Just some guy, riding out his time.
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The Cutie Mark Crusaders are off on another mission from the Friendship Map, this time to Cornucopia, the home of Starlight Glimmer's former master.
But when they're faced with a problem they thought had been taken care of ages ago, tensions flare up, old wounds are opened, and the girls find themselves up to their ears in Timberwolves.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
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This feels like an all new ponyville mysteries book.
9369536
It's nice to know I'm hitting the show feel when aiming for it.
Cool
It feels like it takes place after the events of journey to the livewood.
Translation: "I don't think the ground wants to be my friend."
And so we have our parallels and our problem. This is going to be quite tricky indeed, and I get the feeling you haven't told us everything quite yet. Looking forward to more.
9383427
Gonna work on it a little more over the weekend, I think, and aim to publish part 3 either Sunday or next Thursday. Classes started again yesterday, and still need to make my plans for this year...
Anyway, glad you like it! There's some CMC shenanigans coming up mixed with Starlight and Red Horizon interactions. Beyond that... you'll see why I had to re-think it when we get there.
Random side note: Granny Smith's Civil War re-enactment with artillery. Too much or just enough
9385044
Just enough. Party cannons had to come from somewhere!
Wow. Even putting aside Apple Bloom's comment to Scootaloo, wow. I hope the Crusaders introduce Mooncalf to Starlight. I'm sure she'd have quite a few things to say about this sort of philosophy.
I was right there with Scootaloo give all of the "Right, Scootaloo"s. Seriously, girls, notice the habit. Still, the answer may be within reach now that the blockage has been blown out a bit... assuming Haily and Mooncalf give the Crusaders a second chance.
9395783
Yeah, it was a little more anvillicious than I'd anticipated, but it works. It's interesting to note Mooncalf is only one half of the issue, though. Dunderhead is just as guilty in causing her stress. There was a point where this story was going to revolve around Apple Bloom openly siding with the stallion and Sweetie Belle openly siding with Mooncalf, but I'd have had to tone them both down for that, and the message would have been lost. So I kept the angle of the girls definitely wanting to get Haily away from the grownups, but making the same core mistake, just being less intimidating about it.
Plus, that would have taken too much time to write, and this is already a really slow project.
That's why I went with those from the thesaurus: dunderhead and mooncalf both mean 'idiot'. Totally not a representation of the fandom's arguments regarding Scootaloo, by the way. Absolutely not.
The 'kind-hearted world' line was taken right out of Liber Null, by the way. So that's an actual chaos magic element right there.
Right framing is the most important thing ever!
Do what must be done, Lord Glimmer. Do not hesitate, show no mercy. Only then will you be strong enough with the Dark Side...
9402885
Yup. The original line is something along the lines of "The life force of the Universe is not human-hearted. Therefore the wizard cannot be human-hearted in trying to tap into it."
It's important to note, though, that this does not mean evil deeds are required to attain this sort of power. That would imply some kind of pact and an outside source, more of a deity-based system. This one's more gnostic: it's a rule that you need to think and feel this before you can move this.
Seemed like an interesting touch, is all
9403221
I've been intrigued with "can thing, that requires you to be bad guy to use it, be used for good?" kind of question since I've first seen Star Wars (although, it's probably not the best kind of story for any "serious" questions). Realistically it may as well be too easy: humans can be trained even to deliberately change parameters of their EEG with biofeedback, and things like that are, well, basically biofeedback.
Admittedly I'm pretty sceptical about long-term therapeutical consequences of providing one a single burst of motivation by insulting them and intimidating with bad counterfactual futures. It is not a non-obvious idea and it is very cheap to implements, so it's one of the most commonly used things in reality and the efficiency is, well, not terribly impressive. And then they're immediately gone. Maybe her friend will be able to pull off all the hard work, but he's still just a child and is competing against two adult blockheads.
What's her diagnosis?
Not bad, it's like an original episode.
9415152
I don't think I get the issue here.
Competing against two blockheads... for what? Haily went to Dunderhead for coaching, and Mooncalf is a meditation coach. Neither one is an entity she can't simply, well, walk away from.
As for Starlight's diagnosis, I don't know, man, I'm not a psychiatrist. All I know is I can write Starlight by copying a few other characters I know have mental problems/illnesses, mostly from Grant Morrisson's work, and I wouldn't know how to write her if I had to make her a full-blown criminal without this angle.
So yeah, sorry to hear you didn't like it, maybe the next one will work better.
9415155
Target hit, then. We'll see what the consensus is on the matter.
Fantastic work. The solution was forehead-slappingly obvious in hindsight, which is how you know it's a good moral. And the epilogue was a very nice way to resolve Scootaloo's stake in all of this. Thank you for a great read.
9415201
She most certainly can, the problem is why would she? As Starlight could always disband her cult, return cutie marks and walk away, but why would she? "Competition" part comes from interesting way of looking at behavior in psychology where organism has limited amount of total time and is trying to redistribute it between accessible activities in order to maximally satisfy it's needs based on it's previous experience.
pleated-jeans.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/how-lions-spend-a-typical-day1.jpg
That may lead to some misleading effects.
Returning to Starlight, in comparison to her baseline free time distribution of 70% studying magic and 30% sulking, redistributing to 40% studying magic and 60% equality speeches, stripping marks and crushing dissent suddenly gives her whole village of ponies who value her advice, want to socialize with her and generally treat her friendly --- great improvement on social scale. The problem is not that she liked cults, it's that it was her best available option. Of course, as outside observers we may say that she had even better social alternatives, but they depend on other ponies, are not within her skill or within her experience and just words to her. And that perfectly explains away why she immediately stopped when Twilight and co. started to treat her nicely.
Same thing is with "victim culture" --- it's not victim culture that is problem, it's that behaving that way in exchange to approval is people's best available option and as so it comes to dominate their social time. Which is very sad really.
Here luckily Haily spoke to Live and he reacted positively, but what if (or when) he didn't? She would need to mend it somehow, but she doen't have experience of pushing through unpleasant social problem and getting rewarded in the end and she doesn't have someone to teach her. What she has is ever present option of redistributing her time from him to Mooncalf and continue exchanging behaving as she likes for affection.
I wouldn't say I didn't like it --- it was a pleasant read. After all, if we had obvious general solution for this problem, world would have looked very differently.
That was a good story.