Solitair Reads The Immortal Game: Chapter 12

Okay, maybe I was wrong about Titan. Maybe. He tacitly admits to Esteem that he’s anticipated everything his enemies’ know that they think he doesn’t. So maybe, just maybe, he’s got something up his sleeve and letting Celestia escape was part of his big master plan. I’ll have to wait and see if his plan is all that impressive. Obviously it won’t be, since convention dictates that he’s going to lose, but I still want him to get more of an edge.

Also, I can’t decide if I would rather have seen Titan subduing dragons and rewriting reality than just having Titan say he did it. These sound like impressive feats worth reading more about, but going in too deep would probably do bad thing to the story’s overall pace, and it’s not strictly necessary to the overall plot. I personally don’t mind these kinds of digressions that much, but I suspect most readers would probably be glad to leave this all to the imagination anyway.

After that scene, there comes another with Luna and Twilight Sparkle. Luna has just appointed Twilight Sparkle as the commander of the resistance’s military operations, and in the process of convincing Twilight to take up that mantle, Luna reveals that the demeanor I noticed from her earlier was a complete put-on:

“I’ve been able to speak the typical Canterlot dialect for three weeks. My voice is just another tool I use to make myself impossible to relate to. I de-equinize myself because if others thought me capable of feeling emotions they might actually think I have flaws like everypony else. You think that after a life spent killing I want to be a monster? Equestria needs me to be a monster, so I do everything I can to keep up the appearance. I’m better at this than I ever was at being a princess.”

Okay, this is most definitely a break from canon. I mentioned earlier the episode Luna Eclipsed, where Luna’s character was pretty much set in stone. Her appearance in the show’s second episode was barely any more substantial than that of the background ponies that the fandom bestowed with personalities. I’m sorry, but that’s how it was. Aside from her regret for her actions as the pilot’s villain, Nightmare Moon, and eagerness to repent, I saw no indicators of character from that first appearance. Thankfully the fandom has embraced the new Luna with open arms and largely forgotten the concerns they had about her reappearance, so I haven’t heard anyone claim that Luna Eclipsed ruined her character. If you want to try and break that streak with me, let me just preemptively tell you that you’re wrong.

But I digress. Luna’s awkwardness and anachronistic behavior in the show were completely unintentional on her part, mostly stemming from future shock (though you do have to scratch your head and wonder just how much time has passed since the events of the pilot if she hasn’t learned modern customs yet). The conflict of the episode revolved around her grappling with the fact that the pony equivalent of Halloween has turned her (in her aspect as Nightmare Moon) into an object of fear. She needs Twilight to help teach her how to meet the ponies halfway, and after that episode her cameos show signs of her taking those lessons to heart.

Here, however, we have a Luna who deliberately shuts herself off from other ponies and turns herself into a pony that can’t be approached… because of reasons. Luna says that Equestria needs her to be a monster. Why? What possible part of the plan to beat Titan requires the population to hate her? No, I know what this is. Luna is still mired in guilt over all the things she’s done and she hasn’t had the time to accept it like Celestia has. She’s convinced that she doesn’t deserve a happy ending, and I’m not buying it. This is My Little Pony, and even when blood and death creeps into the story, I still expect to see something resembling a happy ending. I expect to see Luna shed the self-pity and learn to be happy somewhere down the line.

In other news, my wish has been granted, and we’re starting to learn about Twilight’s mindsplitting. The interesting detail to me is that a normal trope in making multiple personalities, differentiating them by compartmentalizing aspects of the personality, is the worst possible thing that Twilight could do. The real point of splitting the mind in The Immortal Game is to allow for serious multitasking. I’d say that I’d love to have this ability in real life, but it would be far more useful if I could duplicate myself, body and all, as well as my laptop.

Twilight’s meeting with the top brass of the restistance movement takes place from Applejack’s perspective, and once again the poor girl is overshadowed. Introductions are made, there are moments of levity, Twilight’s parents are still a wee bit sore that Twilight was allowed to go through the crap she went through, and Unimpressive is still a twit.

The author is taking an interesting strategy in averting the typical pitfalls of the self-insert, or in this case friend-insert, namely by packing on flaws to subvert the feeling that the author is trying too hard to get the audience to like the character, as well as (and this is important, so take notes) having other characters in this story acknowledge those flaws. Unimpressive’s flaccid attempts at wit impress nopony at the table, and his rude skepticism about the capabilities of Twilight and her friends rankles them, with nopony else buying it for a second. I’ll buy that he has doubts about Twilight’s commanding ability and Fluttershy in general, but why in the hell hasn’t he heard about Rarity’s prowess with her blade? I’d say that AestheticB has taken to heart the maxim that a character doesn’t need to be likable to be interesting, except that Unimpressive is neither.

The meeting proceeds, the resistance decides what their next course of action is, and Luna gives many pointers to Twilight on how to act as if she was an adviser for a candidate running for political office. Twilight wisely lets that advice shoot right out her other ear and calls another meeting with her close friends. She points out all the lucky breaks they’ve gotten so far, from Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy having magic from other species to Rainbow Dash being able to find Rarity in a battlefield to rescue her from Esteem. Logically, she points out that she’d rather not leave anything else to chance, starting to analyze the Elements of Harmony and discovering that she and the other bearers can magically sense each other. I suspect we’ll be getting into the origin of the Elements, and my guess is that Astor Coruscare is involved somehow.

Coruscare is a character who has been mentioned several times throughout the story, but whom I haven’t given myself an opportunity to bring up in my posts. What I know about her is that she’s an ancestor of Twilight’s, she had a scale of magical potency named after her (that Twilight broke, naturally), and that she was implied to have done a Bad Thing. I can’t tell if the narrative has been intentionally vague on what the Bad Thing was or if they explained it to me in a detail and I just happened to skim over that in one of my absent-minded periods. We’ll find out soon enough.

In more immediate concerns, Twilight got so focused on training and analysis that she didn’t notice Dash’s foul mood until it was too late to talk to her. By then only Fluttershy was left for Twilight to pour out all of her frustrated feelings to, make confessions about her feelings on Nihilus, and just vent in general. I feel bad for Fluttershy here. It’s a situation I’ve found myself in a lot on chat, when a friend comes to me with an emotional problem. Whenever that happens, I have no earthly idea how to make them feel better aside from just listening, and I always feel like I’m letting them down whenever I’m just listening.

We close out with another Celestia segment, a complete reversal of her last one. Whereas the previous chapter featured her making a fool of her mother, in this one Terra slaps her down, takes her back, and reveals that the whole escape was nothing more than a rug waiting to be pulled out from under her. I winced a bit in sympathy for Celestia, the poor mare. From what I can tell, the main point of the whole depowered Celestia story arc (and there has to be a point to justify her immediate recapture) is to show that for all Luna and Twilight’s concerns about how Celestia manipulates them for the greater good, everything is completely out of Celestia’s hooves now. Not only that, but her attempt to plant the seed of doubt in Terra’s mind completely and utterly failed. I was joking about how she had apparently planned for everything, but clearly there are things she didn’t anticipate even though she clearly should have. Seriously, she knew there was something that rubbed you the wrong way about Esteem and she didn’t keep a closer eye on him? Nor did she assume that Titan and Terra’s prison was not impregnable and that they might escape?

Also, it just occurred to me that Terra basically pretended to take Celestia’s harsh words about Titan not loving her to heart while also pretending not to notice that Celestia was only pretending to goad Terra into killing her while waiting for the opportunity to escape. Revolver Ocelot from the Metal Gear Solid games would be proud. Well, he’d consider it a good start at least.