A week after they had left the Crystal Empire, Cadance and Shining Armor had left Twilight's castle, since it was perhaps the most obvious place in the world for Amaryllis' agents to look for them. Hiding an alicorn and a unicorn of impressive height and stature wasn't easy, but with magical help it was achieved, the two settling down into an isolated cloud-home that hovered in the air six miles from Cloudsdale. Everything they needed would be brought to them by Twilight Sparkle herself via teleportation, and only the three of them plus Cheval and Flurry Heart would know where they were. Amaryllis finding them was as impossible as they could make it.
A week after they had left the Crystal Empire, Flurry Heart and Cheval had reached the Badlands Changeling Hive. One of the words in its name was now a throwback and had been for years, for with the Protean Throne gone and no longer draining magic from the land, the lands surrounding the Hive had transformed into lush savanna, and the Hive itself was overgrown with moss and flowers and vines that turned it into a riot of colors. As the two sisters stepped from the sky-chariot that had brought them, they were met by King Thorax, Prince Pharynx, and Chrysalis. Flurry Heart was welcomed with open arms and embraces from all three. Cheval was looked at with and could taste something she hadn't expected and couldn't understand: pity.
A week after Cadance and her family had left the land now known as the Crystal March, a dozen crystal ponies in the capital, members of the Society for Equestrian Harmony, had been rounded up by Robust Core and the Crystal Guard by the authority of Queen Amaryllis, suspected of having robbed or aided in the robbing of the land of the Crystal Heart and aiding in the flight of its renegade former rulers. They were marched to the empty dias where the Crystal Heart had been on display and, in full view of the city, executed for treason. The intent was to show the crystal ponies cost of treachery to the Northern Changeling Hive. But some of them, hearing their fellows’ protestations of innocence and ignorance, wondered instead if it was the cost of allegiance.
Author's Note: No, people who didn't want me to write this in the first place, I'm not going to write a sequel despite deliberately setting up for one, you won't have to suffer through that. I hijacked a fic already, I'm not quite enough of an asshole to hijack an entire series.
So...I've gone on at great length elsewhere as to why I don't buy Amaryllis' military successes since Courtesans, or Flurry Heart, Savior of the Empire. Most notably earlier in this story from Flurry's own mouth. I could honestly go on for...hang on, let me check my notes...at least another two pages.
But that's my worldbuilding issues, and it's obviously not the major point of divergence. Cheval is.
Why did it feel more "real" to me that Cheval admits what she did? Fundamentally, it's simple. Amaryllis told her she's a liar, and Cheval hates Amaryllis and everything she represents. The tragedy of A Foreign Education is that in Cheval's attempt to become her own mare and get out from Amaryllis' shadow and stop hurting her family, she instead became more and more like Amaryllis.
But at the same time, Cheval (supposedly) isn't stupid, and had Amaryllis herself tell her, to her face, that she was becoming like the Queen, and advised her on how to be a better liar, a better Queen. It's one thing for a teenager to make stupid mistake after stupid mistake when those mistakes follow one right after another in a way that clearly is spiraling out of their control and they just don't want to admit it. It's another when a teenager, out of defiance towards some authority figure they resent, makes a transparently dumb choice that they were told was dumb.
But it's a whole other thing entirely when Adolf Hitler walks up to a teenager and says "You remind me of a young me. Keep it up. And keep on after those Latinos, it reminds me of what I said about Jews," and the teenager doesn't realize that they're doing something fundamentally wrong.
Basically, I don't buy it. I don't buy Cheval hiding what she did from her family. Not because she's necessarily sorry, but simply because Amaryllis wants her to, wants her to be a better liar.
Here’s the thing about a smart character: you have to show them doing smart things if you want the audience to believe they’re smart. Cheval and Flurry in A Foreign Education didn’t do that, even once, at least not in any way that matters. For all of Flurry’s supposed intelligence in the original fic, she blunders into choosing a power she could never realistically hold on to (and frustratingly unlike Cadance’s plan at the end of Courtesans we’re never given even the slightest sense of how she intends to do it - nearly everypony goes on about how she could save the Crystal Empire but no one stops to say how). Likewise original Cheval makes dumb choice after dumb choice after dumb choice even when directly confronted with those choices, recognizing how dumb they are, and having ample opportunity to make intelligent choices. Do you know what you call someone who only makes dumb choices? You call them fucking dumb, no matter how well-spoken they are or reflective they seem.
From Cheval’s change, the other changes fall into place. Being honest with her family necessarily means hurting them with what she's done, or in other words, catastrophically failing in everything she'd tried to accomplish by going to Griffonstone to begin with (becoming her own mare, escaping Amaryllis' shadow, stopping hurting her family). She is, from her perspective, left as nothing but dead weight for her family. Which helps Amaryllis, so of course she'd want to try and remove herself from the equation, first by hoping to get them to hate her and send her back to Griffinstone, then in trying to kill herself.
The other major change, Cadance finally deciding to get out while the getting's good, likewise feels more natural. Amaryllis' ultimatum gave as an option Cadance taking Cheval - in other words, even if it was nominally "optional", Amaryllis has now directly targeted Cadance's family, and also revealed at least something of what she really wants. Why would Cadance choose to remain, given what we know of the loyalty of crystal ponies? Why would she stand stock still as a noose tightens around her childrens’ necks? Why would Shining Armor?
The two of them were already bad leaders. I saw no reason to indulge in the idea that they’re bad parents, too.
Anyway. Like I said, I'm done. I mean, I know where I'd go with this, personally, but again: I'm not enough of an asshole to hijack an entire series.
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We are born in the bed our parents make, not the ones we make.
Ain't nothing left for Amaryllis to kill, because you just assassinated Cadence's character right there.
9579769
In the sense of the Starchild theory of the Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40K that posits that the Emperor's propped-up desiccated barely alive body should be unplugged from the Golden Throne because if allowed to die he will be reincarnated and at the least restored to his former power before Horus did his thing.
Yes, I did. Gleefully, and with malice aforethought. You'd turned her into a bad character from how she had been presented in Courtesans.
Gapjaxie and double rainboom , I understand Alt time lines and such, but I find it hard to believe that Shining Armour, The Sisters and Twilight where this complaint to allow a Hostile Changeling hive to be come this much of threat to Equestria . You both wrote well and I like rainbooms ending better because I'm a sucker for happy endings .
9580187
I would personally call my take more "hopeful" than "happy". Cheval's lost just about everything she could, the Crystal Empire has for practical purposes ceased to exist, Flurry Heart has no confidence in the ability of the crystal ponies to ever realize the power trap they've caught themselves in, Cadance has been forced to disown and banish her daughter as the only viable punishment for what Cheval did, and Equestria continues to be distracted by other events. There's not much to be happy about.
But there is stuff to be hopeful about. Cheval is going some place to try and fix herself and make up for what she's done, the crystal ponies are starting to see through Amaryllis' façade (and her whimsy of acting kind is cracking), Cadance at least escaped with her family, and Equestria posses the Crystal Heart. A way forward can actually be seen.
9580318
There mostly likely in nothing left of the hive or the crystal empire with the heart gone the crystal empire will die off and so will the massive hive that is trapped with it.
9580456
Given that the original author didn’t even broach this idea in either Courtesans (where Amaryllis taking it was presented as a reasonable war demand for a successful war, even if it didn’t come to pass) or A Foreign Education (where Cheval was going to do it as she left the Empire with Flurry in charge), it’s safe to assume that the Crystal Heart doesn’t work the same way in Jaxie’s universe as it does in canon.
9581492
Oh, I read that. :) I still didn't get it.
9581791
Okay, long story short, a fic series that I was really enjoying took a turn for the worst in every possible way - not merely narratively, ‘cause, shucks, sometimes bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it - but actually at a meta level. The author made a series of blunders in world building and characterization...and ignored every attempt - not just by me, but at least a half-dozen others - to point them out.
And...I just couldn’t stand it, not after how much I had enjoyed the first two stories in the series, particularly the second, especially once those meta-blunders started to have effects on the characters and plot of the story. So I wrote this to get my frustrations out of my system. I almost certainly shouldn’t have, but I do feel better for having done so.
But, whatever. I’m done now. I wrote this, unfollowed the author, and I’m done.
9581819
Fair enough. Thank you for the explanation. I hope it helped you.
9581843
I honestly just want to move on at this point. For a Few Bits More updated; I want to focus on that for a bit. Then maybe finally get around to writing the next chapter of ”Daleks Have No Concept Of Friendship!”
Okay, the final author's note did clarify the way you feel the story had to be changed. *slow nod*
Still, your story tagline -- "How monstrous do you have to be before you can no longer earn forgiveness?" doesn't answer the question any more than Jaxie's does. Cheval still isn't forgiven here. She might be, in the future, but we can't assume that any more than we can assume a future yes or no out of Jaxie's original.
Also, it's 1943 and Adolf Hitler is about to invade your home country after getting a non-aggression pact out of Russia, and your country's rulers are pursuing a policy of appeasement.
That's the sort of situation where it's real easy to decide that your home is f*cked either way, and take it upon yourself to become a monster in order to beat back the bigger threat with their own, demonstrably more effective tactics. It's not failing to realize that she's doing something evil. It's merely textbook radicalization.
At any rate.
I do feel like, if Cheval had said something, this is an entirely plausible look at how it might have gone (except for the fact that you've got a very different take on Cadance than Jaxie does, one which I doubt is compatible with his story universe but I'm sure is compatible with yours). So while I'm not convinced by it as a fixfic, I'll take it as an interesting AU.
Hope you're enjoying getting back to your other writing!
9584930
The very first thing we ever saw Jaxie’s take on Cadance do is emotionally and verbally abuse Light Step in a snap retaliation for Light mouthing off to Shining Armor. She is similarly, but also more deliberately and methodically (in that it’s not a single emotional outburst, but rather a deliberate effort on her part over the course of several days at least) abusive towards Double Time through much of Courtesans, and unabashedly hates Amaryllis throughout, to the point of beginning a long-term plan to take down the changeling queen from an angle she believes Amaryllis isn’t ready to defend against.
She has her reasons for all of this that make sense within the context of both stories, but basically I am just dying to know how this squares with the idea that alicorns can’t really change and Cadance can’t help but love people due to being mentally and emotionally stuck at one moment in time. Because I’m getting the sense that GaPJaxie came up with both ideas, or rather only started trying to actually implement those ideas and think through what they actually meant, only after Courtesans finished. It is a clumsy retcon, which would be bad enough in and of itself, but it’s also a clumsy retcon around which Cheval and Flurry make major decisions.
I wasn’t kidding when I said the original story was plagued by fractal wrongness, that it runs into problems both as a whole, and when you zoom in to look at individual points.
As for the point of Cheval’s forgiveness: the question is asked, but the fact that it’s left unanswered is deliberate; there’s nothing wrong with unanswered questions in and of themselves. That being said, it should be noted that Cadance’s disowning of Cheval is specifically noted as an official rite of discommendation - she’s saying the words but does not necessarily mean any of them, particularly the last bit about dying naked and alone (clearly it is emotionally damaging to her to even say them, given she needs to physically lean on Shining for support). But Cheval did screw up and she should be punished, and she screwed up ROYALLY so that punishment should be severe. It also plays a bit into what I saw of Cadance’s character and it’s arc. Her being a bad princess has, in a very personal way now, started to affect her ability to be a good mother (something she cares much more about) with what Cheval did and the reasons behind it (namely, an unchecked Amaryllis ruining everything she casts a shadow over). Thus we get a very deliberate and obviously painful attempt to be a good princess and a good mother at once, even though it probably comes as too little, too late (if Cadance actually was trying to bring herself to hate Cheval, she would have just put her in a dungeon somewhere, not sent her to the Badlands, the best possible place for her).
That all being said, a final note on forgiveness - there’s a reason why Chrysalis (note the lack of a “queen” title in the story) is in this chapter and alluded to in the penultimate one with the mention of three royal changelings in the Badlands (“Royal” here in the biological sense). Anything Amaryllis has done, Chrysalis has probably done similar in her time, and Cheval was turning into Amaryllis. Chrysalis was included both because I take it as a given that the show will have her redeemed (it’s that kind of show, and they’re deliberately making her sympathetic and pathetic with how lonely she is), and because she’s an obvious sign that Cheval can earn forgiveness. Eventually.
I’m not unreasonable, and I know that after two stories where our main characters find forgiveness the natural next choice is to write one where the new main character doesn’t. It follows pretty logically and would have been good. But the reasons for that stumble when they run into the world building, and also depend on major, unexplained, and frankly nonsensical changes to an existing character (Cadance suddenly becoming especially naive and useless and a doormat, particularly when Courtesans ended with her starting to engineer a plan to overthrow Amaryllis), and a nonsensical choice (Cheval listening to Amaryllis) from our main character, and an unintelligent choice (Flurry going along with the coup) from a character we’re repeatedly told and are supposed to believe is intelligent.
Had I been re-writing this story from the beginning I might have tried to engineer it into basically the same as the canon ending but with a more logical progression of events. Hell, if I was going for a minimalist change all that might need to change is keeping Flurry’s rant about the impossibility of the situation to Cheval, Cheval then by herself deciding (stupidly) that Flurry’s wrong and would still be better, performing the coup, then Flurry retaliating against Cheval in a moment of emotional outrage and petrified her for what she did to Cadance. But how long Cadance is going to be asleep is left ambiguous, so Flurry is de facto Crystal Princess now and is in a “do or die” situation.
We’re left believing that Flurry is intelligent (since she could directly identify the problems facing her potential rule), Cheval still is stoned, etc. I didn’t do this because it didn’t fix three problems, though, namely it straining credulity at best that Cheval would ever listen to Amaryllis, Cadance suddenly becoming a doormat, and the fact that Jesus Christ how could Shining Armor not have a single line of dialogue?!
Seriously with how little he’s mentioned in the original fic I’m left with the impression that he was an absentee dad most of the time given how little Cheval seems to ever think of him.
But since I chose to start instead at the moment I feel the fic jumped the tracks and fell apart completely, it instead ended this way.
But, that’s that, and I’m done. In all seriousness, thanks for giving it a chance. Now go read something I’ve written that wasn’t written while I was possessed by Pazuzu. “Daleks Have No Concept of Friendship!” Is fun and lighthearted, try that.
9585208
Rather than continue discussion about this, I think that's the best next step. Thanks for the rec.
Its not very well written. There's no style or charm, dark or otherwise, to the actual prose. It is details in the form of internal dialogue.
But that's okay. Bad fic, or fic you don't like, isn't a crime.
And because this wasn't intended to be a good piece of writing. To tell a fascinating and engaging story, to find joy in creating and finding a way to communicate complex or powerful emotion to readers.
It was written, much like your ceaseless, wall of text "critiques" eating up scroll space and begging for attention and validation on GapJaxie's original works, with the intention of bullying.
It was written from a selfish place, and judging by your continued vitriolic, vapid, nitpicking, and downright entitled Tl;DRing on GP's newest fic, was also written with the intention of harassing others into either siding with you, or shaming/convincing GP to change his own work to your liking. Not to help you cope, or work out anger. If that was the case, you wouldn't have needed to post it. Or to continue harassing GP on his fics.
Please take a step back and realize that is what you are doing. You are likely better than this in real life, I do hope so.
Don't let pony fic make you act like this. Write for the joy of it, create for the joy of it.
Cathartic, maybe. But this cannot have been enjoyable to write.
9615749
Oh, awesome, you're here. Did you notice your cameo in this? Because that came from a place of spite more than anything else in this fic.
As for everything else...
Seven years ago I wrote a story that at its most basic premise flipped around Twilight's and Trixie's roles in "Boast Busters". Then I wrote a follow-up story called Longest Night, Longest Day that expanded on that fic, and from there launched what remains to this day the largest collaborative universe on FiMFiction, even despite our massive slowdown recently. There was a brief point where we were the 9th largest group on the site. It directly or indirectly inspired more than a dozen additional spin-off AUs. I call it the Lunaverse.
But that's not what's important, that's just context.
What's important is that one particular reader of those first two fics by the name of InsertAuthorHere, who sadly passed away last year, absolutely reamed me for every single thing that was wrong in them. He was quite merciless and did not fail to point out characterization flaws, dumb plot points, bad decisions, nonsensical worldbuilding choices, and so on. And we argued. Back and forth we argued, me defending my choices, him attacking them, and so on. And when I opened up the Lunaverse to other authors and had other authors writing in it, he was just as critical of them.
I realized very quickly that InsertAuthorHere was doing more to contribute to the Lunaverse than any of my other readers or authors. Because in forcing me to defend my choices he forced me to face my bad ones. In forcing me to look at my characterization flaws he forced me to realize where I had screwed up. I was better for everything he said and did.
When I made the Lunaverse group I instantly invited him to be a moderator for it, and I bent over backwards time and again to keep him in the group and keep him reading my stories and keep on finding their flaws no matter what, and sparing nothing. It is directly because of him that the two biggest mistakes that I'd made with the Luanverse were spotted, and I wrote two entire fics that total about 150,000 words together to fix those mistakes. Because when you're a good enough author and have enough followers there's a certain point at which you can publish almost anything - deliberately spiteful stories notwithstanding - and have people lining up to sing your praises and shove you into the feature box for days at a time. And that's great, it's a good ego boost. I am absolutely a vampire for praise the way everyone is, we all like being told that we're doing a good job when we're doing a good job.
But when you've reached that point the important posts aren't the ones that tell you what you've done right. They're the ones that tell you what you've done wrong. They're the ones that are willing to spend time and effort critiquing everything, coming at you hard and pointing out all your flaws and asking you how you could ever have been so stupid as to make these basic mistakes. And they're even more important when you're writing not just a stand-alone fic, but an entire series of fics that are meant to feed into and support one another, a narrative where you have to keep certain details in mind and carry them through from the first story to the last.
It would have been easy for me to ignore InsertAuthorHere, ignore his wall of text posts and his harsh words. And I would have been a worse author for it, and the Lunaverse a worse setting, and my stories worse stories.
The most valuable thing an author can have is a critic.
9615786
As someone who's been quietly observing the scuffle...
I think you need to understand that while well-spoken and explained criticism is the single most useful thing an author can receive (well, beyond the motivation to write), a story which is not your own never exists for you to fix. You can convey whatever you like to the author as eloquently as possible, but if they disagree despite all the points you raise, if they have their own explanations or they just flat-out don't care - that's it. You have no say in what they're doing. They're not obligated to follow your advice and they might not even be wrong for failing to. Even if they are, you don't matter in that decision.
And once you've hit that point, where it's become clear the gap between your ideas and the author's choices for the story - you don't have anything useful to say. You're not helping them. Further chiming in about the things you dislike is at worst harassment and at best immaturity.
You're painting yourself in a nasty light here. You're talking about helpful criticism, but you've moved past the point of appearing helpful and have since migrated to spite. This alternate ending is one thing, though I'm going to echo a lot of what Horizon said of its message not being much different from the original's, but things like the note you prefaced this with, and the fact that you're still continuing to harangue GAJPixie despite your profession that you're done with the series - they're another entirely, and I think that's the reason you're getting spammed with downvotes, not the fix-it itself.
Let it go. Evidently the story isn't moving in a direction you like. GAJPixie isn't the author you thought he was. All right. It happens. Take your own advice and move on. There's plenty else to read. I'm not unsympathetic to the feeling of a story I loved being hijacked and crashed into the ground, of feeling horribly betrayed by swings in characterization or bad endings from nowhere, but your continued arguing - maybe it's therapeutic for you, but your constant spite and needling is unfair to everyone else. This is a healthier form of channeling it than your haunting the comment sections.
Good criticism comes from a neutral place. It can be hard to face and harder to soak in, but it's helpful because the observer is impartial or wants to like the story. Criticism generated by anger or malice does not help the recipient. (Like the bit about changeling tear ducts. Come on. Half the fics on this site make bigger changes to clear canon than a detail in one episode.) If that's truly your intent, then please at least consider why you're saying things before you say them. What do you actually want to get out of them? Do you honestly think you will?
As for this... I enjoyed the talks had by the characters in the second chapter, but the beginning felt jarring tacked onto chapter 6 of A Foreign Education and the ending was... as I said earlier, it feels equally unhappy (or bitter-bittersweet) as the ending you sought to fix. You've screwed over the Crystal Empire and broken up their family, and made it clear just how much Cheval can't be forgiven for her crimes. The coup is more bloodless this way, but we as the readers never care about nameless characters. That's just how it is in this business. The only real changes are that Cheval wants to be better, and that it's Cadence who comes down hard on her, not Flurry. Which - the former is important, sure, but the latter is just as grim. So I'm afraid this was a bit lost on me.
9621947
I spoke to Jaxie via PM recently. I’ve resolved to scale back my tone. But I reserve the right to remain critical.
He promised me that most of my questions would be answered by the end of the latest fix. I’ve compiled a list of 38 important ones that I’ve asked since the start of the series that remain unanswered, and am holding him to it. But going forward I plan on just erasing questions from the list and at the end I’m just going to post whatever remains. Comments will be kept to a minimum and relevant.
(actually more like 60 questions but some of them are grouped together; the point is most of them are questions I’ve been asking for several fics now).
As I pointed out, the issue isn’t whether or not Jaxie changed a detail about changelings from the show. He can do this. It’s his fic. He is 100% entitled and he is in no way wrong to do so.
The issue is that he didn’t even check first, and mocked the idea that he even should have. That’s an author just not giving a damn. And while it doesn’t make a big difference in that scene, it does matter elsewhere, when he writes things that don’t make sense and then has characters affected by or make decisions on based on those nonsensical events, it harms the entire narrative. He’s building Wonderland, except even Wonderland was consistent in that while everyone in it was mad, they were each of them consistent in how they were mad.
I’m stepping back to a more neutral place after a conversation with Jaxie, but my list of problems doesn’t grow smaller for doing so. And, well, sunk cost fallacy. I made it this far, I tried to bow out but was drawn back in by someone PMing me his Doolittle comment in Virgin Princess (my first hint that he didn’t really give a damn), I might as well see this to the end as long as I got through 4/5ths of it.
9621947
Now as for the fic itself...
If Cheval couldn’t be forgiven for her crimes, then she wouldn’t have been sent to the Badlands Hive, Flurry wouldn’t have gone with her, she wouldn’t have been looked at with pity, and Chrysalis wouldn’t have been there.
As Flurry outlined here - based on information from the original fic - the Crystal Empire screwed over itself by any dispassionate observation. Hell, I left out the detail that Jaxie included in his author’s notes, that the Empire has had many wars (his word there - “many”) with the changelings since the original War of the North, but crystal ponies nevertheless serve in Amaryllis’ army in greater numbers than they do in the Empire’s, this despite the Empire having expanded the size of its army over the years specifically in response to Amaryllis.
So basically Amaryllis opens with atrocities against the Empire in the War of the North, then every few years kills a few hundred or a few thousand more crystal ponies, and yet those ponies are happy to serve in her army, fight and die alongside her changelings against their homeland and their people, in greater numbers than they were willing to defend it.
That’s not my invention, that’s not me adding a detail that wasn’t there, that is canon fact to the world that Jaxie created, from his own lips.
All I changed was the willingness of Cadance and her family to sit by and remain in that hopeless a situation. I let Flurry actually act intelligently and realize that there is no damn point in trying to appeal to a people who so obviously prefer strength and conquest over their homeland and neighbors.
Now maybe in the canon fic Flurry was able to pull some victories out of her ass, demonstrate greater personal power than Amaryllis and get the Crystal ponies to switch back to their own homeland (making them traitors twice over in the process), but you have to ask - is it worth it? Flurry does ask that, here. And the answer’s no. The Crystal ponies canonically want a tyrant. Flurry could become that tyrant, but to what end? So that she can spend decades trying to push the Crystal ponies away from a might-makes-right culture? All the while she has to defend herself from the next Amaryllis, the next Sombra, the next being with personal power greater than hers that the Crystal ponies want to flock to?
Or maybe Flurry gives a big Independence Day style speech about the Empire and how the Crystal ponies should be on her side and not Amaryllis’ and that converts the ponies in Amaryllis’ army back (still making them traitors twice over). Do you buy that? Do you believe that there is anything that the usurping daughter of an unpopular princess could merely say, not actively do, that would get people to abandon their comrades-in-arms en masse, whom they have been fighting and dying and collecting the spoils of war alongside, and join her? And then she still has to spend decades reforming the Empire while looking out for the next tyrant?
Do you see another way forward? It’s not a rhetorical question, I want you to actually spend a few minutes thinking on this and not respond until you have something. What is Flurry’s way forward here? What makes her conquest of the Crystal Empire worthwhile to her, to her family, in the state that it’s in? If crystal ponies don’t want to change from Sombra, why should she try - or should she just embrace it and become Sombra?
The theme of A Foreign Education was love verses power. Supposedly, Flurry was capable of separating the two in the canon fic, like a truly great leader. But do you see a truly great leader? Or do you see a naked power grab into a hopeless situation, not just the war itself, but the peace afterwards?
Again, not rhetorical questions. I want your answers.
9656747
I would have no idea, I don't keep track of the site's trash.
9656752
I dunno, you’re following the Third Wheel series...whoever you are.
9656747
In the interest of absolute fairness to Jaxie, he did say that an earlier draft of the story ended on a more positive note, but then he changed it to cover a “plot hole”. We don’t have the full details about what happened there. So it’s possible that an earlier version of the story was genuinely happy in its ending.
Having said that, the story that we actually got is a tragedy. It doesn’t end happily. The Crystal Empire is not saved, and it’s certainly not saved by anyone’s love, least of all Cheval’s for Flurry or Flurry’s for Cheval. Circumstances were contrived and characters were assassinated left, right, and center to boost the prestige of Jaxie’s OCs (even his own characterizations - what happened to the proactive, aggressive, vindictive, scheming, yet still benevolent and caring Cadance of the first two stories?)
And an honest person would admit to all of that.
And on a personal note if I’d promised a happy ending and couldn’t figure out how to make it work, I wouldn’t finish the story until I found a way to make into work. I put a story on hiatus for four years and only just got back to it because I finally figured out how to make it work, and it’s a friggin’ story about foals playing pirates, it has far lower expectations. I am not holding Jaxie to any standard that I don’t hold myself to.
9656801
It didn't even have to end happy, your comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back fit. The author went down the path of dismantling all the hope they built up and ended at the stories most hopeless point. If they sat down and ended up deciding they wanted it to turn that way that's fine. It was mainly the illogical way it got there that soured the story and the author at the end justifying it by saying "well it's a happy ending for someone" while turning purely defensive against criticism that ultimately pushed me away.
And yeah I never made it a point of any criticism cause OC characters can have a lot of nuanced issues and pitfalls that I'm no expert in but the fact A Foreign Education practically assassinated the character of every character except the OC sibling of a main character and that OC's OC love interest didn't escape my notice either. If anything my complaint would be that they were portrayed fine the others should have been portrayed just as consistently.
9656849
For all intents and purposes, Flurry is also an OC. Aside from “adorable baby”, she doesn’t have a character in the show, and that clearly doesn’t apply to this series (and nor should it, I’m not gonna indict Jaxie for that).
9656801
Fun fact, I actually don't like it! But not for the reasons you or the other loser did. I read it because I'm close to the author, liked parts of it, disliked it as a whole - he can be really hit or miss for me, and I even criticized some of his direction with it. No matter how much he's annoyed me, though (and, I assure you, he has annoyed me a great deal over the years), the petty ridiculousness on display here is beyond. It's a peculiar kind of pathetic.
As for who I am, I dunno, look at my work? That speaks for itself plenty. In particular, Through the Well of Pirene is my most notable work (though far from my best, but I've largely moved on from writing fan fiction.)
I was perfectly happy to leave off and be done, but if y'all wanna keep dragging me in, that's fine with me.
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I didn't drag you back in. You chose to respond to Dragonwaz, who responded to a post that was more than a month old; Dragowaz's post, for the record, was one I had actually completely missed in my notifications, meaning I wouldn't be here if you hadn't decided to come back and add another notification that I didn't miss. Also I knew I was being too subtle with the "whoever you are" line. This should make things a little more plain: 9575793
Classy.
Idle question, what is it you don't like about the Third Wheel series?
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Bitch I am so classy it'll make your head spin. I am the classiest lady on this god-damned Earth.
I think he sometimes contorts characters and situations to extreme negative conclusions which strike me as unnecessary and uncalled for. I think his disdain for explaining anything to the audience leads to profound misunderstandings which confuse more than they are useful. I have for ten years argued with him over these things and more. Sometimes he takes my advice, sometimes he doesn't.
Still, I respect his creative vision for what it is - different from mine. Flaws and all. I have, in fact, written for some of his stories where I felt my touch would be important (older ones than these.) Yet each of those times was as a part of the editing process, part of my role as advisor, and all subject to his vision.
I call you a loser here because this fix fic is a loser move. What, my calling this pathetic earlier was classy, but if someone is behaving in a pathetic way in public it's suddenly not "class" to put a name to that behavior? That's schoolyard logic.
I guess we could get philosophical here. For instance, I don't actually believe there are good or bad people - I think there are behaviors that are good and bad, and sometimes people behave well or badly quite a lot. This comes up in cases of people who think they're "good" based upon past behavior and refuse to acknowledge that a bad thing they did was bad because "I'm a good person."
So let us then say that fix fics stand up there as peak loser bullshit in this space. You clearly disagree, and that's fine. If you cared what others thought (and most people think this is ripe bullshit,) then you would take it down. Its abysmal quality and the bad optics are all downsides you clearly don't care about.
Then again, you did put it up for the public to see and critique in the first place, so maybe you do care. You care so much that this gnaws at you, derails you into agonizingly long diatribes and trite prose.
You know the funny thing is, I used to follow you. I enjoyed the Lunaverse, though admittedly mostly just Grass' stuff, genius that he or she is. When I wrote Pirene I thought about the more interconnected and less cartoony Equestria that the series presented. It helped shape the vision of Lyra that found her way into it and became a surprise favorite to me and hundreds of my fans. I, in short, synthesized what I'd learned and used it to create something new. I mean, don't flatter yourself too hard - it was hardly the only nor the greatest inspiration, but it meant something to me. It touched me.
This is not something new. It's not something creative. It's not something special that you created. This is a coward's act, being so fearful of accepting someone else's vision when it diverts from your idea of it that you couldn't handle it when it went somewhere you didn't care for.
This is the equivalent of tracing art and making the most minor alternations and passing it off as something new. That shit may be cute for a teenager just expressing her anxieties and excitement, but for a grown ass man who already has well-regarded shit under his belt it's pathetic.
I expected more from you than creative cowardice.
So yeah.
As long as this travesty stands or until you grapple with the weakness and shameful lack of creativity and courage it represents, you are a loser.
I'm done. My respect for your real creative works demanded that I give you a full explanation for my commentary, but I've said everything I wanted to say and this shitshow has taken up too much of my time. Contact me in PMs if you give a damned about real creative vision again.
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Nnno, I don't think I'll be doing that. Oh, I'm happy to talk with you, but you were the one who got "dragged back in" to this story, and if I have either the courage or the boneheadedness to post this story knowing full well how it would go ahead of time (note I said outright in the foreward that I expect it to pick up far more hate than praise), then you can rustle up one or the other to do the same. This started as a public conversation and it will remain so if it's going to continue at all, we won't be running off to hide behind private messages. I'm not going to call anyone else here but I'm not going to keep other people out if they want to get involved, either.
Actually, no, it is not, though admittedly my upbringing was fairly Irish so perhaps there's a bit of a cultural thing going on, though certainly it falls in line with my American sensibilities as well (maybe it's a New England thing?). Long story short you can act a certain way without being a certain thing. It's very different to call someone's efforts pathetic (or whatever) than it is to actually call someone pathetic (or whatever). The former implies that the person can change by simply changing their behavior or putting in more effort or whatever, the latter implies that he or she can't because it's what he or she is. It is a huge escalation.
As a counter-example, you will note that I have not yet and do not intend to actually directly insult Jaxie as a person. I have called out what I have perceived as mistakes, quite harshly at times. I have questioned his skills as a writer but taken the time to present evidence for why I am doing such. But the closest I've come to a direct insult to Jaxie is calling him a liar over the idea that A Foreign Education or The Virgin Princess would have happy endings, but, well, I have evidence that he lied and other witnesses who will attest to that fact. And even then, lying once doesn't mean you're fundamentally a mountebank. I observed back in A Foreign Education that everyone lies every single day. How much of an insult being a "liar" is directly scales to the size of the lie and, to be blunt, there's only so big a lie over a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction can be. In terms of this site? It was pretty big. In terms of real life? It barely registers. Fishes and ponds or something.
But, anyway, yeah, to summarize, there is a world of difference. Or at least that's what my parents raised me to believe. Your parents apparently had different views. Better? Worse? I dunno, you can decide.
(Other thing I was raised to recognize as wrong: placing money on the counter rather than handing it to the cashier. That is so fucking rude oh my God I want to strangle people who do it)
As of this posting, 19 people besides myself - I freely admit one of the 20 total likes is mine, I upvote my own stories, so what? Toot your own horn, no one else will - like this story. Is your assumption, then, that all 19 are losers like me? After all, what else could they be if they like something this pathetic?
One of them is likely Horizon (I can't say for absolute certain since it's not like made a habit of asking people if they liked or unliked my stuff, and I'm not going to do so now, but certainly his responses come across as positive if critical - the best kind of response), you can check out his response upthread, but ultimately it boils down to "this seems like a plausible way things could have gone if Cheval had admitted what happened; an interesting AU" (Horizon, if you don't know, edits for GaPJaxie, as far as I know is still on good terms with him, and generally liked A Foreign Education). Do you want to drag Horizon into this? Is Horizon a loser too, by implication of liking this loser-fic? You should tell him as much.
I'm not saying that those 19 people are singing its praises from the rooftops or anything, but they liked it enough to click a button that says they liked it when they could have not clicked anything or clicked that they hated it. 19 people to some greater or lesser extent enjoyed this fic, knowing full well what it was about ahead of time. Why should I take it down? Because it's unpopular? I think not. Because you don't like it? I think not. Because it lacks artistic merit? Many would say that the purpose of art is to hold up a mirror to the world. Is this not a mirror, however pale the reflection might be? Or even if it does lack artistic merit, so what?
Eh, sort of. First, that's not why I posted this story. I posted it because I honestly just felt a fundamental need to. I explained why in my foreward, which I know you read because you caught the "eloquent temper tantrum" line.
But second...actually flexing my critiquing muscles this much has had a direct, positive impact on my writing elsewhere. I finally finished "Daleks Have No Concept of Friendship!". I finally figured out how to continue Treasure Hunt. I got back to For a Few Bits More and I wrote Queen Chrysalis Reforms (Accidentally) (making me the proud owner of both the first and the third most-popular stories on this site with the Grogar tag) and I got started on Penultimatum (Lunaverse season 2's penultimate episode) and Across the Multiverse (Lunaverse Equestria Girls). And somewhere in all of that I had the time to be possessed by Pazuzu and write this fic. I have been more productive in the past two months than I have been in the past two years, at least where MLP fanfiction is concerned.
Reading Kris Overstreet's The Maretian and Changeling Space Program re-lit my creative fires, but in 100% honesty these past few months of analysis and critique of Jaxie's work has kept them stoked and burning. I like arguing and debating. It helps me think both critically and creatively, it fires up my brain, both concerning the thing I'm arguing about and in all other matters of my life. Which does not mean that I don't care about the arguments I'm in or am merely using them as fuel, I do care about what I'm arguing about, my every word and effort are genuine. But at the same time, arguments are fuel for me.
We all have our creative processes. Reading really good, really well thought-out stories that rise to the standards they set for themselves and even exceed them is one of them for me (Overstreet's work, natch, plus what I love so much in Courtesans, the God-damned thought that clearly went into it)
...but so too is spite and anger, apparently. Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire, ooh - yeah-hah!
Oh, and if you think I've been agonizingly long now...my "final thoughts" on the series have been typed up for about a week now. They're longer than some chapters in the series, and that's with me having edited to try and make them more succinct. They're long enough that I'm probably going to post it in multiple parts, or something.
Finally, the part I care most about...
That's it? I mean don't get me wrong, you were on to something with your second issue, but the first one to spring to mind is that? Rather...shallow, don't you think?
9712880
No, marquess is masculine despite the spelling appearing feminine, it's one of the oddities of the English language. Marquis is an alternate French version of the title used in mainland Europe and Canada, but in the United Kingdom itself it's marquess. It's an easy mistake to make and not one I'd expect most people to know, however, unlike Jaxie, when I write something I do my research first.
The feminine form of the title (in English, not sure about the French one because I don't speak French) is marchioness.
There are currently 34 marquesses in the United Kingdom.
EDIT: Or at least I make a good faith attempt to do research, and will admit a mistake when I'm wrong and correct the mistake if feasible and desirable. There's actually a couple major mistakes in this story - Chrysalis is alive, while according to Jaxie she's dead. However, since this is not once mentioned in any of the stories in the series and only true by implication in The Last Changeling, I don't feel a need to correct it here. Likewise in this story I forget that the Crystal Empire according to Jaxie has fought multiple wars with the Northern Hive by this point and lost all of them but is nevertheless a major power, but frankly this is not directly mentioned or implied until The Last Changeling either (A Foreign Education has a throwaway line about the Crystal Empire being "the most powerful empire in the world", but as the historical Empire of Trebizond shows, empires are not necessarily powerful) and I feel the world makes more sense if the Crystal Empire is portrayed as a weak second-string nation under the Hive's thumb rather than as the major world power Jaxie decided it should be because the crystal ponies have powerful magic and wizards. Literally his words. In any event since the Crystal Empire being a weak puppet nation is compatible with the series as it existed at the time of me writing this, I don't feel a need to change that either.
9712909
My mistake then. I actually knew that marchioness was the correct feminine title for a marquis/marquess/margrave but because both "marchioness" and "marquess" are words that begin with a "mar" and end "ess", I got them confused. I myself tend to use marquis instead of marquess for that very reason, to make the title gender difference more distinct, but that's merely a point of personal preference.
As to the research difference, you're sort of quibbling with philosophy rather than best practice. I happen to share your philosophy in that I prefer to lend credibility to my worldbuilding by skewing close to actual reality, under the reasoning that if an outlandish idea in fiction has a legitimate real-world precedent, it makes the idea stronger. However, not everyone believes in this idea and GaP is certainly someone who wanders out there in his own strange universe and prefers to avoid being constrained by reality when he's not writing about reality.
9712858
Fair enough, on your responses to the other two large mistakes I saw; your reasoning here seems entirely, well, reasonable.
As I said, I personally liked A Foreign Education. I feel it did what GaP wanted it to do, although I have no idea what that might be, because I'm not sure that GaP knows what he was trying to accomplish. The Virgin Princess is actually trademark GaPJaxie from what I've been able to gather from reading his work and interacting with him on Discord, in the server that Wanderer D set up (which I believe GaP has since left, for reasons I don't know): unashamedly strange. The random sprinkling of other stories at completely random places throughout is... weird and I've yet to see anyone bring it up in the comments of the work (although I haven't yet read them all). But as much as it was a bizarre thing for me personally, it has a strange sort of connection to the title that came before: it seems to be the result of GaP writing a story by using that old writer's block demolishing tool of allowing yourself to write crap. Just vomit your ideas and thoughts onto a page in a disconnected stream of consciousness until you can write coherently. Except, I don't think he ever got to that last step, and then published at least two stories that were the result of spewing a lot of good ideas onto a page and then publishing the mess instead of giving a lot of good ideas vast room to breathe and grow.
Twilight being frozen in a state of mind where she's borderline nonfunctional is a really fascinating idea that could be turned into a really interesting thing, getting to the end that GaP wrote but by a path that makes it clear that Twilight suffers because it serves a good so great that her suffering is a small price to pay in her own mind.
I am entirely on board with the message that Flurry lampshades at the end of A Foreign Education that an empire founded on love, built around a magical artifact that absorbs and radiates love to power all kinds of magical defenses, can be destroyed by choosing its foundations over the cold reality of a Machiavellian opponent. Much more could have, should have, been made of this, but GaP welded the accelerator to the floor and jumped straight to the end without justifying that end. I like this story, but I'm not blind to what it is.
I want to note, as a bit of an observation, that my normal interpretation of someone who writes off a work, but then returns to it to rant at the author has a personal grudge rather than constructive disagreement. I obviously cannot know your mind, and don't pretend to know why this happened, but it seems like you were pretty determined to take a machete to stories that came out after the one that you said ended your interest in the quintology.
And I'll admit to being disappointed in your fix-fic because with all your righteous anger at GaP's errors, I had hope that you would actually rectify his mistakes. Instead, the fix makes what he did look better than it did before you tried to fix it. But I can't even really put that on your shoulders because that seems to be the way of the world: whether programmers, game developers, artists, or authors, the frequency with which people try to fix a complex problem and end up making it worse is the most amazing thing to watch.
9713396
I totally agree with that, but there’s a small problem and a big problem. The small one is that none of the reasoning Twilight gave actually requires her to be stuck in Hellicornhood; everything she says she’s trying to accomplish, she could do as a mortal pony, and more to the point her condition is forcing her to LOSE friends. She can’t help out Rarity anymore because she no longer has the maturity or experience needed, and Rarity treats her like a kid next door, not a friend. We also have to rather bleakly accept that by the time of the story Twilight’s has dozens of friends, including the original members of the Mane-6, who have seen her be trapped in Hellicornhood and left her in it. That’s also part of a larger problem touched on in my blog review, the sidelining and mistreatment of canon characters over the series.
The second problem, the big one, is that The Virgin Princess isn’t a standalone story, it’s part of a larger universe. Twilight’s condition being inconsistently applied (she can’t reflexively remember Spike but can reflexively remember Diamond Shoal and Light Step; she can’t be emotionally mature enough for romance but is emotionally mature enough to act coolly under military pressure; as an alicorn she stood up to Tirek and Chrysalis and others but doesn’t stand up to Amaryllis or Flurry Heart) is bad enough on its own, but then when you take the basic idea behind it and try to apply it to the other alicorns, particularly Cadance, the entire idea falls apart. It’s a bad story under its own merits and a detrimental addition to its own series.
The point of this fix-fic was to show that A Foreign Education didn’t have to have such a hopeless ending, that it could have still ended in a dark place without simultaneously forcing the next fics into corners that would require author fiat to get out of. I did not understand at the time that Jaxie actually didn’t care about such things, that he’s perfectly happy to write a nonsensical narrative if he gets to the the story he wants, even if that undercuts the story. It took me ‘til The Last Changeling to understand that, though at least I got him to admit it publicly twice. Three times if you kow the story behind one set of deleted posts.
That’s what ultimately offended me most about this series; this fix was written as an emotional outburst but ultimately is just and only that. But when I stepped back and became more analytical and recognized the actual problems of the series, that’s when my blood really started to boil. Not the mistakes, but the apathy of the author towards them, the lack of pride in or care for in his own work and the lack of desire to fix or even acknowledge his mistakes. I genuinely believe that I put more effort into this fix, making it sync up to the series it’s part of (the parts actually published in-story) and making its narrative follow itself and it’s world make sense, then Jaxie did for his own stories.
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I would say that implicit in the idea that what you call "Hellicornhood" could be explored is that it be made consistent, and made clear that "Hellicornhood" is necessary to accomplish one thing or another.
As a minor personal sideline, this has always been my issue with the "Twilight is an alicorn" thing as the show did it: Twilight is written to be STRONG in terms of her magic from the very beginning. She can twig out and enslave an entire town to her will without trying. She can telekinetically pick up a bear the side of several buildings, pick up and empty out a water tower, take that tower through a herd of cows milking them into it as it goes (all the while holding up the bear the size of several buildings), put an improvised bottle cap on it, and give it to the bear the size of several buildings while rocking it gently to sleep... then moving the entire affair back to its cave. This took effort, of course, but the show canon is that Twilight Sparkle is a slightly introverted, friendly, adorkable superweapon in the form of a little pony and then the show hands her 1/6 of another magical superweapon to play with.
Oh, and then she's upgraded to a force of nature on top of being a magical superweapon carrying part of another magical superweapon. You have to bend yourself into fucking pretzels to create a situation where the nerd who can mind control a town without effort on an impulse has to be trapped in a hellish existence where her mind is coming apart at the seams if she wants to do meaningful things. As far as I can tell, the only thing Twilight has ever needed alicornhood to do is to combine her over 9000 power level with the over 9000 power levels of three other alicorns for the PonyBall Z sequence of massive awesome. Suffice it to say, there's no other problem that requires a magical Tsar Bomba to fix.
It does without saying that Twilight could delete-button Amaryllis if she felt like it. She could do so before she became an alicorn. Again, I don't see anything you need alicorn superpowers to do if you can solve an entire war in between your morning cup of coffee and picking up the morning paper and a danish. As you say, this question desperately needs answering, and GaP doesn't do so.
I tend to feel this way about it, although not quite for your reasons. For me, it was just so strange and pointless that it would never do anything more than adding nothing and if the best a story can do is tread water, it's pretty much inevitable that it'll diminish the things that surround it.
I suspected this was the case given your treatises pointed at GaP and for me, your fix-fic took GaP's hopeless ending and quadrupled down on it. The end story was not only dark, it was hopelessly so. A Foreign Education's canon ending offered a lot of possibilities, I feel: that Flurry could keep Cheval petrified until her yearning for her sister overcame her outrage at what Cheval had done, that Flurry would earnestly prosecute the war with Amaryllis without nosediving into grimderp tyrant, that Cadence could undo the petrification because GaP's canon is that her capacity for love and forgiveness is virtually unlimited. GaP's ending, to me, offered hope; I saw none in your alternative.
Do you mind if I ask why you persisted in reading and commenting on a series that you swore you were done with at the midway point?
Which I do not, and would be interested to hear about if you're willing to tell.
It's certainly possible, but GaP evidenced an awful lot of thinking for someone making no effort. He plowed ahead, ignoring all feedback and disregarding his own precedents, but I think that he legitimately thought the entire thing through beforehand and then just spewed words at the page until he'd done everything he wanted to do. These qualities, I would say, existed in the two stories you do like but weren't apparent until he expanded beyond highly limited-scope stories into ones where the bigger world was included. The rot was always seething under the surface, but it was invisible until GaP pulled up the floorboards.
Also, the one big thing I wanted from The Last Changeling was an explanation of the spiritual manifestation of Amaryllis. She seemed like a genuine manifestation of the character rather than a delusion of Cheval's, and I wanted to know more. A shame I didn't get it.
9713973
To be fair, exactly what being an alicorn does was never really defined in the series. One would assume immortality as a matter of course, but the show's creators outright stated that Twilight will not outlive her friends - although the wording of that leaves open the possibility that Twilight's friends are also or will become immortal. Or it could be a bit of fourth-wall breaking and the show's creators pointing out that they're hardly going to kill off any of the main characters before the show ends - Twilight and her friends will live forever in the same way that any character in fiction does.
In any event, Twilight never seemed "stronger" from her alicorn power-up, and nor should she really need to be. This is Friendship is Magic, after all, the real problems that the mane-6 face are never solved by brute force. Starlight Glimmer is a good example of what happens when we get a unicorn who tries to solve all of her problems with raw power - ultimately it helped no one, especially not herself.
Ultimately my issue is not whether or not Twilight could beat Amaryllis (or Flurry) in a fight, or even if Twilight and all her friends could beat Amaryllis in a fight. It's difficult to imagine any changeling queen standing up to the level of power that Twilight can bring to bear when combined with several generations worth of friends and confidants, but a skilled writer could contrive reasons why they might fail.
Jaxie is not a skilled writer. Rather than having the characters try and fail, he has them never try at all. The most that ever happens with regard to Amaryllis or Flurry is Twilight realizes that Flurry Heart is a monster and a corruption of everything that an alicorn is supposed to be and so tries to dethrone her - and loses the fight. Fair enough. But Twilight never goes back for Round 2, never attempts a second time to unseat Flurry Heart. Jaxie would seriously ask you to believe that Twlight's line of logic is "well, I thought it was wrong for an alicorn to murder her subjects, but Flurry throws a mean right hook so I guess that means she can do what she wants."
Jaxie, in other words, would have his readers believe that Twilight accepts that "might makes right". Jaxie has no sense of the characters he writes - not the canon characters and at many points not even his own characters. I find it genuinely hilarious that he accused me of assassinating Cadance's character earlier in these comments when if anything as near as I can tell I got her back on track to her portrayal in Courtesans.
See, the thing is, I didn't see that hope that you do when I sat down and thought through the situation.
Flurry's war with Amaryllis should have been hopeless: there's no way that the Crystal Empire, only 22 years returned from a 1,000 year temporal exile, should have the population or industrial capacity needed to fight a major war against a modern nation, let alone the changelings and the griffins both. Now Jaxie waved a God-damned magic wand over the Crystal Empire and had them type in a few cheat codes to make up for that, but I knew clear as day that the direction was going to result in Flurry hollowing herself out and debasing herself as a person. The genocide of the changelings, the murdering of her own people, I called literally all of it in this fic. And for what? Time and again I pointed out in my comments in The Last Changeling that the crystal ponies were cheap dates, kraterocrats who only accepted rule-by-the-strongest, and so Flurry remains in power only until someone stronger comes along to unseat her because that's what the crystal ponies consider normal. And why should Flurry want to live that life? Who benefits from it?
It was the one point no one ever challenged me on and the point that turned out to be 100% correct when, in fact, Flurry shows a moment of weakness and is dethroned by her son for it. As I had Flurry say in this fic, it's not worth it, to be the princess of a nation like that, where they prefer Amaryllis over her mother anyway. You can't force change on ponies who don't want or don't see a need to change. But that's why I included this line in the epilogue: The intent was to show the crystal ponies cost of treachery to the Northern Changeling Hive. But some of them, hearing their fellows’ protestations of innocence and ignorance, wondered instead if it was the cost of allegiance. It's dark as Hell, sure, but it shows cracks forming in the kraterocratic nature of the crystal ponies that Jaxie established in A Foreign Education and hammered home in The Last Changeling, them realizing that all power comes at a price. The fundamental flaw in their culture is changing, or starting to.
Likewise it actually builds on the weaknesses of Amaryllis established in Courtesans. Amaryllis' problem is that she doesn't see people as people. Her changelings are just tools, extension of her will, and everyone else is just food. She can put on a pretty face and act kind and feel kind all she wants, but at the end of the day it is all an act no matter what Double Time or Amaryllis or any other changeling tries to claim. Amaryllis lost here - she didn't get Cheval, didn't get Shining, didn't get Flurry, didn't get Cadance, didn't get the Crystal Heart, and was publicly humiliated by Cadance and her family doing nothing but fleeing. So she finally slips up and makes a mistake and slips back to the old ways by having crystal ponies executed, shows a crack in her "kind" and "reformed" façade - a crack that'll widen, given time and applied pressure.
With regards to Cheval, meanwhile - it's not a coincidence and not for the sake of a cameo that Chrysalis was included in the epilogue. Chrysalis and Amaryllis are of a kind, both changeling queens who can be presumed to have both done awful things (because unlike GaPJaxie if I'm gonna write canon ponies into a darker world then I'm going to assume that the canon villains were darker themselves). Any crime Cheval has committed, Amaryllis has probably committed, including murder and rape - and therefore Chrysalis as well. But Chrysalis is living among the Badlands Hive, openly, and presumably Reformed. She has earned forgiveness at some point over the past 16 years - which means Cheval can as well. That's also why Thorax, Pharynx, and Chrysalis all regard Cheval with pity, rather than disgust or scorn.
I'd sworn off reading it unless the subsequent stories were recommended by someone I trusted - and The Virgin Princess was, which is why I didn't show up until after the whole thing was over. Even still when I read it and had a very different opinion, I tried very hard and mostly succeeded to keep my scorn isolated to one thing, Jaxie's "Doolittle Raid" comparison that demonstrates to me that if he is a student of 20th century military history, as Cold in Gardez claims, then Jaxie seriously needs to go back to whatever school taught him military history and demand either a refund or a better education, because the griffin attack on Ponyville resembles the Doolittle Raid only in that it was an offensive attack by one nation against another nation - absolutely nothing about it is similar otherwise; he might as well have compared it to the Battle of Lukaya or the Tet Offensive for all its similarities. It was also the biggest thing that clued me in to how little Jaxie cared about worldbuilding and maintaining a consistent narrative - two things I personally value above everything else when writing an ongoing series.
After that, The Last Changeling was simple sunk cost fallacy (indeed I even had it in a folder named as such). I'd gone through four fics out of the five that Jaxie planned, I might as well go through to the end. And the recurring issue with The Last Changeling was that in so many cases it could have been good and in so many others it actually was good. I love the idea of ponylings, for example. But like I said, individual good scenes to not a good story make. There are individual scenes in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice that I like, but I still overall hold it up as the worst big-budget movie I've ever seen, so Godawful that I am actually more forgiving towards other bad movies that have come out since because every time I'm about to tear them a new one I find myself stopping and thinking "but, really, is it as bad as BvS?"
Anyway, sunk cost fallacy, mixed with a desperate desire to see Jaxie somehow pull a miracle out of his ass and actually deliver on his promise of a 100% happy ending. Because remember, I like The Third Wheel and I love Courtesans, and I even like most of A Foreign Education until the final chapter and epilogue. And at so many points I felt hopeful that Jaxie might actually pull it off or at least get reasonably close. For most of the story I felt actually basically positive about it, and there was a good stretch from between June 1st and 8th, four entire chapters, that I was gearing myself up to write a longwinded apology.
Then...the ending. Where Jaxie dropped the ball, in fact spiked it down so hard that it left an impact crater, and was proud to have done so. Again.
It's fortuitous that the griffin attack on Ponyville was brought up, because it's relevant to this.
Okay, so, when Chapter 16 was published, I posted this comment. Because it was Jaxie making the Doolittle Raid mistake all over again, only worse this time. Wanderer D asked for an explanation of what was problematic about it.
I explained the problem, which can be summarized as, "you established back in A Foreign Education that the Crystal Empire is remote from Equestria, meaning that a train from the Empire to Ponyville can be very reasonably presumed to take many hours, possibly as long as several days, to reach Ponyville (point of comparison: from New York to San Fracisco is 3-1/2 days by modern train). There is no way for Flurry Heart, former Crystal Princess, riding in an openly Crystal Empire train with Crystal Empire soldiers in uniform with weapons, to just make a surprise visit to Ponyville, Twilight should have known for a long time that Flurry was coming and would have had adequate time to prepare Ponyville for her arrival, including informing Cheval. Further, trains are not like airships. They move along tracks and their courses and speeds are monitored by dozens or hundreds of people who's job it is to know where every train on every track is at all times in order to avoid collisions. So this train can't just secretly cross the border like the griffin airships somehow could, nor could it switch tracks to Ponyville without dozens of hundreds of ponies noticing - and this is discounting ponies who see an openly marked Crystal Empire train passing over the course of many hours or days and comment on it."
Jaxie's response was something to the effect of, "it isn't illegal for Flurry to come to Equestria, so why should Twilight know? Also there are regular trains from the Empire to Ponyville."
To which I pointed out that the epilogue, the very next and final chapter, notes that as of Chapter 16 the border between the Crystal Empire and Equestria is not an open one ("With the reopening of easy transit to the Empire", the line is still there for your viewing pleasure). This means at the very least a checkpoint where the Crystal Empire train is stopped and inspected, and the ponies doing the inspecting would have presumably noticed the Crystal Princess and her entourage of armed soldiers. Now I can 100% buy that Flurry Heart would have diplomatic credentials that would let her pass through the border should Celestia will it once she is contacted. But what I can't buy is the ponies at the checkpoint not informing Celestia of the arrival of a visiting foreign dignitary and her soldiers of an unfriendly nation carrying weapons, who then has zero reason to not inform Twilight - and thereafter, see above about Twilight having hours to days to prepare Ponyville.
Within...I think it was 10 minutes...Jaxie deleted both of my comments and his own, thereby hiding what is, since it sets the entire tone for how Cheval and Flurry interact in their final scene together, a major worldbuilding mistake. He deleted everything so fast that Wanderer D didn't even get to see my explanation, although I later PM'd it to him.
Which I take as an admission that Jaxie just doesn't care. He wanted Flurry to be at Cheval's mercy for their final meeting but for Cheval to forgive her, he wanted the ponylings to get some semblance of revenge on the crystal ponies, he wanted to give Twilight one last change to impotently chew out Flurry...and he didn't care about the nonsense needed to get there.
Or to be more accurate I think he didn't even consider it. I'd almost feel better if I knew or thought that Jaxie realized that he had written himself into a corner and decided to just plow out of it, but I don't get that sense from him in any of his writing or comments (especially not the direct response I did manage to get before he started his deletion spree), not since Courtesans at least. I think that he just honestly didn't consider it in the first place. It's sloppy writing, plain and simple.
By the way it was after that discussion that Jaxie started mass deleting all my posts, although he had deleted earlier ones - even positive ones, seemingly at random.
I know that as of writing Courtesans he had not yet planned out the next three stories, or at least this comment back in Courtesans strongly suggests that. And while I do think that once he started the next three stories he knew basically where he wanted them to go, it's pretty clear that he didn't workshop them to any real extent, or spend any time considering the world he built and how to have it logically progress. It's faintest in A Foreign Education but the sheer ludicrousness of the world really comes to the fore in The Last Changeling. Likewise I completely believe that Jaxie latched on to the idea of "being an alicorn means being stuck in time!" some time around writing Courtesans but did not stop to think about what he actually meant by that until he sat down to write The Virgin Princess - and then was only interested in putting Twilight through the wringer because of it, not caring that Hellicornhood was not actually consistently applied to her or that his attempts at defining it make it impossible to reconcile with his portrayal of Cadance in the first two fics compared to her portrayal in the latter three.
Jaxie had a lot of ideas and a lot of scenes he wanted to write, but he didn't stop to think those ideas through, or how to coherently string those scenes together into a full world and full narrative.
Actually that I'm fine with not knowing. It's not really "necessary' to know and it's always fun to have a little mystery. Not every question needs to be answered...just the ones that, if left unanswered, damage the story by being gaping plot holes. And the Third Wheel series is full of those.
I agree that she didn't seem stronger, but disagree that she shouldn't need to be. I don't know if there's anything official about how Celestia and Luna became alicorns, but I imagine that being able to simply will celestial bodies to move around required that they become more than merely powerful unicorns. It seems like the alicorns each represent a fundamental aspect of the world: the sun, the moon, love, friendship, and whatever Flurry Heart will represent. If friendship is literally magic as the show subtitle says, then the alicorn representing friendship should have titanic levels of personal power. Not because massive personal power solves problems, but because Twilight embodies an esoteric concept from which magic springs in the show universe. The fan assumption about things like Celestia being outdueled by Chrysalis is that she has the personal power, embodying the sun as she does, to annihilate entire square miles of the world by simply wishing it to be so... and yet, Celestia never solves problems this way. Being an alicorn places world-breaking power in her hooves--which she never uses. It seems to me that Twilight should have been massively powered up by becoming an alicorn but like the rest of the alicorns then living, never uses it (unless you count Cadance punting the changelings out of Canterlot, although she doesn't directly harm them by doing so) because her intelligence, personality, and the talents represented by her friends make the use of that power unnecessary.
I think GaP is skilled but cripplingly lazy. He has the capacity to worldbuild and write with subtlety and cleverness but not the inclination. You've said it yourself a few times: he does not appear to care that his stories veer wildly from consistency to inconsistency, because he wants to skip the hard work and just get to the payoff. I think this tendency is characteristic of someone who doesn't feel like making an effort, not someone who is incapable of making an effort.
We simply see the same writing in different ways then. I read and understand your reasoning, but it doesn't change how I see either your work or his. Simply put, your ending strikes me as bereft of hope, his strikes me as offering it.
I myself didn't care for The Last Changeling because it was dreary and hopeless. Amaryllis was dead, Flurry Heart was a monster, Twilight was locked in hellicorndom, Celestia and Luna weren't even part of this story, Double Time and Light Step were dead, Cheval was alone... there was no joy, no hope, and no reason to care. It wasn't the spiked knuckles to the face of The Thousand Year Change (distinct in my mind as a fic written with great skill that was utterly grimderp and unimaginably pointless because the author made it clear at the beginning that the entire gutwrenching story was a DREAM) but it was quite nearly as dreary.
The thing I got from that line was that instead of a direct route from the Crystal Empire to Equestria, you initially needed to go to a neighboring nation that had an open border with Equestria and then take the long way around, but later the direct train route was reopened.
My initial assumption--and this remains my assumption--was that after being gracious and interested in your fix-fic in A Foreign Education, and leaving you be in The Virgin Princess, GaP's patience with you finally snapped after you showed up in a third story (the second you vowed to never touch) to club him with giant walls of text about his failures as a writer. I wish I could get a commentator like you in the annals of my own large story, because I've been desperately starved for people who give enough of a fuck to ream me about my shortcomings, but I think I'm unusual among writers in that regard, and clearly GaP is not me.
It's pretty much the only thing I did want to know more about. I liked his work, but GaP's world was not very interesting to me.
9714797
The closest thing to “official” is the published version of the Journal of the Two Sisters, which says that Celestia and Luna were foundlings adopted by Star Swirl and the other Pillars. They were already alicorns even as foals. I think there was something about them being from a long-forgotten race of alicorns, but I could be wrong.
As far as I’m concerned, “unskilled writer” and “lazy writer” are synonymous terms. Part of the basic skill set of writing, in my view, is the will to put forth your best effort. Anything worth doing at all is worth doing as well as you can. And while there is a point at which you’re just obsessively chasing perfection and should stop (because then you’re never publishing and getting views and feedback, and a writer without an audience is just a dreamer), basic worldbuilding and character and setting consistency are well short of that point.
This still leaves a Crystal Empire train flying Imperial colors and carrying armed and armored Crystal ponies passing into Equestria somehow unnoticed until it got to Ponyville. This is impossible given everything I know about trains and how they function, particularly at borders (and for the record my knowledge is extremely basic and comes from about 5 minutes on Google plus being a regular train passenger for trips from my hometown to Boston, I’m not claiming expertise or extensive study). Especially given the cool relations between Equestria and the Empire, it is inconceivable to me that Flurry should be able to enter Equestria without anyone noticing her and her entourage. Canada and the United States have extremely friendly relations but I still need a passport to cross into my northern neighbor, even by car or train. And if it was me and twenty armed guys? There’d be some questions.
One possibility, and the only plausible one I can think of, is that Celestia WAS informed but deliberately did nothing, anticipating the changeling reaction and hoping for Flurry’s death. If that’s the case then we can throw Celestia’s corpse onto the pile of characters Jaxie assassinated.
9715264
Oh, alright then. Fanon consistently seems to assume that they were something else and became alicorns but if the canon word is that they were always alicorns, that opens a whole lot of questions that would make a whole lot of stories, but makes some of my thinking about alicorns moot.
They pretty much are, but I prefer to make distinctions where there are legitimate distinctions. Ignorant and stupid are treated as synonymous, for instance, but one is a lack of knowledge and the other is a lack of intelligence so it's unjust to call an ignorant person stupid, and misguided to call a stupid person merely ignorant. In like matter, I treat the distinction between not having an ability and not using an ability as distinctive even though having an ability and not using it is functionally the same as not having it. Honestly, calling GaP "unskilled" lets him off the hook for his bad decisions as a writer because if he's truly unable to be consistent, the character assassination and other problems you brought up are not his fault. You seem to think they're his fault, and I think they're his fault, so it seems more accurate to say that he could have done better but chose not to.
I was really just explaining what the line you cited meant to me, not using it as a defense for the immense plot hole around the event.
You're assuming it's that benign. Another possibility is that Celestia was informed and thought it was a wonderful thing that Flurry was coming to Ponyville to make amends, never thinking it all the way through. That's actually worse than assuming malice on Celestia's part.
9715546
The thing is that in that scenario I can’t think of a good reason for Celestia to not tell Twilight, or even for Celestia to not be there herself.
But like I said, I’m pretty sure that what actually happened is Jaxie just plain didn’t consider it at all, because he wanted to write the scene and didn’t think about how to actually get there.
9715556
Well, neither of us can think of a remotely sane reason for most things in A Foreign Education forward, so what's one more thing?
9715546
Oh, and exactly how canon or not canon the published Journal is, is up in the air. The show is reasonably good at sticking to its own canon where episodes and the movie is concerned - within the context of its intended audience and 22 minute runtime - but the show’s creators have said that the comics, the EqG spinoff, and the novels are all pick-and-choose canon; individual fans can decide whether they happened or not and if the information in them “counts” or not. I assume the Journal and like publications also count as part of that.
9715569
I rather like such "canon" because I feel free to take advantage of it for ideas without feeling obligated to adhere to its depictions of characters and history. Since I worldbuild my own fanon, I tend to think of most canon this way but it's better when the creators of the show canon give tacit permission.
Speaking of fanon, I ought to go sample more of yours.
9715569
Follow-up: I just realized you're the Crisis on Two Equestrias guy.
You're also a fellow fan of My Choices: Twisted Through Time.
My day is now a little brighter. :)
9715648
Honestly, I liked this version. Chapter 4's decisions made sense. Considering how much of a pushover and DUEERRRRRRR Shining and Cadance was in the original fics. A bit of interesting politic'ing as well using some Eastern European history as well.
Frankly, I like this. She should have been send into the ... Greenlands now I guess it should be called now. She can't trick an ex-ruler, and two ex-drones now rulers, and with Flurry there, being the stubborn filly she is, can keep an extra eye on her as well. I like it. That's pretty much all I can say.
9734005
I was actually thinking a bit more Norway than any Eastern Europe nation. Robust Core is intended to call to mind Vidkun Quisling, at least in the broad strokes of “collaborator leader who sided with the conqueror to gain power in his homeland and goes along with atrocities”, if not in any specific detail. Though you can find similar analogues in plenty of other places through history.
9734050
True enough.
Well uh, I'm not good with wording these types of things. But, I will say? I enjoyed this route far more than the original. I've been looking at the dislikes this has, the massive *wave* of dislikes every comment has in favor of literally anything you say or anyone who agrees with your sentiments, and I just...don't understand it, myself. I get the taboo something like this *might* have, yes, but I've seen far worse produce even worse content simply for the sake of it being put out there. This *was* an 'eloquent fix fic' as it were, but that's just the thing; it was eloquent and it told a much better story, from what I've seen. I've followed GaP for a bit and uh, completely honest? Everything you said, from my point of view, rings true. I've seen nothing but evidence to prove the guy has some MAJOR issues, especially when people dislike what he puts out, and then he has a following to boot which only turns down his naysayers even more. I just...this is one side of the site I'd prefer to not see, but looking at what this put out, I can at the very least say it was worth it to *someone*.
9870927
Thanks. And the term you’re looking for in Jaxie’s most fanatical followers is “echo chamber”. “Hugbox” is also a good one. It is the most dangerous thing you can possibly have as a writer. Avoid it at all costs.
It’s important to note that my response to The Third Wheel series had two phases. Not intentional ones, it wasn’t planned, but you can see them if you look for them. The first one is ultimately expressed with this fic. It’s a purely emotional response. I’m not terribly proud of it, but basically it was a series I had become personally invested in for better or worse, and the failings of A Foreign Education ultimately pushed all the buttons in the worst possible way.
I feel, unfortunately, that because the response was so emotional, I ultimately shot myself in the foot once I got a little bit of distance, sat down, and thought about the series and its failings. That lead to phase two, which was when I became much more analytical of the series not based on my personal likes or dislikes of it (although I hardly hid those, but then again I was never shy with offering praise for what did work), but in its merits and flaws as a piece of art. When I stopped being an overly emotional fan and started being a critic. But, because of phase one, most people still interpreted me as just being an overly emotional fan.
Writing isn’t like many other art forms in that there is a degree of objectivity to it. A painter who puts the wrong stroke on the canvas can claim it’s a stylistic choice; my brother, a guitarist, is fond of saying that he doesn’t make mistakes, he’s just trying out some jazz. But if you write “teh” instead of “the”, for example, you’re just plain objectively wrong. And this applies in a larger sense to an entire narrative. Plot holes are things that, objectively, are wrong about a story. You can get people to ignore them or try and cover them up, through various means, but ultimately that’s merely ignoring a mistake. And a mistake doesn’t go away simply because it’s been ignored.
Even in the depths of my emotional rage over A Foreign Education, I in my author’s note at the beginning noted the fundamental problem with the series going forward based on the canon ending of this story. Jaxie had written himself into a corner where only pure authorial contrivance could move him forward.
And ultimately, I was proven right about that, wasn’t I? The Crystal Empire won its war with the changelings only because Jaxie outright admitted (once I had backed him into a corner) that he basically wrote it as an RTS faction with cheat codes on. Flurry Heart gets away with fifty-two years of rule only because Jaxie decided that no one would try and unseat her (except once by Twilight, and then Twilight loses and apparently never tries again, giving off the impression that Jaxie believes that Twilight believes that Might Makes Right). Cadance’s character is totally inconsistent, which is problematic because she’s supposed to be trapped in the same Alicorn Hell as Twilight and Flurry. And so on.
I have come to believe that Jaxie is not actually much of an author, a very different opinion from what I held just one year ago. What Jaxie is, is a messenger, or philosopher. He has a Thing To Say in most of his stories, but he doesn’t actually care for the craft of writing as he writes those stories. He’s good enough when focused on single scenes or very tight narratives, but once he tries to construct or insert his characters into a larger world everything falls apart because his writing style is totally dependent on The Message rather than the narrative. I phrased it once as “he has a story he wants to tell and he doesn’t care what gets in the way, even if it’s the story”, but a user named TheGrog summed it up even more succinctly: “They’re good stories as long as you don’t stop and think about them.”
Basically the quality of Jaxie’s stories depends entirely on his ability to distract you with his characters’ motivations and emotions and the philosophies they’re espousing to hide the fact that he’s very weak at stringing a plot together. And I think the fact that I noticed and zeroed in on that is what really got to him. If I’d been in the stories as another political philosopher debating the finer points of Marxism or Objectivism or whatever, he’d have been amicable because that’s what he expected and that’s what he was prepared to deal with - and as well, it’s difficult to really be objectively right or wrong in such debates.
But I was instead telling him and pointing out his flaws as an author, and I don’t think he was prepared to or really knew how to deal with that other than eventually resorting to just first mass deleting my posts, and then blocking me. Because I wasn’t saying “what you’re saying is wrong”, I was saying “how you’re saying that is wrong”. And that’s ultimately much more clear-cut and objective. I wasn’t really saying “Cheval wouldn’t do X”, I was saying “it doesn’t make sense for Cheval to even be in a position to do X to begin with”. I think it’s been a very long time since someone judged him on the how of his writing rather than the why.
It’s also rather telling that he finally resorted to just outright lying about the content of my deleted posts to justify his deleting of them (although I’m sure he feels otherwise, but while the civility of my posts could be debated, their relevancy was unimpeachable). The particular sequence at the end, and the fact that one of the deleted posts is his own, is also revealing.
But, it is done. I don’t care how many downvotes this story gets or how much it may hurt my reputation on this site, nor the final review blog post I posted, nor the responses I put to his stories that he has yet to delete. I’ve said what I said and I’ve done what I’ve done, and I stand by all as things that, while I may do differently in some aspects, I would still do again. They were learning experiences for myself if for no one else, and going forward the best “revenge” I can manage is to just be the best writer I can be in spite of Jaxie and his obfuscation of his own talents.
Though a small part of me hopes that whenever Jaxie sees me in the feature box he gets just a little peeved. It’s petty, but it makes me smile.
9871030
And I think that makes you all the better for it. Just, keep on keeping on, because it's always good to see someone who explains, defends, and mitigates, rather than blunt refusal or deletion, as I've seen and you've said to have seen from Jaxie. It's just a shame things have turned out as they have, but I'm glad to see you've weathered the storm and have come out ahead, in some ways. You've stayed true to your goals, and I think that's more admirable than anything, especially given the many considerations you've put forward. But uh...yeah! I'm glad I found you again, cause looking through the stories you've posted, a GREAT deal of them I've already enjoyed, favorited, etc., so it's high time I give you a follow and see where your stuff takes you. Just uh...best of luck in the future and keep your head held high, cause it's always good on my end to see good, considerate authors get the positive spot in the limelight sometimes.
9871076
Thanks. I’ll admit that whenever I see someone’s commented on this story I wince a little, so it was nice to have a change from the usual pace of having to rehash old arguments.
I liked it. That's all I'm gonna say.