On Sea Monsters · 12:25am Jun 28th, 2021
I have nothing irrelevant to ramble about today, except that you should read Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. It's a very informative book, and just as interesting. I honestly don't know how to recommend it highly enough.
But we're not here to talk about perspectives; we're here to talk about issue #98.
Today's moral is that even a wise alicorn with roughly 1112 years of leadership under her belt can get caught up in a familiar pattern of thinking and forget to be open to the possibility that things are not as they initially seemed. First impressions wield a great deal of power, and there is always more work to do on better fighting that power.
I guess really I'm not disappointed that 'Tia rejected 'Shy's assertion that the kraken meant no harm—right though she may have been, I sympathize with that being a difficult shift to make simply based on testimony of general principles—so much as I'm disappointed that she showed no interest in the question of why a kraken was behaving in such an uncharacteristic manner. She knows better than to explain behavior with simplistic labels rather than reasons.
Well, that and the fact that she's believed there was a dangerous sea monster threatening ships for over a millennium and she's never done anything about it. I'm pretty sure she didn't even get that spot marked on naval maps as non-navigable, and she clearly never attempted to keep track of whether that kraken moved on to terrorizing another spot. (Although it's weird that the dangers of the area weren't already known when she was a filly; that whirlpool should appear roughly four times per day as the tide flows in and then out twice every 25 hours, so it shouldn't have taken ponies very long to figure out they shouldn't sail there.)
So apparently Celestia doesn't think two adult alicorns can take a kraken in a fight. I wonder if she's right?
And what exactly did Celestia do to get rid of the whirlpool? She appears to have just enchanted the surface to not swirl, but that's stretching my ability to believe that magic can work that way. Maybe she actually blasted away a bunch of the seafloor to open up the Moskstraumen-esque shallow channel between islands that I assume must be the source of this strong tidal current and its resulting whirlpools. (I can't imagine that she was sailing across the Crystal Sea in a narrow strait, after all.) Or maybe she totally overstepped the boundaries of her retirement and actually messed with the moon itself without so much as a heads-up to the current steward of its movements. Wouldn't that be rude.
