For his hard work to the Crown, the Royal Engineer of Equestria has been honored with a retinue of VIP bodyguards who protect him everywhere he goes. Their ordinary, everyday adventures together wind up being anything but ordinary.
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Ahh, there’s the bright and cheerful pegasus we’ve all come to know and love!
I guess nothing brightens one’s mood like the promise of a brand new toy to play with.
This gonna be GOOD.
Nice.
Wonder what the gift is. I have a feeling it's some Valkyrie-associated (but not -exclusive) equipment.
New toys!
Artemis seems to be taking this better than I thought she would, that or the full weight hasn't landed yet. Also hoping huckle doesn't air their dirty laundry back in Berry. Close-knit communities like that love their gossip.
This is fair. A living legend is never as good as a legend. Usually legends have almost martyr status. That is a hard thing to live up to while still living.
10644850
Some mares need buckets of ice cream after a heartbreak, some mares weapons of mass destruction.
'tis a complicated world.
10644919
Yeah, and she also has a good point that there's more to Celestia than just her skill with magic, and arguably these things are even more impressive, which makes it harder to label her as 'just' the most skilled mage.
I am just imagining Sparkshower walking out of her room with a gunlance. I have no idea what this is going to be, but that is what I immediately started imagining once she was told to be careful with it.
Noble hooch!
... the gift, I mean. Not the mare, herself. Though that would be pretty sweet gift, too.
Did you mean to say "never reduced but only increased"?
10644921
Kind of unfair to put include a demigod in the rankings with the mortals, was my thought at that point.
10644938
On second thought, I'm slightly a little at a loss for intentions, so I'm leaving it in the original writing.
If shame is a virtue available in fixed quantities assigned at birth, it may well be something you can only lose over time.
10644938
No, no. Never increased but only reduced is right. Growler is talking about the fact that mares are, traditionally, supposed to be caste and full of 'shame', I guess about being born of the feminine sex. The alternative would them for be to be 'shameless'. Locks and Keys metaphors and all that.
10644945
Except that makes no sense in context with the next part.
10644947
It does though? In the context of this theorem, for mares to have MORE shame is good. Less shame is bad, because having less and less shame means they are more and more 'shameless',
10644954
That's one way to use "shame". However it sounds like they're using the other kind. Like when you shame yourself by your actions.
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10644960
That is how it was originally written, and I believe that's TMFAT's intent on writing it this way.
Stallions have honour, which they can earn or lose depending on their actions (and maybe also given at birth if they're of noble blood).
Mares are born with shame (about their gender/sex/role in society), because they're traditionally meant to be coy and contrite. The machinations of lechers or their own sinful impulses means that they can lose their shame and become a 'shameless woman/mare' which is irreversible in the eyes of such traditional views.
10644960
The idea here in the traditional view is that the mere fact that they're mares instead of stallions is something they should feel shame about. A mare that feels shame for their gender/sex is good because they know their role in traditional society. A mare that is shameless about it is bad because she should be feeling shame about how they were born.
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My original wording was correct. In patriarchal cultures, one interpretation of the way honour works is that women can be said to be born with a fixed quantity of "shame", which they can only lose by performing shameful actions or having shameful actions done to them, and which they can never recover. Eventually enough shameful actions make them "shameless" and abhorrent. On the other hand, men have "honour" which they can gain, lose, or recover according to their actions.
The distinction is important: if a woman belonging to a tribe or family is raped, she is ashamed and debased, and the menfolk also lose honour (for having failed to prevent it). By avenging themselves against her attacker, the menfolk can recover their honour, but even if they do, the woman's "quantum of shame", lost due to actions beyond her control, can never be recovered.
Major Growler's cultural proposition is from a history essay I happened to be reading at the time. These are not the actual terms the people of those cultures themselves use, but it's an interpretation of how the "algebra" of social credit seems to work for women vs men in those cultures -- which includes those in Western Europe up until the advancement of feminism around the turn of the 20th century.
Equestria in ELWG is a partial reflection of culture in 19th century Victorian England. Obviously there are some big differences, like females in the military at all, and overall it's far more advanced in terms of gender equality and the noble-vs-commoner divide is also less pronounced, but many holdouts remain.
10644988
That makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up!
10644985
Ahhh, okay. I follow where you're coming from now.
10644988
Gotcha.
I was reading the comments when the screen refreshed and a new chapter appeared! It was like finding a twenty on the sidewalk.
Glad to see Artemis' relationship issues getting attention. Goodness!
Lily and Artemis getting favours and free stuff from the nobility? I sense politics.
Can’t really help but agree with the good Major on the point of ‘honor’. You find a lot of people both real and fictional whose ideas regarding that particular thorny concept are at best fundamentally shallow and self-serving (if someone makes noise about their ‘honor’ and I can easily glean from context that what’s actually at stake is merely their pride, ego, or reputation -- all of which incidentally seem to instead have a long tradition of actually getting in the way of figuring out one’s genuinely honorable way forward --, it’s a pretty safe bet they’re in that group and their claim is just so much BS), and that’s before also throwing in any toxic -isms like the downright blatant sexism in this particular case on top of that.
I'm full after that chapter.
Also, the gift is a "thundercloud"!
With all the references made in this, I can only guess how many I’ve missed. That in mind, I absolutely loved the one in this chapter. Keeping my fingers crossed that there’s a unit within the 4th Armored Regiment known as ‘Growler’s Gruffnecks’.
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To this day, it still blows my mind comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. The book took some very controversial views, but the movie was seemingly made by a guy who flat-out hated the book and wanted to make it look as bad as possible...
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See, I thought that was the point. The movie took the book’s earnest glorification of militarism and parodied the hell out of it. At least, that was my take on it. I suppose that Poe’s Law may apply here.
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It's hard to call Starship Troopers an earnest glorification of militarism, since the principal fault Heinlein speaks to and identifies in the story is the lack of investment a voter needs to have in the success of their nation to have a say in its policies, which creates perverse incentives that cannot be sustained or ignored. Heinlein's solution was to require a period of public service in order to attain franchise (the right to vote) -- a request for service that cannot be refused. Since military service was the easiest example to write a good story around, that's what he decided to write about.
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Agreed. Honor's killed more soldiers than bullets, blades bombs and disease combined, I figure. It's also wasted more materiel and time than the laziest and most incompetent of military units.
Honor is about as useful on a battlefield, as a bag of smouldering pubic hair is to a drowning man. Fucking worthless.
Oh fuck yes I was half expecting a confrontation but glad to see not all military higher-ups are wankers
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You possess "shame", it is a thing of value and it's given to a mare at birth. They must guard it lest they loose it. Once lost, they can never get it back.
Have you no "shame"!?
"That "shameless" hussy."
A temper? Are they sending her a dragon?
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Depends on how you define honor and what is considered honorable. If you're talking about the "sterling reputation" of a unit, and want to suppress information on something bad the unit did (just to have an example, let's say that you have an accident involving civilian casualties during combat operations that could have been prevented in some way), then I agree. Such conduct does more to harm the unit's real honor than by owning up to it and accepting the punishment associated with it. Does that mean you plaster it on every newspaper known to man? No, but you make sure that the proper channels are notified so that they can deal with it (this conduct itself can be argued to be honorable).
If you are talking about the honor that comes from holding a position against an enemy force that outnumbers you by hundreds or thousands to one (I have multiple IRL examples for this one, one example being the Chasseurs Ardennais during the Battle of Belgium at the start of WW2), by taking prisoner enemy combatants that have surrendered and treating them with the upmost respect and dignity, acts of selflessness and courage that go above and beyond the call of duty (for example, Corporal Desmond Doss during the battle of Okinawa in WW2), or even the simplest acts of kindness and generosity (ex: seeing a bunch of starving kids while on patrol and providing them with surplus MREs that you have, to ensure they have a meal for the day, as a buddy of mine did while on a combat deployment), then I heavily disagree. Such honor is what motivates a lot of soldiers (especially those in combat-focused specialties) to actually withstand the great stresses and hardships that come with war, and builds a comradery like no other. The effects that real honor provide are significant to the morale a fighting force, and leaders understand this.
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Honor has also probably stopped untold atrocities as well. Without it, the difference between soldier and attack beast becomes very thin, indeed.
It's going to be some kind of portable thundercloud, isn't it? XD
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True, but then you grow out of it and I was assuming he was at an age that he should have already grown out of it.
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One does not grow out of cultural expectations and norms overnight, and there's no hard and fast rule that says talking about sex has to stop being embarrassing.
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The Royal Engineer is flabbergasted by discussion of sexuality/romance exactly twice in the story:
They happen to be the first two such discussions, but I think it's fair to say that those are pretty extraordinary incidents. There are going to be more discussions about pony romance and sex involving him later, in less shocking circumstances, and you will find he does not instantly transform from a respectable homeowning engineer who was nearly married into a fainting, nani-shouting shota hero of a cocktease shonen/seinen anime.
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Verhoeven, the director of the movie, read two chapters and hated it. The screenwriter, Edward Neumeier, was a longtime fan of the book, and was the one who ended up having to tell to Verhoeven what happened in it. Kinda explains why people on both sides of the aisle like the movie.
I get the feeling she is gonna get some break-up comfort from this gift.
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You got it right. The director of Starship Troopers the movie HATED what he thought the book represented & sought to rip it apart via parody. Instead, because he didn't really understand the principles the book was actually espousing, he ended up making a bombastic but ultimately enjoyable adaptation, rather than a scathing parody.
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Heinlein had a rare gift and a unique idea in some of his mid to late works what he would do is pick a world view/philosophy and make a world around the best version of it he could reckon. The A plot of star ship troopers is the how a boy becomes a man story but the world is a idea of a near ideal military state were non military are safe and not oppressed but the military is revered above most anything else. The moon is a harsh mistress is the libertarian state. Stranger in a strange land is the hippy ideal. There are more I cant think of at the moment. Movie bob said it best about the starship troopers move "quite possibly the greatest act of artistic meanness ever" he did not parody he made the book a straw man and beat it up for a two of hours.
You've been posting every day or two, how are you managing this?
Oof. Looks like Sparks dodged a bullet by not ending up with the valkyries.
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Several years of material that I am adapting (with permission and help from the original author), rather than writing from scratch.
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Ok. That's understandable. Though you still must be moving pretty quickly. How many chapters are there in total?
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As far as thought-experiments describing the ideal society go, Plato did it first.
https://www.overthinkingit.com/2012/11/08/my-little-pony-plato/
And then Marcus Cicero borrowed the idea and came up with his own dialogue treatises on what makes an ideal government.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54161
(Sadly, de Legibus doesn't seem to be on Gutenberg, but here it is in the original Latin)
And then the Enlightenment thinkers and Continental Congress drew heavily from Locke who drew heavily from Cicero.
https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mVTiG8e11Q&list=PLTve54sz-eh_bDHo7N3PCNNyhCDHBy9kR&index=123
The idea of giving greater civic privileges to those who are willing to put the good of the state above their own personal good (and proportional punishments for abusing authority or neglecting civic responsibilities) is certainly not a bad one, so long as there's a reasonable baseline and those who do not become "Citizens" are not persecuted or deprived. And it should be noted that in the book, a variety of volunteer works like participating in medical trials are used for achieving full citizenship. Military service is just the most popular because of the huge demand for public service opportunities.
Still, Stranger in a Strange Land (uncut edition) is his greatest achievement.
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We'll find out when we get all caught up; I don't know yet, either!
Yeah!
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Oh, they only think he's dead. They don't know he's been in enchanted limbo for one thousand years with the rest of the Pillars and Stygian.
Will be interesting to us if L.G. and A.S. do get to meet Starswirl in the future after the limbo is lifted by You-Know-Whos.
First thing I thought of in my crazy crazy side of my brain is a minigun. Sparks can be an Equestrian A-10!
But in all honesty I've no idea what it really is but I did enjoy this chapter. I hope they didn't send her a little packet of flame stickers to make her go faster. It sure didn't work well for Rainbow Dash.
Hmm -- one could always choose Princess Luna as greatest Sorcerer, or Princess Twilight Sparkle. Celestia and Starswirl do not have the monopoly on the ideal.
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You could even make a case for King Sombra, given that he was never defeated by less than two ponies working together.