Present Perfect vs. Five Score, Divided by Four · 6:30pm Jun 18th, 2018
I was first introduced to the world of Twisted Spectrum's Five Score, Divided by Four through CyborgSamurai's memorable sidefic The Last Crusade. I had at least some interest in reading the original afterward, and since it was requested by dimencio20 (now Dementia20) for being my 600th follower (haha holy shit I have put this off for so freaking long), that tipped my hand.
Note that I will be reading the mature version, which is about 9k words longer, and which I expect will otherwise be the same story. Let's see what the story that bills itself as having inspired so many sidefics, Fimfiction had to make a rule banning more is all about, shall we? Wait, wasn't that PonyFall
I'm going to be talking about Last Crusade a lot in the context of this review, but for those of you who missed that one, Five Score's basic premise is this: Dave, Jack, Fiona and Evan are friends with the same birthday. They (save Evan) are all bronies, and on their collective 25th birthday, they find themselves going through some changes: growing colorful manes, hair on their bodies, tails and eventually hooves. As it turns out, they are, respectively, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Fluttershy and Big Macintosh, turned into humans by a traitorous Discord at the end of "Season five" and cursed to live for "five score, divided by four" years (that's 25) until their true natures reassert themselves.
As humans-turned-ponies ideas go, it is… if not good, at least different. I see a lot of stories lately about people just waking up any given canon character (to say nothing of OCs). It's different. That said, here's your tl;dr:
Even if your most fervent, heartfelt wish is to go to Equestria, you can do far, far better than reading Five Score, Divided by Four. I do not recommend it to anyone.
So let's start unpacking that, shall we?
When I came to this story, I was 90% sure I wasn't going to like it, but I was nevertheless intrigued. Last Crusade — in which the same premise happens to four friends who turn into the Cutie Mark Crusaders, Babs Seed included — came off distinctly as an "elevates the idea" sort of fic. Something about Five Score had gripped CyborgSamurai, and he had put his talents to use making a good story with strong characters.
Five Score, being the story which spawned that "different, if not good" central idea, has no such favors going for it.
Now, I will note that I hamstrung myself into really not enjoying the first ten or so chapters by having read Last Crusade first. And this can actually be taken as a criticism of LC: it pulls the "turning into ponies" sequence straight out of Five Score, with nothing changed but the names and setting changed. This is partially due to the setup: everyone's going through this change at the same time in the same way because magic. Regardless, having been through that once, I just wanted Dave and company to get on with it, already.
That said, I can definitely blame Five Score for telling the same story twice with the same story beats. Because, once Dave is Rainbow Dash, etc., their group starts checking the internet for suggestions of other people having gone through the same thing, see if they can't help them out and so forth. So then we meet Rachel.
Rachel, her sister Tess, their friend Harry and Rachel's crush Tom are, respectively, Shining Armor, Twilight, Pinkie Pie and Rarity. Because of course Rarity's human name was Tom. And they go through the exact same thing as Rainbow, et. al., in the exact same way. It was tedious. I would have seen it twice regardless of what happened.
And yeah, it's not exactly the same. While Dave and Jack are running to Walmart (fucking Walmart) to enact their long-standing zombie apocalypse preparation scenario, Rachel and co. are busy trying to cross the Canadian border, avoid Rarity's rich parents finding out what's happened to them, and oh yeah, they burn down a bookstore in Seattle somehow. But as the order of operations of the transformation is the same, they all basically react in exactly the same way. As I said, tedious, and moreover, the effect is really dulled when you already know what's going on.
Before I get too far into talking about these people and what happens, I need to address the difference between the two versions of the story. The Mature version — i.e., the one I read — is 9k words longer, and the description of the regular version promises not just sex, but mature language and nudity. So I figured, okay, it's just the original with 9k of clop scenes thrown in; I'll read it and get the full-full picture.
Except, I'm not sure I did.
I only checked to see if there were differences once, but there were. In a scene where Rainbow Dash and Big Macintosh, on the road, stop to have sex — along with RareArmor, there's MacDash — in the Teen version, they just stop and take shelter from the rain. It was very different, and I found myself wondering what else I might be missing, or how much the story might have changed between the two. :/ This is what we have to live with, though.
But this also meant that the early going had a lot of Dave getting off to pictures of Rainbow Dash, which, when you can figure out pretty easily what's going on, is both weird and hilariously fitting. (I was thoroughly amused by the idea that this takes place in 2020 and he has a hard time finding new clop pictures, like, honey, it's 2018, show's ending in a year, there will still be clop in 2020. XD Hindsight, but it was funny.) Granted, any humor is dulled by just how much sex is in the first ten or so chapters. Like, literally every one has a reason for people or ponies to fuck or whatever, whether it grinds the (already slow-paced) story to a halt or not.
I guess I need to segue into the characters now; trust me, this will make sense in a minute.
None of these characters are likable. Some of them have their moments; I suppose Tess, being Twilight before she's Twilight, is all right. (There are a lot of POV characters, not just Dash and Shining.) But they're not very good at being friends with one another, and more than anything, ain't none of them very kind to women.
Let's not mince words here: it is the current year, and if you can't handle the fact that you're participating in a fandom for a show starring strong female characters who don't need men to bail them out of every situation, you need to get over yourself. And this shit, more than anything, is what made this story utterly unbearable, time and time again.
Sure, Dash ends up sleeping with Big Mac, but before that, she and Applejack get it on one morning. She spends time referring to AJ as her 'lover', and then it just kind of is never brought up again. Shining Armor's big douchebag moment is telling Rarity that he needs to go do some kind of dangerous thing alone because "I'm the guy and you're the girl". I'm the fucking guy. Shining Armor, who has been female for the last 25 years, is the guy now, and the guy needs to go do dangerous things while the girl sits at home and pines for him because that's how it is, sweet cheeks.
Fuck you.
Even little things like Harry not wanting to turn pink because it's "gay" pissed me off. (And yet Harry, out of all eight of our main cast, takes to the change more readily than anyone else. This is of course overshadowed by Rainbow giving Big Mac a blowjob and angsting about how gay that is.) Five characters in this story change sex; you'd think it would be used as an opportunity to explore gender roles or at least something more than just "how do I pee?" I mean, with the mature version, there's a lot of "time to test the new equipment", and even that would have been fine if disappointing. But "we have each other's junk now, ergo our roles must reverse" is just ludicrously backwards, garbage thinking. And let's not forget "I don't want to have a vagina!" (And lots of opportunities for them to be naked and talk about their boobs toward the end!) Fuck, I hate this story.
Oh boy, I'd forgotten about this one. Quoted verbatim in my notes is a line… And I don't quite remember the context, but suffice to say Pinkie and Shining were fucking a lot at first, after they'd fully become ponies and Shining wasn't sure he wanted to be with Rarity, like, full-time. Point is, I think it's Pinkie who says to him, "Don't be a girl about it, I'm not going to rape you."
Don't be a girl about it.
I'm not going to rape you.
Can I… God, is there even… Do I have to explain what's wrong with this? Because there's just so much, I do not know where to start. D: And the fucking worst part is I couldn't ultimately decide if I hated this line more, or one that comes shortly after it, where Pinkie expresses dismay at alicorn Twilight being canon.
ARGH
I'm probably just going to start rambling now, but there was more to hate than just the characters. Like how, for all that Dash's side of the story is pretty much focused on discovering the changes and then trying to figure out how to deal with them — all that Walmart shopping is taken back to AJ's family farm, because of course human AJ lives on a horse farm, as they try to collect all the ponies they can — for whatever reason, Shining's half apparently needed to be more dramatic.
So we get things like Shining, Rarity and Pinkie Pie being kidnapped by a drug ring? And like… it would be human trafficking if they were still human? Not to mention the immense contrivance of this group of motherfuckers in Seattle just sitting around with a bunch of cages and shock collars, like, what, hoping something would come along they could use them on? And then Shining tries to teleport home, the 'home' part of the spell is taken literally, and he ends up back at his Vancouver apartment. Where Rainbow Dash just happens to be waiting for him, because reasons.
Oh yeah, and when Dash crossed the border, flying at supersonic speeds of course, she set off a bunch of defense alarms and that, combined with the whole "unexplained terrorist bombing of a bookstore" event, has put the US and Canada on the brink of war. Fucking war. Later appearances of ponies around the world start fomenting global unrest, and this is attributed to Discord's subtle influence over the world (which is kind of neat, I guess), but when you're reading through this for the first time, that's just a lot to take in. Like, I thought this was supposed to be a story about people turning into ponies, not Defcon fucking one.
I should definitely mention the writing. Credit where it's due, I think it does get better at the story goes, but this being one of those labor of love with endless updates kind of fics, not nearly enough effort has been put into editing it. Just in the first page of my notes, I'm seeing slow pacing, lack of punctuation, tense changes, being overly detailed, formulaic sex scenes, and dialogue that's just off. There were some POV shifts early on, but that didn't stay a thing; most of them came with scene breaks, which is all you need, though I also noted that narrator voicing was pretty similar between character. Alongside poor structure and unlikable characters, it's just one more nail in the coffin. I don't know if there's any difference between the versions.
Let's talk some more missed opportunities. Once Dash gets the whole mane eight (I guess?) together, they all settle in at the farm and things don't go quite as well as any of them hoped. Dash, and to a lesser extent, Applejack, is really into being Rainbow Dash, while other characters like Big Mac and Shining Armor are very, "I'm still human, we need to figure out a way to fix this." This causes a lot of conflict and drama, which was a good idea… but it's all just sort of resolved offscreen. Like, there's a big blowup moment around a dinner table, but eventually Shining's camp just fall in line with "well, we're ponies now". I think it's a case of the plot demanding it, or maybe the author forgot it was an angle being gone for. Who's to say?
And like, there's a weird sequence where Applejack goes out into the horse barn and starts losing her mind, basically going feral. This is never explained, nor does it actually matter after she's pulled out of it. Rainbow Dash has weather sense, even while going through the transformation as Dave, which is interesting, but completely irrelevant to the story beyond being a little bit of headcanon about pegasi. More just plain disappointing is the explanation that Lauren Faust (who thank fuck does not actually appear in this story) got all the ideas for MLP:FiM by basically plagiarizing the stories of a little girl, who happened to be Tess, who happened to be Twilight Sparkle, who happened to be the only pony who remembered literally anything about Equestria and was reliving her memories as childhood fantasies. Like a lot of things in this story, it would be clever if it weren't so dumb.
Let's not forget the biggest disappointment: Shining and Rarity. I mean, that's a major thing, right? You've got these characters who are completely different people from who they used to be, and now two of them are in a relationship they weren't in before, when one of them was married. Cadence shows up eventually at the farm, and while that first meeting could have been a really intense character moment, or even just some explosive drama, instead it's mostly laughed off, like, "ha ha, how awkward" and shoved under the rug. Once they get back to Equestria, it's brought up against, how basically one of their royalty is no longer married, but what you might think is a major governmental upheaval is just a footnote in the "here's what's going on now".
Not everything in this story is execrable, of course. There are some legitimately funny moments — like Evan hooking up with a woman who just really wants to get railed by a horse, while he just so happens to be growing a horse dick — and actually one plot point that I thought was really good, like the absolute best part of the story, which I can sum up as "the mythology of Dubuque". It makes sense in context; it also is undercut somewhat by having to live through the show characters argue over whether Equestria Girls was canon. >.< Oh god, I cannot describe the cringe that evoked.
(Okay, but if EQG is canon, does that mean their human selves are still hanging around, and 25 years older? Talk about missed opportunities!)
I'm looking for some other stuff here, just because you need to get something out of having read this. Okay, like Dash early on suddenly worrying that all the fuckery is going to wind up with her getting pregnant, spending the night with Fluttershy to stave it off, and then getting shit for it in the morning, that was funny. There's a sequence where they sneak into Fiona's apartment, looking for Fluttershy, and Dash encounters two drunks dudes in an elevator and just fucks with them. It's clever how one method they use for finding other ponies is having Big Mac look through a photo album and name people he sees. Since they slowly think of each other as ponies while they transform, it actually helps identify certain people as ponies in hiding. There was a Little Red Riding Hood joke that was apparently funny, but I neglected to mention what it was. :B There's a spot where Shining gives a very well-written, inspiring speech, shortly after Twilight gave one that was short and, like, the exact opposite of inspiring. And I did like that, once they find out they can use the mirror portal to go to Equestria, come back, and be human, the whole global unrest subplot is used as a reason why they can't just stay human and live their lives in peace while maybe figuring out a way to fight Discord in a few years.
But no, I'm just going through my notes and seeing shit after shit. Like, let's talk about Starbreezer for a minute. Like Dash, Shining's party initially tries using social media to find other ponies. And they meet up with one called Starbreezer… who, it turns out, is just a middle-aged brony whose roleplay account they came across.
I have no words for this.
And it might have sufficed to be a one-off, if extremely cringey joke, but he ended up being plot relevant. He drives them around, because yay ponies, I guess, and at the end of the story, he's brought to Equestria, where he gets to become a pony and I just…
The lack of self-awareness is staggering. And yet, he's actually a decent character? Like, he's nerdy and awkward, everything brony stereotype, but he's well-meaning, doesn't take advantage of their situation, and actually comes through for the ponies when they need him. I don't want to like this motherfucker, but that's what this story has forced me into.
And of course, Discord is way more hardcore than in the show, and does far worse things to them when they attack him. The absolute nadir is him turning Fluttershy into a draconequus and hypnotizing her to fall in love with him. I was very glad that didn't go any further, but fuck's sake, augh, why? (The day is saved by not just Shining Armor, but Big Mac as well, because of course you need the guys to save the girls.) The way they beat him also far more hardcore and kind of gross, too.
Before wrapping up, I would like to mention the ending. There are basically two epilogues, one shortly after Discord's defeat, and one five years later. The five years later one was honestly pretty neat. Like, there's this whole mostly one-sided Earth/Equestria exchange going on, the portal on the Earth side is surrounded by this futuristic complex, and Twilight and friends are basically treated as royalty. It's a setting I was interested to see more stories in, and that definitely overshadowed everything that came before it.
But, because I can't praise this story without having something fuck it up, I came to a terrible realization in that final chapter.
See, the mane six go to Earth to attend the wedding of Shining Armor and Rarity. Dash is still dating Big Mac (and fuck's sake, does he ever think with his dick), but they aren't anywhere near committing. And the thing I realized is, for all that this was a story that started with a guy who turns into Rainbow Dash, and for all that the final, climactic fight hinged on Rainbow Dash realizing who she truly was — like, this was the whole point of her character arc, it was a theme that showed up again and again in the story, and the fact that the CMC's show up with all their Equestrian memories actually causes conflict in Dash's camp — I'm pretty sure Shining Armor was the main character.
And yeah, Rachel gets most of the POV segments once we've switched to her team. But I can't shake the feeling that Shining was really who the author wanted to write about, and couldn't because they'd started off with Rainbow Dash as the main character. Shining doesn't just save the day because he's the guy, but because he's the hero. I see it in how strong his character is written when he's being a military leader. I see it in how well-versed the author is in military jargon that at least sounds real. And I see it most of all in how the story ends, not on a major character point for Rainbow Dash, but on Shining Armor's wedding. Because when you have a story about a guy and a girl, the best thing that can happen is the guy getting the girl in the end, holy fucking matrimony and everything.
Shit.
Have a notes dump:
Jack's criticism of Applejack is going to bite him when he turns into her :V
The awe of suddenly being Rainbow Dash is one thing, but Dave being sad she doesn't get to have sex with herself is rather another
I never thought I would read a story, fanfic or not, where "Faded" is quoted. c.c
ah, it's penis o'clock
Pinkie told Rainbow her human name entirely so we could have a Harry Potter joke, I cannot believe this
And Dash herself just made a My Little Dashie reference, I cannot even, I am so done
And the continuing conflict of Shining not understanding who he really is... continues
Oh boy, shining and Rarity are getting off to thoughts of unprotected sex and marriage, there's just no living with them
There's a presidential election going on? Let's just turn this into a politics story
... Okay, I was joking, you can stop now
No, it's not like anything important is happening right now, let's just segue into a Monty Python sketch, why don't we
Dash reminiscing about how great her human life was makes me realize that My Little Dashie has a more realistic portrayal of what the future is actually like than this story
I do not understand why or how labors of love end up so bad time and time again. Five Score, Divided by Four is yet another entry in the litany of "ponies go to Earth" or "humans go to Equestria" or "humans turn into ponies" stores — again and again, mashed up any way you can think of, they're all insufferably interchangeable — whose sole purpose is to provide an outlet to people who really want to go to Equestria. And I can hardly blame those people; I spent my teenage years caught up in fantasy, and the world wasn't half as bad then as it is now. Life is shit, it's hard, say what you will about escape into fantasy, sometimes it's all you've got.
But this story is not the way to do it. Five Score is a slog of bad ideas and worse ideas that plods through its non-plot, missing every beat that could have made it at least memorable. I spent months dreading the next opportunity I would have to experience yet more of this offal. Not since My Roommate Is a Vampire have I wasted so much time on something I enjoyed so little. And yeah, that was a requested review, too. I'm glad I stopped doing those.
I think the worst thing I can say about Five Score is that is obliterated all the good will Last Crusade had built up in me for the setting. I am not going to read another of these stories, so long as I live. Not the Daring Do one; not the Chrysalis one. Fuck Five Score, everything it stands for, and everything associated with it.
1/5
See, it's just five divided by four.
That was the story I was reading while walking around town. I will be replacing it with something that clocks in at over half a million words, but promises to be a much better read. I don't expect I'll have that one done before the end of the year, but we'll see.
What, you can't read half a million words in less than six months? Pfft, pansy.
There is a whole litany of reasons why Five Score ended up being dropped and I'm pretty sure this review doesn't even cover half of them.
Wow, congrats on finally being past this! Even being, uh, very into the content involved, and the story kind of directly being responsible for me knowing my best friend of five+ years now, I never even made it to the jump to Rachel and Tess.
There's a couple of fun facts I kind of feel like talking about, in that... not to cast shade on Twisted, since they honestly seem like a pretty decent person, but I'm not sure how much of Five Score was a labor of "love" as much as it was "fame"? I remember it taking off because TS wrote a bunch quickly in a PTFG that was starved for content, and then reposted on fimfic where it monopolized the feature box.
Like, you call out that weird sequence where AJ starts going feral and that getting completely dropped, and that was 100% a remnant of the original concept just being Anon and another guy turn into ponies on a farm and get rutted by feral horses. (Dave's name was Anon for like three or four months, by the way, if that retcon wasn't clearly in the authors notes somewhere.) I don't 100% remember if that concept got ditched for being uncomfortably dark to write or if Twisted wanted to write something with more appeal after people took note, or whatever other reason, but stuff definitely spiralled way out of control, and I think you get a different perspective on a lot of the decisions made from that starting point.
Which giant fic is next?
I actively loathe this series. It's as bad as the *shudder* Displaced "genre", and was about as popular for a while.
This has got to be some of the worst understanding of gender on par with the whole of RGRE (okay, that one is worse, but still) and people who think celestial bodies are valid genders.
But I'll contain my trans grumpiness and just leave you with that comparison. Ugh.
The pernicious sexism and homophobia is the prime reason to utterly loathe this story. You'd think that a story that prominently features numerous gender swaps would be a bit more progressive, but no, it is outright disgusting in how regressive and backwards it is with regards to gender roles.
I knew this story was shit when it came out.
Thanks for being a bro with that echo chamber confirming that.
You're a stronger man than I. I only made it up to the first sex scene between Rainbow and Applejack. Years and years ago though it was.
4884897
I really want to see an RGRE story where the author takes the reverse gender roles seriously with regard to the conflict it would instill between ponies and a human from our reverse of Equestria. Like, I'm pretty sure that contrary to most stories labeled "RGRE," when confronted by hyper-masculine females, or hyper-feminine males, the majority of people (and ponies) aren't going to go "That's the hottest thing I've ever seen, I need to fuck it now!!!!"
That's not how societal norms work...
4884884
Wasn't it mostly (or at least stated to be) that in the pre-EQG world of fimfic, that the story, at least early on, had to have something to do with Equestria, and not just be a random story that used names from Friendship is Magic, but nothing else? Like, you could replace all the character names with non-ponies and it wouldn't change a thing.
I know that's why Red Thrush High School got pulled.
In which Present Perfect reads a smut tf kink fic.
4884917
Outside of the usual issues, it's that RGRE also doesn't know what things like gender and gender roles actually are. No one in those stories is really masculine or feminine in any way, especially not in any 'hyper' way. Instead, everyone is simply a hypersexual brute. It's surprisingly sexist to both males and females, and not even in a remotely funny way, like that one story by Vimbert the Unimpressive with a sillier version of an Equestria that hates heterosexuals. If you want stories with an insightful role of gender, none come to mind off the top of my head, but it's certainly a theme I like to read and write about. The LGBT and transgender groups are probably your best bet for gender exploration stories where it would be a main theme. Feel free to PM for suggested reading too, and I might recall/be able to find some
Jeez. I think you actually hated this thing more than I did when I covered it in 2014. (Heh. You were talking about needing to review it back then.) Though maybe that's just down to how much space you were able to dedicate to your review. You're making me wish I could have taken the time to savage it properly.
I thought the story was mostly alright up until the end when they returned to Equestria. Sure, a few things made little sense, but there was something that took the cake. They were American's turned ponies knowing they'd be in a fight for their lives and species when the entered the portal, and what did they do? They made spears and built catapults and ballistae!
They're in the most gun dense country on Earth, and they went in and made makeshift medieval crap.
That was indeed the best part of the story. I was actually caught off guard by such a neat idea suddenly appearing after so much bleh.
I didn't hate this story near as much as you, but I can definitely see where you're coming from. While I did find parts of the story rather enjoyable, other parts really did seem to drag, and there was no shortage of moments when I was rather peeved at each of the characters. Discord was just a little too twisted and gritty, and not in a good way. Overall, I didn't think Five Score was a truly bad story, necessarily, but I definitely preferred The Last Crusade.
Ha, seems like a vaguely inverted one of my current reading experience of the original TCB. Nothing offensive, but the plot is built upon incoherence and wish fulfilment that never got past 4 chapters.
4884922
I was using "hyper" as merely distinctive from minor characteristics, which is naturally entirely subjective to the society. A guy who is soft-spoken and makes elaborate hand gestures while talking is fairly different than a guy who wears dresses, puts on eyeshadow and lipstick, and who flirts coyly from behind his hand.
The actual gender roles for an RGRE are probably there in each story, to a lesser or greater extent, and not necessarily in the ways you'd expect. For instance, in the latest one I checked out, building a house (construction) was something that stallions simply didn't do. Naturally the human-turned-stallion had built his own place, bucking the normal gender roles. But rather than finding it weird that a stallion would not just undertake, but relish such a heavily mare-like activity, the mares instead all turned right around and lifted their tails. I could see a select few with less strictly held mores, but all...?
4884993
Yeah, RGRE is... special, to say the least.
4884894
Sweet giblets, it could have been worse? D:
I mean, I kind of got that it started as a labor of love, both from the A/N and just the feeling of the story at the beginning. But I absolutely will buy that it spiralled out of control due to sudden influx of horse fame.
4884895
You honestly should. Everyone should.
4884908
'Swhat I do. :B
4884921
After reading the scene where Discord shuts down the mane six with wicked transformations, my only thought was, "Well, now I know all the author's fetishes."
4884951
You poor fucko. D: That's probably right around when I read Last Crusade.
4884987
TCB is awful, but definitely better. Because it's shorter. D:
Wow, it looked like the worst idea on the site by far and ended up being worse than I could have possibly imagined. I first heard about it in a site blog post clarifying the rule that your story cannot be posted until it has a chapter with a pony in it, which destroyed all the good will any given HiE or Tf story would have, which is zero. Good on you for suffering for the sins of the fandom.
As usual, criticism that is easy to read and more entertaining than some stories I've read.
I've become skepitcal by default of most of the fandom's earlier work, and it looks like that was justified in this case. Wish fulfillment is a common fixture of our fandom, and it shares a lot of similarities with porn: both are more about the idea than the execution, and the intended audience tends to have low standards. This story just so happens to include both porn and wish fulfillment, ha ha.
Yes! A PresentPerfect blog post that results in my nigh-infinite "to read" list getting shorter, rather than longer. More, more!
Oof. Sorry to hear. I'm happy to say that I've never heard of it until now. Or (probably?) whatever RGRE is. Better luck with the next one.
Let's start with the title: I assume it's a quotation from Discord? But why would he say that? It's not a riddle or anything. It's not even obscure. It's just ever so slightly obtuse. Don't get me wrong, I know the real reason is that it has a nice cadence and forms a couplet, so it's kind of catchy, but I'd hope there's an independent justification.
I mean come on, clearly that's not the first place to look if you have a Shining Armor involved. :V
Also it seems at least a little mean-spirited. At least the plagiarism part (if that's how it was actually presented, rather than a broader inspiration kind of thing). Also does G1 (the movies + show) exist in this history?
I feel like that might have been the best way to go, in a sense. The "completely different people" part carries a lot of weight (and I'm willing to take that in a very comprehensive sense, because (e.g.) like hell Shining Armor is that misogynist), and by that point on at least Shining's side it's seems like it would be pretty clear (once they've found out they aren't the only ones) that he just doesn't care that much about the former relationship. He wouldn't necessarily have had to break things off right after realizing Cadence might be out ther, but you'd expect that to have created drama between him and Rarity, or at least some introspection and discussion, probably a decision, before Cadence arriving.
Okay, I'll grant clever, but what are the mechanics there? I'd be perfectly happy with it if it were something like Discord captured and transformed everyone, together, into their adult forms then did a memory wipe so Big Mac could then match ponies to human pictures, but this seems like something where with the sequence of things described it should just be out of his information set. And if everyone turned pony at the same time, it's not even like you could establish at some point an ability to do that in person to someone not yet switched. Did any of them (Twilight especially) have any kind of "feeling" or instinct regarding certain people before turning that they only subsequently recognized? Do they have a divining rod sense for when other ponies are nearby that might extend in the same way? Why does this work?
4885032
The title is from the curse Discord lays on the ponies at the end of "season five" (I'm pretty sure this was started in season three), and it's just one part thereof. There's an attempt to suggest that it was meant not only as the period of time they'd spend on earth, but also that they would always be grouped in fours, but it didn't work.
G1 is never mentioned. No surprise there, G4 fans tend to know nothing about it.
Fuck if I know. There's no actual opportunity for a 'divining rod', as you suggest, but it comes from the fact that they start slipping pony-gender pronouns into their speech when talking about each other, then accidentally calling each other by their pony names, while the transformation is occurring. It makes about as much sense in context as probably anything else, I guess.
4885009
No. I know all the author's fetishes. Because I'm netfriends with Twisted.
4885044
Right, but their point is that it doesn't really mean anything (for which I agree.)
Your reviews inspire me sometimes.
So... tell me if I have the plot correct:
“I am human.”
“I am a human who loves ponies”
“I love ponies a little too much.”
“Me too! I mean... Eww? Ewwwww.”
“Oh noes! I’m becoming a pony!”
“Me too!”
“I don’t want to be a vagipony!”
“But you’re RD, I’d do RD.”
“I’d
Buffalo Billdo me too.”“Let’s switch roles, yo.”
“That makes sense”
“Let’s do this!”
“Do what?”
“Each other, obviously!”
“I’m being done!”
“We’re all being done!”
“Don’t be a girl about it.”
“I have a dick now.”
“Let’s get married.”
“What about your actual waifu?”
“I’m over her, you’re my only pony.”
“I’m his wife, and I’m strangely ok with this.”
I... think if done properly, this could make for an actual entertaining story.
4885009
true, true
Still, I'm gleaning a tiny bit of amusement finding what random plot points that nobody seems to have used, and what plot points get repeated to infinity.
The thing that got me about Last Crusade was, you could fudge it for the others, but the CMC were all definitely going to be less than 25 years old when they got cursed. So there's an argument that their human forms are their "true selves", because that's what they've spent the majority of their existence as. But iirc that's just never brought up or addressed in any significant way.
4885108
Let's go with 'yes'.
4885136
The one thing that really bothered me about Last Crusade was along those lines. That the CMCs regaining their memories were basically erasing these people from existence. My fears were assuaged somehow, I forget how. :B
You don’t get paid enough for this
4885375
I've been trying to tell people that for years. :B
4884917
Time to writea ponification of the part of les miserables where that woman was sluthsmaed and fired by her sexist pig manager for secretly having a child she was sending all her money to help raise, and eventually she has to sell her hair, teeth, and self just to survive... but in a RGRE!