Moments
written by Bad Horse
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Ooh. How interesting as a chapter. I'm guessing the next one will be called "Afterworld."
We ARE ponies...
3889510 No; that's the end. That's a map of the Earth during the Cretaceous, just after the asteroid that killed the
dragonsdinosaurs and every other big land animal on earth.3889519 Oh, when I viewed the last chapter it still said "incomplete."
3889529 You must have snuck in there between when I published the chapter & edited the story description.
3889543 What a sneaky bastard I am.
Anyways, I have to think about the story more. The way you ended it with an image is strange, even thought the rest of the story is fairly easy to understand.
3889569 The implication is that Equestria was Earth in the Triassic period, and we all owe our lives to Twilight.
And the readers are unhappy! Only 14 views of chapter 7, and 2 of them are downvotes.
3889569
It signifies that Equestria was pre-Earth.
3889590 I meant to think about the more thematic implications, not the literal ending (which I got).
People were expecting more written chapters, so that is probably the reason people disliked.
3889598 I was talking about the thematic implications, not what the image obviously showed.
As the ancient Chinese poet said...
Our best friends died before we were born.
.....
Ha!
Wasn't quite expecting that--nice one! I'd complain about the humorous end to a very serious story, and how I wanted a more emotional sendoff, but the laugh I got was worth it.
Heh. Nice one.
Ohhh. Very clever. Very, very clever
This ended about as well as I could have expected, coming from you, Bad Horse.
We're just hand waving the fossil record, eh? Or would the mass simultaneous extinction of all life on the planet vaporize its magical field and disintegrate everything that contained magic within it?
3889771 No, no. The life that survived the K-T extinction was just that which Twilight saved. It recovered in just a few hundred thousand years--not long enough to show up as a gap. Dragon skeletons from before that have of course been found in many places. Triassic unicorns, not yet. Their bones must not be as hard.
Princess of Ponyville, perhaps. But what about Canterlot and Manehattan and all the other myriad locations in Equestria?
I liked the story, though I'm concerned that my enjoyment is primarily because it's a time loop story and I haven't yet read one that disappointed me.
I'll try and put a more thoughtful comment tomorrow.
This does indeed put his entire happenstance in perspective.
Heh, extinction as a happenstance. Guess that would make the end of the universe a normal tragedy, right?
3889590 But ... after all that comment-space spent on how their cosmology is utterly different from our own planet (and in-story confirmation) ...
(Disclaimer: the face seemed like a fitting expression for the intended emotion; however, though named "oops", "oops" is not what I mean. More like "wat" or dismayed bafflement.)
Also, I am only a dabbler in evolutionary history, but less than a million years to go from worms and insects and suchlike to even small mammals seems extremely hard to swallow. More important, however, is the unlikelihood of evolving into carbon copies of the previous, killed-off species.
*Reads story*
*Sees picture*
i738.photobucket.com/albums/xx27/lexiingram/I%20stole%20gifs%20from%20lauren/Lost/Sawyer-OMG.gif
"Son of a Bitch."
You know, I can see how this is a relatively happy ending compared to some of your other stories. It doesn't even feel sad in a way, just taking 'life moves on' to the logical end. Which I realized while writing this is what Twilight wasn't able to handle during the time loops. Good story and I've added it to my favourites, but I'm still waiting on a legit happy ending for Twilight and Mac.
It's like some crazy inverted Planet of the Apes.
3889590
It would be Cretaceous. The Triassic period was some several million years prior to the dinosaur extinction event.
I had a sneaking suspicion this would be the case though. As it stands, you are now making me feel guilty for living. The end of the last chapter was a knife to the gut as it was, with Sweetie Belle being a nasty twist of the knife there. But the confirmation that their extinction ultimately occurred in our planets distant past is what leaves me feeling hollow inside.
I think I am going to have to go back on Prozac before I read anything you write again. This is not a joke.
I was guessing that this was how it would end since the second or third chapter.
It was still a brilliant story though
Oh Bad Horse, you , this is not the end of the story! You've put humans in a universe where time travel is possible. Humans are going to exploit the crap out of time-travel's propensity to make weird stuff possible, and someone's going to notice that odd chronal anomaly during the Cretaceous Extinction event.
3890240 Knife to the gut? The ending is supposed to be heroic and inspiring.
3890665
Heroic I'll grant, but the only thing it inspires is a lingering hopelessness.
3890668 Why? She succeeded! She overcame her self-pity and her imagined limitations, redeemed herself as a princess, and saved life on Earth!
Sorry, this didn't do it for me. It was... an interesting take but ultimately, just did not grasp me on any level.
The final tip of the scale is that, as a lay palentologist, was the Cretaceous extinction muddle (I am not, at the best of times, enamoured of the the "[this world] is Earth at some point in time" ideas.) While the impact was disasterous, it was not the sole cause, but the final blow to an ecosystem that had been suffering from a multitude of problems, especially heavy volcanic activity (often the theorised cause for a lot of the smaller extinction events), for millions of years prior. If it wasn't for the asteroid, we'd likely have had a lesser mass extinction event anyway (probably of the scale of the Triassic/Jurassic or Jurassic/Cretaceous events) Nor was it the most severe extinction event, though it's probably the second biggest - the crowning glory goes to the Permian/Triassic extinction, which really did nearly wipe out 90-96% of all species.
In addition, it causes the moon-interception excuse to fall completely apart. Since this is now Earth, and thus Luna (i.e. the moon) = because if we've got real-world geology, the moon can't be a magical construct of insufficient size - the asteroid impact that hit was "only" 10 km diameter. Enough to ruin the crap out of surface life, yes, but not event distantly close enough to cause structural damage to the moon - in fact, the biggest impact crater on the moon is over ten times the size of K-T's Chicxulub impactor crater. (Something big enough to shatter the moon would very definately, if not shatter the Earth itself, either on impact or by rotational and/or tidal forces tearing it apart due to the damage, cause enough structural damage there would be no life that would survive.)
(I'm sorry, I do apologise, I'm bringing the harsh light of scientific nit-pickery to Equestria... But that's what happens when you start tying it to real-world events: my suspension of disbelief because "it's magic/it'sanother planet" vanishes in, to quote Douglas Adams, a puff of logic. And once I get started on lecturing I get a bit Twilight-y... (Partly due to the Lich racial trait of monologing, you know...))
3889590
Jurassic. The Triassic was the start of the period when dinosaurs arose towards the end (Triassic/Jurassic/Cretaceous). (Blue_Paladin was under-stating it with "several million", it's actually 56 million years - the length of the Jurassic - between the end of the Triassic (201 mya) to the start of the Cretaceous (145 mya) - plus the 79 million years of the length of the Cretaceous; so about 135 million years.)
Ants were in fact around 100 million years ago, so you were right on that... But, fun fact, I discovered while looking it up (because yes, I am that awkward...!) they've discovered just this year a 49 million year-old cockroach, which is 5 million years older than previously thought. So, as I like to often say, you learn something new everyday. We've both been educated today, then, so there is at least that I've gotten out of the story - so for that, I thank you.
I think that you would have been better served not implying it was Earth, which would have obviated most if not all of the preceeding nit-picks, personally.
3890700
That last part is arguable really. Short of completely shattering the planet, it would be virtually impossible to completely extinguish life on the planet. Nature will always find a means to restore itself, regardless of the time needed. You could go one further and say that even the total annihilation of the planet would ultimately result in the formation of life somewhere else, built from the bones of our world.
Her success therefore is limited, largely, to the fact that she was able to bring Ponyville together to face their end with dignity. This is admirable, and worthy of praise. Certainly it is heroic. I suppose even inspiring in a way. But in the end, the result is the same. Equestria dies. All it's potential wiped away by either a total happenstance or by a Discord who can't stop it even if he wanted to (which he probably would really). All it's lives gone. All the potential Twilight had is gone, represented in a smattering of minutes of greatness before being lost forever, with possibly no real impact. The lives of everyone in the town washed away, and Equestria, and the whole world.
And then you realize, it could happen to us. If something that size were barreling towards us we would have no way to stop it, and no way to survive it as we are now.
Hah!
Twilight wins! The new life that evolves on earth will be able to use Star-Swirl the Bearded's Time-Turning spell included in the bank-vault books to teleport an intervention back in time to the end of Chapter Six and save the ponies.
Well played Twilight, well played.
Of course the ponies will have to be kept hidden until the intervention has been launched from the future to prevent them from erasing the timeline in which the intervention was launched... and probably the future world would need to be prepared for the arrival of ponies, so that it wasn't too great a shock...
I wonder how one might go about doing that...
Moments should have stayed a one-shot. I swear I'd read it somewhere before, months ago, but at least it stood on its own. If it had to be a multi-chapter story, complete with timey-wimey Groundhog Day shenanigans and Hard Reset snarkery, then it should have ended at chapter 6. This Afterword is unnecessary and - once we figure out that eventually Twilight will "get it right" - predictable.
You're better than this, BH.
Damn...that ending was a happy kind of bittersweet.
Personally (all science aside because I don't feel like jumping into that argument, as much as I could) I liked the story. If it just stayed at the first chapter, it still would've been good. I dunno, I just liked how it unfolded is all.
3890706 Oops, I was translating K-T as Cretaceous-Triassic instead of Cretaceous-Tertiary. No, I'm putting them in the Cretaceous, to match up with the asteroid.
Yes, that was the risk. I knew it would do that for some readers. It was an experiment.
Obviously, the high extinction rate preceding the asteroid was due to the development of intelligent life and pony interference with the ecosystem.
I looked all those things up before posting. The larger craters are larger in diameter only, and they're thought to be the result of shallow impacts, or possibly not impacts at all. The deep craters from near-vertical impact are about 60 miles in diameter max. See my last blog post for the admittedly shakey argument. And, heck, maybe Luna thought she was playing it safe.
3890800 It was in the January write-off. I wrote it the 3 days before the deadline, so you couldn't have read it before then.
3890989
Deja vu, then. Still stand by my comment. Great one-shot, good 6-chapter piece, unnecessary afterword.
And of course, this was a little predictable as well...
Oh well.
Good show.
On to the next one, yes?
3890706 Yes, this also totallty white-washes the FACT that creatures such as crocodillians survived that impact. The impact that this supposedly represents was not a biosphere-killer. Not even close. The griffons on the other side of the planet would have survived. As would anything else on that side of the planet.
Not to mention, there is now ZERO plausibility because we are now expected to believe that magic existed IN OUR UNIVERSE since this is Earth.
This really was not thought out very well at all.
3891396 Your objections are partly correct, but not all of them are very well thought-out. You demand precision from others, yet throw out half-baked objections as if they were decisive. That's okay, but I'm tired of your narrow-mindedness, your rage, and your insulting tone. I know you're having a tough time with your mom's illness, but it's just... not my problem. I haven't got the energy to deal with you anymore. Goodbye.
(ADDED: Anyone who wants to can read Alondro's response to this here: "Moments, by Bad Horse... and study in how to F up a fictional story in every way possible.")
That was awesome.
That picture just.. it made this story incredible, rather than just really great. :D
dunno, it feels kinda anti-climatic (if I'm saying that right)
3891410
Well... I would sacrifice my eyes for being able to write comprehensively and utterly engaging like you.
3892528 Thanks, but... if it's that important to you, I recommend writing some stories & posting them on fimfiction, rather than sacrificing body parts.
3892857
But how then will the ritual be completed? Body parts are lingua franca to magical rituals as the actual need to be crazy enough to undergo any such mutilating act of defiance against logic. I mean... why not fight for it? Hmmm... am I actually giving myself advise? How multi-personal of me.
Soon I'll drink tee (Russian Earl Gray with a slice of lemon) and converse with Azathoth about which model of car to avoid! And why one should change socks after a hard day at work.
Oh, by the way. Should I feel ashamed for thinking of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT_nvWreIhg Whilst reading your story? OneRepublic - Counting stars.
3892518 Anti-CLIMACTIC
3890989 Your blog argument re: pushing the moon out of orbit was entirely unconvincing as far as "Luna would do a suicidal thing rather than risk the Moon" when the asteroid had 1% to 0.001% of the energy suggested necessary to push the Moon out of orbit (and my guess is that making it escape would probably be easier than making it crash), since that also requires that 100% of said energy be directed entirely into motion as opposed to explodey energy, and that Luna would be unable to arrange a glancing blow which as you say would have much less consequence to the Moon's orbit.
3890665 There's a kind of catharsis that comes from experiencing (even in fiction) a noble sacrifice. It's a feeling that can never really be called "happy." It isn't properly "sad" either. Tears are a common symptom, and grief, and relief that the right thing was done, and inspiration that we might one day be so heroic ourselves.
If you succeed in depicting a hero overcoming their own personal hangups to make a necessary sacrifice for others you also depict someone truly noble and praiseworthy vanishing from the world. And that is an upsetting thing.
3891396
]Oh, but the video description is where the gold is at.
Well that's enough of reading hard headedness.
Time for soothing, mind numbing ultra violence...
HURP DUUUUUUUURP!!!!!!!!!! ENFORCE QUEEN WILL!!!!!!!!!!
BLUD 4 TEH BLUD GAWD!!!!!!!!!!!
RIP HIS ARM OFF AND BEAT HIS HEAD WITH IT!!!!
3894214
Wait, you want tears from moi?
Sigh... guess I'll read Perfect Pony Princesses for the fourth time... Jesus somersaulting Christ...
It's more like brony tears of fear than sadness. I cannot guarantee there won't be snot in the shot. I tend to have such a runny nose crying like that. Think Blair Witch Project levels.
3894637
Maybe the things you wish to describe are self fulfillment? Duty? Honour?
...
Maybe disgust? Heresy? Supreme anger? Horniness?
Well, the asteroid that basically pushed the big, red, glowing 'RESET' button on our planet wiped out Equestria? That's actually quite clever.. clinically depressing, but clever.
On a related note, Equestria as Pangaea would be an interesting idea, although I'm not sure exactly what kind of story one could mold from it besides a pseudo-copy of yours...