The Problem of Evil: Themes · 11:48pm Jul 1st, 2018
This blog post contains spoilers for The Problem of Evil. If you have interest in that story, please consider completing it before reading this post.
NB: I fully subscribe to the death of the author style of literary criticism. This is my interpretation of my story. Now that the story is written, it is up to every reader to decide what they think the story is about. If you disagree with me you are not wrong, and I’d love to hear about it.
***
Though it didn’t come to me until near the end of the first draft, the primary themes of The Problem of Evil (tPoE) are very much contained in the title. In theology the problem of evil refers to the struggle to reconcile the existence of evil with a god that is simultaneously omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. It occurred to me that those three traits (benevolence, knowledge, and power) were arguably the traits that make a person (or pony) a good ruler. The story is an exploration of four ponies, each of whom have some combination of those traits, and the struggles they face as they attempt to rule.
The four ponies, naturally, are Luna, Twilight, Sombra, and Celestia. Let’s start with Luna. Luna’s benevolence is fairly clear. She genuinely wants to be a good pony and she does try her best for her subjects. She is also powerful. Her early interaction with the dragons and the courts always go best for her when she brings to bear the overwhelming fact of who she is.
She is not particularly wise. Forming the New Lunar Republic so soon after being placed in charge of the government was simply foolish. After that she let her emotions lead her to hide from her responsibilities for months. More personally, she didn’t even know herself well enough to realize what she did and didn’t want when it came to ruling.
Twilight, for her part, is a very clever pony. Tricking Blueblood into leaving, managing the court, and fighting Luna on equal terms despite the significant power imbalance all display her abilities. Naturally, she is also well-meaning when it comes to the other ponies. However, she is not powerful.
This requires some explanation because Twilight is a very powerful unicorn and routinely displays that fact. In Equestria, especially this version of it, beings have something like a divine right to rule. The immortals are in charge and mortals only wield political power when it is given to them by the immortals. Twilight feels this keenly when she relies on Luna’s borrowed power for her trick against Blueblood. Essentially, no matter how powerful a unicorn she becomes, she will always lack that divine right to rule and the explicit power that comes with it, and that frustrates her early on.
Sombra is powerful. As he says, he is the only one to become king by right of power. He successfully seized the divine right to rule and held it when the immortals attempted to punish him for his audacity. He is also clever. With the minds of thousands of ponies to draw on and one thousand years to plan, his machinations tend to be successful. He tricks Luna into giving him more power, if not releasing them. He manages to convert enough nobles, including Blueblood, to joining or following him that he can stage a rebellion to get his forces closer to himself. He is not kind. His hold on his ponies is predicated on their suffering and this, frankly, doesn’t bother him. I would argue he is actually sociopathic, completely incapable of caring about other ponies’ emotions even when he is feeling them himself.
Finally, Celestia. Arguably she doesn’t fit with the other three. As an alicorn she is powerful and, having ruled alone for 1000 years, clearly does possess the divine right. She is wise, having manipulated the court for years and prepared dozens of potential explanations and plans for Luna’s return. I would also claim (and I suspect some will disagree) that as a ruler she is benevolent. Her actions at the government scale allow the ponies say in their own lives, keeping things stable without being stultifying, and generally keep her subjects happy and free.
The problem with Celestia is that all this comes at the expense of her individuality. She sacrifices Luna, her beloved sister, to the moon for 1000 years because that is what her country requires. If you asked Celestia - the pony – whether it was worth it she would probably give an emphatic no. Mortal ponies come and go, but her relationship with her sister should have been forever. Similarly, she realizes that she is good for Equestria, and that she cannot survive alone for another 1000 years. As a result, she sacrifices her personal morals and puts a frankly horrifying spell on Twilight to make sure she never turns on her as Luna did. Celestia had all three traits and meant well for the state, but she lost everything and everypony she personally cared about in the process.
This is where our ponies are at the beginning of the story. Now let’s see how they developed through it.
***
Luna’s goal throughout the story, though she didn’t know it, was to acquire wisdom. This refers both to her knowledge of the world, and her knowledge of herself. For the world, she slowly learns how to rely on other ponies without simply letting them take charge. In the beginning Luna let’s Twilight run court without bothering to learn any of her reasons or deeper points of what she’s doing. This leads to her being unprepared in the face of Blueblood’s machinations and implementing a plan that she has not trusted anyone else to evaluate.
By the time of the conference with the dragons she trusts Sunlit Rooms enough that she’s willing to actually listen to the other pony, while still making up her own mind. You can see this in the strategy meeting immediately after the funeral as well. Luna clearly leads the meeting. She takes in the thoughts and knowledge of other ponies, but in the end she is the one who decides. Twilight, her perpetual foil in terms of wisdom, even bows to her decision and asks permission for her plan to stay behind.
Luna’s self-knowledge takes longer to manifest. There are traces of it in her self-portraits, but she doesn’t really understand why she’s painting them or what they mean. As Nightmare Moon becomes clearer and clearer, Luna gets closer to that knowledge of herself. However, she’s initially thrown off because the Dreaming thinks a specific action, taking control, is what she has to do and the Dreaming is wrong. The harder Nightmare Moon pushes the more Luna digs her hooves in. It’s not until Luna considers the opposite extreme from what the Dreaming demands that she realizes what she really wants.
Luna does not want to rule. Oh, she was jealous of Celestia’s attention, but the actual process of running an army or a state is not something she wants to do. She used to think it was. The creation of the Nightmare came from that mistaken estimation of her own desires and it drove her insane partly because she couldn’t reconcile what she thought she wanted with what she actually wanted. However, she realizes it at the end, and in so doing gains wisdom.
Twilight knows from her argument with Luna exactly what she wants. She wants and thinks that her intelligence should be more important than a divine right to rule, and she spends the rest of the story attempting different methods of gaining that right. Unsurprisingly, her attempts have mixed results.
Her first attempt is to simply run things when Luna won’t. It feels like it works, for a time. She does indeed successfully run the army camp for nearly six months. The problem is that she realizes everypony is still waiting for Luna to take charge and they are only suffering her in the meantime.
In response, she stops trying to freeze Luna out and instead throws herself into what I would call the Celestia mistake. Twilight thinks she has to win against the other armies no matter what it costs her personally. As a result, she sends Fluttershy out on a mission that is practically speaking a good idea for a solider, but a terrible idea for a friend.
When the mission goes south, Twilight still thinks she can use her brain to get out of it. She concocts a whole plan with illusions and an ambush and any number of tricks. What she should have done is show up, grab Pinkie and Fluttershy in a shield bubble, and teleport out. Simple, easy, and nearly impossible for the griffons to defend against as far as she knew. She didn’t because she was still thinking of turning it around on the griffons and gaining an advantage in the stalemate.
After that, Twilight essentially gives up. She defers to Luna on the battle plan, and arranges things so she can do some good while committing suicide. If Spike hadn’t realized that she was staying behind, she probably would have died, possibly before even reaching Hvergelmir.
When the divine right does come, it comes as a curse in the form of the memories of the crystal ponies, rather than a blessing. But like any true ruler, “divine right” is just an allegory of the will of the people. Twilight becomes a nation, and in doing so gains the right and power to rule.
It’s worth taking a moment here to note the inverted arcs Twilight and Luna go through. Luna has a rising arc. She starts at nearly her lowest point and rises from the beginning of the second arc on. Twilight, meanwhile, starts off on a high, running the court, and falls until she hits a suicidal nadir right at before the end. This corresponds to the trait they are lacking. Knowledge is incremental, something that can and must be built up slowly. There are epiphanies, to be sure, but they must be built up to and supported both before and after the fact. Power, especially the divine right to rule, is in many ways a binary thing. Either you can do something or you can’t. Either ponies follow your orders or they don’t. And the harder you try and make it happen, the further away it seems. Thus, Twilight had to lose everything before she could gain the right to rule.
Sombra, in contrast with the heroines, does not gain the trait he is lacking. He is given every possible chance to do so. As Twilight says, he was raised in a normal loving family. It is implied he attended magic school with normal and presumably friendly peers. Despite that he still developed horrifying mental magic and then tested it out on his parents.
After gaining the network he has access to the emotions of literally thousands of ponies. He feels what they feel and still can’t dredge up the smallest shred of compassion or well-intent for them. He knows compassion, love, friendship, etc. exist, but they are beyond his comprehension. From this perspective he is a pitiable character. He conquers because there is nothing else he can do that has any meaning to him, so he might as well take everything he can see.
He lost the final fight because of this lack. Sombra absolutely could have ascended if he could have made himself truly see what the world was like for the ponies he controlled. A Sombra with access to immortal magic would have been able to deal with the gift of the mantle of the sun. Or he would have been able to prevent Luna from cutting him off and Twilight from getting close enough to make the gift instead. He was ultimately defeated by this lack of compassion.
Unlike Sombra, Celestia was undone not by her lack of one of the traits, but by the conflict between the traits and her personal desires. She was compelled to choose the option that would put her back on the throne. The plan she told Twilight about them sharing a body probably would have worked, but it would have placed Twilight in a dominant position and Celestia could not abide that. Instead, she chose the option that put her in charge, and would have sacrificed Twilight to do it.
And yet, because she cared for Twilight she couldn’t commit to it completely. She could have easily tricked Twilight into revealing her magical signature. She could have asked Twilight about how she had discovered the mental spell and what had happened after. Heck, given how unstable Twilight was at the time, Celestia could probably have convinced her to give up her body without much trouble.
Instead, Celestia tried to do both. She tried to comfort and stabilize Twilight while also plotting to steal her body. She also planned for Twilight to have the best chance of surviving even if she beat Celestia. She couldn’t commit and because of that Twilight’s halfhearted and late defense was ultimately successful.
***
Twilight and Luna gain the trait they lack and that allows them to defeat Sombra and Celestia, who do not. It’s important to note that Twilight and Luna gain their traits before their respective confrontations. Twilight began to ascend once she entered Hvergelmir, and she would have without Celesita’s interference (though she also would have gone mad). Without having those memories, she would not have won against Celestia. Similarly, Luna needed to realize she didn’t want to rule the Dreaming before she could give away the connection to it and the mantle of the moon which then allowed her to contribute to Sombra’s defeat.
So how does this tie into the ending? Twilight and Luna gain the traits necessary to defeat the other two potential rulers, but they aren’t enough for those two to rule the country again. They’ve each made too many mistakes and neglected the country for too long, and the people of that country no longer acknowledge their divine right to rule.
The citizens’ refusal to allow Twilight and Luna back is couched in the language of the problem of evil and the crusaders spell it out directly. Because of the connection left over from Sombra they know anything any one of them knows, they can do anything any one of them can do, and they will be benevolent because they all can feel the pain of the others. Luna realizes that she could never rule as well as the connection now could and that she no longer is wanted as a ruler. Thus, she feels it necessary to abdicate the throne. Twilight, who was already humbled when she tried to lead to army, is willing to go along with this.
The point of this abdication was that no matter how well a single monarchical individual rules, it is unlikely for them to do better than the group can do looking after itself. Essentially, it’s an allegory for the transition from divine rule to democracy. In the future, every pony will have the power of the rulers, and the world they make will be very different. However, there’s still a place for Twilight and Luna to share their expertise.
So that was the primary theme of tPoE. The side characters played into this to a greater and lesser extent. Rainbow Dash and her friends were a brief exploration of rule by sheer force of will, almost like a cult. Dash pulls the others along with her driven personality until they can hardly even imagine going against her. Even by the end they’re still following her, though she herself has lightened up somewhat and is not in as dangerous a state.
I hope this essay was an illuminating look into what I was trying to convey by writing tPoE. If you have any thoughts on themes or meanings, I would love to hear them.
Did not read past page_break because spoilers... but must copy-paste one of my standard nitpicks:
"Death of the Author" refers to the claim that there is no such thing as an author, because no stories are original. (It's just a variation on Nietzsche's "Death of God", because to a post-modernist or medieval scholar, only God can be an author, because original material can come only from God.)
"The Intentional Fallacy" refers to the claim that a story might not be what its author intended it to be.
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I wouldn't claim to be an expert on literary criticism by any stretch of the imagination, but the Wikipedia page on The Death of the Author seems to suggest that it is from a 1967 essay that argued "that writing and creator are unrelated." I was simply trying to make the point that my own interpretation of my story shouldn't preclude other interpretations, which appears to be what that was saying.
Link to the wiki article
From what I can tell "The Intentional Fallacy" is a precursor of "death of an author", not a totally separate concept.
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Well, I have read both those essays more than once, and my opinion is that they are actually unrelated. The fundamental idea behind "death of the author" isn't about interpretation. It says that writing and creating are unrelated because it presumes the medieval theory of meaning, which is that the meaning of a work is merely the sum of all of the meanings of its parts. So, for instance, all MLP stories have the same meaning because they all use the same characters and locations.
This derives from Plato's theory of meaning, which is that only Forms have meanings. This means, in our terms, that only nouns (or things that Plato can reify into nouns) have meaning. Actions, events as we understand them--these are meaningless; they must be abstracted in a way that strips away their arguments to have meaning. A story in which Jack loves Jill is composed merely of the Form of Jack (which Plato was terribly confused about, since Forms were collections of things with the same name, yet Plato noted that different people with the same name might not be similar), the Form of Jill, and the Form of Love (which has been converted from a verb to a noun, which takes no arguments--it isn't possible to say Jack loves Jill with Plato's concept of "love"). There's no notion of grammar or structure. A story about Jill loving Jack has exactly the same meaning in Plato's theory, because there is no structure or order to the story components; each Form present in the story merely adds its individual meaning to the story.
So, Death of the Author doesn't say anything about author interpretation; it says there is no such thing as an author. All stories are merely permutations of earlier stories, and contain no original content, because the only things that are original are the original Forms, which existed for all eternity, maybe. (Plato waffles on this sometimes.)
(Caveat here being that DotA, like all post-modern essays, spends most of its words meandering about irrelevancies or circling around the topic it means to get to, so I won't swear that it doesn't talk about interpretation.)
I'm pedantic about this because it's a really important point. People keep lending respectability to "Death of the Author"--which is a really stupid and damaging theory--by confusing it with the intentional fallacy.