New Chapter of Basments of Doom! Also, A Question (would Quiz say "buck"?) · 12:55am Jun 4th, 2015
That was record time! For me, anyway. Admittedly, it's a really short chapter, but I think the length is justified (and not cheating at all). The scene described deserves it's own chapter, and it's best presented uninterrupted. Also, this resolves the cliffhanger ending of chapter 12, right now instead of sometime next week. I hope you enjoy it.
About the question - I don't see it as a very nasty swear word. In my head canon, ponies use "buck" the same way we do. Ponies say buck instead of a very nasty swear word. It's like saying heck instead of hell. It's their "frack" (or frag, frig, fug, or whatever you choose to say when not quite dropping the f-bomb). I like my interpretation; among other things, it means Applejack is not as foulmouthed as some fiction would indicate. But the answer is "No." Quiz still wouldn't say buck. It's too close to something she'd find unthinkable. Darn is as off color as her vocabulary will ever get. But you should know that if I ever have one of my other characters say buck, I'm not going for a teen rating.
Again, please enjoy chapter 13 of Basements of Doom. The next chapter will not be so swift in coming, but it will be longer.
Under the right circumstances maybe she would say buck. Maybe as she gets older she would say it. I find that since I've gotten older, I've been more liable to swear a bit, but when I was Quiz's age I didn't swear.
Just out of idle curiosity, how catastrophic, bizarre or both does her predicament have to be in order to get Quiz to use a real swearword? It's probably the sort of thing you should only do once per story, timed for maximum dramatic and/or comedic impact.
3121616 Well, it hasn't happened yet, so I don't think it ever will. I don't know how to top the things I've already done to poor Quiz (this is a lie).
The best way to do it in my opinion is to have a dramatic buildup, overdone to about the nth degree, preferably in Twilight Sparkle's presence, where she angsts about 'drat' not being a fierce enough word, but not wanting to use any language which would be considered socially unacceptable, even though what she is angry about is so awfully terrible that it really *deserves* to have a nastier word used (back/forth/back/forth) until the word just slipped out.
"Poot!"
Sweetie Belle gasped.
Scootaloo looked impressed.
Apple Bloom merely scowled. "Poot?"
3121767 I like this idea. Shame you nailed the CMC's reactions so perfectly that I would have to steal this outright to use it.
So, when filly Twilight keeps thinking "Buck, Buck, Buck!" in The Little Filly And The Sea, just how bad are you imagining her language is?
3121800 That's an act of defiance by a childish angry unicorn in the first part, and a quite mature princess swear word used by adults all the time in the second, although she is very careful not to say either out loud. They're both expressions of pure frustration, and they both seem to summon a Handsome Prince, so perhaps it is a magic word, of sorts.
To me, for a pony who is more conscious of her language than even Rarity is, a swear word would probably only be uttered if she was sufficiently surprised.
Given what she has gone through already, such a surprise would likely have to be cosmic in scale. (Luna takes this as a challenge...)
Or it would be something incredibly minor after so.ething incredibly harrowing, after which she goes mildly catatonic that she actually said something so foul.
"Quiz? Quiz c'mon. Quiz, all you said was horseapples. Quiz. Quiz. Quiz."
"Just let her be Applebloom..."
"But, but it's not even that bad!"