It's back! great chapter, as always!

Nice, another chapter !!! 😀 Love the story and moonie here! Keep it up!

Ok, so after much binge-reading, I am now caught up and ready to articulate my thoughts on the story so far. To summarize, it's great, but not perfect. I'm loving the thematic links of how one grapples with their own emotions and decisions tying all the characters together in a shared struggle, regardless of which side they're on. Nightmare Moon and Caed, the main protagonist and antagonist, have essentially arrived at the same point from different paths. Nightmare Moon started off as pragmatic and cold, but after opening up to another for the first time, was struck by loss and being consumed by grief and rage. Caed, meanwhile, was tired of violence, and strived for peace, but when backed against the wall, adopted and ends justified the means mentality, willing to commit atrocities for the sake of his charges. That's damn good writing. This also applies to the other princesses and the Praetorian Guard, who are all great characters by the way. The action scenes are also nicely choreographed, and you convey emotion well. Even the human world feels like a fully realized world almost on par with Equestria.

The main problem I have is a lack of focus. No, I'm not talking about the april fools or holiday chapters, those were fun. Many times, perspective seemed to shift without warning, either mid-scene from one pony's head to another or dedicating whole chapters to side characters we never see again. For example, Coco and Suri, or random Royal or Eclipse guards. I'm not sure adding Lightning Dust was wholly necessary, either, as she's rather one-note. The biggest offender, though, are the griffons. At first, I thought the humans would attack their kingdom in force, but that never happened. Aldo and Gilda could have been omitted entirely with minimal effect. It's almost as if you just wanted to include them for the sake of showcasing your admittedly neat headcanon on the setting and nothing else. And that would be fine, in a vacuum, but compared to what I didn't get to read instead, it's disappointing.

For instance, I really would have liked to see more of Twilight. The level of suffering she went through, to the point where she willingly embraced a suppressed hatred and used dark magic, now essentially ending up as a pained creature of hard logic? That's heavy. More peeks inside her head over the course of the story so far would have been leagues more interesting - and more tonally relevant - than griffon politics. I'd argue the same for Sunset, though to a much lesser extent. Even something like replacing Scarlet with a determined Coco post Wisp Knight attack would have opened up more deep character interactions with the Mane 6.

Regardless, I eagerly await more chapters as you head into the final act. It will all end in flames, I'm sure, but questions remain: how big will the blaze of vengeance be? And what will be left uncharred afterwards?

I am so happy to see nightmare out of her Funk and ready to kick ass again. It might be a suicide mission but at least she's going out in her own way. And who knows she might just come back which is what I'm hoping for by the way. I can't wait till the next chapter, this is one of my favorite if not my favorite story on this entire website thank you so much for making a great story.

10457437
I say “you know it’s a good story when you want the villain to win” because it means the author has portrayed the villain in a way that makes them likeable, even if they’re evil. It fits into the idea of anti-heroes like Deadpool, except it’s not the same because they’re still villains.

It’s hard to portray the bad guy well enough for the readers to like them, by virtue of the fact that they’re meant to be portrayed as evil, so you’re technically not supposed to like them. But if the author has done well enough, you will like them despite the evil they do, while acknowledging that they are in fact evil. You know it’s bad, but you want them to win.

It’s also a sign that the villain in question actually has a good character. It’s very easy to create a villain, but more often than not you’ll end up with a cliche, or stereotype, something one-dimensional where it’s simply a “I’m going to do something bad for the sake of being bad”. Most often you never get to hear that villain’s reasons, and most often when you do it’s something like poor upbringing, a singular event, etc. etc.

Now of course a backstory isn’t required to make a good character, but personality is. Skeleton is a good, likeable villain, because he is a good character. He has personality.

Nightmare Moon in this story has been portrayed excellently. She is no doubt the villain, yet she’s also going through character development that is normally restricted to the protagonist. Her personality is well-developed and complex, and she’s facing her own trials. She is one of the best portrayed villains I’ve seen in a story in quite a while. Because of all she is going through, it makes you want to see her win. You know she’s evil, she’s the villain, yet despite it you like her and you want to see her succeed.

...it can be a little complicated to explain all this but I hope I got the idea across with some semblance of accuracy.

10603467
True

any idea on when we will get a new chapter, the suspense is killing me

Its like been a whole year since i checked fimfic. Happy to see an update! Ive read this whole thing at least 3 times. Top knotch and hope to see an update at your most comfortable convenience!

This is a fantastic story. I loved the themes of this story and how they're really felt throughout all points of the story. While reading this, and for hours after finishing it, I spent a lot of time just thinking about it. To me, the primary themes really feel like Vengeance, the Burdens of Leadership, and Everyone has Friends. I think the interplay between the themes of vengeance and the burdens of leadership is really poignant in how it is deeply affected in all three primary factions/leaders(Nightmare Moon, Caed, and Celestia/Luna.) While each of them are trying to do whats best for their people and the people they love, they are all ultimately unable to not let vengeance decide what they think is best. Nightmare Moon initially decides to overthrow Celestia because she wants vengeance for her thousand years on the moon. If she simply wanted to make her name known through history, or to achieve power, or to achieve both, she could have done that in other ways which wouldn't have put her in direct oppositions with multiple powerful alicorns, the set of magical artifacts already proven to be naturally effective against her, AND Discord. She takes all the burdens of leadership given to her from her conquering of Equestria with aplomb, yet it is not for the her people she took power nor is it why she stays in power- yet she still gives a lot for her people. And ultimately, when the Rouge Knights unveil themselves, she personally takes offense for their damage and the humiliation of Caed defeating her and never bends or compromises with them. She seeks no diplomatic path, despite the good chance that if she opened a more clear diplomatic relation with Caed(and Caed opened a more diplomatic relation with her,) they could have potentially resolved the starvation of Caed's world with things like, more organized volunteers, shipping of magic-laden crystals, and a two way scientific street to discover a way of, perhaps, opening or supporting portals from the Equestrian side. Later into the story, when Vinyl is kidnapped and Nightmare Moon enters into the Entropic Fracture to rescue her, she indiscriminately slaughter's her way through the Rouge Knights and deeply damages their infrastructure, most notably killing Eishwel despite him doing everything in his power to help her. This could be due to a lack of cold calculation, but my interpretation that it is as vengeance for their assault on Equestria and specifically, Vinyl. This leads to Nightmare Moon's eventual defeat, even, as by damaging the Rouge Knights so heavily, they are so desperate as to unleash the Medusa Screamer in the clash between the Diarchy's forces and the Empress's forces, as well as Vinyl's death. Of course, on the Rouge Knight's and Caed's side, they are in many ways a great foil to Nightmare Moon- similarly motivated by vengeance, with a more pure intention for leadership and a similar ruthlessness. Caed and the Rouge Knights, upon having the Greenhouse experiment destroyed by the Orxtoni, want vengeance for their lost hope and the irreplaceable deaths of what(to me) is insinuated to be a huge portion of their civilians. The vengeance blinds Caed from seeing a way to collaborate, and they attack Canterlot. Many of them become dedicated to their plan of capturing and slaughtering unicorns to fuel the spectrum shifter. And of course, later, when Nightmare Moon enters their world and slaughters many civilians and destroys their cloning tanks, they become desperate to win at any measure and desire to strike back at Nightmare Moon, and they unleash the Medusa Screamer, the most unforgivable sin by their own metrics. Caed feels deeply conflicted about whether what he is doing is right, and would never have agreed to use the Medusa Screamer if it wasn't for Nightmare Moon's vengeance, and his own desire. He is also someone who struggles to decide what is the right path to take as a leader, and it becomes very muddy for him to decide when it becomes cluttered by vengeance- he isn't sure whether attacking Nightmare Moon straight up is the right choice after the initial Canterlot attack where it becomes clear that Nightmare Moon did not mean to destroy the greenhouse sector(I've forgotten the sector's name.) With Celestia, Luna, and the Bearers of Harmony, they are much less motivated by vengeance in comparison to Caed and Nightmare Moon, but it is still there. Luna, at the end of the story struggles to move past the horrible things Nightmare Moon has done and the control Nightmare Moon once had over her. Celestia spends much of the middle portions of the story thinking the worst of Nightmare Moon and agreeing the plan to, with Zecora's Cleansing Joke, kill her, because she believes that Nightmare Moon is true evil for possessing her sister. When Luna is harmed during their prison break, she uses the sun strike to nearly boil Nightmare Moon alive and reveal the depths of what Nightamre Moon has done to Twilight. The Mane Five, and particularly Rainbow Dash, hold their personal positions due to the usage of hostages, being forced to convert Discord, and the ritual used on Twilight. Twilight spends much of her time after the being implanted with the crystals struggling with her hatred for Nightmare Moon, and spends the trial time at the end of the story trying to explicitly use a cold, detached point of view to get the worst possible outcome for Nightmare Moon. However, as a whole, Celestia and Luna, to me, feel the least motivated by vengeance as a leader. Many of their people explicitly want them back on the throne, they have largely sincere reason for believing the worst of Nightmare Moon, even if they do largely dismiss the potential of real friendship with Vinyl until after they ultimately come up the betters after the Medusa Screamer. They peacefully talk with Caed, and seek to minimize harm to others. They do even give Nightmare Moon a trial after their victory, although much of this seems to come from Celestia's personal guilt. Much of the moving plot of the story happens because of vengeance, and is set at odds with the burdens of leadership, where often, how the problems Caed and Nightmare Moon need to deal with become muddied by their desires for vengeance. My personal viewpoint is that the story is a tragedy. That these characters came together to all make the situation worse together, and that it is tragic because they couldn't have the real chance to grow and perhaps move towards better ponies/people due the situations. If Nightmare Moon didn't overthrow Celestia and Luna, Celestia and Luna probably wouldn't have jumped towards destroying the Entropic Fracture as their first action, and may have traveled through to the world on the other side. They definitely wouldn't have imprisoned Sunset Shimmer to complete it. If they traveled through the Entropic Fracture and made a peaceful first contact with the Rouge Knights, that entire plot wouldn't have come to be. But thats the thing, the characters didn't do it because of their own character flaws, and it pervades into the themes of the story.

I could talk more about the final primary theme (Everyone has Friends) but I think it's a more heavy-handed theme(Vinyl and Nightmare Moon's friendship is a major, major plot point) and I think is slightly less interesting than vengeance and leadership as themes because of how Caed and Nightmare Moon serve as foils to each other through the lens of those two themes, but not really through Everyone has Friends. I didn't even really talk about Ebony or the Crystal Empire here which also tie into these themes but I don't feel like writing more about this right now.

Anyways this story is really cool and way more ambitious in its scope(scope meaning more than simply word count and length of plot, but also complexity of the story and the depth of its theming) compared to any other fic I've read, and overall, hits it out of the park. Great story, I loved it. I feel bad for Mirage, he deserved better than being another weapon in a war.

Criminally underrated, I wish we could have gotten a conclusion but it was still a very good read.

However I genuinly don't understand the hatred the ponies and the comments have for humanity, it's written to be a sympathetic and understanding plight to be in, they NEED to do these terrible things or thousands of people will slowly starve to death. Yet the comments and the characters are treating them as if they're random invaders simply seeking to commit random acts of terror. In the final confrontation with caed luna says something like "to kill is to kill" acting as if she wouldn't be sentencing thousands to a slow and painful death and causing the extinction of an entire intelligent species if she managed to stop them.

Their current plan is to send nmm to human land in hopes she's exiled for and manages slaughter thousands of innocent people, it just doesn't make sense to me.