• Member Since 11th Apr, 2012
  • offline last seen 9 hours ago

Bad Horse


Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.

T
Source

Practice makes perfect. And Princess Twilight wants everything to be perfect. Especially the end of the world.

Chapters (8)
Comments ( 301 )

What will it take for you to write an unabashedly happy story, Bad Horse? A petition? Divine commandment? The words "BH WRITE HAPPY STORY PLS" spelled out on the Moon in huge letters?

Yes, yes, this is brilliant, and clever, and unutterably sad, just as you meant it to be, but think of the good you could you if you put your incredible powers in the service of making people smile instead of making them weep softly while reevaluating their existence and finding it wanting.

P.S.

To other readers: I've read the second chapter of this thing. You want to hit that "Favorite" button. You really really do. Trust me on this.

3872452 "Sisters is happy, right? Right? :unsuresweetie:"

3872473
I don't trust it. The cover could be BH lulling you into a false sense of security.

3872452
Honestly I am a bit frighted. Bad Horse stories always seem to trigger a depressive episode...:applejackunsure: Especially his really great ones...

3872473
3872523

No, no, it is happy. But it was ages ago. I want moar happy! :pinkiecrazy:

Alright.

Fave'd
Like'd

Now to go weep. I may or may not be back. :fluttershyouch:

3872452

Trust me on this.

piclair.com/data/ze7qd.jpg
Nah, just joking. Loving the story thus far (and yeah, I already clicked that fav button, don't worry). :raritywink:

Comment posted by Bad Horse deleted Jan 31st, 2014

3872535 That's what you say now. But would you respect me in the morning? (And by "respect", I mean "fear".)

Was my favorite of the writeoff, so I totally dig it as a one-shot. But I'm quite curious what you have in store for the extended version here. :ajsmug:

3872669
You have to respect a evil genius who can go out of his comfort zone.

And if you do not fear one who can be good as easily as be evil, but simply chooses not to, then you are a fool.

A fool.:pinkiecrazy:

3872669
3872704

Listen to Blue, Bad Horse. How do we know your evil means something if you don't demonstrate—regularly—that you could be good but choose not to. Think of the uncertainty that would impart. Think of how stupid we'd feel over our attempts to redeem you—you can comprehend good, and friendship and all that rot, you just choose to be otherwise. Think of how difficult it would be for people to plan against so mercurial a foe who doesn't show mercy but might—on a whim—because being a Dark Lord is all about not having your options constrained. Think how we would despair over ever overcoming you.

Think of the fear.

3872669
But wouldn't it be a satisfying and enriching experience to give the readers warm fuzzy feelings... and then crush them with the sequel?

3872793 3872810 All right, all right--ONE happy story. But don't blame me if your heart explodes.

3872810
don'tgivehimideas

Ixnay on the equelsay, kay?

I do have to congratulate you for breaking new ground in the field of Making Time Loopers' Lives Miserable, which is no small feat. :trixieshiftright:

Powerful story for its size. I look forward to the supplemental chapters, though I'm curious as to what can be added here.

(Anyway, I should get back to writing my Michael Bay version of this. :derpytongue2: I've got lots of paradoxes to sort out.)

3872950
The sequel will involve Big Macintosh becoming a cannibal. A cannibal with cancer. Terminal cancer. Also cataracts.


3872953
Why? Because pain is weakness leaving the body, and your heart is far too weak.

3872669

Pinkie Pie does a wonderful job of keeping Ponyville under her hoof. Look at all those coordinated town-wide musicals! :pinkiehappy:

3873033
Every-time I see that phrase, I want to find whoever said it and kick them in the sensitives repeatedly. With steel toed boots. :pinkiecrazy:

At the very least his nads will become stronger for it. :trollestia:

3873073
Well yeah. With all that pain, simply massive amounts of weakness will be leaving. If you keep it up, soon they'll be INDESTRUCTIBLE. Make sure you stop kicking then lest you damage your own foot.

'Course, if you did that, it would hurt, thus making you stronger, so you could keep kicking them until your foot was more manly and just plain metal than their gonads, at which point you would express more weakness from their bodies and so on and so forth.

Good grief! I believe I've constructed an Infinite Strength Engine. A paradox!

Crikey. This Quantum Algodynamics stuff is hard!


3873033
No, no, no, that's just gratuitously tragic. Bad Horse is more bleak. Think Russian literature but on serious downers.

So Big Mac will be in love with Twilight but he'll never say anything, not about that, not about his love of literature which he hides because, damn it, he's just an apple farmer. And he can only ever be an apple farmer. He'll just spent agonizing day after agonizing day faced with the perfect bleakness of existence until some day a ray of hope appears, he'll do his best to prepare, he'll try, he'll make an effort, and then he'll be utterly crushed. Only nobody will see it like that, see, so he'll hide the hurt. Just fold it all in. Until, one day, his body just gives in, and we close at an eulogy delivered by Twilight Sparkle who's devastated, of course, but whose words betray than not even she got him at all. He's remembered for the least part of him, for the silence, for the labor. What he thought of as himself will fade as if had never existed. The End. The reader goes and hangs him/herself.

3873201 That's brilliant! Hey, I'm going to have to put that happy story on hold, okay?

3873201
3873258
Dammit Ghost! You ruined it! :raritycry:

No wait. This is salvageable.

Okay. Here is what we do. Bad Horse. Write the happy story. Because you can't have this story.


Ghost is writing it.

3873201
Hmm, lets just take a peak in my Notepad of Cunning Plans.

Cunning Plan #314: Ghost Ruse
Step 1: Bait the trap by mentioning a downer sequel involving Big Mac abuse
Step 2: Watch GoH outline the soul crushing sequel far better than I could
Step 3: Listen to the distant yet unmistakable sound of a horse cackling

Ah yes, everything seems to be in order here!

3873258

The lonely person that noone understands is boring and old. Where's the tragic story of the person that everyone understood completely, and was never able to escape an extremely social existence?

3872452 Certainly that would end with the writer of the words across the moon dying, alone and unloved while the rest of the world fails to look up into the sky. :pinkiehappy:
3873258 Darnit, GoH, you just had to open your mouth. Now the gloom of eternal night shall enfold the site as the Dark One spins his web of pain and agony across our blighted souls. Hell, yes, I'll read it. :rainbowlaugh:

Woo! Glad to see this posted! It deserves all the attention it gets.

Looking forward to the rest of it, too. :twilightsmile:

3873258
Hey, now, y'all know what happens to ponies who break their word 'round these here parts, right?

'sright.

We defenestrate them.

And you wouldn't want anything happening to yer fenestras all sudden-like. :pinkiecrazy:


3873309
Oh really? Watch me take that plot and turn it 'round into a heartwarming tale.

After the end, pen lifts from paper and it's Big Mac writing this whole thing out as catharsis. He's just come back from town where his attempt to submit something to a literary competition—say one invented by the, ahem, librarian—was interpreted as a really funny misunderstanding. Nobody laughed with malice, but they laughed all the same. Nobody wanted him put down, but they did want him in the little box they set up in their minds for him and those such as him. So he's left and he's in that disused barn where he hides his writing.

Except.

Except someone who keeps an eye on him—oh, for Reasons—notices what happened. And so she follows him and sneaks in. First he tries to hide his work, but she teases the truth out of him and he shows her a page or two. After a while there's a gentle wing across his back and a pressure on his side and she reads and—oh, all the princesses and especially this one how he always loved to see her read—and her eyes lit up and she says it's really brilliant and offers to take it to the contest.

Later, there is kissing. :heart:

There. Happiness. :twilightblush::eeyup:


3873383
Everyone dies alone and unloved. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

...that's it. I'm overdosing on Bleak Horse. :applejackconfused:

Eyup :applejackunsure:

I would've liked to see more of Applejack's reaction. Seems like she knew somehow. How did she know, or is it just that Twi can't face the Honesty? There's no 'moment of lie' that'll work for AJ? Ripoff :rainbowhuh:

:rainbowdetermined2: Somewhere in space there's a tiny, rainbow crater on a big ugly hunk of very quick rock.

Glad I read this.

3874326

Everyone dies alone and unloved.

While I suppose death itself is a lonely experience, I so no reason why everyone dies unloved.

If... if this was second place... what in the unholy lands of FimFiction was first?
...I will go find out.

3874560
I was just gently teasing our Esteemed Host's propensity for unutterable bleakness. I don't actually believe what I wrote.

Okay... On Ghost's recommendation, I will cautiously give this a watch... A like will be pending next chapter upon seeing where you're going with this.

(My caution comes from the fact that I am not, generally, a fan of bleak/depressing - as might be evidenced by the one and only pony fic I wrote in defiance after seeing something that had a similar, but much more clumsily and poorly handled premise (with the obvious other major difference that this is actually going to go... somewhere...) and just one-too many "Twilight grows up old and alone" stories.)

But I will give it a fair shot.

3872793

I found this comment amusingly hilarious, because despite it being completely unrelated, it actually describes me pretty well...

3874326 "Everyone dies alone and unloved...."

Reminds me of this: All I want to do is die quietly in my sleep like my uncle, not screaming in panic like all the passengers on his bus.

An asteroid impact...

Again...

Uhm... couldn't Celestia just position the Sun between Equestria and the asteroid? You know, cuz she can move the Sun?

Or maybe they could just nudge the planet to side a degree or two... or create an arrangement of the Sun, Moon, and Equestria such that the asteroid's path is deflected by the gravitational effects.

I mentioned that in the previous story I read about Equestria getting asploded by an asteroid.

It's not a very plausible doomsday scenario in a world where ponies can move stars. :twilightsmile:

This is a wonderfully written story. I very much enjoyed it. Thank you for taking the time to write it and share it with the world. I'm looking forward to reading more from you.

3875013 It'll take three more chapters to turn around.

3875240 The world of MLP isn't spelled out enough or consistent enough to make anything plausible or implausible. Celestia raising the sun isn't consistent with there being a sun before Celestia, or with Equestria being on a spherical planet. Raising the moon exactly when the sun isn't in the sky isn't compatible with any celestial mechanics we know. You don't know if they're on a spherical planet; you don't know if it orbits the sun or the sun is a gentle magical fire a thousand feet in diameter. You don't know if the moon is bigger or smaller than the sun. The most scientifically consistent hypothesis is that the whole raising the sun / nightmare moon thing is an elaborate prank or game by the sisters.

So, yes, there are plausibility problems with the asteroid. I made it implausibly huge to try to hush those kinds of objections. You have to leave some of your impulses to consistency at the door when entering the world of MLP. It might not be plausible that Celestia can't divert an asteroid, but then it isn't very plausible that she'd be unable to defeat Chrysalis in one-on-one combat. And it isn't plausible that they have electroencephalograms but not radio or telephone, or that they have a labor-based economy when there's a magical pool next door that can duplicate people, or that a third of the population can do magic and yet the only device in Equestria that uses magic is a single apple-cider-making machine, or that gryphons can find anything to eat in Ponyville, or that an entire race of dogs (obligate carnivores) lives underground.

I could construct a hundred different scenarios to explain why the princesses were low on magic at the time, or why magic didn't work that why, or how Discord had interfered, yadda yadda. And it would be reasonable to demand that if we had a clear idea of what is and isn't possible in Equestria, but we don't.

At some point you've got to let it go, man.

3873201
What you described is very similar to something I read once before FimFiction was a thing, and I don't think it ever made it's way here. I ought'a find it.


images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101111022234/spongebob/images/thumb/b/bb/3_hours_later.jpg/554px-3_hours_later.jpg


Never mind, it's totally on FimFiction! Though I was actually remembering two stories, one a sequel to the other, as a single story. Both very short, though. Took me way too long to find the damn things, with their vague descriptions and unremembered names, but at least now I have them in my FimFiction favourites list.
Ships That Pass in the Night
The Three Notes

I totally had to listen to this while reading.

Excellent work. :pinkiesad2: If really, really sad.

Clever, it's almost like hard reset, forced to live through only a short time, 23 minutes, except this time she can go back at will, and from the looks of it, she has been doing this for a very long time.

Interested and waiting...

3875761
You there. Yes YOU

You should get a MEDAL for those words.

People in the mlp community in all facets like to create headcannon, it natural to try to find an explanation when there is none, but FAR, FAR too many people argue about their validity and whose "right." Too many people just can't get it into there heads that it's a fantasy world created for a young audience and is treated as such. It doesn't have some underlying truth or logic to it, it never had one in the first place.

And that's what I love about headcannon, there is no "right" or "wrong" to what you make oif it, because, technically, non of it is correct.

Goddamn, dude...

You know, I hate tragedies. The biggest reason I dislike End of Ponies is that at the end, no matter what happens, everypony we know and love will still be dead. I hate seeing my ponies die. But this...

You have written a beautiful picture of not a princess trying to stave of disaster, but of a mare trying to get just one moment of happiness, one she denied herself because "there will always be another day," before the end.

Faved, brah. Faved hard. :ajsmug:

SO... wait. If she forgets everything every time she loops, then how is she narrating?

3877264 No no no, she's saying that she stopped learning new things because the addition of each identical loop to the endless array of identical loops before it has stopped changing her mental state. She doesn't forget, but the last loop that's getting added is nothing new.

WAT

NO

I THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE A BALM, NOT A KICK

3877289

So... why does she say she can't just end it? I thought it meant something about how the loops affected her won't let her change the decision?

3877464 If she was going to change her mind she would have changed her mind while her memories were still changing. At this point all she remembers are identical loops. Nothing about her situation is going to change, ever, so why would her decision change?

It's not literally true. Maybe realizing that she's trapped in an endless cycle and has given up hope is the change that'll make her change her mind? :pinkiecrazy:

3877601 This fic is starting to get too complicated...

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