128 - Putting Things in Order
"I see..." Luna rose to her hooves. "Allow me to ask this plainly. Do you act in the interest of ponykind?"
"I hope so?" Comforting lifted into the air. She had gotten used to being at or above pony vision with her bipedal stance. Luna was throwing that off with her impressive height. "I like them. But I like a lot of creatures, if you get down to it." She waved over herself. "Even my body is a big love letter to the creatures I'm good friends with."
"Is it?" Luna looked Comforting over, leaning left and right for other angles. "Do you love them?"
"Romantically, no." She tapped at her chin. "I don't really have a lot of romantic drive. I'm a filly! But as friends, yes, a lot. They are precious to me and I want to be their friends. Part of me wants to offer that to you, but we just met... So that'd be kind of a creepy thing to do, the more I think about it. But nice to meet you anyway."
"A pleasure." Luna circled Comforting on slow hooves. "You do not appear to be a dangerous creature. But we've had to deal with creatures with innocent faces. Were you not there? I seem to recall you, thinking on it... When we captured Cozy Glow."
"Yes..." Comforting thought back to that moment. She was still a filly then, entirely a filly. She had felt so impotent, trying to help her friends against that destiny-foretold event.
But she had broken it.
She had destroyed the grip of destiny on the world, for better, or for worse. She could help them, if something like that came again, but it'd also be her responsibility if it all went wrong.
"Are you alright?" Luna leaned in close. "Did I ask an impolite question?" She reached a hoof, brushing a single tear threatening to spill from Comforting's eyes. "I apologize. That wasn't the goal, I assure."
"S-sorry! Not you!" Comforting rubbed at her eyes with her arms. "I'm alright. It's... You're a princess."
"I am?" Luna inclined her head, confusion displayed clearly. "What of it?"
"So you know what it's like." Comforting smiled up at the large night princess. "I'm just realizing I have a lot of responsibility, and I brought it on myself. It's up to me to help my friends be safe and happy."
Luna offered a hoof, and soon had a Comforting to hold gently against herself. "I understand that. I feel my sister understands it even more keenly. That is why she is upset. She can no longer walk confidently, knowing she was doing her absolute best to protect her little ponies."
"Is she... mad?"
Luna considered that a quiet moment. "No, certainly not at you." She released Comforting to her own feet. "But she is concerned, and a little worried. Just like you. She wants to do what is best, but that doubt she's avoided for so many moons... It's back. She has to act on her own." She smirked as she rose to her full height. "Good, if you ask me. Her ramblings make more sense now, come to think."
Comforting backed a half step. "Ramblings?" That hardly seemed a kind word to use towards Celestia. "She wasn't rambling, I hope?"
"In a manner of speaking..." Luna wobbled a hoof in the air. "She spoke as if everything was decided, and, perhaps, everything was. This colored her view sharply. She was preparing to retire. Not because she had to. Not because she especially wanted to. Because it was what was to happen, and if she wanted that happy ending, she had to do it. She had to get her student, Twilight Sparkle." She pantomimed Twilight with middling success. "onto the throne she sits on currently."
Comforting mmmed softly, rocking left and right in place. "What does she want?"
"As if I could know." Luna paced away from Comforting, towards a window. "As if she could know. She was following a script set before her for so long. Perhaps, now, she can take up that quill for herself." She looked over her shoulder. "I admit, I am curious. There is so much of this modern world that confuses and fascinates me... I would love to explore it."
"So why not do that?" asked Comforting with a spread of her hands. "It's right there, waiting for you."
"I am a princess." She turned entirely back to Comforting. "If I leave, who will watch over their dreams? Chaos creature, loving or not, do not suggest you do it. You have your own responsibilities. Also, caring and loving or not, you remain a chaos creature. Not who I would select to be guardian of dreams. You are young as well! Enjoy that youth."
"Dreams are plenty chaotic," Comforting argued without a lot of force behind it. "But I'm not trying to do that..." She had things on her own plate. "Still... Here you are."
"Here I am." Luna sank closer to Comforting's standing level, which prompted the chaos spirit to land. "You know, though we are, technically, nearly identical in age, our experienes are vastly different. I do not feel the years as she does."
"You were trapped on the moon." Comforting pointed up, but hesitated midway at Luna's flinch. "Sorry... I thought... I was dumb."
"No.... No, this is common knowledge." Luna turned her ears back. "Perhaps we can trade? An awkward past for an awkward past. Tell me, Comforting. Share your dark past with me, that we can hold such a thing of the other in equal gravity."
Comforting sifted through the pile of her life, starting with the recent and working backwards. Her pony and chaos life was one, predominantly, of joy. She struggled to place a dark spot in it. Being hurt in the human world had been frightening, but not embarassing... "A few lives ago... I was born. They decided I was a boy, looking at me. I guess I can't blame that doctor. I looked like a boy, at that point..."
Luna tapped at her chin. "Most ponies are as they appear to be, regarding that... But there are some. A stallion with the manners of a mare, or a mare with the manners of a stallion. That is simply who they are, nothing to be upset by. But that is the pony way. I presume it was not such where you came from, in this former life?"
"Definitely not..." Comforting rubbed at her chin. "A 'stallion' wearing a 'mare's' clothes was a reason to get upset. They got upset over a lot of things that didn't really affect them... Like which two ponies fell in love, when neither of them were the person being upset."
Luna rubbed her cheek with obvious confusion. "Why should one... Oh! Was it a royal or a noble and a common pony? That could cause some commotion, especially back in the day. Sister has done away with a lot of that..."
Comforting pawed at Luna, more of a petting than any actual striking. "Silly! No... That would have at least made some kind of sense. Just a bunch of commoners, arguing over which commoner got with which other commoner."
"I fail... to understand. So, you, a stallion in shape, but mare of thought, were unwelcome?" Luna cycled her hooves as she worked through the idea. "The world must have been peaceful, were this the height of debate."
"I wish!" Comforting threw up her hands and herself, casually drifting to the fridge. "Want a snack? I feel like a snack."
"Since you are offering." Luna watched Comforting work to get a big bowl of salad together. "Well, you are no longer of that life, but, I would contend, you are still not entirely a mare."
Comforting dropped her tossing forks. "What?"
"You can't be, for many reasons." Luna stood slowly. "Impossible. You were something else, a confusing time it sounds. You knew what it was like to not be a mare. A mare otherwise does not know this. You are, now, not even a pony. How can you be a mare?" She raised a hoof to her chest. "Don't get me wrong. You are a valid and wonderful creature, from what I know, but a mare? I struggle to accept that. You're something else. Maybe better? Maybe. Certainly not worse. Something new."
Comforting put her hands on her hips. "I worked very hard and very long to be known as a woman, which I was from the start."
"A what?" Luna perked her ears towards Comforting. "What is that?"
Comforting covered her face with a hand. "Mare. A mare of what I was before. I had to fight people shouting, screaming, and willing to get violent over the idea that I was not."
"Unkind of them." Luna approached slowly, her magic taking the salad tossing forks and resuming the job on her own. "I would say you are not a mare, but equally deserving of our support. What is it they wanted to prevent you from doing?"
Comforting let out her voice in a groan of remembered discomfort. "That's a long list. Let's start with maybe the stupidest example. Go to the bathroom."
Luna started. "All creatures, of any kind, need that... What did they expect you to do?"
"Go to the stallion's bathroom."
Luna inclined her head left and right. She set the forks next to the bowl and reached for the dressing with her magic. "I fail to see what meaningful difference there is."
That was when Comforting remembered that ponies were not humans. They treated bathrooms differently, to the point that what they did in them remained something of a mystery. "May I ask a super dumb question?"
"Certainly." With a curled tail, she sat there at the table. "We are sharing secrets, are we not?"
"Don't take this the wrong way..." She pinched her nose. "How do I use a bathroom?"
Luna started, shocked at the question. "You could take a bath?"
"Besides that!" Comforting was bright red in her cheeks. "The other part. The part you'd need a toilet for." She had seen those! They existed! Surely they had a use!
"Oh..." She glanced off into the house, where the restroom resided and the other ponies. "Did... your parents never help you?" She raised her hooves to tap nervously. "How... do you not know? You are a chaos spirit now, so I suppose it's... optional... But you weren't before. What... Were... Nevermind." She rose up almost angrily. "Nevermind! It doesn't even matter.
"Did I make you mad?" Comforting floated up to grab the forks and put them in the sink for later cleaning. "Sorry."
"I am not mad. But you're long overdue for something that should have been taught before you even said your first word." She tapped at her chin. "I take that back, it can be often around the same time. Either way! This is past due. Come. This qualifies as your embarassing truth. Let's address it."
Comforting drifted after Luna. "Address it, how?"
"How else? You are past due for this lesson."
Luna held open the door for Comforting to drift past her. "Really... I am not casting shame. We both have something to be embarassed about, but this cannot stand to be left. You will learn its use."
She closed the door behind them and spent the rest of the day going over the ways and means of taking care of things the pony way.
At least some things were learned. Even if it spoiled Comforting's idea of perfect pony bodies that never needed to sully itself for any reason.
Better to know the truth, she decided, than to live a sweet lie of being comfortably wrong.
Oh dear. That got sensitive. Off to the land where the camera goes black. Likely for the best. You can decide for yourself how ponies handle that.
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lmfao i love how what Luna got from that was that Comforting was never taught how to pee or poop
How did she go this long without having to go! I assume she would do it similar to people.
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That sure is a question that never was gone over in the primary canon, leaving us to assume things about our beloved magical horses.
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If it helps, she was a normal girl a while and probably did normal little girl things.
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Well I am assumed that something that nobody really needed to see. But still it's not exactly hard to figure out if they have bathrooms.
I feel second-hand embarrassment for poor Chomforting Shade. It also brings up a really good question of how she was relieving herself as a pony before being a chaos spirit. Also I think explaining that her former species wasn't covered by fur may help Luna get the big deal. All those fleshly bits on display and people feeling vulnerable.
Lemme get back on track and far away from political discord. Have fun being potty trained Comforting.
What a strange chapter
I am not sure if you realize this, but the things Luna is saying sound transphobic.
She's not doing it in a direct, angry way, but she's repeatedly going through weird mental gymnastics to insist that Comforting can not possibly be female.
Like...she didn't say that Comforting was non binary androgynous or genderfluid. She didn't say that Comforting was clearly female but that being in a male body may have made her a bit male, mentally due to the exposure to a male physical form.
She said Comforting either was a different kind of male, or genderless.
It's okay to be male or agender, but...this is something trans exclusionary radical feminists say in order to say that trans women are "separate but equal." They say "you can exist, but you aren't one of us. You can't be. It's impossible."
It's driven by a certain biological existentialism that says that no matter what you feel in your heart, you can't be a woman if you have, or have ever had male plumbing, because what was between your legs cancels out all your femaleness. Even if you get rid of it later.
Comforting herself seems fine, especially when she gets appropriately upset, but Luna...seems off. Luna is old, yes. But she probably knows better than almost anyone about what it's like to have one's identity discarded. Luna became Nightmare Moon because she didn't feel like others thought a real princess, and felt she had to assert that to everyone.
And well...she gave a peace of candy to the Nightmare Moon statue because she was begging a self she was now ashamed of now to "gobble her up."
How many trans people fear that they will never escape the self that other people forced on them, that it will, "gobble them up?"
I just can't imagine Luna, someone as tormented with her self image as she is, who likely watches foals cry themselves to sleep half the time in their dreams, would speak to a foal this way, even while apologizing.
I'm not sure what happened here. It's probably not as jarring as, say the author of "Cerebus the Aardvark" turning his comic into a misogynist tract, especially since, as I noted, you might not know what you are saying, but it feels like the whole train ran off the tracks and now there's a wreck, metaphorically speaking.
I'll always cherish the writing you shared for this story up until this point, but this story feels like a different story now, and you feel like a different person, and I'm...very sad and disappointed. I'm not sure I'll be coming back to this specific story, at least not soon. I hope something changes things back to how they were.
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She would just as firmly say Comforting can't be a stallion either. She's not even a pony. She literally cannot be a mare or a stallion.
She didn't say Comforting was 'a bit male'. Or male at all. Just not a mare.
She's not a mare. She's a chaos creature hailing from another world. She's a lot of lovely wonderful things. Mare? No.
She's... really not a mare? You're dragging RL human loads into this pony world.
She's... not... a mare. She is a welcome citizen of Equestria, there is no doubt. Beloved by most everycreature in sight!
Luna likes Comforting a lot, and would like her to keep on being awesome.
She would just as firmly make it clear that a purple foal is not brown. Comforting is not a pony. Not being a pony, she is not a mare. This has nothing to do with sexual identity.
I'm not sure how to address this. Luna got confused at the identity of the one who has lived many lives, then gladly offered assistance. This wonderful creature is not a pony. They're not much of any one thing. They are a lot of things, beyond the grasp of most ponies. It's a big, wonderful mess that she's not putting down. I don't know how else to phrase 'I do not get you, but I'm alright with it.' Luna was not on the attack.
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What you are missing is that it comes across as the same as Comforting being told by Luna that she can't be female at all. It comes across as othering.
If that was not your intent, then you should have chosen what you had Luna say a lot more carefully.
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I don’t understand what happened.
I read your explanations but I’m still baffled by the change in tone, both of the story , and of the change in tone regarding your explanations of why things are happening.
It’s less a change of logic, in more a lack of …care. A lack of simple empathy for both the characters and the readers that was there before, but is now gone.
I don’t think I can say more than this at this time because I think we’re at an impasse and I don’t think we’re going to change each other’s minds. I’m not sure if I’ll be gone forever but I think I need to take a break.
I just wanted to say Best Pony Princess she may be but talk about awkward
Edit: I just want to be clear I was referring to Luna apparently teaching Comforting how to use the toilet. I wasn't referring to her whole not a mare. I can see what she means, it's like how tomcat can't be a stallion or a mare because they're not an equine.