Solitair Reads The Immortal Game: Chapter 21

The first thing I should point out about this chapter is that it ends abruptly in a way that I haven’t seen in this particular story. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, nor the end of a scene. My only conclusion is that since the final confrontation of the series is upon us now, the rest of the story is so epic that it can’t be contained in a single chapter. AestheticB decided to release it in three parts, presumably because a single chapter of about forty thousand words would scare off readers. Now, the concept of a final battle this long almost reminded me of the hour-long ending action scene from Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But this didn’t occur to me until I’d already read this chapter and found out what was going on the hard way, so I can tell you that this is a much better deal than that movie. Let’s count the reasons: the proportion of final-battle to not-final-battle is much greater in the movie than this story, the events that take place in this chapter actually mean something beyond mere spectacle, I care about the characters, and you can guess the rest from there.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of spectacle going on, though. My wild guess that the final events of the story would not involve combat proved naive. This is a series that used to be called Ponies Make War, after all. In addition to the scenes of four of the mane six fighting all of the beasts that Titan has bent to his will, there’s also a badass rallying speech on Twilight’s part, lots of fist-pumping unity on parts of the ponies they lead, and all of the good stuff that we come to expect. I said good stuff, because the story’s earned the Braveheart-esque war-rallying scene, and even the fight scenes actually ended up making me smile a little.

But before I can talk about that, I have to talk about Fluttershy again. As Fluttershy herself thinks to herself during this chapter and a few times prior to that, she’s still the least combat capable pony on the team. She always has been and always will be. And yet she has the most distinctive role in this chapter, a diplomatic role in convincing the most powerful dragon in the land to join their team. Fluttershy was written very well in this chapter, feeling intense fear yet continuing on her mission even when chased by all the bloodthirsty beasts of the Everfree Forest and facing down Exakktus himself.

The negotiation process took place in two parts. The first was pretty surprising to me, with Fluttershy thinking of reasons why Exakktus would want to side with the free ponies. She’s pretty reasonable here, especially given her state of mind right now. The second part comes when Exakktus blows her off anyway, saying there’s no chance of them defeating Titan. At this point she proceeds to go through with a more epic reenactment of the episode Dragonshy. In that episode she was dragged along on a mission to relocate a giant dragon, only to prove her worth by telling off the dragon for hurting her friends and shaming it into leaving. We have the same thing here, with Fluttershy telling off Exakktus for being more of a coward than ponies much less powerful than him, only this time the dragon is bigger and meaner and Fluttershy has to scream out all the frustrations that have been mounting throughout the whole story, and she also starts growing plants thanks to tapping into her magic. Oh yeah, and I almost forgot she recovered from being roasted alive.

The fighting at the end has Rarity, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie actually telling jokes about the duty of knights to slay dragons, which I liked. I’ve seen one person in the comments section (sifting through dozens of enthusiastic proclamations from fans who want to have AestheticB’s children, natch) complain about this light tone at the end, and I had to think for a while about whether or not I agreed. It is possible to throw a story’s tone out of whack with radical, jarring shifts. See the aforementioned Dark of the Moon and that Ctrl-Alt-Del miscarriage debacle for examples on how to make it happen. I thought about whether comedy relief like this is a good idea at all.

Then I remembered the best television show I’ve ever seen in my life, The Wire. If you’ve never seen The Wire, fix that. Not everyone is going to like it, but if the idea of a police procedural deconstruction, heavily serialized TV, deep analysis of the Drug War in America, or a modern-day equivalent to A Song of Ice and Fire, this show will not disappoint you. The relevant point is that for all the depressing turns that show’s plot takes, it found a lot of ways to make me laugh without making me care any less about the dramatic tension in the story. It pulled off comedy relief perfectly, just like nearly everything else it ever did. Were it not for that comedy relief, I may well have liked the show less, or given up on it altogether.

That’s why I’m grateful whenever I find something funny in a story like this or Project Horizons. The drama in those stories is admittedly more of the melo- type than The Wire, but I still want to get the occasional break from it. I still want to feel that these characters are capable of more than just misery all the damn time. I want life and variety and verisimilitude, and above all else, the characters from the show are funny. Thanks for remembering that, AestheticB.