• Member Since 14th Apr, 2012
  • offline last seen March 9th

Fiddlebottoms


"Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control ..."

Comments ( 21 )

That final line is great, everyone loses at life

1494953 Could not agree more. Epic.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. What honestly can be said?

this is strange and i love it!:derpytongue2:

This story actually had a deep lesson to be learned.... and it was creepy.

It was pretty good though it was a bit repetitive.

Oh my, you actually used an ellipse properly. Back to reading.

Okay......

Imagine for a moment that, your door suddenly burst open. A strange looking guy enters the room and sits down on a foldable chair. And then he just stares at you.

That's how this story felt to me .....

1632410
So ... did you like me staring at you, or what?
Because I am confused.

What the buck.......:facehoof:

This story made me laugh. Some games do get away from you. The trick is to change the game to what you want.

1494953 1496245

That last line, I believe, actually hails from the movie War Games.

2365585
Last line and the chapter title form the complete quote.

A mini-review courtesy of the Orient Express Explorers.

Like Amit said, it's easier to say this is something different than to say what it is. Technically, it looks a little rushed. The POV bounces back and forth between Twilight & Trixie unexpectedly, there are missing question marks and four azure unicorns, and some of the bad kind of telling ("The two mares stared at each other across the table, driven to self-destruction by their own weapons.")

The idea of the two unicorns starting a fight that they can't stop, which turns out more horribly than either had imagined... that's compelling. It sticks with me. The title & last line are taken from WarGames, which I guess has the same message... but I'm not sure. WarGames is about war that can only be entered into deliberately. This story is about people who can't let each other be.

Trixie's role is straight-forward, but what about Twilight? Did she have the chance to back out of the conflict, or not? That isn't clear. I'm troubled that Twilight got into this situation without ever making a clearly bad decision. That makes the story a lot darker than a WarGames-like story, where horrible things happen when people make bad decisions, but we can avoid them. I'd like more clarity about whether Twilight made an error in judgement. That makes the difference between concluding that we can learn from Twilight's mistake, or that there is no such thing as wisdom and fate will chew us up and spit us out no matter what we do.

2487590
The rushed part, yes.
I've spent the better part of the past several months trying to figure out what fanfiction should be, and I'm still not clear. This was part of a period where I ran on the theory that putting out ideas as fast as possible was the main point, and everything should look rough and unfinished. Make outsider art, basically.
I don't think that's the right answer anymore, and the idea of people still reading this is kind of embarrassing.

As for Twilight, I think that is part of why the story overcomes its grammar. No one joins the army expecting to lose a leg, or takes up smoking expecting to get cancer, or eats a hamburger expecting to suffer a heart attack, or starts drinking expecting to lose their job.
The possibility is there, of course, but it is pushed out of mind. And that (once again, I'm just assuming based on the comments I got and my own experience with other stories that I've remembered) is what gives the story its effect. It reminds readers of something that they put a lot of effort into forgetting.

If there is a lesson to be learned (I mainly wrote this as an absurdist comedy) I'd hope it was one of having compassion for others. The homeless guy down the street didn't wake up one morning and say, "Ya know what I'd like to do today? Spend the rest of my life living under a bridge and begging for spare change."
He, like Twilight, encountered a situation and made what seemed to be the most efficient choice at the time, and then, caught within the aftermath of that choice, he made another choice, and then another.

"All terrible things start with innocuous decisions," is how I'd say it if I had to write a letter to Celestia.

Well, Twilight at least has friends who'd notice if she went missing, and once they find her I have no doubt that Celestia would be able to restore them. Still, this would be an awfully humiliating experience either way.

PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

Goddamn, this is so freaking weird.

I really like this story and how it put a twist on the strip poker game. Also I did a reading of your story. :pinkiehappy: Reading

There is an episode of the 1990s series "Tales From The Crypt" titled "Chop Poker". The rules are if you lose a round, you cut off a body part.

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