//------------------------------//
// Part 2 - Shim-Curious 
// Story: Heroes Never Die 
// by Shimmerist Ari 
//------------------------------//

A>Listen! I’m not a Shimmerist. I’m not even Christian. I’m in favor of legalizing consensual transformation only and don’t support forced transformation or agree with what Sunset Shimmer did! Sunset Shimmer was a criminal and I don’t like her on any level. I really had no idea those things were dog whistles, I just picked them up from ponies I know online.

Okay! Maybe… that would be enough?

Who was Ari kidding, of course it wouldn’t!

But before that, Spring Breeze had some explaining to do!

A>How are you a Shimmerist?

SB<Well I’m a social Shimmerist. There's actually a lot of differnt types. There's social Shimmerists, techno-Shimmerists, Eco-Shimmerists, seperatist Shimmerists, Christian Shimmerists...

Ari thought it was just the one thing. She never heard of any of those before.

A>What the hell is a social Shimmerist?!

SB<Well if you plotted all the Shimmerists on a political compass, we’d be on the far bottom left. Our main thing is promoting communal living. Everyone says humans can’t do it. They’ve been saying that for years. But we say ponies make it possible. That’s one of our slogans.

SB<Also CET.

A>A left-wing Shimmerist? Shimmerism is a sect of Christianity! And it’s supposed to be a hard right, ethnocentric ideology.

SB<No, no. Even those ponies down south, the Christina Shimmerists we call them, are left-wing compared to the Democrats. All Shimmerists are left. We’re just the most left. Also anarchy.

SB<Also, social Shimmerism has nothing to do with religion. I guess we’re secular, but you can be whatever.

Ari’s head spun. This was going against everything she’d built up in her mind. But she couldn’t exactly tell Spring Breeze she was wrong. Spring herself was one of the most hardcore socialist Ari had ever met.

A>Don’t Shimmerists want to do FT? Like, make everyone a pony?

Ari had no better language than what the Shimmerists gave her.

SB<It’s more like I’m confident most people would eventually choose to be ponies if given a choice. 97% of those who transformed prefer being a pony. So there’s a pretty good chance any random person on the street would prefer it too. If given the chance.

SB<Again, even the Christian Shimmerists down south will say the same thing. None of us want FT.

SB<I mean, there are FT Shimmerists, but there are very few of them and we want to ostracize that faction.

Assuming 97% of ponies preferring to stay that way probably didn’t equate to 97% of the population eventually deciding to become ponies. Even still, Ari did have to admit it was a damning number. And she herself badly wanted to be a pony for so many reasons.

A>If you’re so into consent why would you take up the mantle of the person who did the most forced transformations ever?

SB<They’re going to call us Shimmerists for wanting to legalize ponification. So our only choice is to try and own the label. We appropriated Sunset Shimmer as an icon or rebellion. A rejection of the current system. You know?

A>No! I don’t know. That’s a terrible idea. You should name yourselves something else.

SB<Well go ahead. Tell them you’re not a Shimmerist, you just want CET. Let me know how well that works out.

Ari didn’t like the fact that she might just be right one bit. She went back to check on her Twitter account, to the post where she assured everyone she wasn’t a Shimmerist.

<”I don’t agree with what Sunset Shimmer did, but let’s keep ponifying people and see what happens.” T. Literally every Shimmerist people.

<If you’re not a Shimmerist, why are you hanging out with Shimmerists? Half the ponies you follow are Shimmerists.

<Every Shimmerist does the ‘I don’t approve of Sunset’ line.

The hell? Saying you don’t approve of Sunset Shimmer’s action was a Shimmerist thing? Then what did non-Shimmerists do?!

Spring Breeze certainly had a point. Maybe Ari just hadn’t gone hard enough.

A>Okay! Fuck Sunset Shimmer! I’m glad she’s dead! I hope she's in Hell because that's what she deserves. Are you happy?

<That’s what a Shimmerist would say.

<Look, do you support using her evil virus or not? If you do, you’re a Shimmerist.

Fuck!

Ari went crawling back to Spring Breeze.

A>Okay, I see what you meant. But I’m getting canceled over here! You're the one who roped me into this! Why didn't you mention this outright?!

This never came up in Spring Breeze's streams... but she was pretty a-political there.

SB<Sorry. I honestly thought you were a Shimmerist this whole time too. How are you not a Shimmerist? You just agree with me on everything.

Did she? She did. But… there had to be something that made Ari not a Shimmerists. She saw a random comment that gave her the idea.

<Ask yourself this: do you think every human would be better off as a pony?

That was it! Ari messaged Spring Breeze again.

A>I think I’d be better off as a pony, but not every human would!

SB<What percent do you think would?

A>I have no idea.

SB<Right. Which is why FT should be illegal and we should pass a morphological bill of rights. Right? The thing the SSP is trying to do?

SSP? Ari vowed to never not look up an acronym again after today. A quick search and she found that was the Social Shimmerist Party. The political party Spring mentioned previously.

A>Do you think every human would be better as a pony?

SB<I dunno about all of them. Probably the vast majority.

SB<Here’s an analogy we like to use. Most smokers would be better off if they quit, right? That doesn’t mean we want to force them to quit or feel like we have the right to do it. But we do have the right to tell them why quitting might be a good idea.

SB<Now imagine it quitting smoking was illegal and it matches up.

When she put it like that, it did sound kind of reasonable. People were generally okay with proselytizing religion and anti-smoking. Was doing the same for ponification different on a moral level? Not that Ari like religious proselytization to begin with.

It was hard to say…

Ari wanted to be a pony, so it had to be some percent of the population that would be better that way. Saying it was zero was just as ridiculous as saying it was one hundred percent. She really didn’t have much of an argument against Spring Breeze other than that it felt like ‘the vast majority’ was too high.

A>Neither of us has any way to quantify this. The humans who want to be ponies are the ones who’d be better off that way.

SB<Yes.

Ari was running out of ammo here!

A>Well I’m not a Shimmerist because I don’t think it’s ‘the vast majority’.

SB<Okay. I’m not forcing anypony to be anything.

Well at least that was one pony who believed Ari. For some reason, Ari felt like she took an L on her argument with Spring Breeze, though.

She checked Twitter again.

<Your hand looks like it was generated by one of those art AIs.

Oh no!

That last comment wasn’t from a pony! It wasn’t anyone who followed her either! It was happening!

Ari shouldn’t have posted that one picture showing her right hand! What if she got doxed?! What if she got fired for this?!

“It’s okay,” Ari assured herself. “It’s just one person being an asshole! That doesn’t mean this will go viral or anything.”

Ari rocked back and forth on her chair. Normally, when she was upset, she went running to her online pony pals. But they were the source of her problems right now! What could Ari even do?!

After resisting for all of five minutes, she went crawling back to Spring yet again.

A>Why does Twitter suck so much?

SB<Do you want an actual answer?

A>No. I want to feel better.

SB<Well the good news is that we’re working on an alternative, friendo! It’s called Whisper 3. It’ll be a more pony-centric social media app. Promote less drama, and focus on community building. It’ll probably be great.

A>That sounds wonderful, but drama is what makes money.

SB<For humans! It might be different for ponies! We’ll see. I can probably get you a beta invite.

“Sounds a little too good to be true. But so does magic,” Ari muttered.

A>I just can’t get over you being a Shimmerist.

SB<Why not read the SSP’s official stances? Surely that’s not too much. You don’t want to be like those mean humans on Twitter who just dismiss everything out of hand, do you?

SB<Those other humans, I mean.

“Don’t remind me…”

Ari sighed. Maybe she should at least look into it.









Spring Breeze sent Ari a host of links. Reading material. Videos. She couldn’t help but feel as though she’d been passed a cup of Kool-Aid.

It was something Ari wouldn’t have taken seriously… but Spring was right. The media spread lies about partials so why not about Shimmerism too? Spring really did seem to be all about social progress. And she never really mistreated Ari.

In the end, she decided to look a the official SSP website, at the least.

They seemed to assume most people visiting this place would be ponies. The first and most prominent message, right under the tabs categorizing their policies, was urging pony communities to seize control of the local government and to contact the SSP for support in that endeavor.

It was only under that where you saw their mission statement talking about extolling the virtue of community, bringing America out of its hyper-capital-focused phase, ponies are Americans too, they’re super pro-consent when it comes to transformation…

Nothing contradicting what Spring said.

Under that, they had a list of accomplishments. A fair amount considering the SSP had existed for a month tops. They controlled a huge number of local governments and about ten state representatives, but nothing higher than that yet.

They also managed to push for prison reform in several states that made it so jailed ponies had to be kept with at least one other pony. Apparently, isolating a single pony was akin to solitary confinement.

Aris supposed she agreed with the one reform they claimed to have helped push in the past week. But she really didn’t care about having more pony politicians. Not unless they’d actually change stuff.

So she went into the tabs explaining their various political views. The Social Shimmerist Party had a long, long list of reforms they eventually wanted to pass. It really would be a radical shift if even a quarter of this stuff happened.

Ranked choice voting. Guaranteed universal food security. UBI. A largely Georgist tax policy. 4-day work week. Public transport. A heavy focus on reducing air and noise pollution. Restoring the rights of unions. Enforcing anti-trust laws. Break up monopsonies. Banning lobbying.

It was everything Ari would do with infinite power. And more even.

Universal food security would have been some insane fever dream just earlier this year. Especially in America. But it was seriously possible now… wasn’t it? ‘Ponies make it possible’ was one of their slogans. It made Ari wonder if all the other stuff would be worth it too.

Even just one item on the list seemed more than the current system would ever grant them. Just one or two of these would easily justify a Shimmerist takeover.

Or course, they had more pony-centric goals that Ari was more ambivalent towards.

Deregulation on magic. Increased rights and autonomy for pony communities. Promoting ponies in politics. Protecting against abusive rehumanizers.

Ari couldn’t say she was against any of that. She knew a lot of pegasi were suffering from not being allowed to fly in certain cities, for example. And they were vastly underrepresented in the government. So…

That last one, however, led to the main topic of contention. Transformation.

Ari was 100% on board with the concept of CET. If someone wanted to transform then they should be able to! Maybe the FDA could regulate the safety of transformations, but they didn’t have the right to tell someone like Ari ‘No, only do the transformation we want’.

But so often the Shimmerists were portrayed as wanting… well FT. Ari had no better language to describe it. The mainstream never even made a distinction between forced and consensual transformations. It was all the same to them.

Ari clicked on the prominent ‘Morphological Freedom’ tab.

The social Shimmerist party does not support forced transformation of any kind, including forced transformation into ponies. On the contrary, we are the leading proponents of morphological freedom. We are the first and so far only organization in America to codify the protection of your right to choose or decline transformation.

It went on to state many of the same truths Spring Breeze had given. The lack of FT being illegal. The importance of the government not being allowed to coerce you into consenting to transformation.

They promised support for ponies who encountered abusive rehumanizers…

And then it went into ‘partial rights’.

“What the hell are partial rights? Partial free speech?”

Ari looked at the strand of hair that should have been green.

“Oh right. Partial rights. Me rights.” Ari leaned back in her chair. “What rights do I want again? The right to hair.”

Ari swung back forward, in front of her keyboard. She had an idea! To test if these ponies were just all talk with their ideals and stuff.

She sent Spring Breeze a line.

A>Hey, Spring! I’m reading the SSP stuff. It says you fight for partials?

SB<Yes! Partials face all kinds of discrimination! You know, the government refuses to even recognize stage three partials as disabled right now? That’s one of our big goals.

A>Well I have a partial rights problem. At work, they’re forcing me to dye my hair, so I look ‘normal’.

SB<Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?!

Because she was embarrassed…

SB<They can’t do that! I’m going to let the SSP know about this right away! We’re looking for fights like this right now. We won’t let you down.

“Sure.” Ari smiled and leaned back into her chair. “I’m not going to get my hopes up in the meantime.”

At least she’d know if ponies really were as competent as they made themselves seem soon enough.