Shining Armor was dying.
In books, he thought, dying was a passive affair. It was something that happened on its own while a character did other things. But as he lay in bed, soaked in his own sweat, a bucket by the bedside for when he vomited blood, it occurred to him that dying felt like quite the active chore.
It has been easier, earlier. Then he’d had orders to give, officers to quickly promote, final letters to dictate to friends and family. He’d dictated a formal letter to Celestia, informing her he was no longer fit to fulfill his duties as Captain of the Guard. Then he send her a personal letter, thanking her for everything she’d ever done, and asking her to keep Cadence and Twilight company through the long years ahead.
He’d summoned Cadence and Flurry to his side, but they wouldn’t arrive in time. All his affairs were in order. And so there was nothing left to do but die. It was an active verb. He was spending his last moments in the mortal world dying.
He hated it.
In the field there were things to do. But in his hospital bed, which was full of lumps and itched furiously, which smelled like antiseptics and bile, in that bed there was nothing to do but think. To think about the daughter he didn’t save, or the wife he was leaving alone for eternity. Or the fact that he didn’t really believe in an afterlife.
His stomach revolted. The world spun. He rolled over to the side of the bed and vomited a mix of brown and red into the bucket. It burned when it came up.
“Here you go, sir.” A bottle of water floated into his sight. Shining looked at the creature offering it to him, took the water, and swished the taste of vomit out of his mouth. He spat it up into the bucket, and it took him effort to get comfortable in bed again. He didn’t have much strength left.
“So,” he said, “you’re not my real doctor.”
The creature, who looked very much like Shining’s doctor, looked down at herself. She appeared to be a young unicorn mare, green-coated, white haired, with medical red cross for a cutie mark. A white lab coat hung over her shoulders, a stethoscope around her neck, and a collection of bracelets on all four legs.
Chagrined, she finally asked: “What gave me away?”
“Your bracelets are fused to your ankles.” He pointed with a hoof. The bracelets on her ankles were tight, so snug they were flush against her skin. “The real doctor’s bracelets are loose. They shake or jingle when she walks.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She smiled and shook out a leg. “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d like it if I assaulted a medic, so I couldn’t steal her clothes. I faked a message saying she was urgently needed at a field hospital about ten miles away.” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t make you sick. I don’t think any of us did. Or if we did I didn’t know about it.”
“I believe you.”
She paused at that, tilting her head to one side: “Really?”
“Would it make a difference if I didn’t?” He tried to laugh, but it came up as a belch with a foul odor, and a spasm of pain wracked him. “If it doesn’t matter either way, I’d rather trust you.”
“Oh.” She nodded quickly. “My, um. My name. My real name, is Ersatz. I’m a spy in one of your artillery units. And I’m your daughter. I’m not here in an official capacity. I wasn’t ordered to be here, I mean. But I heard you were…”
She indicated the bed with a nose. “I had blue hair, when I was a grub. But now I have a frill and it turned red in my nymph phase. I don’t look that much like you anymore. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Shining let out a breath. “But why do you say you’re my daughter? I never loved you.”
“I know. But you’re the reason I exist. And, my brother always wanted to meet you.” A section of her skin melted, and from inside that gristly pocket, she produced a small folded photograph. When Shining took it and unfolded it, he saw a colt in that awkward teenage phase. A crystal pony, with a coat like diamonds and a mane like garnets. His cutie mark was almost visible—something with shapes and a musical note.
“After the first war,” Erstaz said, “My clutch heard about you adopting a changeling. And we thought, aren’t we supposed to be good now? Like, don’t we believe that friendship is magic and love conquers all? And there were so many war orphans. So we adopted one. The caregivers and teachers and all the nymphs. Like a group pet.”
“Cute kid.” Shining managed to smile.
“He always wanted to meet you. Um. I already said that. But he asked if you’re his stepfather, and I said I didn’t know. Because, in the hive, you wouldn’t be my father. But we’re siblings, and he’s a pony, so maybe that counts.” She cleared her throat. “His name is Lucky Sweep.”
“You love him?”
“Yeah.” She chuckled. “I’d have strangled him if I didn’t. You things are impossible to raise. You need love and food and to be kept out of danger, and when you’re little, you somehow manage to create more poop than could possibly have been formed from the food that went into you. Diapers are ridiculous. We all had to install the hive’s first toilet just so I could explain potty training. And then I discovered puberty is a thing. You can’t just crawl into a cocoon and grow up over two weeks like a respectable species. You’ve gotta go through eight years of being angry balls of hormones.”
Shining managed a laugh. “It’s true. He learned he could defy you?”
“He was going to be a diplomat for the hive. To Equestria. Straight A’s, perfect performance, he was inducted into a caste like a proper changeling, and then he goes and gets a cutie mark for musical theater and says he’s going to run away from home.” Erstaz put on airs of frustration, but her face was covered by a broad smile.
“Did he?”
“No. He’s a huge wuss.” She giggled. “He’s studying music at Queen Novo’s Conservatory at Harmonizing Heights. He wanted to go to the Crystal Empire, but we all wanted him far away from the war. And he loves it there.”
“Good. I’m glad.” Shining handed the picture back. “If you’d like, I could write him a letter. From his ‘stepfather.’”
Shining dictated a short letter full of encouraging words. Erstaz wrote it diligently, and tucked it and the picture back into her skin-pocket. Then she said, “There are a few others who would like to see you. If I bring them, will you promise not to shout?”
“I want you to promise me something first,” Shining said, and after Erstaz nodded, he continued. “I know you’re a soldier, and you’ll do what your queen commands. But promise you won’t do anything that would make your brother stop loving you if he knew. Don’t go back to being what you were.”
After a moment, Erstaz nodded. “I promise.”
“And don’t kill my wife or daughters. Promise that too.”
“Okay.” She bit her lip, then nodded again. “Okay, I swear.”
“Good.” He gestured with a hoof. “Go ahead and bring the others.”
There were four more spies. Shining joked that learning how many infiltrators were running around his army was the most embarrassing way to die. There were two changeling soldiers who crossed the lines when they heard he was dying. Their disguises were crude and unrealistic—it wasn’t their caste. There was one defector, who had switched over to the Equestrian side at the start of the war and never looked back.
They talked about their lives and their families, and he made all of them make the same promises Erstaz did.
They stayed with him until he died.
Three years later, Flurry Heart shrugged off her battle armor. The metal plates hit the ground with a clatter. “That gets heavier every day, I swear.”
She’d been with the artillery when the sun set, and didn’t want to walk back to the infantry camp until she was sure the ammunition problems were dealt with. Colonel Rain had offered her the use of his command tent for personal quarters for the evening.
The other officers were distracted. Flurry Heart was tired, soaked with sweat, and wearing no more armor than a thin underlayer of cloth. And she’d turned her back to the room.
Erstaz picked up a knife from the table. She took a step Flurry’s way. For a half a moment, she froze.
“Your Highness,” she said, offering the knife to Flurry. “Respectfully, there are changeling spies in the camp. It is not appropriate for you to be unarmored and unarmed with your back to the door. Something could happen.”
Flurry thanked for for her diligence, took the knife, and promptly forgot the entire incident.
A bit happier chapter. Still depressing but it's a start.
You know, it’s probably weird to ask at this point, but where is Chrysalis in all of this? Did she die a long time ago?
That's heavy. That question from Cheval, though, nailed home the fact she's just a teenager still. A child that the day previous made sleeping coffee for her father, and now woke up to his death some fifty years ago.
Flurry's gotta some questions to answer.
9615561
He wasn't poisoned by changelings he was poisoned by communists.
The chapter says that specifically. That's what "The International Party" means. The communist international movement.
Flurry, not Cheval. We established which one he loves more.
9615563
Mea culpa. I'll fix it instead to "the third major time that Shining and/or those around him were poisoned", and remove the "by changelings" qualifier. It doesn't exactly undercut my point.
Speaking of. This chapter reminded me a little bit of my favorite scene in Courtesans, which is when Shining Armor and Double Time meet for the first time and end up swapping war stories. Aaaand...that's it, actually. Within the context of the hate you feel for Shining, it's actually otherwise good, if sad. Good job.
9615537
Nevermind Chrysalis, where was Thorax? You'd think that the number-one ally that Equestria and the Crystal Empire would want would be the Badlands Hive. They'd presumably be approximately as good and capable at infiltration and espionage and would form a vital spy corps that the two nations otherwise lack, and I can't think of a good reason for them to want to stay out of this, or to have stayed out of the previous wars.
I can think of plenty of bad reasons, though. Including one tied to why I really, really, really hope is not the reason why this fic is entitled The Last Changeling.
9615531
Shining Armor is a good pony. And that makes him special.
He doesn't have to be anything else to be worthwhile.
9615537
In this continuity, Chrysalis died some time ago. Thorax is around (he's been mentioned in the other stories) but mostly sticks to his own territory. The Badlands Hive isn't a very political entity, and is a bit isolated.
9615584
Don't do it, Jaxie. Don't do what I think you're going to do. You want to kill Chrysalis, fine, but don't take that one extra step that I know you're going to. I want to be wrong, I want to be wrong.
9615593
... What's that extra step?
9615595
Your changelings are eusocial: without a Queen, the Hive can't reproduce. Without Chrysalis the only way the Badlands Hive could continue would be if one of the changelings there was already going to grow up to be a Queen; if Chrysalis is dead and none of the extant grubs were Queens, then there's no more Badlands Hive (or at most a lot of increasingly elderly changelings) - and given how rare you established Queens to be, there happening to be a grub one in the Badlands HIve seems vanishingly unlikely.
I'm holding out hope that either Queens are more common than A Foreign Education led us to believe (when Gia remarked that she's only ever seen three changelings with hair: Cheval, Chrysalis, and Amaryllis), or else like many species of bees the changelings have a way of making an "emergency Queen" should the extant Queen die, and thence have the "emergency Queen" give birth to an actual Queen.
Or maybe that Thorax is a Queen now, or Pharynx, or let's go for contrivance and make Ocellus turn out to be a Queen. That'd be fine too. Or even the Badlands Hive having been wiped out by Amaryllis or communists or a meteor strike or something. Really just anything other than the Badlands Hive having died off due to not having a Queen.
If the main OCs in this story series were voiced, what would they sound like?
9615630
Personally I've been imagining Tara Strong doing her Raven voice for Cheval.
I kind of love the "communists are the real changlings" vibe to this series, it makes this series feel like "The Americans" of fimfiction. Bet if this had been written in the middle of Season 5 Starlight would have been an interesting changling ally.
9615672
For the record I completely agree that it's your fic and you can do what you want, but if this is your attitude towards the idea of basic fact-checking first before deciding what facts you want to change then it goes a long way towards explaining your three most recent fics. Although it makes how you could have possibly produced Courtesans even harder to understand.
Remember I wasn't always a hater. Hell, I was with you through the majority of A Foreign Education, even.
9615677
static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_fnrywxd.png
I did think about making Starlight a member of the Intentional Party! But it would have diminished a lot of her character growth. In this continuity, she's a former member who escaped the movement.
I'm getting a feel for how you write.
That last line, that's a premonition that Bad Things are going to happen.
9615593
Didn't the first story say Chrysalis died offscreen in a previous war? Like, the S6 finale was replaced with a second full-on war before Amaryllis rolled in. Shining lost because that's apparently what he does in this saga, then either Equestria intervened or Magic Bullcrap Happened because that's a thing that happens with ponies, and they ended up reforming.
9615743
I read that as Bad Things didn't happen. The assassin refused to follow through and Flurry just never realized she had been in danger that night.
There's a lot of talk, from multiple commenters, about some of the continuity errors.
I just want to chime in, that I don't really care about that when reading this. I don't need the story to align 100 percent with every detail of canon in order to be engaged and immersed. After all, the show is about magical colored ponies, and ignores its own canon plenty.
But also because there is no creativity, or even any joy, in that.
Certain aspects of world-building and continuity, including internal working logic, only matter insofar as they serve the emotional, character driven core of the story or invoke particular feelings in the reader; whimsy, quiet, hungry, fearful, shock, home, etc. Connection to the original work, particularly in fanfiction, is only necessary up to the point that the author needs it to be in order to communicate familiar ideas, places, and characters to the reader. Enough so you go, aha, I see. This is mostly Cadence from the series, but it's a speculative piece on how she may act if she was expected to lead her country in war, how she may act if she then lost, how she'd react and change and grow if a whole bunch of things that didn't happen in the show, that could never happen in the show because it's for children, happened.
Changelings being unable to cry in this fic does not align with canon. But it's worth the trade off for such a small slip in continuity because it allows GaPJaxie to write an evocative moment that illustrates some of the alienation Cheval feels simply by existing in the body she exists in. To show more concretely one of the reasons she doubts her own feelings, devalues them, even. It allows GapJaxie to do more, to write more, with the character than what we would expect based solely on the constraints of the original work.
9615771
I don't mind if Chrysalis is dead, I mind the potential implications for the Badlands Hive this could cause if Jaxie takes the step I fear and yet am totally certain he is going to. Bluntly, it basically means that Thorax killed off his people by trying to save them. It's one more good, kind, decent canon character and his intentions sacrificed on the altar of GRIMDERP.
9615773
Dude, if Jaxie wants Cadance's magic to be pink instead of blue, that's fine (though no one gets to complain if it's misinterpreted as a sign that something's wrong, given that magic of the wrong color has been used to that effect before in the show). If he wants changelings to not have tear ducts, that's fine. That's not the issue. The issue is in whether or not Jaxie even checked in the first place to know what facts he's changing. Because if he didn't then it's not a trade off, it's plain not giving a damn.
And yeah, sure, it doesn't make a difference with the tear ducts or with Cadance's magic because it's not like there's really anything major happening because of them. But it sure as Hell mattered in The Virgin Princess when Jaxie accidentally revealed that griffins have cloaking devices without intending to or thinking through the implications; or in A Foreign Education when he had Double Time mocking Cheval trying to claim that her instincts took control of her actions when the very opening of the scene had Double point out to Cheval that her instincts will take control of her actions.
Above all else, he was a good pony.
Though it is kind of embarassing how thoroughly the changelings infiltrated the camp. On the other hand, it's kind of what they do.
Saving her one last time, mm? That was adorable in its heartwarmingness amidst tragedy, I think.
9616214
I know it is! I do like it!
I just... haven't gotten around to switching to the first part. I started on Foreign Education.
But I'm reading The Third Wheel now! :D
Chapter 2:
"explaining, an long silence"
"explaining, a long silence"?
"don’t have tear-ducts."
"don’t have tear ducts."?
re Amaryllis(?) there:
...Interesting. And... saying things that Cheval may not have known?
"I hope ghosts are real, because if there’s an afterlife it means you can burn in hell for eternity."
...Hm. Except, ghosts being doesn't/wouldn't necessarily mean one or more afterlives are, are furthermore, if her restless spirit was still haunting the world of the living, isn't it, well, in the world of the living, rather than some hell? It also occurs to me to wonder just what hell Cheval is thinking of.
Of course, I'm sure the detailed and reasoned metaphysical underpinnings of her words are exactly what's occupying most of her mind right now, so giving her something of a pass. :)
"Cadence didn’t react. A moment later, her ear twitched."
...The question arising, of course: What is she seeing and hearing here, and how is she interpreting it?
...Oh, and I was just looking back for something and noticed an interesting juxtaposition here:
"By midnight, she and Cadence were the only two ponies left in the graveyard."
"Amaryllis was there too."
Now, could be that Cheval is classifying Amaryllis as "ghost" or "hallucination", and that that falls outside the category of "pony" as "changeling" wouldn't... but I think perhaps it's not that.
Oh, hm, though then that would have a further juxtaposition with the... title. Hm.
...Has it actually been said that "the last changeling" of the title is Cheval? I could see that not having a purely binary answer, too, and being played with.
"Amaryllis’s wings buzzed against her shell."
[looks up at her line a few paragraphs previous]
"and her smiled showed a"
"and her smile showed a"?
"a spy for the international party."
"a spy for the International Party."?
Ah, and sounds like Shining was exiled too, and/or went with Cadence to Equestria but not with her to the south? Hm. Well, the latter could be explained by him being in hospital at the time (must have made it an even more fun trip for Cadence...), and I could see either one working for the former, yeah. Not sure which is more likely; even though he was a prince consort and either deposed or self-semi-exiled, the International Party might still have thought it would deal a significant morale blow or something.
(Though I also don't think I can currently rule out him being in the North, with Flurry, but Flurry being too busy with the ruling. Oh, or maybe just busy in a different part of the North at the time, though that would probably still count as "with the ruling".)
Ah, and then some of my questions get answered.
(Though, assuming we can even trust Amaryllis(?) here, what, they thought telling his wife would injure the dignity of the army, even if they also asked her to keep it secret? Believable, but I wonder just what led to it.)
"who she was talking too, and"
"who she was talking to, and"?
"other than mom. And"
"other than Mom. And"?
"He turned what should have been a quick battle into decades of suffering."
...Ah. I will point out, pre-reform Amaryllis conquering the Crystal Empire would likely have gone significantly worse for... pretty much everyone involved possibly up to and including herself than post-reform Amaryllis doing so, because even if that reform wasn't as deep as many thought and hoped, I don't think it was wholly surface either.
I mean, if I had to pick a pair of ponies who turned what should have been a quick struggle into decades of suffering in this affair, weeeell... it's not Shining and Amaryllis, let's say.
I do also notice that we've heard basically nothing yet about the current status of Flurry or the Empire's, or North's... or Equestria's government.
Chapter... ah, next?:
Ah, and as I suspected from the title, a flashback I see.
"something that happened that happened on"
"something that happened on"?
"Then he send her"
"Then he sent her"?
Hm. No mention of a letter for Cheval?
"with medical red cross for"
"with a medical red cross for"?
Oh, yes, so I wonder if it's a usual thing for changeling grubs to express some physical traits of the father, before growing more uniform later in life?
Nice. :)
Well, in its sad...bittersweet? way, of course. Not quite sure what to call it. But nice.
(Oh, and I can see why this might not have been told to Cadence...)
Ah, yep, and there's War Princess Flurry Heart.
"Flurry thanked for for her diligence"
"Flurry thanked her for her diligence"?
(This one I actually read straight past the first time and only caught when I was looking up from the comments to check something. Ah, the elusiveness of typos...)
:)
...Of course, then we look back up at the title again, and wonder what happened to Ersatz...
9615577
"Flurry, not Cheval. We established which one he loves more."
...Look, do you think Flurry would have allowed him to release her? And this isn't a case of "his daughter looked up at him with big eyes and asked him to pretty please keep her sister in stone", it's "his daughter, the one with the cutie mark in what appears to be rulership with likely a side of war and conquest, which she got by deposing and exiling her own mother, his wife, ordered with the full authority of the throne that her sister stay in stone". If he can't convince Flurry to release her, which he tried and failed at, getting around that would involve breaking Cheval out and presumably then fleeing the Empire with her. Which, given Shining's popularity and the fact that there's a war on, might have escalated. Neither Shining nor Flurry want that kind of weakening in the war, but Flurry's arguing for the status quo on the issue and has more official authority over it.
"and I can't think of a good reason for them to want to stay out of this, or to have stayed out of the previous wars"
...Do we know that they in fact did stay out of all the wars? Because we know there were changelings fighting on both sides, and while maybe the ones on Flurry's side were all deserters from Amaryllis or the like, I don't see why the Badlands hive couldn't also get involved.
If anything, I think it's fairly strongly implied that at the least Ocellus was involved.
9615584
Ah, thanks.
9615722
"In this continuity, she's a former member who escaped the movement."
Oh? Interesting. Was that before or after Our Town? Or did that not happen here?
9615773
Aye, I care about it being consistent with itself, but... it's already different from the show. I don't expect the great majority of fics I read to be Oliver-level attempts to make sense of and hew to as many of the show's fine details as possible, and while I find what Oliver does very impressive and think that there's a lot of good material there, I think that there's a lot of good material outside of there, too. So changelings not having tear ducts when apparently at at least one point in the show at least one did is, okay, changelings in this universe don't have tear ducts; that's another difference among the others then.
9616233
I think he knows Twilight Sparkle, which The Virgin Princess established is just as good at teleportation as she ever was. So Flurry’s desires aren’t a going concern unless he lets them be, especially not while she has an impossible war to win. She doesn’t have the luxury of turning down Equestria’s aid or retaliating against Shining no matter what Shining does.
But he didn’t do that. You can be a good person and a bad parent, they’re not mutually exclusive. And if he’d grabbed his little sister and had her teleport his daughter to Canterlot, then Cheval would have been just as safe or safer as in the Crystal Empire, and would most likely have been de-petrified sooner. Maybe even in time for the funeral.
Oh, this is also leaving aside that he accepted Khaleesi Flurry Heart rather than conking her over the head and getting her out of that impossible war, too. Which I honestly hope Jaxie doesn’t explain, because there is no number of Independence Day-style speeches that could make me believe that Flurry could reverse the situation she grabbed with all four hooves. That situation, as a reminder, is as princess of a land where more Crystal ponies are in Amaryllis’ army than in hers, this despite the Crystal Empire having been involved in...I think we settled on around four total wars prior to this one with the changelings? Inclusive of the original War of the North. I don’t think Jaxie gave an exact number, just “many”, so let’s call that three plus the original one. The point is, Amaryllis kills crystal ponies every few years (and in particular killed a LOT during the War of the North - remember the nailing them to fences, burning them alive, and other atrocities committed?), but they still flock to her army over the Empire’s. They love Amaryllis more, they view her as their true ruler and Cadance as a satrap - and therefore Flurry as a usurper. I mean, unless Jaxie has them all bitten by the idiot bug I’m going to mention below.
Or maybe I totes called it and crystal ponies are cheap dates who view right of conquest as a legitimate succession method. They flocked to Amaryllis because she was winning. Flurry pulls one or two miraculous victories out her ass, and all those ponies who’d spent years fighting alongside changelings as comrades in arms flip sides. They're loyal to strength, not crowns or bloodlines or lands.
Anyway. Shining Armor. Good pony? Sure, I can buy that Jaxie-Shining was that...and that he died for it. The lesson being that being a good pony won’t save you. Might save your family if you’re lucky, but you get to die far from home surrounded by strangers. But he was a good pony.
But also a bad parent, by any rational measure. He failed to prepare one daughter for her own nature (remember, A Foreign Education establishes that Cadance and Shining and Double suspected that Cheval might have been a Queen, but said nothing to her about it), let her wander off to a place we’re he knew she would not be getting enough love to avoid starvation, and his negligence on both counts played a part in Cheval turning into a monster. He let his other daughter depose him, petrify his little girl and keep her as a trophy, and start a war that it’d take a miracle to win and another miracle to be worth winning - the fact that those miracles apparently happened do not justify allowing it. As parents, he and Cadance failed, but Cadance has the excuse of not really being a person anymore. Shining was just inept.
Jaxie certainly implied as much with posts like this, 9615584, and similar in the other stories in this series. There have been a number of places in previous stories where if they WERE involved, they would/should have been mentioned...but weren’t. So, yeah, the implication is that they’ve largely been bitten by the same idiot bug that Jaxie has bite everyone when its time for Amaryllis to win some more and/or Khaleesi Flurry to pull victories out her ass and/or when the griffins need to have invented cloaking devices.
I do hope that the Hive got involved in this war on the side of ponies, but if the Amaryllis changelings have been able to continuously run roughshod over the Crystal Empire, then it’s doubtful that the Badlands Hive did much for them in the last few wars. Which doesn’t make sense, even a stupid person - that is, Cadance, according to Jaxie - should have remembered how much Thorax owes the Empire and petitioned him for a bevy of changelings to form an effective spy and counterintelligence corps, and I can’t think of a good reason for Thorax to have refused it. Yet not once is this request ever even implied to have been made. There’s that idiot bug again.
Plus I’m worried that Amaryllis used her ovaries as a weapon/bargaining chip against the Badlands Hive. I do want to be wrong about that, though.
Going to be an interesting reunion with 'Empress' Flurry Heart. I actually think Cheval could take the whole "Sorry for turning you to stone, but I had to do what I had to do." Considering what she herself was going to do.
Wonder if Light Step and Double Time are even still alive at this point. They'd be pretty old.
Can I have a TL;DR of new info from "The Virgin Princess" that's relevant for this story? I've skipped that one because of its darkness. Also I don't trust Jaxie's "this will have a happy ending" claims anymore.
9616645
Basically, most alicorns (the jury is out as to whether or not this applies to Flurry) are trapped at one mental and emotional moment in time. You know how in the show Twilight seems to need to learn some of the same lessons over and over? That's explained as not being the result of it being an episodic kid's show in this case, but rather actually caused by alicornhood. Twilight became an alicorn at sixteen, and she will now always be sixteen. She's also fundamentally locked into the emotional state she was in on the day of her ascension. She was happy. She will always be happy.
Or as another example, she'd never tried coffee before becoming an alicorn and was always nervous to try it in case she didn't like it. Turns out she likes coffee, but even though she objectively knows that (if she takes the effort to recall it), she is still nervous about having coffee for the first time in any given day.
Or as a third example, Twilight used to love to read new books, but since ascending she doesn't really actively recall any books she's read, so she reads the same books in her library over and over again. Get her a new book and she'll probably get around to reading it at some point, but it won't really stay with her without effort on her part to recall it.
It's sort of like 50 First Dates, except that Twilight doesn't exactly forget what's she's learned since becoming an alicorn, so much as it's just not actively with her mentally unless prodded. She can recall everything she's learned but she can't learn or grow from it, and she has and always will have the same inborn emotional reactions to things.
Twilight is happy to be the way she is, but it's because she can't help but be happy. She pretty much doesn't have any choice in the matter. Things can push aside her happiness - it's not like she'll giggle at watching someone die - but her default emotional state will always return to happiness in short order (That is, minutes or hours). She justifies it to herself (when forced to by others - she'd almost never reach this epiphany on her own, and even if she did she'd quickly forget it) by being of the belief that by remaining sixteen she can keep making friends with teenagers in Ponyville who "need" it, basically helping them learn friendship lessons. Y'know, the show, only not with Applejack or Pinkie Pie because they've grown up and moved on, and so have her next set of friends, and her next ones...
It's incredibly arrogant. It places her at the center of Ponyville and basically establishes her belief that only if she's around and makes the sacrifice of being trapped as she is, can the ponies she make friends with actually improve and grow. But she doesn't realize how arrogant it is, because she can't. Because she's trapped.
Oh, and she has a spell that can undo alicornhood. She had what I'm going to call a brief moment of lucidity when the horror of her situation occurred to her and she put effort into creating the spell. But she'll never actually cast it on herself, both for the above reason of arrogance, and because she'll almost certainly never be in the emotional or mental state needed to realize that she needs to cast it on herself.
Light Step decided that she's fine with all of this. Enforced happiness is still happiness, I guess.
Jaxie has yet to explain exactly how this applies to Cadance, except that it's "less obvious" since she was about 30 when she ascended rather than 16 (Jaxie being of the opinion, I suppose, that teenagers are not mentally or emotionally complex but adults are). Obviously since Cadance wasn't a statespony at the moment of her ascension, she can't ever really learn to become one or grow into the role, explaining why she was bad as a princess. But one wonders what emotional state Cadance was in at the moment of her ascension given how vindictive she acts throughout The Third Wheel and much of Courtesans, and starting an active plan to tear apart Amaryllis' hive from the inside, and yet has been a complete doormat since A Foreign Education. By everything we know for her to have been as methodically vindictive towards Double Time in Courtesans as she was, over the course of several days at least, would have required her to actively force herself into that emotional state - but at the same time the same condition means that Cadance shouldn't be able to do that on her own. Unless her kneejerk reaction to changelings is vindictiveness, but then by that logic it should always apply to every changeling she meets forever and she would need to work herself away from that vindictiveness - but that would be something Cheval would certainly have sensed and understood growing up, but there's been no implication of it, plus again it wouldn’t occur to her to need to work away from it.
Jaxie's also been mum on how this affects Celestia and Luna, though by implication Luna is doomed to go Nightmare Moon again sooner or later.
Anyway, so that covers alicorns. Plot-wise, war officially broke out between Equestria and the Crystal Empire verses Amaryllis' Hive, allied with the communist Griffins. The Griffins at the climax of The Virgin Princess launched an attack by zeppelins that got across the Equestrian border due a Commie spy, managed to cross the crowded, populated skies of Equestria at a frankly absurd speed without being detected, and conducted a propaganda raid on Ponyville, Canterlot, and Trottingham that mostly did superficial damage (Ponyville was totally destroyed, but it's a small agrarian community and no one died since mentally-and-emotionally-trapped-at-sixteen Twilight apparently has incredible self-control in a crisis situation so who cares), and then somehow made its escape.
Jaxie compared it to the Doolittle Raid from World War 2, but really the two are not comparable in any way excepting that some nation attacked some other nation.
And then that brings us to this fic.
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Double TL:DR, Twilight is 16, and will always be 16, and she's perfectly happy with that, because she was when she ascended. And Celestia is a monster for having done this to her.
Also the Griffons sided with Amaryllis and blew some shit up when they really shouldn't have been able to, but never mind that because Twilight's stuck as a living Disney animatronic to friendship.
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I'm not sure I can call Celestia a monster. She wouldn't have had any more real choice in her actions than Twilight does in hers. She's just as much of an emotional robot as Twilight. Different overall state, maybe, but same lack of real choice or ability to comprehend and anaylze her own actions, learn and grow as a person. Though that does still leave it as fucking impossible that Equestria could be a 1,000-year-old nation that by all indications is one of the strongest on the continent. Celestia should be just as inept as Cadance, and you can't even use the excuse of a more rapid advancement of technology and science in the modern age of railways and industry and so on. Do you know how much society and warfare and politics and everything changed between 500 AD and 1500 AD? Or even just between 1500 AD and 1800 AD?
It also means that the main benefit that being an alicorn should bring - not the power boost (which Jaxie previously defined as being minor in his fics anyway when compared to the show), but the wisdom and experience of just living for so long and being able to learn across such a vast span of time - is completely off the table. Alicornhood contains no appreciable upsides other than eternal life...but it's eternal life in what any rational person would realize is Hell.
So how about this Amarylis?
Is she ghost or what?
Or she live forever because Cheval?
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Jaxie's changelings sort of have a hive mind (it's pretty vague so far on exactly how, though, for the moment I'm thinking of it as being like the Dalek thoughtweb from Doctor Who in that there are individual changelings but they can access a sort of group consciousness in order to talk to any other changeling in the hive mind if they want, although it might just be feelings or emotions, not words), so maybe Amaryllis exists as a sort of presence in all of her brood, although Double Time never even alluded to its existence in Courtesans, either to others nor in the narration itself. Possibly it's something only Queens have, a link to the previous Queen, sort of like previous Avatars in Avatar: the Last Airbender.
Might also be a ghost, I guess. In any event given the specific information relayed and its corroboration in the flashback chapter I'm not inclined to think that it's merely a hallucination.
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Also In "Foreign Education" Cheval turn in Amarylis one time.
Seems legit
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Yeah, that scene did bother me a bit when I re-read it, as I don't think Cheval should have really had any way of knowing exactly what Amaryllis looked like pre-reformation, and certainly not what she sounded like. I was intensely worried for awhile that Amaryllis and Cheval had switched places.
But if Amaryllis sort-of exists Avatar style inside of Cheval, then it makes sense...sort of, since it also raises a number of questions about how individual each Queen really is, and how much of what Cheval did in A Foreign Education was Avatar Amaryllis in the back seat. Even if an Avatar Queen can't do anything more than whisper in a living Queen's ear, that removes a lot of the living Queen's real agency.
Well, I'd say in the light of Double Time's story about how they killed nymph whose color was weird that's unexpected. Unless queen directly approved.
More please
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She observed the weird color and the nymphs thought they might have had less rations, but it very well could have been just paranoia.
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...Well, I agree Shining could have been a better father in a number of ways, disagree with a variety of your other points, and am uncertain on a few with the current information, but, ah, sorry, I don't think I'll take the time at the moment to reply to everything in detail; I'm not sure how productive it would be.
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I expect at least some of the variance in Cadence's behavior can be explained by the difference between threats to her family and threats from her family, though I don't think Twilight is as simple as you seem to either.
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"but it's eternal life in what any rational person would realize is Hell"
You realize, yes, that different people can have different values, and that these differing premises can change the conclusions given by even perfectly rationally executed logic? To insist that any rational person would come to that conclusion therefore seems to me rather excessive.
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If you found The Virgin Princess too dark to read (and I'm not saying there's something wrong with that; different people like different things), I suspect that RainbowDoubleDash and Spiritus Arcane's views may be close enough to yours here that their replies are more useful to you, but as I feel I should provide some contrary voice, I'd just like to say that not everyone finds the sequence of events in the story so structurally problematic. Again, you may be someone who would (and nothing wrong with that, see above), in which case listening to RainbowDoubleDash is probably a good idea for best guiding your future enjoyable reading, but I thought I should say something just in case.
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Based on the description of how Hellicornhood works in The Virgin Princess, Cadance should not actually ever love Cheval as a daughter. Her first reaction on seeing her every day should be “that is a changeling” and then she’d react according to how her condition forces her to react to changelings. If prompted she can work herself away from it, but by default? Cheval would know it.
Actually in fairness this should also apply to her reaction to Flurry Heart. Every day Cadance wakes up as the pony she was when she ascended, which wasn’t as a mother or even an expectant mother. Sure, she objectively knows who Flurry is, but the emotional bond? It shouldn’t be there. She’d love Flurry like she’d love anypony else, because that’s all Flurry is to her: somepony she knows.
Shining Armor, too.
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...Well, we do appear to have different interpretations of how the alicorn thing works. Not sure what I can say here.
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To clarify, Jaxie had Twilight say in the first chapter of Princess that she does learn, grow, assimilate new information, and can make new friends. But that’s not how he then proceeded to show her acting. Sure, she has new friends, but she’s the Element of Magic and the Princess of Friendship. She’s friendly, so of course she can make new friends. But if she could actually learn and grow, she wouldn’t be circling the library reading old books for the millionth time. She wouldn’t be worried about whether or not she likes coffee, and she wouldn’t be calling for Spike whenever she comes home and needs help. Because the fact that Spike isn’t there would be new information that she assimilated. The fact that she likes coffee would be known to her at a reflexive level. She isn't assimilating new knowledge, even if she can push herself to access it.
She lied in the interview. Because that’s what Twilight does, she lies so that she doesn’t worry people. And that’s all she’ll ever do. Or at least, I choose to believe that she lied in the interview, because the alternative is that Jaxie lost the thread of the character from the start in the very fic where he was trying to define her. And that would be truly depressing.
Damn, that scene with Shining Armor...
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He's a good pony.
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Yeah, he is. Best pony material, the way you wrote him.
Dude, what did I do with my flashlight? This shit is DARK
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That she can't learn and and grow in all ways does not, I think, mean that she can't learn and grow in some ways. As I interpreted it, her flexibility and adaptability have changed and narrowed but not vanished.
She must be, for instance, and appears to be, able to assimilate information about new friends, as one example, to remember who they are and what they are like during the period they are her friends.
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The thing is that there is not a difference between that, and remembering what books she’s read, or remembering that Spike no longer lives at home, or remembering how previous attempts at romance don’t work out. The brain doesn’t really draw distinctions between memories like that.
The only explanation is if she retains information when it’s convenient for Jaxie’s narrative for her to, and loses it when it’s instead convenient for her to do that. Because no other attempt to explain how her brain categorizes things really works in light of everything we know about how brains categorize and organize and prioritize information.
"Artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl" -- Col. Rarity Belle
NOTE: In the US Army, Division Artillery is abbreviated DIVARTY. Yes, really (dahling).
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What on Equestria makes you think that's how alicorn minds work in this Equestria? They're magical immortals embodying a theme or a purpose.
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"Artillery kills the enemy. Infantry loots the ruins." -- Something taught to me when doing my conscription. In the artillery, as you might have guessed.
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What makes me think that is the reasonable assumption that fanfics work like the show unless specified otherwise, and the show works like real life unless specified otherwise. We’re two inception layers deep in reasonable assumption here, but even if we weren’t, would YOU like to take a stab at explaining why Twilight can remember who Diamond Shoal is but can’t remember that Spike was gone? Would YOU like to explain how Cadance’s opinion of Double Time and Light Step can change and how she can love her daughters as her daughters despite meeting them years after her ascension, but Twilight can’t stop having the same opinion, forever, about coffee, or endlessly circles her library reading the same books over and over?
Do YOU want to explain how Cadance can never grow into being a statepony but Celestia can successfully lead a strong nation for 1,000 years in spite of the changes to science, technology, magic, society, culture, and morals?
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"The brain doesn’t really draw distinctions between memories like that."
...I mean, this isn't a human or even a normal pony brain, though (and normal pony brains can also vary from universe to universe). This is the brain of the magical immortal ascended Alicorn of Friendship. And we know that mind-altering magic exists. I think it's definitely possible that her brain and associated magics do draw distinctions between memories like that.
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Is Twilight the Alicorn of Coffee and Libraries? Is Cadence the Alicorn of Statesponyship?
I really don't see why the same magical process that makes them, among other things, immortal couldn't also be selectively choosing memories that are Important For Their Role vs. ones that aren't.
The chain of assumptions of mention is useful, I agree, but each universe is... just that. It's physics, its history, its geography, these things are not guaranteed to match any other universe exactly. New evidence that appears to contradicts the theory is something to be explained; perhaps it will be found that, indeed, the evidence is flawed, but perhaps it will be found that the theory does not apply in the situation in question.