Clyde and the Tenants
Once upon a time, there was an eminently sensible earth pony named Clyde; an ancestor of our beloved Clyde but with the same sensibility and work ethic from working on his rock farm.
One day he received news that his great-uncle Shepherd had died and left him a working rock farm on the other side of Equestria.
"Since I don’t want to move the family," he thought, "I’ll lease the farm out to a group of workers who will live there and work the farm and harvest the crop at the end of the year. These workers will sell the crop and will receive their wages, with the rest of the bits returning to me."
So Clyde placed an ad in the paper with the details of the offer, and soon a group of Diamond Dogs responded to the offer saying that they’d like to work the farm. Clyde took a train to the new farm, met the tenants, and signed a contract with them before returning home.
When harvest time came around, Clyde waited for the check from the tenants, but after a week nothing came, so he sent one of his farm hands to check on the farm. A day later he returned bruised and beaten.
"What happened?" He asked Garlic Scape.
"Boss, I brought the message to those dogs, but they jeered at me and ganged up on me; there's easily twenty of them."
Clyde's wife came to him and said," Clyde, we need to save your uncle's farm. We have twenty strong farm hands that we could send to take back the farm; we could even send our son, they'd respect him."
"Granite," Clyde said to his wife, "do you value the farm more than you value the life of your son, or the farm workers who have loyally worked for me for years? These dogs have shown that they will do whatever it takes to keep the farm. Do you think that they will respect one stallion, our son, or will not put up a fight with our workers? No matter what, if we choose to fight them, we will be the ones who end up suffering the most loss. However, these dogs may not respect me or my family, but there is someone that they will respect."
Clyde then went to his closet and packed a knapsack with the essentials and grabbed some bits out of their rainy-day fund before heading out the door.
One day later, Clyde arrived at his Uncle Shepherd's farm and was met by the Diamond Dogs.
"Well, if it isn't Clyde Pie..."
"Whatcha doing here, Clyde?"
"Here to take back the farm?" The three dogs chorused
"As a matter of fact, yes. You dogs signed an agreement, and when I tried to mediate the situation, you hurt my best farm hand. This is your last chance—"
"Fat chance, Piehead"
"He was a pushover!"
"You can't take all of us on!"
"No...No I can't...but she can!" Clyde agreed, gesturing up with his head. When the dogs looked up, they saw an armored Princess Celestia diving rapidly towards them, her horn glowing with infernal magic.
"RUN!!!" The dogs howled as they scampered off down the long country road back to the train station.
"I hope that got the message across," Celestia said as she landed beside Clyde.
"I think so. Thank you, again, your highness, for taking time out of your day to help me. All that's left now is to find some new tenants...." Clyde mused,
Celestia smiled,"You are quite welcome, Clyde, and actually, I think I might know the right tenants for your farm."
Clyde met with the family of earth ponies who Celestia knew, and he immediately approved of them after seeing their character and commitment to each other. Under their plow, the farm reaped bountiful carats of precious metals and stones.
Moral: In a dog-eat-dog world, sometimes the solution is to get a bigger dog.
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This looks suspiciously like a certain story in the Bible, which, as it so happens, ended pretty similarly but after rather more violence. So uh... I guess the point of this chapter is that Clyde (the elder) is more sensible than the Abrahamic God? That's ... quite an implication to make.
6323970
Outside of inferring sensibility from phrases like "God is perfect", very little about the Abrahamic God is sensible. Powerful? Sure. Kind? Sometimes. Vengeful? Sometimes. There are a lot of adjectives to describe Him, with both positive and negative connotations... but I would not include "sensible" on that list.
6324153 seriously? what made you think going there was a good idea? You could have just looked at the joke and moved on but you had to get the last word in and now the comment section is going to be filled with ten pages of unrelated chat about people arguing about god, just watch.
What if you can't get a bigger dog?
6324316
Get a gorilla?
6324285
I just learn to ignore that crap because after school when I quit choir and they wanted to know why, and then I told them it was because through the fact that three out of four songs were religious and Christian, they asked what wrong with that and I ended up in detention from saying I was agnostic, and years earlier when I was younger in the same school system, every damned student who knew I was agnostic except one either teased me or annoyed me, trying to get me to join a religion where I think the whole thing is stupid because of how infinitesimally small the chance that there is a deity is, and I'm ranting.
These stories are brilliant
6324619 You realize comments like yours are exactly the ones I was talking about; irrelevant to the story but leading to long comment chains tangents and other replies that are also completely irrelevant, like this one and probably the ones people will write to this. Mark my words someone is going to reply to yours with the "not everyone is like that" message and then the fucking floodgates of idiots from both sides will descend like a bloody plague.
I'm grumpy today.
P.S. "I'm aware of the hypocrisy so don't even bother pointing it out" -Sideshow Bob
What I want to know is how he got Celestia to intervene.
Some of the stories are a bit... Off... This one makes no note of how he got celestia. He coukd have just gotten the police or guard or other heroes to intervene. Also the boy who cried wolf, he didn't wait for a pattern. I'm worried about the continued quality of these stories....
Without swords the law is silent (Roman proverb) In a dog eat dog world, sometimes life's a bitch.
6324671
I do realize that. However, I needed to vent. Sorry for the ensuing comment-chain flame-war.
6324720
Probably went to court and told her the tenants on his farm had broken contract and assaulted one of his workers. That would be the sensible thing to do.
6323970
It's clearly based on that parable, but any comparison will necessarily break down because the analogies are different. The parable in Matthew 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, and Luke 20:9-18 was directed towards the chief priests, scribes, and elders. These religious leaders were cast in the role of the tenants, and the parable described how the Jewish religious leadership, once ordained by God, had spurned and murdered His prophets, and was even then plotting to murder His Son. It showed God's long-suffering patience with them, but also that once they had done what they were even then planning, that He would condemn them and destroy the whole religious edifice that they had built, ostensibly in service to God but in truth in service to themselves. And He did this, roughly forty years later, by the hands of the Romans.
This story, on the other hand, puts the every-man character of Clyde in the position of landowner. Clyde, an eminently sensible earth pony, is intended to be the model that the audience is to emulate. By switching the positions of the audience like this, it changes a warning of condemnation (based on things already done and things not yet done) into a guide to dealing with unruly, dangerous individuals. It ends up bearing less resemblance to the original parable than it does to Maxim 37: "There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload.'"
6325140 Hmm. I can see what you're saying, although I think the deliberate parallel really weakens it, since it requires serious work to see past the apparent similarity to the actual point… and there's really no reason for this red herring to exist at all. It's just misleading to no purpose.
6324739
That one's on me. Despite it being a bit off, I figured using Celestia for this role was better than using "the police", which takes people out of the fairy tale mindset, so I requested the author change the story slightly. In retrospect, and the way I shall advise it in future, having Celestia send some royal guards instead of coming herself would have preserved the fairy tale mindset and been more reasonable. However, I only just thought of this.
6325140
Yeah, that's what I was going for. Nice analysis of the Parable of the Tenants btw.
6326534 I dunno. If im getting a bigger dog why do it by degrees? Why not just jump straight to the top, Its not like they can one up that.
6330045
It's not a matter of Clyde making a poor decision here; rather it strains credulity a bit that Celestia herself would come out to handle such a problem, rather than sending guards in her place. Naturally, Clyde should prefer Celestia herself if the offer is there.
6326534 He should've shown up with the Mafia and broken their kneecaps.
That's how we did things back in the old country...
Revised Moral of the Story: Sometimes you just have to go biblical on those who would take advantage of your good nature.
6324739
It is heavily implied that our sensible friend is very close to Celestia's heart. Luna's as well, as long as he keeps attending their weekly checker games.
6324720 She owed him for giving her his cloak.