February 22
I kinda hated to get out of bed, but my wings were gonna get stiff from disuse if I kept on sleeping in, so I nuzzled Peggy and got out of bed real slowly so that I wouldn't disturb her and then put on my flight suit.
It was a crystal-clear morning, maybe just a little bit nippy. I could still see a few stars standing out sharply: the sun hadn't come 'round far enough to wash them out yet, although I knew by the time I got to altitude, they'd be gone.
I was already in the air before I asked for permission, but even as eager as I was I kept my height below the chapel bell tower until after the airplane controller said that it was safe to fly.
Rather than take a long climb off in any particular direction, I thought I ought to stay close to campus, so I started a narrow climbing spiral until I peaked, then I flipped a wing down and did a vertical wing-roll halfway back to the ground, pulled out of my dive, and let my momentum carry me back up.
When I was up to height again, I made a couple of broad circles, slowly picking up speed until I could feel the air begin to respond in a mini-cyclone, then I stopped flapping and let it swirl me around for a couple of revolutions. It petered off pretty fast; I could have gone tighter and made a faster one, but there was the risk of creating a dust devil or a tornado if I got carried away.
Although I'd planned to stay on-campus, I saw a hawk off in the distance and dove down to investigate. The ground was barely lit by the sun, and I wondered what she was doing up in the air so early.
When she saw me coming, she banked down and flew off, and I followed for a bit but not very long. I didn't want to disturb her too much. Singing birds and waterbirds usually like pegasi, but birds of prey generally don't. It takes a while to earn their trust.
That was one thing I was looking forward to in the spring: the birds coming back. They didn't all leave during the winter here, but most of the fun ones did.
One of the strangest things about early-morning flights is how the sun is up when I'm at altitude, but if I land really quick, it's still down and I can watch it rise again. So I did that, circling back to campus and around the bell tower, where I hovered until the sun came over the distant treetops, then I dropped down to about fifteen feet and zigzagged around all the trees in the quad as fast as I could.
A couple of people on the ground saw me and started pointing their telephones at me which I've figured out means that they're taking a movie which will soon trend on YouTube. I didn't mind, though; I decided to give them something really good and descended a bit more and flew right at them, pulling up when I got close.
It was easy to see who the aspiring filmmaker was: one of the students let his telephone down and dodged out of the way (even though I wasn't all that close); the other one followed me, leaning back and turning as I went overhead to keep me in the frame.
I looped up to the roof of Olds-Upton, then angled back down and landed in front of them. First I apologized to the boy who I'd scared, but he said it was alright; it had been really cool to watch. The other one agreed and put away his telephone down and stuck out his hand and shook my hoof. He said that he was named Gates and he wanted to make documentaries and he thought it would be really cool to have a pegasus-eye perspective of what I'd been doing.
I said that I didn't think I could use a camera with my hooves while I was flying, and he told me that there was a special type of movie camera called a GoPro, and he had one and if I was interested he'd loan it to me.
So we decided to do that on Wednesday morning and then maybe again in the afternoon. He said that he'd be getting a better camera than his telephone, and he shook my hoof again and thanked me.
In climate science class, we started talking about climate change, which is caused when the mixture of gasses in the atmosphere changes from one thing to another, which changes the global average temperatures. That was really interesting: Luke had brought it up before but I hadn't been entirely sure what it was.
He started off by explaining how not much more than a dozen thousand years ago all of Michigan had been covered by a thick sheet of ice that was miles thick, and it was the reason that we had the Great Lakes—they'd scooped out low spots and they retreated and melted and then the melting water from them had filled those low spots.
Then he told us that the glaciers had been so heavy that Michigan was still springing back up a little bit. That was hard for me to believe, but apparently there was all sorts of geological evidence and now humans even had satellites that could measure how much the land rose and fell.
I raised my hoof and asked him how the glaciers had formed and he said that it had just snowed a lot for a long, long time and that was basically what caused them.
That was a troubling thought, that things could get so far out of control that glaciers might form and cover everything up, but I guess the same thing might have happened to us if the three tribes hadn't learned to work together and defeat the windigos, so maybe I shouldn't be too critical of the humans' system.
Then in philosophy we started to talk about Nietzsche, and I wished that he'd been brought up sooner. He'd come up with the idea of perspectivism, which said that there were no objective facts or knowledge of a thing-in-itself. That was sort of a rejection of some of what Descartes had said, but I thought maybe it took too much of the opposite extreme. Wasn't it true that if I bucked up on a raincloud, I was going to get wet? Wasn't that a fact?
But I don't think he meant for his philosophy to apply to everything, just things that are less tangible than clouds.
At the same time it was kind of strange to have someone say that there weren't universal truths to discover after all, even if he thought that having a value was as much of a value as what the actual value was (which is confusing, but Nietzsche thought it made sense). Was that a universal truth? Was he wrong about that?
Philosophy is making my head spin. Luckily when class was over I could put it to the back of my mind and concentrate on lunch. It was a fact that after I ate lunch I wasn't going to be hungry any more, at least not for a while.
I was really looking forward to Equestrian class because I hadn't seen Meghan all weekend, and she was a lot of fun to talk to and hang out with. She came as usual with Lisa and Becky, and all three of them greeted me when they saw me and we went in and sat down together.
It was always a little weird to be in class, because I shifted languages and it was actually beginning to feel foreign to talk in Equestrian. But as the class went on, it felt more and more normal, even though I kept getting mentally dragged back out by mispronounced words.
One of the students who'd been reading ahead—a boy named Craig—asked me if it was true that unicorns used their own alphabet and I said that it was. He wanted to know how that would work if he wanted to visit a unicorn city, and I told him that nothing important was written in Unicorn script. That was reserved for spellbooks and the genealogy books that so many unicorns obsessively kept.
He wanted to know if I could teach him Unicorn, and I shook my head: I could barely read it, let alone write in it.
I don't think he was happy with that answer, but I really couldn't help him with it.
After class got out I asked Meghan if maybe some night this week we could go sit in the hot tub again, and she told me that she didn't really have a way to get there unless Becky wanted to drive us, because she'd deleted the Uber on her phone. I asked her why—it had been so useful—and she asked if I'd heard about what had happened over the weekend.
I told her that I had, and then she said that the guy who'd done it had driven an Uber-car, and she just wasn't sure if it was safe to use. She said that until she was confident in what the company was doing to protect riders and drivers, she wasn't going to use it any more, even though it was a bit inconvenient to not have it.
That was a disappointment, but she said that I could come over and use their bathtub again if I wanted to. She also reminded me that Friday night there was going to be a handbell concert and I should come to it.
I said that I would, then we nuzzled and I went off to dinner.
It wasn't anything special tonight, and I wasn't really paying attention to the food anyways; rather, I was counting down the time until I was going to go over to Aric's to spend the night.
When I got back to our dorm room, before I could even get started on my homework Peggy asked me if I was doing anything this Saturday. I told her I hadn't planned anything and she said that we ought to get out of town and go to a ski resort before all the snow melted.
That sounded like a lot of fun, so I told her yes. Then I got as much homework done as I could until it was quarter to nine, and I told Peggy I was going to Aric's for the night. She told me to have fun, and I said I would.
I took my flight suit, so that I could get my morning exercise tomorrow (although I was secretly hoping that we'd stay so late in bed I wouldn't have time) and brushed my teeth and then I was off.
He didn't want to jump into bed right away, so we sat on the couch together and watched a cartoon called Animaniacs and drank some beer. Some of it was kind of silly, but there was also a part with a singing cat named Rita and that was really beautiful.
We finally went up to his room and I just jumped into bed and stretched out on my back. Peggy had told me that was a willing pose for humans . . . maybe having their bellies exposed is inviting. It wasn't that comfortable, and I felt foolish and vulnerable.
When Aric came in and saw me he snickered, which kind of ruined the effect. I rolled on my side, and then he said I'd actually been kind of cute when I was on my back, so I pushed off with a wing and got back into my sorta seductive pose.
Then he got most of the way undressed and slid under the covers. He wiggled around a bit and then pulled his underwear out from under the covers and tossed it at the wall without me even having to ask.
He leaned up on an elbow and looked at me, running his eyes down my body, then he reached out his hand and started tracing it along the ruff on my belly, right down to where my coat ended. I turned my head to kiss him on the lips and gave his hand a little encouraging push.
Afterwards, I snuggled up against him and stroked his chest with my wing as he drifted off to sleep.
Developments! Real-world stuff! For once, I'm up early enough to catch the update in my time zone!
And now, if you'll excuse me, I have maybe ten seconds of consciousness remaining.
One thing, despite
NietszhNetshithat stares-into-abyss guy's name being spelled correctly throughout the journal, the chapter title is not spelled right. Not sure if intentional.7136552
No, it wasn't intentional. Dunno how I missed that one. It's fixed now.
/sees chapter title
Oh god, she's going to have an existential crisis, isn't she?
/reads
I was right!
Also, still waiting for when she finds out just how "feral" our world is. I'm eagerly awaiting that particular existential breakdown.
After the push or did stuff happen.... I'm actually really wanting to know if clop happened.
That's a first. Good job!
Hm. That's a pretty good way of putting that aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy. I might have to use that.
Yeah, I always found Nietzsche to be a little hypocritical myself. If we don't have free will, then why would he complain about people trying to enforce a moral standard, since by his definition they can't help it?
I bet Craig wants to learn magic. When Silver points out that humans don't have horns, I'll simply point to our prosthetic limbs and say that we don't yet.
I find that to be one of the funniest things I've read in a while.
7136558
Define feral in this context please?
And more contentious stuff to keep your readers on their feet. I love you.
The 'not as tangible as a cloud' was brilliant and the whole filmmaker thing looks really promising! Yay for GoTo. Are there pegasi in Russia? They'll have dashcams issued as standard.
Pretty sure you meant 'hoof', unless words in standard expressions like that are the first victims in the 'Equestrian becoming foreign' process. I know how she feels though, I never learned to speak my own language again without the occasional English word or sentence thrown in.
And yay Aric! Way to fill the word 'afterwards' with meaning.
7136775 Or maybe it was I shook is hand again?
Didn't we already read that a few chapters ago?
7136633 If anything would get humans to accept genetic engineering on themselves, having the ability to use magic would do it.
7135567
germany buck yeah !
Good job, tiny equine, you've figured him out. Nietzsche is brilliant and wonderful and horrifying--I found in undergrad that I had to do my best to sort of bracket out his rhetorical flourishes in order to not misunderstand him. It was easy to read him as a nihilist--ironic in that he set himself against that nihilitic insistence that life was not worth living. It was easy to read him as monstrous--not that he made it hard to do so.
Perspectivism is the only thing I grappled with in the man's corpus that I didn't feel sordid after discussing. Also Silver is both right and wrong here. He does actually mean this to apply to everything, but it's not so much as that there is no truth so much as facts are contingent. The part about truth and stuff is secondary and aftermath. The contingency of fact is the important part.
But I'm curious how much farther they will look into that abyss, and when Silver will see it looking back. I can understand her wrestling with and being interested in the idea of facts being contingent, on the subjective will--even the whole nexus of ideas that is the will to power, because she's a pegasus, of am martial tradition--but I can't see her liking Beyond Good and Evil or Genealogy of Morals very much. (More the second than the first.)
On one hand, she would be fine (maybe even like to an extent) Nietzsche's appreciation for hierarchy. On the other hand, Nietzsche's dog-pile of authority is not the sort of benevolent dictatorship she has in mind. But Genealogy? No way in hell she comes out of that without feeling at least a little sordid. That book made me feel like I was reading the Unabomber/Zodiac Killer Manifesto About Why Being a Monster Is Awesome And Morally Justifiable.
EDIT: also THEY DID THE THING
EditEdit: I can't believe Kierkegaard isn't on their syllabus I'm so insulted
7136770
Behaving according to natural processes as defined by the laws of physics, rather than by the conscious decision, command, and control of a thinking being. Sunrise is an illusion caused by the rotation of the earth. Weather is a product of the interaction of several things, including atmospheric temperature and humidity.
It's feral. It's uncontrolled. It's untamed.
No one controls it. No one directs it.
"So, dudes, what's the craziest thing you've ever done at college?"
"I jumped off some risers into a kiddie pool!"
"I got drunk and apparently did it with 4 girls and another dude..."
"I stole the casing off one of the dorm's elevators!"
"I chased campus safety around with their own mace one night!"
"I, uhhh... did it with a pony."
7136868 I kinda meant just making wands or stuff that functioned like horns.
wait what ?! there is a part missing !
They are honestly a pretty cute couple.
Also, she could probably make some good spending money by wearing a GoPro for her morning flights, making regular Youtube videos of them. Just the "is a pegasus" novelty would probably bring in several thousand subscribers.
7136579
Some problems are hard to solve because of their nature. But some solutions are hard to implement because of the nature of the people turn around and say things like, "But I don't want to solve the problem - because it's the principle of the thing." These two types of problems are not comparable, and gun control is definitely the second one.
Principle is all well and good, but principle is a model of how you think the world works. I oppose X on principle, because my principle tells me that the likely outcome Y will not be an improvement on how things are at present. In some cases principle can actually lead to the avoidance of thought. Sometimes this is a good thing. We really don't want judges questioning principles like 'innocent until proven guilty.' We *want* such things to be 'unthinkable'. But on other occasions it can be counterproductive. Having a principle by itself doesn't actually mean your model of reality is helpful or has any resemblance to actual reality.
When i comes to issues like gun control it can be helpful for everyone to ask themselves questions like:
*How do I know I'm right?
*Have I tried to disprove my views?
*How hard did I try?
*How much confidence do I have in the results?
Confirmation bias is one of the easiest mental traps to fall into, especially about emotive topics. A good place to start can be to avoid the extremists on the other side, and the political straw-men of your own, and look for compromise solutions. Maybe you'll find one that really isn't that unthinkable after all.
I feel like I'm going to need a pony anatomy lesson here: where does a pony's coat 'end' exactly?
This little pony sure is getting snarky.
It occurs to me that, in all likelihood, the reason Unicorns have their own alphabet and care so much about bloodlines is due to keep a certain level of magical power in the general population. Presumably, when they were raising and lowering the sun and moon, they needed significant amount of magical power to do so, even with many unicorns working together. Protecting and strengthening bloodlines is probably a key part of that.
Nice I hadn't come across that with Nietzsche. Most of my philosophy classes where we discussed him mostly focused on his nihilism and his ideas around the Übermensch. Great seeing something I hadn't known before.
7137110
Most medium to large mammals have thin or no fur between their hind legs. Reduces local overheating due to lack of air circulation back there. So nipples and vulva basically; depending on how far things went.
Also... Woo-hoo! Go Silver!
7137110
Equine coats are thinner on their belly, and fade to non-existence the further back you go. So, that point is not far ahead of her teats.
[The more you know...]
7137251
TIL: Evolution isn't an idiot.
What makes a bird 'fun' in Silver Glow's eyes?
Ah good old Nietzsche. I really wonder how he would have viewed ponies and their society.
7137251
Eeeeh, Aric's involved in stage productions; that's probably not even in his top five!
7136950
She already is familiar with that.
She explained that natural weather happens in pony world the same as human world, the exception being that the natural weather over land cycles of pony world are fucked up to inhospitable levels from past calamities, and again from past bad management, necessitating artificial control to correct the damage.
Feral Planet stuff.
Come summer, one of her favourite websites to check might be the National Hurricane Center.
I mean, tornadoes are a spectacular and hugely destructive weather phenomenon, but they're always limited to a comparatively small area.
Contrary to that, the sheer scale of a powerful hurricane is awe inspiring, and no matter how many satellite images I see of the things, it's still a 'damn, look at that monster' experience every time. The damage done in the US can be huge and at times catastrophic, but when looking at Typhoons that tend to hit the poorest countries and can wipe whole coastal areas off the map due to the shoddy infrastructure and kill hundreds or thousands every year... I think she'll have a hard time swallowing that.
More feral planet things: earthquakes and volcanoes. Could earthponies work as early warning system? Can they sense seismic activity further down?
As soon as she's flown around a cloud a few times, Silver knows 'what it wants to do'.
Can Aquamarine ask the ground below her hooves in what mood its bedrock is today?
7137404
So she's familiar with feral weather. Does she have any grasp as to the scale of ours? The sheer, mind-numbing lack of control or direction? Can she fathom Tornado Alley? Can she wrap her head around the Dust Bowl? How would she react to a hurricane like Katrina, or Sandy?
What about other processes? What might she think of Mount St. Helens? Or the Ring of Fire in general? Earthquakes? Tectonic plates?
How about less earthly processes? How would she take the fact that the moon is the product of a planetary collision? Or that the sun is going to die in a few billion years? What about the fact that there was a time when it simply didn't exist? Would she be able to understand such concepts? What about asteroid strikes? The finely-balanced house of cards that is our planet's orbit? Solar flares and coronal mass ejections? Mars' famous dust storms? Jupiter's Great Red Spot? Supernovas? Black holes? Gamma ray bursts? The Big Bang?
How would she take a concept such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Or phenomena such as the warping of space-time and quantum entanglement?
I admit some fault in my last post. How do you describe the universe?
Silver comes from a place where everything, up to and including the time of day is controlled by someone. Directed. Monitored. Regulated. Everything is nice and neat and orderly.
I want to see her find out how NOT our world is. And I want to see her reaction.
I suppose that since Aric and Silver are getting closer and getting to know each other more, then they won't be waiting too much longer to have sex. I'm sure another reader has already asked this question, but I wonder if Aric is a virgin? Heh, Silver would have to guide him if he hasn't had sex yet. That would be something to see.
7136563
I think it did happen (there was a space and most of the the time that mean some time has passed between the two parts) and maybe even ponies don't write about what they did in bed in their journal
7135646
Wow. I need to get more sleep. What even was my point of all that? That has to be one of the most incoherent things I've ever ranted. Sorry about that everyone. (I hope my boss heals up quickly and work returns to normal, because it's exhausting me.)
I guess what I meant was that we DO have strong gun laws in America, especially compared to laws concerning other equally dangerous objects. People fear things that they don't understand or often encounter more than much more dangerous things that they are familiar with. Yes we can do better - there's always room for improvement - but when people make demonstrably false claims (for any subject) like that, as political rhetoric, it irks me.
Even fictional characters, apparently.
7136558
Only a little one . . . but then it's only the first day of Nietzsche.
That's something that would have to be more experienced firsthoof than read about, I think. I know there's a lot of stuff that I knew from books and then I actually experienced it and understood it in a much deeper way than I ever had before (tunnel vision, for example).
7136563
You'll have to wait until the next chapter to know for sure. Or scroll over the spoiler text if you're impatient.
yes, sex happened
7136615
Feel free to!
7136633
Wouldn't that be cool? It's be just like Harry Potter. Even if they could only teach non horn-based magic to people (like Zecora's potions, for example).
7136692
7136775
Yes, presumably. Muzzlecams, maybe?
Nope, I meant hoof. Actually, I think what happened was what 7136789 said, and I just muddled it up and didn't catch my mistake.
Huh, that's interesting. I don't know any foreign languages fluently, so I don't have any personal experience, but when I was at my brother's wedding, most of the bride's side of the family was Indian, and they'd have conversations that switched languages mid-sentence. That was really weird.
7136835
In an earlier chapter, she thought about making a cloud drill, but then didn't because she was worried it would go out of control.
7136868
I'd be standing in line for sure.
7136910
The same thing can be said for many humans. And Voldemort as well, according to the wand-seller.
I don't understand it, to be honest. Not entirely. I'm grappling with the concepts to understand them well enough to present them from Silver's (often flawed) point of view, and then hoping that I do it well enough that nobody in the comments flays me. Especially with Nietzsche, because he never came up in my philosophy class.
Maybe if she takes another philosophy class. . . .
7136959
It's such a long list, I'm not sure which one to pick.
7137017
Gotta keep the teen rating.
7138572 it continually surprises me that people aren't constantly in awe of each other and the terrible/beautiful quality of other minds even being a thing
7137018
Oh yeah she could.
7137087
Yeah, first we've got to admit that we have a problem. And a lot of people won't even do that.
That's actually a handy list for all sorts of things in real life. When I'm diagnosing a car, the first and last questions are the most important to me (two and three don't apply as much to machines). It's served me well in my writing, as well; there have been multiple occasions where I've been about to put something and then ask myself if I know I'm right, and then I look it up, and as often as not I'm not right. (I'm also wandering off-topic here.)
Very good summary, and very neutral. Thank you. I might borrow that.
7137110
Well, you've already gotten a couple of answers to this, and they're both correct. Generally on horses, the coat thins/vanishes just below (imagine it's standing on its hind hooves) the belly button, leaving the udders, thighs, and other 'fun' bits bare, all the way up to the dock.
41.media.tumblr.com/4d9238ece1520f82791827c5e209553f/tumblr_msg8g2WTrZ1sq6axxo1_1280.jpg
Yoinked this from Archonix's blog [also this is a gelding not a mare, but the coat coverage is about the same]
She's learning from her classmates and roommate.
The reason for the alphabet is two-fold. First, they can horn-write, so complicated letters aren't an issue. Second, they can learn magic from books/scrolls/whatever, and it's a good bet that when you're learning a spell that way you want there to be no ambiguity whatsoever about what the word is. Case in point: pronounce and define lead.
The magical power is somewhat important, although I think that's not totally a matter of breeding. Twilight's a way better spellcaster than anyone else in her family. We don't know enough about Rarity's to be sure.
My headcanon reason is that unicorns still have Noble Houses, and that's why they care. Twilight got into magic school in part because she's from a good house; Starlight Glimmer (who's certainly Twilight's peer when it comes to magic) apparently did not.
7137203
You're welcome!
7137309
It will fly around with her and sing. She prefers ducky birds and chirpy birds to hawky birds.
That's a good question. They have values; he would have liked that. Otherwise, I don't know. Just the concept of cutie marks throws a lot of philosophy out the window.
7137331
I can say as a theatre person that you're correct.
7138534
I never actually lived or even worked in english, and yet I still have an odd english word or formulation that slip in my train of thougth.
And I do know that each time I visited France, I came back with an accent.
And I've experienced people switching from french to english randomly when talking together, or from Arabic to French and so on... It IS really fascinating.
So yeah, I really find what Silver is experiencing to be normal.
7137475
Really, any good storm system is going to be of a scale that's hard for her to imagine, especially since we humans can't do anything more than warn the people who are in its path and then just hope for the best. We can't even set up counterstorms to try and shear it off.
I would think some could. Not all; that's more of a specialty skill. Maud can do it. Maybe the rest of the Pies, too; they do work on a rock farm. But the Apples, they know topsoil and maybe a little further down the roots, and they know plants, but they don't know bedrock or magma.
Aquarmarine cannot. Perhaps she could get a vague notion, but she's not a rock expert, she's a farmer. Silver Glow, on the other hoof, used to work coastal feral weather, so she's got a better sense of weather than many pegasi would.
7137562
I don't think everything is. Many things are, and many things are at least somewhat controlled, but other things aren't. Silver Glow knows about feral storms; she worked East Coast weather, so she's dealt with hurricanes and nor'easters . . . but they probably wouldn't be as bad if there were weather teams in place to fight back, to dampen it before it got too close, and maybe to set up some preventative storms out over the ocean to take some of the energy out of the system before things get really nasty. Because in terms of weather, that's really what it's all about, energy and moisture. If you can limit that, you can keep feral storms smaller.
I haven't got a firm answer on how much of the cosmic and geological dance is controlled by the ponies. Not all of it, but certainly way more than here on Earth.
So I guess that the short version is that Silver Glow has a concept of feral weather and of geological process that are beyond sapient control, but the sheer scale of them on Earth is frightening . . . but it's going to have to be something that she witnesses firsthand to really appreciate.
7137822
They already did in the little missing section (to keep the teen rating)
No, he isn't.
7137859
Yup
Not if they want to keep a teen rating. I suppose she could keep a separate journal for that.
7138295
I agree with you. We could do better, and we probably would do better if we dropped some of the foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric (on both sides) and had a calm, rational discussion. We've been able to improve automobile safety and workplace safety and aviation safety, and other developed countries don't have such high rates of gun deaths, so why can't we solve the problem?
I don't know what the answer is; it's probably a much larger social shift than just banning high capacity magazines or lengthening the waiting period or having open-carry laws or whatever else. But what we've got now isn't working that well, and not talking about it rationally isn't solving the problem, either.
In my opinion, a sign of a good story is one where the characters annoy you sometimes.
7138659
Well, I am. I read a lot of stuff and wonder why I can't be that good or clever or witty or (in some cases) how that person could be so ignorant.
7138720
That happens to me at Renaissance Festivals. I also picked up a few phrases from Scotland and Australia, although it's been so long since I've been to either place, I've pretty much forgotten them by now.
7138572
From how the novel I read back then were, I would've expected a very laconic sentence to sumarize things. Like "I finally got lucky." "And then we had fun" and such.
The hole in the text is very very weird.
7138678
It seems like such a strange thing to complain about though, on Silver Glow's part. I'm not sure a tightly controlled language incapable of ambiguity is something anyone would want to use in normal everyday life, since slang is often a large part of language as its used. In essence, it sounds like the Unicorns have less of a language and more of a math--which makes it weird to complain about.
You're forgetting Shining Armour, who could shield a whole city single hoofiedly. Granted, the evidence is rather thin, but it would very very unusual if there wasn't a genetic component to magic. Of course, one has to keep in mind that even if there isn't a strong genetic association between magic strength and breeding, the unicorns might think that, and given how utterly important controlling the sun and moon was, it'd be dangerous for them to discount it.
I always thought the association of Twilight with a noble house was somewhat strange. I don't doubt that many ponies get into Celestia's School largely based on social standing, but I'm skeptical that it'd be a large part of it. It it was merely the case that you had to fork over money, why would Twilight have been so invested in the entrance exam--why do they have an entrance exam at all?
Personally, I think Twilight was something of a lower class pony--not poor, so to speak, but certainly not extremely well off. She worked hard to succeed because that's the only way she'd ever get anywhere and she ultimately makes something of herself. This isn't, I think, to dissimilar to Rarity, who comes from a poorer background and ends up building herself up.
I suppose Cadance foalsitting Twilight is something of a sticking point in that theory.
Except Twilight is so cute as a filly I'm sure Cady just couldn't help herself.One could imagine that Celestia insist that Cadance go out and get a broader, less noble centric view of the world, though, which led her ponies like Twilight.Wow. Nicely done.
7138824
I may have backed down a little too much, but a certain person who shall not be named was complaining about the rating, so I PMed a retired story approver and a mod and decided I needed to back down just a bit to make sure that I was in no way crossing a line, and I couldn't think of a way to fit in what I wanted to without basically jumping on that line and saying 'what're you gonna do now?' And be assured, tomorrow's entry fills in some of it.
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It's not the language per se; they speak the same language. It's just the way they write the words. Essentially, unicorns use a complete phonetic alphabet, whereas the rest of the ponies use a much shorter, more simplified alphabet like we 'muricans do that leaves us with words like 'lead' that we have to figure out from context.
Well, here we get into special talents. Yeah, he makes a damn good shield that's mostly changeling-proof, but what else can he do? Can he cast from spellbooks? Can he copy spells, like Twilight did with Rarity's gem-finding spell? Or is he more of a one-trick pony? I'm sure there's a genetic component, but I don't think it's assured, any more than it's a sure bet that all the Apples will be good at growing apples, or everyone in RD's family is fast.
Well, that's a good point, too. Even if they do know it isn't a sure thing, they're likely to figure it's a safe bet. A bloodline that has produced a dozen Twilights will probably produce another, whereas Snails is probably better off not siring any foal.
I don't think it was money. They did have an exam, and she passed it. She not only passed it, she passed it well enough that Celestia noticed. So she got in on merit, straight up. And that feels more honest to me. I don't think that the ponies value material wealth like we do; I'm not imagining that all the Noble Houses are built on old wealth and inbreeding and snobbery. There's some of that, sure, but I think the ponies are more sensible than that overall.
I think that Twilight's family had a lot of advantages that Rarity's did not, but I also think that could only take them so far. Despite what Silver Glow thinks, even the unicorns aren't going to put up with a complete tool being in charge (Blueblood may be an exception to this, but I don't think that anypony actually listens to him). Breeding is important, but so is what you can do.
It's possible. I haven't read the book where Cadance becomes an alicorn, so I don't know all the background, but I think that Princess Celestia's way of grooming powerful ponies isn't teaching them how to have tea properly, it's throwing them out of their comfort zone and making them figure shit out on their own. I think Twilight is a prime case of this. Celestia knew that there was more to being a leader than reading books, so she kicked her out of Canterlot and gave her a library in a small town near a dangerous, wild forest, and told her to figure it out. That might have been an overreaction due to her failure with Sunset.
As to EQ weather, season 1 Bridle Gossip the Everfree Forest is creepy, in part, because the clouds move w no pony's help so it is not ALL controlled. I suspect one of the 1st jobs ponies will get hired for is weather control. Tornadoes may occur too fast to be responded to from a distant team but hurricanes... They are so costly it would make sense to have an emergency response team. Houston just got 16" (40 cm) of rain in 24 hours. If they could take that excess rain & move it about 1000 miles west it would help our drought & so on.
As to Twilight's family, there are some threads on that in Poniverse. At the least, Shining Armor is able to join the guard & rise to Captain. + they can afford the gems to feed Spike (although, plausibly, they aren't as expensive as on Earth they are still used as money) They are probably at least upper middle class although they do not seem to have a title.
As to Silver thinking magic books aren't important, someone has been hanging out with Rainbow Dash
7138938 Well, why not just focusing on the fact that Aric is finally doing what Silver want? You used euphmism many time already. If it is too explicit, the you already crossed the line multiple time when Silver was lamenting about not being able to do it, when she and Peggy compared their experiences, when she expressed surprise at the expression "junk" and so on.
Maybe you could reverse the problem. We do know that the afterward imply things, but it is supposed to say that after Silver gave a few encouraging push on Aric's hand, then they went to sleep while she stroked him.
Maybe you could replace the afterward by a small "When we were done" or something.
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THe book about Cadance really didn't explain any of it.
However, it largely sounded like Cadance was an accident--she basically managed to ascend on her own without outside help or work. I mean, she was originally a pegasus, for example, and she princessifed at the same time she got her cutie mark.