This story is a sequel to Wishing Werelights
Before she had her cult town, Starlight Glimmer lived her life as a wanderer with a decaying mind. The mare's self-imposed isolation increases the instability of her corrupt ideals by giving them the chance to fester. Her inability to reconcile the loss of her friend Sunburst outlines some of her worst parts, which she jots down in a series of journals.
Here is one week of Starlight's entries.
Set before the events of the show and a prequel to the above story. Vaguely inspired by Regidar's Hypnagogic Drift and You Left Me Standing At My Front Door by milesprower06, but this is related to neither. The title comes from this song. Contribute to the TVTropes page!
Chapters (7)
How many children have you eaten so far
Will you specifically eat a certain species' younglings or are you nondiscriminatory towards your prey
If you eat baby rodents, do you swallow them like nutrition pills or do you chew them up first
Do you consider pizzas children
Are you a child
If you're a child when will you eat yourself
Oh, I'm always down for angsty StarBurst
or StarBurst in generalthis chapter is delightfully dark, the beginnings of a truly twisted mind, leaves me anxious to see what will happen next.That last paragraph made the hair on my arms stand on their ends.
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Please stop.
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No
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I have eaten an endless amount of children thus far.
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I hold some preferences.
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external-preview.redd.it/9vuLOPQLI9pnCBm72PzcW06ZLRr7BFqh3xKE8Xab3YY.jpg?auto=webp&s=a84519dad1722aa1b5302d6eda2f0e8c30b4b46f
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No, because when you consider the most basic classifications for life, pizzas lack the ability to respond to stimuli. I'm like 43% sure that those fuckers are made from single cells too.
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No, and please do not bring such slander to me.
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Bold of you to assume I was ever a child.
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Starlight Glimmer is honestly quite the
yanderepossessive little thing. I'm surprised most stories don't touch on how her twisted, pre-reform side would work in light of her Sunburst obsession. Thank you for the comment, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.10087061
To be honest, this Glimmy piece is more of a character study and piece to just play around with in that regard. Hearing that it's that effective thus far is excellent! Thank you very much!
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Please don't post comments unrelated to my story and any discussion already in the thread.
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Mainly, if they were to meet with her in that state, it wouldn't end well for Sunburst
All things considered, he should count himself lucky that the most he suffered through was an age-regression spell...
Heck yeah! Keep them coming!
If these are Starlight's obsessive tendencies we never see "off-camera", is there an actual psychoterapeuthic intervention we don't see after her downfall?
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This is pre-show Starlight as the description says, so she wouldn't be putting herself in a position to willingly get treatment. Depending on if you want to read this as a standalone, or if you came from the prequel, there's some possibilities:
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Oh? It was more of a thought experiment, I had no idea there were stories related to this one.
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It's linked in the description.
Interesting to see how Starlight's ideas for her village are slowly taking shape. Interesting, but terrifying.
For now
I think Sunburst would be the first to cry out against the destruction of a book...until he saw that it was propaganda and kindly throw it aside where no pony could read it (still might be an interesting historical record of the time though).
And what about the second one? Does is contain the spell she needs to achieve her crazy dream? For the sake of Equestria let's hope not...
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Thanks for sticking around! I always figured that she was a character with a gradual descent into disillusionment. Using Sunburst and further isolation as a starting point to her immersing herself in false ideologies works much better than just having her sad about her friend, especially when she would have to have effectively brainwashed herself to get to where she is in season five.
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Oops, I somehow missed your comment when it was first posted! Very sorry about that.
The book wasn't actually propaganda, Starlight is just crazy. The part where it mentions Nightmare moon/Princess Luna is the part that really touches on that.
That's for the next chapter.
Ah, so communism is cannon in this story, that explains where she got the idea for her village, I like that!
Starvation and isolation would drive anyone crazy. I kind of snickered when she said comrades when in the end they were pretty much slaves to her whims.
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It is, just with a different name and history. I never thought that Starlight would have devised the ideology that her village ran on by herself. It didn’t seem within her skill set, especially with how she ended up reverting to her truer self and especially when there were real world parallels with her ideals. I felt it fit more to have her as the messenger instead of the message maker, and having her self destructive tendencies show in her brainwashing herself by falling to propaganda fit really well.
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Gotta love villain delusions!
...But Starlight, you're gay too.
Also, yikes. That explains Sunburst's silence in the end. This was an interesting piece, the ramblings of a madwoman and seeing how she falls in the end, like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Good work!
10248465 Thank you very much for your time and comments! This one didn’t get a lot of attention, but it was great having notifications from someone.
Sunburst is silent because it’s just Starlight writing a journal to him at that point, with no one else to send her loneliness to. Sunburst is the journal. Starlight is just crazy in thinking she can still have him read the journal in the same way he would have been able to read the letters she sent at some point in the past.
And yeah, she can be a little gay herself. She’s just got a fragile, childish mindset and possession issues.
Considering Sunburst wasn't reading and responding to anything from Sire's Hollow within the show, Starlight might very well be feeling Sunburst abandoned her by not answering any of her letters.
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With that in mind, I wonder how Starlight feels about the below ponified Sorabji quotation:
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...I've never had anyone with a name that was barely not 'Public Clop Account' comment on one of my stories before! I gotta say, that's what struck me first.
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The origin of my username was that there were a ton of Reddit accounts with names like "MyLittleClopper" or "SecretClopAccount" so I made a spoof of them.
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Huh, I never dug into pony Reddit stuff but I know there are accounts on here with names like that.
Honestly, I don't get parallels with communism here. It's central issue is private property (on means of production in particular). Does she treat cutie marks as some kind of means of production?
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Her village and social beliefs at the start of season five had obvious parallels. Here I decided to include it as something Starlight was inspired by, since I find it unlikely she came up with a whole ideology on her own, as opposed to her using it to further her personal resentment for the things around her.
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I don't see any except some visual style borrowed from USSR (although, it may as well be every second totalitarianism)
I think this is my favorite line out of all of the entries. It was a tough call, though. There were soooooo many good lines in here, especially in the sections that centered around Sunburst.
Holy crap, my dude. I am so glad I saved this one for last on this "Ice Star Reading Day," because, holy dumb shit do you get Starlight Glimmer. The possessiveness, the denial, the descent into madness... The desperation to understand, to find her place, to stop the pain, to have Sunburst, to have anyone, to know and be known... It's so deliciously dark and tragic and beautiful in a terribly sad way. Like watching something burn. Even Starlight's homophobia was a fitting addition, both because it closes one door so firmly, but because it further amplifies her own self-hatred and denial.
The diary format was a great choice for this, even moreso than a first-person narrative. While there are events that occur over time as she gets closer and closer to where the village was founded, ultimately, it's Starlight's evolving mental state that the diary entries serve to highlight. Great storytelling choice.
Sunburst leaving just destroyed her so much. The fact that he never, ever wrote back, canonically or in this story, undoubtedly must have added to the misery that led to what she did. She is just a pained, tortured soul taking out all of her misery on the world... None of which makes her misdeeds okay at all, of course, it makes them compelling to write and read about.
Although this was written before we knew about Firelight and Sire's Hollow, I don't feel like canon Starlight is any less ostracized than this version of Starlight with her crazy aunt. You captured her loneliness perfectly. After all, one can't look at Starlight and her village of fake smiles and, beneath the horror, feel anything but lonely.
The books that she read (and misunderstood) added greatly to the formation of her character and Our Town. Trotsky was a clever way of implementing the totalitarian/collectivist ideologies she did display in her village. I wouldn't go so far as to unironically call her a communist, but she definitely was a collectivist who believed in Jante's Law. I was really glad to see the "tall poppy" reference for that reason.
Overall, this is probably one of my favorite pre-S5 Starlight stories. Granted, I haven't read a ton, and there aren't that many to pick from, but... you just nailed it. The tie-in to Wishing Werelights is a nice bonus too.
An easy frickin' fave, this one.
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Oh boy, that implies there will be more Ice Star Reading Days. I admittedly wasn't sure what you would think of this one, considering that it is way darker than most of what you've been dipping into for my horse fare. Plus, you know that I admittedly don't write Starlight that much compared to other characters.
It really puzzles me how people didn't realize from her debut that Starlight was insane. She quite literally snaps when she loses her one friend in the world and is completely unhinged. She does not operate by much rhyme or reason prior to her reformation. The girl literally founds a cult, and considering the amount of bullshit she imposes on others and still manages to spout, the sheer hatred she holds, it really came across like her first victim would have had to have been herself, since of all the ponies in her village she showed herself to be the most vulnerable to hateful and twisted ideologies. Plus, most dictators were mentally disturbed figures, as were many of the philosophers behind those kinds of ideas. For Starlight to be part of that mentally ill target audience makes far too much sense.
This is probably going to sound bizarre, but I would hesitate to use 'homophobia' here too. I write Glimmy as pan, so it isn't that she has any disdain toward gay ponies, she can't take 'no' as an answer to monosexuality. If their orientations were reversed, and their genders with it, Starlight wouldn't have understood if Sunburst was heterosexual. Orientation incompatibility and monosexuality do not exist to her, just the forceful idea of soulmates. I was hoping that came across well.
I really wanted to convey just how fucked up her abandonment issues left her, especially since I've written a couple of other characters who have them really bad/warped in other stories. Since she has canonical abandonment issues, it made her rife for exploration.
I'm pretty accustomed to the diary format after all the other utilization I've made with similar kinds of storytelling. It's just so much fun! Plus, it easily accounts for a) the no electronics nation of Equestria having hobbies like diary-keeping being common and b) Starlight has no one to talk to!
I mean, the girl literally starts a cult. One has to wonder how she got all those ponies to stay. There are not a lot of stories that try and reconcile the Starlight of the season opener with what we learned in the S5 finale about why she did things.
Starlight always struck me as someone who was too disturbed to function through the rest of normal society after Sunburst. Part of why I had her leave home so early was because of that and because she needed to build up the skills needed to run her cult one day. People/ponies like her are the ones you vaguely remember going to high school with and only ever think about when their name comes up on the late-night news for the heinous shit they've gotten themselves into — something reminiscent of the ending of My Friend Dahmer, if you've ever read that.
I'd say that she shows the cultural/philosophical understanding that would make her a communist. She certainly shows enough that she would likely agree with the ideas that spread when Marx rewrote how he saw human nature. Her village did have some of the softest examples of political elements they could probably get away with (labor in her village is collective, there isn't any currency) but other than that, yeah she'd need to be more political.