Sun and Hearth Post-Update Blog: Chapter 16 - A Very Good Excuse · 1:26am Dec 2nd, 2017
A bit late, but still within the week, so I’m still on target. Expect the next chapter towards the end of next week, unless my prereaders go on strike or ask for a raise or something. I’m currently working them to death to keep this coming.
Anyway, spoilers for chapter 16 - A Very Good Excuse below the cut.
End credits:
Random trivia:
There are a few things referred to in this chapter that I would love to go into further, or to have touched on, but they’re tangential to the story. At the very least, a side story about Celestia and some or all of the founders (other than Cookie) is getting added to the list.
I first used the phrase “white princess’s burden” to talk about pony imperialism in the comments of a writeoff a few years ago (the fic was about griffons, actually.) I remember it specifically because it was in a conversation where I was explaining to Bad Horse for several comments what the anonymous author intended by the story… so, obviously, it was Bad Horse’s story.
I am really worried about this chapter. It’s something that I hoped would be shocking, but I’ve also been laying the groundwork for it since chapter four. But I also realize that a lot of that groundwork is stuff that people read over half a year ago. So… here’s hoping.
World building:
She lit her horn, revealing a cave of shelves. Many were filled with scrolls and books entrusted to her by ponies who felt they belonged in her hooves, and a few with a jumble of talismans and artifacts.
Let’s talk Celestia and censorship. Celestia tells Twilight that she’s not “hiding the good stuff” while handing her a pile of books she kept hidden by history’s great mages on a magic that made a pony immortal.
As a princess, Celestia can’t technically censor powerful magical research. The charter has a free speech provision, but more importantly it has a provision making it extremely difficult to make any law that would put an “undue burden” on one tribe over the others, which directly applies to things like limiting what earth ponies, unicorns, or pegasi can do with their magic. If you think about it, in founding Equestria one of the major concerns would be that, for example, earth ponies and pegasi would get together and amend the charter to limit unicorn magic use, so that provision was central to getting it ratified.
But Celestia still has quite a collection of magical research that other ponies aren’t allowed to see. She got this two perfectly legal ways:
First, she funded a lot of it herself, personally and/or through the School for Gifted Unicorns (which is technically privately run; it was never nationalized after she took it over from Clover.) She’ll often seek a pony out to offer funding to if she hears they’re working on something that has the potential to go pear-shaped (or in some cases is intended to go pear-shaped.) If the research panned out in a manner unfit for messing around with, she owns it, and, well, thank you for your work, I’m sure this will be useful at the appropriate time.
Second, often she’d have tea with mages who’d made some breakthrough of interest to her, after which they always seemed to decide that Celestia should take the notes for safekeeping.
Questions to Answer:
Sacrificing kittens for immortality: is it the path to darkness? How much do you like cats?
How do you handle classified information when you have a spirit of chaos as a free citizen?
you know I tracked this story down after seeing a bit in Never The Final Word and I'm not impressed. I don't like the way you write Celestia, and I've seen characters pop in and do like Discord did this chapter a thousand times. They're always full of it and they're always right because the writer says they are
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Suit yourself!
I have a feeling those issues are related: if you're not into how I'm writing Celestia, I can almost promise you're not getting the reason Discord is right. (Which is not your fault; you're not going to try to understand a puzzle you think is ugly, and you totally shouldn't.)
Hope you find something you like better, and thanks for giving it a shot!
Why 👏 I 👏 love 👏 this 👏 fic
This makes me want to reread, because while I am feeling extremely compelled with where the story is going, I also am feeling like we're just sort of picking this up out of nowhere. But I barely remember more than the broad strokes of the early chapters, so I'm not surprised.
My family has owned cats for longer than I've been around, so I grew up with cats in the house and we had one litter of kittens. And no matter what type of immortality we are talking about here it really comes down to how you have to sacrifice the kitten.
What I'm saying here is I'm a monster but not a complete monster.
Short answer: You don't, they do.
Longer answer: Don't try and get them to see reason, it's not going to work, instead you have to find a way to spin it so that it'll be more fun if the information is kept a secret for the time being. Hopefully this will work until such a time the information in question won't cause a problem and if that will never be the case maybe you can get the spirit of chaos to forget about it or distract them with other things.
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...okay, now I need to see a fic about the Special Hilarity, Invention, and Novelty department. The ponies of SHINY have one job: keep Discord away from the government of Equestria.
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Where does the "Y" come into play here? Is this a case of getting two letters from the same word? Could be the Special Hilarity, Invention, Novelty and Yogurt department, because normal ol ice cream isn't interesting enough most of the time.
Or Yodeling, that seems like something Discord would like if only because it annoys others so much.
Or you could have Special Hilarity, Invention, Novel Interaction Entertainment Specialists and then they would be SHINIES.
So much fun you can have with acronyms.
...I never even made that connection.
It's the path to light, but cats have mostly succeeded in convincing us otherwise, to keep us in darkness. The fiends.
Tho I do like me some kitties.
4740255>>4740546 This is hilarious and needs to be a thing.
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And here I thought Celestia already had that in place. It's called "Discord's playmates in Ponyville".
Additional advantage is she doesn't even have to pay them for distracting him.
Part of me now hopes Twilight raids Celestia's spell closet. The rest dreads what she might learn.
1. Depends on the kittens. Using inbred strays seems not just permissible but downright beneficial.
2. Make sure something much more interesting than the closed-room meeting is going on at the same time.
I was tremendously relieved when Discord showed up. I thought I was the only one thinking those things.
Celestia just got an offer to be her world's Catherine the Great. Except the scandal will be that she doesn't have sex with a horse.
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So much Yes for Dept. Of S.H.I.N.Y. or S.H.I.N.I.E.S.
Or here's another idea based upon something one of the ladies at our local DMV told me based upon my propensity to misplace things and get easily distracted a Department of Shiny QUirky Items Ridiculous Riddles Extra Laughable Soliloquies (or something like that I am half asleep on account of drowsy weather so my brain and ability to come up with creative acronyms spur of the moment are not exactly full power).
As to the blog questions:
Cats for sacrifices part of me says absolutely not part of me says depends on the cat, the method of sacrifice being used, and other detaily things.
Funny Purpose made departments of distaction aside, I think that if Celestia and Luna have a few personal secrets that don't specifically harm anyone (not counting their behavior in canon btw) that is fine. If it were me, in an ideal world of course (I'm no saint IRL) I think the ideal situation would be to gather my advisors to discuss what information should be considered dangerous or not, if we could unanimously (or at least a majority) agree that a certain book or artifact would be better off being forgotten about, then we would do so, but we wouldn't hide information unless it was determined that the risks of it being freely available would outweigh the costs a/o possible benefits. It would be a group effort rather solely in my own hands.