Some trust in chariots and some in horses.
Twilight Sparkle enjoys a relaxing Hearth's Warming with her parents, sipping hot cocoa and tea. Meanwhile, extradimenisional monsters attack Ponyville.
This was written for iAmSiNnEr as a part of Jinglemas 2020! For more information about Jinglemas, checkout our group!
Page generated in 0.065 seconds
Total duration
584 users online
1,048,973 hits today, 2,782,760 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
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.®
Danke!
I lol'd.
You can always count on Fillyfoolish for at least one Canada joke per story!
"Alien" is hardly informative. We talking about Grays, slavering monstrosities, the Great Race of Yith, what?
Ah. Horrors from the fourth dimension. That makes sense.
I'll allow it.
Poor Sunset. I honestly hope she takes Twilight to task for this after the situation clears up. Talk about learning all the wrong lessons from Celestia...
There's something inescapably menacing about "the Edict of Sparkle."
Dubious prioritization aside, this was a delightful bit of absurdity. And I can't decide if that last bit i a feghoot or not. Thank you for it, and merry Jinglemas.
10595533
My pleasure!
10595886
🇨🇦
10596142
Whether it's a feghoot is a semantics issue. The contrived midnight setup was specifically so I could make that pun work, but otherwise the story content predates the pun, and the title does not setup a feghoot.
This seems profoundly strange to me.
Twilight says that she'll make Sunset a Princess, but then forces her to do a job that princesses delegate to local librarians and/or unpaid volunteers. No part of what Sunset has to do as princess is remotely related to being a princess of Equestria.
It'd be like if you offered to make someone president for a day and then drafted them in spite of a total lack of military experience on their part and then sent them to the front lines of a war.
I mean, I get that the point of the story is, "Twilight dicked over Sunset, let's point and laugh," but this:
undercuts the comedy of the situation by making it seem like Sunset is downright brain damaged, and brain damage isn't really funny. Canon Sunset isn't so stupid as to think that Rainbow Dash is a princesses, and Rainbow Dash, not Twilight, is the one being publicly castigated for not doing the job Twilight falsely presented as the domain of Princesshood.
The lesson isn't "be careful what you wish for" so much as, "Don't deal with con artists." Sure, Twilight, we all totally believe that the job of princess is identical to the job of being a fashion designer, a weather manager, an apple farmer, a baker/event organizer, and an animal caretaker, and all of those jobs necessarily include all responsibilities that a so much as a single pony thus employed took upon themselves independently of the actual job description.
With a bit of temporal distance, and also having ruminated on the story for a bit, I've realized that I wasn't entirely fair to the story. I had focused so much on Sunset's explicit statement of the moral she had learned, that I completely overlooked the larger significance in terms of Twilight's characterization.
By renouncing her status as a princess of Equestria, Twilight returned to the position she held in Seasons One through Three. As such, her words and actions here provide direct and substantial commentary on how she's changed since then. She's legally reset herself to the same position she once held, but the intervening years of personal growth haven't disappeared, so we get a clear contrast between who she is, and who she was.
By initially refusing to intervene, in spite of her parents' pleas to the contrary, and doing so on the grounds that she's returned to her previous station, she's effectively saying that faced with a Season One through Three mulligan, she'd become a call refuser instead of an eager hero.
Twilight is announcing to her parents, on Hearth's Warming no less, that if she had it to do over again she wouldn't attempt to defeat Nightmare Moon, if given the chance to go back, The Return of Harmony would end thus:
if it were possible, she would have responded to the Changeling invasion by doing nothing (which would have been fine, it should be noted, since it was her brother and future sister in law who actually expelled the invasion), and that she certainly wouldn't have headed off to the Crystal Empire when it returned, and that she'd make those changes for them.
While she claims (though I have my doubts) that she would have allowed Equestria to be conquered six ways from Sunday if given the chance to do things over, she also claims that she would have spent more time with her parents. That's dark, but it’s also kinda sweet. Twilight is telling them full on that they mean so much to her that she'd gleefully let Equestria burn if it meant a few more hours spent with them.
I have to compliment that. Portrayals of Twilight as villainous usually don't go to quite these lengths to show that she still cares about at least some other ponies.
Honestly, I don't believe her about her supposed paradigm shift to "If I'm not a Princess, I flat out refuse to be a hero", but I also don't get the sense she's lying. I think she genuinely believes what she's saying, and her refusal to do anything about the worms until she's been nagged into it does suggest that there's at least some truth to her claim that (in the absence of noblesse oblige) she has become an adamant call refuser.
So, yeah: that's well done. It was a lot of very major characterization packed into a fairly small space, and unlike the lesson that Sunset learned, it doesn't feel forced, irrational, or stupid. It flows naturally from the rest of the story and is an effective and chilling portrayal of a significantly transformed Twilight Sparkle.
I still don't find it particularly funny, but it is very well written as a character portrait. I apologize for my previous comment focusing on what I consider a major flaw to the exclusion of the story's positive points. Sunset's stated moral was a major "Wait. What?" moment that completely threw me when I hit it, which seems to have caused me to treat attribute outsized importance to it. Sorry.
The weirdness of Twilight passive-aggressively punishing Sunset aside, this was a fun story. And that last pun!