• Member Since 8th Jun, 2014
  • offline last seen Apr 15th, 2016

TheAnonymousT


This is my short biography. It is a biography. And it is short. Maybe you should just read my stories instead...

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Twilight may sometimes be naive, but when it comes to riddle solving, she's no fool.

Chapters (2)
Comments ( 8 )

Heh. This was cute, well done, and I agree with your assessment. Twilight shouldn't have fallen for Discord's trap, she's supposed to be smarter than that! :twilightsmile:

You should have just put the whole thing together as a one-shot.

This is quite funny, but if it were a serious story, I'd have two objections:

- The Castle of the Two Sisters should have been a much higher probability than the library, because the friendships Twilight formed were actually not in the library; she met her new friends in multiple locations in Ponyville, then they were all at the Summer Sun Celebration, then they did research in the library, then they went on their quest. So the location of the Summer Sun Celebration is just as likely for where their friendship began as the library, and the Castle of the Two Sisters is where they became the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony; this is a more likely possibility and has the advantage of dramatic irony, since that's where they got the elements in the first place.

- Pretty sure Discord would have been watching to see if they solved the riddle and would have had a backup plan for that. He had no backup plan for "what if they overcome my discording them" because he's hitting Twilight in a place where she's weak -- her dependence on her friends, in his mind, is a weakness. But he almost certainly knows that Twilight is highly intelligent, because he knows all of them well enough to know how to target them. So he would have known that she might solve the riddle, because the riddle hits up against an area where she's strong.

That being said, as a humor fic it's fine. But now I want to see something more epic where Twilight solves the riddle, Discord enacts a backup plan, and then Twilight and the gang have to solve that, and so on. Honestly I don't think they could have beaten Discord until they got to a place where he is weak -- namely, his understanding of the strength of friendship (he knows all about the weaknesses of friendship, but lacking it himself, he doesn't understand its strengths.) Discord's smart enough that you can't beat him in a straight-up battle of wits, because even if you're smarter than he is, he's smart enough to see where you're going and come up with something new to screw with you; you have to get him in a place where he thinks he's won, and then his overconfidence defeats him.

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Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, even though I didn't tag it as humor it was meant to be funny, although I do want the fic to be somewhat taken seriously. That said, since the riddle was so ambiguous Twilight's logic had to be a tad contrived to get a resolution.

1. The ambiguity of the riddle, not to mention the English language, opens up a wide wide world of possibilities. I get your argument but I still think the library deserves first place in terms of probability. I (well, I guess Twilight did it but whatever :twilightblush:) assigned the Library with a much higher probability than the Castle since while the Castle was the beginning of the bond between the Mane 6 and the Elements in their physical form (i.e. the actual elements branded with the Mane 6's cutie marks did not physically exist before that encounter), the library (as in: that scene in the library where Twilight was telling the Mane 6 about the Elements) represented the beginning of the bond between the Mane 6 and the Elements in their intangible form, i.e., marked the beginning of the quest through the Everfree to the castle. Although you are right in that the six were gathered in the same location for the Summer Sun Celebration I don't think that was really the beginning of their bond with each other (and thus with the Elements). Also, since the Elements are about all six parts coming together (to a rainbow-y energy beam thingy), the individual first encounters of Twilight with each of the Mane 5 also would not qualify.

2. You're right. You're completely right. :rainbowderp: The plan at the end was stupid on Twilight's part just because she completely forgot that not only will Discord not be sitting on the sidelines but actively fighting back, since he is such an awesomely devious bastard (as you pointed out) he will be five steps ahead of everyone else. The only explanation I would have for that is:

- Twilight has no idea who she's up against. The only villain she's ever faced is Nightmare Moon, who, as we know, is just stupid. And in terms of sheer power, she has never encountered anything close to the likes of Discord.* She has no idea that villains can do more than fire energy beams and give long pointless monologues. Yes, Discord took the Elements, but Twilight could have probably also stolen the Elements by drilling through that door or shrinking herself and teleporting herself in the box and then the box and herself out of the room or something. Taking the Elements is not a huge demonstration of power. What is a huge demonstration of power is the stuff Discord does in the rest of the two-parter. Unfortunately, Twilight doesn't have cable.

- Twilight's a little proud of herself in getting the riddle in such short time. Without the time to carefully think everything through down to the last detail, despite her logical approach, there is a lot of guesswork and poorly thought out crap in there. For instance, a minor complaint—how in heck is Pinkie going to get to her rock farm and back? Also, instead of splitting up, a more efficient approach would be to have Rainbow Dash flying around alone and Twilight teleporting the rest with her around everywhere for more efficient search teams. Plus there would be less of a safety concern that way.

*(Even Nightmare Moon, I would assume, since in Twilight's Kingdom Discord was the only one who was supposed to be able to stop Tirek. Celestia definitely must have had hard feelings, even in S4, when it came to Discord, and probably only picked Discord as a last resort since nothing else in her power would have worked, i.e., the power of four alicorn princesses. So, assuming they are equally powered (which is a bit of a stretch but in terms of raw power would make sense), Discord is more powerful than four alicorn princesses. So definitely more powerful than even a buffed-up version of Luna.)

How's that for a wall of text? :twilightsheepish:

Just caught up with HPatMoR before reading this. Definitely had some carry-over

“That's it! I have a plan, girls!”

Unfortunately, the other Ponies had ran off to the labyrinth a while ago while she stood around staring into space. :pinkiecrazy:

Haha. This is nice...:twilightblush:

I agree with this:twilightsmile:

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