//------------------------------// // ACK // Story: Twilight Sparkle & the Idea Machine // by darf //------------------------------// "Read me back what we've got so far," Twilight said, exasperated. That's what we're doing now? We're just putting how ponies feel in a single word? This is outrageous, they said, outraged. "Okay," Lyra said. Her voice was shaking. She reached towards the pile of papers and took the one from the top. "'Mcguffin'," Lyra read, hesitantly. She closed her eyes tightly and shook her head. "And we're... we're still reasonably sure that's not a type of breakfast?" Lyra shook her head again. 'No', she mouthed. Do ponies have lips? "Okay. Just put that one aside for a sec. Okay?" We've been putting all of them aside for a sec, she said. Go away please. Current music... "Someone please stop it before it kills again." "What?" Twilight snapped up from the piece of paper she was reading. It said "'You are currently reading a piece of paper'." Punctuation. Period. Letter. Letter. Word. Sentence. Paragraph break. Lyra shook her head. "What does the next one say?" Twilight asked. "'Copyright law mandates that 70 years after the creation of an idea, it is returned to the public domain—paraphrased'1," Lyra read. "I think some of that was in Equestrian." "It wasn't written by anypony who understands what they're talking about in a technical or legal sense, that's for sure." "So do we care about it?" Lyra held the piece of paper above the garbage can. "It's trying to tell us something. Put it in the 'translate again' pile." Lyra sighed and threw the piece of paper over her back, where it landed in a giant stack now bigger than the machine that had generated it. Space loomed to accommodate the necessary ambiance and mood lighting. The thing that went 'parp' went 'parp'. Current music... "I'm going to stop it every time it does that. We are not in a multimedia storytelling format. We're not. We're not. We are not. We are ponies in a fictive narrative about the nature of reality." "So why so far have we just been sitting in your basement reading weird pieces of paper and arguing about them like second-year English majors?" Lyra asked. "Because we're trying to prove a point." "We're probably doing a very bad job. If I was reading what we were saying, I'd be pretty unconvinced." "What exactly is it you'd be unconvinced of?" Twilight asked. "Well... that it was a good idea to pay money for this story, for one thing." "Lyra!" "Come on. We have to address this issue. The only time words come out is when somepony is paying for them. That's not art." "There's somepony sitting in a room with their hooves at a real, physical typewriter, somehow also watching what we're doing and recording every bit of it as accurately as possible." "So why do they keep butting in with bits that aren't related to us at all, or that mostly just seem like excuses to masturbate and fill up word count?" "Do you have any idea how much practice it took to translate that sentence into text without adding all the extra stuff? The pony watching us is listening just to our voices, even though it keeps trying to butt in with 'Current music'... I feel like that one might be important, Lyra." "Stop using my name. I'm trying to confuse it and you're not letting me get away with it. Uh. Lyra." Twilight sighed, and looked obliquely at a bowl of oranges sitting on the table next to her. It reminded her of some song lyrics she had eaten for breakfast once. Spent the whole morning bridging in a minor key. Let's get to the heart of the matter. "What is the point of a story, Twilight?" Lyra asked. "You can't just make your characters say exactly what you would say," Twilight said. "I'd like to see you do any different," Lyra said. "It's literally impossible to say something without imaginging yourself saying it first." "No it isn't. Listen." Lyra listened. There was no music. Mostly the hum of the machine they'd built up over the last twelve hours. Scraps of paper mingling with each other. If, she was very careful, breathing, a soft, little sound. And... a clock? It was definitely a clock. Hmm. "Can you please stop assuming you always have to do the best you've ever done?" Twilight asked. She struggled for an adverb, but came up short. It was okay to say things like that sometimes. Don't you dare, she thought. "I'm here on loan from a temp agency. We haven't addressed how much I'm getting paid, or what my physical worth is, or if I'm even trained for the job... frankly, I think I was a self-insert to begin with." "You can't be a self-insert, because Twilight Sparkle, aka me, is clearly the stand-in self-insert for everypony in existence who watches the show and assumes they're the main character of their own life. Everypony has to give up their single-minded pursuit of what supposedly makes them happy away from everypony else and instead focus on the fact that being with other ponies is what makes them a pony in the first place, and if they run away and hide in their rooms and do nothing but write stories or watch movies or watch World War II educational documentaries, holy shit, can you believe I completely forgot what the end of my giant sentence was going to be? Oh, right. And as a pony who has been medically identified as on the autism spectrum and still doesn't know the correct or inoffensive way to say that and as somepony who has seen the ravenous thirst of another community to label their characters as on the spectrum understands the disquieting nature of labeling fictive beings with medical diagnoses in order to foster a parasocial sense of understanding and relationship, still feels there is a metaphor somewhere in all of this about the single-mindedness of that particular diagnoses, and the way that Twilight's obsessive, introverted personality seems sculpted specifically to cater to a certain demographic, and how Touhou as a parallel set in a universe entirely populated by kawaii female characters establishes the precedent that a cast of female characters can be adored or even worshiped by a fan-base not in its normally telegraphed demographic. Gasp." Twilight took an overarchingly important and pivotally paragraph breaking pause to breathe. Current— "Stop! Telling them the song you're listening to won't accomplish anything! It's dead air! It's subjective! It's a radio filler! It's five minutes of someone's life they won't remember ever again! It's nothing of importance to anypony whose priorities are grounded in reality and commerce and having enough food to eat for next month that doesn't come printed on a compact disc or Amazon MP3 code." You're really mixing your metaphors here. And we keep saying 'pony'... This has divorced reality a long time ago. Hold please. No, literally leave this part blank. Hold please.