Twilight Sparkle
I breathed a sigh of relief when the last scout returned. We waited just around the bend on the road to Sweet Apple Acres. Clouds lightly jostled above, but clumped loosely such that some moonlight filtered down. The farm was situated amongst rolling hills and it was apparent that the clouds gathered only around the farm, which probably disconcerted the bipeds, assuming they noticed. Probably couldn't have noticed, but I've been told I was way too observant by too many ponies, but it was just a guess.
The bipeds seemed to have retreated to the farm, according to the scouts. Rainbow Dash had visited briefly to say she'd seen some return from the orchards and seen none leave. Together with the pegasus guard, after a discussion of what I might call for, she'd returned to shuffle clouds about to conceal any shadows from the ground.
I looked from Starlight to Trixie. The blue mare had her fight face on, but I knew her determined glare was a performance. I handed her Fix All's tool to hold in her magic; it resembled a large tree pruner. I said, "The stakes pounded into the dirt floor are 'grounding' AJ like a lightning rod. A teleport will fail because the spell thinks it has to move the entire world. Cut the cables holding AJ down first."
"O-kay."
I lit my horn and told them both, "Rainbow Dash said they've illuminated the interior of the barn, so let your eyes adjust, first, by looking at my light... Okay. Starlight, when you're ready..."
Is there a chance for longer chapters?
9899841
Competent is different from instantly knowing the chemical composition of gunpowder from smell alone. Twilight here is VERY mary sue, with how she's been able to instantly figure out how the weapons work as soon as she sees one up close, or handles it. Twilight is smart, but she isn't "This is how this goes into this and now I know how to make complex firearms and how to work them". The "Spike's figers", "Horn math", and "Magic" arguments can only get you so far. Twilight here reverse engineered a technology far out of her era in seconds just by holding it. Not even a 'diogonics spell', holding it. I'm honestly surprised you didn't have Twilight figure out the 'velocity' of the guns when she picked up the shell. To be honest, that's more logical than figuring out a complex chemical compound, BY FUCKING SMELL. You're going to smell the sulfur WAY MORE than anything else, and it's 10% of most mixtures. In fact, it's the only thing you smell, BECAUSE CARBON AND SALTPETER ARE ODORLESS.
Actually scratch that. Twilight shouldn't have gotten that formula at all. Because, fun fact, it changes when lit on fire. You've exchanged the energy in the unstable formula, for a far more stable formula which now includes a CRAP TON of oxygen.
Point is, Twilight is very much a mary sue in this story, right down to everyone agreeing with her and going along with what she says to do.
9900277
Methinks thou doth whine too much...
This T. S. Sparkle has been to S. S. Bacon Goddess earth, it's plausible that she knows of weapons, as for her hyper competency. It's SO book horse... She's smaht and has a lil of worldy knowledge
9900428
And humans are the big bad idiots who go gallivanting on private property and shoot, from their perspective, barn yard animals.
This entire fic didn't rest well with me since I first figured out it wasn't military invading. With military you can at least say "They were under orders". Here you have to say "Gun owners are bastards" which is entirely untrue.
Villainizing humans is fine, the problem is the way the author does this is by having a "Bunch of gun toating yokals" barge in and start shooting up a farm. A very small minority of gun owners are stupid enough to do that, and most of them aren't legal gun owners. These are clearly legal gun owners running through a portal and just start shooting up a clearly private property.
As for whining too much. Twilight figures out how a gun works by holding it. She figures out the pre chemical reacted state of burned gunpowder by SMELL ALONE. Then she finds the weak points on a safe and decides to just destroy some poor couple's house, instead of doing the more logical and quieter thing of just, I dunno, picking the lock with magic? She found the weakness of the vault, the exact velocity the vault had to be in order to break it, etc etc etc. She couldn't just pick the lock? She already knows the lock wasn't enchanted, I thought she was just going to click the tumblers into place and open it up. Instead she goes fully mary sue, destroys the case, and gets away scott free after destroying a god damn house, and making a noise loud enough to alert anybody around.
I whine too much? Try providing a proper rebuttal to my critiques of a story instead of trying to sound smart by using doth and initials. Yes, its cannon she went to EarthQuestria or whatever. But that's a liberal paradise where we don't need guns and it's all sunshine and rainbows. Applejack would most DEFINITELY own a gun in that world, she'd probably hold onto her father's gun because that's what country folk do. Twilight would've SEEN that gun at least once or twice. So we can only infer that guns don't exist in that world and it's just as Utopian as Equestria. Rainbow would probably also participate in sport shooting, though I'm not sure about ages in which case.
I will say one thing though. The grammar is at least good. I just wish you didn't exchange good grammar for bad story telling.
Best stories I've seen? Terrible grammar. Worst stories I've seen? best grammar.
9900672
Thank you for your thread of comments and, in the end, some of your complaints and maybe the Mary Sue comment may hit the mark—but you are jumping the gun, so to speak. Not all the POV characters have come on stage, yet. Please withhold further fusillades until the end.
As far as Twilight’s competency is concerned, canon has demonstrated she has arcane knowledge of an immense range of subjects (though not everything, especially soft subjects like friendship), to the point of re-reading libraries. Gunpowder is very old-tech. As are cannons. Fireworks predate firearms. It is no stretch to assume Twilight knows the basic chemistry and engineering, and can reasonably deduce the rest given the hardware. Fireworks (missiles) and cannons are established in-canon, though avoided in the series as weapons for “icky” reasons.. One wonders how Tirek would have fared being hit by canon ball, but nopony tried. It is that lack of competency that I rail against by writing characters working (and sometimes failing) at the best of their abilities.
BTW, i was born and raised in the midwest and was a marksman.
Lastly,
But she didn’t, did she? Nor did she necessarily get it right by what she deduced, did she?
9900663
Describing Twilight's approach to the safe as her being a Mary Sue kind of gives away that you're just looking for things to complain about. Of course she used a method that involves math; that's how Twilight approaches problems. There was no question she could get it open one way or another and her method was clearly not the most efficient. Twilight being depicted as brilliant at Science stuff like a chemical smell or complex math is pretty standard.
9900732
My main problem is that she still deduced it by smell. She has the magical force to deconstruct a shell easily, she has the knowhow to deconstruct the gun easily.
She's knowledgeable, yes, but she also takes time to work through problems just like everyone else. She just has access to a wider array of knowledge to work from. She figured out the gun in, what, five minutes? Sure, a gun isn't the most complex thing. But she also figured out what the safety was mere seconds after the gun didn't fire. Not by another search through the gun, but a "Little indent by the trigger", then laughs at herself for overlooking it. Most people don't realize the safety exists, let alone someone who doesn't even know what a gun is.
I don't doubt she'd be able to figure it out. It was the ease that makes it unbearable. Two out of the three components to gunpowder are odorless. The chemical remnants of it is a confusing mess of a compound.
It would've been fine to leave the velocity of the bullet unknown, it would've added a real sense of danger to any encounters till she had a chance to deconstruct the weapon. The tension only exists though for the first chapter though, cause now that Twilight knows, she can tell others. Maybe they aren't strong enough to cast a shield like Twilight, but there is a certain someone who does know shields better than she does.
This removes humans as a threat, which makes their current 'invader status' as flimsy as wet toilet paper. Removing Apple Jack was a good idea, takes the Elements out of the equation in a... somewhat natural way. Still don't like how they just started shooting up a private property. They know the weapon, they can counter the weapon, humans are pretty much just monkeys with sticks now.
Now, I did enjoy the very real consequence of Starlight doing something that wouldn't hurt a normal, magic filled pony against the frail, brains over brawn human. That was a nice touch I'll admit. There's plenty of good things in the story, just the overarching instigation of humans being idiots irks me.
That along with how easily Twilight disarms normal citizenry. A gun isn't the most complex thing in the world but...
i.pinimg.com/originals/1e/5b/a1/1e5ba1a4994a506f5984ce95bc57f44f.jpg
I think deciphering all these little doodads with telekinesis alone would be closer to Rarity's speed, since she's far more precise with her magic than Twilight. Twilight doesn't seem to be the type of pony to saturate an object with magic to pick it up, she seems to be the kind of pony to lather something with the floaty spell then carry it. It would also take a smart human who's never heard of a gun before a good minute to decipher what everything does and how it works, where it took Twilight a split second to figure everything out.
My point is, she's more than competent, she's closer to Jimmy Neutron brain blast levels of genius. Twilight isn't that though, she's an academic of course, and I don't doubt she wouldn't be able to figure it out. But she figured it out much, MUCH too quickly. Maybe compare it too a crossbow? "Hmm, it has a trigger, like a crossbow. if I depress the trigger it'll fire?" Then she'd wonder what was wrong, then maybe look into it with her telekinesis to figure what's blocking the trigger. Then she'd see how the safety interacts then flip it and fire.
There's no solving her ability to figure out the compound by smell alone. That should've been done differently. Maybe if she recognized the smell from say, the party cannon. Then that would make more sense. Especially since she's already made connections to cannons.
There's plenty of ways to make Twilight smart without her falling into a deus ex machina role. It's also inconsistent. She brute forces her way through the safe, then expertly reverse engineers the pistol without pulling one screw. Brute force was definitely not the best option in that case, or the only option. She would know how combination locks work, so she could pick it, she could pull out screws and dissect the safe. There's plenty of ways around brute force, but she went for that.
The idea is fun, GATE except with USA and MLP instead of Japan and fantasy world #203. It's just there's a few big problems with the way you've executed it.
9899841
No, your humans are bumbling idiots. What's the point of limits on magic when you made them insurmountable?
Not nearly as competent as you make her out to be. When she makes a plan it usually fails and she has to relay on her friends to help her out. Here she makes a plan and it works out perfectly.
Ch. 13? The one where you show how ponies are also morally superior? Or the yet unpublished last chapter of the fic where they easily beat back the "invasion" and act smugly about it?
9900732
Black gunpowder is, smokeless gunpowder is fairly modern.
Mary Sues often get clumsy or quick to anger character quirks so that they can say "Hey! See? She has a flaw! She isn't perfect Mary Sue!" Except she still is MS, because if a character flaw doesn't affect her in any bad way then she doesn't have a flaw.
If she miscalculated bullet velocity, would it lead to some guards getting injured or dying, thus giving her guilt and confidence issues? Or will the bullet just lose most of it's kinetic energy and harmlessly bounce off of someone, after which Twi immediately recalculates, gets it right and makes guns useless permanently? If the latter, then your TS is a perfect Mary Sue.
9900830
Exactly, ponies are already established as stronger, tougher, faster and smarter than humans. Guns are useless and ponies know everything about "invaders", while humans don't even know that they are under attack.
In typical invasion stories, invaders are depicted as better than victims in almost every way. Only after trials, errors and mountains of corpses, heroes find a flaw in aliens and enact a crazy plan to win the day.
It's like this fic forgot who was invading whom. Or maybe it's just a prequel to ponies invading Earth.
I didn't, it just shows that in a rare moment of ponies doing something wrong, the humans will suffer consequences, not ponies. I also don't like the implication that magic automatically makes something stronger.
And since when are humans frail? We are one of the toughest species out there, something that would kill a lion or a horse, a human can survive or even recover from.
The best part of GATE was it's realistic depiction of a battle between medieval magic society and modern world. This fic went the opposite road.
Well, I'm still enjoying this. I do look forward to hearing the humans' side of things. For now, there's a rescue to execute.
9900955
GATE was also funded by the Japanese military to make them look good. So that isn't a very good comparison.
There's some credit to humans being idiots, but not to the point where they'd just shoot their guns on private property, tie up animals that aren't theirs, and ransack a clearly well kept farm. I'd probably just go from "They're just animals" instead of "Let's shoot up a poor guy's farm". With the just animals angle, you could have a serious debate between factions on earth, where humans think they're superior to ponies because they're, well, humans. Then you could also do the same thing on the pony side, because we know many ponies are xenophobic to a degree that they're the best thing to grace their planet.
But you're right, none of this matters if Twilight's God. Capital G God, omnipotent omniscient God. It's hard to side with anyone BUT the ponies, because you've painted humans in such a bad light that we'd rather them all fucking die. But then you still throw in that ponies want to be friends and their side becomes unbearable. Friendship doesn't always win. Sometimes, oftentimes, violence wins. Humans are very good at winning with violence, the ponies only win with friendship because they have a friendship orbital laser cannon. Which has debatable morality once you think about what it's done. I mean, it froze someone, multiple someones in stone, and it's cannon that they are CONSCIOUS WHILE FROZEN. It sent someone to the moon for the ultimate solitary confinement, then when said person finally gets back, either forces a change of heart or removes a parasite. Considering Luna is GUILTY over what she's done, I don't think it was a parasite. Which means it forced Luna to change her mind. The Elements of harmony are morally debatable.
I really do hate this, because ponies are shown to be xenophobic. They're scared of everything that isn't a pony. Makes sense since they're a prey species, but what would have made this encounter so much better, was if the humans showed up, Applejack freaked out, then the humans escalated it because, you know, tiny weird horse thing running at you trying to lasso you, you'd probably shoot at it too. That would be far more logical and in character for all species involved if the ponies instigated it in their fear, rather than the humans just being fucking idiots.
EDIT: Ponies don't usually get hurt, and considering they're tossed around and ram into the ground and nearly mach speed all the time, it's safe to assume magic passively increases somethings ability to survive. Contrast that to a human being nearly at the bottom of the food chain were it not for our tools. Go ahead and fight a bear hand to hand. No tools on either side. How long would you last hm? Humans are weak, that's why we have brains. We can be at the top of the food chain because we have weapons, but our bodies are not the strongest thing on the planet.
9900830
Much better critique, thank you.
I'm going to indulge myself in justification, so you can ignore the rest if you like. The story should stand for itself, and where it doesn't, that's a shortcoming. The rest of this reply might be slightly spoilery.
Your idea of deconstructing the shell is a good one, as is the crossbow model for figuring out the trigger, especially since a trigger doesn't need a guard and could be operated by hoof. That said, in the rush of the moment, Twilight didn't think of it and thinks of other things, flagging prior knowledge and book learning. And by that, I mean I didn't think of it since I work to become the character as I write a story. And I write fast. Very fast. The situations T encountered were not conducive to long data analysis. They were a series of grasping the first idea and running with it. And I wrote it that way, warts and all. And regarding smell deduction, she does have predicate knowledge of black powder in many ways, the least of which is being shot out of a cannon in the Movie, which stretched credulity in so many ways, especially the landing.
T given time to find the best solution enters analysis paralysis, which is why I think her competency is often better in the finales when she can't overthink. (Though in reality, Hasbro toy directives, questionable soft story ideas, and various midseason writers who inconsistently see the characters is the ultimate cause of T's variable competence.). The second part of the Ending of the End shows her analysis paralysis happening. That she can barely keep that in check and the result of her doing so is a recurring theme in this story.
The assertion that T is infallible is yet to be proved.
So, fast writing and questionable choices. If I get the urge to tweak and rewrite bits, I'll keep your comments in mind.
9901676
Well, the problem there is you didn't write it that way. It doesn't feel like the span of 20 or so minutes, or maybe it's supposed to be longer than 20 minutes.
You're pacing is also off. I really suggest you slow down your writing since, I know from experience, that ruins the pacing of a story. I feel a lot of these mistakes could be fixed just by slowing down and reading over it a few times. You said you were raised with these kinds of people, so you should know this isn't how you act with a gun. At least, not a wide majority of people act with a gun.
I put a more detailed reason of why I don't think human citizens should've instigated the situation, and a more logical way of producing the effects you're looking for. Namely a rocky start between humans and ponies.
The summarized versions is Applejack overreacts to strange aliens on her farm, and the humans react in turn by firing their weapons. That way ponies aren't faultless in the situation, but humans still escalated it by using force. There's still plenty of ways afterwards to make humans less appealing though, there are plenty of people who'd refuse to see ponies as equals. Sadly, mostly the Christian/religious groups. As much as I wouldn't like that, it is how some people would react to their religion being proven wrong.
The biggest problem with the story is how everything was instigated. The humans have nothing to claim innocent too. They invaded, they attacked, the caused property damage. There's no redeeming quality to humans here. Ponies are complete saints in comparison. They only wanted to keep their family safe, they just wanted to save applejack, they just wanted to see how their weapons work so they could protect themselves against them.
For Twilight, you should've had her comparing it to things she's seen or read about from the very beginning. Crossbows probably exist, cannons do exist, there's plenty of comparisons to be made. Even, instead of knowing the exact chemical composition of gunpowder, she recognizes the smell from the cannon, then deduces "It's blackpowder". There's plenty of ways to make her smart, without her being an unbearable deus ex machina.
9900663
OK, Let us begin the dance:
YES! YES, WE ARE! THAT'S HUMAN NURTURE! ESPECIALLY ON THE TIMES OF TRUMP-AMLO... To deny that is to fool ourselves, That's one of the reasons I do Pony... To get a respite of the stupidity my fellow man KEEPS DOING OVER AND OVER AGAIN!
Then I ask... Why are you still reading? I mean, it's obvious you dislike the presentation of the concepts on the fic, you should stop, you're only tracking something you're clearly not enjoying. Not saying you should leave, just wondering why are you reading something that doesn't sit well with your complexion. and It's true, not all gun owners are the orifices on the rears of donkeys, but those who are, are sadly the noisy minority.
Villainizing humans is never fine. and yes, what the author saw was just that: a bunch of Gun toating CALIFORNIANS barging in and shooting ina clearly private property, there's nothing wrong with that.
Was it by Smell alone? I thought she heard the explosions, which would be pasted as "cannon" by her mind, then he watched the Stupid Californians using their guns, which reinforced the theory, then she went into the house and reviewed the items, which helped her realize the purpose and use... WAIT A MINUTE! I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE OVER THINKING STUFF WHEN PONY!!! as for the vault scene... I got noting, valid critics there.
[quote=*I whine too much? Try providing a proper rebuttal to my critiques of a story instead of trying to sound smart by using doth and initials. Yes, its cannon she went to EarthQuestria or whatever. But that's a liberal paradise where we don't need guns and it's all sunshine and rainbows. Applejack would most DEFINITELY own a gun in that world, she'd probably hold onto her father's gun because that's what country folk do. Twilight would've SEEN that gun at least once or twice. So we can only infer that guns don't exist in that world and it's just as Utopian as Equestria. Rainbow would probably also participate in sport shooting, though I'm not sure about ages in which case.It's never implied that the Earth behind the Mirror is "a liberal paradise where we don't need guns and it's all sunshine and rainbows." or "as Utopian as Equestria" but earth where the sole difference is the connections to the Pony world.
Try to provide a proper rebuttal? do you even KNOW of me?
As you can see, in this Fic the last ninja thing I'm going for in my comments is seriousness. Yes, you have a couple of valid criticisms, but it's all neatly, almost adoringly wrapped in a foot-thick layer/blanket of Whining. Not even Rarity could Whine as expertly as you're doing right now. I just pointed that up, didn't offer that much of a rebutal but pointing up a couple logical things to consider.
Any doubts you have, you can call at no cost in Mexico at the number 800-Idon-tcare.
9901226
that'd be nice. to see what the stupid Californians are doing / thinking, to hear whatever misguided train of thought they call their reasoning for the invasion...
Well here it starts.
Its off that the mobile phone of the female worked. Shouldnt have a signal.
10038843
It was most likely a walkie-talkie. Phones don't answer themselves, whereas that black nubbin thing crackled to life without warning.