My name's PJ. I'm from New York. I write pony fics. I go to parties with bronies. I'm not good at self-introduction.
With the cutie mark map having inspired her, Twilight Sparkle is traveling Equestria to make new friends. Now her hooves have taken her to a forest where a zebra village is located.
But the zebras give her a cold welcome, and when she leaves, a strange illness starts striking the zebra villagers.
Cover art by Grieffon
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First Like!
Awesome story! 
So they just...mutilate any Zebricorn that comes into existence, and Twilight just accepts this? They cut off a natural part of their body and will continue to do so! And Twilight Moon is considered as a legend of Strife despite the fact that magic is what helped them to thrive so much in the first place..
Seriously, I can't get over the fact that she heard that they willingly mutilate future children, see the marks herself, and basically accepts it.
Im actually quite intrigued as to what happened with twilights ancestors. So im hoping for a sequel to this at some point.
Something is missing here.
Change of speaker, new paragraph.
"Mainline" is an odd choice of words here, and doesn't feel right.
Aside from a sparse assortment of errors, your sentences are well-constructed and the parts of the story are put together in a way that works rather well. The issue is more the story itself. Although there is a great deal of potential conflict here, the actual tension as the story is written feels quite low. The reason, I think, is that every obstacle Twilight encounters is resolved in short order and without substantial effort, pain, or resistance. Even the sacrifice of part of her horn, while part of the consequence is shown, carries no real weight because her loss has no negative impact on what she does or how she feels.
Overall, the experience of this story is a fairly well-written exploration into one small facet of one Zebra culture. That really isn't enough to carry it, though, and there's little else of interest to be had. (This makes the application of the Adventure tag rather questionable, but I don't actually care about that so much as the story's content.)
It's possible the story suffers from being told in the wrong perspective, but I think the third-person limited perspective here is simply misused. There's a great deal of potential intimacy with the character's thoughts, feelings, inner and external conflicts, and their overall personal situation, that really ought to have been used in telling Twilight's story here, because it could have added a lot to the story. That's usually the point of this perspective.
I'm giving it a solid "meh," and I'm a little disappointed because I've seen better from you.
6845848
And what is Twilight supposed to do about it? She has three options, really:
a) Fight them verbally. She would probably be the better at putting the right words together, but that doesn't matter, because this tradition is based strongly in emotion, and they will just entrench themselves in their position.
b) Fight them physically/magically. She would probably win (barring any other aces up the zebras' sleeves), as not all of them would fight her and by this point she's not completely new to fighting. And the zebra villagers would entrench themselves in their position and find ways to subvert her 'might makes right' authority, which would not be difficult because there are too many of them for her and perhaps a small contingent of Royal Guards to keep track of. Furthermore, that's simply not Twilight.
c) Gradually undermine their tradition through non-aggression and acts of friendship. See: This story. There isn't really enough here to get a good idea of what's next, but the story appears only intended to be a start to things.
6846136
My problem is that her narrative never once mentions it, she never really thinks on it at all to the point of it being glossed over despite this being a surprisingly huge thing. I know she likely wouldn't have done anything about it, but she never once thinks there's a problem there to begin with.
The whole "Sins of the Fathers" coming to the point where every child is mutilated of a natural part of their body just really, really bugs me that this is somehow just a sideline issue.
I enjoy the story, but that bit of lore basically just made me cringe with how it was.
6846167
I must have misunderstood your initial comment.
You're right that there's a serious problem with how Twilight is presented in the story. Her failure to react in any meaningful way is an issue, as you say.
I would love to hear Twilight Moon's story!
Will that ever be a thing, PJ?
6847126
Probably not. Full disclosure: this was originally the subplot to a larger novel about Twilight finding her ancestors and there being a devious twist and it turned out that Princess Celestia was using her and...and frankly, it was garbage. The new characters weren't working, the twist was contrived, and I couldn't figure out how to make it interesting after it happened, which was, like, half the story. So I stopped. But this part seemed to stand on its own, so I made a short out of it.
This is a nice allegory about the evils of sexual genital mutilation. We should not sexually mutilate the genitals of boys and girls.
Let me start by saying I liked this story. There's a lot of potential here, which is great, but my standards go up in proportion, and I tend to nitpick more.
So yeah, as others like Wroth 6845848 said, the whole "remove horns a birth" thing is disturbing and Twilight needs to be disturbed by it. This is doubly true because the parts before that go into some amazingly wonderful detail about how horns are connected into the brain, how important they are, and we're shown just how much pain Twilight's sacrifice of a small sliver causes her.
The other thing, as Walibo 6909974 mentions is the FGM thing. I do not know if the parallels you've drawn here are intentional, but if not, then I'm afraid you're going to need to google a very barbaric practice to fully understand how this story may potentially be seen by some. Glossing over it, even in metaphor, is not likely to be viewed well. Now, I understand that in-world, Twilight really can't do much about it. Those amputations already happened, and she can't just force her views on another culture outright. But stepping back, and viewing it as a story, there's an assumption among most people that certain subjects have to be taken seriously, even in fiction. I'd posit this is one.
All that said, I really did enjoy the read, and felt it was part of something larger. Reading your notes, I see it was. I think a sequel would be interesting, either following Twilight's continued journey, or maybe even the aftermath in the village, maybe from Zoe's perspective. Heh... can't help but think of "Zoe's Tale" which retold Old Man's War from a different perspective.
6945027
¡Sexual genital mutilation is bad for BOYS and girls!
Good work, very interesting.
6909974 Yeah! Stop turning dicks into janes!
(Seriously, you didn't expect ME to sense this conversation? I, the Troll God?)
bitchspot.jadedragononline.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/jesus_troll_face.png
7306590
We sexually mutilate the genitals of boys, intersexuals (children born with ambiguous genitalia), and girls. Sometimes, when we sexually mutilate boys, the boy looses his penis, along with the ability to feel sexual pleasure. Sometimes, the surgeons "fix" the mistake by castrating the boys and making the scrotum look like a vulva. At about 13 years of age, when the boy become a teenager, they start hormone-replacement therapy with female hormones and take a section of small intestines and make a fauxvagina. This is rarely satisfactory because of the lack of sexual sensation and the majority of these fauxwomen feel like men in the bodies of fauxwomen. Here is an example of a typical case:
David Peter Reimer
7307070 Oh blah blah blah. All you mortals will be dead a billion billion years before I even think about nonexistence!
You put soooooooooooooooo much emphasis on those petty hormonal tingles you're all addicted to!
6909974
I don't think so. What this village is doing is morally questionable, but it's not the equivalent of genital mutilation. Right or wrong, the village has reasons for removing the horn: Those horns give Zebras superpowers, and the superpowered Zebras caused a lot of pain and misery. We humans don't have that excuse!
6945027
Walabio has a point in the reply he made to that post: You shouldn't have said "FGM" (female genital mutilation):
If you distinguish between male and female genital mutilation, because you (rightly or wrongly) think female genital mutilation of Africa and the middle-east is more extreme then the male genital mutilation in the United States: This isn't really about gender. This is about how much of the genitals are being removed, and how debilitating that removal is. So you should say "extreme genital mutilation", not "female genital mutilation".
11432968
In the Eemian, 130 thousand to 115 thousand years ago. the average temperature was warmer than now. Our ancestors failed to take off technologically. Our ancestors were beneath a critical intellectual threshold. Our intelligence puts us at existential risk (genetically engineered pandemics, nuclear weapons, AI, et cetera). Maybe, we should lobotomize everyone.
11433138
I don't see what that has to do with the story, or with the post you're replying to.
11433155
The zebras reduce the potential of their foals for protecting their civilization.
11433162
For the sake of the argument, I'll grant that human intelligence is creating a grave threat of human extinction:
The zebras operate on an exceedingly small scale, a single village! Even if we had a brain surgery to reliably reduce IQ rates to a certain level, how are we going to perform that operation on billions of people? We can't, the scale is too large. And even if we could: By doing so, there'd be no one left smart enough to perform the operation.
11433263
The lobotomies are a rhetorical tool for helping us analyze the morality of what the zebras do —— ¡not a literal suggestion!