So you know all the complaints about the maneverse drift we've been giving each other? It's hardly a mystery where it comes from. While I understand there's a necessity to understanding how to interpret the official characters, there are now about three or four different threads about them. The profiles are a nice quick reference guide, but for all the stories and stuff, we haven't exactly delved as much as I'd like into our main characters, with the exception of Trixie. It's bad when I'm hesitant to, for example, write a story focusing on Raindrops because I'm afraid I've made her too chillaxed or too angry about a situation. And I mean, what about her sense of humor? What makes her sad? She doesn't have to have only two emotional states...

So (With all due respect to Lauren) here's a thread to talk about our main characters instead of Faust's.

325403
I'd actually considered staring a thread a little like this once or twice. Glad to see someone actually taking the initiative to do so.

Having written a story mostly about her, Raindrops has definitely been a concern for me. I very much kept worrying about that exact same chillaxe -vs- blindrage issue. I'd like to think I pulled it off with a successfully enough popper balance of the two by the end.

As I see it, her temper is something she struggles with regularly. She's knows she's got issues, and she's probably hurt those around her in the past; mostly property damage, probably a few instances like her promise with Trixie or even her tussle with Gilda, but I'd imagine there might be a singular life changing event where the injury inflicted might have been of a more long term or even permanent variety. (though if anyone ever tries to suggest that is why Snails is a bit slow in the head I will personally go all Raindrops over their sorry flank ).

Her temper is nothing she's proud of and is in fact her greatest shame. She hates losing control. This produces the unfortunate side effect of her bottling away most of her other emotions as well, which is why she can seem like such a bland and dull girl, when she's not screaming bloody murder. This is a quality I attributed to her out of a fair amount of personal experience with anger issues.

As for a sense of humor? I'd see it as a very dry wit, and certainly nothing she herself thinks of as funny. I find that would go best with her rather blunt variety of Honesty.

Anyway, we've already got a bit of Cheerilee going on under the hood in the Berry Punch thread. Someone might want to think about porting some of that over here, or maybe will just keep it all over there, make a link up top this thread, and I can retitle the other one as something like "The Punch Sisters".

In many senses, I see Raindrops to be something like Bruce Banner.

she knows exactly what might happen if she slips up at all and loses her temper, and it wasn't pretty.
She tries all sorts of things to keep it under control, and that makes her come across as dull, and somewhat cowardly.
she can vent some of it via Deadpan Snarking, but it's not enough of a vent.

325433
I'll agree with most of that, except the cowardly part. Raindrops is never a coward.

Well except maybe when it come to herself. I'd see losing control as her singular greatest personal fear, more specifically losing control and hurting someone in the process. So while her self-restraint is probably one of her most admirable qualities, I could see her viewing it as a form of cowardice, an inability to own up to an undeniably real part of herself.

325446

that is more specifically how someone who doesn't know the whole story might see it.

She would back off from the confrontation, but if someone keeps poking and prodding at it.....

325448
I don't really see Raindrops as ever backing off from a direct confrontation. She'll pull a "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry" type line, but she'll almost always stand firm and wait for the other side to back down first. Even on the ocasion she does back down first, she'll only do so with an appropriate display of just how angry she is so that they know she's doing it for their safety not hers.

This is sorta what happened in Trixie's office during GOtL:Ch3, though to a lesser degree. She was pissed that Trixie was ignoring the problem and getting to the point where she felt like breaking something, or somepony. That's not what she wanted though, so she screamed her frustration and stomped off in an obvious display of barely restrained fury.

This isn't really a conscious behavior on her part; she's not really trying to intimidate those around her. It's just part of who she is. It's all part of her Honesty. If she is angry and wants to hurt you she can usually hold herself back, but she'll make damn certain you understand just how much effort she's putting into that favor.

Let's see...

Trixie has developed quite a bit from the way I originally intended to write her, but I like where she's gone.

For one thing, I originally saw her as much better at manipulating ponies, but our canon seems to of shifted more towards the idea that she's actually fairly mediocre at it at best. She's really obvious when she does it, sometimes to the point of letting ponies know that she's doing it. She probably, in her head, sees herself as revealing herself as the grand manipulator; in reality, she's revealing herself to be a giant ass.

325573: I see her more as being capable of being good at it when she really tries (such as in M&D, when she did manage to get Octavia to confess by manipulating her emotions, and then came up with the whole fake-trial scam), but only when she's trying really, really hard. When she's just doing it normally, she either fails, or she succeeds but makes everyone so mad at her that it doesn't really help her much anyway.

Also: while I don't want to overdo it, I can see Carrot Top having a little angst sometimes about her generous nature and how much more work that makes for her. There are probably nights after bad harvests or other disasters where she wonders if her life wouldn't be much easier if she tried to follow the Trust's business strategies instead of her own compassionate nature.

325586
I'm not so sure I saw that as Trixie being good when she tries really hard. Her initial go at Tricking Octavia was a complete wash, not just because her illusion was easily pierced, but she was also utterly off base on how to pick out the week-links in the cellist's armor. It was only when she was down to a last chance desperation ploy, with Octavia about to walk out the door, that Trixie finally struck the right cord.

It all goes back to Trixie's tendency to overplan and introduce needless complexity into her schemes. It's only when she stops trying so hard and starts following her gut that she truly succeeds. Playing to her real strengths as a deceptive stage magician rather than trying to build herself into a cunning political chessmaster.

325587
I can sort of see that, though CTs farm is way too small for her to actually try and follow the Trust's example even if she wanted to. She could, however, theoretically accomplish something similar by banding together with all the other local farmers. Something like the Eventime salads, but taken to the next level.

325637: True, I guess that's a better way of phrasing it. What I meant was that Trixie could be a good negotiator, but she usually isn't. It's not that she has no hope, it's that she often tries to go for the big dramatic scheme instead of something intelligent that will more likely work.

I think CT's profile says something like 'she's not a very good negotiator because she's too generous'? Unless I just hallucinated that. But I could definitely see CT as having the problem of being too willing to lower prices and/or help out other ponies in need, with the results that she doesn't actually make all that much money.

325651
Carrot Top's problem is that as great and naturally-talented a farmer as she is, she's horrible at the business side of things.

Hang on a second...

325651
wasn't arguing the point about CT being a bad negotiator and such. More so I was trying to point out that even if she were better at that, she still probably couldn't compete finacialy with the Trust on any meaningful level. Her farm is just too small to measure as much more than a blip on the radar of their megalithic nation wide monopoly.

Even if we only measure against the local branch, I'd wager that Sweet Apple Acres has as much land as any half of the rest of ponyville's farmers put together. No one local farm could hope to take on SAA in a direct marketing competition, though all banded together they could probably trounce AJ, but that would take some pretty A+ leadership skills.

Oddly CT might just be able to pull that off, not by pulling the strings and being manipulative, but by being truly open and making sure every farm in the alliance got a fair cut. She'd just need to work up the necessary confidence.

I kind of see Lyra as trying to help out all her friends when they need it, but she has a tendency to have it all pile up and crash down on top of her (like in RDD's Helping... Hands?, for instance).

She also seems very secluded, like she doesn't branch out a lot. Not to the point where she's antisocial, but she doesn't necessarily try and make new friends very often.

I also touched down slightly on her being a little forgetful in Changing Gossip (she forgot to tell Bon-Bon she was going to Canterlot for a day), but that doesn't necessarily need to be kept. It was just for the situation I had going.

325656: Sure, but even if she still couldn't really take down the Trust, she imght think she'd have at least a slightly easier life if she weren't so prone to giving discounts to friends/the needy, and could manage her business a little better. She wouldn't become the top farmers in the area, but she might have a few bits to go out for a nice meal once in a while or something.

325662
Well I'm rather sure she already has the bits to afford a nice meal every now and then. She has to work hard every day, but she's hardly struggling against invertible financial ruin. That's mostly beside the point though.

As of now I think you and I are mostly talking the same concept just phrased slightly differently.

CT is bad at business and she knows it. There is a part of her that thinks if she was just a bit more ruthless she could be much more successful. The Apple Trust needn't really factor directly into that equation as anything other than a bar she unfairly measures herself against.

325667: Right, exactly.

325659 I like thei dea that she always ready to help her friend, but then end up with lots piled up on her. I like to think Lyra puts a LOT of importance on being the Element of Loyalty and that it might be a sort of uncouscious burden on her shoulders. She's always striving to be more loyal and it can cause her some angst if she felt she hadn't done all she could.

Another aspect of Lyra I think could be fun is that she could bethe most well-read of the Luna 6, at least in term of variety of field of knowledge. She knows magic, she knows music, but she also knows the cultural background regarding music, the myths andl egends that inpired the great operas of the past, she was probably friend with unicorns in different faculty at the Academy (I have her spout some marine biology factoids in one of my next story). Basically she could be a fountain of trivia on a lot of subject. Maybe not as specialized as Cheerilee's legal knowledge but enough that if they encounter say, an hydra, she'd know what it can do and how to deal with it. she would probably already know about Discord as well.

Basically, Lyra = Bard :p

325691
At some point I'm going to stat them all out.

...

...hmm...

325691 I like like the idea of her being full of useless knowledge. But it was hinted that at least Trixie knew who Discord was in the final chapter of Longest Day. So maybe not exclusive knowledge about Discord, but random trivia.

325693
So far a few ponies have mentioned Discord, actually: Lyra's angry exclamation of "Discord's mismatched horns," which sounds to me like it's probably a common explative.

325695 So we can safely say that he's pretty common knowledge. Are we even going to do a !The Return of Harmony?

325693 So I guess she wouldn't be the only one but she would still know about him.

Also, I like the idea that Trixie think Lyra is a starving artist always looking for a job :p

325697 But when everyone does, it's not really that special. So, yeah.

325698
There's a big difference between knowing the basics of a historical figure and knowing the finer details.

Lyra's knowledge of creatures like Discord might not be exclusive, but could well be more detailed.

325705 True, true. I guess we'll see.

325697>>325705>>325710

Maybe Discord's like the maneverse NMM; most ponies think he's just a myth? I mean, his being real was somewhat confirmed for the Element Bearers during the confrontation between Luna and weak!Corona in the epilogue, but they were kinda distracted by bigger issues at the time...

325758 That's true. I guess we'll have to wait until RDD either does a !Discord story or gives it to somepony else.

325760
The thing about Discord is that I'm wary of both writing him myself, and letting someone else write him, because he has to be written right. He should be the *definition* of Chaotic Evil given form. He hurts others physically, mentally, and emotionally because he enjoys it, because he honestly gets a kick out of it, because he enjoys watching ponies suffer.

On the other hand, he also has to be legitimately funny. And, I don't want him to show up and transform Equestria into a grim dark world and radically alter the tone of the Lunaverse.

Basically, doing Discord right is like trying to do the Joker right. It isn't easy.

I would be quite alright with holding off on Discord for a while. I think we have enough bads running around (Corona and her allies, Zizaine, Night Court folks, etc) without bringing on Q.

325652
Hey, that's also in the TV Tropes WMGs for M!Applejack (and probably their clan)
325696
If we are, Discord's probably gonna have an easier time, if you know what I mean.