[First Person] [Alternating Perspectives]
During a long and boring night, devoid of any ponies seeking to petition the Night Court, Lyra Heartstrings asks Luna a question. “Why did you become Nightmare Moon?” Luna answers her question, starting from the very beginning, recounting her long life of rejection, failure to achieve her goals, and marginalization. For the first time, someone besides Celestia gets to know the full story of Nightmare Moon.
Yet to be featured. But I know we can do it!
For my fan’s convenience: This story takes place in an alternate timeline of the Equisverse. No storyline beyond that of The Bridesmaids, Horseshoes, Dinner at Ravenloft, The Queen is Dead, All Hail the Queen, and Lyra-7% happens or will happen in this timeline. However, some world events, elements of the setting, and concepts from other works of mine apply, but this only pertains to foundational concepts such as thaumaturgic current. This is the more “serious” timeline.
Hey guys, sorry its not all finished, here's the first half. Its 3am and my heads been pounding for the last 2 hours, so yeah. I'll edit up the rest tomorrow, or later today, whatever...
But hey, how bout a little funny?
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84836737/Pics/Ummm_okay_meep.PNG
To set the mood :
7534426 Ah but the real question is, who deserves that theme song? Probably my character Gentle Repose, but she's not been in a story yet >>
Somehow I now see Luna and Celestia singing a version of this :
So what Luna was looking for :
7534439 She was going for more of this kinda vibe. Only downside is that Celestia would eventually have sent a cease and desist to Prance (even though Prance has been doing it for 2000 years longer...) and then this would likely have happened.
Oh hey, it's 6:15 AM and I haven't slept a wink because of that oh-so lovely swan boat from The Park.
Time to read some sad.
The creature that you are thinking of is called a "Writer". They can be dicks sometimes.
Huh. You know, it's a good thing I obsessively trawl the new story section on the front page. I seem to have forgotten to follow you, and didn't notice that you'd started a new story. A historical, is it? OK. And follow failure corrected.
Sigh. There is no more misunderstood historical event than the French Revolution and the problems with the Ancien Regime that made it inevitable. de Toqueville wrote a book on the subject before Democracy in America which made the very nonintuitive point that the problem with the French aristocracy was not that they were rich, privileged and untaxed, but rather that they were privileged, untaxed, and useless. The old aristocracy, which had been fractious, dangerous, and heavily involved in the pre-Bourbon governance of France, was carefully maneuvered out of positions of power by four generations of Bourbon kings and the swarms of intendants which they used to centralize the military, legal, and civic governance. An entire, large class of aristocrats were shuffled aside, and encouraged to be decoratively useless. It kept them out of trouble.
It also divorced their privileges from their function within the nation and the state. The peasantry will put up with much from the rich and gifted if they're contributing proportionally to the commonwealth, according to their status and position. There's a corresponding concept within Confucianism known as the Reification of Names, wherein those who perform certain tasks within government, the courts, religion and the arts are inherently corrupting if they do not hold the proper titles and status for that work for which they are performing. All things should be called what they are and not some other thing. To look on X doing Y and call it Z doing V or W is to base society on a cascading series of lies. The chain of cognitive collisions continue until everyone is convinced by the pervasive falsehoods that the system is rotten and must be torn out root and branch. This is what breeds revolution - the Mandate of Heaven is lost when every relation within the state is a lie.
BTW, Luna's order of knighthood sounds an awful lot like the Bourbon intendancy.
7535641
Whiel I agree with you, I use the name Prance as it's a cannon other nation in the world. It is slightly based on France in this AU, as well as Normen culture, but is mostly my own creation. I am unsure why you have written a history lesson summary here, but I did enjoy reading it. I am a fan of history :)
It would have been more like the Specters in practice. An extra-legal task force allowed to break certain laws to ensure the proper working of the government who must then provide evidence of the wrongdoings they allegedly stopped or be punished as per how anyone else would be for breaking whatever laws they broke. But the Bourbon intendancy is probably the closest thing to this to have ever been real, so... yeah. I guess?
So, what folder in the group should this be placed in, or should I make a new one for it?
7535903 I put it into beta. If you want, you could make a 'historic tales' folder or something.
Ugh. Basic income. The technical monaritists and the Friedmanites love this concept, but it offends something intrinsic in the ideological construct of your standard interlocator. Probably something purity-oriented, that's the usual non-economic go-to for objections against pure utilitarian solutions like this
7535963 And yet, remove the power of corporations to be the only means of sustenance for people, and you greatly improve social happiness. When you are free to look for a better job, and you truly don't need that corp to exist, they hold no power over you and must behave better to attract employees, forcing them to put their employees first, and thus improving the lives of everyone and not just the CEO. I believe that most people hate the idea because it would make things more even, and most people have that mentality of "Yeah the system is rigged but that's why it will be AWESOME when I run this thing!"
But ponies? Ponies care way too much about one another to have any hangups about providing the most basic bare subsistence shelter and food for everyone. They are not humans, they should have different values and moral leanings than humans. Because having non-humans be humans in costumes is boring.
See Celestia, this is why Luna is my favorite. Cause yer so... Thick! You're Miss Thick Thickity Thick-head, from Thicktown, Thickania...
And so's your dad!
Annnnnnd, done... HURRRRK!
Nope, just done, enjoy. Or you know, not enjoy. I mean like, enjoy the non joy. I mean...
Never fucking mind...
Best button.
Maybe this is my constant urge to "Twist the knife", but I'd have told her.
In excruciating detail.
People deserve to know the consequences of their actions.
7536286 I honestly dont blame you.
7536412
Yaaaayyyyyy I have the Meep Stamp of Approval to be a manipulative cunt.
7535990 If ponies were alicorns, no government would be necessary; if alicorns were to govern ponies, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by ponies over ponies, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. {grin}
Corporations are no different in substance or content from government; they are both constructs of law and custom which people use in different ways to regulate their economic relations in different ways in different contexts. It is the scale and that context which is important. Extinguish the name "corporation" and your government officials will double the offenses whose commission offends your sense of justice and fairness under the name corporation, because those offenses will be committed not in the name of profit and self-interest, but rather virtue and public interest. Good-cause corruption and lack of personal interest in outcomes always, in the total balance of outcomes, produces inequity and outrages in greater numbers than lowly self-interest and the metric of competition. The vast sum of outrages produced by great corporations are those generated by the structural resemblance of those great corporations to pseudo-government, motivated by virtue-signaling and wish to be loved rather than financially rewarded, rather than those aspects generated by those great corporations' often tenuous connection to the free market. Too many great corporations are themselves pseudo-governmental bureaucratic masses of cogs geared to turn in unison with similarly geared governmental bureaucratic masses, all of them soulless and careless of the ponies caught within the gears, and even, the ponies making up the gears.
The last thing we need are more masses of gears, and the basic income concept makes of all ponies, gears properly toothed for turning in the great machine. The Friedmanites propose the basic income because they feel that the welfare state has already made of ponies ill-fitting gears undesigned, and propose to reduce the stripping of teeth in the great machine by gearing the machine in limited and simplified ways. They're wrong because their proposals will never replace the existing gearing, but simply introduce new competing cogs within the already-taxed machine, rather than retiring the old mangling gearwork. Likewise their new simplified gearwork even if it were to replace the old cogs, would only intensify the great inequitable sorting of talent and energy, by reducing if not eliminating the great principle of competition within the dependent classes.
7536582 Okay, let's break this down from your wall of psuedo-legalese.
Not true. If all were alicorns they would have vastly reduced needs, this is true. However, they would still have their own desires and boredom setting in across the ages. Organization of some kind (i.e. some form of government) would be necessary to maintain balance.
I think Celestia puts the lie to that statement quite nicely.
No government will control itself, because living creatures are inherently untrustworthy. They will always seek to harm others to put themselves forward. This is far less common with ponies, but the people that would seek governmental positions are the ones that would exploit the powers and privileges of the position.
This entire paragraph is so densely packed with deliberately oblique verbage and what looks at first like purple prose that your intent to paint corporations as a good and needful thing is almost lost. Corporations are, by their nature, run by greedy, self-serving, and evil people. They are designed to enrich their executives while paying their employees as little as possible, to thus increase the wealth of the already rich and reduce the wealth of those struggling.
And this is why the machine in-whole needs be torn down and built anew.
Except that you are demonstrably wrong here. There is already little to no competition. Corporations will cooperate to screw over the populace as much as they possibly can to rake in the greatest profit. Rather than compete, they collaborate to deliberately raise prices across the board.
I'm honestly not sure where your rhetoric comes from, as that is what it is: rhetoric without substance. A basic income would produce issues with most current governments, perhaps, because they're already run by the rich and greedy. It would undermine the 'screw everyone else' mindset of most corporations, as well, and because it would hinder the already wealthy by allowing those struggling to be able to focus on bettering themselves or allowing them to leave a job where they are treated terribly without worry, is why those same money-grubbing executives will throw millions of dollars into trying to ensure it can never happen and/or trying to convince people that it is something that they don't want.
7536694 The first part was an extended ponification of the famous bit from The Federalist 51 which starts "If men were angels" etc etc and is quoted in pretty much every political science discussion of balance of powers. I was trying to be funny, and ironic.
And if you think that all corporate officers are evil capitalist orcs, greed-addled monsters with bank vaults where their souls ought to be... well that hurts them in their weepy, bleeding hearts, and you could probably shake some cash out of their charity budgets. I'm often surprised by the ways that the liberal guilt of corporate officers and the principal-agent conundrum collude in the big corporations funding their fiercest critics. And genuinely sickened by the well-intentioned horrors the big corporate foundations - the Ford Foundation primarily, but the Rockefeller foundations as well - have inflicted upon the inner cities and the Third World abroad. Good intentions have a higher body-count than the cholera.
So, this First Kingdom made another plane, and it's the Twilight Zone? I guess that's one way to solve a problem.
I was sold on this story before I this existed :D
black and blue, or white and gold?
The only song I have for this has a whole lot of cuss words in it, so I'll leave this one without a song.
So...the basic lesson I got from this was that everything is Celestia's fault and she hasn't learned anything so what's to stop this from happening again?
7538024 Nothing. Because that's Tia's fault, she rarely sees anything as her mistake and blames the error on anything else.
7538043 Huh, a DEVO song I didn't know about. High five there, mate.
7538092 And is anything going to be done to CHANGE this? Ever?
7538120 Of course. You dont establish a problem in the world when writing a story without intending fixing it.
7538124 I dunno, seen plenty of worlds that have huge problems with them that are never, ever fixed. They are sad worlds.
7538126 *Good authors never
7538140
7534450 Shortskirtsandexplosions is a bad author?
7538147 If you introduce a conflict that would make for an interesting story and never resolved it, you certainly loose good author points. You can still be good, but you're not as good as you could be. I'm certainly guilty of this one myself in a few places, but I assure you, this one has been set up to be resolved.
7538198 That's good
Excellent story as usual.
Can't say that I enjoyed this one, Meep, it was pretty much everything I can't stand about how the fandom fetishizes Luna wrapped up in a neat little package. Basically, Luna is correct about everything, when she isn't we can see from Lyra's reactions that she really was correct and she's just being too humble about it, the whole Nightmare Moon event was just her trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and Celestia is a worse pony than her sister in every single way that matters (uses evil mind magic liberally, manipulates her sister, manipulates Twilight, has been steering Equestria down a worse and worse path since its founding, never ever admits a personal fault or failing, it just kept going on and on). It pretty much hit every single mark about how Luna is Good and Celestia is Bad. I have seen them in so many stories, though probably not so efficiently collected up.
The only thing that could recover this for me is if all of the above is because Luna is the one telling the story, and that she's terrible at recounting events without letting her personal biases leak in all over the place.
But hey, I liked the dream magic worldbuilding, so there's that.
7541115 I
If I did Celestia's side of the story (and I just might) it would come across as exactly the same, but with Celestia appearing as the good one. The point of the whole thing is that no one sees themselves as evil. Well, no sane person. Yeah, Celestia does use mind control and approves it's use by the state (and I see that as evil) but she has her own reasons and justifications for it which ,well some are quite compelling. And well, Luna didn't mention too much about things she did back in the day, now did she? She in fact DID cause some pretty horrible things to happen, sometimes by direct order.
Luna's quick to use a bomb when a scalpel would have sufficed, favoring scorched earth policies to be triply sure. But she sees that as good, so of course she won't mention it. She's talking about the BAD parts of the old day. Ask her about the good and she might talk about the time she had her troops literally level a Diamond Dog city in retaliation for them torching a trade caravan and not recognizing Equestrian clais to their ancestral lands because... well the Dogs were there first. (They once had a City State rather than disorganized clans of murder hobos. Oh and they weren't always slavers... Though they would eat captives cus hey, carnivores gonna carnivore.) Luna's proud of that one. Her only regret is some of the Dogs escaped. Which is where the modern tribes come from.
Remember, Luna IS the war general of what is in everything but name an Empire comparable to Rome, and has been alive since it's beginnings. Her hooves are as dirty as her sisters. But of course she won't see it that way. Because everyone sees themselves under their own bias and Luna has only once broken her own moral code (when she attacked family).
I had to toss something in there for the sake of world building fans :) I mostly wrote this one because I wanted to do a historical story and the idea to establish these events wouldn't leave my head.
I think you'll like what's up next on my to do list though. Back to changebugs and character driven storytelling.
Wow so many questions and comments for this one.
1. Is this story of Luna the one for all of your universes or is just the one Human Lyra visited where she met Luna when she was still a blind knight?
2. Why are there not more alicorns, if the spell was that simple? Also how did Cadence and Twilight do it? (for this universe) If so easy there should be more like the mane 5 for instance. Please don't hate me. just saying.
3. I am glad that you portrayed alicorns, in general, as powerful near immortal mages and not goddesses. They are far too flawed (in official cannon even) to be divine (maybe Greek god at best) and they didn't create ponies or anything else for that matter and are still very finite. Also, I am pretty sure a properly placed sword would kill them
4. Luna and Celestia sure have a lot of issues to still resolve. I wonder if Celestia feels even a smidgen of remorse for what she put Luna through?
5. Finally, as it was never confirmed at least for me as a technical reader, what did the Elements do to Luna when the Mane 6 used them upon her? Has she been partially mind controlled and is somehow aware of it. If so that is truly monstrous.
Good story overall. A- The later resolution of the story may change this grade.
Not that this is something that I usually discuss on a pony site but if you really think that all competition is evil and we should remake our government into some sort of Utopia I think you should watch this first.
7536694
But I do agree that much of Western society has been corrupted and is no longer capitalism but crapitalism. Special loop holes in the tax code for certain corporations and "too big to fail" are wrong because they are collusion and prevent true competition unfortunately the power of government is what made the present paradigm and only the power of government can unmake it.
7544797
I'll do my best to answer them all :)
This is Beta's Luna. SO yes, the one Human Lyra visited.
The spell is NOT simple. It's very complicated, but Clover was capable of casting it (Starswirl was not). Cadence is a freak accident, she triggered a contingency plan Clover left behind by accident. Twilight Managed to work out the rest of the spell from the fragment Starswirl had recreated from memory in his journal (Celestia eventually asked him if he could remake it) and was able to cast it because she's that damn good.
While personally I think the cannon Alicorns are best described as Greek Gods (Because well, they basicaly are. Even in behavior and moral ambiguity.) I prefer the immortal mage interpretation much much better. They are ageless, hard to put down in that they regenerate slowly (Twilight could grow back a leg in a few months.) and are immune to disease (at least natural ones), but a sword through the heart will still kill them. Ageless yes, immortal no.
I'm thinking about a sequel where Lyra askes Celestia for her side of it recognizing that Luna is a biased source. But incase I don't do that:
Celestia regrets her actions immensely, even though she refuses to believe Luna was concious and suffering unimaginable hell for the whole time. Her mind can't accept that she did that to her sister. None the less, she honestly truly hated every day of it. They have real problems, like any siblings will (especially as they get older) but they are still sisters. They give a fuck about each other even as they fight and squabble.
Twilight's first use of the Elements was much like Celesitas, she had no idea she could control the results. The most recent thought in Twilights mind was 'friendship is magic', and so the Elements gave Celestia and Luna a chance to be friendly with one another again.
Thansk for the high grade ^^
As for your other comment:
That's not remotely what I think. While we certainly could use social safety nets and honestly with the upcoming robotics revolution as most of the capitalist ideas will soon to begin to break down so we should be working on a plan for those not so distant days, I firmly believe that for humans, competition is nessicary for innovation to progress at a rapid rate. I also believe that a government's duty is to make sure the lives of its citizens are as prosperous as possible, which means we do need some reform to reach that ideal. The notion of what a government is is outdated and should evolve to fit the modern world. We can be more than our ancestors were, if we only try.
But I'm not a radical or anything. I'm just someone who says we could do better than we are now, which isn't half bad all things considered.
7544880 the last comment about economics was not directed at you Meep but to the other commenter.
7544892 Oh. Well, my mistake then. I hope I didn't offend you.