Can't post this until I have some more of it · 2:39am Sep 5th, 2014
Preface
by Princess Twilight Sparkle
Although I have come to be known as the Princess of Friendship by many, my first great love was always scholarship and knowledge. Based on my experiences as one of the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony, I have found that just as Friendship is Magic, Knowledge is Power, and often, the most ancient or esoteric of lore has proven to be invaluable to my friends and me as we were defending Equestria from the many dire threats that have plagued our nation in the past several years. So I have taken it on myself as part of my mandate, one of the missions of the Friendship Outreach, to try to recover the knowledge that ponies have lost over the millennia, and to reach out to knowledgeable experts to provide their expertise.
One such expert was, once, one of the very threats we fought. Discord, often called the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony, is an ancient entity, who holds in his memory many valuable secrets lost to ponies over time. In addition, he is the last of the mysterious race known as the draconequui, beings believed to be chaotic conglomerations of the body parts of multiple animals. While Discord was an enemy in the past, he has since been reformed by the power of true Friendship, and has provided invaluable assistance to us in the past. Thus, I prevailed upon him to write a short monograph on the nature of his lost species, the better to explain himself and his people to Ponykind. The result is this book you hold in your hooves.
Having read it for myself, I can definitely say, beyond a doubt, that it contains many different words, most of which are formed into syntactically comprehensible sentences. I can also say for certain that these words were directly penned by the paw of Discord, although some liberties may have been taken to edit for spelling and a complete lack of comprehension of where you are supposed to capitalize words and where you are not. It is, indeed, a volume containing many paragraphs, all written by Discord himself, and I can say with great certainty that if you read it, you will be able to say, in perfect honesty, that you have read it.
Sometimes True Friendship calls on us to make sacrifices. Sometimes, we find we must sacrifice decorum, the truth, dignity, and possibly even some small degree of sanity, because it would be too hurtful to a True Friend to deny them the publication of a monograph that you yourself requested that they write, simply because its ratio of fact to nonfact is a percentage in the single digits. With this in mind, let me present to you, A Guide to the History and Nature of the Draconequus Race, by Discord, Lord of Chaos.
Sincerely,
Princess Twilight Sparkle
Alicorn of Magic
Princess of Friendship
Ponyville Librarian, Emeritus
Inspired by a discussion on LickleSoxy's To Judge A Book on whether or not Discord himself might have written the chapter about draconequui in an encyclopedia of chimeras. It was my contention that Discord is incapable of writing in a deadpan, scholarly tone unless what he's writing is so patently absurd it's an obvious parody, and then I started thinking about what Discord would actually write if called on to write about his species. And then I thought about what Twilight would have to say about it. :-)
Now that is a book review!
I just hope that it doesn't end with Discord punching Twilight Sparkle in the face.
ugh, once again i am dead from laughing too hard at one of alara's comedy pieces. so inconvenient :P
2429032
No, but it came very close to ending with Twilight punching Discord in the face. Or possibly dropping a piano on his head.
2429083 Sometimes I even wonder if Discord notices bodily damage, or is actually a borderline masochist because he loves the feeling of getting someone mad enough to hurt him.
2429085
Both. He can't really be hurt by conventional damage; he can feel the pain, but since his body probably repairs itself more or less immediately, it's more like hot spice than grievous bodily injury. And both the disharmony generated when someone's mad at him, which tends to feed his magic, and the feeling that he's important to someone else, that he got them to notice and react to him, probably give him enough pleasure that being physically attacked doesn't bother him.
Of course things would be different if he couldn't heal quickly, but yeah, I think under normal circumstances he enjoys it.
Well, you can't say anything nice, say something tautological. I suppose we should be thankful that Discord at least bothered to use some kind of grammar rather than tossing a word salad.
2429528
Well, it had to be comprehensible enough to express some meaning or the effort would have been pointless. I suspect Discord was staging a revolt against his concept of "literary formalism," which would be most beings' concept of "sentence structure."
2429576
Oh, no, his sentences are syntactically comprehensible (most of the time), they're just not true. And are sometimes semantically nonsensical. Twilight simply has no sense of humor. (says Discord).
I think Twilight could have justified refusing to publish it if it was literally unreadable, but unfortunately problems like random capitalization, lack of respect for niceties like writing in a straight line, the staging of a revolution against the tyranny of spelling rules, and bad handwriting could all be resolved when it was prepared for a printing press, and what was left afterward was, in fact, readable... it just isn't what she wanted him to give her. Since what she wanted was, you know, factual.
2429584
Did she give it to her parents to print up, and did they lose SAN points from doing so?
2431264
Velvet turned the writing of a self-aggrandizing, egotistical archaeologist-adventurer with no experience writing anything other than academic monographs into the greatest bestseller in all Equestria. I think she can handle anything anyone writes.