Chapter 4: Second Break
Once again we go from an examination of Reality to the expression of the Fantasies of the salesmares, the ones they hope will convince you to buy the products of their clients. Reality all has the same author and quality; the degrees of skill and resultant products of the salesmares are quite variable.
Once again, the volume rises, to sell.
***
Tinkling half-abstract music plays over a perfectly white room, in which a mare stands. Her coat is pure white, and she has a long, flowing straight black mane with one white streak down one side; her legs are long and her stance proud. She wears a peach-colored scarf and a strange frilly sort of garment about her upper hindquarters, rather like a translucent pair of shorts. She would be beautiful, were she not terribly skinny, but then this is the new fashion for beauty, taken up by a population most of whom have never known real hunger for a day in her life. Her expression is absolutely emotionless, and she speaks one word as if hypnotized: "Succession."
We switch to a big, muscular stallion. He is entirely orange; his mane has been dyed to match his coat. His face is firm-jawed, beetle-brown, and utterly vacant. He is wearing a blue propellor beanie and, for absolutely no obvious reason, a matching blue tail-bow, as if he were a mare of six thousand years ago. The camera focuses on his face; he has an absolutely-determined and yet incredibly-vacant expression, as if he is very heavily drugged. He says, in a gruff masculine tone: "Succession."
Three Ponies, a rather trim red stallion wearing a formal dinner jacket and two mares, both peach-coated and very slim, wearing very wispy evening gowns through which their whole forms can be discerned, with frilly shorts on underneath and very high, spike-heeled shoes, trot by as a female narrator, speaking in a heavy Prench accent, says "Succession."
The music grows wildly and atonally dramatic, almost painful to hear, and all five Ponies stand atop rectangular objects of different heights, facing in what looks like random directions, with very dramatic and yet vacant expressions. A male narrator, speaking in a Pranco-Germane accent says: "The new fragrance, for new Ponies who dare to be different yet belong to the future. The fragrance that comes forth to take up the torch of change, the new leader ..."
All five say together: "Succession."
Across the bottom of the screen appears a famous logo: an indigo "R," coiled as if it were a mane, with two lovely long-lashed blue eyes peering out from them, gazing directly at the viewer, over the words: "Rarity Enterprises, Ltd."
***
Far away from the interview, there is conference room located near the top of a tall skyscraper looking down on the gorgeous tracery of light that is midtown Manehattan by night. Despite the lateness of the hour, that conference room is full of Ponies.
The Ponies in the conference room are jubilant.
"And it's launched," says the tall, lanky Pegasus stallion in the suit jacket, blazer and tie. His coat is cream, his mane white-blond, his eyes blue, and his face at once smiling and firm-jawed, as if he is both satisfied and defiant at once. He turns to the others, obviously expectant.
"Great ad, H. C!" says one of his subordinates, a pert-faced orange-maned aqua Earth Pony mare, standing bolt upright from her chair in her enthusiasm. Enthusiastic cries of "Yes!" from the others.
"Fantastic ad, H. C!" chimes in another, her eyes shining in honest enthusiasm.
"The best ad ever!" opines a third, waving a hoof excitedly.
"The ..." the fourth one begins. Everypony else looked at him questioningly. "... the greatest ad in ... the history of advertising?" He is a small Pegasus stallion, gray-coated with curly dark gray hair, wearing glasses held on with an athletic strap. His face is nervous and eminently forgettable.
"Indeed," replies the tall cream Pegasus. "I have today initiated a new age of advertising, one which goes beyond the mere presentation of products in terms of their utility or even desirability. Instead, I shall sell the ad itself to the public, as a work of art which will lead them to herd after it and buy the product so that they can shine in my reflected glory."
His followers look at him worshipfully, smiling in awe and in what -- on most of the female and at least one of the male faces -- looks remarkably like lust.
High Concept beams benignly down upon them. Just a perfume advertisting campaign, but everypony has to start somewhere. This catapults Conceptual Advertising onto a broader stage. It's just the beginning.
He thinks briefly of his real father, who had refused to marry his mother, who failed to see her worth and by implication the worth of his bastard foal. His father, who did not and had never wanted to be more than a small-scale society writer, a mere hanger-on, a cheeful, mindless bon vivant. Who utterly lacked in the true vision High Concept himself possessed.
I'll show you, Dad, he vows to himself, and not for the first time. I'll show them all.
As much as he can be, High Concept is ... in that moment ... happy.
***
In the parlor of a small mansion near Ponyville, sitting on a very large and overstuffed couch, its framework made of moonsilver, and upholstered with a lush but very tough composite silastic fabric -- resistant to casual penetration even by Dragon claws, which was why the designer chose it -- sit a very unusual couple. She is a white-coated Alicorn, with the long-elaborately styled indigo mane and lovely blue eyes on which was modeled the corporate logo. He is a long-limbed, late-adolescent purple Dragon, with green spikes and a yellow-green belly; his eyes are green and intensely intelligent.
They are Rarity Belle and her husband Spike the Dragon, the two principal owners of Rarity Enterprises, Ltd, and their jaws are gaping in utter astonishment. They look at each other with expressions of dawning horror.
Rarity is, as usual, the first to express herself vocally.
It is not a pleasant sound.
***
We return to the fantasy in front of the screen. This time, it is shot in a dismal gray-toned black-and-white, subtly out of focus. The seeming low quality of the image is entirely intentional.
The camera whirls confusingly around the interior of a subway car, such as one might famously find running beneath the streets of Manehattan, or less famously beneath the streets of most large Equestrian cities in this postwar era. The cities have sprawled; motorcars have congested their streets, and webs of steel and electricity spread through tunnel networks to transport commuters from suburban homes to urban occupations.
The camera stops whirling and finds its subject. A young, handsome but rather troubled-looking Earth Pony stallion, with a soft light-brown mane and brown coat, wearing a business suit and overcoat, stands in the car. He is also whirling around, as if he were a small colt confused by the increased complexity of the new world he must inhabit. He changes trains at a station, and boards a crowded car in which he he can barely find a seat. Bored Ponies sit all around him, utterly-uninterested in his existence.
He sees a pretty little mare, smiles winsomely at her, a smile offering nothing but the purest Love and Friendship. She seems for a moment to respond to his sunny nature, then gives a disgusted little moue, rolls her eyes, and turns away to read her magazine. He will find no friends here -- he is alone in this packed train carriage, in a world which is suspicious of normal equine warmth.
He gets off, walks through the brick and concrete and glass artificial canyons of the urban downtown. Around him swirl the multitudes, Ponies hurrying from trains and buses to work, Ponies who have no time for any softer emotions at this moment, for they must focus on survival in a competitive environment in its own way every bit as cruel and pitiless as the Primal Plains.
He looks up at the skyscrapers in wonder. They gaze coldly back down at him in bleak indifference. He tries to stop and breathe in some beauty from his surroundings. Most Ponies ignore him. A few look at him as if he is crazy.
He walks through the crowds, his stride subtly out of pace with the Ponies around him. He accidentally blocks the way of an inense-looking little black-maned stallion. They do the little urban dance of trying to pass one another, accidentally blocking each other's way again and again. The smaller stallion stares at him, obviously blaming him for this situation, resenting the even temporary retardation of his passage to whatever urgent business calls him.
Finally our hero stops and smiles at the smaller stallion, graciously waving him past. The black-maned stallion gives him an even nastier glare and hurries past, shoving him aside, obviously within an emotional hoof-length of actually kicking him. Tempers run high in this overcrowded city, where Ponies are packed together in numbers vaster than any conditions for which they evolved.
Saddened, he stops dead in the crowd and closes his eyes ...
... And suddenly, the screen explodes in full glorious color!
He is standing on the white sands of some tropical isle, probably somewhere in the Gulf River or Carriagebean Sea, maybe the Bayhaymas. Blue waves lap the beach; behind him is a skyscraper, but one whose lines are pleasantly rounded, rather like some colossal beehive, and gaily bedecked in iridescent paneling and multi-hued bunting.
His face breaks out in a disbelieving smile as he sees this beautiful building. He walks toward the structure. On the beach are happy Ponies, families or couples, some of the latter very obviously though tastefully courting. Serving them meals and drinks are equinoid figures -- technically also Ponies, since their ancestors were one of the Five Kinds, but only recently rejoined with their kin.
They might almost be mistaken for gigantic arthopods, for their bodies are sheathed in black exoskeletons of a substance technically called chitkeratin, which strongly-resembles the chitinous shells of insects or spiders. They bear filmy wings and single curved little horns; their eyes are great and lidless, protected by layers of optkeratin. Their ears are like antennae. Small fangs protrude from their mouths.
They are decorated as gaily as is their Hive-scraper. Their shells have been polished to a high shine, and colorfully-lacquered. Their Marks, normally visible only in the infra-red, have been outlined in more lacquer, so that they no longer have the lack of individuality that made them so terrifying to Equestrian Ponies in the wars of decades ago.
These were once the Flutter Ponies, though they ceased to be such over two and a half millennia ago. For most of those two and a half millennia they were a horror out of dark myth, a rumored presence in the darkness outside the circles cast by Pony firelights -- worse, a terror that could take the form of loved ones and slip into those charmed circles, to feed their singular hungers and thirsts. Still worse, sometimes they would carry off an especially-unlucky Pony, to eke out the rest of his doubtless short life feeding them in their own hidden homes.
Briefly, one of their Domains was revealed as an open Enemy, led by a mad High Queen of Hunger to invade Equestria, overrun the Vale of Avalon, threaten Canterlot itself. For two and a half years, war raged, with increasingly-destructive weapons, and allies including Friendly Hives led by the High Queen of Kindness, until Hunger and her last Hive perished in a sea of roiling radioactive earthfire, and the long nightmare of the Changelings was at last over.
At last they came blinking out into the light, accepted into Ponykind, integrated into the Equestrian economy, doing their best to become part of the larger Equestrian culture. This is one of those efforts, and one of their more sucessful ones.
As the stallion trots up to the Hivescraper, two Stewards, members of a Worker subcaste, come out to greet him with happy, welcoming smiles. The Desk Clerk, an Administrative Worker, smiles even more warmly at him as he approaches her station. They are glad to see him. The gladness is quite genuine, though the Administrative Worker for the sake of this advertisement is actually being played by a skilled Infiltrator. The Hive is putting its best face forward for this spot.
Fade-out on the now-relaxed stallion as he sits on the beach sipping a colorful drink out of a glass with a little umbrella in it. He is smiling at a cute young mare, who returns his friendliness open-heartedly.
She may even in truth be an Earth Pony. They get a lot of guests here.
A warm female voice speaks over the images.
"Take a Club Medfly vacation," she says reassuringly. "The antidote to civilization."
A critical mind might point out that this is in fact the essence of civilization, that the uncivilized thing was the former state of continual parasitism, occasional predation and sporadic covert warfare that existed between Equestria and the Changelings. By comparison, this is all more or less open and above-board. The Ponies are Guests rather than Captives: they pay nominal fees in bits, and the Hive does its best to make themselves loved by their Guests, by providing the most luxurious and sybaritic vacation imaginable, according to the tastes of their visitors. And thus, the Hive gets the more important payment.
"All we really want is your love," the voice concludes.
Which is quite true.
Welcome to the Reconciliation.
***
The camera centers on an old castle. It's obviously an old castle, from the design ... high curtain walls in a location defensible from the ground, designed by Ponies who feared neither the gunpowder of the Time of Unification, nor the more potent weapons of the Second Age of Wonders. The banners it flies are mostly archaic, many the symbols of Houses long-extinct save in their theoretical union with that of the Royal Realm, when Celestia made herself their matriarchs by her adoption into their clans and the passage of sufficient time for her to become their senior mare.
But everypony knows this castle. They've seen it ruined, in documentaries from forty years ago. They remember its restoration. They've seen its reopening, and numerous news reports shot with this iconic structure as a backdrop.
Princess Luna Selena Nyx has the Palace at Canterlot. Princess Twilight Sparkle has the Castle of Friendship at Ponyville. They both, together, keep the castle where they first met and spoke to one another in their present incarnations; the castle Luna destroyed and Twilight restored.
The Castle of the Two Royal Pony Sisters, looking down on the reborn City of Everfree.
A mellifluous, confident female voice begins speaking. The audience has heard that voice before: she was everypony's darling in the moving pictures of the 1510's, a romantic lead famous in films from the 1520's. The roles began to dry up in the 1530's. Unwise personal choices and changes in popular tastes have led her to take any respectable work she can land, the better to keep her in her Applewood mansion high in the Hills. The voice is full of class: she perfected the aristocratic and yet approachable tone in her movies.
"Come back to the place where Equestria began, to the city of legends, for gracious yet affordable living in an urban setting in the midst of beautiful primal wilderness, easily accessible by car, train and public transit."
She enunciates each word so well, delivers her speech with such a smooth upper-class accent, that any flaws in the logic of her statements have been lost in the beauty of their utterance, and the beauty of the scene as the camera, now from a low aerial perspective mastered by Ponies the moment that they invented cameras small and rugged enough to be carried and used by a flying Pegasus photographer.
The city of Everfree is both modern and lovely. All but its oldest section, built right next to the castle, was laid out after the Wars, and wide, straight, multilane boulevards offer ample clearance for all manner of motor vehicles. Tall buildings tower in the old town, though by civic ordnance none of them top the turrets of the ancient castle, all of them aesthetically pleasing, both singly and in combination. The finest architects and engineers bult this city, in part to the plans of its ancient predecessor, in part to the needs of the new super-scientific age of airplanes and fast motorcars, computers and earthfire.
"Here, for but a fraction of what you would find in Canterlot, you can enjoy a studio, apartment, house rental or even home ownership."
The scene repeatedly changes, showing progressively more sumptuous living quarters, with figures flashing to indicate sample prices. The numbers are less important than the images, of happy, confident and good-looking Ponies -- ranging from healthy young colts and fillies through handsome young stallions and mares all the way to distinguished -- never decrepit -- older stallions and mares breezing through obviously-successful upper-class to upper-middle-class lives. Notably, none of them were depicted without obvious mates and in many cases happy families.
"Come see us at Everfree Estates, offices in every major city." A list of addresses and phone numbers roll across the screen. "We can find you the right home at the right place."
Live here, the advertisement whispers by implication, and you too will be rich and successful. You will find good mates, you will have children with them. Live in our houses, and you will have the kind of lives which others will admire.
The Ponies are hardly stupid. But they are the gregarious descendants of herd animals, and this approach works well on them.
Besides, the message is mostly true. Everfree City is a great place to live: it's mostly new and well-planned construction, advantageously-situated on the superhighway network; outside the urban core, land is still relatively cheap, and thus housing and rents inexpensive. And Equestria is enjoying a great economic expansion: most Ponies have plenty of bits to spare.
The Ponies the camera focuses upon are actors and actresses, chosen in part for their appearance and ability to project the desired image. But some of the clips are pans across crowds of Ponies in Everfree City, and these are just the ordinary folk who really dwell there, though there has been an effort to edit out any scenes of anypony positively unattractive, an attempt to focus on the Beautiful Ponies.
And they are, for the most part, happy and healthy and successful Ponies. Only -- and this is very subtle -- especially among the younger Ponies, is there something soft about them? Their smiles are cheerful enough, but their faces perhaps a bit vacant, their body language and expressions somewhat artificial?
Once, the skies opened and the Shadows rained down on Ponykind, and heroines and heroes strode forth to fight for all Earth life against an evil from beyond the Universe. Once, fires flashed and thunders roared, and Ponies proved their right to live in the only manner which Strife accepts, by successfully struggling to survive. It was a time of terror and triumph, horror and glory, stark tragedy and high heroism.
The Ponies won, and wrought -- from the tools they made for war -- a bright new world in which to raise their children. Their civilization has leaped through two centuries of technological progress in two decades, bringing unprecedented safety and security, luxury and wealth. Now a post-war generation has grown who know naught of peril or predation, life-threatening violence or serious want. A generation who, perhaps, do not fully appreciate the value of what their parents fought to win for them.
The Ponies have achieved their Second Age of Wonders, climbed back to the heights they had lost four thousand years ago, gained and surpassed them. They have attained paradise.
Can the children hold on to what their parents have won?
Here's my main inspiration for Club Medfly.
They hope you love them ...
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of perhaps?
Nice to see this update after the long wait
. keep it up!
5894847
Fixed ... thanks for pointing this out!
Symbiosis is always so much more rewarding than parasitism. Far better publicity, and no one's dropping nukes on you.
As for that final question... well, between the increasing numbers of immortals to remind the younger generations of the struggles of their forebears and the challenges of space colonization, I think ponykind will be okay.
5894954
Well, indirectly. HIgh Concept is Trenderhoof's son. Trenderhoof himself is a far nicer guy, though hardly perfect.
Oh yes. The other Ponies still aren't sure of the Changelings, but for the most part said Changelings are being honest.
I agree. Some of the more adventurous Ponies are already going offworld.
5894954
5895000 I was already blown away by High Concept, and now that I realize that he's Trenderhoof's son, I am doubly blown away. Who was his mom? (Did I also catch a glimpse of Silver Shill?)
That perfume ad truly IS alarmingly familiar for high end designer goods, although the explorer's Louis Vuitton ad and the jeans ad using "O Pioneers" are at the top of my list.
This does not look like "Places You Need A Designer Handbag."
I'm sorry, guys. Walt Whitman would plotz.
I also LOVED Club Medfly. See, people? It can work!
5895111
I'm glad you liked High Concept. He's more a Jerk than a true Villain.
I was not sure at first whether I wanted Trenderhoof to be dead, but I decided that he's still alive and living in happy luxury as one of the grand old stallions of Society. I doubt that either Applejack or Rarity have anything against him anymore -- why should they? Both of them have been happily married and successful in their careers beyond their wildest dreams of youth for decades now, and neither of them are so unfair and petty as to blame him for an embarrassing situation that was at least in part their own faults as well.
Sadly, Trenderhoof doesn't get on well with his son, among other things for the reasons hinted at in High Concept's internal monologue.
I didn't have Silver Shill there -- remember, he'd be quite old now, so he'd look like an elder stallion. I kind of like the background Sketcha-holic is giving him, though, and will probably make that part of my headcanon in general. It's unlikely to get jossed, because the show's unlikely to ever do a Silver Shill centric episode.
I had a specific ad in mind for "Succession," I think it was one of the late 1980's Calvin Klein "Obsession" ads. I couldn't find it online. The "Club Medfly" ad is a cross between several of them, but mostly the one to which I linked. The Everfree City real estate ad is sort of a composite of many real estate ads that I've seen.
So when do they have open contact with the humans, I'm looking forward to that.^_^
That first ad... is both terrifying and something I could easily see being a real thing. Which, given your comments, I guess it is.
How does that sell? No, seriously, what aspect of the human psyche makes that work? It's like eldritch terror perfume.
And now I'm thinking of a horror film based around animated perfume bottles.
Invisible cutie marks for the changelings, huh? I would presume that means they can see in the infra-red, too, which would also mean that there's a negligible temperature difference between changelings (while disguised, at least) and ponies, since they can't seem to tell themselves apart while they're in disguise.
It is rather strange how much emphasis ponies seem to put on the presence of cutie marks, from a human perspective. I mean, when they come across the town in The Cutie Map, Twilight insists that its the fact that they all have the same cutie mark that is strange.
No, Twilight. It's the smiles. The smiles are creepier by far.
Kinda like that last line of the changeling ad. Perhaps they should have left that part out. Or put it in a small, text-based disclaimer along the bottom of the screen, if they're worried about legal issues. But hey! Apparently, creepy works! Good on you, changeling marketers!
Methinks a lack of tribulation in the newest generation is a problem which will solve itself, in time. Perhaps not soon, probably not pleasantly, but eventually. That sort of problem tends to do that.
Oh, how I love that commercial with the Changeling-run resort. That really does sound like something they'd do if they could live openly. Three cheers for the shapeshifting emotion-eating bug ponies.
6014535
I've always found car commercials hilarious, once I understood the psychology behind them. And I cut my teeth on Mad Magazine, back when it used to be really good.
I thought you'd like Club Medfly.
6014779 I've always found car commercials hilarious, once I understood the psychology behind them.
Yes. Both amusing and vaguely sad to see 'sex sells' used to push product even in Ponyland,
Though nothing will ever top those Burger King commercials from years ago that seemed like they were advertising for high quality porn until you saw it was about a hamburger, of all things.
And yes, I do indeed like Club Medfly. At least the 'lings can live openly and honestly in the future.
Wow this is interesting i can't wait for more!!!
6014828
Ironic since in the pony pov series, ponies think 'porn' is a type of popcorn.
Someone (H L Mencken?) once said 'the reason no one ever went broke underestimating the public's taste is that no one ever succeeded in underestimating the public's taste.". He also said "the lowest common denominator is both incredibly common and remarkably low."