A Strange Game. The Only Winning Move... · 5:41pm Nov 29th, 2015
So, I have just resurfaced from Retail Worker Hell Week, known colloquially as Black Friday. Basically, this means I have been relatively silent for a while not because of my usual rising and fading interest in the fandom, but mostly because I've been exhausted as hell. Fortunately I've had some practice writing that's going to eventually end up in an actual fic on this account sometime soon maybe possibly, making promises like this always bites me in the end. I also haven't seen the season five finale. I'll get around to that eventually. For now, though, state of the Scarlet is "alive, happy to be alive, and feeling interested in blogging just to get back in the writing groove before I start into a bigger project".
So, let's talk The Conversion Bureau. Again!
So all of you who've followed me since earlier this year probably know I'm a huge fan of Chatoyance, and for good reason. She is by far one of my favorite people on this site, she has the strongest theming of any writer I've had the pleasure of reading through FiMfiction to begin with, and I urge all of you to get out and really devour some of her stories. I particularly love her short story anthology-type tales, though let's face it, nothing will unseat Michelson and Morely. Ginger and Nutmeg are still the best pair of hapless missionaries on this site, and I love them.
Anyway, I bring her up now because a little while back, Chatoyance showed up in the comments of my previous blog post on her story. She brought up that one of the consistent themes in her work is that her Newfoal characters- the ponies who have previously been humans- are nicer and, essentially, better at being ponies than actual ponies-from-birth. Even though TCB played straight is often looked at as being "anti-human", Chatoyance claims her fics are about the strength of the human spirit as much as they are about anything else. I can absolutely see that. What I can see even more than that is that her stories are optimistically about a humanity that's willing to evolve and better itself rather than be defined by a violent, wasteful history. Chatoyance doesn't whitewash the fact that the world of her TCB stories is nearing its breaking point, and humanity is surviving only through advances in technology. She is also far less interested in that and far more interested in building human characters in this world, humans who are confronted with the possibility of undergoing a transformation and escaping it. It's compelling stuff, though hey- I've always been fascinated by stories that feature transformations and ascensions.
So why is it that her fics get negative press out the wazoo and something like Rated Ponystar's Negotiations gets a Featurebox slot?
If anything in the brony community has ever convinced me to despair of the human spirit, it's "Fixfics" like Negotiations, targeting "anti-human" TCB stories and the like. And I hate them for the same reason I hate the original TCB stories: Lazy, zero-sum writing that leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.
First, stories like this one tend to treat human and equine culture not just as separate but as, somehow, diametrically opposed. In the original (terrible) TCB stories that kicked off the fad before more talented authors got their hands on the concept, humans are treated as absolute petulant children who need to be guided, shepherded, and saved from their own greed and stupidity through the magical power of Jesus Christ and ponies. For the worst fixfics, this dynamic is just flipped on its head. The ponies are clearly hypocritical jerks, and humanity is better because we're honest, and we have gigantic weapons! There is no room for the possibility that both sides have things the other might be able to learn from.
I should probably mention my second major issue is that authors on both sides seem to lack the imagination of the average seven year old. I have yet to read a story that focuses on human/equine conflict from either camp that really satisfies me in terms of execution. If you press the pony/human war button, the least interesting thing you can do is skip to the end. Ponies are not naturally warlike, but I like to think that given canonical friendly chaos elementals, access to magic, and general awesomeness, ponies wouldn't necessarily be routed by human military actions, particularly when a global, coordinated strike is hard as hell to pull off. However, I don't ask for fidelity to reality when someone says the backdrop of a story is an epic pony/human war- not necessarily. I ask for excitement. If you're going to have humanity go to war with a fantasy kingdom and you're not going to treat it as a somber, horrifying concept, I'm going to ask that you at least have some fun with it. Plucky ace pilots/fliers! Secret military strike forces! Pegasus/F-15 dogfights! Unicorns vs. Artillery! If you can't turn that into a cheesy back and forth, I'm not sure you have ever had a childhood. Stories like Negotiations are just content to assert that one side routed the other, however, and play the story with a given assumption that one side or the other was not only entirely superior militarily, but also superior in motivation. Which brings me to my next, and biggest, galling point.
The third problem with both Early TCB and TCB-fixfic is that the stories lack nuance. Both are playing a zero-sum game. Either humanity is worthless; or ponies are hypocritical jerks who don't respect the spirit and power of humanity and don't practice what they preach. It's one or the other, both seem to assume. Negotiations is probably the worst in that regard. Every line is calculated to make Twilight Sparkle seem as if she's in the wrong, every line from the human negotiator is in the right- and at one point, the story literally Godwins itself by declaring Celestia is "more hated than Hitler".
Really?
Celestia, millennial ruler of Equestria, she who raises the sun and yet walks among her subjects without lording this fact over them- you think she'd declare war on humanity without provocation because they chose not to be friends? Celestia hasn't mounted a targeted campaign against the changelings, and we know they're about as monster as you can get as far as canon is concerned! Why the hell would she ever mount a campaign to wipe out humanity? What would she ever gain from it?
That word "gain"? That's important. Wars do not happen without a reason. Even ideologues have concrete reasons they target their enemies.
By the by, human superiority stories do one more thing that just gets me every time:
They fellate the military. Oh my god do they fellate it.
Don't get me wrong, I love good soldier stories. I am a Gundam fan, after all, and Gundam loves its military even as it hates war. But that's the thing- any good military story should ideally, even while it can glorify the actions of soldiers as heroic, make sure to focus on the fact that using military force makes for great action sequences but depressing fallout, with shades of grey and nuance presented wherever applicable. There need to be heroes on all sides. Stories where humans are declared "superior" to ponies inevitably try to play humanity as this advanced, warlike race, showing off that we may be capable of killing but aren't we just so awesome at it? It's essentially ceding the other side's argument that "we're the worst" and then following up by saying "but everyone else is worse than us." It's not glorifying humanity, it's creating bigger demons so we look less terrible by comparison.
I love humanity. I have never felt more insulted than I have by the insistence that we're valuable only in that we're less evil than Hitler.
I'm going to write a more coherent, structured post later, because I feel like this needs to be revisited at some point, but I wanted to get this up today because Why Did That Story Make Feature.
Until next time, dear readers, may your dreams be filled with the humming of arcane engines.
- /me inserts image
camo.derpicdn.net/b11bcf03d56eaec0e772ad0530d9033ee14525b5?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjenniverse.com%2Fimages%2FFortress%2520Of%2520Solitude%2520SM.png
well, actually I was looking for it in "Human in equstria", but it was in "Adrift Off Fiddler's Green"