It's just not fair. He was the only one who truly understood the threat of the other species, the stallion who mobilized Maretime Bay in the battle for ultimate victory, and what did it get him? A criminal record and community service. And now the unicorns and pegasi are just moving around HIS city like they own the place and that's totally unfair. His mother should own the place (through having sold more anti-them stuff) and once she'd stepped aside? It would be Sprout time!
But nopony recognizes how vital he is. They expect him to pick up litter and worse, to do it before Hitch. They don't understand that ponies are meant to be afraid. All the time. Then somepony can be in charge. Like him. (Again.) And if they're not going to be terrified of wings and horns...
...what's an 'Ursa'?
Doesn't matter. He'll just go find out the Sprout way. By WINNING.
(Now with author Patreon and Ko-Fi pages.)
Cover art from a mark capture by SproutHooves.
And this is why Sprout doesn’t get any respect
What a loser....
Ugh, I almost forgot just how bad of a hypocrite this idiot is
Sprout needs therapy. Lots of therapy. Perhaps even a chat with his mother (who needs to confront the fact that she's the one who turned her own son into a highly offensive idiot). If he honestly believes fear is the way to live, that he's smarter than anypony else when he clearly knows nothing about anything, then he's not only a bigot, an idiot, and a hypocrite, then he really wouldn't be able to survive outside of Maretime Bay.
He almost had it.
Or worse, he knows he's a villain, in this case, and just doesn't give a damn.
Therapy. Lots of it.
was that a Paul LePage call out? >.>
Did he do the wind farm cancer thing, or just the 'they have motors on the windmills' level of malicious incompetence? really hated wind farms.
I hope Florida keeps him. pls. pls.
i can't help but feel bad for him, even though its his own fault. i'd love a sequel
"Bridlewood only lets convicted felons run for office,"
You know, that explains a lot of stuff and makes sense, too. I mean we know the politicians are crooks and liars, so put the ones too incompetent to get away with it into office where they can be watched carefully.
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A couple of sci-fi authors have suggested this Terry Pratchett? Frederick Pohl? I'm[ bad at remembering names. as a joke. That is, you were elected & they threw your ass in jail to save time.
We might be about to try it IRL
He's what Larry Linville described Frank Burns as being: someone who acts without reason, without true intelligence and without any awareness of what the consequence of his actions might be.
He's also the ultimate product of CanterLogic: a malfunctioning, poorly designed weapon created to fight a non-existent threat the wrong damn way. The only pony who'd find him amusing company would have to be a misanthropic jerk with strabismus because he's proof of what she thinks about ponies.
Silly Sprout. You've got the wrong post-G4 post-apocalypse.
It is interesting that Sprout assumes earth ponies are genetically recessive. I suppose a life of being taught to fear the Other means internalizing some degree of belief in one's own fragility.
Given the smoothie stand and her incomplete ascension, I suppose this makes Sunny Dame Mix-a-Lot.
Here but for the grace of Cheerilee goes Diamond Tiara.
Well, that's not fair. She has some degree of tact and and intellectual curiosity. And genuine love for her parent beyond the inheritance.
Ah, the joy of stopped clocks.
An entirely valid question. We certainly haven't seen any in G5. Really says something when the tenant species abandoned the ponies, or possibly vice versa. (Heck, going by who Canterlogic targeted, even most of the monsters left them alone, though that may have had to do with the absence of magic.)
So close. So close to genuine empathy and self-reflection. And then he decided to go constellation baiting. Oh, Sprout, you absolute imbecile.
Delightful bit of absurdity. Thank you for it.
11728416 There's a lot of irony in that because Larry Linville was a very nice guy and excellent actor who really made a difference in real life. He played a jerk so well that most people think he was that way off the camera too. (sort of the inverse of the typical Hollywood type who play heroic, noble characters on screen but are repulsive loathesome creatures when interacting with non-fans.)
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He'd originally balked at the role because up until then, he was most known for playing henchmen on Mission: Impossible. Then.....he realized that the public needed to be warned about someone he referred to as "every asshole I ever met" who seemed to be God-damn everywhere. Thus, the ruining of his career. Ah, well.....at least he wasn't as bad off as McLean Stevenson. It wasn't just Henry Blake's plane that went down in flames........
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He's why Turtledove overuses the phrase "this, that and the other thing never crossed X's mind."; there's a protective stupidity that keeps him from admitting that his whole life has been an utterly useless waste.
Oh god the more he talks the worse he gets!
Fantastic, never have you written a more punchable character Estee, my hat tips to you
Seriously they need to find his mother because she raised him and made him this way. I feel sorry for him because he doesn’t know any better but until he can realize that his mother was wrong and what she taught him was wrong he will always be this sort of pathetic. I wonder what Haven and her new beau would think of all of this?
On today's episode of Sprout Ruins Everything...
Jokes aside, is it weird that this freaked me out a little? I mean, this version of Sprout is basically a sociopath. A dimwitted sociopath, but think how much worse it could've been if ponies hadn't reunited.
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Haven and Alphabittle would probably just laugh their butts off.
Most fics I see about Sprout generally have him coming around and more or less reforming...or at least conceding that what he did had been a mistake on his part. Which is totally fine, but it's sort of refreshing to see a fic that outright bucks that trend and just keeps Sprout totally unapologetic and resolute about what he did (and doesn't understand why nobody else can see that, clearly).
Estee's portrayal of Sprout also stands out to me, because this almost feels like your typical Estee-brand Rainbow Dash fic, where Rainbow spends the fic holding the idiot ball and demonstrating rampant egomania. Except here, Sprout gets to hold two idiot balls, and the egomania has been replaced with megalomania. Makes for a somewhat surreally familiar but still uniquely enjoyable experience altogether.
Not nearly as much as you clearly think it should, Sprout. Especially when phrased like that.
Sounds like there's probably a whole other fic exploring that matter in more depth. I can just picture some poor sap of a pony trying to figure out how to get the different earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn styled networks to all cooperate with each other without shorting something out (at least) while all the while having to deal with other ponies constantly telling him they should switch to just their style of network because it was clearly the superior one, and so on.
The irony of Sprout ending up having a unicorn/pegasi fetish when he's trying to be the one who's anti-both of them.
Sprout, my man...you'd probably be happier in the long run with just giving in to that fetish...assuming, of course, you can actually get any willing unicorn/pegasi partners to go along with it. Kind of a critical point, that one.
We really surprised by that? Unity, if anything, just gave Posey more things to complain about than ever before, and she seems to be at her happiest when she has things to complain about, so...yeah, she's probably having the time of her life right now with all the new things for her to complain about.
Dang, Phyllis really must've been pulling a whole lot of strings then if she actually managed to keep this kid of hers from ending up in jail well before now.
No it wouldn't. It was telling how even Phyllis started to see pretty early on that Sprout was taking his brief "reign" much too far, despite being the one who had effectively set him up for it.
Still...first time in the fic so far where I can actually sympathize with Sprout at least a little. Being avoided even by your own mother has got to be rough, no matter how deserved one might argue it to be.
Good, because this is definitely going to go viral on the pony-internet due to how hilarious the footage will probably be.
...dang! Guess I wasn't the only one who'd gotten the idea of Sprout possibly crushing on Misty, but clearly I've been beaten to the punch on someone putting that idea into a fanfic (however brief). Guess that's what I get for not getting around to writing my own G5 fics sooner, eh?
Yeah, that sounds like Opaline all right.
In Opaline's defense though, it probably is still good advice--if you can avoid fighting an Ursa altogether, then by all means, do so! You'd probably be saving yourself a whole lot of trouble (and probably property damage too).
Incidentally, I did see a video on YouTube get suggested to me, like, just the other day with a title asking where all the cows (and other like cattle) had gone by the time of G5. Should've watched it when I had the chance, then.
At least the unicorns understand perfectly what politicians really are and decided to stop beating about the bush and just acknowledge it.
Oh for heaven's--!
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Honestly, and perhaps tragically, I'm not sure that'll make a difference, because Sprout would probably just conclude the "intruders" had gotten to her and brainwashed her or something and thus dismiss anything she might tell him and continue on his merry idiot way. He's that convinced he's right, after all.
Doctors Dunning and Krueger would have to make an entirely new category...
Actually, coming back to this because I had a little brainwave and now I need to spread it to others: if the cows are really MIA in G5 Equestria, then...where have the ponies been getting the milk?
Because they have milk--G5 have been clearly showing them making various foods that generally require (or at least usually greatly benefit from) milk or some other form of milk-based product in the recipe. I think actual milk even appears and is used in one of the TYT episodes.
So if they aren't getting that milk from the cows, then...where are they getting it?
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Probably the same magical place that G4 ponies got all their milk from when non-Yak cattle finally stopped existing, wherever the heck that is.
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Er... for someone who supposedly "ruined his career" playing an egocentric jerk, Larry Linville did quite a bit of TV and movie work after he left M*A*S*H...
McLean Stevenson pretty much torpedoed his own career when he left, though. (To his credit, he later admitted that it was a huge mistake on his part.)
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Could be almond milk, I suppose... G5 certainly has enough technological and industrial capability to manufacture it in quantity, assuming they can also farm almond trees in sufficiently large quantities to mass-produce it.
Or, given that Maretime Bay is more of an urban coastal-city environment, rather then G4 Ponyville's more rural setting, my guess would be that cows still exist, they're just "off-screen" on farms run by farmers at some distance from the city, so we just don't see them. (Or "cities", since Zephyr Heights is clearly an urban setting as well, and the top of a mountain isn't exactly dairy-farm country.)
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11731782
You have to remember that two lines above that question, the same speaker is credited as "the insane mare" by the narration itself. Her opinion on what does and does not exist is likely not representative of the general populace.
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True, but for the purposes of this fic, Sunny does just a few lines later admit that no one had seen cattle in centuries, so...in this particular case, the fic does support Izzy's opinion on the matter.
In terms of canonical G5 though, I suppose the cows are still around and just haven't appeared--they didn't exactly appear all that often in G4 either, so it's plausible. But one still can't help but wonder regardless.
The same thing had happened the last time she had climbed down the Aurora Borealis to give birth in the relative safety of the sub-Lunar sphere. Next time she had a cub, in a millennium or so, she'd pick another continent.
I can't decide if that is horrifying or actually brilliant.
An oddball ghost happened across your fic and read it. Have a review!
a initial -> an initial
Thank you for sharing, I needed those laughs.