Discussion/crosstalk chapter
I'm adding this in so that readers can leave general commentary and back-and-forth chat without cluttering up entry #23's comments. If you want to comment on a specific story, make sure you're writing your comment from within that chapter view. 
Stats
Page generated in 0.027 seconds
Total duration
1,029 users online
1,835,800 hits today, 2,921,617 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Jackson Pollack, eh?
6461959
Plus the piece's title, which I
It seemed somewhat appropriate given the nature of the collection.
blatantly stole fromwas reminded of by one of the entrants.6461966
What's it called?
6462003
Source link pops up if you hover over the photo, but to save you a click: it's named after Shakespeare's homage in The Tempest to a drowned elder — "Full fathom five thy father lies ..."
6462021
I thought the obvious Shakespearean allusion to draw would have been Hotspur, but Bill Shakes is solid gold, either way. This should be good....
EDIT: And now I see #4 has a Romeo and Juliet reference. Man, the Bard is really on board today.
For me:
"Whodunnit?" is the question I've been asking since I read the original back during the Writeoff. So I think that's what my comments will focus on: does the piece answer the question in a way that I can buy? But I'll probably remark on other aspects of each entry, too, if I know me...
Mike
6462201 6462269
I'm definitely doing the same thing for the "left brain" portion of the judging (that's half of your points!), but PLEASE don't let me stop you! It'll be a useful way for me to cross-check my scoring (since whether a solution has contradictions / whether it offers a solid explanation should be objectively measurable against the facts), and having submitters launch that conversation themselves means that I'm not stifling discussion by providing a "right" answer from above.
6462285
Adagio actually is mentioned, at the end of Sonata's chapter.
Fun fact: for a while I thought the big twist was that this would be a Starswirl the Bearded origin story, but that theory seemed untenable the more I read and studied it.
6462531
Starcraft. It's a strategy video game where you can play as either human colonists, the Zerg hive (think John Carpenter's The Thing) or Protoss, your standard glowy Star Trek-esque godlike aliens. You pick your side, build a base, and blast the crap out of the other sides, which, now that I think of it, actually does make a cunning sort of sense, given this story's themes of isolation and an encroaching threat.
6462562
Huh:
Okay, thanks. Being so out of touch with pop. culture, I've developed an ability to recognize when I'm missing something even when I have no idea what it is I'm missing.
Mike
6462700
True, but he did ask.
6463421 Tommy did say that someone tripped over him at half past midnight, but he never explicitly said it was Peridot. At least not to my mind anyway, lol.
In the first two chunks of his chapter, Tommy criticizes unicorns in general. Then, he criticizes Peridot for her treatment of the lone night Guard. Finally, he says 'feck em both', which to me aims at Peridot and at unicorns in general. At that point, he says 'gonna wake me up by trippin...', which I took to be somewhat vague. He was asleep and drunk, and there is more than one hornhead in town, so it may not have been Peridot specifically who tripped on him.
^^Again, just my reading of it. I could be wrong, lol.
6463413 I've noticed that with a few of the entries and, while some of those were overall better than others, I found I kind of liked the idea of not laying out a full solution; of not knowing for sure what happened (or at least not saying so up front)
Granted, mysteries exist to be investigated and solved, but not all mysteries get a resolution. (or at least one that we can feel solid about). Take Jimmy Hoffa: We have tons and tons of evidence, years of investigation... and all we have for it are a pile of semi-solid theories and an even bigger pile of guesses. Much ink has been spilled over Hoffa's fate, yet all those authors can do is speculate, and perhaps chart the best accounting that they can, incomplete as it is doomed to be.
So, Nightmare, Rosetta, and a few other 'dreamers' who did not fully solve things may still have a story to tell. They lack the direct answers many seek, but sometimes, that only deepens and enriches the mythos of the mystery itself.
/Just a 'thinking aloud' moment :)
6463737
I know from experience writing this thing that even if you have a "look, here's what happened" down pretty solidly in your mind it can be difficult to make that stick with your idea for a solution with maximum "right brain" potential. Obviously the best entry will maximize both, but in my case there was a definite balancing / optimization thing going on.
6462453
6463308
Thanks, folks!
I have one of the world's worst memories, and I have this odd way of reading, too, I've noticed. If a story grabs me and carries me off, I'll forgive it any number of smaller faults. But if I start stumbling while reading a piece, I come all unbalanced and start seeing more stumbling blocks--even when it turns out on later inspection that I was just imagining them. I had other problems with #1, so Adagio not being in the original became a problem despite Adagio actually being in the original. But #14, my favorite entry, had me from the first lines, so the narrator actually and in fact not being in the original story doesn't bother me at all.
It's why I hope I'm never put in charge of anything important.
Mike
6464004
The fact that Spotlight specifically says, "Two weeks after the night without a moon," explains what happened at the wall, and then concludes with, "And now Peridot," implies -- to me -- a gap of time between what happened at the wall and Peridot's death.
6464255
In Horizon's contest notice, under "Right Brain: creativity", he says, " I want to remove as many restrictions on content as possible. Write prose, or poetry, or any combination of the two. Make your entry the Nightmare's own dream, or their report to their supervisor, or a conversation after the city's fall, or a conversation before the city's fall ... or anything that makes sense within the premise!"
The original was in free verse, but now (Luna knows) anything goes.
6463737
6464001
You know, in hindsight, I really should have offered a additional (consolation?) prize to the best left-brain story and the best right-brain story, regardless of their overall ranking. The way that I structured the contest definitely did force authors into those tradeoffs, and there are a few entries here which I think could have been even stronger by ignoring the constraints of the contest and going full left or full right.
(But I'm still really impressed by the output!)
If I get any more offers of prize support, or end up with a little more discretionary budget, I might add those prizes in.
6464014
The story gives zero textual evidence that Adagio was the Nightmare. Given that, I'm pretty sure the writer simply either messed up and forgot/didn't read the rules very carefully that they were supposed to write about the Nightmare, or decided that they really liked the idea and simply rode in on sheer chutzpah, but I don't think Adagio is supposed to be the nightmare at all in the story, because, as 6463442 pointed out, there's zero evidence she can hear dreams.
As Horizon noted, he is looking for the best final chapter, so maybe someone was just being ballsy, because they felt that making Adagio the villain was the best solution.
Or maybe they just forgot the rules by the time they entered.
6463723
The entry was using her tripping over him as evidence for its conclusion, though.
6463737
The best final chapter is the best final chapter, though; it needs to feel like a satisfying conclusion, not just someone rambling or "rocks fall, everyone dies"; neither is particularly good at wrapping things up, and the latter conclusion makes everything else just not matter - if the ending is just "everyone died, so it doesn't matter who did it", that makes all of your effort spent trying to figure out what exactly happened feel like a waste.
6464638
Well, thinking about the story hints, there are... a lot of them. I don't think I've seen a single story yet which uses every single hint (though of course, some of them are probably just red herrings/unrelated).
Hotspur is the one who finds that Peridot is missing
Peridot is hated by the nocturne
Peridot is seen as a troublemaker by Majority Vote
Peridot tripped over Tommyrun in the middle of the night
Peridot is at peace in the kelp in the water
Peridot is still dreaming
Someone who was with the minotaurs is in town
Someone who WASN'T Spotlight threw a spear at U Low Kene, then let Spotlight take a beating for it
Dawn Guard claimed he saw a minotaur
Sunspot is worried about spears being used for sympathetic spellcasting
Sonata is innocent, but Sailcloth's chapter notes that "they" believe a kelpie pulled Peridot into the water
Moonstruck felt drained after spending the night with Littlemoth
Littlemoth is worried about someone finding "her" and being discovered, but because of Tommyrun and Moonstruck's chapters, couldn't have been the one to murder Peridot, so it has to be something else - but Littlemoth clearly did something bad
Littlemoth thinks in a different way from the other ponies in town
Tommyrun is a veteran of the opium wars
Sailcloth mentions the "lotus-flower"
Shooting Star confronts a dreamwalker, who may or may not do something to them, or may or may not have escaped
We know for meta-reasons that the sirens feed off of discord
We know for meta-reasons that changelings feed off love (incidentally, this totally implies that changelings and sirens would naturally hate each other)
Horizon told us that there may be dreamwalkers of all three races in the colony
And I'm probably forgetting a ton of other things.
There are a number of ponies who are outright ruled out by the narrative, but there's quite a bit of latitude, and using all of the hints would be pretty hard - some may just be innocent or misinterpretations by characters and not really be important details.
Honorable Li Kao and The gems glitter like blood in the sand both take passing details and make a lot of them - the Li Kao story makes the whole story be ultimately about the opium trade, with the colony being a trading post which is forcing opium onto the Qilinese, in an analog to the Opium Wars and China. (This story also went way up in my evaluation after I realized there were multiple opium references in the story)
The Adagio story relies on meta-knowledge (that the sirens feed on discord) and a passing reference to Adagio, along with the accusation that Peridot was murdered by a kelpie.
In both cases, the writer decided that the only reason these things were mentioned is because they were clearly relevant to the story, and provided a motive for someone to sow discord in the town for their own political ends.
But it is easy for both of these to be irrelevant background details as well, just flavor/show references, so they're easy to ignore if you want to write a more land-bound solution.
I don't know what Horizon's real solution was, but it wouldn't surprise me from his past mystery stories if the solution was fairly complicated - The Mystery of the Cowled Changelings and Hearth Swarming Eve both had fairly complicated solutions, and the latter in particular had a number of huge red herrings.
But there were four things that I felt were very big dangling threads:
There's someone who was with the minotaurs who is in town now, but no one in town makes mention of who it is, and we don't see them dream.
Spotlight wasn't at his guard post, but someone there threw a spear at U Low Kene - and then never fessed up to it, allowing Spotlight to get a lashing. Something strange happened there, and it is a discrepency between Spotlight and U Low Kene's stories - a discrepancy we have no reason to disbelieve.
Likewise, Littlemoth is guilty about SOMETHING. But what? Who? Is she worried about the real Littlemoth's body being discovered? Is she worried about Palei Hantu being discovered? Or is she actually worried about them finding Peridot, and even though she didn't do it, she knows who did and she is either an indirect accomplice, or the pony who did it, upon being caught, will either give away her shenanigans or stop being able to protect her?
Shooting Star was either attacked by or saw a dreamwalker while he was sleeping.
All of these struck me as major unexplained plot points/discrepancies, and thus, they seem like they have to be explained by whatever the solution is. Littlemoth's chapter exists soley to demonstrate she's freaking out about being discovered, and U Low Kene's chapter introduces two major discrepencies (the spear being thrown and the presence of someone from outside in town), so I can't help but feel they have to be critical to the mystery in some way. Likewise, Shooting Star's chapter seems to exist soley to establish someone is messing around in people's dreams.
6464758
I would've laughed, but I needed to construct additional pylons.
I just finished reading the full collection, and I have to say this is some impressive work all around. Kudos to everyone who submitted something. Still, I'm a little confused and dismayed that some otherwise beautiful entries didn't bother to explain whodunit, and to me that sort of defeats the purpose of functioning as a final chapter... Unless of course I missed someone being too subtle and sneaky for me. That's certainly a possibility...
My runner-up idea for what happened, which I didn't see explored here, is that the at least one guard's dream is a complete fabrication, since they should've apparently been trained to detect dream incursions but showed no obvious signs of such. Granted it's only said that the Night Guard get this training, but leaving out the Day Guard seems like a silly and dangerous oversight
Also, this poem is totally relevant after consuming 23 poetic explanations of the same event.
There was some pretty good stuff in here. A lot of different theories that I had never considered, and then a bunch of people who all agreed with me on numerous points.
I look forward to what comes.
6467710
Except that the Lunar agent is explicitly not necessarily a bat pony. Rosetta's tribe is not identified.
[redacted]
I wish everypony the best of luck. Despite my critiquing, I really enjoyed all of the stories I managed to get through. A lot of excellent work went into each of these and that deserves to be celebrated. (Especially whoever did the image entry, which must have taken a very long time, and is both poetic and stunningly beautiful. And is, I promise, not mine.)
6468451
Yeah, TQ, don't bow out or anything just because of a discussion in the comments. I hear you, though--it's way too easy to get sucked a little too deep into this one. All credit to the author for that, I suppose.
6468451
Please stay in the running, TQ! I won't say if you did or didn't review my entry, but I did hope that this voting period would include other entrants cross-examining how well we all followed Horizon's clues. Still, since this whole thing is the literary equivalent of a bridge-building contest as opposed to regular free-form storytelling, I think we're all a little too close to (and invested in) our own solutions to really dig deep.
Since I read every last entry, I can say without reservation that I enjoyed reading yours
6468414
No, I think you're right that that's the point of that bit.
That said, some folks, shall we say, creatively reinterpreted it, and I didn't really feel like it was THAT discordant with things as long as it was two unicorns.
6468451
You don't need to apologize for the feedback. The only thing I really took issue with was your statement that the other writers hadn't read the story at all, which I found kind of irksome - obviously they had read the story.
And equally obviously, EVERYONE missed something. I don't think a single story didn't overlook at least one clue.
Having crosstalk on whether or not something is or is not wrong is not a bad thing at all, and listing out things which are wrong, and then having other people chime in, is good times.
6468680
6469163
It doesn't have anything to do with being in the running. Pulling out would just add more drama, and it was stupid and selfish for me to mention the idea. I was really upset when I wrote that, and I do wish I hadn't entered the contest. I'm glad I read horizon's story and I'm glad I wrote my entry, but the idea of choosing a "right" answer to a slightly-vague puzzle is clearly not the kind of thing I'm good at being flexible about.
Besides, we all know Zergling Drone is going to win this thing.
6469334
You're absolutely right. Statements like that were completely uncalled for. You were correct to reprimand me.
Somepony whose artistry and critique I have a lot of respect for has already emailed me to tell me that retracting my feedback was self-centered drama used to focus attention on myself, appears to be a personal passive-aggressive attack against you, and was hurtful to horizon in particular.
Whether or not anypony believes me, this wasn't my intent. I removed my feedback because it would have been absolutely wrong to leave it up. My reviews were overly critical despite being highly subjective, and it wasn't right for me to post them in the first place. I still feel that leaving them up would have been worse than taking them down.
I've done more than enough damage and I want this to stop, so I won't be reading or responding to anything else here.
6468237
That makes a lot of sense, thank you.
6468237
Yeah, I really think the author should've italicized that "loathesome shrew" quip, because it was definitely supposed to be an ironic usage.
6474731
What if I were to write a fic in the comments of "Never the Final Word"? Would something explode?
6474779 You would have passed... the event horizon.
6474788
As opposed to the present contest, best described as a "horizon event."
YOU SEE WHAT WE'VE BEEN REDUCED TO, HORIZON?!? YOU SEE WHAT THIS STORY HAS DONE TO US?!?
6474890
Why can I only give this one upvote?
6474930
Well, you could always use sockpuppet accounts. Not that anyone here regularly uses obvious sockpuppets or anything.
6475013
>.>
<.<
o.o
Of course.
6475047
I object to being described as an "obvious" sockpuppet.
My icon is nothing like 6475013's.
6475808
Ugh. It's just one big incestuous family among you FIMFiction elites keeping the common man down with your backroom deals and your favors, isn't it?
6475799
I prefer this one:
6475890
Well, we ARE Zerg, so...
6475910
#EarthForEarthlings #WallAroundSpace #DonaldTrumpsHead2164