• Member Since 10th May, 2013
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Sporktacles


I love sporks. And I love soup. Those two things unfortunately don't go together very well.

T

One day, Twilight Sparkle discovers something amazing about her friend Sunset Shimmer.

She's a magical talking pony!

This requires investigation! Science! Possibly a full-body physical!

Or maybe Twilight will just ask her what's up with that.

Rated Teen for frank discussions about... y'know.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 167 )

HAHAHAHAHAH THAT WAS SO FUN IN THE END
wona likes

This was pretty good.
Nothing serious. Just short and sweet.

but I didn’t know they were sentient!

The word you're looking for here is sapient.
Sentient means it can feel, that it can experience things. Cats and dogs are sentient.
Sapience is, boiled down, the ability to understand personhood.

“No I don’t know what you mean by y’know.” Sunset changed her grin to a smirk. “You’re gonna have to explain what you know about y’know if you want me to tell you what I know about y’know. Y’know.”

Never change, Sunset. :ajsmug::derpytongue2::pinkiehappy::rainbowlaugh::raritywink::twilightsmile::yay::trollestia:

Also. Liked, faved, and have a :moustache: !

7037677

Thanks, it's been changed.

Twilight just got vajected

I'm not gonna lie... I expected Sci-Twi x Sunset..

Damn DX!!!

You get a thumbup for not confusing sapient and sentient. For those in the peanut-gallery:

Sentient:
Can feel.

Sapient:
Wise.

Zoologists consider animals sapient if they look at themselves in a mirror and are smart enough to figure out that it is a reflection of them.

Equines on this planet of the ape are sentient but not sapient. Pretty much all amniotes* are sentient, but figuring out whether an animal is an automaton (just instinctual responses) or sentient (capable of cognition) is difficult:

Arthropods are generally automatons, but bees and jumping spiders seem capable of cognition, thus are sentient.

* I worked with chickens. They seem to be automatons to me. Chickens in Equestria, such as Elizabeak, seem sentient, and animals which are sentient but not sapient on this world might be sapient on Equus, such as Angele Bunny.

7037996

If you look at the comments below you will find that I *did* get it wrong but was corrected minutes after being posted, and changed it immediately. I know better now. Please don't downvote me!

7038050

Alright, I shall not downvote you.

Bees vote and jumping spiders plan. Cockroaches just do random stuff, blundering their way through life with pure stimulus/response and some very basic learning. I have no trouble killing cockroaches, but capture jumping spiders alive and release them outside. Cockroaches are automatons, while jumping spider are sentient, and all apes and sapient.

Good job at the end Sunset, good job.

Hah, yeah. What kind of freak would find pony's hot?

*Hides History*

I do hope someday they animate a scene where they explain to Sci-Twi about how Sunset and Princess Twilight are actually originally ponies. Until then, this is a fun way to imagine it going, good job. Poor Sci-Twi, first she's so excited about examining Sunset, but Sunset's already thought of most of her questions. Then that letdown at the end, ouch. I liked it, but probably mainly because of my preference for Princess Twilight with Sunset rather than Sci-Twi. Not that there's anything wrong with that pairing, just prefer the former, though Sci-Twi and Sunset has popped up quite a bit over the years and gotten really popular since the last EQ movie.

Poor Sci-Twi, not only no experiments, but she's losing out to her own alternate dimension counterpart. Talk about an awkward love triangle, but then that's partially what makes it so much fun.

Bonus points for the dietary comments - especially the daffodils. Last time my local ponythread were discussing the topic (and my stance is basically the same as yours, i.e. they're "vegetarian" rather than "herbivorus") and it was interesting to look up what foods ponies eat that real-world horses can't.

This list, incidently, includes tomatos, onions, potatos (which they can eat but don't do them any good) and cow's milk (and there's only one OTHER reason they'd have cows at Sweet Apple Acres is) and noncanonically in the comic, persimmons. And Equstrian ponies appear to tolerate a lot more sugar in their diet.

I wish I could give this more then one like!

“No I don’t know what you mean by y’know.” Sunset changed her grin to a smirk. “You’re gonna have to explain what you know about y’know if you want me to tell you what I know about y’know. Y’know.”
“Okaynevermindletschangethesubject!”

Very good my former student, very good. :trollestia:

Sci-Twi had her hopes crushed... Shame. She should get with Pony-Twi and agree to secretly trade places for a while!

Also, this always bothers me:

“Just fingers alone are a pretty creepy. To a pony they look like little bony tentacles. And the way arms are so much shorter than legs makes a human’s body shape look so… uneven. "

Spike? Iron Will? Too Many Pinkie Pies? Discord? Tirek? Nobody on the show ever seemed bothered by fingers, and there are quite a few ponies that likely see them every day. Even with the latter two (or three), what disturbed ponies probably wasn't the fingers. It might be weird suddenly having them (for Twilight and Sunset) but not as much just seeing them.

Having everyone clothed might be more unusual, though there are enough nudist Twilight / nudist Sunset stories on here already to cover that.

Something tells me that Twilight needs a cold shower!

And that poor Princess Twilight is now her sworn enemy without ever knowing why! :rainbowlaugh:

Pretty sure the whole gender imbalance thing is an artifact from earlier seasons. The animators have been keeping things fairly equal for a while now.

I love this. Not enough fics take the perfectly reasonable and understandable stance that Sunset is not attracted to humans.

For a moment it almost seemed like this would deserve a sad tag... But that last sentence put her into "my other half of merely a setback!" Mindset, so no sad. Here, have a like.

“Horses can eat meat!?”

Sunset frowned a little. “Yeah, they can. There are lots of scientific reports about horses killing and eating small birds and other tiny animals. Didn’t you ever come across this in your research?”

Thank You!!!:pinkiehappy:

Largely a headcanon dump, but it was a fun one. And that ending was just cruel. :rainbowlaugh:

7037996 I always feel weird about using sapient for things other than humans though. Its root is specifically referring to humans and its direct ancestors like the Neanderthals. Ponies don't fit that because they aren't in that line, but they are thinking and feeling individuals who are self aware. Its too bad there isn't a more generic word available for self aware and wise beings.

7038783

Not to mention a YouTube video I remember seeing which explained how, even in earlier seasons, there seemed to be plenty of subtle evidence that they were going for "most of the time, all the stallions are away from the camera doing work like tilling fields which benefits from a higher average strength." (Which makes sense for a Victorian-esque rural community founded by Earth Ponies)

This was mostly a headcannon dump and less of a story. This is a pratfall I see a lot of writers fall into, and my best advice would be to show more, tell less. Like for example, instead of Twilight directly asking if Sunset if she found ponies and horses from the human world attractive, instead she would say she wants to do a visual test and has a bunch of pictures of Horses and ponies, and asks, 'how do you feel about this?', and then have a bit of back and forth, with the pay off of that scene being Sunset using the same orangutan comparison.

Sci-twi stopped being the conflict of this story the moment Sunset started explaining a lot of details about pony life at the drop of a hat. No one in a natural dialogue would ever talk like that. Sci-Twi however would probably ask a lot more questions and Sunset would give a lot more concise answers. If anything Sci-Twi would make a lot of on the fly hypothesis and shoot them by Sunset for verification or clarification.

7038973 It's not that bad, the beginning and the ending were free of exposition-dumping. It just needs a little less discussing the toxicity of daffodils and a little more...

y'know.

7038868 Yep, and 7037699 ...

“I see,” said Twilight. Much of her earlier embarrassment had begun to fade, though she was still blushing furiously. “What about horses or ponies here?”

Sunset snorted. This time, her voice implied that she was definitely offended. “If you were stuck on a deserted island with an orangutan, would you start smooching him?”

Thank you very, very much again :twilightsmile:
And, basicly, thank you again for this end xD You did not make this into a typical unrealistic shipfic, but rather in a realistic and plausible one :rainbowlaugh:

But I have to admit, I also liked the SciTwi at the begin more, bombarding Sunset with questions

OK I hope we won't have all that "we have to stick to canon 100% all the time or else!" as it would be silly...
Good fic, move along. :twilightsmile:

Typo

I think he figured it out after awhile, which is why he broke up with me.

a while

Headcanon dump? Definitely.

Hilarious? Without a doubt.

Contains the best possible zinger and the greatest rebuttal to the countless 'Sunset-fucks-horses' fics ever? Oh hell yeah.

I love it.

Yeah, this falls flat, because pony Twi DID find human Flash attractive. You made this story way too realistic for its own good. And then a possible hint at a lesbian ship at the end just further undercut that idea.

Cows and pigs are sapient in Equestria,

Cows are, pigs aren't.

"Not to mention how oversized human teats are. One barely notices Pony teats except during the nursing period, while a lot of human woman always have these grotesque fat-bags dangling from their torsos. Not that you or Rainbow Dash have too much of a problem there..."

"Gee, thanks" muttered Twilight.

Oh wow that was a total lead on, on sunsets part oblivious as she was and then she drops the hammer. or she she knew exactly what she was doing and it was her way of letting her down gently.

7038920 ... and I can't find it now. Was it taken down?

7038914

¿Is Fluttershy humane? It seems that humane is more associated with a kind of ape than sapient, but Fluttershy is still humane?

We only associate sapience with humans because we use the word most with humans and it is part of the species-name:

Homo sapiens:
Wise Human

It seems that other animals can be wise. Certainly, the most common animals we encounter, cats and dogs, are sentient but not sapient; they clearly think and feel; but when faced with a mirror, cannot make the leap to understand that the image represents themselves.

Mirror-Test

7040053

I couldn't find it either, but I just assumed it was because I could only remember what the guy's OC looked like and the title was non-obvious. (Wouldn't surprise me. It took some very creative searching today to find a blog post that linked to this video when I wanted to show it to someone.)

Eventually, I'll find time to write a link organizer so I can go through my unsorted bookmarks and find it again.

EDIT: Yes, it was taken down. This page has a text transcript.

7039937

Lauren Faust had all hoofed animals (Perissodactyls and Cetartiodactyls) as sapients. Unfortunately, writers have not been consistent.

7040122 Absolutely Fluttershy fits that definition without a doubt, its the root word that troubles me -- because a Pony wouldn't of come up with a word like that nor would they use it to describe a pony to someone else.

However I kinda answered my own qualm with it; Ponies wouldn't even be speaking English if they had developed their own language, it would be more like a highly advanced version of neighs and whinnies. However if you take Translation Convention into account then it all makes sense. Of course a pony wouldn't use a word like humane or sapient. They aren't using English words at all, we are just hearing them as English because of the translation convention. Humane and Sapient are the closest equivalent words we would have to compare it to whatever they are actually saying.

Obviously a TV-Y show wouldn't necessarily knowingly use a trope like that, but it actually would be kind of awesome if that were the case.

Gosh, how the heck did this get on top of the featured box?

7038973

This is awesome advice that I will keep in mind in future writing efforts.

7038485

I did read up on what ponies eat! In fact, in an earlier fic I wrote in a meal which was practically a laundry list of things horses never eat, just to see if anyone would notice.

7038730

I think I could have used a better word, like 'bizarre' instead of 'creepy'. And I avoided talking about clothes because I can't imagine a pony being put off by them, since they do wear clothes constantly.

7038783

There's a part of me that jokingly wonders if the majority of the male population of Equestria is employed in the Royal Guard. I can only imagine the resentment. "Damn Celestia, keeping all the good hunks to herself!"

7039023

It is very unlikely that I will ever write y'know, because I'm pretty bad at it.

7039502

Well, maybe our pony princess has a primate fetish? Seriously, how on earth do the writers explain her falling in love with literally the very first human male she gets physically close to despite not knowing anything about him other than what he looks like?

Or maybe she was just thinking "Oh gosh, someone who can give me a backrub that won't have weird brother/son semi-incestual overtones!"

7039242

Corrected, thanks a bunch!

Aww, poor Sci-Twi. :fluttershysad:

7040222 I meant just discussions of y'know, not actual, well, you know. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more, drive the joke into the ground.

7037677

You know, I understand this and appreciate the differences but I've been reading sci-fi since I was old enough to parse a sentence (1977 or so) and as far back as I've read, Verne, Wells, Lovecraft, Asimov, etc., almost every author just uses sentient when describing other intelligent races.

I'm not saying you're wrong, because you're not. I'm just wondering why the sudden need to differentiate so suddenly in the last few years. Yours is not the first comment I've run across making this point. It's everywhere in fanfiction these days as well as regular sci-fi on various boards. In an age where writing is getting sloppier and less grammatically correct (I'm assuming because of US public education), why is this suddenly so important?

I'm honestly curious.

As for the rest of this story, it was a fun read. I do like the psychological aspect of beauty and attraction being brought up. I actually have a theory as to why there are so many 'clopfics' these days and why the furry community has become so large.

Like the author stated, much of our standards of beauty and attraction is formed at a young age. What do children mostly do in the average household? Watch TV, specifically cartoons. This goes clear back to the sixties but anthro characters didn't really start becoming main characters until the late 70's and 80's. Then the late 80's and early 90's introduced children to things like Rescue Rangers, Gargoyles, Darkwing Duck, and other anthropomorphized characters. It's no wonder after watching romantic interactions between characters, no matter how innocent, has warped people's acceptance of what is sexualy attractive.

Makes me wish I was back in college, this would make for an awesome psych research paper.
:pinkiehappy:

7040302

Actually, having been an avid fan of cartoons and hence observing the cartoon community for a long time, I'd like to lay a giant chunk of blame on the saturday morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon. Seriously, there was an immense community dedicated to that fandom - probably still is, honestly.

Oh, and interestingly, the reason I used 'sentient' at first and had the impression it was the correct term was because of the line "Freedom is the right of all sentient creatures." by Optimus Prime in the first live-action transformers film. Though I admit a Michael Bay movie should not ever be used as a source of anything, ever.

Apropos of nothing, but something that just happened to come up because of something utterly unrelated: one wonders what Sunset thought of the cripplingly slow top speed of humans verses equines (given that humans are actually - far from being the baseline often assumed - are heavily geared up for endurance over speed).

Ponies seem to have a higher endurance than real-world equines and no particular loss of speed. Must have come as quite a shock to Sunset the first time she tried to sprint and found herself moving what could be 3-6 times slower at flat out...!

Given the ponies are used to far more kinds of intelligent lifeforms I think Sunset would be more open minded.. Also get the feeling this could go on to with Sci-Twi trying...

7040419 But the really scary part is when she learns just how fragile human beings are... :pinkiecrazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUYP6OGw1iQ

Wow I can really picture Sunset and human Twilight having a conversation about the fact that Sunset is a pony turned human. Good Job.

7040222 that was an unexpected turn ????????band Twilight thought she was sunset's crush:rainbowlaugh:

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