A Very Silly Story About Money
Once upon a time, there was an earth pony named Brickwork, and he worked very hard. Brickwork helped build houses, but not simple little houses like the one he lived in. No, Brickwork built big houses, houses that could fit as many as twenty ponies all at once. He built them for unicorns, even though unicorns almost always had the smallest families, but he didn't ask questions about that sort of thing. The unicorns asked him to please build a very big house, so he did.
Brickwork worked very long and very hard. When the sun started to go down, he would stop working and start to go home. Now, while he was working, Brickwork never really felt tired, because he had a cutie mark for building houses. But when he stopped working, he would start to feel tired, because building a house is a lot of work. But ponies don't just get tired when they've done a lot of work, they also get hungry, and since Brickwork worked so very hard, he got very hungry and very tired.
Now, Brickwork really didn't spend a lot of time at home, or even close to home. Unicorns liked to have their big houses on the tops of tall mountains, or just very big hills. Sometimes they wanted their big houses in the middle of huge valleys, or on islands that Brickwork couldn't just swim away from. If Brickwork wanted to go all the way home, he would need to stop working at lunchtime, if not earlier. And because Brickwork was a very hard worker, he wasn't the sort of pony to leave a job half-done when he could have kept working. By the time he was done working, there just wasn't time to go home and cook a proper meal unless he wanted to get to work half a day late tomorrow.
So instead of eating a fancy meal made of random flowers and bread and vegetables, Brickwork bent down and ate some grass. And instead of going to sleep on a bed, he just straightened his legs and fell asleep standing up. And when the sun came up, it warmed his coat enough to make him wake up, eat some more grass and then get back to work.
Yeah, I know. Shocking, isn't it?
But that was how earth ponies lived, once upon a time. They built big dumb houses for unicorns because they were asked to, they grew food for all the ponies too stupid to find their own because they wanted to, and they ate grass and slept under the stars because they could.
And then some stupid unicorn discovered gold, and everything went wrong.
You see, unicorns always loved to stare at shiny things. They would knock down perfectly good mountains so that they could stare at the pretty rocks underneath, and they'd spend hours and hours twisting metal around bits of these pretty rocks and putting them all over their bodies. The unicorns called it jewelry. The earth ponies called it a waste of good food. But you couldn't even say that much about gold.
Gold is soft. Like, really, really soft. The big draw of diamonds and rubies and other stuff like that, for earth ponies at least, is how crunchy they are. There's a sort of juicy flavor that builds up in crunchy rocks, and I've heard a lot of my friends say that they taste really good. But you don't get that flavor with gold. Gold feels like chocolate, or really soft cheese, except those taste good. Gold tastes like old socks and tin.
It also isn't really good for making anything else. A whole bunch of those shiny rocks weren't just shiny. They got used as parts of really cool inventions, like clocks and paperweights. But gold is too soft to make gears out of, and it takes a lot of work to make gold pretty enough that it can just sit on a desk with nothing else to make it fun to look at.
But the unicorns didn't care. They passed the gold around just so they could take turns staring at it, and they told all the other ponies about it too. When the earth ponies came to build houses, the unicorns showed them the gold, and went on and on about how it sparkled and glittered. When the pegasi came to arrange the weather, the unicorns arranged their gold so that the sun would shine off of it and get in their eyes. It was annoying, but it wasn't getting in the way, so the other ponies let them have fun with their new toy.
But it didn't stay a toy for long.
Ponies have always traded when they needed stuff. That's just how ponies work. If I have a fluffy cloud, but I want a potato, and you have a potato but need a fluffy cloud, then we trade what we have for what we want. If you need something done, and I need something different done, we help each other out, and everypony's happy. It's a simple system, so simple that fillies and colts know how it works.
As long as they aren't unicorn fillies and colts.
Before they discovered gold, unicorns didn't really have much to trade. Oh, sure, they had their shiny rocks, but that was pretty much it. Anything a unicorn's magic could lift, an earth pony could lift better, and getting teleported was always way more dangerous than just getting a pegasus or three to carry you. Or just walking. A lot of ponies walked back then, and just ate grass and slept standing up.
So, if the unicorns couldn't really do a lot of trades, why did ponies like Brickwork build super-big houses for them? Because it was fun. Because ponies like Brickwork had cutie marks for that kind of stuff, and there was no way they'd ever want enough potatoes at once for it to be a fair trade, so they just helped out the unicorns for fun. No, it wasn't because anypony felt sorry for the unicorns. They may be stupid, but they're not stupid enough to forget how to eat grass.
But the unicorns didn't think that was why the earth ponies and the pegasi helped them with all the crazy stuff they wanted to do. They thought that they were getting help because some of them were really good at convincing other ponies to do stuff. They never realized that the unicorns with more awesome houses were just friendlier than the rest. They thought it was all some big awesome trick to get around having to trade stuff they didn't have. But now they had something that they thought was worth trading.
Unicorns started to offer gold in return for what the other two tribes were already doing. They'd wave around big bricks of it, or sometimes little nuggets if they were especially stupid, and say that they'd give the workers some gold if they did stuff. After the first few earth ponies tasted the stuff, word got around and they didn't want to take it. And since pegasi would only want rocks to trade with earth ponies, they didn't have any reason to want gold either.
A lot of ponies from back then probably wish that the story of gold ended there. Hay, I know a few ponies from right about now that wish it ended there. But we all know it didn't, even if not everypony can tell you what happened next. I mean, I can, otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up, but they don't all know this stuff.
Even though nopony except unicorns wanted anything to do with gold, the unicorns still kept losing their minds over it. They traded it between each other, pretending that it meant anything more than "could you please ask those earth ponies to build a house for me after they're done on your house". Then they realized that, magic or not, gold bars are really heavy, and you have to have custom-made saddlebags to carry them in. So some unicorn decided to make tiny little bits of gold that were easy to move around. And that's how the bit was born.
With the invention of the bit, unicorns became even more gold-crazy than they had been before. Gold bars vanished almost overnight, and more than a few worker ponies accidentally thought that the new form of gold was tasty crackers. Now, I don't have any evidence that the unicorns meant to trick everypony into taking huge bags of bits only to find out they weren't food, but whether they meant it or not, it is what happened.
Now everypony had bits, and earth ponies and pegasi had no idea what to do with all of them. The unicorns didn't want to take it back. They came up with the word 'charity', which means getting money for nothing, just so they could say they wouldn't accept charity. And everypony knew that unicorns had nothing to trade, so there was no way to make them take back the bits.
So the earth ponies came up with what seemed like the greatest idea that anypony could have ever come up with, and because they were nice they shared their idea with the pegasi. Their idea was that, if they couldn't get the unicorns to take back their stupid bits, the only thing left was to take all the bits away from the unicorns.
They stopped working for free. They demanded bits for their work, and not just one or two bits but as many bits as the biggest number they could think of off the top of their heads. It turned into a bit of a game among pegasi to see how many bits they could get away with charging for weather. The earth ponies, though, figured out that the unicorns were happier when they only had to pay with a small pile of bits instead of their entire treasury. Any time an earth pony heard that one of their friends was charging less, they'd drop their own prices.
The unicorns didn't make a game out of bits like the other races did. For them, this was a happy time. The rest of ponykind had joined them in their love of gold, and the other tribes were obviously having so much fun with the whole idea that they were coming up with cool new ways to move gold around. That was when the unicorns decided to do the only thing they've ever been good for: Making up words that are really fun to say, even though a lot of them are kind of hard to write.
The unicorns ran down to the places where ponies were showing off all the things they had grown and made and talking about how much it cost, and they called those places 'markets'. Then one of them made up the word 'marketing', which meant the things that sellers do in a market, and also words like buyer and seller and buying and selling. The way that earth ponies did marketing got its own words, which were 'competitive marketing'. The pegasi also got a word for how they did marketing, and it was 'extortion'.
Somewhere along the way, all of this stopped being a game. Earth ponies started to buy shiny rocks from unicorns to sell to other unicorns at real good prices, pegasi tried to justify their high prices by inventing new weather, and all the while the unicorns kept minting new bits to meet demand. It wasn't some scam to take away the unicorns' favorite toy anymore. It was just business. Cold, hard business over cold, hard bits.
So, why did the windigos come? Because we made the world cold. And not cold like we cast a bunch of freezing spells, no, cold like in the heart. We stopped caring about friendship. We used to make houses and double rainbows because we wanted to, and then we just made them because that got us bits. Bits, bits that don't care if you love them or hate them or just never got the point. Cold, dumb bits of gold that aren't even gold anymore.
I still see earth ponies and pegasi doing trades, you know. They trade things for things, actions for actions. Lots of ponies still know how to pay fairer prices than the markets ever will. Of course, lots of ponies still think the bit is more important than actually being happy, so it's not all nice. But... two thirds isn't bad, right?
The Court of the Sun was silent. They had been respectfully silent as the little filly read every word of her short essay, but this was a different kind of silence. This was the silence of primitive villagers as they try to work out if that rumbling sound just now was the volcano waking up, or Uncle M'Gundu getting hungry.
Princess Celestia sat on her throne, her face immobile and betraying nothing. Oh, there was a smile, but it was the default smile she always wore to court. Behind that practiced smirk, who knew what inscrutable gears of reasoning were turning?
The little pegasus filly certainly didn't know. She just sat there on the cold marble floor, fluffing up her feathers and clearly struggling with the moral quandary of whether to close the journal that held her essay or keep it open. Judging from the look on her face, she was also suddenly feeling all of the eyes on her, and the old fight-or-flight instincts were bubbling up. Something would need to be done, and fast.
"What?"
Something that preferably wasn't that.
"Seriously, what?" Princess Celestia was just staring boggle-eyed at the filly, her disbelief plain for all to see. "I mean, why? I mean..." The Solar Princess of Equestria shook her head violently, as though she were a dog shaking off water. "I think I'm missing something here."
The filly smiled at the princess, and held up her journal. "Well, if you want, I could read through it again, and you can ask questions abou—" She stopped. Princess Celestia had lifted a hoof.
"No, no. I didn't mean that you should read your..." the centuries-old alicorn who had personally mentored some of the greatest ponies in history was briefly stumped for words, "essay again. I'm just not sure what brought all of... this about."
"Oh." The filly looked a little bit crestfallen at not getting to present her labor of love twice in a row, but Celestia weathered it. There were lines, and she was fairly certain that all of them had been crossed. Then the filly smiled again. "So, you want to know why I wrote it?"
"Precisely." Celestia hated having to say that word with such dread.
"Well... Princess Platinum's birthday is coming up, right?"
"Right."
"And to celebrate, our teacher suggested that we each write an essay about one of the biggest unicorn achievements." The filly's smile widened, as though the answer was now obvious. "I decided to write about the invention of money."
"Really." Celestia had to fight not to hang her head. "Of all the adventures of ponies like Starswirl the Bearded, Clover the Clever, Princess Platinum herself... you chose the discovery of gold and Equestria's transition to a market economy?"
"Well, yeah," the filly answered, "it's basically the biggest change that unicorns ever brought about. Plus, everypony always does the big adventures. I wanted to do something original!"
"And... why are you presenting this to me instead of your teacher?" Celestia raised one eyebrow, a subtle gesture of questioning that was completely lost on a younger mind.
The filly just stared up at Celestia. "I thought you'd like it." Her face shifted just a little, going from a curious filly who doesn't understand her situation to a confused filly who's about to cry. "Do you... not like it?"
What Celestia wanted to say was that the essay was only accurate in the sense that it had fired an arrow in roughly the same direction as the target. What she wanted to say was that she hadn't heard something so clearly charged with unfair tribalist undertones in two centuries. What she wanted to say was that the reason that fillies and colts wrote essays like this about great heroes of folklore was because they weren't really expected to do research on those, but the theories behind complex economics were the sort of thing that needed a bibliography.
Instead, she simply said, "I'm not your teacher, Silver Glow. You should be asking your teacher what she thinks of it. I know I will."
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- QueenMoriarty · 2.1k words · 39 2 · 690 views
- Bugsydor · 3.4k words · 239 2 · 3k views
- CCC · 5.7k words · 54 1 · 983 views
- Chessie · 8.3k words · 594 13 · 5.9k views
- CCC · 4.4k words · 15 1 · 514 views
- Orbiting Kettle · 2.6k words · 40 2 · 973 views
- Admiral Biscuit · 2k words · 84 2 · 1.8k views
- SirNotAppearingInThisFic · 5.2k words · 69 1 · 1.3k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.23 seconds
Total duration
677 users online
781,697 hits today, 2,591,549 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.®
I maintain that the childlike simplicity and matter-of-fact tone of the essay fits perfectly, given the perspective and subject. It's unapologetic, lacking in any sort of grace, and makes me wonder if a bit of the heatedness might come from her home environment, or that of her school.
And I greatly enjoy the process you show in how Celestia goes from "I'd love to curbstomp this line of thought" to "how can I avoid being heavy hoofed." While her distaste for such opinions is noted for the reader in her own thought processes, having her adjust to address her young subject with all the patience of a teacher who has suffered through centuries of this sort of thing cropping up on occasion comes across beautifully, and avoids using taking her out of character to verbally berate the filly with "THINKING LIKE THIS IS ABSOLUTELY WRONG."
Once I found out who the narrator was, everything became wonderfully clear. Thank you for a truly singular perspective on the history of Equestrian economics.
I feel like 70% of the story is contained within the last two paragraphs.
I was imagining this being presented as a dissertation, and thinking of the ways I would tear it apart. It was extremely gratifying to have Celestia call out how atrocious it was.
Yes, I think I'd like to know what her teaches thinks of this as well.
I imagine the academic review board may also be interested.
AAAAAAHHHH SILVER GLOW you can't be the same one though so i will cancel my hype
All we need now is someone to shout "They're on to us! Shut it down!" and it'll be a perfect story.
this was...
rather good
yet oh my oh my, dat filly
or rather that fillies teacher, I question there teaching credentials.
And then there is her name...
Is she the same as that one with the journal or is she a different one?
You know, I sometimes wonder if that's how the whole thing with money in our world started.
Wow. I have some food for thought here.
Well, this is probably why she gets that year in college after they discover a stable Earth portal... Hehehe.
Pffft! Okay, very cute and certainly succeeded in brining a smile!
at least the little one has the excuse of being a child.
8111075
happy birthday
Someday this kid will either be an economist or a storyteller. Either way, I hope someone saves this essay for her to look back on.
Also, I feel bad for the teacher who's about to be interrogated for producing a student capable of expressing nonconformist thoughts.
In the middle of reading this is thought it looked like a child's essay. Glad I wasn't proven wrong lol very good
The twist at the end was my favorite part.
Ah, makes me remember the fic about filly Twilight writing a report on many nobles and such lying. I laughed so hard while reading this my lungs hurt, man.
Glorious, simply glorious. A merry laugh, and a beautiful twist at the end.
Also, nice to see someone notice that economic development was a bit more complicated than "everything was wonderful until money."
I take it that this is some other pegasus filly named Silver Glow, not Admiral Biscuit's one. Becuase if it is her she definitely had some form of education put in her skull.
Fictional etymology! Yay! At the very least, it makes more sense than...
Wait...
I was ready to dislike this story until the end. At that point, I loved it. Well done.
It occurs to me that in most fics I've read (at least ones set in the "present day" of the show rather than the founders' era), the unicorns are the tribalist ones. This was genuinely interesting (and disturbing).
It doesn't really strike me as a comedy story, though.
This was cute. Racist as fuck and just as simplistic, but completely in character. Bravo, it was beautiful
I'm going to be honest -- she could have just denied the holocaust and I would have given her a hug. This is heartbreaking.
8111608 Not really. Money for us got started around the same time of the earliest population booms, when trade became more likely to happen between strangers than acquaintances. Before that, we mostly traded favors, with barter being reserved for cross-tribe trade. You only need something that's difficult to fake (such as pure coins of a rare metal) when the trustworthiness of your trade partner is in question.
8111468 Well the incredibly
racisttribalist (Gotta cut Biscuit off in advance) undertones are a perfect fit. I say it's canon!Oh please. You're a politician in a city stuffed with old-money nobles. This can't possibly even rank in your top ten.
Well. This will certainly be an interesting exercise in compare/contrast once I finish my "libertarian screed" fic.
(Did you know that Equestria is a perfect capitalist utopia with no taxes? Or coercion of any kind? 
)
8112483 no taxes? its at best an ad hoc parlamentary system with a very large monarchy, at worst its just a slightly more modern feudalist system, either way you got piles and piles of nobles and aristocrats, so theres gonna be taxes even without celestia's input. maybe not sales tax but probably lots of railroad taxes and little "processing fees"
at least thats my 2 bits about it
(im writing a fic about making money in equestria too...)
8112539 I think I once saw it suggested somewhere that the reason the CMC are able to get on the train unsupervised is because there's no actual train tickets, and transportation is just paid for out of taxes.
8112529 Why the unsolicited reciting of a child's innocently tribalist essay on economics that contains no questions is being compared to Job asking the question of "God, why have you forsaken me?" (roughly speaking) so many times in your comment is more than a little surprising. Then again, I am an agnostic, so I will fully admit to not being fully aware as to the presence and form of certain religious themes that may have seeped into my work.
Is it really so clear? Because if it were that clear, I'm pretty sure someone other than you would have said something by now. Because, based on what other people have said, the only thing that's 'clear' about the immediate future is that Celestia is about to ask some very pressing questions to that filly's teacher. Questions like "Did you teach this child to say these racist things?" or "Are you actually teaching your students anything?"
So... carefully choosing one's words to avoid hurting a child's feelings or call her a horrible person somehow translates to Celestia being cold and unaffected. Somehow. Apparently.
Huh.
I really want to know how a story where nobody talks down to this child, and the child is carefully asked questions to try and determine why this is happening, and the incredibly racist nature of the essay is only commented on internally, read by an audience who live in a world where our first instinct on encountering a child innocently spouting hurtful words is to assume that they are mindlessly parroting those words from either their parents or their teachers or other adults and then take steps to help them, could possibly be pushing the agenda you claim it is.
Did someone insert a paragraph where Celestia beats the child when I wasn't looking? Is there a second story written in invisible ink in the margins of my story that's just full of comments like 'this child should never have even opened her mouth, she's a complete idiot'? Did someone just message you and say something like "KingMoriarty wrote this story to criticize children for being children"?
The closest that Silver Glow gets to a comeuppance in this story is being discouraged from reciting her essay a second time, and perhaps realizing that Princess Celestia didn't really care for it. Literally the closest that any part of the story gets to the agenda you claim it's pushing is pointing out that the theories behind complex economics are a little too advanced for this child's current grade level, and that she doesn't really know how to construct an essay at that level yet.
Here is what the author of the piece, myself, was trying to say with this story: This is an essay written by a child who has been raised in a racist environment. I have hereby proved I can write such a thing believably. Happy birthday, one of my best friends.
8112314 In my defense, the person for whom I wrote this story as a gift suggested the Comedy tag.
Yes, I know it's not a good defense.
8112622
8112314 To add to his defense, I made that call because I figured the simplicity in the essay and Celestia's initial reaction would make for a few giggles. So feel free to lob your rotten fruit thisaway.
8111824 Thanks :D
*Sits to wait for Admiral Biscuit to come comment on this*
You know you've written something great when it turns into a debate about political agendas and the main character is compared to both a holocaust denier and a transphobe. Not to mention referencing David Chapman as a source...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_David_Chapman
I can't help but feel like this is an extreme example of facetiousness, exemplifying your story in a way of "just enough of the wrong kind of education."
I had many laughs reading the story, and the comment thread. +1 for entertainment today. Thank you for this!
8111468
I'm willing to accept that it is. That's how filly Silver Glow would think. Although to be honest, meeting with Princess Celestia is probably AU. . . .
8111595
Well, sometimes I wonder about Cheerilee's, as well.
I'm willing to go with the same. IMHO, meeting Princess Celestia is a bit of a stretch (although it works quite well in the story, and to be honest, that's probably exactly how filly Silver Glow would act in that situation). Everything else is totally the way she thinks.
8111679
8112081
She's reasonably close to the real one, I'd say. Sure, she's had some more education since she was a filly, and now knows that the concept of money isn't quite as simple as she thought back then, but I bet most of us would cringe if we re-read our essays from elementary school.
Growing up in Chonamare, with most ponies just bartering and trading for goods, would certainly lead her to believe that money was an unnecessary, stupid invention.
Plus. I like her idea that peagasi would keep raising their prices for the weather, if they thought that the unicorns were happy when things cost more.
8112314
I think that all three tribes are, but that the pegasi and earth ponies figured out first how to work with each other, since their two talents are so symbiotic.
8112374
I officially approve of it.
And yeah, totally tribalist, not racist.
8112727
Here I am!
I love it. It's so the way filly SIlver Glow would think.
8112826 I have to ask, where do you see Celestia ignoring the racist angle? Also, Godlestia isn't being applied here, so stow the headcanoning. In fact, one can take a look at her actions here and see quite clearly that there is a part of her that does want to take this line of thinking out behind the woodshed and put two in the back of its head, but she knows that it would be better for her ponies to teach them another way rather than just screaming her head off about how it was wrong. As for the bit about the teacher, yeah, Celestia's probably about to pull her aside and ask "what the actual shit is going on in your classroom" because that is a very valid question when a little filly comes up and says "I wrote this for class" and presents something dripping with tribalism to the freaking immortal ruler of the land. And given how peeved by this Celestia is, I highly doubt she's going to just go "lol, I wash my hooves of this, toodle loo~" if the answer is anything less than satisfactory.
Also, regarding your point on people who have ideas and yada yada: that is literally the freaking point of Celestia not just screaming and slapping a bandaid on the situation. Her last line implies that she's going to find the root of the issue—bluntly, those who have immediate influence on the little filly before her. It's a rather rational step to take when someone who shouldn't be so cynical and jaded openly pulls out "unicorns are the problem with everything" with all the delightful innocence and matter-of-fact tone as a child telling someone "this is the way the world works because mommy/daddy/teacher said so."
8112826
I'm reluctant to give any spoilers here, due to your warning; however, I will say (and I hope that this isn't too spoilerish) that this is a reasonable interpretation of something
she'd thinkshe would have thought when she was a filly.8112839
I did not. I typed exactly what I intended, and as far as I'm aware committed no sin. Did you do the same? ;P
But seriously. I did think you were joking. If you're serious... well... okay then. I had other plans today, but internet arguing can be fun too! Bear (yes, bears. The grizzly kind.) in mind, I don't feel like any party has been offended yet, I'm just ridiculously amused by the situation. It's gonna take me a while to type this up.
Felt this was appropriate.
I would like to thank thee for allowing me to partake in this gracious offering.
Fear not the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin.
I think the big thing here, is that Celestia would find the ideas being expressed as horribly unfair and tribalist... but that the child had said them in a matter of fact tone. These are things the child is either taught to accept as true or has determined over the course of her own interactions among the three tribes.
"No, you're wrong" doesn't help, and would crush the child. A lengthy discussion on economics would go over her head. A lecture on tribalism and how it's not right also requires Celestia to see where she's gotten this first. If her parents are the ones filling her head with this, or even a trusted teacher... having her 'goddess' correct her might lead to an instant defense of those people. Surely they wouldn't be wrong, they're the ones who she's supposed to listen to in the first place.
I'm sort of seeing this as something that was a petitioner, and Celestia was expecting, if anything, a little fluff piece on a child's hero that she could offer them some relatively unknown tidbit, make their day. Instead, she got an extremely complex retelling of economic history from a child which was so horribly fraught with inaccuracies that she was lost trying to catalog them all. Where does she even begin? She can't accuse the filly of not doing research without first finding out if she had; that seems like the bibliography thing. Celestia wants to know where this came from. She can't praise the filly for the attempt or the creativity because then it looks like she's offering approval of this sort of thinking.
Celestia's in a bad position. The concept of money and the idea that unicorns have nothing to provide to society is terrible. Even the suggestion that pegasi don't actually control weather but let the unicorns think they did, and that earth ponies build houses because they're just so nice? There's a LOT of bias here on display, and openly so. Anything positive she says is going to be used as reinforcement of these terrible ideas. Honestly, the only reason I don't see Celestia having stopped it early on is because it just startled her. She's used to children getting a detail or two wrong where a minor correction can help. Having the entire essay be what it is, there's just too much. Whereas a fluffy piece on a childhood hero can have a few details wrong and get the gist right, this essay started with a negative idea and then twisted events to fit it. Even the idea that earth ponies eat metal and gems came out of nowhere, to Celestia's knowledge.
It'd be like someone writing a lovely and heartfelt essay on why the entire sky was a beautiful lime green, followed by conjecture as to why it was true, with all sorts of science to back it up... but the basic premise is wrong.
8113031
A proper answer is gonna be even more spoilery, but if you want I'll go ahead.
8112676 Oh, I'm hardly offended. I enjoyed the story quite a bit. I just found it more disturbing than funny. Like, "wow, Silver Glow seems reasonably intelligent but somehow doesn't grasp the benefits of fiat currency, especially after beginning with an example like Brickwork that should make them particularly obvious."
...Come to think of it, I'd been meaning to read Silver Glow's Journal for quite some time but still hadn't gotten around to it and...good heavens there are how many chapters?
At least I've got something to do for a while.
8113026
Celestia is holding court. She is surrounded by the cream of the crop. The aristocrats, the business owners, those who make the machines of government and business and just plain old people spin. Her every movement, her every word, is being watched and taken note of. She is in the room in Equestria where her actions have the most consequences.
And...you consider the most appropriate action in this context to be immediately prioritizing the emotional welfare of this single child, as opposed to confronting the problem at its most probable sources, preventing even more children from being messed up by a toxic worldview, and in all likelihood initiating an educational reform that leads to a more all-inclusive curriculum that teaches children about all facets of history, not just the ones that serve a particular agenda.
I'm sorry, which one of us needs to do their research about what actions would be appropriate and plausible?
Now, this is all pretty much subjective, and it doesn't really...
Wait a minute.
No. You aren't seriously doing this.
Do not presume to know the author's intent. You don't know what the 'intended power of the resolution after that point' rests on. You have literally no idea what power the resolution was intended to have. Never mind the fact Celestia is not doing exactly the most correct thing in all ways, and I never tried to even imply an infallible character.
Let me lay it on the line: The actual intended power of the resolution is a spit take on the part of the audience that this tribalist amalgamation of inaccuracies was being read aloud to Princess Celestia of all ponies. Because this isn't some super-serious story about how ideas are totally more important than individuals.
It's a great. Big. Joke.
And yes, you're allowed to not find this joke particularly funny. Even for incredibly subjective reasons that you really shouldn't be advertising to the Internet. But don't just assume that you know what I was setting out to do with this story. Because you don't. You blatantly, horrifically don't.
I found this very entertaining, especially Celestia's reactions. I'll check out your other stuff as a result.
...The comments here are pretty entertaining too, at least in a "what the hell" kinda way.
8113229 I'd honestly like to apologize for the comments. Well, more for the fact that you have to scroll past a few very large comments to actually see any of them.
8111608
This short series gives a nice overview on the subject.