7055836 whoops

...Wow...

7055867 original ending was actually bleaker

7055876
And it makes me wonder how.

Besides Sam offing herself or Celestia offing her. Or bad dude winning.

7055883 If you really want to know, the point of divergence was her capturing Zecora. The original version made me feel... Sordid. I think some of that horror is reflected in the scene as it is. Celestia wasn't present and the suicide took a different form--she deliberately strode into town delirious and losing it from all the magic, hoping to be judged for her crimes... Only to realize horrified that these gentle townsfolk were actually concerned for the blubbering wounded Everfree creature who seemed harmless and that no one would ever be able to deal with her as she should be dealt. She would get away with it.

I wonder what Celestia chose.

I don't know how this made me feel. I kinda like that.

7056002
If the circumstances turn out right (seems like a difficult task to not seem contrived), the sequel could be a dark TCB fic, with a more sympathetic Celestia. Not that terrible caricature Xenolestia, but terrible in her own right, yet neither the physical god that Chatoyance writes.

I wish I had time and better writing skills. I keep having all these ideas bounce around my head that end up going nowhere.

Kudos to you, Cynewulf, for giving us this piece.

So, it's Absolution a sequel? Couldn't find it in your stories. Are you going to do one, telling of Sam's life in equestria, her eventual recovery? Because Celestia judged humanity based on Sam... But I severely doubt she'd condemn Sam, no matter the future she chose for humankind. Not only she suffered for her ponies, but Twilight considers her a friend. Sunbut might be a lot of things, but she's not so callous, I believe.

Anyway, this was beautiful, and beautifully sad. Good job with the feels, Cyne, good job

7056440 This is the pony version of Absolution, which I recommend in general if you liked this but which doesn't have as much to do with the Pioneer

No plans for a sequel. If I did... I really have no idea.

7056132 Glad you liked it.

I was actually pretty big into TCB years ago, less because of the Chatoyance-ian rhetoric and much more for the joy of discovery and danger and first contact and I like stories about characters in a new world with little to no frame of reference. I may reread some of her stories soon and see if I still like them or if they've aged poorly. Her rhetoric eventually overshadowed the discovery/adaptation/first contact elements for me and I didn't like that rhetoric. Seems hypocritical, looking at this, but for me I felt a bit uncomfortable with what was essentially a perversion of the concept of grace and a misanthropy that was without hesitation. I think people are bad but I don't hate them. Quite the opposite. Chatoyance hates humanity straight up and she's pretty disturbingly open about it.

That being said, a sequel would probably have to balance Samantha's slow recovery with Celestia's decision regarding the fate of humanity. I think that once she was sure Sam was a gibbering murdering wackjob, Celestia would probably send her with a guard and a nurse to Ponyville and ask Twilight and co to try and help her be at home. Move her into the library. (Samantha would have loved that in the old world.) It could be cool, I just don't think I could write it for a few reasons. The biggest being

I have no idea what Celestia does.

7056434

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

7056002 I have no idea.

Not because I couldn't decide, but I kind of realized when I reworked the story to end with that decision that I really couldn't answer it. I shouldn't. I'm not sure what happens, beside for thinking that Celestia will treat Sam as kindly as her situation permits... even if perhaps not trusting her too much.

7056507
I didn't particularly like that aspect either. Chatoyance has some great Xeno material but the utter condescension for humanity was hard to stomach.

Her portrayal of Celestia didn't strike me as unrealistic, though. I could sort of see a godlike being making such decisions. Is death preferable to having your mind forcibly altered? Celestia (and human terrorists) made this choice for others. The stories shamelessly represented Celestia as right.

This didn't sit well with me at all.

7056934 let's be real here. When she followed I sincerely thought about making a new account because this one felt broken.

A cynical first contact with a bittersweet ending done right.

Extremely thought provoking, and incredible story.

Despite borrowing themes found in a lot of other first contact stories you've woven them together in a way that feels wholly original.

7098425 Yeah. Suns in a very real way is as much a reaction to other things as it's own, standalone thing.

Without Arrow 18 or Project Sunflower it probably wouldn't exist at all, ever. Without C.S. Lewis, I doubt I would have come to Malthus at all.

7133447 I actually don't really remember any jokes.

7191279 Yes, you read that correctly.

Sam did exactly what I would have done. Liked and faved.

Yup.

I just finally got around to finishing this. It took me back to the days when I was new to Pony, soaking up fan work like a sponge, and looking for decent first-contact stories. It's a pity that it's so overlooked.

7622228 I def am reminded of Biblical Monsters in the end.

Began as a decent enough first contact story. Such a shame it turned into a trite "humanity is inherently evil"-bullshit.

7626796 If that's what you got out of the end, then you missed a lot.

I love stories like this one, first contact, exploring a brave new world sort of thing. You've got some pretty good twists on it, with post-apocalyptic Earth and arcanoallergic humans. And of course, deliciously dark. Bleak ending with some hope shining through, all depending on how you want to interpret it. Loved the story.

7841981 I see you reading

It's late

Go to bed old man

This was great. I found it a hard read in patches, not because of anything wrong, but because of things right. Because it was so intense I had to stop to come up for breath now and then. (Baby made certain that happened anyway, though.) In the end I thoroughly enjoyed it. And because I am somewhere deep down a complete and hopeless optimist, I feel like Celestia judged generously and found a way to help Samantha and humanity. That is my headcanon for this forever. But I see why you left it the way it is. There's a certain... something in our fate being unknowable, in not knowing if we're to be a little lower than the angels or barely better than demons. (To mess up metaphors quite a bit.) So all around I approve of this. It's a shame it doesn't have more attention.

This story really resonated with me at several points and made me vehemently rebel at others. That moment with Zecora talking to Samantha about Perique really blind-sided me and brought me back to a moment nine years ago with my father in the hospital after his accident. C.S.Lewis' quote from God in the Dock really got me thinking - trying to argue the point. Also, I have to congratulate you on making an excellent antagonist, FC, the hatred I feel toward him is rich and multi-layered. Mix that with the lore/ backstory liberally sprinkled within and you easily hooked me, but more importantly it's an easy read.

I was sadly disappointed to have figured out how the story was going to end several chapters ahead (in a vague sense); the disappointment being that Samantha didn't surprise me. I like to call myself a pragmatist, but this story quickly took on a subtle misanthropic note in the second-half that sounded by hope's death knell. It always saddens me when characters fail to overcome their nature. If this story has any weak-point, that would be it; the character sacrificed her morals, her humanity. There was no call to kill Malthus, that was murder. Honestly, it felt a little forced, a little soapbox-ish.

I guess all my complaints aside - and they are mostly a matter of flavor - what you have here is a very well written, very pleasant read, one that makes me wonder how it slipped under the radar?

_∏_
-_Ƣ ~Stay classy

8017695 Consider the full ramifications of what you suggest. If Humanity came to a new world, any and all natives would be treated in a manner which is beyond inhumane. Every single time Humans go to a new land, we exact a terrible toll from the native populace. The Europeans and the Native Americans are a prime example. Feel free to explore the history of Wounded Knee and The Trail Of Tears. Humans would do the same or worse to the peace-loving Ponies. I would not be willing to see that happen. EVERY governing body would exploit the native population, no matter what they claim. It ALWAYS happens. To say or believe otherwise is ignorance and wishful thinking.

If Humanity has sunk to the levels which seem to be indicated in the story, is there any hope for them at all? Would any Humans ever be capable of finding peace after everything they had been through? You know the answer, you just wish to believe the contrary. The scenario you suggest could not happen, Human nature would ensure it.

8018248 (FYI, if you respond other than in the chapter where the comment was, the other person doesn't get a notification.)

The Trail of Tears, the Harrowing of the North, the Hebrew invasion of Canaan...I am quite aware. I also know that as much as I love my dog, if its me or my dog, it's going to be me that survives every time. I would hope as Malthus did, that we learned our lessons and weren't complete asshats...then there is the matter that Equestrian magic is literally toxic to our minds, so I don't think this is so much Mayans and Conquistadors, as Greeks and Persians. Ultimately there may be violence, but I doubt it would be so one sided when there is a being that can move a STAR living there...oh, she also has a similarly powered sister. It gives me hope that we can interact as equals and so long as there is hope, I will move toward the future.

Furthermore, you missed the entire point of my statement. By separating the statement into "let them rot" you have literally made an "us and them" separation - you are demonstrating the same flawed mindset that caused the shit-storm in their world. By making those people them and you not them, you create a psychological disconnect and remove empathy from the situation. This allows you to encourage a character to kill other human-beings that are not guilty of any crime. I cannot say this any simpler:

Samantha Marshall is objectively in the wrong here. What she perpetrates on Malthus is murder, not self defense.

8023360 If the 'us against them' mentality is already the mindset of the Humans in charge of the various factions, which it clearly already is, there is absolutely no chance for any sort of peaceful resolution. It will not happen, it cannot happen despite what we might hope for.

The conflicts between these groups will carry over into the new world and bring nothing positive with them. I would venture that within less than a year, the native inhabitants would be cursing every Human because of the massacres they were caught in, from somebody else's wars. There is no limit to the atrocities mankind will perpetrate against what or whom we consider to be enemies, history has proven that time and time and time again. It is a given, it WILL happen.

As for the emotional disconnect, of course it is there! When you have had friends and family killed by members of a faction, you WILL consider all members of that faction to be enemies. It is Human nature. You can be sure that the members of this other faction think of you EXACTLY the same way. It happens every time there is a violent conflict. Oh, and as a final note, we can debate this, but I would not mind if you dropped the superiority tone in your responses.

8023734 I'm not talking about characters in the story, I'm talking about you! My comment about the emotional disconnect is aimed at you! You are demonstrating the behavior you claim to detest!

8017823
8023734

Firstly: Please stop arguin' in my comments, y'all.

Second: Killing Malthus was murder and I think it was not justifiable. That she did so, that I wrote her doing so, is not me condoning it.

Is he dangerous? Obviously. Of course he is. If anything, anything may be gleaned from the history of humanity it is this: that we are just as likely to make war as we are to engage in mutual aid. It's my one gripe with Kropotkin, actually. Cultures all over the globe have found new neighbors and enslaved or genocided them in short order. Europeans did it in the Americas and Africa. The Chinese did it or attempted to do so to many of their neighbors. Rome wipes out Iberian culture through death and slavery/colonia. The Seleucids and the Hebrews. The Maori get guns and within a handful of years they go from border raids to apocalyptic island-emptying war.

There are three humans, and three dangers.

The Federal, the Conquistador, is the obvious one. The invader. The slayer of men. What is Malthus? First, I was cheeky with his name. Malthus was an 18th-19th century thinker in the realm of Political Economy who wrote a stunningly influential essay that we still talk about today on the nature of population and its relation to food and sustenance. If the terms of the Federal are purely primal, the terms of Malthus are economic. If the Fed is War then the Concordat is Famine --I think of Revelation 6:6, with “Two pounds[a] of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds[c] of barley for a day’s wages,[d] and do not damage the oil and the wine!”

The danger of the Fed is immediate attempted genocide by gun and bomb. The danger of Malthus is the more subtle danger of colonialism. Malthus wants to set up a colony. Exploit resources, settle a few people, build farms. These things may not necessarily be bad, but I think seeing Malthus as not inherently dangerous is difficult. He's absorbed the colonialism of Earth's past and we don't have a definite proof that he's not going to lead others into eventually doing the same thing. Even Kurtz was a good man once.

But is murdering him the right answer? No. Would it have been the answer Sam had without the dangerous effects of Celestia's overwhelming presence? I don't think so. Sam is not an enthusiastic killer by any means. Nor, I think, would she have easily killed a man that she had offered hospitality to and who had no plans whatsoever to harm her and never really did. She didn't trust him but not to that point.

To
8017823 I am generally with you.

I've been consistently disappointed that people see this ending as somehow making the whole thing misanthropic. I think on the balance up until the absolute most bitter end Sam is a good ambassador for humanity. Incredibly imperfect, but she manages to make friends of a sort. But she is fundamentally not whole. She is not okay in any sense. She is deeply scarred. Killing Malthus was murder, but would she have done that without what is essentially catch-able insanity? I don't think so. More likely I think without Celestia's involvement she would have never gone through with it. Alternatively? I think Sam would have done one of three things: trapped Malthus in a non-lethal way and send him home with a message, go back with Malthus and sabotage the gate, or go back and attempt to convince them that the inevitable colonization and nightmarish subjugation they are about to inflict is a bad idea. Because, while Malthus is not an inherently bad man, he is a mercantilist. Those that come after him will be far worse. Hhe would like to think that he will shape how things go--he says as much to Sam--but its bullshit and she and we can see it if we dwell enough on the idea. He'll try, certainly, but in the end the idea of a New World will catch on exactly as it did before. That the natives this time can throw magic may only make the resulting conflict shorter, for it will certainly not keep it at bay.

Would these methods have been successful? I don't know. I don't think they would. Short of destroying the gate and the knowledge of how to build it there is no way to put a lid on pandora's box for long. But could she have delayed the second meeting until such a time as Earth was not in a long, drawn-out period of general war and mass human suffering? Sure. It's more likely than you think. In the world this was based on, Sam's period is towards the end of the Second Civil War. The Concordat and the Westerners sign an alliance and together take New York and Washington within a year and a half. the USA would be whole again about two years after this, and in far more benevolent hands.

If noting that the slaughter of the innocents is a part of human existence is misanthropic, then I guess it is misanthropic. But as I understand that word, I don't think it is. Humanity's frailty and tendency to do evil in pursuit of a worthy goal is very well documented, and doesn't require much in the way of pessimistic speculation to come up with. Misanthropy would have been condoning what she did, and Celestia doesn't. Celestia does not at any point decide that human beings are not worth time or effort. She considers them dangerous, but they/we are dangerous. Most living things have the capacity to be dangerous--ponies are dangerous in their own world to some things, things smaller than them or without magic. She considers their world dangerous and contact with it perhaps corrupting, but she would consider the same of a nation torn by civil war (which is exactly what Sam is coming out of). The point I wished to make, which by comments I generally didn't do well, wasn't "oh humanity sucks we should nuke the world and start over" but rather that any optimistic projection of the future of mankind must be tempered with the reality of our history and our limitations. We have been slavers more than we have been abolitionists (but we have, indeed, been both) We aren't going to be nice a lot of the time. We aren't going to know what to do. We can be violent. We can also be not violent, and smart, and brave, and compassionate. The law of civilization is Mutual Aid. What bothered me about more positive first contact stories wasn't that they ended well ( for that delighted me) but in that they did so little to address Humanity as an object of contradiction, and of passions that she is not necessarily the master of in any given moment. It is misanthropy to say that humans should be eradicated, or that they are always spoiled. It is not to point out that historically there are patterns of behavior that should inform any first contact scenario in the non-existent space future.

We are good at meeting new people. We're bad at staying friends. But we don't have to be. Kropotkin remarked that the unsociable species doesn't last long, and yet here we are.

8025636 First off, sorry about arguing. I thought it was an important point that needed to be made. That said, it stops here.

For clarification, when I said there was a "subtle misanthropic note" that snuck its way into the story in the second-half, it was not intended as a disparagement against you, merely a lament... One specifically referring to the actions Samantha takes. What I saw was your 'good ambassador for mankind', demonstrating some of the worst traits of humanity, ones that - in my experience - most of society simply doesn't share. The vibe I walked away with, regarding the temporary insanity they were stricken with, was that it moved them more toward a base state, the primal. It seemed to sap their cognitive skills and heighten their more primal instincts - paranoia, fear, etc - making them more animalistic. The subtle misanthropy comes from what I took away from her actions in that state, and that was you (the author) conveying your opinion through this 'ambassador of mankind' and that message seemed to be that at our core, we're killers. This seems to fly in the face of all my experience of humanity to the contrary, that most human beings only become violent when threatened or otherwise wronged. As a further point of reference, I disagree with your last point and happen to think that human beings are a very sociable species, considering what happens to most people when put into isolation...

That said, perhaps I did not walk away with the message intended, but I again applaud you for writing such a thought provoking, argument starting work. Truly, the fact that it has the ability to cause spirited debate on the subject of human nature is something to be lauded!

8026038 I also think they're sociable. The last point was that we wouldn't have endured so long had we not been social.

9033375
There’s different ones?

Mine is perhaps far too pessimistic here.

Ah, but it works all too well. Glad I got around too this.

9502600
yeah, that actually raises some questions even from a non-human and pony interstellar interaction perspective. there are a lot of sapient creatures in equestria and i'm sure some aren't always aware of certain creatures' sapience (like how some animals can speak, but not all can be understood, and carini/omnivores clearly exist). which can lead to unintentional vore.

maybe only vegan people should be allowed to travel to equestria.

And here, we have a picture-perfect example of "Reality Ensues". Played out straight to its bitter end. Delicious, though I did have some choice words for how agonizingly slow the beginning was progressing.

I personally welcome using MLP to take a long, hard look at humanity's flaws this way - the hallmark of good science-fiction. Dark indeed, but I couldn't fault the author if I even allowed myself to try - I know my own darkness well, I think, and this story doesn't even reach its deepest depths. And I am one of billions.

Though it is... fitting, I suppose is the word, for Celestia of all ponies to really, properly understand. And that, I think, is the chief reason someone would shirk away in horror of her presence.

It also seems fitting that humanity, in this work, is used as a mirror for Celestia herself. Because above all else, Celestia understands necessity, and that is one of the darkest weapons one can bring to bear - it doesn't excuse, it doesn't explain, but it permits. It permits anything.

Twilight doesn't grasp the concept, at least not innately. She would go against what is necessary to do what is right. And that, by far, sets her apart. And it doesn't do anything at all to prevent the fact that - as noble as she is - she would fail. Meeting humanity, as it happened here, is the worst thing that could've happened to Equestria - the damage is already done, because no matter what decision was made, someone would suffer for it, one way or another. The reality of that could never be sealed away.

Necessity... And, dear Reader, the only reason you might side with Celestia in this bout with himanity (one way or another)... is because you'd take sides, and hers is the side you would choose.

No other reason.

_{Let that sink in.}