Lost and Blind revamp ideas. · 8:36pm Apr 30th, 2018
This is me wishing to start some conversation about Lost and Blind, since Lord Barleycorn is inching its way toward completion. I've been reading other stories that are starting to make me wonder if I should include them to help mix things up.
I've never really been a fan of the idea that the male/female ratio is like 1:5 in Equestria, necessitating the meme of herding, but the concept does add to the idea that Equestrian culture is very different than our own, and that alien-ish feel would be right at home in a HiE. I'm not sure how I feel about reversed gender roles, I think Oh To Be Old Again is a marvelous example of this in action without having to be backdrop to clop. Put a blind human male in a society like this and it would be infuriating for him, from being self-sufficient to being treated like a helpless little girl.
This is your chance to influence the story you've probably been waiting for. Is there something tickling your fancy? Please let me hear it. =3
And interesting idea. The base story in and of itself is good, but toss in the RGRE setting and you would get your targeted idea quite well.
4850816
It would be quite the drama pot, but I'm curious to know what my readers think of it.
I figure it depends on how exteme the RGRE is. From the stories that i have read it ranges from extreme to barely even there.
My take on the gender thing is that, while herding is a thing, it's not common. Instead, mares tend to be bisexual (straight or lesbian is considered strange). It's also common for mare couples to ask a stallion friend to sire a foal.
Also, sex, in general, is not a taboo. While ponies won't just start screwing a random stranger in the middle of the road, two friends having sex is a normal thing, even if one's married.
I could see this working in non-clop as another form of culture shock, especially with humans' typical view of sex.
4850827
I don't think the ratio of male to female is any different for Equestria as it is for any other mammal group. Normally, it's pretty close to one to one. A good observation made by a YouTuber that I've long forgotten the name of, said that most gender roles stay true in MLP:FiM with the males off at jobs during the day and the mares in town or at home. He cited Miss Cheerilee's class is pretty well divided into an equal male to female ratio.
But that doesn't me there isn't herding going on. In real life, males can compete for multiple females to be part of their group (herd) so that their genetic material is spread more widely.
For humans, there are still cultures that can take multiple wives, even in some otherwise Christian societies. This stems from there being individuals that can support multiple spouses while in the same society that can support none. So the culture that certain stallions have multiple partners in a proper family unit is impossible.
Hope this helps.
4850879
If you can remember what youtuber that was, pass me the video.
4850874
4850842
I'm not completely signed on for making it a RGR story, but so far the culture shock is the biggest positive to adding it. It would have to be enough to cause said shock ,but I would never crank it up to 11 like in Running Running Running where the mares treated stallions like they were all hysterical, incompetent weaklings.
As for herding, I think it could be a thing so long as it was just an option, a holdover from older times when birthrates were low and predators were abroad. I'm also not a fan of gender ratios being skewed as badly as other fics make it out to be.
This is something I really have to consider because the Cakes feature predominately in this story and thus this decision effects them the most.
4850966
It wasn't too long ago that if you made it to 50, you were ancient and way too lucky to be normal. People getting married and having kids in their mid teens also was the norm, mainly due to regularly dying at 30 or so. Would be logical the same thing happens with the ponies if you go back a century or three or more. Herding and polygamy would make sense to keep the population from dwindling away.
Equestria is also an ancient society, their culture should be rife with ceremony and remembrance of the past-- a good comparison would be China. Another reason those old habits could very well be practiced in "modern" pony society.
Another point for not being monogamous is there's little to no competition for resources (food, land, water). There's no reason for the church/state to try and force the population to stop overpopulating the land. I feel this is also a strong reason Equestria is so damned peaceful.
Jews believe, that along with their individual soul they have connection to collective Soul of Jews, combination and personification of all jews that live now and lived before. And this Soul communicates with God directly, and actions of individuals influence what this conversation will be about, and what happens to Soul. And what happens to Soul reflects on every jew in the world.
So I thought - what if ponies are like jews? And have Soul of Ponykind? And that Soul is powerful wizard and prophet. That would explain cutie marks. And how parents know how to name their foal properly for their future passion and cutie mark. Cutie marks and names comes from Soul. And alicorns is just ponies a little more tightly bonded to some aspects of Soul.
I written it more through in my old blog post: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/540714/pony-nation-pony-naming-traditions-and-cutiemarks
4850827
I think it's getting old, and you may consider using something else to make alien society sensation. But if you think story will benefit from it - do it.
The herding and reverse roles is kinda old, try odd superstitious instead. Like ice being used as an evil power instead of fire.
4851161
I think the idea of herding is settled for me:
For me, the big blinking, neon 'don't do it' sign with the herding concept is that there's so many harem fics. I've never cared for harem stories because... well 1. it feels like a 14 year old boy who wants a small army of women adoring him, and 2. Since I feel such relationships to be nothing but wish fulfillment I find them to be very boring. If I include it at all, it will probably be relegated to an antiquated system that's fallen out of use in rare cases. Marriage seems to be the norm in the show since its what Rarity wanted from Blueblood and cadence and shining armor went through.
Its the RGR i'm not sure if people would want to see.
4851156
Eh... I kinda want to stay away from the topics of religion and the afterlife. I feel these topics can just be a bit too decisive and I'd be too tempted to steal ideas from my favorite scifi/fantasy settings.
I was not talking about religion I was talking about history and how in shape folklore.
Herding is over done. They only look like horses.
4851348
It's not about afterlife, it's about life in flesh. And I don't think it can count as religion in a world where magic is real, where lives persons like alicorns, draconequi and other heavy-overpowered godlikes.
If you are going to make a RGRE story, then make it have a point, it could be anything from comedy to drama but just make it so that it somehow pays apart of the story. Also it will be an added bonus if the Equestria you describe will fit with the RGRE theme and not be logically inconsistent.
The most confusing RGRE story I have read was probably Herding Instinct, what made it so weird was that mares were basically the superior gender but the stallions were still the ones who fought in duels and were the ones to defend mares. What made this confusing is that stallions are somehow the more physically adept and more proactive members of society but still they are viewed as the weaker gender. As far as I remember the story never gave an explanation for this contradiction, but on the other hand I dropped it because had bigger flaws than just weird logic.
4851463
That's... confusing. Sounds like the author didn't have a clear vision of what he wanted. But you make good point. the main focus of LaB would be a young man learning to deal with blindness in an equine world. Dealing with reversed gender roles would be just another complication, another hurdle for him. This is more or less me deciding what flavor of Equestria to use.
Also: I don't want this story to enter any field of clop. I'm not comfortable writing it, though the act may be eluded to. I'd like to avoid getting the Sex tag.
4851391
I've never really put any thought into the naming of ponies, and would prefer to stay away from destiny, souls, and other topics like that. I don't even think those will come up since I will be taking steps to make sure our human does not gain any magic or powers of his own. I'd also like to use this opportunity to like to state that I'm of the opinion that Celestia and Luna are just very powerful ponies, and not divine in any sort. That's a very old idea in the fandom from when we had 0 information on the sisters and I think its an overused concept that makes the sisters appear cold and separated from everyone.
4850966
I'll have to Google deep, but I'll try and track it down.
Y'know, I was all about just letting you find your own ideas and develop them from there, because I generally like you're style, but then you mentioned herding and then almost reflexively I started thinking of other things that could make a 1:5 ratio work while still having monogamy. The first one I thought of was longevity, and maybe some serial monogamous relationships along with it. A kind of "we've been romantically involved for forty-fifty years, we can transition back to being friends now"-style of thing and then mixing things up with other ponies. That struck me as super weird, though, which I imagined could be an interesting twist on the human-pony relationship, considering most ponies would break it off around the twilight years of the human.
But that seemed like entirely too much drama for what I think you want, so then I went full this-is-for-the-chill'uns mode and thought about non-sexual reproduction. Or rather, magical conception. Magic seems to be the answer for how everything else in Equestria works, so why couldn't the magic of love literally make babies for a couple that biologically speaking has no business having babies. So while Pinkie and friends could go out and discover the magic of Friendship, our young human could discover the magic of love for himself. And then accidentally a baby into someone.
... and now I'm giggling at the ridiculousness of what I just wrote.
4852283
I know how you feel. if I need that much to explain how herding works then i think its too complicated. I want this story to be mostly about a blind man adjusting to his condition, equestria, and pinkie feeling she needs to help him. I'll have plenty of drama with pinkie learning to calm down a bit and being a bit of a care taker. I'm not against adding it to the story, but so far I'm leaning toward herding being an outdated and seldom used practice in the modern age, something that fell out with serfdom and fiefdom stuff about the time of Luna's banishment. I'm also supposing that the M/F ratio would be closer to 1:1 in the modern era so its not needed. Equestria seems to be a very peaceful yet not (wholly) stagnant society, so I have to infer that marriages last quite a long time.
I could see herding being a very earth pony thing, with ancient unicorns being more focused on lines of decent, with ancient pegasi dabbling in it but preferring to duel over mates as their culture seems to be the most warlike (that's how i see it anyway). In modern times I could only see isolated and very traditionalist ponies like the pies practicing herding.
this won't play much in the plot of the story, but it could be something to toss in to make our HiE scratch his head.