"An Epistolary Legal Consultation Between Princesses" as Character Study · 2:38pm May 16th, 2015
Introduction
In the course of writing the story, I went from originally just riffing on the original to doing a serious character study of the Mane Six and Derpy (and, peripherally, of Celestia and Luna). All of them reveal character in their interactions with Yu and with Twilight.
Analysis
Twilight herself is horrified by the whole situation but gamely trying to carry out Celestia's assignment. She does not like Yu one bit -- his intellectually-lazy stupidity and unashamed lechery are antithetical to Twilight's high intelligence and moral standards -- but she is fascinated by the glimpse she's getting into the thought processes of an alien being, and she believes that she has a duty to evaluate his actions fairly.
Derpy is thought by many to be seriously retarded with a childlike mentality in a mare's body, and little grasp for propriety due too her stupidity. Actually, Derpy is reasonably intelligent, but suffers from mild autism. She doesn't internalize social standards well and she is a very poor judge of character. While among the social standards she doesn't fully grasp are sexual morals, she's not naturally all that promiscuous; she'd like to find somepony to love and faithfully love that Pony. The problem is that she's a Horrible Judge of Character, and hence she frequently gets used, both sexually and in other ways, by other Ponies. And was so used by Charlie Yu. The story in part examines why this happens.
Applejack has more sympathy for Yu than does any member of the Mane Six. This is because she regards him as immature and weak rather than evil; she's worked side by side with him, knows him well and hence finds it very difficult to hate him. Hate is in any case not a major component of AJ's character. She is not at all frightened of his feeble capacity for sexual violence, and sees him essentially as a sad, lonely little colt in the body of a stallion, unable to properly comprehend social decorum or control his male urges.
Big Mac, who has also worked with him, pretty much concurs with AJ on that analysis.
Pinkie Pie, pure and simply snapped under the burden of spending months being friendly to him, coupled with the fact that toward the end of that period he was sexually-attracted to her. Yu imagined he had no other friends (actually, Applejack and Big Mac were friendly toward him, but he took that for granted) and mistook Pinkie's extroverted nicenness for romantic interest in him. When he openly claimed to have abused Derpy and rejected Derpy publicly, in Pinkie's own name, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. (looks at Camel. "No offense.")
The Paradise Entity (Pinkie's true sire and That which sometimes looks through her eyes) sees Yu as an alien who has proven to have hostile tendencies toward Ponies. The prime directive programmed into the Paradise Entity was to protect Ponykind. Yu's lucky that the Paradise Entity is more like Valentina than HAL9000, in its general niceness.
Rainbow Dash hates Charlie for having hurt her old friend Derpy. She hates him more after he upsets her oldest friend and the Pony she most romantically-idealizes, Fluttershy. She'd like to fly fast and hit him, but he's already a prisoner and her code of honor tells her that this would be a bad thing. Besides, one of the Ponies she respects and loves most in the world, Twilight Sparkle, has told her not to harm him.
Fluttershy tried Kindness on Charlie. It's worked before, and on beings far more dangerous than is Charlie Yu. Unfortunately, her Kindness ran into the iceberg of Charlie's obsession with sexuality. When her Kindness failed, she used her Stare instead. She was a bit emotionally-upset at the time, so she overdid it. The reason for the extremity of her reaction is plain from A Robust Solution, as is the reason why Rarity understood what happened.
Rarity, altogether more cynical regarding male nature than is Fluttershy even after the events in the flashback part of A Robust Solution (which are essentially the same as the main events of Fluttershy's Night Out), never liked or trusted Yu at all, even before the incident with Derpy. She was very aware of the fact that he kept trying to stare at her privates, and found him both creepy and -- what is worse from her point of view -- rude. She now likes him even less -- Fluttershy's one of her two best friends.
Spike always thought Yu was a jerk, and now sees him has a villain. Spike's sorry he lost control and hurt Yu's leg, mostly because he's aware that he's living in a World of Cardboard where most other organic life is concerned, and he would be horrified if he accidentally hurt (or worse, killed) a Pony by getting angry like that. Spike sees Ponies as his own kind in a way he does not see Charlie Yu as being, though given his own nature he is sympathetic to the claim of non-Pony sapients to moral treatment by Ponies. Spike generally likes Derpy (most Ponies who know her do), and Fluttershy is specifically his friend, so he's mad at Yu for mistreating them.
The Sisters dislike Yu, though being immortals who have seen considerably worse behavior, even from Ponies, in the course of their long lives, they take a more philosphical approach to him. Plus, they don't have to deal with him directly on a day-to-day basis, which helps.
Celestia is using this as a training exercise for Twilight Sparkle, something of which Twilight was well aware from the beginning. Twilight gets angry at her when she learns something she didn't want to know about Pony nature, and realizes that this was something Celestia meant for her to discover. Celestia anticipated this reaction on Twilight's part.
Luna also knows what's really going on. She hates Yu anyway, because he hurt Derpy and because his actions are indirectly hurting Twilight Sparkle. The Shadow Wars Storyverse Princess Luna loves Twilight Sparkle, as she's the reincarnation of Luna's earlier incarnation's husband, Dusk Skyshine. (Even vanilla-canon Luna likes Twilight Sparkle). Luna rather wishes she could just resolve this by summarily executing Yu, but she understands why such would be a bad idea.
Conclusion
Generally speaking, I like the way in which this originally silly and snarky story has evolved into something more serious.
*as Camel* "None taken"
You appear to have left one pony out of the equation: Derpy herself.
3073491
Fixed.
Epistolary was the story which introduced me to your work - so this is pretty interesting to read.
Interesting take on that story. I did pretty well get all of these described attitudes about Charlie from the ponies in the story, so I'd say you did a great job at characterization.
I forget, was it ever finished?