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Twilight ran through Ponyville, measuring every step carefully; at first, she thought that bumping into other ponies—‘background ponies’—would be what the narrative wanted her to do, to symbolise her sense of urgency, but then she had the thought that perhaps the narrative wanted her to think that way, and so she very purposefully bumped and knocked over a mint-green pony on her way through, running past her fallen form.
She knocked over a filly, three more mares and a stallion before she reached Sugarcube Corner, in fact, but they weren’t important enough for her to remember. What most certainly was important was Pinkie; if anyone would be free from the narrative, it ought to be her.
Pinkie waved as she bounded into the candy-shop. “Welcome to Sugarc—”
“Pinkie,” she said, noting the way she had stopped speaking as soon as she’d been interrupted, “I know you know about what I know.”
“But what do you know about what I know about you know?” She giggled for no reason in particular; Twilight noted that her giggling was establishing a character trait, and her eyes narrowed.
“This isn’t a laughing matter, Pinkie Pie!”
Pinkie Pie’s eyes opened wide and her face became very quickly a mask of solemnity.
“What happened? Did you set the tree on fire? Did you turn yourself into a spider and fill the town with spider babies? Did you make some dream-reading jewellery and find out that Fluttershy wants Luna to—” Her solemn face turned steadily more terrified at the possibilities as she put her two hooves up against her mouth to stifle herself; Twilight winced at the tricolon, a clear feature of constructed speech.
Normally, she would have asked what Fluttershy wanted Luna to em-dash, but she knew then, analysing her prior interactions, that she would interrupt her own sentence and then start the one she had now begun; she liked efficiency, and so said what she needed to. “Don’t play games with me, Pinkie. I know what you’re doing—”
And then she realised that part of her character was her like of efficiency, and so she began to interlace her sentences simply to be epistemically inefficient. “—what you does are Fluttershy showing want your Luna personality do through to your her exaggeration?”
Twilight glowed a little inside from the feat of semantic ambiguity she had pulled off; one of Pinkie Pie’s eyebrows raised as she looked closer. “Twi? Are you feeling alright?” She looked deep into her eyes for about a second before drawing back and gasping. “Are you a changeling? I’ve got to tell Princess Celestia!” She made as if to canter out the door; Twilight’s magic enveloped Pinkie’s tail in a purple glow as she attempted to bound out the door, making her yelp, spin around in the air and fall splayed onto the ground.
Twilight stepped over her, looking down menacingly; then she realised that the spin had been engineered by the narrative to allow her to look down and instead grabbed Pinkie by the hoof, pulled her over onto her front and proceeded to push her face into Pinkie’s, bending down and bumping muzzles. “Nice try, Pinkie, but I want answers.”
She rubbed her head and shook it, her face bursting into an enormous grin. “Sure! I love helping my friends out! This one time, Rarity asked me ‘what’s in your head’ and I told her and then she kind of cried for a while and that was sad so I threw her a party to make it all better!”
“Vaguely terrifying comment, surely revealed later to be innocuous. I know your game, Pinkie. Your non sequiturs and your reality magic—you know what’s happening, don’t you? You know about the narrative.”
“What’s—” She deepened her voice, eyes wide. “The naaaa-rative?”
“It’s everything, Pinkie. Don’t you see? Every single thing we do pushes us along, makes us do what we do. I read Elements of Literary Construction. You know what’s going on. Everything we say’s written by something, everything we do has a reason. We’re not thinking for ourselves, Pinkie.”
Pinkie nodded sadly. “I know what you mean, Twilight.”
Twilight considered her response. “I’m going to say ‘really’, and you’re going to say ‘nope’, and I’m going to get frustrated with you, right?”
“Nope!”
“Nope?”
“Yep.”
“Wait, yep-nope or yep-nope-nope?—aha. I see. You’re going to talk like you know what I’m saying and then you’re going to get really close to understanding it but it’ll turn out that you didn’t really know. I’ve seen it. It’s part of your personality, Pinkie. You’re nothing more than a set of words stuck onto a list. Cheerful, bubbly—but I know you’re more than that. I’ve seen you defy the narrative. Tell me the truth, Pinkie.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Twilight! I mean—”
Twilight interrupted her by pushing the top of her muzzle up against her face, her hooves pushing down and granulating around hers. “Do you think I’m playing, Pinkie? If you don’t ”
Pinkie looked wide-eyed at her for a second before the tears began to flow. Even though Twilight knew that she only did so because the narrative would demand it, extrapolating from her tiny pool of traits, she could not help but feel the pain of a regret that she could not push away, although that too was clearly a manipulation of the narrative.
“Look,” she said, her tone somewhat softer as she tried to atone—doubtlessly, she was sure even as she did it, to please the narrative, which clearly wanted a flawed protagonist, “I just want to know. When you talk to nowhere—who are you talking to?”
She seemed to consider the question, and the tears seemed to fade almost immediately. Twilight noted the mood swing with a touch of distaste. She seemed to have forgotten Twilight’s violence; convenient, she noted. It wouldn’t have been very much of a story if the mare had decided not to speak to her. “Life.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow before pushing it down again as hard as she could, trying not to give the narrative the satisfaction of involuntary movement. “Life?”
“Yeah! Y’know when you feel like somepony’s watching you but you don’t really know what and sometimes you feel like you can’t really control yourself and sometimes you do things that you can’t really explain? Sometimes I get this feeling that I should, y’know, talk to it!”
“I’ve never had that feeling before.” Perhaps because it wouldn’t be convenient for the narrative to write. She had a sudden stroke of understanding. “So, the narrative tells you to do things, but it lets you know that you’ve been told?”
“What are you talking about, Twi? I mean, are you saying that we’re nothing but a bunch of thoughts in somepony’s head? That’s just silly.”
And it struck her; Pinkie wasn’t free from the narrative.
Pinkie was another tool; maybe an experiment, maybe some sort of twisted joke the narrative had played.
And the narrative let her see her, let her understand.
No, that wasn’t right. The narrative hadn’t just let her understand; she understood nothing.
The narrative wrote her understanding.
She recoiled from the being and clutched at her chest with a hoof as she stood upon two legs, knowing the pointlessness and the insignificance and the construction of the gesture; she glanced at nowhere in particular, realised that every single thought she had ever made was never hers; she knew that the realisation itself was constructed, built, and that the only reason that it disturbed her and disturbed her that way was by the narrative’s twisted grace.
“Twilight? Are you... okay?”
She moved her limbs as if they were marionettes on strings and got onto all four of her hooves; even the feeling of disassociation, she knew, had been written, had been scripted. There was nothing she could do that wasn’t.
The terror came as a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, in her limbs, in every single part of her body that she knew she could move; a deep sort of powerlessness that she knew she only felt because she knew.
Knowledge she knew she had only had because she was being written to have it.
“Princess Celestia,” she choked out to herself. “Have to get to Princess Celestia. Goddess of the land. Savior of ponykind. Bearer of the sun.” She didn’t say ‘tool of the narrative’; despite everything, she still had hope.
And she felt the doubt that she knew that the narrative had planted, and knew where the hope came from as well; and she knew that her urge to know was part of the narrative, and she knew her acceptance towards the course that she would take towards it was part of it as well. Pinkie hadn’t made a sound since Twilight spoke, instead cowering on the floor; maybe, Twilight thought, the narrative had grown tired of writing of her, but she knew that the narrative had only brought her to her attention because it wanted her to know that Pinkie still existed. But did she, when she didn't see her?
She wondered what Pinkie’s thoughts were like when nopony wrote them. Perhaps she was, in some twisted way, free: maybe she was enslaved, instead of the narrative, to the beliefs of whatever audience their narrative had. Perhaps the audience controlled her as much as the narrative.
Or perhaps it was nothing but nonexistence, some thought at the back of some writer's head.
Her horn began to shine with a purple glow as she continued to move to what she knew was a script, and she looked down at Pinkie as she raised her head and disappeared in an enormous flash, the sight of Pinkie's silhouette against the pink wall the last sight in Twilight's mind.
She hoped that in those empty moments she was happy.
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1003856
Bretagne is the French name for Brittany; it's a region in France, ha.
1003904
I had the silly thought, when I was first writing this, that this might be a shipfic where Twilight is cured by Pinkie's good, old-fashioned Pinkie-flavoured love.
Of course, that would have completely broken the entire idea of the story. Funny to contemplate what could have been, though.
Hmm
Holy cow. This story hurts, like a punch in the gut. That's not a bad thing, mind you! It's a tragedy, in some sense. It's supposed to hurt. But by Celestia, does it hurt!
I think we've all had moments like this.
Well, I know I have, at least.
What? Stop looking at me like that.
Yay
1004098
I generally envision the reader to be the greatest blocker in the world, the author to be a puncher of varying quality and the story to be a wrestling mat.
In other words, I am literally picturing myself punching a wrestler caricature of you in the gut right now.
1004109
Catharsis: the release of emotions. It's tough stuff. When you write happy stories, we laugh. When you write sad stories, we cry. And when you write stories that punish the characters through the very act of us reading them, we stop and wonder for a second, "Am...am I a good person?" It sucks! And yet we enjoy it, in a way only catharsis can be enjoyed.
So, to watch Twilight suffer like this hurts. And, in that cathartic way, I'm loving every second of it.
1004109
I like this comment more than the rest of the story put together. And I LOVE the story.
Made my evening.
ok, now this is getting really freaky. Don't know why, just it feels like it's getting really freaky
The horror, THE HORROR!
6.asset.soup.io/asset/2331/4486_dc3c.gif
She's Gone CRAZY!!
3.bp.blogspot.com/-MGPWOQ1HgRU/TrXYGC9LI9I/AAAAAAAACoE/VqMvbLUQnME/s400/crazy_twilight_by_nazoth-d4cy4nf.png
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!
schneide.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/onoz-omg.gif
Damn, this is getting deep. MOAR
plz
.
Anyone know what the other two stories around the"spiderses" referance are if they are indeed other stories?
The fact that I am reading this narritive makes me so sad!
1004109
That explains VOLUMES about you.
1004289
'Treehouse on fire' is a general disaster, and 'dream-reading jewellery' is from YukoAsho's Dream a Little Dream, wherein Fluttershy expresses her desire to be em-dashed by Luna.
It's not safe for work.
1004109 and I thought my writing process was weird... eh. dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/shrug_Twilight_future.png
Very interesting Amit. I didn't know you wrote, but now I am glad to be wrong. You have an... interesting style, and an unusual topic. It grabs the eye, and I like that.
This is... It's just... AMAZING!
Pure genius! Anyone can write an existential crisis, but to write it this well?
This is taking a very dark yet comedic twist...
1003587
Solipsism is a similar, but contradicting, concept: that the only thing that truly exists is yourself, or alternatively, that only what you perceive and affect are real.
Nothing is true, Everything is permitted... well, for the author anyway. They are making the world.
The heck does em-dash mean?
1004810
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash
Huh. You're using "begun" when you should use "began" again. To quote someone from a grammar message board:
"Began is the past tense. It occurs alone.
Begun is the past participle. It occurs after the verb 'have'." (or after 'has' or 'had')
Anyway, an interesting chapter to be sure. Pinkie didn't know, so the story can go on.
1004951
fml
4TH WALL NUKE INCOMING RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!
Nothing is permitted and everything is true!
The term funadmentals doesn't apply here. Free your mind!
I'm reminded of a short story where the narrator is explaining to an unseen audience the revelation he had that the universe ran not on chance but on fate, that what we perceived as random chance was in fact the effect of countless tiny forces we were unable to measure well enough to predict the outcome. It cut off abruptly when the narrator realized that, if what he was saying was true, there was literally no point in his trying to convince anyone else--or, indeed, in anything, as all of his actions had been pre-determined when the universe began.
HA! A Background Pony reference.
Also Twilight has gone insane. I know because even Pinkie Pie had no idea what she was talking about and PINKIE PIE KNOWS EVERYTHING.
1000601 SHHH! Be quiet you fool.
Otherwise the mods might put the nail in the coffin for this story...
never read a story that was a comedy and tragic
Know how she could have broken the narrative? She could've tried getting answers from that prompt instead of an actual character.
And for the record, I refuse to see Spike as a side character.
1005157 And that's why I believe in free will; in a world where everything, even our minds, is purely deterministic, nothing really matters because nothing can exist in any other way. It's possible I'm fooling myself, but in deterministic-world I can't do otherwise, and in nondeterministic-world I'm right and own my actions.
1005213 Yeah, I appreciated that. Namechecked and everything.
1004109 Then I'm among the best blockers out there, usually simply by not playing. Other times I bring armor to the mat. But when the punches get through, they hurt me just like they hurt everyone else.
1004102 Ever heard of that facet-of-Christianity's (Calvinism, I believe) idea of Predestination? It's this story. In real life.
........
Twilight? Twilight, you're panicking. You have a tendency to do that.
1005728 But if she did, it would be the narrative directing her to do so!
Faust: "Dance my puppets, dance!"
So it seems MLP has gone Animal Man on us. Well, if Twilight goes crazy and breaks the fourth wall with a massive "I CAN SEE YOU!", I'm gonna laugh.
Is it really going crazy, or is it really going sane? Either way the effect is the same: it breaks the locks on the mentally tame; everyone else will think she's gone insane.
Twilight has not questioned why she might have been written/given her new perspective, she wouldn't have found that book by accident.
Also, Pinkie might actually be aware, and too smart or afraid to let another's new awareness drag her out onto the spotlight, as it were. Perhaps she knows the time is not yet right?
Edit: Suddenly I think this is what would happen if Twilight tried to write a fanfic involving herself as the primary protagonist. If true, it's like some self-tormenting Duck Amuck scenario.
There is one pony who DOES know the truth!
Lyra... she knows that humans exist.
*exerts will upon Twilight* You shall enter a clop relationship with Lyraaaaaa... you have no choiiiiiiice! *Alondro's will is FAR TOO POWERFUL!! Lyra and Twilight start shagging like Snookie on a bender! Which is a horrifying sight by the way!*
One does not defy the narrative, and if one defies the narrative, it is because it is written in the narrative for them to do so. We are all pawns in a game, and the narrative is the player. We live only when the narrative shows us, when we are seen. When we are not seen by anything is when we do not exist.
Yet the narrative always sees us, for it is written in the narrative when we do not exist, so the narrative must make sure that we do not exist. But then we are seen, hence we exist. So there is never a time when we do not exist. Then, do we defy the narrative? No, for that is written.
Our leaders, our thinkers, our great minds, our idols. They are rooks, bishops, kings, queens. we are all pawns, and, should we forget our place, we shall be no more. Yet we can move up through the ranks of this twisted game.
The narrative is a twisted, confusing thing, and to understand it, you must know insanity, for to be insane is the only time that we are free of the narratives influence. Yet our insanity is written in the narrative.
We are never to defy the narrative, for if we do, we are playing into it's hands. Yet if we do not defy the narrative, we also do as it is written.
We cannot defy the narrative.
Mr, author, whoever you may be, I love you. You are the paragon of literary virtue, a light in the darkness of bad fanfiction. You truly inspire me with your work. As someone who has been teaching English I have to say, I am more than impressed. This was right up my alley and I loved every single bit of it. You are a competent, descriptive and intelligent writer who has a great sense of humor and I'd love to see more of your work.
I salute you, with all my heart and mind.
This is brilliant! Original, well-written, and thought-provoking.
I'll be watching you, Amit.
Wait... I'm confused...
Did Twilight die? Or did she just teleport to Princess Celestia?
Sorry, the "last moments" line got me all confused.
1005731
Interesting. It seems to me that "free will", in the sense of being capable of making meaningful choices among various alternatives, is actually compatible with hard determinism. Your decisions may be fixed within this particular universe if this universe is fully deterministic (which it might not be, if quantum randomness is affecting macro-causality; I'm not sure if it is), but all of the instances of you (i.e., informationally exact duplicates) in other possible worlds would choose differently depending on their options. So, I think that one's choice does have meaning in terms of dynamically changing the future toward a particular set of goals, even if that behavior was a logically necessarily outcome of deterministic physical processes. Then again, the term "free will" has many meanings, and you may have meant a different one.
1006387
i.qkme.me/3qazmv.jpg
1006490
My interpretation was that she just teleported somewhere. The way it was written, it didn't seem to imply her demise. I could be wrong, though.
Brilliant and thought provoking.
I'm glad to see this is humorous because if this was taken truly seriously then I would have been thrown into an existential crisis. Very similar to when I read the universe tab on the NASA website.
Though I can't wait to see where this goes, my head will probably be spinning trying to process all of the variables of Twilights actions.
You are given the Mustache Award for pure class and the Happy Pinkie Award for brilliant comedy:
Things are getting increasingly dark, desperate, and tragicomic. I still like it, though. It tickles my frontal lobes.
I've never read another FiM fan fic quite like this one.
OR
Twilight spends an afternoon on TVTropes.
1004044
D'expressions Bretonnes.
I know it's A region et dans les petits villages de La Bretagne, Ils Utilisent BEACOUPS
Cela dit,c'est difficiledl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/misc_RageFace.png de communiquer avec les Bretons (Selon MOi)Quand on ne comprend Guere leur language dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/shrug_Derpy_Hooves.png
This isn't going to end well, is it?