TSC: After Vision (Contains Spoilers for the latest chapter) · 6:58pm Nov 20th, 2018
So the newest chapter of The Sweetie Chronicles is a bit of a break from the regular formula, and I can see how some readers might find themselves disappointed in Sweetie's actions.
There are a lot of things I considered when writing this chapter, and admitting that my heroine could fail was really, really tough, but necessary.
What is a hero? Is it a character that just breezes through everything? Or raises to every challenge with perfect results, or almost perfect? Someone that will always win, in the end?
Sweetie was a filly, just turning into a teen when TSC started. A bit older than in the show at the time, and has been out there for years. This is not the first time that she's been selfish—in The Immortal Game she was too, and also there there was some backlash against what she had done.
She's a teenager at that point, but more importantly, someone who was denied her happiness, her home, her connections… and felt betrayed. So she lashed out and said things that really hurt the local Rarity.
Was it fair? Of course not. What happened was a result of Esteem's manipulations, after all. But Sweetie wasn't perfect at the beginning of the story, she wasn't perfect at that point of the story, and she isn't perfect now either.
When I stopped to consider where I would take TSC going forward, I realized I had to re-evaluate the character's psychology. Sweetie was never intended to be a perfect hero that breezes through worlds, or suffers a trauma only to forget about it by the next chapter like some sort of 80s cartoon.
On top of that, I owe it to myself and the readers and authors that have worked with me to not make this a power-trip fic. This is not a story about a character that turns into a goddess of awesome and prances through life like nothing is wrong.
In part, due to how the story was being written, and how I had half-finished chapters that were never completed, and I was waiting on authors to be available, while available authors waited on me in turn to just write the story, I managed to loop Sweetie into a sort of stagnation. I was afraid of moving forward, because hey, what if X author comes back?
A character that never changes is not an interesting character.
So we come to Vision, after Sweetie has just encountered a Twilight Fragment that literally forces her to accept that she's not in control of everything. That she can't save everyone. That she can't possibly win them all. She comes back from her first attempt at sexual exploration (which didn't get anywhere) where she saw her other self get lost in a life that was just about using her body as some sort of rebellion against the government, life, and self-identity. Where her sister never achieved happiness.
Sweetie, for all her strengths, is not perfect.
Vision is a place that's subversive and plays to pony's flaws. It ensnares them, using their desires and fears. Sweetie had no stability, but also didn't know how long her stays would be. It was something she craved… so it gave it to her. She wished for love, companionship and a sense of belonging… so she got it. She wished for family, to make a life of her own… so she got that too. But it wasn't free.
When we start the story again, we see what happened to her. As her message to herself is: Leave. Leave now. Don't stay. Don't touch. Don't do anything. Just go because this place destroyed you once already.
She's vulnerable and weak from being reborn. She doesn't remember what happened, but she understands what she did to herself, just not why. She latches to the only thing that might help: finding that happy pony in the pictures. The one that would know.
And she learns just how bad she messed up, until she's presented with a choice: stay forever or carry on and leave behind this whole thing. (Or attempt to.)
It's hard when the hero does something that is not heroic. Would she had stayed if she had known about Distant Shores? Yes. But she didn't.
She went with the information she had, with what she had learned about this corrupt place and chose between finding somepony she had hurt terribly, or just going away.
This is a turning point for Sweetie, of course. This is a real consequence of her own actions and decisions. She wasn't forced into this, and now, she's either going to start to take control of her life for real, or she's going to break.
The ending hasn't changed, just how we're getting there.
This is her final visit to Fallout: Equestria, as was always intended. And it was always intended to be Kkat's Fallout.
Those of you familiar with the philosophy of the characters might see where we're going with this, just a little. It's a loop that needs closing, and it's the last stop before her return to Mendacity and then moving on.
But Sweetie is not an innocent filly outside of her comfort zone. She has many experiences that have shaped and will continue to shape who she is—it's not going to be a dark fic. There's plenty of good stuff coming in the future. Stories that make you laugh, rather than despair. But she's a growing character, and like her, the story will continue growing.
Darnit. Now I'm going to have to write a story where Sweetie Belle climbs her wardrobe and screams when she sees a spider in her room. And when Rarity goes to see what is going on, she winds up on top of the wardrobe too. And Twilight later. And Spike. And then Applejack...
One panicked shifting of wings, horns, and hooves later, Applejack had somehow managed to wedge herself into the narrow space between the huddled horned mass of mares on the wardrobe and the ceiling. There was a sullen silence, followed by the farmer's quiet, "Don't nopony say nuttin. Yes, we gots spiders out at the farm, but they's smaller than that. And not so... creepy."
"And hairy," agreed Spike, who had wrapped himself all the way around Twilight's horn and was threatening the stability of their formation by his weight hanging over the floor below.
"My heroes," said Rarity with a sigh. "I suppose we can wait until Fluttershy shows up."
You: Please understand why I did what I did with her.
Me: That’s- that’s great, I just gotta read all the fanfics she jumps through still. I’m uh, I’m working through the sequel of The Best Night Ever still, just gimme a second, just uh-
So this is where the "tell them it's like a mirror" bit comes in... will be interesting.
This blog post helped me make some peace with the last chapter. I was a bit confused about what happened and where you were going, but reading this makes more sense- we don't need to see Sweetie's actions that led to the downward spiral that led to her first step, the results are already on display, and now she's got to grow up and move on.
Wherever that is, I look forward to seeing it.
"Would she had stayed if she had known about Distant Shores? Yes. But she didn't."
...Hm. Did pre-regeneration Sweetie somehow lock the diary away to stop post-regeneration Sweetie from accessing it while still in Vision?
Did you see my comment on the chapter, by the way? No problem if you just haven't gotten to it yet, but I don't want it to be missed; in addition to some typo-spotting, I've some questions in it.
4970865 I'll touch on them later, but one thing that a lot of people seem to get wrong is that Sweetie has a normal body. She doesn't. She still has her Fae body. The confusion came from Somber writing a line in the Project Horizons chapter which I think I already removed.
Well, I suppose this answers enough of my questions. Not all of them, but I don't need them all. Now I at least understand a little why, and I still trust you to do what needs doing for the story to work.
Doesn't change the fact that that chapter scooped out my insides and left them in a pile a little to my left, though.
Also, it's weird to remember that we still need to get back to Mendacity, which has really been screwing with Sweetie's travels.
Honestly, this is something I might have expected to come up in Blueblood's time loop. That paradigm has a way of dragging out the worst in a person, before they work their way through to the other side. But then I suppose she wasn't the same person then that she is now? Her temptations are different.
There was a danger, a serious danger, of her becoming overly powerful, especially after her ascension to litchdom. By that point she had an immense portfolio of abilities to choose from, a solution to every problem. But as you rightly ascertained, power means nothing if the bearer cannot use it. And vision was/is not a problem that could ever be solved by the application of Power.
And now she is in yet a different paradigm, one that will not be solved by Power any more than Vision. A hostile environment, blasted, toxic, barren. She still needs to eat...
4970877
"I'll touch on them later"
Ah, thanks.
"but one thing that a lot of people seem to get wrong is that Sweetie has a normal body. She doesn't. She still has her Fae body. The confusion came from Somber writing a line in the Project Horizons chapter which I think I already removed."
...Hm. Thanks for the clarification, but this seems to still be in there:
"She stared at her recently truncated limb, now whole. Slowly she turned it over, staring in shock. It felt... normal. Not just gem normal. Normal normal."
Ah, though, looking down a bit further, I don't remember seeing this part before:
"Not a normal body at all! She could feel her glamour spell failing with her emotional state, and risked a look at herself, lifting her hoof up. Her coat was almost a normal, pony coat, but under her glamour, the living rock had mutated... it was less solid, more... crystalline than before... she had been remade, but from the same components, after all."
That's the area you were talking about?
So, her body is now more crystalline, and her glamour is better able to simulate a normal pony's outside?
you ask, "what is a hero?" and I immediately remember what Celica A. Mercury said on the matter.
"No. I don't think that person is merely a hero. That person is incredibly brave because being a "hero" is just about the result. It's just a name people give after something ends to praise them. But someone who is truly brave is different. No matter how painful, no matter how hard things are, they stand up and face that challenge. That's what it means to have true strength."
(Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Spoiler following.)
Reading this cleared up a few things for me. Thank you. However there are still some things I don't understand yet and most important to me is:
what is wrong with her phoenix talisman?
As far as I can tell it is a LOT different from Rampages.
First since Rampage is not just regenerating after death but keeps healing under any circumstances including intoxication with all the drugs. She is not having any longterm effects of drugs because the talisman starts healing her the moment she takes them. Why is Sweeties apparently so different in that aspect?
Second since Rampage keeps her memory through death. (I guess that can be attributed to Sweetie Belle deliberately screwing with her memory in order to move on.)
Third since Rampages only gets her back as a filly after total disintegration. Sweetie became young after drinking acid (and slowly having destroyed the body with drugs). Rampage was fine even after walking through Enervation being practically melted by it. So what gives?
Fourth since Rampage is still as ridiculously strong as she is as an adult when she is a filly so why is Sweetie "vulnerable and weak from being reborn"?
And last but not least since Rampage becomes a filly because that is the age she was when she got the talisman in the first place but Sweetie got hers when she was at least a teenager so shouldn't she regenerate as such?
For most of those I could probably pull an explanation out of my ass if I wanted to, but I'd like to hear from the master himself. (Herself? I dunno. Oo)
Well said. I think a lot of people that read stories like this get a little... Over zealous about how characters "Should be". When in the end, they are who they are, and will do what they do. Saying that a person can or should only act in a certain way based on what they have been shown to do before is so limiting. People make mistakes and strange decisions all the time. That's what makes greatly written characters different from NPCs.
4970980 Sweetie's talisman was sort of the prototype for Rampage's. It also is limited in its functionality due to the world-hopping and different magical fields across the multiverse.
4971026
Thanks for answering.
I am really happy to read you say that. In my eyes it would have been bad if you had said something along the lines of: if Sweetie continues grinding souls, she'll eventually unlock those other abilities too. I don't know, it wouldn't feel right to me.
In other words what Sweetie got was less a regeneration talisman and more a revival talisman? That would clear up most of my questions. Still don't get the age thing though. It feels to me like a rather arbitrary age for her to come back as. Unless it is the age that Twilight (shard) remembers Sweetie Belle as and imprinted that to be her "default" age?
i don't get why many people is taking bad the last chapter... is quite obvious that sweetie has been through a LOT of shit that nopony but perhaps Celestia and Luna has endured... the progression in the character of Sweetie is somewhat reasonable, no one can stand all that stuff and go away untouched, the fact that she remains mostly sane is a feat by itself
I thought this last chapter was brilliant, if a bit confusing at times heh.
Love the most recent chapter, hope the following ones are as good
In a morbid way, the only way she could be selfless was to be selfish. If she had stayed to help others, she's just be hurting them, because the pony apologizing wouldn't have been the pony that hurt them. If she had gone to see Swiftwing, it would only cause harm because it she wasn't the pony that Swiftwing fell in love with. If she found out about her child, that would as a trap for her to not leave. And since that world grants wishes, what would happen if she went back to the starving mare or the pegasus waiter? She may grow attached to them, also acting as a trap.
It seems that she may have had an understanding with Echo. But even then, Echo never reconciled with the mare he knew. And he understood this fact.
Essentially, Vision is a world where the only right option would be the one that gets her out. I noticed that Vision did grant one of this Sweeties Wishes though. She did want to escape that world. When she wished for that, she was taken to where she had the option to leave. And even that wish came with its price, that being the knowledge that she had a foal that she left on it's own (assuming it was still alive).
I never read Vision but I enjoyed this chapter. I am aware of the unknown, I can see why she did what she did, multiple potentials why. I didn't pick up on every detail though. But I knew it was an unknown world to me, so accepted its quirks as unexplained but having reason. Also I readily accept subversions of tropes. Madoka Magica for example. I know the flaw that is 'a hero'.
I think its because I know critical thinking that I didn't have a problem with the breaking of the formula. Can't speak for others though.
Well, I still think that the chapter could have been clearer about Sweetie's thought process, but this clears up all of my major concerns. Now I just have to delete that long confused comment that I was about to post on the main story. Good thing I came here first so I don't feel like an idiot. Can't wait for the next chapter.
Whew, finally caught up on the last couple of chapters after starting to read again and... I like it. I like it so much. Keep up the good work.