Review: Mortal · 8:41pm Aug 14th, 2013
I actually first heard about Mortal in the aftermath of Friendship is Optimal's release. I'd been looking at a fanfiction thread on LessWrong when someone brought up a story they were writing that was "a response to Eternal and similar fics". As Eternal is one of my favorite pieces of fanfiction, I filed the fact away in my mind and resolved to check it out when it was finally released. Naturally, I wound up not learning about it until it was already finished. This is my own fault, in an ironic way: I have a mental habit of filtering out maudlin stories about immortals in the same way other people filter out clop or gore, and for whatever reason the description of Mortal wasn't enough to break through.
Coming from that perspective, I initially expected this story to be something like HPMoR or FiO, stridently ideological with an upfront message and a bit of canon revisionism. This turned out to be mostly unfounded: Benman is, after all, an Equestria Daily pre-reader, and the story is as polished and unpolemic as you'd expect from one. But I don't think it's an entirely inaccurate link, either. One of the major common threads of all the "rationalist fanfiction" I've read is its strong anti-death message, and that's something this story leans upon heavily. There's also definitely a tinge of the subversive spirit that informs those fics in the way that it plays upon the fandom's tropes for tragedy.
Benman's writing makes me feel better about my own snippets of story ideas. That's not because it's bad, but because it tends to be cerebral and idea-focused in such a way that doesn't come across as pretentious. For the most part, Mortal is purposefully restrained and thoughtful. Conversations drift into weighty topics frequently, without ever sounding stilted or moralizing, and the story makes a deliberate and successful effort to avoid stock "sad" tropes. The prose is never truly great, but it doesn't need to be: its strengths lie mostly in its concept and method. Its treatment of old age and death is probably the best example of this. Despite being the subject of the entire fic, it's never overplayed. We see age through its effects: broken limbs, failing organs, physical handicaps. There are no sobbing relatives, no exaggerated eulogies, and not even the slightest hint of sentimentality. This might be a bit jarring to those expecting something more conventional, but it's striking and illustrates the author's point well.
The characters were a thornier matter. Most of them acted fine, but how accurate their portrayals were also tended to be inversely proportional to how important they were to the plot. My favorite bits of characterization were the little conversations between the main cast's relatives, discussions about weddings, gifts, business and family reunions. I've always been a fan of fics that explore the friendships and family dynamics of the main cast as time goes on, and this is a good treatment of the subject that avoids most of its common pitfalls. None of the relatives are particularly notable characters on their own, but they help to add a sense of original flavor that the more weighty parts of the fic often lack.
As for the main cast, Twilight seems basically the same as her show counterpart, but this version of Rainbow Dash has a significant mean streak (for lack of a better word) that is at odds with my conception of her character, and that's not even getting into the alicorns. I realize that Mortal is primarily a response to other fanfiction rather than a statement on its own, but its versions of Celestia and Cadence are obviously based in fanon rather than any material from the show, and it's frustrating to read as a result. They're a pretty flat representation of traditional attitudes towards death, something that I've never thought of as in-character for either of them. Ordinarily I tolerate this sort of thing with a groan, but here it isn't just an offhand remark. It's the very lynchpin of the story.
Most of the real content of the fic lies in arguments. Twilight argues with Rainbow Dash and seeks counsel from her mentors, both of them offering their own opinions on death. They're well-written, with some punchy dialogue, and do a good job of summing up both sides of the issue. I'm torn about them, though, in a manner that has almost nothing to do with their content. Basically, most of the important points on both sides are made within the first few chapters, and the remainder of the fic winds up restating them, again and again. It's important for the sake of the story that Twilight take proper time before making a decision, but I'm not sure that Benman made the best possible use of the space that this provides. There's litle feeling of development or response on either side, something that's really important if you're trying to turn an argument into a narrative. Rainbow Dash, in particular, seems to rely on the same points every time. I don't think that's a fault of her argument, but it does become unduly repetitive by the end as you wait for the story to finally catch up with the discourse.
The ending seems to be a serious point of contention for a lot of people. Twilight is moved after Fluttershy's death to make Dash and Rarity (and eventually anyone who so desires) immortal, and they start their own society. In other words, everyone sprouts wings and flies off into the sunset. I think most people were annoyed because they felt the points raised by the alicorns weren't addressed. I personally disagree, but I can't help but share in their disappointment regardless.
I guess what I wanted from Mortal more than anything else was a sense of striving. In its current form it feels a little bit like an environmentalist story where the main character suddenly realizes, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't cut down the rainforest!" and then adult trees push their way out of the ground, all the animals come back out of their holes, and the sky turns pristine blue. Death feels like a massive paper tiger (or paper dragon, if you prefer) here, and the story is too quick to brush off questions about food and related quibbles with "alicorn magic". I'm not saying there's anything morally wrong or even unpleasant about the society Twilight starts, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me feel a disconnect.
Because you know what? We live in a world where every extra year of life is the result of literal millions of dollars worth of medical research and practice, one where the mortality curve is superexponential and discoveries are still managing to slow down despite our best efforts. Seeing Twilight discover the secret of immortality in an afternoon isn't just unrealistic, it also winds up making me feel more hopeless about the way things are working out on our end. Because most people do want to live, and expend a great deal of money towards that end. I'm inclined to think of most people's issues with immortality as simply shortsightedness, a failure to imagine all the possibilities that time and health could allow. I doubt most people who speak grandly of death's meaning and value would say no to an extra year or two of healthy life, and that's the scale that people deal with death in the real world.
In one respect, I get it. I've seen people in this fandom use phrases like "the inherent beauty of mortality" before, and I've rolled my eyes plenty of times at device heretic and others who portray guilt-wracked immortals. If nothing else, I enjoyed this story for the amount of anger it managed to inspire over an ending that literally gives superpowers to everyone. But its resolution comes across as a little staged in its delivery of a positive message, which is disappointing given how much of an even keel it was taking beforehand. This is a serious flaw, too: my biggest complaint with most stories with anti-immortality morals is that they also stack the deck in favor of their side. I'd have liked some acknowledgement that the attitudes this story criticizes are a direct result of how intractable the problem is in the first place, as well as immortal characters who don't feel entirely like they're lifted from more short-sighted fics.
Pre-emptive apologies to Benman, who has probably been ranted at entirely too much about this story for no good reason. This was a good story and you're doing good work. It's a shame about the comments section.
As someone who loved Mortal, I think that's a fair review.
Thanks for writing this. It's always fun to see what came through and what didn't. I particularly like seeing what different people dislike about the ending. (My own thoughts, now that I've had time to get distance from the story and talk to a couple of mentor figures: most of what comes after chapter 4 should've been cut. It's a story about Twilight making a decision, and once that decision is made, the story doesn't know what it's trying to do anymore.)
There's only one thing you criticize that I did on purpose. A lot of anti-death readers talk about how shallow Celestia's position was, but she was never meant to be convincing after considered, unbiased thought. She was there to put an emotional voice behind the pro-death views that I actually encounter, and she passed the ideological Turing test. (Pro-death readers found her compelling, and I can't recall any of them complaining about the treatment of their arguments.) In other words, her arguments are bad because she is arguing for something false. I hope I was able to convey why she made herself believe those false things.
I'm glad you liked the role of the extended families. Getting the right amount of that was a tricky balancing act. You don't want to know how many times I rewrote the wedding scene.
Common, but not omnipresent! I also wrote a story about preference modification, which I consider more explicitly rationalist than Mortal. (I usually describe the latter as "transhumanist" instead.)
Strong disagreement! If there's a better feeling than inspiring enough engaged commentary to fill multiple novels, I can't think of it offhand.
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Well, for starters there's the fact that most of the pro-death people commenting on this story are around 20 or 30, while Celestia's at least a thousand years old. I'm not sure most of the anti-immortality sentiment makes sense from the perspective of someone who's already immortal.
But, that aside, I think more effort could've been made to portray her as an ambiguous, idiosyncratic figure. One of the things that often surprises me when I read about famous people is how they often have strange hang-ups and compartmentalization when it comes to moral intuitions, like Voltaire with anti-Semitism and Ray Bradbury with life-extension. Maybe I'd've been interested in something like what HPMoR did with Dumbledore, although I understand you're not working in an AU here.
And regarding the anti-death stuff, I definitely agree with you on it not being terribly "rationalist". I mostly included that because I felt that it was a bit of a tired trope at this point. There's nothing terribly interesting or analytic about the argument against death (it's pretty much one large appeal to emotion) and it tends to get too much press from the community because it's one of the big things they can all agree on. Sure, I'm all for killing the dragon-tyrant, but why can't we get stories about utilitarianism and self-modification and psychology instead of beating the "dead horse" dead horse? I didn't particularly like Friendship is Optimal, but I did appreciate that that story didn't harangue me about it despite having the opportunity.