Hmm, changelings of different colors, each feeding off different emotions. Friggin' brilliant, dude. As always, love the flowery description of the land and the sorrow.

5334419 Indeed, it paints a picture showing that the Caribou invasion has other victims besides those we can see.

5334419

I wanted to expand the world. Each fae species has their own look and capability. Pooka become animals, Gremlins small objects, and so on. Changelings are the most experienced at taking normal pony forms.

The descriptions of the land are some of my favorite things. I want to use my artistry to really get across the point that what had been the most... near-perfect world has been ruined, for no good reason at all.

5334419

I wanted to expand the world. Each fae species has their own look and capability. Pooka become animals, Gremlins small objects, and so on. Changelings are the most experienced at taking normal pony forms.

The descriptions of the land are some of my favorite things. I want to use my artistry to really get across the point that what had been the most... near-perfect world has been ruined, for no good reason at all.

WHAT?!! Chrysalis? There has got to be some mistake. The Queen of all Changelings would not fall to such depraved simple beasts such as the Caribou, nor would such insolent 'magic' make her a subservient mongrel. (Honestly, changelings wouldn't be effected by 'lust' magic or anything of that nature. Doesn't fit with them.)

Though...This is 'that' series, so stupidity runs rampant....It still doesn't fit right with me.

5338854

I'm going off of two elements, one direct impression, one logical derivation.

Direct impression: I heard from someone who actually saw some images that the face of Chrysalis was used as a kind of threat/warning; that is, she's on Caribou propaganda telling ponies to obey.

Logical Derivation: This is absolute pants-on-head insane MRA misogyny bullhonkus. Even quisling females are treated like torture toys. Given that micro-dick King Gary Stu has all the power of pure MacGuffinium, he need not even pretend to be afraid of Chrysalis or give her anything resembling respect. So while he likely uses her image (and commands her subjects with impunity) she s very probably being continually tortured, if she isn't, in fact, dead.

7617543

Because I'm a socialist and a rose is too peaceful of a symbol for what is essentially WWII if it was only fought by the Free French, Brits and the Russians against Ultra-Hitler. The iconography is powerful, in propaganda terms.

7618229

Iconography cares little for anything but results. See also the various designs of cross, which as a collective represent a mistaken impression of an Imperial Roman execution device (the Tau cross is more accurate) and in specific cases are used as a noble sign (Maltese cross, Lorraine cross) they have also been negatively highlighted while used as "good" symbols (the Iron Cross, a cross pattée used by the Teutonic Order). As I say, I'm a pony propagandist. Take an agrarian and industrial pair, give them a symbolic color scheme, add them to the old iconography a la the Free French flag, and you get a common cultural touchpoint in the universe. You seem to be thinking with your biases rather than inside the universe, which had no such thing. It was a morally neutral symbol, made positive by association. Try "Blue eyed Matador" and "Suffer the children" back to back to see how it works.

7728426

Thank you! I like to make the effort to make stories that are engaging and reasonably unique. I do what research I can if I'm using some element that could be enhanced by that, and strive to make the interpersonal matters worthy of my readers' time. I'm so glad you enjoyed this effort.

The EOEN series as a whole I would say is one of exactly two anti-FoE 'fics I have read that is actually really good (the other being KnightMysterio's Fall of the Caribou). It strikes a really good balance between showcasing just how terrible the Fall actually is, and giving the resistance the chance to actually accomplish objectives and not just wallow in despair and EDGE all the time. I'd say that this particular 'fic is the best out of the whole series (and just in general it improves with time) but really they are all good.

At times, especially early on, the stories get a bit didactic in tone, although given the nature of the material you are dealing with I really cannot judge you too harshly for that. Sometimes these didactic bits even produce some relatively novel and interesting ideas- I particularly liked the bit in Interlocutor where the Caribou are seen as peculiar for 'sexing' abstract concepts and inanimate objects.

The Black Knight also walks a fine line just shy of being a complete Gary Stu, but he's sort of like Batman in that we actually get to see how he pulls off the implausible tricks he pulls and that actually makes him a very effective character. It helps that basically all of the other resistance characters are fleshed-out badasses in their own right as well.

There are some kind of just weird things about the way the 'fic is written where it seems to not directly interact with FoE- despite being described as medieval throwbacks (which is pretty accurate) the Caribou at times have a very 20th-century vibe to them, and some terms are inexplicably changed from what 'standard' FoE uses ('reassigned' versus 'switched', 'Heartless Hind' versus 'Dainn', and I don't think Hraljord is ever actually referred to by name). Also I am not clear why, despite all these other changes, the characters were kept anthro when FoE did that purely to make them more wankable and that is obviously not the intent here. But these are minor nitpicks. Overall this is excellent and I'd love to see it revived with a final strike to liberate Canterlot.

9749361
Oh my word, this is exactly the kind of comment I hope for. Appreciative but constructively critical. Your praise is kind and your notes well appreciated. As you might have guessed, I took a few... creative liberties for a few different reasons, one being that as written originally they would have genuinely failed, and done so with such spectacular grandeur it would have made some kind of hybrid Titanic/Hindenburg disaster look like a door ding in a parking lot.

I also started slightly blind. Being loath to really dig into the terms of art I absorbed what concepts I could from popular presentations, extrapolated a bit, and filled in all the huge gaps that bad porn leaves when it makes a world. I didn't even initially know they were caribou and you see it in the VERY earliest stories, because the creator was, and this seems to be consensus, a literal idiot that could not use Google. On the internet. Caribou are NOT sexually dimorphic. Cows are the same size and grow the same antlers. Regular deer are ridiculously dimorphic and comparatively sexist, if anthropomorphized. Hence the nickname, which I used because I genuinely didn't know his name was Dainn, people didn't use it much in a lot of the images. It's also a meta-literary thing. In-universe, they're fighting a propaganda war. During such a thing you don't give your enemy the glory of his true name and titles. You curse him with epithets. "The Heartless Hind" even has two meanings to cognoscenti. It could just mean the cruel deer, getting the species wrong and calling him evil. But in an older verbiage, which the Black Knight loves, it means the gutless coward. Heartless, lacking the seat of bravery, and honor, and love. Hind, a timid creature, a symbol of abject cowardice.

I also got the VERY clear vibe from them of fascists. They're authoritarian, autocratic invaders pushing for undeserved lebenstraum for their master race. Mixed with Vikings, another common Nazi icon especially in neo-Nazi circles. They're like some hideous Frankenstein of Nazis, Vikings, Incels, and Pick-up Artists. All written and consumed by people upset at Stacey and Chad and angry that women have jobs and can tell them to take baths or stop creepily creeping. It's why I don't use the real name of the money/idea man. Just Creepy McCreeperson the Creepy Creeper who Creeps.

I tried to keep as much as I could, in the interest of making it a... generally equitable fiction. Remaining anthro was one of the conceits I kept just to maintain some parity. I actually gave them a larger army. Several thousand is what I hear originally. Several thousand, including non-combatants, primitive northmen invading a continent-spanning ultra-modern technological nation with a population that could be estimated to reach into the hundred of millions or billions. A partisan militia of tool-armed volunteers could swallow them whole and spit out cleaned bones. I shored things up with a suitably impressive brainwashed force and only an implicit number of actual caribou. They also somehow overran other entire nations like griffins and zebra. And buffalo. It's pathetic. They should by all rights lose every kind of war they could wage, from words, to ideals, to attrition, especially attrition. I have to work hard to keep them from losing by default. Have to make them selectively clever and dangerously bloodthirsty so they can stand up long enough to be cut down. I also need to make note of everything Creepy McCreeperson forgot to write in like the buffalo, plus donkeys, dragons, Diamond Dogs, Changelings. I'm doing his work for free. All to spit in his face. It's like Khosrau Anushirawan. "Your soldiers choose me, your towns choose me, and your people choose me." By just making the effort, putting in the serious mental work, I'm running victory laps around him while he's tripping over his pants.

Again, I thank you very kindly. I hope I addressed everything I needed to.

9749876
I never really particularly saw them as fascists, but I wouldn't say that's really wrong either. They're so one-dimensional that they can really kind of be anything, and to attempt anything resembling a serious deconstruction of the premise you have to make them something because otherwise they're just cardboard cutouts with the word 'rape' written on them in crayon so they may as well be fascists. If nothing else your writing style kind of reminds me of the tone of a lot of literature that was written in 1930s Europe (Welles, Capek, etc.) so it's a decent fit on that alone. Although it's an open question whether in doing so you are insulting the caribou by comparing them to fascists or insulting fascists by comparing them to the caribou. I'm pretty sure even the Wolfenstein-type Nazis would think twice about taking over the world if they had to construct a giant revolving crystal penis to do it. Probably a little of both, then.

But yeah I can't blame you for not staring too deeply into the faintly jizz-scented darkness of Edgelord Supreme's basement just to track down specific terms. I only know enough to nitpick because I've been cross-correlating terms from a bunch of different anti-FoE 'fics for a good long while know, a lot of which weren't out when you were updating your own. Interestingly, anti-FoE 'fics seem to outnumber regular FoE 'fics by a factor of about 3 to 1 but maybe I am just not finding the conventional stuff. Not that I really even want to...

It's weird. All of the approaches to anti-FoE 'fics I've seen have been really, really different. It's been years and still I don't think anyone is entirely sure what to make of the whole thing, like it just fails in more ways than a single mind can hold onto or put into a coherent narrative.

Christ this thing is easy to rip on. The jokes practically write themselves. I'm not usually this colorful!! Really I'm just typing stuff to make myself laugh at this point. I should probably stop.

9750107
First off, thank you! I tend to aim for "pulp" era writing. Does my love for Lovecraft show? Or all the detective, fantasy and sci-fi magazines? It's a democratized time in writing. I love it.

You're right. Frighteningly right. A member of the anti-Fall community always put it as, "You could replace them with floating cocks that telekinetically hold stun batons and yell "cunt" if a woman walks within two feet." Paraphrased. They are literally nothing. Faceless ciphers. A planet of cheap drawings of hats. I mean... sad to say that trying to clean them up doesn't help much. The core of them has them as complete monsters. And I've seen the breakdown of how those work, you CAN'T develop the backstory and move up motivation. That's against the rules. Complete monsters can't be sympathetic, and only complete monsters could do what the caribou are doing the way they do it and for the audience they do it for. It's like that movie, "Cabin in the woods" where the sickly voyeuristic horror movie audience is represented by petulant gods demanding ever more disturbing appeasement to solve their boredom and pique. All bad porn leads that are put into BDSM dom or tyrant roles need to be petulant children with tiny egos and no patience or ability to not get their way. Because either the writer or audience are tired of people being able to turn them down or call the cops or mace them.

So yes, they are nothing. I have to make them something, I have to work to turn them into the simplest kind of villain because otherwise they're nothing but walking furniture, sex toys with clockwork keys.

Also, as I understand it, because this kind of flat villainy and stilted action simply can't work in writing, very little is written. It's all commissions, all comics and single images. A picture is worth a thousand words. And need not worry about lack of character. It's already literally paper thin.

9750394
I didn't really get a specifically Lovecraftian vibe from this so much as just in general the word choice and sentence structure being reminiscent of that time period. Although to truly behold FoE in all its facets is to gaze upon the face of madness...

"You could replace them with floating cocks that telekinetically hold stun batons and yell "cunt" if a woman walks within two feet."

God dammit stop giving me ideas for really terrible joke SCPs.

On a more serious note, where did this quote come from? The only dedicated anti-FoE fangroup I am aware of is the Caribou Hunters one, and it's got maybe two or three actually insightful people drowning in a sea of edgelords and Gary Stu crossovers.

On a less serious note...

"Gaze!", King Dainn bellowed, "upon the great rotating crystal penis marking the site of my first conquest! Observe the society I've consecrated to the transcendent beauty of all things phallic, and the idea of complete independence from all things female! Tremble in fear of my legion of incredibly buff, shirtless men in tight leather pants! And all of Equestria will know, once and for all, how utterly and overpoweringly straight I am!

9751142
The wording is what I mean. Depending on the subject I'll get more or less pulp-y. Right now I'm doing Zootopia fic and "Let it go, it's Happytown" is a love letter to noir with all the feel of that. In terms of pony work, "The Trotford Husbands" (particularly Penny Lane's chapter) was intentionally made as an homage to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth) while "The Bad Apple Chronicles" chapter "Apple Shrugged" has a lot of that pulp feel as it's ostensibly about taking down pony Ayn Rand in her personal stronghold which is filled with nods to the 30s like rampant art deco, abused factory workers and anti-union bully boys.

You can look in my list of groups. Both the Caribou Hunters Club and post-Fall groups might have it. I just wish I could remember. I referenced it in a comment and the originator chimed in.

Depending on which rectification of the Fall cult you look at, and there have been two schisms I know of, maybe three, some still existing with their own Pope/Antipope dynamic, straightness may or may not be a thing. Images are always in theory straight, given the power dynamic (and at least subtly somewhere between anti-trans and trans-dismissive) while writing really takes the form of the writer, adding technical bisexuality, homosexual overtones, the usual. And yes, I know it sounds like reification of a setting but given how closely whoever dumps their blood and treasure becomes to the thing, it's fair to consider financier/ideologue and creation as one big gestalt entity. The latest one has a really, really weird fixation of feet and maybe children. That second one is technically new, mostly by prior omission.

I really miss stories like this, where sadists and degenerates were dealt with well. The site is a much better place with stories like this.

10470705
Agreed. Absolute degenerates who like and enjoy fall of equestria should be purged

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