Earth's militaries were prepared to wage war on land, sea and sky. Powerful navies, countless aircraft and millions of soldiers. A few planners even had contingency plans in case of an alien invasion.
There were no contingency plans to deal with an angry goddess.
An entry in FanOfMostEverything's Villain Exchange Program contest.
Cover art by Zero Devil
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Not to my liking. Just leave it at that.
Yikes. Um. That was more... curb-stomp than I'd expected.
I do love the concept that unicorns can naturally hear and send radio transmissions. That's got some very interesting potential.
This was... darker than I'd have liked to see (though the tag was there). But I guess it's hard within the contest wordlimit to set up an overpowering villain like that and also a plucky band of misfits with just enough capability to defend themselves and overpower the villain.
I surprised they had not dropped a nuke or two on her.
Or once they figured out she can pick up radio chatter overload her with white noise
Daaaaaang.
Let's hope that the title doesn't prove prophetic here.
Yikes. Well, this sure earned its dark tag.
9248483
She survived the kind of orbital re-entry that ends with a nuke-sized kinetic impact. I don't think a nuke is going to do much.
Your sure right about the out of context part, I kept waiting for the part where there was some sort of justification or at least rationalization of a fully aware Luna destroying humanity.
But it just wasn't there, not even a hint.
If you're going to write a story this simplistic then just call her nightmare moon and be done with it because as it stands your 'luna' and nmm are the same character for whatever reason. Which is especially confusing when you referenced nmm earlier and then didn't touch the concept after.
It had its good bits but just seemed so dragged down by a deal-breaking plot hole.
Wow. This was quite something! This is one of the few times I've seen Nightmare Moon not be disappointing
Of course, like this, it has a dark tag. Swap Luna out for some sirens, and Celestia for Star Swirl, leaving another world to its fate, and suddenly it's canon
9248066
It's always seemed a little odd to me that this isn't an obvious interpretation to more people. Radio waves and visible light are the same phenomenon at different frequency ranges. What we call "visible" light is what's visible to us, but it's normal and common for creatures even on earth to have different ranges of perception. Snakes can see into the infrared. Many animals can see into the ultraviolet. Rats can hear ultrasonics. Whalesong is partially out of the human perception range. Dolphins use sonar to transmit images to each other. Bats use ultrasonic echolocation.
All of these things are simply vibrations, be they vibrations of air, or water, or electromagnetic waves. Different creatures have different biology that allows them to detect/emit/interact with vibrations in different ways. Unicorns have a horn, and it's made very obvious that their horn is the organ used to interact with magic. Humans, today in the word we live in, use radio devices for long range communication. Telepathy if you will. That a unicorn would use biology for the same purpose seems no stranger than saying that an electric eels uses an organ to generate electric current.
But instead, it seems more popular to interpret magic as some sort of "undetectable by science!" abstraction.
9248268
Well, word count wasn't a problem. This story was well within the limits. But 'plucky band of misfits" wasn't the point. This contest was about a villain, so I made it about the villain. Having read several of the other contest submissions, I've yet to actually see a single story besides this one where the villain is actually being very villainous at all. More like, "politely objectionable" seems to be as far as anyone else wanted to go for some reason.
Certainly the story could have been longer. And there were lots of things I wanted to do that didn't make it in. But plucky misfits saving the day was never part of the plan.
9248854
...well, villain, right? That was the whole premise of the contest. That a villain crossed between worlds. And like Horizon was pointing out, I was deliberately invoking Out of Context Problem. That humans were completely incapable of addressing the issue because they expected conventional warfare and instead received an angry goddess...I mean, it's right there in the story description.
Again, it's right there in the reference made in the title, and the story description, and this was a contest about villains. It shouldn't have come as any surprise.
I don't see this as a plot hole at all. Remember, this story takes place during her banishment, not before, not after. For a possessing spirit like the Nightmare to play upon issues of identity is standard fare, whether or not we're talking about MLP at all. "The Nightmare" is a modern invocation of Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. That story is from the 1800s. Playing with the mental boundary between parasite and host, or whether they're actually the same entity experiencing dissociative identity is an very old and well established trope.
Granted, I didn't develop that angle. It's not the story I was trying to tell. But it's certainly not a "plot hole" that I invoked it.
9248998
Yay! Somebody who liked it!
I only ever watched the first Equestria Girls movie. Don't really have much of a sense for who the sirens are supposed to be, and the contest rules didn't say anything about it being necessary to include them. But why would this not be compatible with canon? Nightmare Moon was banished 1000 years before Sunset's trip through the mirror. I'm not entirely sure of the canon timing on all the season 7+ interactions between Starswirls and the Dazzlings, but it doesn't seem any great stretch to me to propose that over the thousand years she had before Sunset showed up, she could have dealt with them somehow.
9249346
You 'explained' the plot hole by openly admitting that you never once did so in the story itself. Just, think about that for a few seconds.
Alright, now you should have an understanding as to just how silly that sounds. What you just said was. 'there is no plot hole' then in the same breath said 'I never explained away the existence of this hole in the story'. That's where you should explain it though, not here, not after the fact.
The biggest problem with your story is that Luna isnt a villian. She simply isn't. Its out of context villian. Not out of context some character I've arbirtarily decided is evil now and I refuse to offer any justification for this about-face as the only context we can gain is from the show in which Luna has been expressely called an unfortunte bystander. But that probably wasnt quite as nice sounding though huh?
As for the comparison in jekkyl and hyde, thats just lame. In that story there is conflict between these halves of himself, yet Luna, the character we have untill now been expressely told is a good guy, does not bat an eye at brain draining an innocent. She doesnt so much as twitch when she does so, there is no hint of this at all in the story. The conflict you seem to believe you have sowed simply doesnt exist. Its not in the story. Sure its kind of in the meta narrative, but if its not in the story at all, then the meta narrative excuse kind of falls flat and sounds like an explanation for poor foreshadowing rather then something thought out during the writing stage.
9248483
I think it's reasonable to assume they did, but that it was done off-screen. If the story had been longer, yes it's a thing I very obviously would have wanted to depict, but at the same time, like Horizon is pointing out, she already survived being the impactor in her own personal Tunguska event, so it's not like dropping a nuke on her would have been any serious inconvenience.
Showing the nuke on-screen would have been a big timesink for very little effect, since readers know by the chapter two that it wouldn't be enough. It only would have worked if I'd developed the human side more, but instead I was going for Kick the Dog by having her murder everybody.
This story was supposed to be mildly unsettling because it's a curb stomp victory for the villain. I suppose it could have contributed to the "dark" and "unsettling" bits by taking the time to show more of the humanity...failing, but again, since she'd already survived orbital re-entry leading to a nuclear event, throwing yet another at her seemed superfluous.
9248746
Yep. Deliberately invoked.
9248758
Strangely, at least of the contest submissions I've read so far, it seems like this is the only story that isn't either upbeat and cheerful comedy or about repentance or something. This was supposed to be a contest about a villain, so I wrote about a villain.
If it was dark, then...success!
9249385
...what? No?
Reading what you're saying, I'm not entirely sure you know what a plot hole is. It's not simply a thing that's not explained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_hole
"In fiction, a plot hole, plothole or plot error is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story's plot. Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical or impossible events,[2] and statements or events that contradict earlier events in the storyline."
That's not what's going on here. Where is this "hole" that you're concerned about? Where does the story contradict itself? Maybe you don't like it, I get that...but there's nothing inconsistent about a mind parasite and host having identity issues.
What you're really saying here though, is that it violates canon.
First off, that doesn't constitute a plot hole. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that I stepped on very personal toes and that Luna is "best pony" to you, so it simply annoys you that I cast her as a villain. But there's nothing inconsistent or contrary about me doing that.
Second...as I already explained, Nightmare Moon is basically a possessing spirit / mind parasite. For these sorts of entities to blur the lines of identity with their host is a very well established trope in fiction. Plenty of other people have invoked this same parallel.
...dude, no. That simply wasn't the story I wanted to tell, so I didn't tell that story. Your objection is kind of like saying that it's somehow not ok to tell a story about something without explicitly explaining how that thing came into being in the first place.
Incidentally, as an example, just off the top of my head I'll refer you to Confrontation, which is a fan animation that takes the famous song from the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde musical, and draws in Luna and Nightmare Moon as Jekyll and Hyde. Listen to their interplay. Listen to them arguing. Listen to Nightmare going back and forth between between claiming that they're separate and that Luna "will die" and then turning around and saying she's what Luna sees when she looks in a mirror and that "I am you, you are me" and "you are Nightmare Moon. This entire conversation is taking place inside one person, and the depiction of Luna and Nightmare as two separate entities is a vehicle for the benefit of the audience. Think of mixing black and blue paint in the same can. At first it's easy to point to where the black paint is and point to where the blue paint is, but as you mix them...it stops being so easy to point to one vs the other because they're not really separate anymore. And it becomes very difficult to separate them back apart at that point. But the blue paint doesn't disappear when you mix it. It's still there. And Luna is still there too. She doesn't just disappear because she's merged with the Nightmare.
But everybody already knows the relationship between Nightmare Moon and Luna. I'm not sure why you thought it was necessary for me to explain it. Yes, the "story of their mental conflict" is a valid story, and yes that's been done...but that's simply not what this story is about. It's not a "plot hole" for me to use these characters without explaining the backstory everybody already knows.
"What you're really saying here though, is that it violates canon."
"But everybody already knows the relationship between Nightmare Moon and Luna. I'm not sure why you thought it was necessary for me to explain it."
This is what I'm talking about. You are saying that your story violates cannon but are also hinging your defence of your characterization on cannon. I'm not even a big Luna fan, but when you write fanfiction you have to assume that the reader thinks all things in cannon are cannon here unless stated otherwise. You just arbitrarily making Luna evil without explanation is just that, arbitrary, with your justification being cannon explains their relashionship, while also saying, my story breaks cannon.
You cannot say yours is not cannon but also say the reason you dont explain Luna's character shift is cannon explains it. You cant have both at the same time as they are completely contradictory.
This whole bizare parasite vs host thing doesnt exist in the story. Its not there, I know you think its there, but it isnt. If I'm wrong and that there is some sort of hinting at this then please prove me wrong by qouting from your story. Because as it stands at the time of this comment, the only even vague hint we get of this is the fact that Luna points out that NMM talks to her.
Thats it. Thats where this entire 'conflict' you assert exists, begins and ends.
Like my English teacher always said 'I dont expect an explanation for the storm, I only expect to see the dark clouds in the distance.' I dont need you to explain it to me, but I do need a hint as to why, or else it sounds arbitrary.
Also, just so were clear, this whole 'its banishment luna' defence doesnt make sense. She wanted to get back at her sister, she wanted the respect of the ponies. Yes this may have changed but this is not explored in cannon. You cant just assume we read your mind and understand what you think Luna was like as all we have is the show to go off of, and there she is stated as more or less an unforutne vessel for NMM. Without any explanation or hint on your part her characterization here is jarring, and utterly contrary to our assumptions.
Which would be fine if there was an explanation offered.
Wanna make Luna a world conquering elder god? Sure, just hint at why she isnt like her show counterpart. I dont expect explanation, but an off hand remark of "A good, a primative people to conquer, now I share the spotlight with nopony!" Would explain everything.
9249465
I think what's going on here is that you simply don't understand. I'm seeing the same thing in your posts. First off, I'm not saying that my story violates canon. What I said was, and let me directly quote myself here:
"What you're really saying here though, is that it violates canon."
Me saying that your argument is an argument about violating canon is not me saying that my story violates canon. It was me pointing out that your justification you were offering for your argument...didn't actually justify your argument. Even were I to agree with your statement about Luna being villain...and literally the second paragraph after the above quote I already explained why I didn't...but even if I did, that still would not validate your argument about this being a plot hole. It is not. Me pointing out that your argument about this violating canon failing to justify your claim about there being a plot hole...does not constitute me claiming that my story violates canon.
I apologize, but when you're demonstrating this sort of reading comprehension failure even in the comments, it's no surprise that you didn't understand the story itself.
Second, I'm not "hinging my defense on canon." In fact, doing a text search in my previous post, not only was that not my argument but nowhere do I even use that word except that quoted sentence above where I pointed out that your argument isn't an argument about plot holes, but an argument about canon. That I wasn't "hinging my defense on canon" should have been clear when I said, quote:
"For these sorts of entities to blur the lines of identity with their host is a very well established trope in fiction. Plenty of other people have invoked this same parallel."
Pointing out that this is a well established idea, a thing that lots of people have done and lots of people have used...is very obviously not me claiming that "why, yes this is official Hasbro canon!" No, that's not what being said here. How in the world you managed to contort that into this notion that I'm "hinging my defense" on something I never even said...I don't know what to tell you. Your justification that you gave for your "plot hole" claim had nothing to do with plot holes...but was about canon. I responded by pointing out that "lots of people have done this." Or to phrase it another way, this is a common interpretation of canon. Not canon itself. Whether this "is canon" or not is irrelevant. This story stands on its own. I've taken a canon character, and applied a common interpretation and then told a story about it. I don't understand why you're having such a hard time with this.
Third, I notice that you've completely abandoned your claims about there being a plot hole, now that I've actually provided you with a sourced definition for what one is. Instead you're shifting gears, trying to change your story about claiming there's a plot hole to this other argument instead, making up things that I didn't say and that I'm not entirely sure how you managed to misunderstand.
You're demonstrating a lot of basic reading comprehension failure, and I think that this is not going to be a productive conversation.
9249377 Sorry, my point wasn't to do with encountering the sirens, but the attitude to banishment. In this story, we get poor Princess Celestia having to make the tough decision to abandon the other world along with the monster she banished there, leaving them to whatever havoc that monster wreaks, because it's for the good of Equestria. And that feels dark, and heartless, very pragmatic, and not at all the warm, loving Celestia we know from the show. Hence its dark tag, and hence why this ostensibly feels like something that could never happen in the show itself.
However, my point was that that's exactly what Star Swirl did over a millennia before, banishing the sirens that were ravishing Equestria to the human world, and trapping them there, leaving the humans to whatever miseries the sirens wrought. So actually, yeah, it's not at all unfamiliar for Equestrian heroes and saviours to act this way
Which makes the story all the better!
On a personal sidenote: if it's not your thing then it's not your thing, but I really can't recommend the second Equestria Girls movie enough. A thousand times better than anything else on that side of the franchise, and I don't think I'd be on fimfiction without it.
9249665
Jesus Christ your an asshole.
If your not baselessly straw manning me your spending your time insulting me out of some petty hatred that I assure you is one-sided. You may have been an absolute prick through the entire back and forth in the comments but my point still stands and judging from just how many downvotes this story is getting I guess I'm not the only one with this greivance.
At the end of the day you have made no justification for turning a good character pure evil, that is a plot hole. The error or gap in consistancy is the gap between cannon Luna, who has been established as fundamentally good, and your twisted, vile, and down right evil Luna. You just say, NMM exists, and some other people on this site interpret her as evil, therefore I don't have to bother explaining myself in the story.
I'll leave you with this bit of wisdom.
Some people dont read every single story in the Luna tag. You cant just say "Other people explored this versoin of Luna" you arent other people. I have litterly never seen Luna just be ridiculously over the top evil without any explanation. Sometimes this is their first story read in this odd sub genre.
9250149
9249665
How about you two take all the drugs and chill the fuck out... This is the saddest pissing contest I have ever seen.
Hahahahhaahahhaahahhahahaaha
no.
9248746
I was somewhat down on this story in my earlier comment. But I still think about it from time to time, because it was certainly memorable. And I've come around to the conclusion that it was actually very effective at what it tried to do. It's not the kind of story I particularly want to read myself, very much, but it's undeniably effective.
Personally I'd prefer it as the setup for a story following some plucky underdogs who try to confront this monstrously powerful villain, but that's not what LordBucket was trying to do. What he was trying to do he definitely succeeded at, so I think this deserves a little more respect than its rating box suggests.
9762601
Thank you. I'm glad you came back a second time.
This story was intended,as the title implies, to be an absolute curb stomp due to Luna being an Out of Context Problem. A tank is a very manageable threat for a nation state, but when a tank shows up at the local kindergarten and gets involves in a playground brawl...that's a different story.
Unfortunately, this story ran afoul of a couple things:
1) This was an entry in FanOfMostEverything's Villain Exchange Program contest, and so far as I can tell I was the only participant who wrote a story about a villain being a villain. Everything else I read from the contest was a light-hearted comedy or an already-redeemed former villain being contemplative or basically just hanging out in their day to day life. And then along came my story where everybody's favorite sweetheart little miss Luna is mind-raping an entire planet and murdering children. I think it caused a great deal of mood whiplash among readers. A lot of people went into this thinking "dark" in the sense that villains from the television show were "dark." Instead, they got something borderline Cosmic Horror / Eldritch Abomination.
2) Not only was there planetary mind-rape and very deliberate Kick the Dog murder of the little girl who just wants to snuggle puppies...it was Luna doing it. Everybody loves Luna. Portraying her not only as a villain, but as a Complete and unrepentant Monster...I think that bothered some people. Notice how I very deliberately gave names to the people that she kills.
3) The story completely pissed off Jest, who is a popular author on this site. To the point that even after I stopped responding to him he just kept coming back to keep posting angry comments until eventually I started deleting his posts because they guy just couldn't let it go. He has over 1000 followers. Pissing off somebody that well known isn't a great way to get a story liked.
4) Fimfiction readers have generally trended towards a strong dislike of humans losing. This is far from the first story of that sort to receive negative response. Look at Chatoyance. Or look at all the drama that happened over the Conversion Bureau verse. There are people on the site who become genuinely angry over stories where humans end up losing. And not only do the humans lose here, look at the tropes in play. Look at chapter three, where the woman and little girl are murdered while the man is completely ignored as irrelevant. On the one hand, Luna being from a matriarchal society...it makes sense that she would perceive the women as the threat and eliminate them. But from a psychological standpoint, to a human living in human society...what's going on here is probably very deeply disturbing.
5) The Bad Guy Wins. And then, after the bad guy wins...it piles an additional Downer Ending on top of it by reducing Celestia to tears with the realization that her sister is utterly irredeemable. This is not a feel-good story. And, well...people like to feel good. This story, I think, plays a very pure note. But it's not a note people wanted to hear.
Hitting on all of that at once...in retrospect I'm not surprised the story was poorly received.
Thank you. Clearly you're not the only person for whom this in particular wasn't the sort of story you wanted to read. But if it accomplished what it set out to do,and if you still remember it after almost a year...I'll take it.
Thank you for giving it a second read and posting for me to see.
Ok. But the premise here was that Luna was something that the human race was fundamentally unable to cope with. Like Godzilla showing up to a high school wrestling match, or bringing a nuclear weapon to an argument over which way toilet paper should go on a roller. Such a shocking curb stomp that it leaves the reader unsettled because "there was no chance. There was never any chance. They were already dead before the story even started, they just hadn't realized it yet." That's what I was going for.
Having a rag-tag bunch of plucky underdogs show up and save the day...sure, I can see how that might be a fun read. But it would have been completely contrary to the intended premise.
Late to the party, but I liked it, apparently for all the reasons everyone else didn't.
Seriously, I have been saying since day one that people took Luna's side WAY to easily because she cried a bit at the end of episode two. It was still EXTREMELY possible for her to just have been faking and wow, would it have been easy to do. Yes, later events proved Luna was genuine, but before Nightmare Night? There was nothing to say she wasn't. (She could have been pulling a Cozy Glow before Cozy.) Celestia was regularly demonised in the early fandom as being an ironhoofed tyrant, but I can only recall one half-hearted attempt at anyone writing a villainous Luna, despite the enormous possibilities inherent there. (Not even Nightmare Moon, Luna.)
Two, I'm Evil and like to see the bad guys being bad guys. If how Luna gets away is bad, poor Sombra has it worse I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times he's been used as an actual villain and not some sort of comic relief or romance-fodder in the fandom - and the less said about the apallign use the comcis made of him the better - when in canon, he's so Evil he had to be literally blown up TWICE and in his second appearance, inflicted the greatest and lasting damage of the entire series to date, from a standing start, armed only with the armour on his back! (And yes, even after nine years with the show and the main characters, I was still kinda rooting for him...!) So a villain protagonist (winning) is a thing I'm totally down for, it happens rarely enough,
And I'm always up for seeing humanity crushed into splutchy powder (Invader ZIM, which I'm re-watching again after the new special, remains the show that I think most accurately reflecys humanity) - especially by an out of context problem!
So, I at least, you might see as something of the target audience. Whether that makes you feel any better or not is a matter of conjecture,..!
9763421
We appreciate you writing this as we specifically try to avoid stories like these but sometimes accidentally end up reading the first few paragraphs before realising what they will lead up to.