After you add a story to Main, please comment here with:
- a link to the story
- a list of the folders you think it should be added to
- an explanation of why you think it belongs in this group & in those folders

I added Eclipse to Sociology+Politics, because its purpose is to explore the diplomatic and societal ramifications of a highly-advanced non-magical alien species arriving - and in significant numbers - in Equestria.

I added "Awakening" awhile ago, and I think it belongs in the personal life issues folder, because it's all about a pony having a personal transformation on a busted up ship stranded in the middle of nowhere. Self-exploration and the evolution of one's own personal beliefs are major parts of this fic.

I'd like to nominate "The Dragon and the Photograph" for inclusion in "Love, Family, and Other Relationships". I'm not certain this is a sure sell, though.

The story addresses how one deals with unrequited love and death, though I don't know that it presents any novel conclusions (aside from suggesting that we should actually think about these things). But I don't know that I'd have a very easy time picking stories I was sure of outside the areas of ethics, epistemology, and politics.

789377 Bradel, you're a contributor. You can add things directly to sub-folders without nominating them and putting them in Main.

I am experiencing some difficulty adding And I Asked Why to the Ethics folder.

I am also conflicted about how strict our guidelines ought to be. Being special is about cutie marks, destiny, progress, and loss of purpose. It might fit under Identity or Politics. However, its main focus is on Twilight and her rejection, not economic displacement. And the writing is unremarkable — not bad, no, but not exceptional, either. Anyone want to help clarify what we're looking for?

The folder choices look a bit haphazard, but they seem to be working okay. Where would we put actual novels, I wonder? The Stranger in Personal Issues, Siddhartha in Identity, perhaps Grendel in Epistemology? Fake links? April Fools'.

I just recently joined this group and would like to nominate my fanfic, Royal Tears for the "Love, Family, and Other Relationships" folder. It deserves to be in this category because of the tough decisions the characters have to make. The choices presented all lead one character to die, and it is up to the protagonist to decide who, and why they will, while trying to please as many ponies as possible. It is also revolving around a failed love story that happened 1000+ years ago.

834798 I added "And I asked why" to Ethics. Don't know what the problem was.
Destiny progress, purpose: Sounds like personal life issues to me.
WRT quality I'm willing to settle for "not bad". This group distinguishes by serious intent more than by the quality of execution. We can revisit that if we get too much material in a folder. (If a folder has > 12 items in it, be more critical.)

I'm submitting The Sacred Sonatina.

I'm thinking it'd go in Love, Family, Relationships and (possibly) Personal Life Issues.

It is something of an argument that repressing awful things in one's life (and one's sexuality) leads to destruction of self or others. There are hints at past physical and sexual abuse on the part of the controlling party, which is something I'm intending to explore more in later installments.

Octavia's repressed her sexuality, due to factors largely hinted at but not touched in the story. She finds herself sexually attracted to Vinyl, but sublimates this into anger without realizing it. Octavia takes control of the situation -- as she has every other time in her life -- and things Go Horribly Right.

The story is explicit (in, I believe, three different places), but considering it's a story about sexual repression, I felt it was appropriate.

Right now it's got a total of 49 votes (45 up, 4 down), which is slightly more than 10 upvotes per downvote.

I'm submitting Mayflies.

I'm thinking it'd go in Love, Family, Relationships and (possibly) Ethics.

It's a short that asks the question of whether it'd be right to start a relationship with someone if you know they're going to outlive you, and whether it'd be ethical to make that decision without their input.

Right now it's got 65 upvotes to 4 downvotes, which is roughly 8 upvotes per downvote.

I'd like to nominate my story The End of a Quest for the folder 'personal life issues'.

In the story, the protagonist struggles with the concept of home. A new viewpoint is presented to him by Pinkie Pie which resolves his issues.

I'm not sure whether the story might fit into the folder 'Questions of identity', too, since in my point of view, identity and home are inseparable, but I'm sure others might see that differently.

Hi everyone, I'm an Italian author who has written some pony fanfiction. Some users offered to translate one of them, so here it is.

This story is about delicate matters, like disabilities and looking beyond the appearances, as well as reevaluating oneself. So, that's why I think this story could be added to "personal life issues".

Hello there.

I have recently written "Downfall". I think that in some terms it's really serious story.

I don't want to spoil anything from the plot of the story ( and it's quite hard to not do this ). It contains several philosophical questions, several references to H. P. Lovecraft, some questions of identify, schizophrenia and falling into madness. Still, it's quite different story depending on who actually reads it. It makes a lot of questions and almost none of them are answered, leaving the reader to seek the truth at his own.

As for folders, I'm not really sure which one would be the best one. Because of that, I suggest "Other" folder, but if you have different idea, I'm okay with that.

I'd like to offer up my story Entanglement to either the folder Meditations or Sociology+Politics.

The question I'm trying to explore with it is how, when two groups don't desire conflict and have nothing to gain from it, they can become locked in conflict through miscommunication, accidents, and cultural misunderstanding despite good intentions on both sides.

I would like to submit 'The Frozen West'

I think it belongs in either 'Epistemology', 'Ethics' or 'Meditations'.

This ten page short is an exploration of what magic is. It asks whether all magic we see in the show is real - in which case this story is distinctly possible - or whether some magic that we see is actually a shared dilution, or a kind of mind control, as in the last episode.

Greetings,

I have added The Price of Family, which I believe should be added to both the "Ethics: What is right?" and the "Love, family and other relationships" folders.

This fic is fairly short, only 3000 or so words, and was written as a personal challenge to myself to both write and edit a story within a 1 hour time limit. However, it does address what I believe to be some serious issues, the first and foremost being the father of Dinky Doo (or Dinky Hooves if you prefer). Now, the fandom gave Ditzy Doo a daughter, despite the fact that she can't be much older than the Mane 6, which is mid to late teens. The story is centered around Ditzy's recovery from the event that led to Dinky's conception, which was her being raped in Manehatten.

I believe this is a new perspective entirely on how Dinky came to be, seeing as every other fic I could find seems to name either Doctor Whooves, Anonymous Background Pony #37 or a random OC as her father. This is a much darker view of the matter. It also calls Ethics into question, as Ditzy decides that despite what has happened to her, she will keep the child. She has already been through a traumatic experience, and wishes to continue through to childbirth despite the fact that the child may resemble the father, and serve as a lifelong reminder of what happened to her. The sole reason she wants to do this is to take the moral high ground, just so she can do the right thing despite everything she's already been through.

Thank you for reading, I hope you can consider this fic for addition to the folders I suggested.

- She Comes When the Rain Falls
- Love, family and other relationships
- It follows a soldier who had done some horrible things in a war. The family he grew up with has died, and he has become neglectful of his new family. It comes down to him wondering if he still deserves to live with the blood he has on his hooves.

Ah, hello. I'd like to nominate my story Omega to be placed into the Ethics folder.

Omega deals mainly with the question of survival vs. morality. The protagonist is a simple Equestrian, but after a few key events in the beginning of the story he is cast into a cruel world devoid of Equestrian (human) morals, where he is forced to kill, steal, and otherwise break his morality in order to survive. Along the way he battles with himself over the question of if what he's doing is right. Is it okay to kill, if you have to in order to survive?

I'm also considering nominating it to the Identity folder, as the protagonists struggles with his idea of self. Or at least will, further into the story. The story is set in the Outer World, a pair of continents that are outside the Equestrian mainland, and he is often referred to by other characters as "an Equestrian." However, as he spends more time in the Outer World, he will begin to struggle with whether he still thinks of himself as Equestrian or not. But that may be a bit of a stretch, so whether you put it in or not is entirely up to you.

Thanks.

I would like to nominate 'Piracy' to 'Values+Aesthetics: Art + what is good in life'

This story deals with the problem of good and evil by means of means of moral relativism. Some actions like charity are widely held to be good around the globe, while others like cruelty earn a 'bad' label across virtually all cultures. But what if you take an action that doesn't effect society? If I throw a stick in the forest and nothing ever comes of it, that is neither good nor bad because society is unaffected. The action simply doesn't matter.

That is at the root of the definition of what good and bad are. Good and bad only have any meaning when describing the repercussions of an action in terms of its effect on a group or society.

This story takes that premise and follows it to its logical conclusion in line with canon. I hope you enjoy this dark tale, 'Piracy', an exploration of good and evil that may have you checking under the bed tonight. Just don't read it all alone in the dark... .

Hello, I have submitted Second Princess of the Night in main for a chance at this group. It is currently incomplete and I did not spot incomplete stories being a disqualifying factor but if it is please feel free to delete. The story is +100,000k words and is adventure/light dark.

Without trying to reveal to many spoilers, the selling reason I believe it has a chance for this group is the conflict of two very different life styles in Equestria that bring on the possibility of extinction for a specific race. Ponies are herbivores and currently live in a more peaceful lifestyle. However descendents of vamponies (yes its vampires, feel free to hate if you wish) are predatory in nature. The deal is, Celestia has made attempts to 'cure' them of what is considered a curse or disease, but its creating fatal side effects that have accumulated over time. Mutations, blindness, cancer and other problems. But there is a chance to rectify all of that when one purple alicorn is put into a difficult position. Do you leave a dying race to eventually become extinct? Or do they have the right to live but restored to their former predatory selves, drinking the blood of ponies and possibly killing? Equestria as of today is a tolerant society of differences, but do they allow such differences that can cost the lives of others?

I believe this could possibly fall under the Ethics folder, but possibly identity as it includes the shifting some something herbivore in mentally to a predator.

Thank you all for your time and consideration.

I added "Consequences" to Ethics, despite it having 1 downvote per upvote. I read the story and the comments, and people are downvoting it because they don't like confronting its central ethical problem.

I need more people to help approve stories!

1164576 Added "The end of a quest" to Personal life issues.
1328815 Added "Riding the Storm" to Personal life issues.

I would like to nominate Born In Equestria to Questions of identity.

This story is an examination of the changes a pony struggles to understand and reconcile in herself after seeing and doing things that prove to be very traumatic experiences and leave her in many ways lost on uncertain ground as she searches for a return to the normalcy of what her life was before it all happened - if she can ever really go back at all.

I’d be delighted if you could add Numbers Are Ponies Too to the Ethics folder or possibly the Sociology and Politics one.

I’ve been chair of a charity organization for several years and also joined a well-known charity group in this fandom in 2012. In our campaigns we often encounter what I like to call an empathy barrier. There are many perfectly lovely people who are immediately ready to help family members, friends, and even people they only know because they share a fandom with them, and they help them lavishly, and that is great. At the same time, however, many of these people will ignore that countless of others are suffering the same hardships as that friend they’re helping. While their empathy with their friend is exemplary, their callous neglect of these countless others is not.

Often, what distinguishes the friend from those others is nothing that should make them less deserving of empathy. They may simply be of a different ethnicity or live in a far-away country. In fact, they are often in greater need of help because they may have less of a support network of friends, family, and social security to fall back on.

What further aggravates the problem is that we are usually unable to have our empathy overcome abstractions. When a person sees another person suffer, they want to help, but when they know that several people suffer precisely as much, it does not multiply their willingness to help but reduces it. There are a number of studies on this perverse phenomenon, e.g., “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability” by Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein (2003); “The ‘Identified Victim’ Effect: An Identified Group, or Just a Single Individual?” by Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov (2005); and “Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable and Statistical Victims” by Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic (2007).

The last study even goes a step further and investigates the effect of education about this identified victim effect on donation behavior. Unfortunately, they can only find a decrease in empathy with the identified victim while the empathy barrier to the statistical victim, as they call them, remains unscathed.

In sum, our results demonstrate that sympathy for identifiable victims diminishes with deliberative thought, but remains consistently low for statistical victims. This pattern holds with various manipulations of deliberative thought, including explicit debiasing interventions, providing statistics, and priming an analytic mindset.

In Numbers Are Ponies Too, I try it anyway, but not by providing statistics but by appealing (or trying to appeal) to empathy itself. In particular, Amber Rose develops from a rather self-centered pony who feels that something is missing in her life to one who realizes that her privileges are tantamount to her obligation to those who lack them.

By the way, I’m planning to write more stories tackling similar problems. If you think that this is something you’d be interested in or that you could help with, I’d love to do this whole ideas bouncing thing with you.

Relevant update: Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism

I would like to nominate my story Fallout Equestria: Rules of Engagement for the folder 'Ethics'.

Now before you immediately delete my submission at the site of 'Fallout Equestria' and 'Human' I'd like to take this opportunity to explain why my story is, despite its sub-genre, a serious story.

My story was always designed to be genre breaking. The very idea of a well written Human in Fallout Equestria story that explores serious issues and takes an even-handed, well informed and researched approach to the military creates uncontrollable laughter in some, and feelings of disgust and mild nausea in others. One of the primary goals I set out to achieve was to create a counterpoint to the copious war glorifying fics on the site, the occasional 'soldiers are monsters' fics and the innumerable well-intentioned but terribly cliche and uninformed military fics that cross the homepage.

In an attempt to achieve this seemingly impossible task I have talked extensively with active duty and veteran members of the armed forces (some of them bronies) and researched into military culture and psychology in order to create a protagonist that doesn't glorify, but at the same time doesn't vilify the military. Consequently my story has been widely praised (and occasionally criticized) by military bronies for its accuracy in portraying both the emotional and technical sides of going to war in this modern era.

The title 'Rules of Engagement' refers to the rationale that must be met in the military before lethal force can be used, and this ends up being a dominant theme of the story. At what point can you justify killing someone to protect yourself and your team? How sure do you have to be that they're a threat? Do you have to wait until they're actually shooting at you? You don't have to make that decision, that's for someone higher up in the chain to decide. You just follow orders and deal with the consequences afterwards. Why? Well that's a difficult question, and no two people are the same, and I try to explore that in my story, I don't think I can do it justice describing it briefly here, but I will try.

Sometimes you can't know the whole picture before you pull the trigger, maybe they saw something you didn't, maybe they just received a critical piece of information over the radio; they've ordered you to fire and you have to trust that they're making the right decision. Sometimes they don't.

Rules of engagement change constantly. Where one day you might be ordered to shoot anyone with a weapon on sight, the next you might have to wait for them to threaten you, or you might be ordered to kill anyone in a certain area, armed or not. You have the ultimate discretion on whether you pull the trigger, and sometimes that's more of a curse than a blessing, knowing that making the wrong call could either kill an innocent civilian, or allow one of your comrades to be killed. Beyond the necessary utilitarian thinking, there's a lot more going on psychologically.

Once the protagonist is separated from the rest of his unit and finds himself in a post-apocalyptic Equestria there's no-one left to lay down rules of engagement, he personally has to decide how to approach each situation and weigh the lives of other sentient species against the lives of others, and his own, all whilst struggling desperately to survive in the unforgiving wastes.

Even if this story is rejected I'd love to have some discourse with you guys about why that's the case and I promise to accept all criticism in the spirit it was intended.

Edit-
Upvotes: 481
Downvotes: 23
Views: 7856

I added my adventure story, Love Your Difference to the main folder and believe that it would belong in the Personal Life Issues folder. I believe that it fits in this group because it is about Fluttershy learning to cope with her flaws and the self-resentment she feels toward those flaws.

Huh. A group that actually looks like it might be worth following. I shouldn't be surprised to find Bad Horse here :)

I have added Every Mare Needs her Stallion to the main folder.

I believe the story is most appropriately represented by the 'Love, family, and other relationships' and/or the 'Personal life issues' folders.

It is a story of personal needs, and the consequences of vulnerability, from deep, meaningful love, to ungodly rage. It's also about the unspoken responsibilities of parenting, the effect parents have on their children without ever knowing, and the dangers of keeping those feelings bottled up.

-M

787300 Princess of Friendship

'Ethics: What is right?'
The story addresses the question: Is it right to create life, only for it to be destroyed.

'Love, family and other relationships'
The story is about Twilight's relationship with her friends. Princess of Friendship isn't just her title, it's her essence. The story portrays the lengths, she is willing to go for her friends.

'Questions of identity'
The story addresses the questions:
Is allegiance of Princess of Friendship primary to her friends or mostly to ponykind?
If you're a perfect copy of you, are you still you?

A Dream of Sunny Days
Sociology and politics

I'm suggesting my story because it deals with equestrian politics after Celestia's death. More specifically, it explores the hard ramification of what happens to a nation ruled for milleniums by a benevolent dictator when said figure dies. The story will portray the conflicts surrounding succession for a nation that just isn't ready for it. Different POV characters show this each in their own way, each with their own reason to believe they are right.

787300

TDisplaced into Nothing

• MLP: FiM
• MLP: Comic
• Dark
• Adventure
• Drama

While studying an alien spellform, Twilight makes the most important discovery of all time... The one which could doom her planet. | Horror Rationalfic with Lovecraftian & World of Darkness elements. Deconstruction / Subversion of Displaced.

• Violence
• Death
• Human
• Twilight
• Spike
• Luna
• Other
• Main 6

Rockstar_Raccoon · 91k words  ·  1,075  77 · 17k views

I'm not entirely sure what folders this should be in. It's a VERY serious take on Displaced as a genre, and, as a Rationalfic, it delves heavily into science, occultism, and philosophy. Perhaps Epistimology, Ethics, Meditations, Identity, and Aesthetics could all apply on some level, but the story delves into so many intellectual subjects that I'm not entirely sure where it goes, I just know that it belongs here.

I also know the Sequel will definitely belong in the Politics folder, among others.