[Timescales] Thematic Commentary · 1:54am Dec 17th, 2020
List of Themes
- Consciousness and Romance as Parasite
- Isostatic Rebound
- Prions
- Stoicism
- The Paleontologists
- Teleology
- Archaeological Erasure
Preamble
Highly recommending you read the story first since that is what all these words are about.
I hope this comes off less as intellectual masturbation and more as an enhancement of the experience for the rare reader to stumble upon a fic I put a lot of thought into and hoped would get a better response.
Consciousness and Romance as Parasite
The characters with agency in Neurochemical are not the thinking beings, Starlight Glimmer and Maud Pie. The ones that really drive the action are the components of Starlight’s brain that do not think: the visual cortex that processes an image of danger, and the autopilot that holds the key to the procedural memory of teleportation. It was their actions or inability to complete their actions that determined the difference between one timeline and the other.
However, it is the lazy, parasitic dreams of the consciousness that drive the meaning of the story. The romance is a parasite on the plot, driving none of the actual events, which are these:
In Neurochemical, a slight difference in processing speed of a part of her brain not under her control causes a timeline to split into one where Starlight Glimmer survived a rockfall, and the other where she did not.
In Biographical, a superintelligence named Princess Twilight Sparkle (either Herself a deity or a “superintelligent” in the sense of being the leader of an entire civilization’s scientific and intelligence efforts) uses Her subject Starlight Glimmer as a mere tool to access an otherwise inaccessible Oracle to get an answer to a question so complicated even its statement is inexplicable to said tool.
In Geologic, the forces of time and entropy steadily and irreversibly destroy the last remaining traces of the life of Starlight Glimmer. First, her actual life. Then, the memories of her. Then, the last record of her. Then, the stone cast the bones of her body left behind. Then, the last creature to ever be affected by the image of the stone cast the bones of her body left behind. Then, the image of that stone cast itself, completing the process.
In each of these, instead of ending where the events end, we get this:
The last part of Neurochemical is saying that the greatest loss in the death of Starlight Glimmer in the rockfall is what Starlight Glimmer saw in Maud Pie.
The last part of Biographical is taking the actual, driving force of the events (the machinations of Princess Twilight Sparkle) and using Starlight’s reactions to them to merely illustrate what was gained from the happy years shared by Starlight Glimmer and Maud Pie.
The last part of Geologic bends the flow of time itself to take us back to the continuing life of Grasping Hand, and ends with the meaning she got from the love between Starlight Glimmer and Maud Pie.
Isostatic Rebound
In Biographical, I’m just inordinately proud of using isostatic rebound as a metaphor for the pain that comes in proportion to the depth of the connection one had with a lost loved one, that can even outlast the length of time said loved one was in one’s life. Also, I find the mental image of Maud miming the process for Starlight super adorable.
Prions
This one was a bit contrived. In order to make things work, I needed a disease that has an incubation time of years, during which no symptoms are detectable and everything feels fine, until suddenly it does not and it kills you horribly with no possible cure. It’s a fortunate coïncidence that such a disease exists in real life, speaking as a writer. Speaking as someone who lives in real life, it is very, very frightening.
That one gets it through ingestion was an even better fit, since I could connect it to Maud’s very weird habit of eating rocks. Okay, to spell it out completely and ruin everything: Maud has exactly three moments of showing emotion during the reveal. The second is her sorrow at realizing the pain her death will cause her family. The third is making her final, pleading case to Starlight to choose happiness for the first time in her life.
The first is the moment when she learns it was eating rocks, a thing that set her apart and made her “different than other ponies”, a thing that she managed to make a source of pride against the current even within her own field of rocktology, was the thing that killed her. She has to deflect it into humor because otherwise it would be a painful and cruel irony.
Stoicism
This really could not have worked with anypony besides Maud Pie in her role, with the exception of perhaps Pinkie Pie, given a certain interpretation of her character (which might rope in what my headcanon is for the basis of yak philosophy). The focus would have been too much on the shock, loss, and betrayal.
But it makes sense for Maud. She grew up in a country ruled by an immortal Goddess with the power to raise the sun. Her sister and her friends fight resurrected Gods and ancient evils on a regular basis. She is an earth pony in a world of unicorns and pegasi, whose magic powers are limited to walking around and picking things up with her teeth. Unlike most ponies, she is aware of this imbalance.
Yet her specialty is rocktology. The study of objects so powerful they can overcome the magical power of all of Equestria. Of processes so long that they will outlast the pony species and magic itself. Maybe this is what helps her keep perspective so well.
But stoics are not robots. As mentioned previously, she expresses emotion when pleading with Starlight. That is because she is knowingly engaging in a rational form of self-deception. She can overlook the betrayal and all the evils Starlight has done in her past because she has to. She no longer has a lifetime to process and get through it. Thankfully, it works out for her, and she does manage to maximize the happiness of her last years of life.
The Paleontologists
This is what I call the species in Geologic in my head, since paleontology is their only connection to the magical world of ponies that we care about.
Their specific anatomical configuration is not meant to connect to any deeper themes. The fact that their origin was a joke is meant to be thematic; the details are actually meant to be ironic allusions and jokes since, again, their origin was a joke! So if you see any deeper themes there please let me know, since I would be very interested in learning something new about what I wrote.
The extreme sexual dimorphism of the Paleontologists is intended to be interpreted on a spectrum. On one end is where males are sapient and have a society and culture of their own, but as Moving Finger points out, differences in brain function wide enough could make true communication impossible. The other end is where males are not sapient, making them more like pets that impregnate you, underlining the point that high- and low-dimorphism species would find each other’s sexual moralities disturbing.
(Judging from the society depicted in canon, ponies are, if anything, more low-dimorphism than humans are, a concept I’ve touched on in other stories. A “more human sexual morality than what humans actually have” is the driving thesis for some of my other stuff.)
Teleology
We humans have developed a lot of unfortunate thought patterns brought on by us being alone in the universe. When we look into the earth, we see billions of years of species and not one with signs of a technological civilization. When we look out into space, we don’t see any evidence of radio transmissions or stellar engineering giving evidence for intelligent life. This might easily make us think that the universe’s purpose is to be for us, that we are the point.
It is not the egocentrism that is the delusion. It is thinking that the universe has a purpose at all.
But what psychoses would have happened to us had we looked into the earth and found a stratum of not one, not two, but dozens of species that laid down railroads and blew glass and created pottery? All coëxisting until in what seems to be a single instant in the geologic timescale, they all die out?
(Why did they die out? Well, for some reason, magic doesn’t seem to exist in the time of the Paleontologists, since they don’t interpret the third pair of limbs of the pegasa as wings, and think ponies eating rocks with calcium-based teeth is impossible, due to secular physics. When did it stop existing? Why?)
I don’t know what would have happened because I don’t live in such a species. But the Paleontologists do. Thankfully, the fact that their fossil record stops so mysteriously and their genetic variance with the rest of the planet’s species is just too wide to make sense allowed them to create their own delusions of a creator God and a higher purpose to deal with it.
Archaeological Erasure
A bit vague because it’s really all the Erasures: Queer, Trans, Lesbian, Female…
A tomb is unearthed. A skeleton is surrounded by grave goods one would associate with a warrior: weapons, shields, and armor. But the skeleton’s pelvic width places it solidly in the middle of the distribution curve for female adults.
What is going on? Did female warriors exist in this society? Did a wife get buried with her husband’s grave goods? Was the person female-assigned at birth, but took a male role in society? A male role and identity?
Imagine the society the archaeologist lives in. The mindset they possess. How would that affect which of these questions would have even been considered? Will questions not even considered here be added to this list in the future?
(Imagine the exact same situation as above, but the skeleton's pelvic width places it solidly in the middle of the distribution curve for male adults. How do you interpret this? Are you sure?)
This is us analyzing the remains of someone of the same species as us, of a culture with enough continuity with ours that we can recognize weapons, shields, and armor and the associations they might have had, recently enough gone that said artifacts still are intact and identifiable. Yet already their voice is lost on something so basic.
What would be lost over a gap of millions of years?
The anxiety I’ve seen expressed by some trans people about possible future archaeological misgendering of their remains informed the brief seguë into Maud’s ambiguous parameters, though fortunately her partial or fully estrogen-driven puberty ended up sparing her from it, if she cared about such things (which she would not based on her other comments, but it’s still nice it didn’t happen).
It also had to happen that way, because I wanted the poignant touch of the relationship between Maud and Starlight slipping by the Paleontologists but recognized by a single one in particular.
However, I did not want the slipping by to stem from the same source as it did in humans, which is why I made the Paleontologists have a very different concept of gender and sexuality to our own that would still lead to lesbian erasure but from a different direction. This is what drove their extreme sexual dimorphism.
But yes, the thesis of all this is this: The love between Maud Pie and Starlight Glimmer is so strong that it reaches across the eons to move a creature that understands and appreciates all of its beauty and rightness even though that understanding should be impossible due to the gap that exists between two species separated by millions of years, with no common evolutionary ancestor, with no common sexual morality system.
Now that is shipping.
That is shipping.
That is shipping... with science!
That is shipping on a nigh-unfathomable level.
Imagine when someone finds a fossil of pegasus feather imprints and social media blows up with people complaining that feathered pegasa look stupid.
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That is exactly what I imagine happening! It strengthens the side of those who argue the limbs were ornamental, since feathers imply plumage. The big issue here, though, is trying to explain just how a tetrapod-descended mammal gained a third pair of limbs.
"for the rare reader to stumble upon a fic I put a lot of thought into and hoped would get a better response"
Hm. If you like, I could mention it in a blog post? Not like I have all that many followers, though.
(Sorry it hasn't gotten more of a response yet, though, yeah.)
"a superintelligence named Princess Twilight Sparkle (either Herself a deity or a “superintelligent” in the sense of being the leader of an entire civilization’s scientific and intelligence efforts) uses Her subject Starlight Glimmer as a mere tool to access an otherwise inaccessible Oracle to get an answer to a question so complicated even its statement is inexplicable to said tool."
Yeah, I still wonder what that was, why the Oracle was otherwise inaccessible... etc. Lot more potential stories here. :D
(But then, is that not always the case, if nothing else if one pulls the view back far enough?)
I'm afraid I don't think I understand how consciousness and romance are acting as parasites in the particular context you lay out here, though.
(...As an aside, I do wonder (spoilers for some of Peter Watts's work) what the scrambler-equivalents in one of the more friendship-is-magic Equestria's universes would be like. After all, in the world of Blindsight and Echopraxia, consciousness may be a local maxima at best, but in some Equestria's it'd be needed for qualia and relationships that are themselves keys to things like firing laser beams from one's head, or flight without biology otherwise permitting it, or durability beyond what one's biology would otherwise allow... a very significant evolutionary advantage, in other words. So what, in that system of physics, are creatures discarding the unnecessary bits (assuming that can be done) and optimizing hard for the rest, like?
(Though I think I may have mentioned something like that in your comments before.))
"Also, I find the mental image of Maud miming the process for Starlight super adorable."
:)
(Though I'm not sure how much I got the metaphor there, sorry. Missing metaphors is not unknown for me, though.)
"Now that is shipping."
:D
And thank you indeed for the commentary! There were a number of things I hadn't noticed in or thought of about the story (most of which I didn't comment on here, partly for time and partly because much of it would likely have been just repeated variation of "Oh, I didn't think of/notice that; thanks".), though I'm not that surprised that I missed some layers of meaning.
But now I'm a bit less unaware, on that and some related things. :)
Truer words have never been spoken, so succinctly. Great commentary.