I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go exploring! Over a thousand years, and the world has changed completely. Equestria's remained horrifically similar to what it was before I took over; they've even built a town, Ponyville, where the suburbs of Equuapolis used to be, and Canterlot, aside from making use of that mountain I built that one time, is frighteningly similar to what Equuapolis was. New Maresterdam's now Manehattan, but Fillydelphia's still Fillydelphia and Vanhoover's still Vanhoover. The Crystal Empire's in a time lock, but it'll be popping out and becoming visible to ponies within a couple of months. Quite a lot of the culture's still same-old, same-old, but what do you expect from a place that houses the only Tree of Harmony left and has immortal rulers?
The rest of the world has gotten a lot more interesting, though. I mean, I knew Albion had established a Parliament because I could feel the sweet, sweet disharmony even when I was in stone, but it's so much fun to watch ordinary, democractically elected ponies getting into vicious shouting matches with hoity-toity nobility (not to be confused with Hoity Toity, who is actually a pony living in Canterlot), and have it considered a totally acceptable means of running a government! Also they play a form of hoofball where neither magic nor wings are allowed, but ultra-violence apparently is, and routinely riot in the streets over the performance of their favorite hoofball teams.
Then there's the Griffin Empire, where they consider themselves highly enlightened for not eating their ungulate subjects very much (they spare ponies, but not cows or sheep... helps to have the Alicorn of the Sun come from your species, I suppose. Celestia lets the little people self-govern for the most part, but she draws the line at pony-eating anywhere in the world.) Why, I remember the days when the entire territory currently claimed by griffins was overrun with dragons... of course, I might have had something to do with why that's not the case any longer, but when I ran things, the dragons were still there, just... possibly not entirely and completely sane enough to reproduce. Looks like while I was out of circulation, the griffins killed a whole lot of crazy dragons. Good riddance, I say. I wasn't going to kill them myself, not after defeating them as thoroughly as I did, but... you know, you'd think crazy dragons would be endlessly amusing, but truth was they got pretty boring within a century or two.
And then there's where the non-crazy dragons went. The entire southern continent of this hemisphere used to be dominated by the feathered serpents (well, it used to be dominated by the draconequui, but sadly, those glory days happened before I was born, and the quetzalcoatls moved in from the far south once my kind were all dead), but the dragons of Western Neighropa who kept their sanity did it by running for Southern Amareica, and apparently I never noticed at the time because I was too busy having fun with the Neighropan dragons. Well, no one ever accused me of being detail oriented. So now there are nations down there of dragons and quetzalcoatls and sea serpents living together the way the pony tribes do up here, with an occasional admixture of Eastern dragons and even the occasional long-ma (funny how they swear up and down that they are not draconequui despite the fact that, well, frankly, they basically are. I'm sure it has nothing to do with not wanting to be associated with me; I'd consider that positively insulting.)
Of course the further north you go, the more disorganized, violent and disharmonious the dragons are, which explains why ponies in general seem to have no idea that dragon nations even exist. Not that the civilized dragons are remotely peaceful; they're constantly at war with each other, warlords and matriarchs overthrowing each other in a perpetual churn of power, but they do manage to stick together in sufficiently large groups to have a war. See, now, that's harmony for you. When total disharmony reigns, no creature can actually get enough other creatures to team up with them in order to have a war. There were never any wars when I was the Superdave of Equestria! And ponies think harmony is so peaceful. I ought to take Twilight Sparkle down to the dragon nations to see what harmony gone wrong can do.
...oh, I just had to remind myself of what I'm trying to not think about, didn't I?
Yes, I'm sure you've guessed it. I went on a short world tour so I wouldn't have to think about having to face... bleah, Anon again. (Seriously, that's his name? I can just picture his momma rocking him in her monkey arms, crooning, "Who's my little nameless one? Yes, you are! You don't have a name, no you don't!" Admittedly maybe I don't have room to talk, considering that I was equally nameless until the day my mother died, but a draconequus adult without a name would have been like a pony adult without a cutie mark, and besides, my mother called me Child, not Nameless.)
I don't want to be having this fight. I want to have fun. I want to explore. I want to see if I can bring about the end of the perpetual warfare within the dragon lands by making them all hate each other so much they won't stick together well enough to form an army. I want to enjoy the lovely disharmony between Saddle Arabia, Camelstan, Minos and Tauros. I want to find out if I can get them to crown me Great Dalmuti of Neighypt for making it rain even if the rain is green lemonade. I want to see if Scorpan the Peacemaker is really as badflank as everyone says he is or if I can make him flip out, give up on harmony and go become a hermit somewhere crying into his beer about what he did to his poor big bad bro. I want a rematch with Apep for the honor of Chaos (that's a joke, son, laugh! I said laugh!) I want to find Ar where she's sleeping, tickle her until she wakes up and see if she's really as hot as legend says (in the sense of attractive... she was a dragon who was a chaos avatar, I'm fairly sure she was as hot as she wanted to be in the literal sense.) The last time I was out and free I spent all my time tormenting ponies, but there's a whole world out there to be introduced to my chaos! Admittedly I'm not as ignorant of the changes to the world as Loonie was when she came back -- connection to disharmony, dreamwalking, and being able to view other realities kept me relatively au courant in comparison to the Moon Maid -- but feeling things happen at a distance, or viewing somepony's dream of events, isn't nearly the same thing as experiencing it for yourself. Zebrica was loads of fun, and when I think about the fact that I could do the same thing in so many other nations, with so many other creatures, all over the world... and instead I'm stuck in a cave trembling with fear of worried about some stupid human... This is completely unfair.
Unfortunately I know better.
They have their Elements back, after all. If I go run off somewhere and completely ignore Anon and pals, I'll get distracted and forget to keep looking behind me and one day bam, they'll sneak up on me and I'll be a statue again. Or Anon will chop me to bits. Or both. I'm not sure how both would work, I'm fairly sure that my statue was virtually indestructible given the number of times during the first few months after Celestia and Luna first turned me into a bird bathroom that some pony or other tried to take a sledgehammer to me, throw me off a cliff, blast me with magic or drill holes in me, but if anyone could manage to smash an indestructible statue it would be Anon, since the limitations of the rules of magic don't seem to apply to him. You cannot imagine how much this irritates me. I am supposed to be the only one that the rules don't apply to! And honestly, that's because there's a superset of the rules, the laws of metamagic, that do cover me and what I do, and just because ponies don't know what those rules are and think I have to abide by unicorn magic rules, that doesn't make their ignorance my problem.
Maybe there's a super-superset of rules Anon is covered by. I wonder how I'd go about finding out what they are?...
Well. I know some of them. And one of them strongly suggests that I'm not getting out of this fight.
Let me go on with my story and explain what I do know about Anon.
When we last left our intrepid and handsome hero, he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the psychotic human, and had retreated to this very cave to contemplate how a Seventh Element of Harmony was even possible. Upon such contemplation, he realized that in fact everything he had been doing since coming back home to Equestria was, in fact, stupid beyond belief, and normally entirely outside the range of what he'd have chosen to do... which implied that he was mind-controlled somehow, and only now, back home, was he free of the insidious control. So he began to think to himself, how long can I keep up writing about myself in the third person before I get totally sick of it? And the answer was, about this long.
No, what I actually thought to myself was that I needed to do some research.
I'd had sources of information available to me, while I was trapped in stone. When I was fully awake and paying attention, ie, not manufacturing a lucid daydream for myself or opening myself up to the collective unconscious, I could hear more or less anything that happened in Canterlot Gardens, and for reasons I'll explain later I was fairly good at deciphering snippets of caught sound from outside the gardens. I also had my Discord Sense ™ (hey, if Pinkie can have a Pinkie Sense...), which allows me to feel any major occurrence of disharmony pretty much anywhere on the planet, and by feeling out the shape of it I could generally figure out who the disharmony was happening between and what sort it was. When I was asleep, I could dreamwalk... my ability to affect the dreams of others was almost nonexistent, aside from pre-Nightmare Luna (I didn't actually have the ability to affect Luna's dreams either, but she had the ability to sense me, which meant I could goad her most entertainingly), but I could watch. And I could open vision portals into possible futures, alternate presents, and nearly anything that happened in the past.
If this is sounding like I had plenty to watch to keep myself entertained... imagining cutting off your tongue, your legs, your wings (if you have them) and your horn (if you have one) and lying in a bed in a movie theater all day long. Exactly how entertaining would those movies have to be to compensate for the fact that you can't move or talk? I thought so. So hopefully we'll have no more of this "oh surely it wasn't that bad because you didn't go totally insane" sort of talk, and move on, shall we?
The point is, I wasn't wholly ignorant of the world around me while I was trapped (forsooth, had such been otherwise, I might verily have arisen from my stone entombment speaking thusly to all ye ponies, and in such way have made of myself a laughing-stock, the object of jest and jape rather than the jester in self. Truly 'tis fortune that upon my arousal the command of today's vernacular was mine, or none might understand me save Luna and Celestia. Oh, if 'twere my fate how cruel would it have been, to be understood solely by dullard alicorns of ennui!) But I didn't know anything at all about Anon, how he got here, how he ended up with an Element even in the mundane sense of where he got it from, let alone how it could possibly exist, or what his relationship was to the others. They'd seemed very, very close, weirdly so really, but then the Elements worked off friendship between the Bearers, so I supposed that perhaps that might have explained the possessiveness and overprotectiveness I'd seen. Or perhaps the girls were trying to balance out his stupid, non-reciprocal Element of Protection by protecting him, so it would be reciprocal like the others. Though that continued to fail to explain how he'd been able to use it by itself. Elements of Harmony, by themselves, were useless.
So I set out to learn as much as I could about the world, without revealing myself to anypony.
First I hit the headquarters of the Equestrian Associated Press in Manehattan. A free press has always been near and dear to my heart; nothing generates controversy like the news. While most other institutions of government, business or academia seek a calm, happy, pacified population, the press knows that what bleeds, leads, because what the public craves to know about are the most chaotic and disharmonious things that might be happening in their world. The EAP receives news wires by telegraph and retransmits them all over Equestria so that if there's a massive brush fire in Appleoosa, or a politician indicted for corruption in Baltimare, or a model in Canterlot goes out in public with a few hairs loose from her manestyle, every newspaper in Equestria can print the information. All the news that's fit to print, and plenty of the news that isn't. I slipped into the building, late at night, located their filing cabinets, and took them, replacing them with solid chocolate replicas. While obviously everypony was going to know it was me, I thought it most likely that they'd assume I turned the filing cabinets, contents and all, into chocolate, thus destroying the archive of news articles. I strongly doubted anypony would realize I needed to catch up on the news.
Then I took the filing cabinets home and bespelled the articles to read themselves to me. As perhaps one might possibly have guessed from my name, I'm very much at home in the center of cacophony. As I mentioned earlier, the chaos I prefer is the chaos of complexity, of so many patterns that no pony can distinguish them; I, however, am a different story. Understanding fifty-three news articles reading themselves to me at a time is an enjoyable challenge for me, a good hard workout for my brain. I made it a little more interesting (and much funnier) by speeding them up so they sounded like how you might imagine squirrels or bunnies would talk, if they could. Within a day or two, I'd gotten through the entire archive.
What I gathered from it was that Anon had appeared in Ponyville, coming out of the Everfree Forest, about a week prior to the wedding of Princess Cadance and Twilight's Big Bootied Brother Furry Fatso, or I think that's what that silly acronym stood for, anyway. He had accompanied the Bearers to the wedding, which had been crashed by a particularly ambitious Changeling queen and her hive. During the resulting altercation, Celestia's clever trick for hiding the Elements really, really well backfired, as none of the Bearers were able to get in to get their Elements, but through some means wholly unexplained by any news article, Anon found the Element of Protection, proved to be its Bearer, and proceeded to more or less annihilate all the Changelings in Canterlot, of which there were quite a number. He was then given a medal and a stained glass window, which I resolved to change into a picture of him on the toilet at the first available opportunity.
The interesting thing about all this was that the day after the wedding was the day I got free. As I might have mentioned earlier, I was too busy doing a happy dance of delight at my freedom, in Zebrica, to think much about how or why it had happened. So I thought about it now.
Of course I'd noticed the Changeling invasion -- chaos and disharmony on that scale wouldn't have escaped me anywhere in Equestria, let alone in my own back yard. Superficially, one might guess that that was what had given me a flood of power and broken my bonds. But it didn't match up. When Goodnight Woon had her jealous hissyfit and launched an uprising against her sister, there had been a lot more chaos. Oh, that had been so deliciously painful, like being presented with the most gloriously delectable-smelling banquet right in front of you, only to find that you're chained to your chair and can't raise a paw to take a morsel of it. The bonds of Harmony had held me tight; I'd caught only the tiniest crumbs of power from that event, to the point where it would have taken me twenty thousand years of massive civil unrest to gather enough energy to break loose. Only when the Elements had reset in the process of transferring to new Bearers had my bonds begun to weaken, and it was a year after they'd finalized and transferred entirely to their new Bearers before I'd been able to gather enough power from disharmony to break myself free. One battle with a Changeling horde could not have begun to possibly make the tiniest chink in my prison, unless the Elements were shifting again.
Well. Transforming from six Bearers to seven was certainly a shift. Not a shift that seemed even remotely possible, but certainly a shift. But even then, a change from one set of Bearers to another had still left me gathering power for years, for a whole additional year after the shift was done, and I was as weak as a kitten when I'd first gotten out... admittedly if you've ever seen a kitten in action you'd know they're capable of quite a lot of chaos, but the point is, I'd had to start slow. A bit of chocolate rain in Ponyville, a bit of cola raining onto Cloudsdale. Chaos is the gift that keeps on giving; I put some power into generating a bit of chaos, and ponies react with such sheer horror and confusion, I gather far more power from them than I lost creating the chaos. It hadn't taken me long to build up to speed, it's true, but there would have been no way I could have teleported to Zebrica right after breaking loose that time.
Something hadn't just shifted the load the Elements were carrying and loosened my bonds. Something had charged me up. Someplace there had been a massive wave of chaos, and I'd missed it... and so had these news articles.
I went exploring Equestria, wandering invisibly through towns, trying to find what had changed. When I thought back to that day, I remembered feeling a building wave of disruption and transformation all throughout that week; I'd been very excited, though I hadn't for a moment expected it would free me when it hit its peak. I remembered trying to find it, trying to stretch my senses, and coming up with nothing. It had tasted fresh, like change, not stale like entropy. But I hadn't for the life of me been able to feel out what exactly it was. On the day of that gloriously chaotic invasion, I'd thought to myself, oh, this was it all along, and by the time I would have been able to tell that no, the invasion couldn't account for it... I was free and paying exactly no attention to any of the problems I'd been worrying about in stone. In fact I'd kind of forgotten about them.
This didn't worry me nearly so much as lapses like thinking I was being original and cutting edge by repeating myself; I knew why I'd forgotten about them. Sun! Sky! Lungs that can breathe! Food! Muscles that can move! My powers! Flying! Food! Colors! Sounds that aren't muffled by going through rock! Smells! Touching things! Hilariously terrified zebras! Food! My powers! Being able to stretch! Being able to lay down and sleep! Dancing! Wiggling! Food! No, it was entirely reasonable that I'd lost track of wondering about what that chaos I'd been detecting might be, once I was out.
Something had to have changed. A lot. And yet there was nothing in the papers.
At this point I need to briefly digress into another explanation of chaos, entropy, and information theory.
You ponies think "information" is intelligible, understandable knowledge. "Pinkie Pie is a baker" is information. "Qtsafwjofjwojoeq" is not information. "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte" is not information unless you understand Prench, in which case it is. "Princess Celestia is a potato" is a lie and therefore not information. "A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Princess Celestia was a potato" is fiction and therefore not information. However, the truth is that they are all information. To distinguish between information that has a meaning, and information that does not, we can use the terms "signal" and "noise." Signal is information that is meaningful; noise is information that is not. And one pony's signal is another pony's noise. To a pony who speaks only Equestrian, anything in Prench is noise, but to a polyglot like moi (which, for those of you who don't know Prench, means "me"), Prench is signal. For that matter my fifty-three newspaper articles reading themselves to me at high speed would have been noise to any pony, even Tia and Lulu. But because I have a truly astonishing ability to distinguish signals from each other and parse them into separate meaning so they don't degrade into meaningless noise, to me those articles were signal.
The truth is, the whole world is information. This startles you. To you, information is what's held in books. Chairs are not held in books, therefore chairs are not information. But when I look at a chair, I see it as a collection of pieces of information, and if I change some of that information, the chair changes. It becomes a banana, or it walks off, or it tries to eat the hapless pony sitting in it. Magic is the manipulation of information, and frequently, the transformation of it.
Now, if you shout off the side of a mountain, out to another mountain, you'll hear an echo... at first. It'll die off quickly. What happened to your signal? It degraded to noise, and then to nothingness, because it ran out of energy. This is the form of chaos called "entropy", disorder caused by a loss or transference of energy. Entropy annoys me because it disorders what it affects by making it less complex. It's still disorder, so it still generates magical energy I can use, but it's not... hmm... flavorful. When chaos is caused by things becoming more complex, when information becomes more dense, that produces much tastier magical energy. Disharmony is by definition more complex than harmony, because in harmony, signals are synchronized, and to a certain extent their behavior matches each other or can be predicted from each other. A disharmonious signal could be any signal at all that doesn't match, and the world of what doesn't match is always so much larger than the world of what does.
One way or another, when information changes, it gives me power. Destruction is entropic change. Creation is change toward complexity. However, for either one to have happened on the scale that would have refueled me so thoroughly after the Elements drained me such a short while ago, it really should have turned up in the papers. How could the world have undergone a massive change and nopony noticed?
So I went exploring, invisibly walking (and flying) amongst ponies in search of whatever it was that had changed. And at first, I didn't see it. Their world seemed every bit as idyllically peaceful and dull as it had ever been. Earth ponies still worked the fields and took their goods to market, pegasi still micromanaged the weather, unicorns still stumbled through life using only the tiny fraction of the glorious energies they were born to command that would help them enact the picture on their flanks. Same old same old.
Until I realized... where were all the stallions?
Now, just in case you're reading this at a time when the changes are still in effect -- which you probably are, because why would they revert if I haven't beaten him yet? -- you need to know this. Historically there has always been an imbalance in favor of mares, but throughout most of pony history it has not been all that large. I'm not the guy you want to go to for numbers, so I couldn't quantify it, but in a class of say 20 foals, a little over half of them would be fillies, maybe 12 to 8 instead of 10 and 10. During times of war and organized violence, the imbalance increases significantly, but I think we all know how harmonious and peaceful Equestria's been for the past several centuries. If you stroll down the street in an earth pony town like Ponyville you might not notice so many stallions, because a disproportionate number of them are doing work that involves physical labor, tilling their fields or restocking the shelves, and whether you're in Ponyville, Cloudsdale or Fillydelphia, the fact that the Royal Guard is around ninety percent male means that many of the boys are off in Canterlot. Males tend to do the work that involves being away from home for long periods of time, as well; they're the lumberjacks, and they're OK. Pegasus and unicorn stallions with water-magic talents may be off at sea. Nothing stops the marefolk from doing that kind of work, of course, but Equestria's a matriarchy that runs on friendship; mares stick close to home where their power base is. In the big cities, where power concentrates in noble families or where it's not about how many you know but who they are, this tendency is less pronounced, so you see a more even balance of genders out on the streets.
Here's something else you need to know. I'm not going to be running for Her Royal Pinkness' job anytime soon; I dislike nearly everything to do with love and romance and would prefer I never had to deal with such sappy concepts again, but unfortunately for me, Canterlot Gardens has been the go-to place for romantic trysts between Canterlot citizens for an unpleasantly long period of time. I have heard far, far too many couples whispering sweet nothings to each other or making loud, smacky kissyface noises. Few of them actually went so far as to have sex in the gardens (more's the pity; that might have been fun to listen to), but trust me, I have been present at enough passionate clinches that Cadance ought to be paying me damages for mental cruelty. And I can tell you that the majority of these lovey doves were mare/stallion pairings. Again, numbers and I don't get along, but I'd guess as many as three-fourths of them were heterosexual couplings, and of the remaining couples, about two-thirds were mare on mare and the remaining third were fabulous.
I didn't really notice this at the time, of course. As I said, I'm not interested in romance. I have as much interest in sex as any other red-blooded draconequus male (yes, it is red, I certainly saw enough of it when Anon cut off my tail that I can certify this), but ponies having sex with each other, without even inviting me to watch, let alone join in, isn't really a topic of pressing concern to me. And since personally I can't be bothered to limit myself to a single species or a single gender when I do go looking for playmates, the question of whether a mare is sucking face with a mare, a stallion or a grapefruit is normally not one I care about. But I have a very, very good memory, and when I was trapped in stone, I paid a great deal of attention to ponies any time they were near enough to my statue that I could easily hear them, regardless of what they were doing or saying or how unbelievably dull I'd have found it if I'd been free to go pay attention to something else. I remember the pony pairings I didn't care about at the time, well enough to assess their approximate gender balance and makeup.
You know what I never got to hear? A threesome. Or moresome. I suppose it's possible that some of the chattering groups of friends I overheard went home and had wild sex with each other, but of the partnering ponies gazing up at the Mare in the Moon and murmuring pet words to each other while leaning up against the convenient backrest my plinth provided, I can't remember any of them being a group of more than two.
Herds are rare. They turn up in times of unrest -- during the wars between the pony tribes, there was a severe shortage of earth stallions, because when ten earth stallions go up against a unicorn battlemage, nine of them die in order to distract the battlemage enough that the tenth can get in and buck the mage's head off. (Oh, you don't think ponies were ever that violent to each other? Au contraire, mes amis, your species eagerly sought to enslave or commit genocide against itself when you split along the tribal lines. Windigos don't show up because of petty quarrels.) So there were few enough remaining stallions that earth ponies herded, back then.
And when I was in charge, there were herds, albeit more polyamorous than polygynous ones, on the logic that... well, I am the Spirit of Disharmony. I used to amuse myself frequently by influencing ponies to break up marriages or turn their kids out the door. (Hey, don't look at me like that. I was an orphan, left behind in the wilderness to fend for myself from the age of four, and I turned out just fine! There were pie trees and lollipop flowers and chocolate snow everywhere; no foal starved on my watch. Lost all their teeth, maybe.) When I unbalance a pony's personality it doesn't last that way forever, though, and ponies found that their families would hold together much better if they formed larger ones, so someone could keep the home fires burning and watch the kids until the unbalancing wore off and their lovers came back to themselves. (Eventually I figured out that this was what they were doing, but by then, I'd decided to go big or stay home, and I'd treat an entire town at once to an upside-down mindset for a week or two. Herds didn't help them much with that.)
During times of peace, herds are not common. Lesbian relationships are common, but hardly a majority, and stallion on stallion does actually happen, maybe only half as often as the lesbian relationships but it's hardly unheard of.
I'm sure none of this makes any sense to you, because the world I'm describing, the world that existed for millennia up until the moment Anon changed it, is not the world you know. Because what I found out when I noticed the stallion dearth is what you probably believe the world has always been.
I had observed that there were far, far fewer stallions than I expected to see. I went looking for them in the places I'd expect to find stallions, and, aside from the Royal Guard, I found mares instead. Mares tilling the fields, mares cutting down trees, mares sailing ships... usually, mares in lesbian couples or threesomes or more, and I could tell this because despite the fact that I was observing them at their jobs, they tended to be all over each other, soppily affectionate and exchanging highly unprofessional pet names while logging or sailing or whatever. In the Royal Guard, a majority were still stallions, but the guard itself seemed... smaller. More ceremonial, less capable of fighting any sort of military force. Admittedly they haven't had to fight a military force in centuries, but they're supposed to be able to if they have to.
And where I found stallions still living and working at ordinary jobs, I found that most of them had two, three or more wives. Herding was more common than pairing, now. (By this point, you understand, I was actively looking for anomalies relating to gender; it's normally utterly beneath me to care how many wives the stallion from St. Ives has.) And where I found a two-pony marriage still, most of them were two mares. There were still some traditional couples -- the Cakes in Ponyville, Cadance and her boytoy -- but for the most part, what I was seeing involved either two mares and no stallion, two or more mares and no stallion, or two or more mares plus a stallion, with the old school pattern of one mare and one stallion almost absent.
Now, far be it for me to look down on anyone's fun! Why, if Equestria had suddenly exploded into a hotbed of polyamorous perversity because of some sort of social change I could see, I'd be all for it! After all, I was an immoral polyamorous sex beast before it was cool. I could really enjoy a world where everywhere I turn there's mare on mare action... if it weren't for the fact that no pony alive appeared to be aware that this was a change.
So I did something that horrifies me to this day. Something so awful, I shudder uncontrollably when I look back on it.
I took the form of an ordinary pony, went to the central library of Manehattan, and went back through two years' worth of newspapers... reading the wedding announcements. Guh! I want to scrape my brain out with a whisk broom and a can of maple syrup.
I didn't repeat this experiment anywhere else, but I didn't need to. Prior to Princess Cadance's wedding, the wedding announcements were exactly what I would have expected... mostly announcements for mare & stallion couples, with a fair amount of mare/mare and a small but noticeable number of stallion/stallion. The first announcement of a herd wedding, between a stallion and three mares, was the day before Cadance's wedding, with the actual date set a month in the future. After Cadance's wedding, I couldn't find any traditional mare/stallion announcements. Admittedly at that point I'd been free less than a month, and I broke loose the day after her wedding, but... there hadn't been any time prior where there had been no mare/stallion weddings announced for longer than two days, let alone a month.
I already knew there was nothing in the papers discussing the change. And there should have been! An upheaval like this was only possible if either an enormous number of stallions vanished into thin air, or transformed into mares overnight. There should have been rioting! Grieving widows screaming at Celestia to find their husbands, if they'd vanished, or former stallions shrieking at their leaders to solve this problem and restore their lost manhood, if they'd changed gender! There should have been panic in the streets! There should have been chaos!
But there wasn't. The change had happened, it had created such a massive transformation of information that it had filled me up with energy, just the same as if there had been chaos... but there was no disharmony. There was no visible disruption of order. Something had radically changed and ponies just went on with their lives as if it had always been that way.
This horrified me. I love change, I live for it. But to change everything underneath our feet and leave us unaware of how it happened, or when, and, for the ponies, even that it happened?
I had to admit I had a bit of an existential crisis. Kidnapped a few mares from a small town near Vanhoover and forced them to tell me what they saw when I changed things. I made a hill into a checkerboard bowl, filled it with giant cornflakes, made the cornflakes float as if they were in milk, and made them ooze pine sap so the ponies kept getting stuck to them. Turned one of them into a balloon and used static to stick her to another. Chased them around with giant waffles that were trying to eat them. Caused some of the checkers to be quicksand and then rearranged them when the ponies figured out where the safe places to stand were. The whole time I kept asking them, "Now what am I doing? What did I just change?" By the end most of them were crying too hysterically or too shellshocked to keep talking to me, but one of them managed to describe my chaos back to me all the way to the end of the session, so I didn't do any of the apocalyptic or horrible things I'd threatened to do to them if they refused to talk to me... I sent them back home, completely unharmed. Well, I might have rearranged their manes some and cast illusions to make it look like I'd switched their cutie marks, but that all would wear off in a day or two.
As nearly as I could tell, reality was still real. Things I set into motion randomly, without knowing what I was creating, could be described by ponies who were looking at it, before I turned to look myself. Ponies still occasionally did things I didn't realize they were going to do. This wasn't a dream I'd fallen into, in stone, and forgotten it was a dream. I could be fairly sure of that, at least to the extent I can ever be sure of that.
Yes, you're glaring at me now, I'm sure. I did terrible, terrible things to those poor ponies, you say. I terrorized them. I made them think I'd kill them or subject them to fates worth than death if they didn't cooperate. Well, yes, but if you thought there was a significant chance that reality wasn't real, would you really care about the welfare of possibly imaginary ponies you were using to perform a reality check? Besides, none of them suffered any worse pain than exhaustion or the nasty feeling of pine sap in your coat, and in the end none of them came to any harm, and if you're so worried about their sanity, why aren't you worried about mine? Just because I don't behave like what you think a sane pony would act like when I'm at my best, you think I deserve to be left in some solipsistic hell where I can't be sure reality even exists? I never trapped ponies in a dream for longer than a single night! Well, okay, except for Luna, but given that her turning me to stone was what left me in a place where I started losing track of the difference between reality and dreams... she had it coming.
I'd confirmed that what I remembered being true had been true, and I seemed to be the only creature who remembered it that way. I'd confirmed I wasn't trapped in a dreamworld. That left only one possibility, horrible as it was. Someone had actually altered reality.
Don't tell me I'm a hypocrite. I don't alter reality. I alter things in reality. If reality is a house, I rearrange the furniture, replace the drapes, pull up the carpet, repaint the walls and hang new pictures, but I don't turn the house into Ponyville Station, and most especially I don't make it so the house always was Ponyville Station. Of course, you think it was always Ponyville Station and I'm just insane, or trying to trick you. The historical records haven't been altered to match everypony's memories. At least, not last time I looked. You can confirm that what I'm saying is true. You can check it.
Listen, this isn't what I do! This is radical change, yes, but there's no chaos. There's no disharmony. I want ponies to notice when I change something! I want them to look out their windows and yell "SWEET FILLY CELESTIA ON A POGO STICK, IT'S RAINING UMBRELLAS!" I want them to be shocked, amazed, horrified, discombobulated, confused. I don't want them to just go on with their day as if nothing had ever happened! This is a perfectly harmonious change, a massive transformation of absolutely everything that bothers nopony because nopony can remember that it happened at all. Aren't you horrified? I am! The bedrock of reality, the consensus of the collective unconscious, the one constant value even I could never bear to change because if you change it, it becomes impossible to measure or even notice any other changes... and it's been altered. Do you feel violated? You should! I do! And I'm the only one whose memories weren't altered, probably because I was trapped in stone when the change happened, and if magic could alter my stone form in any way, I'd have been able to use chaos to alter myself into something that could actually do something, a long time ago.
This is not like you ponies utterly losing your marbles over what I do to the world with my chaos. This is completely different.
Still think I'm a hypocrite, flipping my own lid over someone doing to the world something very similar to what I do, except I'm not the one who did it? Fine, whatever, believe what you like about me, but if you hate my chaos you should hate this even more. Have you realized yet that thousands of ponies have either been vanished from reality entirely, with their loved ones having no memory of their existence, or have had their memories so massively rewritten they've undergone a gender change and they don't know it? Do you understand now why I'm afraid? Do you know now why I'm willing to face a maniac who's already cut off my tail once and nearly killed me, in the desperate hope that if I can find a way to stop him, I can restore reality?
If I was going to change thousands of stallions into mares, I'd make quite sure they remembered what they were supposed to be. Fine, I'm sadistic, I'm disharmonious, I do these kinds of things specifically because they upset ponies. But I wouldn't make it permanent, and I wouldn't make it so nopony remembered the world the way it had been before. That makes me better than this. Doesn't it?
Even knowing that someone had altered reality, I didn't immediately assume it was Anon. He'd seemed really pretty pathetic when I'd fought him. Okay, he'd beaten me, so he wasn't that pathetic, but he seemed so... average. Unnotable, aside from being on a planet where no other of his species resides. He wasn't a great intellect, and I didn't yet understand why I'd put up such a poor showing against him, but I did know that his swordfighting skills weren't that spectacular. I'd just gotten really, really unlucky, I thought.
When someone has done something, and you know absolutely nothing about who they are or how they did it, the one reliable clue you may be able to turn to is this: who benefits? So I considered that.
Who benefits from altering the structure of the Elements of Harmony in some way to add a seventh that can be used independently? Not the Tree of Harmony itself, the new Element was too unlike the others. Order, maybe, and Matrisse had actually attempted one of these bedrock changes to reality once; of we three avatars Matrisse is the only one with the power to alter the playing field, because it's the entity that sets and enforces the rules. Except it's suffering from a slight case of unfocusedness due to the fact that I smashed it into tiny pieces, and if enough of Matrisse had come back together to do something like this I would have felt the shift in the thaumic field. I can detect changes in the balance of magic, and that would have been a major one.
Who benefits from altering the structure of Equestrian society so there are a lot fewer males, and herding and lesbianism have become common? A male who wants a herd and doesn't want a lot of fair competition. But how could anypony who wielded such power have such a ridiculously venal motive? I mean... I don't wish to be crude here, but put it this way, when you have the kind of power that can make your dreams come true, a lack of nookie ceases to be a major crisis. Self-satisfaction takes on a whole new meaning when instead of being limited to Madame Paw, you can have Madame Realistic Full-Tactile Illusion Of Absolutely Anypony You Want. Entities as powerful as I am just aren't motivated all that much by sex, because it's too easy to get almost anything you might want. Love is another story, but the kind of love that involves mind-controlling your partner and altering their memories so they think they have always loved you is not satisfying. Believe me, I've tried it. It doesn't work. Even altering their memories so they don't remember that they ever stopped loving you, when they were your lover once but broke up with you over irreconcilable differences like the fact that they think you're a monster now, turns out to be tremendously unsatisfying and actually rather painful.
Who benefits from making me act like an idiot? Any of the Elements of Harmony, including Anon, but none of the ponies demonstrated any such power in the past. Anon was the only one of the group who could have done it.
What's the likelihood that the mares of Harmony would embrace a new member who was a male stranger of an unknown species, who they just met, as thoroughly as they seemed to have? Well, they did make friends with each other shockingly quickly, but on the other hand, I happened to know that all of them had been linked since the day of Twilight's magical surge, that the force that grants ponies their cutie marks had connected them somehow. If someone rewrote reality so that there had always been a Seventh Element, perhaps they might have also rewritten it so the bearer of that Element would be connected to the others in the same way, and more or less instafriend them. But why would anyone have chosen to bring a human here to wield the Element of Protection, when there are plenty of none-too-bright stallions who could have been tapped to do the job?
But I was looking at this the wrong way. What if the point hadn't been to create a Seventh Element, and then choose a human to wield it? What if the human had come first, and the Seventh Element had been created for him?
If Anon was the one who had done this, then the timing matched; the transformation of information started happening after he came to this world. Wouldn't an entity who wanted to alter reality and then pull in some poor sucker from another world to take a role in the new reality have performed the alterations first and then dragged their target in?
If Anon had done this, then there being a Seventh Element of Harmony for him to wield would fit, because he'd have been the one to create it for himself. To give himself power, and a role. And that would explain why I had been an idiot in his presence. But why make me an uncreative idiot? And where did the business with the stallions fit in?
So I went and spied on Anon in Ponyville, invisibly. Amazing how much you learn when you turn invisible and coil around one of the branches of Twilight's library tree.
I learned that he knew a great deal about the Bearers, and always had -- in his world, they apparently had a fairly accurate fictional adaptation of the Bearers' lives running as a popular entertainment, but most humans were unaware that the adaptation was an adaptation, assuming it to be pure fiction. (I assumed. Either that or our lives really are fictional stories written by coatless monkeys, but I am having a hard enough time with my grasp on reality to be willing to go there.) I learned that everyone in Ponyville liked him except for two bratty fillies, who he had demonstrated considerable cruelty to in the course of teaching them to stop bullying the sisters of the Bearers... despite which, the father of one of the bratty fillies liked and respected him even more for "knocking some sense" into his daughter. Because everypony knows, if you can't manage to keep your child from misbehaving, you'll consider a coatless ape five times your daughter's size who roughs her up to teach her respect a gift from the heavens! I learned that his hands were considered wonderful and vital tools that everypony in Ponyville wanted him to make use of to perform any number of activities. Oh, if I'd only known hands were such beloved accoutrements by ponies, I'd have manifested myself some! Certainly I wouldn't have encountered fear and suspicion and disgust at being an unusual creature, unique to this world and unfamiliar to ponies, if I'd just had hands! I imagine little Spikey-Wikey will be thrilled to learn this as well!
I also learned that all of the Element Bearers, who he referred to frequently as the "Mane Six", were herding with him. All of them. With occasional orgies.
I'm very much in favor of orgies. I'm very much in favor of orgies involving multiple ponies having sex with a male who has hands and comes from a completely different species and is the only representative of his kind on the planet. But I'm not in favor of involving ponies whose personalities have been altered by said male in such orgies unless they specifically requested that said male perform the alteration. And I'm very much not in favor of rewriting the entire universe and disappearing or gender-switching thousands of ponies so that their failure to compete with me will allow me to get ponies who wouldn't otherwise have wanted me involved in my orgies.
It was Anon. It had to be Anon who had done this. Whatever other entity might have thought there was a benefit to creating a Seventh Element of Harmony and then picking a human for the role, no such entity could possibly have thought it was a good idea to make all of the Bearers of the Elements fall in love with him. After all, friendship is magic... lust is chaotic. The potential for jealousy tearing the group apart if they were all in love with the same male was a terrible, terrible idea, from the perspective of someone who wanted to make the Elements more powerful by adding a seventh. But that potential would be completely ignored, if the one who made the change was a selfish twit who really wanted to have sex with six attractive, powerful mares and didn't think he could win them over the hard way.
And yet he showed no signs of knowing what he'd done. I spied on him a lot, as the seven of them searched for Luna and the missing Elements. I'd have thought that one of them would have thought of the Castle of the Pony Sisters right away, but even Twilight didn't seem to think of anything unless Anon said something that gave her the idea. However, I saw no active use of magic from him, and I never heard him say or do anything that would suggest he knew he'd made them love him or he knew he'd made them his sycophants, unable to think for themselves unless it pertained to their special areas of talent.
It wasn't as if he was running around throwing mind control powers about willy-nilly. It was more like... he'd turned Equestria into a stage, and our lives a play, with himself in the starring role. Except it was a fairly terrible play because, as the star, he was the leader, the one who came up with all the good ideas, and in reality his ideas were fairly stupid, so everypony else had to play the role of idiots in order to let him shine.
I have no idea how his power works. But since I went out and did all that research, everything else I've seen backs up my conclusions. He wants to be a big hero, and events conspire to allow him to be. He wants to be beloved, so six mares herd with him, and don't consider it strange, because the whole world has altered such that herding, once a rare practice looked down upon by mainstream society, is now common and normal. He wants everyone to be his friend, except the ones he doesn't like; those, he wants to be his enemies, and he wants to defeat us, humiliate us, crush us and, at least in my case, kill us.
The desire to confront him, to do something to harm him, is getting stronger. He doesn't want me to hole up in a cave writing down my observations about him, he wants me to go taunt him to his face and do some moderately annoying things so he has an excuse to cut me or thrash me. I want to know how long I can hold out, but at the same time, I'm afraid that if I wait too long, I'll lose myself in the emotion, and behave recklessly, and he'll kill me. It's not worth the risk.
Time to go take my life into my hands and make my token appearance in front of him again. If I survive this, then the next time, I'll write about the various confrontations I've had so far, including the sad and humiliating details of the incident with my tail.
Man, I love your work. Discord is such a vicious bastard at times, yet you manage to bring across both that and little nugget of selflessness that he would never admit too. Honestly I'm quite eager to see how well he handles a Sue, and maybe it's just me, but the mental image of him summoning Picard to talk Anon down just wont leave my brain.
Either way, great stories, and I can't wait for more!
This story makes me feel a bad way.
I want Discord to win. I hope that there's some modicum of a chance that, if Discord manages to win, all of this reality warping would fall in on itself, thereby changing everything back to the way things were, which would then create a lot of chaos as, not only would it undo everything, there would be nothing to make them think this was always the case. They would remember that they were a stallion, then a mare, then a stallion again. Which is fucked in it's own right.
But he's the villain in a fucked up, self-indulgent, play. And villains don't win. Which makes me sad.
*sounds of a steam engine powering up*
*clanging and rumbling of heavy machinery*
Oh, great. Look what you've done. You got me thinking. If only you knew how much sense this makes to me, albeit in a slightly different context...
I told you you need an avatar of Order! Go put this Matrisse back together and tell it Anon's cheating!
On a side note, the really scary thing about changes to the foundations of reality is that if executed well, they technically never happened if you manage to rewrite past as well as present. You'd need a viewpoint independent of time and what we call causality to notice that.
Or the human's from a conglomerate of parallel worlds influenced by an influx of leaking excess information from other universes due to being located at the information equivalent to the multiverse's centre of mass, leading to bibs and bobs from other worlds manifesting in the monkeys' brains as 'ideas'.
Great chapter, highly enjoyable. In fact, I am now really scared for Discord. I hope his next confrontation with the human will go better than the last.
5067940
On the other hand, this is Discord. He has a lot of practice in the art of breaking the rules, or at least of twisting the rules to the point at which it looks like they've broken.
And if he can change the genre into a "the-hero-dies-at-the-end" type tragedy, for example, then he'll have a much less distracting environment in which to try to solve the problem of everypony's memories...
Man, I'd like to "see" a bit wherein Discord falls into the role of hackneyed villain Completely and only snaps out of it again when he refinds the diary. That'd be chilling shit. But don't feel pressured to go that way if it aint the way y'all were gunna go, bro
5067940 But he's also the rightful and just protagonist of his own story and, metatextually, ours, not to mention our first person, re-relating Narrator, meaning that, if he loses and succumbs to final defeat, the story, since he's telling it as it happens, will have to cease immediately with no closure or indication of what occured. Which, while hilarious, would also be a cruel, cruel move on our dear author's part.
Want to do something chaotic and evil in the mind of Anon, confront them with the questions the journal poses. Point out the fact that Anon is not what Anon thinks, in front of Anon. OR go behind Anon's back and pose these questions to the ponies. I would suspect Celestia or Luna would have to deal with the least of his influence other than Discord himself.
If Discord can dreamwalk, I wonder if he could influence the sleeping Luna, assuming she's still sleeping. If he could go into her dreams while she's asleep and present her with all this evidence... I'm sure she would be more than skeptical at first, but Discord is nothing if not a silver-tongued devil. It could be that he might be able to find an ally within Luna if he managed to present all the evidence that he himself worked through to figure out what was going on and do so craftily and convincingly enough.
Of course... that's assuming that he could even enter Luna's turf without Luna nuking him on sight.
I'm getting a real "Captain Hammer" vibe from this human, so much so that I started reading anon's lines in his voice. Love the story so far though
Credits? I swear, if I find a complete tag in here...
Edit: Alright guys, put down your torches and pitchforks.
IKR?!
Here's hoping that Discord will steel his mind for his upcoming confrontation with Anon. Maybe write on his arms stuff to remind him to fight it, or something.
Anon's power becomes more horrific with each chapter. That is just... holy crap! I'm shivering.
The only way for Discord to defeat Anon is to force the Sue to face his own stupidity. After all his own mental capacity is the only thing he cannot modify.
I cannot imagine the revolt and disgust the Six will feel when she snaps from Anon´s control and realize they have been physically and mentally raped
He actually did
If only he were mature enough to realize how to exploit his "talent"...
This is easily the best fic I've read so far - Discord's characterization is spot-on, the criticism is logically solid, and the amount of research and knowledge that went into this story is impressive. 10/10, can't wait for the next chapter.
5068519
If they realize and remember this, it would definitely be both a sanity-losing and enraging moment. I could see Twilight, in particular, working very hard to try to ensure that nothing like this could even theoretically ever happen again to them.
Consider this: on whom did Spike practice giving back-rubs before he gave AJ a really good one? (and she's almost melting in that scene, which is why it's hilarious). I see two obvious candidates, namely Twilight and Rarity. Twilight's his surrogate big sister, and Rarity -- is far from physically-shy where Spike is concerned.
This is a truly horrific chapter, because it shows that Anon can retroactively alter reality. This is far, far worse than "merely" mind-controlling the Princesses and the Mane Six. He's actually manifesting what would in my continuity be the sort of power that the Paradise Entity has (and, based on Alex Warlorn's Pony POVerse, that's a really dangerous power, as he could generate reality-cracking paradoxes without even realizing what he was doing; I'm hoping that his changes can simply be reversed rather than being permanent).
The only hope for Equestria lies in the fact that Anon appears to be profoundly stupid and rather unimaginative -- he latched on to Equestria because there's a MLP TV series in the universe he came from and his imagination doesn't extend much further than "beat up things, have sex with the Mane Six, and everypony will like me!" He doesn't even get that anything about his situation is strange: not strange as in "I've fallen into another world" but strange as in "Why is everypony fawning on me?" and "Why am I winning swordfights when I have never trained in fencing?" I'm guessing he may have no idea he has any particular power.
One thing that occurred to me is that the modified Equestria might be more than normally Schizo Tech. In canon the energy tech of Equestria appears to be late 19th century with anomalies -- most power comes from external-combustion reciprocating steam engines, with electrical power transmission just starting to be implemented; weapons tech lags to Renaissance and medical tech leads to mid 20th century with antibiotics and simple diagnostic machinery.
But Discord noticed a static society. That may be because Anon's concept of Equestria is Medieval Stasis; he's ignored the hints (on the maps and elsewhere) that the railroad system is still being extended and hence is probably only a century or two old tops and (from several episodes including "Family Appreciation Day," "The Last Roundup" and "Over a Barrel") that Equestria is pushing its settlement into new territories away from the rivers (something economically practical because of advancing railroad technology).
The Schizo Tech could get farther if Anon wants Information Age entertainment. Canon Equestria has developed movie cameras and has some magical equivalents of video games and virtual reality; but it doesn't have an Internet or a widespread gaming culture. Anon might just be able to change the background so that Equestria has, and has always had, these things.
If he changes things enough, he might be able to induce enough paradox that reality might start to break down. That might be the clock that Discord's really racing, whether he knows it or not -- Anon might crash the continuum.
Hey, I just had a thought -- wouldn't the forces of Harmony be getting pretty damned worried about Anon? He's inserted himself into their system of Elements, done so in a way that might threaten the attunement of the Bearers, and he's producing massive Paradox (in both the normal and the White Wolf Mage games meaning of the term). Some of them -- the ones he wouldn't pay attention to because they're not all that sexy to him -- might have fairly-intact memories.
If Anon doesn't have a thing for Zecora, she might be aware of what was happening. Or at least some of what was happening.
I liked Discord's quick explanation of Information Theory.
I was tickled pink when you used this line. Thank you!
A very good summation of pretty much every bad OC main character fic out there, HiE or otherwise.
Still, I don't see how Discord can win this, when even the rules HE must abide by are just utterly disregarded by anon. Even if he does win, I'm not sure how he fixes the world.
Based on this, Discord may be indirectly responsible for the extraordinary strength of Equestrian affinive, familial and romantic relationships (the aspect of Equestrian culture that induced me to write "Why I Cannot Believe in a Free Love Equestria." Here's the reason why.
During the Age of Discord, life-threatening crises must have been relatively common. It was hard to maintain large polities; both Discord's sense of self-preservation and his dislike of order would have impelled him to break up anything above the size of a large city-state-with-hinterland. There would have been (un)natural disasters, wandering monsters, brigands, warlocks and (of course) Discord himself. All this would have made trade difficult and hence famines and other shortages not uncommon.
Indeed, it would have been a "fairy-tale" world, both in the sense of having lots of small principalities and in the sense of being horrifically-dangerous. It would have been great fun to role-play in -- not so much fun to live in.
In such a world, being able to really count on one's friends, family and lovers or spouses would have been of immense survival value. Thus the increase in mutual affection and tolerance which made the polyamorous herds possible. If Discord was also actively and randomly Discording Ponies, then there would have been intense selective pressure for really strong emotions of love and friendship, because the stronger one's own and one's loved ones' capacity to feel love and friendship, the more rapidly and completely one would recover from Discording.
Would the pressure have been so great as to break down the utility of love and friendship entirely? No, for two reasons. First, we see that it didn't -- the Ponies are a very loving and friendly species -- but that's almost circular reasoning. More meaningfully, Discord is lazy and only intermittently malevolent. For every town where he stuck around long enough and worked thoroughly enough to irreperably shatter families, friendships and marriages, there would be many where he only did it just well enough to shatter the ones that were already close to breaking. In short, Discord would have acted as a classical Darwinian selective force promoting increased Harmony (I wonder if he's realized this, and if it bothers him to consider it?).
What's more, Darwinian sexual selection would have come into play, and that speeds up evolution considerably. Ponies choose their spouses, and in a world with Discord in it one would be impelled to choose a spouse much more on the basis of emotional compatibility and strength of positive affect (which Discord could only temporarily destroy short of killing the Ponies in question, and Discord rarely kills directly) than on the basis of, say, social position or wealth (which Discord could permanently destroy, and might just because he felt annoyed that somepony was "stuck up"). Over a thousand years, a bias in sexual selection could have some signficant genetic consequences -- that's fifty generations.
And this would become enshrined in culture, which means that the relatively hyper-rapid force of cultural evolution would become engaged. There'd be aphorisms (very squishily sentimental ones by Human standards) about following one's heart when it came to love; popular legends about couples or families or friendships that Discord tried but failed to permanently break, and so on.
I think Discord is part of the reason why the Ponies are so darned nice and loving -- the nasty and the unloving were just too vulnerable to him for a thousand years.
5068140
Gah, now you got me thinking of the quote my theater teachers' quote about the villain being the hero of their own story, so act like you're the hero when you play them. (There is the fun exception of melodrama where you ARE the villain but it's meant to be over the top).
5068181
Hey, he likes to share his hammer with the mane six.
...The hammer is his penis.
5068833
Don't take Discord's perception that Equestrian society is static too seriously -- Discord is much more interested in sociocultural aspects than technological, and Equestrian culture has changed rather little in a thousand years, at least in comparison to, for example, our culture. (Think of what a human who'd been in stasis for a thousand years would think. Quite aside from our technology, which we ourselves notice because it changes so fast there's radical transformations within our lifetimes, within the past thousand years we have invented liberalism, democracy (re-invented, really), the scientific method, the concept of childhood as a unique stage of life (children a thousand years ago were seen largely as uncivilized, stupid, small adults), the concept of social mobility, and the ideal of acceptance of other cultures. We have downgraded religion, developed an anathema toward slavery, and dramatically reduced the role of the family while at the same time increasing the responsibilities of the parent. Oh, and we've exported the culture and a lot of the genetic potential of one side of the planet to the other side, in the process wiping out most of the culture and genetic potential that were already here.
In comparison, Equestria really wasn't a whole lot different before Discord took power, or immediately after. Celestia and Luna deliberately tried to reconstruct a stable society based on the society that had existed in their childhood, which was the society of approximately 50 years after Equestrian unification, and because they were alicorns who had defeated Discord and were providing the first central government and bastion of stability that had existed in any other pony's lifetime, it was easy for them to do so. Since then Equestrian society has been relatively static. The role of the nobility has steadily declined, but it still exists; the rapid transmission of information has just developed with the telegraph, and right now that's used mostly for news and emergencies; the traditional pegasus-borne mail system is the fastest method of communication that most ponies use, and it's been in play for centuries. Democracies at the local level have, in my headcanon, always existed among earth ponies, and under Discord the role of democracy actually expanded (Discord likes democracies because they argue a lot and the power within them shifts radically on a frequent basis, so he tolerated larger power bases if they were using democracy than if they were autocrats. Also, democratic rulers were much, much more likely to be humble enough to show proper "respect" to Discord, whereas autocrats were very often powerful unicorns who managed to create stable enclaves that held off Discord's power for a while, and it went to their heads because they didn't realize that the only reason it worked is he wasn't paying attention. It wasn't nearly as much fun to humiliate a leader who thought of herself as a "humble servant of the people", or at least claimed that she did, than a leader who thought she was Great and Powerful. :-))
So Discord's observation that Equestria is fairly static come from the fact that Equestria hasn't had a bloody revolution since Nightmare Moon, hasn't radically changed its form of government, hasn't undergone huge upheavals in society or culture, and has in general changed slowly enough that Discord, who was doing his best to keep up with social change anyway from his position as a statue, hasn't really noticed it changing. If he thought about it hard he could probably identify a lot of places where it's very different from his childhood, but it's not different enough to have struck him as such.
That being said, Anon introducing schizo tech without thinking it through could have a profound impact. Imagine an Internet that's used for online gaming and nothing else. It could never really develop that way in the first place, but if a reality warper just plops it down in front of you that way, it's likely to produce a really unhealthy social obsession with online gaming because that's the fastest means of communicating at a distance! Imagine that instead of being able to exchange emails, or call people on the phone, the only way you had to rapidly communicate with people far away was to go online and see if they were on the server at the same time as you, and then chat.
5069270
My dear marefriends, the Mane 6... (we've totally had sex.)
5069312
Discord would be scared of a human with a sniper rifle, if he didn't know exactly where the human was.
He's not ignorant of how tremendously dangerous we are in large groups, on home turf, with access to our technology. He's been to our world before. And if he happened to notice a group of military humans crossing through a portal into Equestria with their equipment, he would probably make the ground open up and swallow them before he allowed them contact with the ponies, because he thinks of himself as responsible for protecting ponies from crap they can't reasonably deal with, because they're his toys and he doesn't want others to break them.
But humans are nothing, by ourselves. An individual human is stronger than a pony, unless they're an earth pony and even then, hands give us a lot of leverage. But an individual human is not stronger than Discord, because he's close to twice our size. An individual human has almost no biological weaponry; our teeth and nails are pathetic in comparison to meat-eater teeth, pony jaw strength, or claws. Our only special abilities as an animal are tremendous endurance -- we can run longer distances without stopping than nearly any prey animal, so even though we're slower than they are, we're relentless -- and some of the best swimming abilities of any land-based mammal. Discord, even without his powers, is biologically a much more dangerous predator than we are, and about the only advantage any human might possibly have over him in combat is that he'd underestimate us... which still won't count for much unless the human is an experienced killer.
So no, Discord would never underestimate humans on Earth, or humans with their technology, and particularly not large groups of humans with military technology. But alone, and without our tech, humans are kind of pathetic, and have no physical advantages over Discord (ponies yes, Discord no) even if you disregard his powers.
5069312 Not as scary as Discord, though, especially on equal numbers. I know if I were plopped down on a world populated by seven billion draconequii, I'd shit myself.
5069354
Of course then again, even Discord can probably get overwhelmed by human militaries if they figure out what's going on and if they are persistent enough.
Funny, you say Discord wants to protect the ponies from things they can't handle, isn't that sort of in turn causing the stagnation he so hates?
Trust me, i personally don't like Discord and I think he's being a massive hypocrite. "Oh you're changing the world in a way I don't like, but it's perfectly all right if I change the world for my amusement!". I really would love it if it turns out that both he and "Anon" get killed off by a human military or something. Because I personally think the ponies would be better off with out Discord holding them back.
5069406
That's why I said Discord would be scared of human militaries on Earth, on our home turf. It's awfully unlikely that enough human military firepower and logistical supply could ever get over into Equestria without Discord noticing, so it would have to be a scenario where they came over and established a beachhead while Discord was still in stone. If he goes someplace they all already are, yes, they could seriously hurt him, maybe even kill him. But in small numbers -- and if they were coming through a portal into Equestria, it would have to be in small numbers -- he could take them pretty easily. Humans are better than ponies at adapting to chaos, but considering how bad ponies are at it, that's not saying much.
And no, protecting ponies from threats they plainly cannot handle doesn't cause stagnation. Protecting ponies from everything, which is what Celestia tries to do, causes stagnation, in Discord's viewpoint. But just as what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, what does kill you doesn't. Nothing evolves if it's dead. So Discord does not protect ponies from, say, invasions by griffins; they ought to be quite capable of handling that. He'd have done nothing to help them with the Changelings even if he'd been free at the time. But beings from a vastly more advanced technological level who are hardened, disciplined killers? Then he'd step in, because dead ponies aren't very much fun.
And yes, he's being a hypocrite. Keep in mind, though, he's writing a journal. If he's arguing that he's not being a hypocrite... there is no pony actually there that he's talking to. Discord wouldn't be arguing that he's not a hypocrite if some part of his own mind wasn't telling him that he is.
5069450
Heh yeah, even then, would the humans militaries simply become more craftier in what they do, as in try to colonize isolated islands or some inhabitable area where Discord wouldn't find them? Or like just send drones to get information about the nations and try to introduce themselves to the other nations of the world?
I also would think some humans would see Discord as nothing more than a Slave-owning Tyrant because of the way he treats the ponies as his toys, they would think he is controlling them essentially like slaves and not as sapient creatures.
5069406
Indeed ... though, ironically, it kind of comes from the good side of his personality. He's caused it as a side effect of his actions, but I think he doesn't really like mass death among Ponies. He likes Ponies.
5069487
Depends on why there are humans invading.
If humans are being imperialistic conquistadores and invading because they want the territory... they'd need to want it really, really badly to keep trying after a few platoons disappeared completely, or one or two guys came back and reported that the ground came to life and ate everyone else. Most likely there are softer targets.
If humans are coming as a liberating army... liberating from who? Politicians don't send armies to overthrow tyrants unless there's something in it for their nation, and they certainly don't overthrow peaceful, benevolent monarchs unless there's a lot in it for them. So they're not going to try to liberate ponies from Celestia and Luna. And no politician on Earth is idealistic enough to send our armies in to save alien ponies from Discord just because it's a nice thing to do. Part of the reason humans kick so much ass is that we're realists and we don't take on fights we can't easily win unless we have to. If we understood what Discord was well enough to be prepared to fight him, we'd understand him well enough to know we don't want to unless we have to.
If there's a Xenolestia situation where Celestia is sending armies to Earth, humans might come over to stop the problem at its source, but in that case Discord would probably decide the ponies made their own bed and can lie in it, and he wouldn't take action.
So I'm having a very hard time envisioning a situation where humans are motivated enough to invade Equestria that they'd keep trying after Discord kills a platoon or two in ways that violate the laws of physics. Discord invading us is an entirely different story but as I've said a few times, my version of Discord knows better than to do that. If he wanted to take over Earth, he wouldn't appear directly and start making it rain chocolate... he'd spread disharmony, appearing to various politicians and making private deals or discording individuals, so that humanity ends up fighting each other, not him. And this would be easy to do because humanity is so deadly; we're our own worst enemy. Once we bomb each other into the Stone Age, destroying our civilizations' infrastructure, crippling each others' industrial outputs and information transmission, then Discord could come in and humans in total disharmony with each other are no threat to him because individually, humans aren't shit. Human power lies in groups. Ironically we are more dependent on harmony for our strength, and gather more power from it, than ponies are.
Any scenario in which human military faces Discord directly, with their full bag of tricks available, is one where either Discord has been egregiously stupid, or humans are either impossibly idealistic or impossibly evil and dedicated to conquest. If the humans are behaving the way humans normally do, and Discord is smart, then Discord will never end up facing a large, well-organized and fully supplied human military, or a human guerrilla insurgency (which would actually be better at dealing with him than a large military would be; chaos is inimical to military discipline, but guerrillas expect chaos.) Discord's not enough of a killer to believe that he can, should or would ever want to take on a war machine like 21st century Earth unless his back is against a wall, and humans aren't stupid enough to put an entity as powerful as Discord's back up against a wall unless we're desperate or hyper-motivated.
5069893
Someone directed me to this post because they thought it'd interest me. As someone who builds off of and modifies characters in his own work; I have no issues here.
However if you want to use that specific phrase, 'my version of [character]', then you need an AU tag.
Just sayin'
I have never felt this hyped for a new chapter.
NEVER.
You have done a wondrous job on this. It's the equivalent of a drug. I've never really liked the mystery genre, but this...this is like Gravity Falls, without filler, in MLP, in word form. It's so delicious.
5069959
Well, you're right that I need an AU tag but wrong about the reason. "My version of Discord" simply means my interpretation of Discord and my headcanon for his backstory; none of what goes into "my interpretation of Discord" is necessarily AU, since I'm basing it on what we see in canon.
However, this story actually is AU, very much so, so I will be adding that tag. Thanks.
5070291
Hmm, yeah that's valid enough. I generally write extremely AU stuff (poat-modernism is kind of the opposite of MLP) so the tag kind of gets more... commonplace, let's say.
No problem.
I'm slightly curious to see when the scene that initially inspired this whole story will pop up. I want to say that the tail-cutting was it, but somehow I get the feeling that it's still to come.
Still pulling for Team Chaos.
Yeah, it’s not looking good, but I ain’t no fair-weather fan.
…
…
…
Smash ‘im, bash ‘im, bop and bomb! Whip the pants right off Anon!
5069893
Since we're debating why Discord and humanity wouldn't fight each other, I have another reason why Discord wouldn't try to do the politician manipulation thing if he was smart. And it's simply because the world can't be 'bombed back into the stone age', and instead of the Elements of Harmony being used against him, a group hidden in the shadows with snipers and bombs would be there instead.
The reason we can't be bombed back into the stone age is because, even if nukes exploded all over the planet, we'd still have internet. Heck, we'd probably still have most of our satellites. Guns would still exist and could still be manufactured with recycled and raw material. And any group that could find access to any of the millions or billions of data centers (some of them personal computers) detailing chemical refining, induction melting, or any other manufacturing details would be a group that would come to prosper quickly. So unless Discord is more overpowered than he is in canon, or he's stupid, he wouldn't pick a fight like that.
As for us trying to attack him, the only thing I could see is a small group that really, really wants his knowledge or biology, even if the safest way of getting it is killing a god, then slowly, painstakingly reverse engineering his brain. And that's only if Discord doesn't want to share for some reason.
5071391
Actually, the internet would be the first thing to go. Not the backbone internet that runs to the military and top-level government institutions -- that was built to survive a nuclear war -- but the side spurs that connect pretty much every human being would go down, because of the massive EMP that a nuke would produce. In event of a nuclear war, every computer that's not in a basement, in a building with a lot of metal in the construction, or in a deliberately shielded facility, will fry. The satellites would be fine but most of the servers they connect to would not.
That being said... I don't really think Discord would have any interest in doing that. Smashing our information infrastructure, our just-in-time transport capability, and massively reducing our population would destroy many of the things Discord would likely find interesting about us. We have so many tightly ordered systems overlapping each other that the result is chaos. Our world is huge, full of rapidly moving pieces, and changes very swiftly. I would think Discord would find us much more interesting with our infrastructure intact... which means he's very unlikely to openly challenge us at all. (And why would he? He could mess with hundreds of individual humans, and as long as he makes sure none of the cameras get a clear shot of him, the majority of us will assume him to be an urban legend or modern myth, like Bigfoot or UFO abductions. Seriously, would you believe a guy telling a story of a dragon with the head of a horse and body parts of a zillion other animals who made him decide to rob a bank?)
5070683
I won't lie; a scene I read in one of these Gary Stufests was so violent and disturbing that I was obsessing over it for a while, and when I read a blog post of Jordan179's about self-inserts, it jelled in my brain with a lot of long-buried resentment toward a former role-playing game partner I had. That plus my mild annoyance at a few other fics created this.
But I have no intention of actually replicating that scene. I'd consider it fair use and as legal as fanfic itself, but kind of a dick move, to write a scene into a story that is really similar to an existing story scene just so I can mock the original story. I will have scenes that have certain similarities, of which the tail-cutting thing is one (we haven't actually seen the tail-cutting scene yet; we've heard Discord whine a lot about it after it happened, but he hasn't yet reached the point in his recounting of events to describe how his tail got cut off and what he was doing when it happened.) But the actual original scene... probably not.
Besides, as I said, I'm not mocking one story, I'm mocking all of them. Plus my annoying acquaintance.
5071491
Huh, I forgot about EMPs. Still, there would still be a lot of computers left even with that requirement, and EMPs decay in intensity over distance following the inverse square law, so I'm not sure how far the EMP would go, but I'm thinking you'd need nukes to blanket the earth to have that happen, when much less could put the world in nuclear winter and kill almost everything except humans and bugs. So yeah, none of this is what Discord would want to do.
To your question in parenthesis, I wouldn't believe a single guy, but I did read into urban legends for fun back in the day. And a worldwide or consistent myth of a draconequis, perhaps in storybooks or fairytales, is approximately what Twilight Sparkle was looking into at the start of the series. And if I was deprived of my home and the world became hellish, I might look into escapes like that.
So over a few years, the possibility of a hit team might be small, but over centuries like he did in MLP, I don't think he would survive trying to make humans his new playthings.
5069893 I dunno, humans are really easy to manipulate sometimes, not to mention ridiculously imperialistic. We don't have to have a good reason for doing something, we just have to have a reason. If a politician were really motivated (which, all things being equal, I don't think is too unlikely), it doesn't take much propaganda to convince a significant fraction of people that Equestria is based on a system of government that's evil/tyrannical/whatever and needs to be invaded for whatever reason, at which point a "just" war (that just happens to have rather lucrative payoffs if/when Equestria is annexed) wouldn't be out of the question, if that fraction were large enough. Never underestimate the power of perception; if we think we're doing what's right, then by God we will keep on doing it.
This being the case, I don't really think motivation is as much of a problem as you portray it to be. And as for actual combat... well, we're clever. I don't think Discord really gives humans enough credit in-story; I mean, he outright says that humans aren't smarter than ponies:
I mean, we evolved in a hostile environment full of faster, stronger, more well-adapted organisms than us. You'd think that being forced to navigate such obstacles on a regular basis in the ancestral environment would have done something for our intelligence. Ponies, by contrast, live in a more or less idyllic world in which the most dangerous environment we've seen is the Everfree Forest, which, all things being equal, doesn't really measure up to the African savannah in terms of hostility. Furthermore, there's evidence that our intelligence further developed due to having to compete with each other once cohesive societies formed, requiring an enhanced modeling and predictive system in order to model social systems and successfully gain support--politics is an old, old game. Our neocortex size relative to our total brain size is absolutely huge compared to anything else on the planet, giving us a Dunbar limit of roughly 150 social relationships--leaps and bounds beyond anything any other species can muster. And how do ponies fare by comparison? Well, there was the rule by Discord, but intelligence wasn't really of much use there, and after Discord you get Celestia and Luna, immortal alicorn princesses who happen to move the Sun and Moon, respectively, which doesn't really leave much room for political machinations. So that's another potential evolutionary strategy for intelligence out. So I would be far more hesitant to say that we aren't smarter than ponies; the evolutionary histories simply differ by too much
Celestia and Luna aren't too smart either, seeing as they more or less rule through power--benevolent rule, but still. Not having to deal with constant plotting to overthrow you does wonders for complacency. Discord, on the other hand, with his constant chaos, ought to be a genius, comparatively speaking, and while he's definitely smarter than the princesses, I don't know if I'd go that far. (His savant-like ability to deal with information overload is pretty cool, but I wouldn't classify that as raw intelligence--it's more data processing than anything else.) So since he doesn't fit the curve for being smarter than ponies, I have to lower my estimate of pony intelligence even further. I don't want to say that ponies are dumb, but... yeah. Compared to humans, I'd say they're dumb. So don't put us out of the running just yet!
Great story. I look forward to more.
Though, regarding your Author's notes and your comments regarding 'kirin' or 'qilin' you are technically correct, but because the qilin are said to have draconic features, and 'longma' isn't quite as well known as 'kirin' or 'qilin', the terms are often used in substitiution to avoid reader confusion.
Also, by using 'kirin' and 'qilin', authors can have different words to call the two types of dragon/pony hybrids. The most common interpretation I've seen, is a 'kirin' being a pony with draconic features, and a 'qilin' being a dragon with pony features.
Though, it isn't unusual for 'longma' to be used to refer to one type of hybrid, and 'kirin'/'qilin' for the other when the author does know of the word 'longma'.
5072018
Mmm, I think you're confusing the ancestral environment with the present day, comparing ponies' present day environment to our evolutionary history. Ponies almost certainly evolved under conditions with hostile organisms trying to eat them at every turn, because why would they have developed their affinity for magic otherwise? Or, if you assume their universe was created and therefore evolution didn't give them magic, there's still no reason to assume that natural prey animals who, in the modern era, have tamed nature to such a degree that animals rely on them for food and assistance with reproduction, did not evolve under harsh conditions. Why would they panic at a bunny stampede without an evolutionary history suggesting that it's a good idea to run at the slightest sign that things might be dangerous?
If both ponies and humans evolved under harsh conditions of predation, then the two species are likely to have begun as equally intelligent. Humans live in a more dangerous and chaotic world than ponies do now, but at the same time, humans are more likely to be saturated with environmental toxins that reduce our capacity for intelligence (how long did it take us to stop using lead paint? And it's still all over homes in cities), and your average pony gets much more physical exercise than your average human from the Western, technological world... exercise, of course, being good for the brain as well as the body.
So I can't see any evidence from lifestyle that humans are more intelligent than ponies. Both species have a vast body of knowledge that applies to their own environment and not outside of it (none of Twilight's knowledge of magic would help her on Earth; most of our understanding of physics would be kind of useless in Equestria). Humans are much more driven to innovate technologically, since we don't have magic, and technology puts power in the hands of a broader spectrum of our species (Twilight inventing a great new spell helps Twilight and the tiny proportion of unicorns close to her power level; a human inventing a great new technology helps every human who can afford to buy that tech, and the price will come down as more humans make and buy it.) We're killers, where ponies are not, because we're obligate omnivores, so we have much more advanced military training and experience, not just technology. But ponies invented advanced concepts of diplomacy and inter-cultural acceptance millennia before humans did, because they needed to in order to survive; ponies have, as far as we know, never systematically killed or tortured their smartest and most likely to question, which the Catholic Church did for centuries in Europe... and ponies don't have a democratic leadership. If Celestia says jump, ponies say "how high?" Politicians in Western societies can rarely get that kind of buy-in from their citizens, and if the citizens don't like being sent off to die in a world full of magic, they and their families will vote the politicians who sent them out.
So I don't think ponies are less intelligent than humans, certainly not on an individual, case by case basis. I do think that humans, having had to use the scientific method for pretty much every advance we've made for centuries, are much better at learning how the world works than ponies are, but this is our culture, not our genes. I think that in a war between humans and ponies on equal footing, where both suffer the same issues of supply logistics and both know the terrain equally well, humans will win, but that neither side has such dramatic superiority over the other that they could invade through a portal or something and hope to win; basically, whoever invades the other's turf first is gonna lose. I also think that if humans are written correctly, our "d'awww!" instinct at colorful, big-eyed little ponies will make us more open to diplomacy, and ponies favor diplomatic solutions because they're better at harmony and friendship than they are at war, so I actually don't see humans and ponies ever going to war with each other, realistically. I mean, Equestria is as close to the Planet Of The Cute Adorable Puppydogs as we'd probably ever get.
All that being said, Discord could very easily underestimate a human scientist's ability to understand what he does and harness or replicate it; his understanding of the theory behind how his magic works is vastly more advanced than ponies, but obviously humans have those concepts too or I, a human, couldn't have written about them. :-) Discord is used to being waaaay out there, an entity whose understanding of the world is so far removed from every other creature's that no one could possibly comprehend him, so he would totally assume humans could never figure him out, and he'd be wrong. However, in this story he is not up against a human scientist. He is up against a very average human. And very average humans are not smarter, on average, than average ponies.
I find it fascinating that there used to be more Trees of Harmony. What happened to them? What would happen if this one were lost? The brief state of the world was also neat. I'm surprised by how happy I was to hear that Scorpan is still around and still embraces friendship.
The reality check wasn't nice, but Discord needed perspectives not his own, and with his reputation, he can't exactly just walk up to someone and ask them, "Could you help me confirm that reality actually exists?" And he is Discord. He probably didn't have much fun given the dire situation, but he might have had a little.
Matrisse definitely intrigues me. I just know that Discord calls it "Mattress" whenever he can... assuming that would even bother it. Given how he shattered it, I'm imagining some manner of crystalline thought construct.
As for Anon... yeah, sounds about right. I've made comparisons to Haruhi Suzumiya before, and they definitely hold true. A subconscious reality warper twisting existence to better suit his desires. Except this one is completely unfettered, whether by cooler heads or a sense of restraint. Discord is entirely right to be terrified. I know I am.
Eagerly looking forward to more.
5069028
This Discord (the one from Last Draconequus continuity) doesn't realize this because he hasn't thought about it. He's very smart, he understands evolutionary forces, and he's actually quite familiar with how various different things affect pony psychology; he just has blind spots when it comes to things he doesn't want to think about. If this was pointed out to him, then depending on how he was feeling that day, he'd either take credit for it and gloat about even harmony needs disharmony to strengthen it and everything he's done has helped ponies and they should be thanking him, or he might go into a deep sulk and complain that ponies have to ruin everything and why can't he have nice things.
In the "Next of Kin to Chaos" continuity where Discord is Q... that was actually the plan. Q played the role of a malevolent chaos spirit because he believed that was what Equestria needed to get over the remains of tribal racism and caste systems, and then got lost in the part, such that his actions during "Return of Harmony" are an extended violent hissyfit similar to throwing the Enterprise to the Borg, except with less potential benefit to his victims.
You make a very good point -- particularly since the society we see Equestria in, with what's still a strong nobility and also a number of powerful Earth Pony clans, would lend itself to arranged marriages, but there's no indication that ponies even know what those are, or have any notion of anything other than companionate marriage as an ideal. Even Rarity, who wants to marry for status, still wants a husband who'll love and cherish her, enough to reject high-status candidates who don't do that. A society that practices genetic transmission of wealth or status almost always has arranged marriages, but Equestria does not. (That one, Discord would be gleefully willing to take credit for. He never wanted to marry Celestia because he always felt that marriage itself was an institution he didn't believe in, but at the same time, it hurt and contributed to a lot of insecurity on his part, that the whole time they were lovers he believed she would eventually marry someone else for political reasons, and even though she assured him that wouldn't change her relationship with him... he's Discord. He doesn't share well. So as much as he claims to consider love sappy and beneath him, he'd happily take credit for freeing ponies from the obligations of marriage without love.)
You know how they say baby rattlesnakes are more dangerous than adults, because they don't really control their own venom? Anon is like that, changing the whole world and not realizing it because he's an idiot. If he was smarter he'd have already beaten Discord, but he'd also be less likely to radically alter reality in a way that is probably doing irreparable damage to Equestria.
W-Was that Tragedy tag always there? No, please no!
5074828
No, it wasn't. But it doesn't tell you anything about the ending, either. In the best case scenario where everything happens just right and Discord saves the day and Anon goes back to Earth and everything is rosy and wonderful... there are still a lot of mares who are going to wake up and realize they don't love the stallion they're herding with, or they don't want to share, so what are right now relatively happy marriages will collapse. There are a lot of formerly heterosexual mares who will find themselves married to other mares, and their marriages will end. There are a lot of stallions who are going to have the memories of having been mares, and having believed they were mares all along at the time, and if they haven't been suffering from gender dysphoria for months because deep down they knew what they were, then the sudden change is likely to traumatize them. And there are six mares who thought they were in love with a completely perfect guy, and thought they loved their best friends sexually as well as platonically, and then they're going to find out they were mind controlled -- essentially raped, when they thought they had perfect love.
There are no possible happy endings to this story -- the best case scenario still produces massive emotional trauma and disruption. Discord doesn't care about that (he tends to view those things as good, when they don't happen to him), so he'd perceive it as a unilateral win, but from the perspective of the ponies he'd be saving, it's not.
And then there are all the other scenarios that are not best case. So when I realized that while a triumphant ending is possible, a happy ending is not, I added the tragedy tag.
5072447 With regards to your point about the present-day versus ancestral environment comparison, fair enough. That being said, I don't think magic is necessarily a point in favor of evolution under hostile circumstances. From an information-theoretic perspective, magic is complex, and if all of the details of how to harness magic were stored within the pony genome, that genome would have to be absolutely huge in order to contain the necessary information to produce such complexity. Even if magic came from some external source, the necessary mechanism to utilize it would still have to be extraordinarily complex, and the size of a regular unicorn's horn doesn't really square with that. Not to mention the extreme competitive advantage such a mechanism would confer upon ponies; once the horn evolved, it's hard to explain why earth ponies and pegasi don't have it. With all of this in mind, I'd have to say that magic evolving from scratch is extremely unlikely, and it's far more likely to me that ponies evolved naturally before possibly being exposed to some source of magical "radiation", so to speak, causing beneficial mutations--in which case magic isn't really all that strongly indicative of the state of the ancestral environment when ponies were evolving; it just occurred by chance. Nevertheless, all of your other points were well-argued, and I'm willing to concede on this one. (I particularly enjoyed your example of the bunny stampede; compelling indeed.)
But even so, what about the second part of my post, the part about political machinations and what they do for intelligence? Ironically, Celestia's absolute rule, which you used as a point in favor of pony intelligence, may have deprived all of her subjects of the opportunity to scheme, which, as I pointed out originally, may have been a major factor in the evolution of human intelligence. I'd be interested to hear your take on that, if you're not too busy.
5076853
IMO the Kinds did not evolve from the Proto-Ponies, they were engineered from them by some Precursor race. In my verse, it's the Eldren.
The horn is an effector-radiator organ; the power comes from the whole neural net and possibly some other internal organs. Likewise effector-radiators are the wings of a Pegasus, the hooves of an Earth Pony, the horn, wings, and hooves of a Changeling, and the voice box of a Seapony.
5075036
Yeah, the only way I can see an even remotely happy ending for this is if the sex ratio snapped back to normal if Anon was defeated -- and I don't see how that's possible. Even Discord wouldn't have the power to do this -- only Anon could do it -- and Anon wouldn't want to do it.
In my universe, Cosmic (not Incarnate) Discord might be able to do it, but only at severe risk of shattering the local space-time continuum. In fact, what Anon did in the first place would run that risk, but maybe as he's more powerful than Discord he does it more smoothly. Anon is really and truly terrifying both in his power and his irresponsibility.