Next story · 11:09pm Jun 24th, 2012
Crawling along with the next story. I'm at about 20k words, but it's dragging, and I'm going to want to go back and do some fairly serious revisions. Furthermore, I may or may not be traveling in the next week, which might slow down my schedule a bit more.
Anyway, the story is in the Lunaverse and is Carrot Top centric. Briefly, Carrot Top enters a farming competition in order to try to win the prize money, which she needs to complete a major business contract. Sadly, the Apple Trust has always been the only Ponyville entrant, and Applejack is mad that Carrot Top is trying to compete against her. Carrot Top has to deal with hostility from the largest farm in the region, as well as the costs of competing, which quickly promise to bankrupt her if she doesn't win. Throw in the Duke still wanting at least one Element for himself and his agents -- a couple of con-artist unicorns -- interfering in the match, and it promises to be a chaotic competition for the poor, beleaguered carrot farmer. Can Carrot Top and her allies -- including a surprisingly useful Berry Punch -- save the farm, fend off the Duke, and avoid going to war with the Apple Trust?
Hmm; sounds interesting!
Ah, good. We'll finally figure out what it is that makes L!Applejack so belligerent. My guess is that with her harmonic quality of Honesty dialed down and her arrogant need to win all the time dialed up, she doesn't want the comforting lie "If I fail, I take the family with me" disproven.
194008: Yep. It goes a bit beyond that, actually. She thinks very, very bad things will happen if the Trust fails... or just loses a competition. Unfortunately, she winds up alienating Ponyville, which just feeds her persecution complex and causes her to double down on "I alone have to do this to save the Trust/the family/Ponyville in general."
Ah, good. We'll finally figure out what it is that makes L!Applejack so belligerent. My guess is that with her harmonic quality of Honesty dialed down and her need to win all the time dialed up (inspired by the same fear of being disgraced that M!Applejack has), she doesn't want the comforting lie "If I fail, I take the family with me" disproven. M!Applejack has friends that can help her see that losing isn't the end of the world. All L!Applejack has got is business associates.
194025: Business associates and a zealous, almost religious belief that she is the only thing standing between Ponyville and famine. Lot of pressure there. Even Carrot Top can't find it in herself to hate her. (Aw, who am I kidding. Carrot Top is nice enough that she doesn't hate any pony, except maybe Corona).
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If only she had friends to help her see that she doesn't bear the weight of the world on her shoulders. Ah, well. There's enough honesty in her to make her vulnerable to the right armor-piercing question. I'd hate to see her defend herself from M!Applejack; she'd get owned.
Looking forward to this story. Your interp of L!AJ is sounding pretty spot on.
That said, you just finished your last story two days ago, and now you're calling 20k words a "crawl"? I have mentioned just how much I hate you, right? Because I don't think I can repeat that often enough. Some of us here are struggling to putout a quarter or less than that in twice or more the time.
194042: Yeah. Her only hope would be being so incredibly stubborn and hard-headed that she just ignored everything M!Applejack threw at her. Which... might actually work, come to think of it.
194114:Glad you're looking forward to it. Your critiques are always very informative.
I've been working on this one for about 4 days now, 2 of them weekend days (M&D was done before I began posting it, so I was actually working on this while M&D was still going up) . So I guess 20k isn't too bad, considering. I was still hoping to have it wrapped up by the end of the weekend, though, but that's looking unlikely. I guess what's annoying me is I'm anticipating needing serious rewrites, which means I don't really have 20k ready to post.
194131: Actually, I'm now seeing a very sad M!verse Applejack hiding and watching L!verse Applejack out bucking apples in the rain, alone and friendless and disliked by everypony in town, obviously miserable but still going forward, and M!verse AJ realizes that's where she could have ended up if not for her friends. And she doesn't even know how to talk to L!verse AJ or what to do to try to help her, but she's just having a whole 'there but for the grace of the alicorns go I' moment.
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The part of her that pities L!Applejack would also be somewhat alienated by the whole overscrupulousness thing. Even though she knows that the matter cannot be resolved and that there is no help for her, M!Applejack would be mildly irritated by the sheer narcissism radiating from her Lunaverse counterpart.