Solitair Reads The Immortal Game: Chapter 19 · 7:36pm Sep 11th, 2014
The weekend didn’t diminish my mixed feelings toward this series any, feelings that tempt me into leaving this project behind me and getting to work on something else, like learning how to draw and writing my own fanfiction. In summation, though I can’t call this a bad story and I’m glad it got finished and that I read it, I’m eager to get it over with and I’m starting to really regret covering this for the blog. I joked about how I was following up a grimdark fic about ponies with another grimdark fic about ponies, but now it doesn’t sound quite so funny. I’m burnt out on grimdark, or at least exploring this kind of grimdark in this way.
But you came here for an evaluation of this chapter, and I’m here to give it to you. Once again the comic is all about Terra, and for once, just once, it actually succeeds in getting me to feel sorry for her, sort of. Although I’m not sure if making the chapter quite this long is necessary, I applaud it for ascribing depth to a character that I had previously written off as a shrill, unlikable psychopath, and for furthering what I believe to be the main theme of the story (that gods suck and mortals would have been so much better off being created with something that didn’t fuck around with their lives after the initial creation phase).
It also makes me want to elaborate on my earlier topic about redemption. It’s still a powerful and enthralling subject for me, and I still hope that Astor Coruscare was able to make good on it somehow (as unlikely as that prospect may be), but just like a lot of story developments, redemption has to be earned. A character can’t just get a last second turnaround with no real buildup, or at least one that results in them being 100% forgiven immediately, and the larger their crimes, the cheaper it looks when the people whom they’ve wronged are just suddenly okay with what they did. I lean toward the positive with Astor’s redemption because it didn’t overreach with the many senseless murders she committed. The half of the journal that has been seen so far ended with the seed of a new beginning and a new romantic relationship with a good influence on her. It also helps that we do not get an intimate look at all of the emotional anguish Astor caused.
With Terra, on the other hand, we get plenty of that and more. She tortured Celestia, killed plenty of ponies, and was an accessory to the corruption of Twilight Sparkle (corruption she herself endured, by the way) and the trauma with Rainbow Dash. I read in the comments to this chapter that there were hints that there was depth to her beyond her cruelty, but other than the hints she dropped informing her that she and Titan used to be good a long time ago I really don’t remember anything like that. The first time she has ever seemed like a different pony is after she has been rendered helpless and powerless, after Twilight threatens her with that corruption spell (great job bringing that up with Rainbow Dash in earshot by the way, Twilight), whereupon all of her spite and awfulness vanish as she gets terrified. She is so unlike the Terra we see in the flashbacks, a character I do genuinely feel sorry for, that I’m having trouble reconciling the two, and I have no idea how they’ll fix her, if they even try. Maybe a mercy-killing really is the best possible solution here.
Oh, and as for Titan being good back when he was called Order, I don’t buy it at all. What I saw was not a good stallion. He was an equine version of Dr. Manhattan at best. Remember that he only ever thought of ponies as sentient beings with feelings on the same level as himself after Twilight and company got close enough to use the Elements of Harmony on him. In the real world, lacking that trait is a sign of mental illness. In addition, we still have no idea why Titan decided to make the world the way he chose to make it, either before or after he renamed himself and defeated Discord, probably because it’s a very hard question to answer and has been asked of the real-life Christian God countless times already. At least Jehovah’s followers can conceivably claim to be testing humanity through adversity or any other reason that revolves around love for humanity. Titan has no such love for ponykind, so what’s his excuse? Despite all this, it wouldn’t surprise me if AestheticB tried to pull a sympathy move for him at the end of this story, but I can’t see him doing it in a way that would satisfy me.
Lastly, there’s the matter of Discord again. If canon is a blank white canvas, then the continually expanding information in the show and official products has painted itself over crucial parts of this fic, replacing The Immortal Game‘s Francisco Goya with, I dunno, Claude Monet. Rarity’s father is the first such clash with canon, removing one of the fic’s major villains, and the direction Discord’s character has taken here is very drastic from that which was revealed in a recent episode of the show, though unlike with Esteem, it’s not completely impossible to reconcile this.
I’m not going to get too in-depth on the actual quality of Keep Calm and Flutter On beyond saying that the execution fell short of the premise. The important thing to note is that Celestia charges the mane six and especially Fluttershy with the cause of reforming him into an ally, and despite his initial efforts, Fluttershy actually succeeds in forming a bond with him and he promises to use his reality-warping omnipotence powers for good “most of the time.”
Since the entire plot took place in about twenty-two minutes and the build-up to the ending failed to convince some people of its verisimilitude, fans have come up with different interpretations of this ending. My personal favorite is that Discord has legitimately learned the benefits of having friends and how to empathize with other beings, and that he’ll be limiting his mischief-making to ends that don’t scar innocent ponies, mentally or physically. Others have theorized that Discord has only learned how to plan ahead and is only biding his time until he can betray the good guys and take over Equestria again. I prefer to think that Fluttershy was able to succeed, and I’m a lot more interested to see Discord as a snarky, insufferable, but ultimately reliable ally than an enemy again, but this interpretation makes sense too, and if a great fic requires that it be true, I’ll buy it.
The main incongruity from show Discord to TIG Discord is the crimes that he’s committed in the past. The background on what went down centuries ago is vaguely explained in the show, so there is no real emotional attachment to his victims there. But after he returns, the audience does see the mental strain he puts the mane six under, warping them with his magic to make their personalities diametric opposites of each other. Seeing Twilight’s disappointment in how much her friends had been made to fail her was the saddest moment of the whole show for me, and at no point in the proceedings did Discord ever express regret that he was brainwashing ponies and ruining their lives. But ultimately, the mane six have coped, though they remember what he did and are initially pissed off when they see Celestia wheel in his statue. They may not be overjoyed to see Discord promise to be good, but they don’t object to it either, presumably because they’re proud of Fluttershy.
The Immortal Game makes Discord’s atrocities a lot less discrete. He regularly turned hundreds of ponies into terrifying monsters straight out of a Clive Barker or John Carpenter story. He tricked Terra and Empyrean, who are probably the most likable characters in that flashback, into slaughtering ponies that he hasn’t transformed yet. He transformed Empyrean and forced his sister-wife (yeah, that’s still gross) to kill him. He drove a wedge between Order and Harmony, his first wife, forcing him to kill her (though honestly I’m still putting most of the blame for this on Titan, the douchebag). Finally, he shares the blame for starting this whole, disgusting, ugly chain of events with Titan. If Fluttershy knew that he had all of these sins against him, much less saw him committing those sins, do you think she’d try as hard to reform him as she did in the show? I mean, it is Fluttershy we’re talking about, but even she has limits.
Ultimately, this whole argument of canon reconciliation is pointless, because this is clearly an alternate world story, if the drastic difference in tone didn’t get that point across enough. If the mane six of TIG ever move on from this mess, I can’t see them having adventures and shenanigans around town like they did in the show. Even them going out to the club like they did way back in chapter two (which seems like forever ago now) seems like an impossibility, unless they’re just going to drown their sorrows. But maybe I’m wrong. This is still technically My Little Pony, and even in the darkest, most traumatic of times, there should be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Stray Observations:
-This makes the fourth or fifth death fakeout in the entire series, by my count. I don’t have many objective complaints about the story, but this is one of them.
-The new alicorns, Empyrean the First and Harmony, are just okay to me. Empyrean at least seemed fun, though his casual willingness to kill and buying into god-superiority is a turn-off. Harmony seems more like a summation of a “kill the gods” undercurrent, exposition and foreshadowing than that much of a character in her own right.
-Terra’s tribal heart cutie mark is given an explanation in the chapter, but it still doesn’t make sense to me. She says the thorns represent the necessary cruelties in being a caring guardian, but before her corruption she is against what Order sees as a necessary cruelty in order to preserve the world as a whole. After her corruption, it’s the heart part of the mark that doesn’t belong. I’m interpreting it as a matter of predestination, since Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark also has an element that would have made no sense at the time she first got it. This connection makes the whole idea of cutie marks a bit more scary than I thought they were before.
Oh wow, that cutie mark predestination idea is damn creepy when applied to Terra. Yikes.