhaps you've heard of me."
"Nope. In Griffonstone news costs money, and I'm not gonna spend my hard-earned bits finding out what's going on with the dweebs in Ponyville."
"Oh. Well, then you have no idea about the alien, and what he's been doing to Rainbow Dash."
That got her attention. "The alien?" she asked, and then caught herself. "Not like I care what happens to Dash anymore, since she made it rutting clear she doesn't care about me. Friendship is for losers anyway."
"Well, then. To answer your questions in order, my goal is to spread a little disharmony and a lot of chaos. Disrupt the pretty pastel ponies' perfectly boring lives, shake things up and make Equestria interesting again. Dash and her friends have a weapon that stands in my way, the Elements of Harmony—"
"Oh, yeah, those things I heard of. Like Dash joined some kind of dweeb superhero team."
"The interesting thing about that team is that its weapon is useless if they don't work together," I said. "As a matter of fact, Rainbow Dash had to choose her pony friends over you, even though she's known you for years and had barely just met them, as a matter of Equestrian national security. I'm sure Celestia has a dungeon waiting for anypony who does anything to disrupt the smooth functioning of the Elements of Harmony... and they only work if their Bearers remain best buddies."
"Wait." Gilda blinked. "You telling me that Dash threw me over because she can't make the magic weapon she and her buddies use work if she didn't? And she'd've ended up in jail if she messed them up?"
"Possibly she wouldn't have ended up in jail. She might have been banished. Or imprisoned in the place she was banished to." I shrugged. "When her own sister tried to disrupt them, Celestia sent her to the moon for a thousand years, but I'm sure she'd be more lenient with Dash than she was with her own sister and fellow princess."
"Dragon shit on a scone," Gilda breathed. "Wow."
"Of course, if something were to happen to any one of the six pretty pony pals, the Elements of Harmony wouldn't work anymore, and Dash wouldn't have to continue to sacrifice all of her other friendships and ambitions for the sake of her service to her homeland," I said. "And I have every intention of performing some act of major interference. Turning Pinkie Pie into a foal, maybe. She already acts like one."
"You can do that?"
"I can do almost anything."
She laughed. "That, I'd like to see."
"The complicating factor, unfortunately, is the human who's mind-controlled all six of them into being his maretoys."
"What?" Gilda practically lunged at me. "What did you say?"
I teleported out of her grasp. "I think you heard me."
"Are you – you seriously telling me Dash is being... mind-controlled? No way. She's way too tough for that crap!"
I sighed. "Toughness has nothing to do with it, I fear. He's powerful enough to mind-control the princesses. For that matter, he's powerful enough to get me every time I go near him, and I'm likely the most powerful magic user on the planet."
"You're shitting me."
"I'm afraid not. He seems like a wholly innocuous specimen to meet him – rather like an ape with a pony-like face and voice, though an even flatter muzzle than ponies have, and no coat, just bare skin. Rather hideous, really, but I don't judge."
"I never heard of a creature like that."
"That's because he's not native to our world. He's an alien from another planet, on the other side of a dimensional gate, and he's both enormously powerful and enormously stupid, to the point where he doesn't even seem to understand what his abilities are. He has the Princesses in his pocket, and Dash and all of her friends are mesmerized into being his lovers."
Gilda shook her head. "That's... that's messed up." She took a breath, her face hardening. "But I don't see what it's got to do with me. Dash made her position pretty clear."
"Of course, I fully understand," I said. "Now that she's no longer either your chickfriend or your platonic friend, it's of no concern of yours that she's being compelled into frequent orgies with all of her friends, for the pleasure of an alien ape mutant who can't even fly. Surely it doesn't matter to you how terribly humiliated she would be if she were able to break free of the mind control enough to even realize that it's there. She's no longer your friend, so it's none of your business... even if the reason she's no longer your friend has more to do with her need to keep a mystic weapon operating for the defense of Equestria and less to do with you, per se, but still! She chose the safety and well-being of all the ponies in Equestria over her feelings for you, so how could you possibly be expected to still care what happens to her?"
Gilda glared at me. "Stop being sarcastic, dweeb. I hate that."
"What makes you think I'm being sarcastic? I am perfectly sincere."
"Fine!" she snapped. "So whattya want me to do about it? Let's just say hypothetically I gave a shit, how'm I supposed to fight something that mind-controlled Dash?"
"With this." I snapped my talons, and the Element of Rage appeared in my paw.
The Element of Rage is a copper amulet, edged in iron, in the shape of a hoof, folded and pointed down in such a way that it looks like a forehoof on a pony rearing to attack. Small blood-red gems dot the edges of the hoof, implying blood. With a thought I shifted it to the form of a griffon talon, fingers outstretched to rake, the blood-colored gems decorating the clawed ends of the talon instead. "This is an Element of Disharmony, Rage. It can only be borne by someone who feels great anger. Bearers become stronger, faster, and smarter when they're angry, and they become more resistant to mind control." They can also perceive and manipulate the anger of others, but Gilda was too direct a griffon for me to think that would be a selling point for her.
"So wait. I get mad, and it makes me stronger? Like Saddle Rager in the Power Ponies?"
"Power Ponies?"
Her facial feathers fluffed with embarrassment. "It's an Equestrian superhero comic," she mumbled.
"Oh, I'm well aware, but Equestrian superhero comics don't seem like the sort of thing you'd be interested in."
"Look, I gotta have something to read for fun. Griffonstone's a shithole and there aren't any good comics with griffons in 'em aside from Red Sorena... hey, wait a rutting minute, I do know you! You're the villain in Red Sorena!"
"Really?" I must admit I blushed. "I had no idea! How marvelous, I'll have to track it down! Tell me, does the art do me justice?"
"I don't know, I don't have any of the early issues and you've just appeared in a couple of flashbacks in the ones I've got. This like old-time griffon warrior went on a quest to kill you because you turned her family into stone, except it turns out they aren't dead and you told her you'd turn them back if she becomes your agent. So she has to run around the world fighting things and causing chaos for you, but the whole time she's trying to find a way to defeat you 'cause apparently swords just make you laugh. Did any of that really happen?"
I shrugged. "Doubt it. I don't turn creatures into stone, griffons, ponies or otherwise." Of course I would have been perfectly happy to blackmail some noble, heroic type into serving me by holding something over their heads, some service only I could perform for them; the only detail that sounded as if it absolutely had to be fictional was the part about turning the griffon's family to stone, specifically. I might have turned them into budgerigars. While I am strictly opposed to permanently transforming anything that lives and moves into something that doesn't, I've been known to derive a great deal of amusement out of changing things that live and move into something else that lives and moves. But I wasn't going to tell Gilda that... or reveal that my memory was shot badly enough after a thousand years in stone myself that I couldn't say for certain whether or not any of the story had happened. "Swords do generally just make me laugh, though. Unfortunately, Anon has one that actually works on me, hence my need to make alliances."
"Huh." She stared at me for a moment with that sort of disconcerting eagle gaze that griffons sometimes get when they're assessing you. "Well, in the comic, you're a total cloc who's obviously gonna sell Sorena out one of these days, but that's a comic book. I'm not gonna make decisions about my life based on a comic book."
"Wise of you."
"What are the disadvantages to this thing, and how do I know I can trust you?"
"You can't trust me." I smiled. "But you can recognize that I'm not trustworthy, and thus that you need to check up on my story, and when you do I think you'll find that I'm not lying. As for disadvantages, there are many disadvantages to trying to use this item without my permission. With my permission, however, the only real downside is that working with me would define you as a criminal in the eyes of Equestrian law, at least until I win."
"Pfft, they can't do anything to me," Gilda said. "I'm a citizen of Griffonstone, not Dweebland. Worst they could do to me is send me back here. Well, send me back to Griffonstone."
The worst they could do would be to kill her, I thought; I didn't know whether Anon's propensity for extreme violence would apply to the "minor" villains as it had to me and the Changelings. On the other hand, if Anon murdered Gilda in front of the Bearers, it would shock and horrify every single one of them. The only pony I could see being willing to accept the bloody murder of a creature as "normal" as a griffon, under most circumstances, would be Rainbow Dash, and Gilda had been Dash's friend specifically; she would not take it well at all if her supposed love killed her former friend. So if Gilda died at Anon's hands, it would actually be enormously helpful to me, maybe even an insta-win. I didn't tell her any of this; it seemed unlikely to me that Gilda would be willing to risk her life for Rainbow Dash at this point. "Then you have hardly anything to worry about," I said.
"Okay. I'll do it," Gilda said. "On one condition."
"Yes?"
"You're gonna need me in Equestria if I'm gonna fight this shithead. I don't want to go back to Griffonstone and be a rutting waitress if I'm gonna be your merc. And I can't exactly get a hotel in Ponyville. So you get me a place to live someplace ponies aren't gonna bug me, where I'm in position to do stuff."
I sighed. "I can't very well build you a palace," I said. "Or a hut, for that matter. Chaos magic is enormously powerful and flexible, but not particularly well designed for permanent structure."
"I don't care how you do it but this is a deal sealer. Take it or leave it 'cause I'm not changing it."
"I... suppose... I could put you up at my place until we find a better solution. I've had to keep the chaos toned down so that Twilight Sparkle can't use her magic to find me, so you could probably tolerate living there for a while. I mean, it's vastly better than those hovels in Griffonstone, and I can supply meat, unlike ninety percent of the eating establishments in Equestria."
"Okay then, we've got a deal." She reached out to shake my hand, talon to talon. "Hey, don't you ever get weirded out by the fact that you've got a foot for a hand?"
"Don't you ever get weirded out that you don't have thumbs on your feet?" I countered.
And so that was how I ended up with a fowl-tempered griffin as a roommate. Or cave-mate, technically, since she doesn't share my living quarters. The Grotto of Disharmony is a cave, as I might have mentioned, and like many caves, it interconnects with other caves (and if it didn't, I could have just made it do so.) Mine is below ground level, with three air chimneys, allowing me to have a non-magical fireplace to take the chill off. I picked it because there's running water down here, in the form of an underground river, and a fantastically deep underground lake I enjoy swimming in. Gilda chose a roost higher up the mountain, with a tiny entrance that for some absurd reason she insists on stunt-flying into despite the fact that the tolerance for error is bare inches on each side of her. I provided furnishings for her – which is to say, since Chaos is impermanent and Gilda has no taste, we went shopping, breaking into various high-end establishments in Canterlot and Manehattan late at night when the proprietors had gone home, where she picked out what she wanted and I teleported it into a giant pile in her quarters. (I'm certainly not going to organize it for her.) Afterward, I replaced the items we'd taken with constructs of chaos magic that will reveal their true nature after they are sold, such as the cuddly blanket that will go in search of ponies to cuddle if nopony's actually sleeping in it, or the omnivorous table that will eat your breakfast, or the barking chairs.
It's... strange. I've lived with others – I lived in the palace with Celestia and Luna, and I had a fairly sizable entourage throughout most of my unreign – and I've lived alone, but I don't think I've ever lived alone with someone else. There are parts of this arrangement I find surprisingly enjoyable. I've never had a companion I could share meat with, for instance; most ponies are unnerved by the stuff even when they know I'm creating it with chaos and not killing any animals for it. Gilda was slightly unnerved by the fact that I wasn't killing any animals for it, until I introduced her to steak and bacon, and now she doesn't question my food products anymore. She still complains endlessly about my cooking, continually informing me that pineapple, peanut butter and steak can't possibly be intended to go together or suchlike, but I frequently notice her taking seconds when she thinks I'm not paying attention.
Gilda can't cook – her Grandpa Gruff was apparently a renowned cook in his younger days, and taught her his skills, except that either he was senile when he did it, she's a terrible student, or griffons in general are horrible cooks, because she'd never even heard of baking powder. She also doesn't like the fact that I put food on dirty dishes, which magically cleans them, but she doesn't have to live with the Spirit of Chaos if she doesn't want to, and besides, I don't always pull that particular gag. I just like reversing the appropriate direction of entropy and disorder. It's hilarious. So there isn't much she can do for me – even if she were willing to do chores she just can't get it through her head that the idea is to increase disorder, so I'm not willing to let her – but she eats my cooking and she listens to me, and sometimes I even catch her cracking a smile at my jokes.
I told her not to tell me what she was doing with her Element of Rage – like Blueblood, she needs to be a more or less independent agent. She rolled her eyes at me. "What, you afraid they'll catch you and torture it out of you?" she sneered.
"No, I'm afraid Anon will catch me and compel me to indulge in a villainous monologue where I tell him exactly what I'm doing, in detail, with sidebars for my minions' activities," I said. "If I don't know what you're up to, he can't make me monologue about it."
"That's really a thing?" she asked skeptically.
"Believe me, he's made me do stupider things than that."
So I don't actually know exactly what she's doing. I think she's spying on Ponyville – after she nearly deafened herself sneaking into the Panauricon's observation center, she asked me if I could give her eyes and ears to plant around Ponyville for herself. So I gave her corn, a joke she didn't get, and eagle eyes, which she'll be much less enthusiastic about sticking everywhere when she realizes they are, in fact, her eyes, wired up to her nervous system with magic, and if a crow eats one it's going to give her a new understanding of pain. What? She should know to stay on her toes around me; I might feed her bacon, but I'm still the Spirit of Chaos. Anyway, she's a griffin, she can handle it.
Now that I've got two minions in play, I really want to find Deception and get Lulamoon into the mix. That mare is actually actively looking for an edge to help her beat Twilight Sparkle; signing her on will be a cakewalk, but she's just not a good fit for Greed. As I suspected, though, Deception is not where I left it.
I wasn't issued the seven of these the day I became the Chaos avatar; they remained in the hooves or paws of whoever had held them before my ascension. And as I've mentioned, I consider them to be mostly fairly useless. So I didn't go collecting them. Some of them, like Cruelty, Hatred and Selfishness, I've never personally held; I don't even know where Selfishness is.
Deception is the only one I've ever actually used. I got hold of it when I was summoned by a young seapony named Dazzle, who wanted me to make her its Bearer. The seaponies have a somewhat different perception of me than other ponies do, since I made them. I'm... not proud of that, honestly; I think I'd feel better if I made them as an act of malice, rather than what I did do. The dragons were holding Marelantis, one of the largest cities in Equestria, and the entire large, swampy island it was located on, hostage, demanding that I surrender to them, back when Celestia ruled Equestria and I served her during the dragon war. So I sank Marelantis, and made the sky a wall so nothing could get out of the water, and transformed all the ponies on the island into seaponies. The objective was to drown the dragons, since, being Western, earth dragons, they couldn't breathe water like I and other water dragons and dragonoids can. It succeeded. It also drowned every other living creature that wasn't a pony and wasn't already a sea creature. As someone who isn't a pony, and has always felt very strongly that hippocentrism is a huge problem in Equestria... well. I don't usually feel guilt over what I do, but that means I don't have a lot of experience dealing with it when I do feel it. I was devastated over what I'd done, and even after I became the chaos avatar, remembering it still hurt.
But the seaponies, being hippocentric, didn't see it that way. Oh, at first they cursed my name, since I tore them away from Equestria; they couldn't live on land for long enough to send representatives to court, so they had to become their own principality, under self-rule, and that was quite a chaotic transition. If I hadn't killed so many animals, and any sapient non-ponies that had been living there, I might have been pleased with it, but honestly the cost was too high. After time had passed, though, and they'd developed a sense of pride in being seaponies and a sense of nationalism, they came to honor me as their creator. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a demiurge, not a true god – I didn't literally create the seaponies, in the sense of making new life. They were already alive when I turned them into sea creatures. But in a hundred years, such fine distinctions get lost. The seaponies thought of me as their creator god and worshipped me. It didn't hurt that their new environment was far more chaotic than the one they'd come from, and the idea of accepting and propritiating Chaos as a principle worked better for them than the idea of trying to live in harmony with everything did anymore. Also, I didn't go down and play with them much, because I felt guilty and I don't like feeling guilty.
Anyway. So Dazzle wanted power for herself and her two little sisters, Blaze and Dusk (they were named for the times of day as they appear under water, where you can't tell precisely where the sun is exactly but you can tell the quality of the light.) She'd gotten hold of the Element of Deception, and she had the right idea – rather than just try to use it, she called on me, her god, to beg me to allow her to serve me as its Bearer. But I felt that the Elements of Disharmony were fairly lame, and I had a use for Deception that wasn't going to involve anypony being its Bearer, so I had a better idea. I made gems for her and her sisters that took power from disharmony and generated magic, which they'd focus through singing. It was an early experiment in contradictions, to see if I could focus harmony in a way that would spread and incite disharmony – the girls had to sing together to generate or feed on disharmony, and the magic made them actually good at it (seaponies don't sing, generally. There's a reason for this.) Of course, there was a price to be paid to allow harmony to serve disharmony, which was that the fillies had to turn into water-serpent-sized seapony monsters, and no longer looked much like seaponies, but on the other hand, they'd be immortal, so they weren't upset about it too much. (Well, Dazzle and Blaze weren't. Dusk cried endlessly about being ugly for half a century after that before she got over it. Personally, I thought the three of them looked much better in their new forms, and I even told them so, but this didn't console Dusk for some reason.)
Eventually, sometime after I was turned to stone, my beautiful Sirens got banished to another dimension by Starswirl, whose antics with time travel and de-aging spells allowed him to survive the eight to nine centuries of my reign to be around to advise Celestia afterward, and maybe after Anon's defeated I'll figure out which dimension and pull them back. Or maybe not. Dazzle had gotten rather big for her britches by the time I was turned to stone, and we'd had a bit of a falling out when she'd declared that I wasn't a god and was in fact rather lame, and it turned out her magic gems had taken on a bit of an independent turn and I couldn't destroy them, despite having made them in the first place.
Anyway. The deal I'd made with Dazzle had her giving me back the Element of Deception, partially activated. Chaos avatars cannot directly use the Elements of Disharmony ourselves; something about feedback loops, or pouring yourself into yourself, or something. You'd think we'd be able to handle a paradox like that, but trying to activate a Disharmony Element myself just gave me a headache so severe I had to remove my head and soak it in the ocean for more than a day before I recovered. The gems I gave Dazzle were linked to the Element of Deception in such a way that as she and her sisters used their power, it would feed through the Element of Deception to power the spell I was weaving through it.
Then I buried the thing at the site where my mother, and the rest of my clan, died. The spell I was tying into it was supposed to make ponies feel unease in the area and make it seem haunted. There aren't really any spirits of dead draconequui hanging around the place – I checked as soon as I had the power to, hope springs eternal after all –but I didn't want ponies doing something obnoxious like building a campground for foals at the place. It would be just like them and their cultural insensitivity to ignore the site's significance as a sacred draconequus burial ground. Also, I'm the only draconequus left and I never told anypony about the place or what it means. (Not telling you either. It's in the mountains someplace. Have fun with that.)
I doubt the spell held up for all that long after Dazzle and her pals were banished, but by then I was in stone so there wasn't much I could do about it. Recently, when I went to investigate and retrieve the Element if I could, I found that someone had dug it up, long enough ago that the ground no longer appeared disturbed, though not so long ago that ponies have moved in yet. (There actually aren't a lot of ponies living in those mountains. A lot of goats and deer, though, which is possibly why there are so few ponies there.) I have some pretty strong suspicions about who took it, though.
See, an authorized Bearer of Deception gets an enhancement to their power to deceive and the ability to detect the deceptions of others, without any increased need to deceive. They can continue to use their talent when it's useful, not because they can't help themselves. Those who take my Element and use it without me granting it to them, however... their abilities at deception are enhanced, all right, but they can't see through the deceptions of others, and they become compelled to engage in deception, the way Carmine Sand was compelled to steal things.
This can take one of two forms. Either they become a pathological liar, compelled to try to deceive all the time. Or they become obsessed with committing deception in grandiose ways, proving their brilliance and general superiority to the world through huge, elaborate lies, where the goal ceases to be whatever they had intended to accomplish through the deception, and becomes the deception itself. This usually results in giving themselves away, because if your goal is to demonstrate how smart and powerful and overall amazing you are by pulling off an incredible lie and making everyone believe it, the fact that no one knows you lied becomes a problem. So at some point the grandiose liars have to reveal the truth, because otherwise how could they gloat?
Now, here's a fun fact about Changelings: ordinarily they never reveal themselves. Changelings feed on love; demonstrating their true identity, ever, disrupts the flow of love. Oh, grunts, soldier-lings, might reveal themselves, because usually they're interacting with ponies, or anyone else, in order to accomplish some more violent goal than the acquisition of love. But the harvesters, the Changelings who go out into a population and impersonate others, do not reveal themselves. Princesses, Queens who haven't fully matured yet, must harvest in order to mature enough to form their own hive, but once a Princess is all grown up and Queen of her own hive, she's usually too busy running things back home, also popping out eggs, to bother to go harvest.
A Queen who is harvesting, even from an incredibly powerful target like the older brother of Twilight Sparkle, is risking her entire hive. Princesses and Queens can both bear new Princesses (and Princes, the males who mate with the Queens and Princesses) the mammalian, viviparous way, by mating with ponies or other species; that's where they come from, in fact. But because they're actually getting pregnant and nursing, they can't make a new Princess any faster than one a year or so. Likewise, Princes can knock up a pony who will then bear a changeling (technically a part-changeling, but changeling hybrids who are reclaimed by the hive and fed love jelly will grow up to become full changelings), who would themselves be a Prince or Princess. But only a Queen can bear soldiers and harvesters and workers, who she pops out as eggs in clusters of a dozen or so every other month, more often if she's well fed.
A Queen who has a goodly number of well-placed harvesters, Princes and Princesses feeding her and a good supply of nursing workers could produce more than a hundred 'lings a year. A Queen who spends several months in harvesting, who does not bear any egglings during that time, is potentially endangering her hive. If she's caught and injured and it prevents her from bearing, her hive is dead. Her Princesses could theoretically spin up new hives, but Princesses don't inherit their mother's hive, they create their own, because a well-fed Changeling Queen who doesn't get hurt could live for hundreds of years. Also, the reproductive power of a hive is dependent on the harvesters and the workers; harvesters must bring in new love energy to feed the young as well as the rest of the hive, and workers need to train up the younglings. Soldiers are only good for fighting other hives or protecting the hive from, say, ponies, so most sane hives maintain a lower proportion of them than the other classes.
I saw the swarm of changelings that attacked Canterlot. (Well, heard. Stone at the time.) Either many of them were harvesters or workers, in which case Chrysalis was insane for spending them in battle, or she had massively imbalanced her hive's population in favor of soldiers when she chose what types of eggs to bear, in which case she was being profoundly irrational. Only a Changeling hive engaged in active warfare needs that many soldiers, and hives avoid active warfare because killing and maiming do not produce love. Most Changeling hives are very, very subtle parasites on the societies they live next to; doing anything to draw attention to themselves damages their ability to collect love. So they carry off the occasional pony, usually a moody teenager or a young child, and bring them back to the hive to slowly drain them to feed the babies, and the harvester who replaces them never reveals herself, ever. If she feels like her supply of love is draining up, she stages the death of the pony she's impersonating and moves on. A given hive kills maybe ten ponies a year, at most, and the deaths never come to light, and the ponies never, ever find out that there are Changelings among them.
Ostentatiously taking the form of Celestia's niece in order to invade Canterlot and conquer it is not a sensible Changeling plan. It's just not. Everything about it is a terrible idea. And a Queen stupid enough to come up with such a terrible idea wouldn't have lived long enough to become powerful enough to ever take on an alicorn, regardless of how much love she'd harvested, because she just wouldn't know how to use her magic that effectively.
As terrible an idea as it was, however, it was an incredibly grandiose and elaborate deception to engage in. And it fooled Celestia, meaning that either Celestia is so stupid and unobservant that her supposed niece, an alicorn, could drain her Captain of the Guard, older brother of her protégé and former best friend of her nephew, to nearly mindless submission right in front of her without her noticing anything... or Chrysalis had magical assistance in making others believe her lies, assistance that only an Element of Harmony who also knew the target managed to overcome.
I am thus pretty sure I know where Deception was, a short while ago. The question is, after Chryssie got her chitinous rump so thoroughly handed to her, where is it now?
Well. I have a third Element in my paws that I can dispense, if the Flimsy Floozy Brothers can share one. This is likely to present technical difficulties, since for obvious reasons Disharmony isn't likely to work well between two. But I pulled it off with the Sirens, who are sisters, and whatever destroyed harmony so thoroughly in Griffonstone left behind bonds between family members. These fellows are twin brothers who have been apparently living in each other's pockets for nearly their entire lives. If any pair could manage to bond equally to an Element of Disharmony and work together in harmony themselves to cause disharmony in everyone else, I suspect it would be them.
And then once that's taken care of, it'll be time to track down Deception.
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Oh man, new chapter! Kickass :D:D
Discord and Gilda are great, and I can't wait to see him and Chryssie interacting. All in all, well worth the wait!
The one they did with Sombra wasn't bad. I gave him a better origin, but still, theirs wasn't bad.
Is this spelling intentional? The commonly accepted spelling is Yggdrasil.
Alternate Chapter Title:
Anyway; yay another update!
I'll be reading this right away and edit my comment when i'm done.
...My grilled cheese sandwich will have to wait...
Edit:
Taking notes as I read this chapter:
Griffons invented guns and very dangerous weapons like cannons.
Dragons were in Equestria because they wanted to invade them.
Dragons were driven insane by Discord, causing most of them to flee to South Amareica.
Griffons emigrated across the ocean to Equestria.
This settlement was called Griffonstone.
There's quite a few interesting things so far, great to see some awesome worldbuilding.
6221558 chrysalis and her drones were killed by anon. Check previous chapters
As mercurial and dangerous as Discord is, I find hard to believe there are shortage of scholars who would take the risk of getting near the Avatar of Chaos just to learn from his insights and vast knowledge. He is simply fascinating.
So, gryphons are the closest thing to humans in the setting? surprise, surprise.
While I agree with the author regarding the comics, I find the one about the changelings good enough: a rottern acorn tree growing in a pool of dark magic, mixing insects, the remains of dead ponies and the blood of Starswirl in a horrific combination... is a refreshing change from the mutated Flutterponies common fanon. Besides, I like the exposition of Chrysalis as an unrepentant monster, in an Hannibal Lecter fashion, rather than another woobie.
You're spot on about the Nightmare Moon and Siren comics in my opinion, and I can understand why you dislike the changeling story, though I enjoyed it (except where Twilight grabs the idiot ball with both hooves at the end). But you didn't like the Sombra book? The worst I thought about that is that it needed to be longer. I'd have loved to see two or three issues devoted to that to fully explore his backstory rather than cram it into one issue.
Anyway, this chapter isn't quite boring but it does edge the line. Even well crafted exposition gets tired after a while and Discord is very much focused on talking over doing. The only important thing that happened in twelve thousand words was getting Gilda on board. The various tangents like the history of Griffinstone, a discussion of disharmony vs chaos, talking about the Yaks, the history of the seaponies and the sirens seem unlikely to have an impact on the rest of the story. The necessary bits, like his conversation with Gilda, description of her living with him, and the background on Deception/changelings also felt longer and more detailed than they needed to be. Even excellent writing, which this certainly is, can be bogged down when there is too much of it for too little purpose.
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I also really liked both Sombra's and Chrysalis's stories. In fact, I rank Sombra's issue above Tirek's. I can see why people might prefer other backstories or headcanon than the origins presented by the comics, but I don't think that there's anything really wrong with those origins themselves. The origin story for the changelings especially matches up pretty well with how I thought chimeric species in MLP came about anyway (more or less; for my mind, I continue to believe that the creation of the changelings and other chimeras had at least some influence from some kind of deity, since it's a bit of a stretch to assume that something like that can be a complete accident).
But yeah, the issues for Nightmare Moon and the Dazzlings were absolute garbage. Let's not kid ourselves about that.
Discord messing with the yaks just makes me think of, like, Yafstafarianism, or something.
6072290 Yeah, this is one of those rare stories that sticks with you and changes how you see every other fic ever. Now every HIE character I read about has to pass inspection in my mind, and the comparison is Anon in this fic. Most of them fail.
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I don't like the concept that there are "evil" beings, as in being born to be evil, naturally evil, etc. Beings that feed on negative emotional energy are one thing, and I like the fact that there are bad guys who are negative emotivores (eat negative emotions) and bad guys who are positive emotivores (eat positive emotions), because it reinforces that being an emotivore doesn't make you evil, it's what you do with it. Someone who feeds on disharmony could use their ability to be a superhero who's strongest at exactly the time they're most needed (this in fact could be how Sir Discord/Captain Goodguy works.) But creatures who are evil just because it's their nature to be evil? That's a cop-out. Sombra should have been a pony who was corrupted by his use of dark magic, not a pony-shaped shadow creature who was destined from birth to be evil.
Likewise, my problem with the Changelings was not that they were created via some sort of magic -- in the MLP world, that makes sense to me. It's that they're a quasi-immortal species where the individuals within in are so incredibly goddamn stupid and yet this is the first time anyone's encountered them. As I think I explained in this story, Chrysalis' invasion of Canterlot was idiotic; many, many fans have pointed out that there are basically no benefits to an emotivore society that feeds on love to conquer openly. It's worse even than imagining vampires taking over; vampires don't need you to love them, they can overpower you by force. But Changelings need love, so taking over Canterlot was stupid. This means that either Chrysalis is young, and other Changeling Queens are more experienced; or the entire Changeling species is brand new, but I got the impression that the comic was suggesting they are quite old; or Chrysalis is an idiot, but if she is she still hasn't been around long because we'd have seen her screw up earlier... or Chrysalis is being influenced by something.
I don't like Chrysalis the misunderstood woobie either. Anyone who feeds on love and chooses to take it by force and deception rather than earning it has several moral strikes against them from the getgo, and I mean, Chrysalis is the kind of person who sings about how evil she is and how little she cares about the dude she's marrying. She is not a nice person, ever. She's also either remarkably stupid, remarkably young and inexperienced, or she's being mentally influenced by something. In my vision, Chrysalis was ambitious and ruthless, but not stupid; she hunted down the Element of Deception thinking it would give her an edge, and it did, but it has also compelled her to go way beyond what would be a reasonable plan for Changelings. Taking the place of the Princess of Love was a good idea. Taking over Canterlot was not. Both are evil, but only one of them was Chrysalis' idea all on her own.
I don't know. Perhaps my rejection of these particular story ideas is less to do with them being "smart" or not, and my perceptions are being influenced by my own moral beliefs. Maybe it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that creatures created by magic could be inherently evil by nature. But I just find it to be really lazy, sloppy storytelling, and in the universe of MLP, where Nightmare Moon and Discord could be reformed and Celestia is a good pony who is sometimes a dumbass and sometimes makes ruthless, dangerous decisions that could harm the ponies she loves for the benefit of the majority... Celestia is good, but she's not "pure" good. She's not, like, God or something; she's fallible, she can get mad and do dumb things, she can take dangerous gambles. So if the closest thing to a force of pure good in that universe is shown to be a good person, not a "force of goodness", why does it make sense for there to be sentient beings that are "forces of evil?"
Huh... Okay... I'm moving Anon carrying the Element of Deception without realizing it from the "plausible" category of predictions to the "incredibly likely" category because while other chapters have hinted at it this chapter all but screams it. Not sure if I'd enjoy or not enjoy being right here though given we're talking about the Element of Deception. It would incredibly amusing to me for what seems like a good deal of set up to be false when trying to predict where deception is.
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While I personally find this chapter more entertaining than the Blueblood one, I think you're right. The history of Griffonstone stuff was actually important because it was part of Discord's process of recognizing the flaws in his own belief system, but the rest of the exposition, yeah, a lot of that probably won't come up again.
There was supposed to be an action scene that would have been part of this chapter, but I felt like the chapter was already too long so I moved it to the next one. Maybe I should have kept it as part of this one.
You mean attack?
Loving the introduction of Gilda, and the lies/halftruths Discord used to snare her.
Again, your Discord is the best.
That's gotta be Anon's element.
So that's how she became a Siren. It's always been my headcanon that the sirens used to be seaponies but were mutated by something.
This makes far too much sense.
I suppose it is if that's the changeling backstory here, even though from what we know in canon it's a fairly decent plan.
Oh I really hope Discord ends up saving Chryssy from what Anon did. She's my absolute favorite character so, holding out hope. Hope springs eternal, after all.
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No, it's pretty much always a terrible plan, because changelings feed on love and no one loves a conqueror. Changelings are always going to do better by sneaking in and taking the place of individuals to feed on the love felt by others toward that individual; that's why they're changelings. When your superpower is the ability to look like anyone, a direct and open invasion is never going to be your best strategy.
For a species that eats food, and happens to have shapeshifting powers, it wouldn't have been such a terrible idea, but the fact that Changelings use love as an energy source makes it automatically dumb. The canon would have had to clearly establish that only Chrysalis does this, or that they feed on emotion in general, or something, to have made it not a dumb idea. The act of openly conquering in their true form is going to destroy the love supply.
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Discord was able to sense when he was in the proximity of his Elements; he found the Kraken's stash with Rage in it, the museum with Arrogance in it, and Winaypaqori, none of which were places or individuals that the Elements had been in before he was turned to stone (in fact he talks about a pony who was using Greed while he was in stone, so by definition Winnie didn't have it then.) So it's unlikely that Anon could be holding any Element of Disharmony and Discord not notice. Also, Anon is neither a compulsive liar nor a grandiose one; he alters actual reality until it matches what he believes, which is less deceptive than narcissistic in the extreme.
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True... I was imagining it as a sort of grand self-deception, but that wouldn't explain the sheer power behind his alterations.
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We don't know how the feeding process works.
For instance, changelings conquer. Ponies draw closer together, to stick with each other. Love each other. Love to eat.
Also, there's the concept of the pods providing loving dreams for victims. I don't personally subscribe to it, but it's a possibility.
Furthermore, do the ponies actually need to feel love? Let's simplify it numerically. Let's say a pony is at 1 'Love points'. A changeling feeds off them, draining 2. That pony is now bitter, with -1 love. Can the changeling no longer feed from them, or can they drain another 2 love points, making the pony an even more bitter -3?
Seemed to work pretty well. Even with the Royal Guard fully prepared and mobilized, looking for a threat, they got steamrolled by the changelings. Sometimes the best strategy isn't to do anything fancy, when you overpower the enemy so much. And we don't even know the entirety of Chrysalis's former plan, since she got ousted not part of the plan.
Not necessarily. To reiterate, we know next to nothing about how the feeding process works, nor of what a changeling-ruled Equestria would actually look like, so there are near infinite directions it can be taken. Some make it a good idea, some don't.
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But wait... Anon makes Discord stupid! Could he become too stupid to notice an Element? Really looking forward to whatever reveal that'll be.
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I would agree that simply having something born to be evil is lazy writing (unless it is non-sapient or an elemental force of evil). However, as I saw it neither Sombra nor the Changelings are inherently evil. In both cases they were predisposed to evil as much as a person with anger issues or little empathy would be, but it's their choices that put them in that category.
In Sombra's comic he was born from the shadow ponies, and adopted by their ancestral enemies, the crystal ponies. Thus a very 'Loki-in-Asgard' situation (MCU Loki at least). It also makes sense that the Crystal Princess would keep his origin from him as a child (because he was already ostracized by another children), despite the pain in caused him later. After he sees his 'destiny' she reminds him that the future is not fixed, but a talk with his mother outside of the city and a confrontation with the Crystal Princess makes him decide 'then let me be evil'. He has a choice, and becomes a tragic figure (in the traditional sense) for making the wrong decision, even though it makes sense to him.
In the changelings' comic Chrysalis clearly doesn't seem to consider herself evil. Her morality is originally centered upon her own needs, like all very young children, but unlike them she never grows past that. Despite gaining knowledge and developing intelligence, she does not gain empathy for any creature outside her hive. Immaturity is also pretty evident in her methods for gaining love: conquer, force-drain and leave a barren wasteland. She takes the maximum amount of love possible in a short time without considering the consequences. To me it sets changelings up as either having orange and blue morality (only those within the hive matter), or being led by a ruler who is essentially a spoiled brat. In either case I don't view their origin as making them an inherently evil race. Though, like I said I can understand where other people would disagree with me here.
And honestly, I felt that way about the Blueblood chapter after re-reading it, but I didn't leave a comment to that effect. Though, I still like it more than this one. The Blueblood chapter feels like 'too many words for too little advancement', but almost all of it is related to the plot rather than going off onto tangents.
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There's got to be some point to putting ponies in cocoons. If a cocooned pony produces love with next to no effort (whether because the cocoon contains sedatives which then give him pleasant dreams of love or for whatever other reason) then it might make sense; a cocooned pony would not love his conqueror, but he would very quickly think he had been saved by somepony (or *something*) that he then promptly went and fell in love with, thus producing lots and lots of food for the Hive.
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That's probably true, but cocooned ponies don't reproduce, so it's kind of like being a locust, eating everything in sight and then starving until you find the next field to strip, vs. being a farmer. Changelings are sapient beings, so they're capable of figuring out that the second strategy has more long term sustainability. Cocoon a few ponies and replace them, so that both the cocooned ponies and the loved ones of the cocooned ponies are providing love; that's going to be much more sustainable than cocooning them all.
Hrmmmm, I still think Spike would make for a better Element of Greed, from the perspective of actually WANTING to save the mane six rather then having any sort of personal vendetta against them. Thus far, both Rage and Arrogance have seen through their own personal (or imposed) grievances against the EoH and want to help, but I question what reason Flim and Flam would want to accomplish beyond their own personal gain. In addition, it seems as though Anon does not care enough about Spike's fate to influence him to strongly against working with Discord. I can quite easily imagine Spike considering the girls part of his "treasure" allowing him to turn the full might of Greed against Anon.
I suspect the reason Discord has discounted giving Spike this role is due to his proximity to the EoH, and Anon which would make swaying him to his side....problematic at best. Still, it would be nice to see our favorite little dragon taking a staring role to save his family.
6222602
Well, yes, you have an excellent point; in the long term, cocooning Canterlot will be a problem (not to mention the thorny question of who exactly moves the Sun and the Moon while Celestia and Luna are dreaming about handsome alicorn stallions or whatever).
But it would hardly be the only time that a spaient and presumably intelligent being has gone to a lot of effort to do something that is clearly and visibly utterly idiotic in the long term in order to gain the short-term benefits thereof. (A cursory glance at human history will give copious examples). Even without being magically compelled by an Element of Disharmony.
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And then one has to consider the long-term benefits of Chrysalis replacing Celestia; if she has a few trusted servants replaced (easy enough), then she can lay her eggs (probably in the privacy of Celestia's room) while at the same time maintaining Celestia's identity. And all the ponies love Celestia... which means that Chrysalis would probably, personally, be collecting more love than some entire Hives... that might make it worthwhile in the long term as well, even if she takes over the rest of Canterlot at the same time...
But... but.. Sombra?
A shadow pony with his past hidden to him and made to suffer unbearable pain for a whole day every year, and the princess knew who he was the whole time yet didn't tell him or help him? Less "evil by destiny" and more a Driven by VIllainry (hell, it's even an entry on the TV tropes page for it). Ok, his species are an 'evil' species, but it was the events of his life that drove him to evil out of a desire to make others suffer as he had, rather than just "raaaah, i'm evil because Umbrum"
...Well, this is awkward. I find this story, read through every chapter (I am a fast reader, after all), absolutely love it, and am about to comment about how much I admire this story and how I now have an idea as to how to incorporate my own headcanons into my own story...then I realize your profile image looks familiar, look back, and realize you've seen and commented on my story already, and it may or may not look like self-promotion to you.
Soooooo...yeah. I like this story, I've come to realize how to incoporate my own headcanons into my own story when I was previously conflicted if I should include them or not, you got my like, and that is all you need to know. And now I need to get to work on my story; because this made me realize that I should probably get to work on the first chapter to actually use the Discord tag...
A very nice analysis of griffins and how they got where they are. I love the irony of fighting dragons with gemstones, and seeing Discord face the reality of too much of a good thing is fascinating. Unwelcome thoughts are churning away, and distracting himself from them isn't going to make them go away forever. Probably.
Griffin insults may not impress Discord, but I do like the blunt elegance of "cockbarb."
Aww. Discord likes having a cavemate. Not a friend, obviously. Neither of them would describe the relationship thusly. But still, he's bonding. Though those chaotic replacements for the furniture may yet bite Discord in the tail.
Huh. Unexpected history of seaponies, sirens, and Chrysalis. Very neat, and it all makes wonderful sense. Certainly more than the sirens' Fiendship comic. I love the Element of Deception acting as the wedding's Idiot Ball.
In all, fantastic chapter. Things are looking up for Discord... which makes me wonder when and how they'll crash.
"But let me tell you all about it anyway".
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Because I want to make absolutely sure you all know that I'm a desirable, sexy creature who can actually get laid. Did you get that? That I'm sexy? Because if you didn't get it, I'll tell you again. Not like I care what you think about me, or anything, except I totally do. :-)
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Ah okay. :)
I asked because in Wanderlust Discord is very critical of the sex lives of royals, but that's because he doesn't think they should hide it so much. However, if that was hypocrisy on his part it would imply he was hiding his sex life too, and uh...he doesn't appear to be the type to do that.
And yeah, geeze. Tell me about it. While the UK isn't as bad for that sort of thing as America is, the British media still love unearthing a "scandal." I'd like to believe the vast majority of us don't care about other people's sex lives, but the high sales of tabloids tell me otherwise.
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It's not really Sombra himself so much as the concept that there is such a thing as Umbrum, Shadow Ponies who are pure evil, at all.
I find the concept that there are pure evil races appalling most of the time, but there are canons where it's clearly the case, like Lord of the Rings. MLP isn't one of those canons. The fact that the series started with the Big Bad Villain being beaten down by the magical mare superpowers and redeemed, not destroyed, set the tone of the series, and since then, we've had two additional redeemed villains (Discord and Sunset Shimmer), one villain presented as irredeemable but still was loved by his family, and loved in turn until he felt himself to be betrayed (Tirek, with Scorpan), and I totally wouldn't be shocked to see the Sirens end up redeemed at some point. The series is about friendship, love and redemption, and overcoming interpersonal difficulties to achieve harmony.
I don't have a problem with Chrysalis and Sombra being irredeemable -- Chrysalis' people feed on pony life force. They're vampires. They can be creatures who can never be negotiated with and can never live in harmony, without being evil -- I mean, from Apple Bloom's perspective the chimera is evil, but from her own perspective, the chimera's just hungry. And Sombra could well be corrupted past the point of no return. But I do not like the notion of any race being inherently evil. And if there was a member of such a race around, who'd demonstrated that he was capable of love and friendship, it would be far more in tune with the nature of the show to demonstrate that that being could be redeemed, that the notion of a fully "evil" race is fallacious. Having someone be a member of an "evil" race who ends up growing up to turn evil is... well, it reinforces the trope of "bad blood", which I despise. Evil does not need to beget evil.
I find that the comics, while more sophisticated than the TV show when it comes to acknowledging the existence of love and romance (I mean, they more or less explicitly gave Discord an ex-sex partner), are often less sophisticated on questions of good and evil. Just the fact that they created a "mirror universe" where the good guys were bad and the bad guys were good with no explanation why they would be that way is problematic, plus their presentation of the Nightmare Forces as something that can kidnap and corrupt a pony against her will, implying that Luna is wholly innocent... well. I have problems with the comics' understanding of good and evil in general. I liked Tirek's story because it didn't try to suggest that Tirek was born evil; he was born ambitious and power-hungry maybe, but that's not the same thing. Sombra, though... they're telling us that there's such a thing as a purely evil pony race, and that despite having friends Sombra was doomed to become just like the race he was born from, and his fall is in part due to a betrayal from a well-meaning princess, which totally has shades of the horrible fan trope that Discord fell because Celestia rejected him... ugh. Give me a guy who turned to the dark side in his quest for stronger magics to protect his people, any day. Or even the more traditional "stronger magics so he could rule." I'd rather have a bad dude who stayed bad who came from the pony race than a good dude who turned bad who was born from an "evil" race.
It's nothing huge, but for some reason I really love the quiet idea of Discord adjusting to company with Gilda as a housemate. If they both survive this I hope they still live together, odd-couple style.
I really hope you use the Tirek comic as canon, since it has Discord as a courtier in Tirek's father's court. I have no idea what he could be doing there, dressed up fairly fancy and looking serious, but I would love to find out what your idea is.
Mixing up your dashes there, huh?
Well, I suppose Discord does what he wants.
static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Growing+meat+on+a+farm_2b33d0_3648738.jpg
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This wasn't actually established -- we know Anon killed a lot of changelings that day, but Chrysalis' death hasn't been confirmed (or denied.)
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Huh. Learn something new every day. I must have mispronounced it as a kid and then that's the version that's stuck with me all these years, because I did in fact think it was Yggsdrasil my entire life. I will probably go back and change it.
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Umbrums aren't portrayed as an evil race, though. Not in the sense you're talking about. Sombra himself clearly demonstrates that they had the capacity for moral choice. Even if the whole race including him were, in fact, evil, it's still clearly a decision that they make. The only thing that seems to suggest they're inherently evil is that friendship magic like the Crystal Heart's is harmful to them, which, yeah, is pretty bad, but the same thing is true of Discord in your own stories, even if the exact effects are different. Sombra going bad doesn't mean that umbrums are all destined to be evil. It just means that Celestia-esque plans like Amore's don't always succeed. Sombra's decision to follow the rest of his people into darkness was on him. He could have been the redeemer, and Reflections showed that in another world, he was.
And even the orcs in Lord of the Rings weren't wholly evil either, if you look into the whole of the Legendarium rather than just the books. Tolkien had trouble reconciling the concept with his Catholic worldview, and later specified that there were a few orc traders and farmers around, living peacefully. They're just rare.
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All right, I'll accept that. I have problems with the connection between "dark" and "evil" that MLP keeps making in the light of Luna's existence and role. And all I know of Tolkien is from the novels themselves, plus what friends who are more obsessed than me have told me. :-)
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Well, let's not equate one use of the word "darkness" with another here. I think it's fair to say Luna has magic that causes darkness (in the sense of an absence of light), but not dark magic. Dark magic would be stuff like the Alicorn Amulet, or Nightmare Forces possession, stuff that is quantifiably corrupting and harmful. Dark magic would also be what corrupted the princesses and later Sombra in Reflections.
But the magic that Sombra uses normally could just be related to darkness in the mundane sense, and it could be something else about umbrum biology that makes harmonic magic inimical to them. I mean, looking at his demonstrated powers, only his fear spells seem to actually cause real harm. Everything else is just a scarier-looking version of spells that we'd have no problem with otherwise, many of which we've even seen other characters do. Blocking unicorn magic may seem sinister when Sombra makes black crystals grow on a pony's horn, but the Equestria Games had a magic security gate that did basically the same thing.
Or alternatively, umbrums may use darkness in both senses of the term, and all umbrums including Sombra are subject to corruption from a young age because dark magic is simply what they have an affinity for (which could explain why they seem universally evil despite apparently having free will). Maybe the good Sombra avoided corruption by simply keeping his magic use to a minimum. Or possibly he removed his dark magic from himself completely and put it somewhere else, allowing him to safely use harmonic magic. In fact, that may be what corrupted the alternate Celestia in the first place - she ran afoul of the darkness that Sombra tore out of his own soul.
After reading everything and all the comments, I'm now stuck waiting for the next chapter like everyone else... curses.
This story not only changed how I look at Discord (kinda. Tweaked really) but also the entire world of the show. And I now have even more reasons to hate Gary Stus. And maybe be distrustul of the few people unlucky to be named Anonsen and such... maybe.
Welp, anywhoo, this story is amazing, your Discord is amazing, and your head canons are amazing. I'm so going to take some of those head canons as my own now. They make too much sense not to.
I get the feeling the elements of Selfishness and Hatred might just come back and bite him in the bum.
I kind of have a theory that maybe one of them (or both!) might have become part of the "Element of Protection", and that the 'wrongness' Discord feels is that Disharmony has been twisted into a parody of Harmony.
Is this on hiatus/dead? ):
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Wow, are there really people who think that because a story hasn't updated in a month it's dead?
I last updated this sucker in mid-July. No, it's not dead, and I'm not even sure why anyone would think so. It updates anywhere between every two weeks to two months. I have 12 other incompletes I'm rotating through.
6294476 Soooo... that's a no? :P
But seriously- Twelve uncompleted fics to update? Wow, that's a lot of expectations and work to keep up with!
... But why did you keep on making fics you need to update after the fifth one?!
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Because my imagination is bigger than my fingers?
Because I have a shameful lack of resistance to new ideas?
Because I wrote next to nothing from 2010-2012 and I'm making up for lost time?
Take your pick. :-)
6294526 I chose all of them!
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Do you dislike my Night Shadows, then? They were intended as an exercise in writing a "pure evil" race.
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Even they are not. They're amorality incarnate and they feed on negative emotion, but being hungry doesn't make them evil. They cannot survive without dark emotion and destruction to feed on. They are predators, and ponies have every justification for driving them off or destroying them, because no one is obligated to let others feed on them, even if the alternative is the death of the others. But they're not causing evil for the sake of being evil. They're causing evil because they're hungry.
You've pretty much summed up why I can't bring myself to believe in anarcho-capitalism. Absent any law to protect property, or even life, it rather quickly descends into mere anarchy. Usually it then climbs out of anarchy by developing into something vaguely feudal (as with the Somali clans), but in the case of Griffonstone, the clan structure is too weak to go very far in that direction.
This is probably the only reason that the Griffons are still able to keep living in a city at all -- though I did think that the city looked somewhat depopulated. I can see from your chapter that you aren't the only one who got a "Mogadishu" vibe from Griffonstone.
Re-reading this, I realize that this explains why Gilda beomes angry at Anon. She thinks of Rainbow Dash as family, and Dashie's effectively been both raped and betrayed by Anon.
That's an interesting explanation, and I like it. There are lots of other reasons why the far North and South are dangerous environments for Ponykind in my world, but those are interesting ones. In my world the far North is dominated by the Lady of the Ice, the Windigos,, the Frost Giants and other hostile things, but it also makes sense that it might be a place where Pony magic starts to fail as well. The far South is dominated by the Shoggoths, which oddly enough makes it less hostile, as my Shoggoths aren't all that malign -- they won't let their lands be conquered, but are sapient and willing to open diplomatic relations and live in mutual peace with other lands. (Within the context of such a pact, someone like Fat-Face would be seen as a criminal by both sides).
Does your concept of the Caribou as hostile evil mages come from The Fall of Equestria?
That's how it works in my world too -- the Crystal Heart is morally neutral (as implied by the fact that Sombra could use it to reinforce his power as well. What it is that hurts Discord is that it's Harmonious (and Lawful). In Divine Jealousy its proximity was painful to Discord before he was at all evil; later, when he became more evil, it was even more painful to him, but the big reason he avoids it is that it makes it difficult for him to use his magic, which makes him vulnerable -- and the old Crystal-Imperials knew this and would have taken advantage of it to strike down their hated enemy.
I'm getting more into Sombra's philosophy now because I have to summarize and write excerpts from The Codex of Shades; what's more it has to be well-written and present its case logically-enough to tempt Moon Dancer (and previously, to have tempted Princess Luna) to mess with Shadow magic. Moon Dancer is both alienated and naive, but she's not about to just pick up the Villain Ball nor even the Idiot Ball -- if the argument is "it'll take over your mind and turn you evil! EVIL!! EVIL!!!" she would just give the book to her father Night Dancer who would put it in the Restricted Archives of the Night Watch for her.
My previous characterization of Moon Dancer, and even more so Luna, and for that matter Crimson Quartz as well, have them as highly-intelligent, fundamentally-honorable Ponies who are at risk of going (in the case of Moon Dancer) or actually went down a dark path because they thought that it would turn out better for them and for others about whom they cared than their original choices. It would totally violate their characters as I've previously shown them if they just went "Ooh, evil shiny!" and aligned with the Shadows just "because" (and as for Moon Dancer ... but I can't say, even in spoilers).
So when I got to Crimson Quartz/Sombra's motivations, I found that I had to actually devise plausible motivations which would turn an originally good and honorable and even idealistic Prince of the Crystal Empire into a warlock tyrant inviting in demons from beyond space and time to secure his power. Fortunately, I'd already done that (even though I keep putting off continuing Corruption at Midnight) so my main problem is merely becoming showing it credibly in his style in The Codex of Shades). I need to present his argument for why he now holds the moral philosophy he originally professed as Crimson Quartz, the ideal of The Harmony, to be superseded by something he sees as more true in the light of subsequent experience.
When one shows a villain from the outside, he may appear to just be EVIL. But from the inside, he needs credible motivations for his actions, and the goals those actions serve. One of the problems, of course, was that Sombra was never given in show any credible motivations -- because Celestia did not tell Twilight his backstory, nor did Sombra ever have dialogue with Twilight (that's the odd thing about the episode -- Sombra and Twilight never directly confronted one another at all; it was Spike and Cadance who finished him him off in "No mortal Pony may slay me" fashion (Spike being mortal but not a Pony, and Cadance being a Pony but not mortal, even though no one spoke the line).
In contrast, every other villain got to explain their motivation, either explicitly or implicitly, because there was dialogue and/or scenes shown from their POV's. Sombra was the only one who was just appeared to be pure gloating evil -- in my storyverse, that's because at that point what he was manifesting was mostly Night Shadow rather than Pony (Penumbra is his remaining Pony nature, which he uses as an emissary and spy because Penumbra still mostly understands how normal Ponies think). And you're right -- even when I write the Night Shadows I consider their motivations, which are understandable in their terms, but they don't bother to talk to most Ponies.
A very dark society -- rather like cyberpunk science fiction, really. And I think logically-construable from what was shown by the episode. This would also explain why some intelligent and passionate Griffons -- like Gilda -- would be very dissatisfied with this culture, and why some Griffons would rather live in or spend a lot of time in Equestria.
I like the way in which this causes Discord to come to a realization.
I also like the way you write Gilda's insult-laden dialogue.
And that's what did it. Not only is it not natural for Gilda to hate Dashie as much as she was doing, but I think there are also strong elements here of "I'm the only one allowed to hurt Rainbow Dash!" and "Rape is a Special Kind of Evil" in Gilda's reaction. Especially given Gilda's origin story, it's very obvious in the main universe that Gilda loves Dashie (at least as a friend) and that her anger sprang from jealousy over Pinkie taking her attention in the first place. She would be furious at anyone compelling Rainbow Dash to be their slave, especially sexual slave. The more so if Gilda's love for Rainbow Dash was in any way romantic.
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Yup. Even libertarianism recognizes that the thing that must be ironclad, that the government must enforce, is property rights. And for a government to be able to enforce anything, it must have a means of funding that enforcement.
Yes. Specifically, the Caribou found a way to generate enormous amounts of power from sacrifice without actually killing anyone. It turns out, if you sacrifice a child's sapience, you get quite a lot of power -- not as much as you'd get from killing them, but if you can do it to half your population, that makes you very, very powerful. If it weren't for their constant battle with the reindeer (yes, those are the same species, but don't tell either of them that if you like your face attached) they probably would have the power to expand and wreak havoc on the neighboring nations. (The reindeer also have an incredible lot of power but they gather it through far more harmonious means.)
No, I think you were more on the mark with Mogadishu. In a cyberpunk, there is a lot of art, a lot of body modification, a lot of technology and creativity, and generally a big contrast between ordinary people working for powerful corporations that function effectlvely as government, and the class of people that fall in the cracks, the independent operators who, because corporations are the law, are essentially outlawed by their status as freelancers. Discord could have a lot of fun with a cyberpunk setting; it has that combination of extremely orderly, lawful, controlled, regimented lives that he would love to disrupt, and a population of the disharmonious ready, willing and eager to participate in the disruption. People in cyberpunk are good at what they do, or they don't get paid. In Griffonstone, most griffons are terrible at what they do, because being good at something and making a lot of money would attract the attention of organized crime, so why try to be good at anything? There's a lot more fundamental despair and unhappiness in Griffonstone than in a cyberpunk setting; cyberpunks play at emo nihilism, but in Griffonstone, nihilism is such a fundamental way of life no one even bothers to talk about it.
And this is of course exactly why Discord brought it up. I often think that Celestia and Discord have perceptual abilities that match up to the questions of the Vorlons and the Shadows; Celestia can look at you and tell who you are, which in Equestria also suggests what your destiny will be; Discord can look at you and tell what you want. He can be as successful a manipulator as he is with as little understanding of how ponies, or anyone, actually think as he has, because he can tell what you want and he can sense disharmonious emotions, so he totally has the cheat codes to manipulating you. He just needs to push buttons until he finds the right ones. In this case, priming Gilda against her knee-jerk (and mostly Anon imposed) hatred of Dash by suggesting that her betrayal of Gilda was for the sake of her nation and was the only thing she could safely do sets Gilda up to start feeling sympathy for Dash again, and then telling the truth about what Anon is doing but emphasizing the sexual elements gets her outraged on Dash's behalf.
Excelent story... To bad Discord can't do the same he did to Blue Blood to Celestia, that or let Chrysalis in his team.
Even so, it surprised me a couple of things, like for example that Discord did not try to send Anon to Winnie... He could say that "Winnie have a Element" and let Anon with his sword to try to reclaim the element. Of course is not a element of Harmony, but well...
Also... Is Spike going to be a bearer of a Element or is going to be forgotten? After all Twilight choose Anon instead of him.