Every new day in the Second Age Of Unity brings a fresh chance for discovery. And what Sunny's mostly been discovering is that when it comes to her half-alicorn state, she doesn't have a lot of control. Magic's return has been creating problems for everypony: she just gets to choose her issues from multiple categories.
Sunny specializes in having BIG ideas. 'Why don't we start a school for magic?' qualifies. And since Sunny's last BIG idea set off the Second Age --
-- Sunny gets the ideas. Everypony else has to deal with the fallout. And this time, Hitch has to shut her down.
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Cover art from a mark capture by Reafelice14.
Chapters (1)
For the record, Twilight started the school from a place of goodwill, not arrogance, and the other creatures, for all their faults, showed to be capable of learning friendship before the school was even founded. See Spike, the Hippogriffs/Sea Ponies, Buffalo, Post-Reformation Changlings, and Yaks as examples.
Then again, since this is set way way after FiM, Hitch probably has very few historical records on hand and those few are probably old enough to be damaged.
As for Sunny, yeah, she gets really big ideas and has one big ol' heart. But, she doesn't think about the consequences until her big deed is done and she really needs to listen more when someone tells "no and here is why" (yep, she's a Brony). She was right about Ponies needing to unite and be friends, because buck racism, and nopony could have known the consequences of restoring magic and tying it to an artifact of unknown function beforehand. But, the point still stands: actions have consequences, Sunny. Just... don't overthink them or you'll freeze up like Twilight did more than a few times.
Interesting ... so The Secret was so successful that it destroyed all of the earth ponies' cultural lore about what they could actually do. Well done, oh earth pony traditions and culture, you got exactly what you wanted.
And G5 is a right depressing world when you look at it ... all of the other races are missing, (bar one dragon), and it seems like even their names may have been forgotten.
I really like the relatively high-friction friendship that is depicted between the characters here. It feels so much more nuanced and fulfilling than anything in the G5 series. Tell Your Tale feels too short and hopped up on sugar to explore anything particularly deep or meaningful, and I can't bring myself to watch Make Your Mark because it looks too much like a cheap, direct-to-DVD kind of show.
Wow. Wasn't expecting Hitch to call out G4 like that.
Yeah, no kidding. Real life school labs are already risky enough even with a qualified teacher.
Had a classmate who once snuck around the lab mixing random stuff into a flask when the teacher wasn't looking. He was lucky it only frothed and got warm in his hand instead of exploding. Now just imagine that, but with magic and nopony in charge.
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That's the problem with oral traditions and not writing things down. If the story tellers are lost, the stories disappear with them.
This went in a completely different direction than I thought it would, but was still extremely entertaining. And I can see how your version of Rainbow could live on in Izzy and I love that idea.
Huh. I don't think I've ever seen Sunny ice skating. Mind you, sea ice doesn't make for the best rink...
Oh, you'd be surprised...
And Sprout might have passed out if he heard that, learning that The Enemy actually had the right idea.
Let's hope that, for the purposes of this world, that story wasn't true. Or has at least been grossly misunderstood in the intervening years.
The ultimate consequence of a secret kept too well.
No, that's just life. A school needs ponies who can teach. Though when I wrote that, I didn't think about the one qualified applicant.
And if you listened carefully, you could almost hear a voice from the Unity Crystals grumble about the targeted synthesis of fatigue poisons.
In the words of Parson Gotti, "We try things. Sometimes they even work."
Lovely tale of Sunny getting ahead of herself. That mare's going to rebuild the world whether it likes it or not, but her friends will need to keep her from completely destroying it in the process. Thank you for this.
Cozy: ah shiz, here we go again
Except its not gonna be me this time(because one im dead that timeline) so yeah
11732844
Technically she is not "dead" per say. She is just eternally encased in stone. However I know that will never be explored so she might as well be dead.
11732852
True
This was overall good, but dang, I really like the way Estee writes Izzy.
11732852 Actually, since the magic "went away" for several centuries, Cozy & company may well have been released from their prison -- they're still just as dead from simple time, though.
And the Changelings (who need magic even to eat) are all extinct too
Quick handwaving of Canon vs New Generation - A great deal of "Where did X go?" relates to licenses that the new team did not buy from the previous group. Hasbro has always been rather fumble-fingered with character ownerships. Remember only Applejack was retained from G1 because all the rest had been poached and not defended against enough. Disney will prosecute you into the grave and loot your pockets in the casket if you try to poach their IP, but Hasbro has been relatively 'soft' on the concept. G4 showed that well, because a whole giant pile of fanfictions and art was generated that they did not get 'a piece of the action' for, but they also sold a giant huge pile of plastic horses with combable manes for good cash, so much so that Transformers and MLP were about the only two net profitable sections of the whole company for years. The reverse-lawyer issue is also quite real. If for example G5 had a scroungy long-coated green earth pony who always wore a fedora and lived with the unicorns in Bridlewood in a traveling tutor position where everybody assumed he was one of them...
So any new cartoon projects are always as much 'clean sheet' as possible. They don't want to buy the rights for IP from other places, and they don't want sued once the project is rolling and some fractions of it appear to be lifted from others.
Sunny, you were standing on the edge of a cliff, talking to Izzy about flying. What did you think was going to happen?
Good Idea, Bad Idea
also this.
*suddenly can't help but think of Misty and becomes alarmed*
I mean that's probably not what happened...but there are still a few blank spots about her going from point A (Bridlewood) to point B (Opaline's place), so...
You really needed her to answer that question, Sunny? Was the answer not already self-evident by this point?
Interestingly, I've found Twilight's own model mirrors this more often than I think she'd ever care to admit.
Eh, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B...
Actually, in it's defense, I was always for the idea of the School of Friendship, because the intent behind that idea was always more to promote friendship than to specifically teach it, which I'm definitely all for, both in and out of universe. It's just that concept is a bit nebulous to convey clearly in the context of a kid's show, so...it ended up coming across only as teaching. Though again to the school's credit, though it always tried to keep it on brand, there are instances where it was fairly clearly teaching other subjects in its curriculum besides just "friendship."
And it arguably still did good for Equestria of the day, in that it did successfully help promote better unity with the other species of the world, so for MLP's purposes, you can't really say it didn't work...
Plus, we still got the Young 6 out of it, and as one who's a big fan of that lot of ragamuffins...
That one I will give Hitch without contest though. A school solely focused on teaching magic to solely unicorns when all of the other tribes (even though earth pony magic was much less clearly defined or demonstrated in G4) exhibited some form of magic capability, or the means of utilizing magic through other means besides their own natural abilities (potions, artifacts, etc), or at the very least still had to interact in a world that utilized a lot of magic that would be helpful to understand why and how regardless of the student's own capabilities in the field...was rather elitist.
But it was also Canterlot, where "elitism" was it's informal middle name.
Again, debatable, because while G4 never really visibly demonstrated said magic clearly, it did still allude to it existing and the ponies being aware it existed. So it wasn't so much earth pony magic wasn't there, it just didn't seem to manifest in as...dramatic...a fashion as it has in G5.
And I admittedly kinda liked G4's (albeit vague) approach to it better, because it's take to it wasn't so...one note.
Pfft, well that's going to happen regardless of whether or not there's a school, Hitch, so I don't exactly see where you're going with that.
And she's right! Well, sort of. I'll throw Hitch a bone in that Sunny's idea for the school is still admittedly half-baked, but then that's part of why she came to him in the first place, for assistance in trying to iron out the details. But the more Hitch goes on about trying to argue against it, the more I'm convinced Sunny's still got the right idea, because a school would help educate ponies against doing some of this stuff and why, and statistically speaking, educating the public about it has always been the best way to get them to do less of something you didn't want them doing in the first place, whether for their own safety or for yours.
Exactly how that should be taught, what should be taught, and why it should be taught, all still needs more refining than what Sunny currently has, but otherwise Sunny is right. A school for magic is still the right idea. Unless Hitch wants to keep dealing with nonsense such as what he's listing for the rest of his career.
But...that's what she's trying to do here! I get Hitch's concerns, and he does raise a few good points--again, Sunny's idea for a school is very half-baked and lacks a base curriculum to teach in the first place and he's right to point that out at least--but he's also only thinking in the short term. Yes, the initial steps of this would be rough...but it'll be rough without it too. It's going to be rough no matter what you do. But what you've currently got is mad inefficient, and Hitch knows that just as well as Sunny. So a school, even if it's just to teach ponies what not to do, or at least how to better conduct their "experiments" safely, would only help make things more efficient and would help smooth over some of that roughness over time.
I mean, Hitch's long list of examples of stupid things ponies are doing in their "experiments" has the upside of having already given them a list of things they can teach ponies not to do...albeit because somepony was dumb enough to try it and learn the hard way...but it's still something to start with, and I say might as well get the ball rolling on that now, start getting these basics spread to the general public, and keep adding on as new things come up. The rest will come naturally as needed.
So rather than trying to shut Sunny down on this idea entirely, he really should be helping her figure out a better way to make the school work than her current half-baked concept of it, so it can genuinely teach some form of protocol for all of this they clearly--desperately--need. To do otherwise is, yeah I'm going to come out and say it, negligent of Hitch.
Again, he still raises a lot of good points that still need to be considered (admittedly, the point about who the teacher should be can't be stressed enough), and he's right in that Sunny was not considering any of them in her excitement, but his whole argument feels more "better to just never take the risk," whereas Sunny's (and I guess mine at this point) is more "the risk will never go away until we at least try." And better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.
But then I think Estee's point isn't so much to take sides in this matter, but rather point out that the matter is oh so much more complicated than it might look at a glance, and that's important. And on that, the fic succeeds.
He does consequences......but he doesn't do anything else. That's as dangerous as not doing them at all.
user@unicorn ~ #man grep
11733413
just an small argument, but it does seems that you kinda fixated on sunny point, because like on the story itself it shows that hitch it isnt against the school, he is against the half-baked idea of an school, and to be fair with him, a school isnt the place to run tests, like sure you can run some small things, and might even go a bit bigger, but if you want to actually reasearch about it, you need an research facility, and he points out that sunny idea isnt an bad one, but an unrestricted research on the middle of an city if something goes bad, then it wouldnt be only the people in the school who would be affected, but all of the people around it too. Like he is trying to show sunny that there is some things that you cant just rush to it, even if she has the right idea
11733626
My issue with Hitch's approach to the problem isn't so much him pointing out that Sunny's idea is half-baked, because it is, it's the fact that he then proceeds to do essentially nothing to help her fix that, except to shed so much negativity on the idea, he's basically shutting it down before it can even begin. He really comes across as he just doesn't want to do the idea at all, in fear of the risks. And it just doesn't strike me as very proactive or helpful for the either of them.
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which the story shows why he cant? like we can see on the story by sunny narration that hitch is barely fuctioning on the moment, dude is trying to be a parent and at the same time being the sole law enforcer on the entire city, and as it said by him, he sometimes is called for things that doesnt even fall on his jurisdiction, adding even more on his workload, and then sunny comes to him with only an idea and expect him to help her figure it how to implant it, and letting him deal with the important bits
11733897
That's just it though--Sunny's idea, if properly implemented, would help resolve a lot of those issues Hitch has piling up on him. And...why wouldn't he want that? Besides, Sunny wasn't really asking of him all that much, just some added input on how it should be done to make it work most effectively and advice on where to find a location so to set up shop--it's heavily implied Sunny was willing and expecting to handle most everything else of running the thing after that.
And in the end, I don't entirely agree with Hitch's assessment of the idea. He voices very valid concerns, to be sure, and the "school" probably need to start out more as "informational seminar" initially until they learned some more things about how...everything...needed to work, at which point they could start expanding things from there, but it could still work with the proper plan and the proper management, and it would still help cut back on the problems in the end, which was why Sunny even had the idea in the first place.
oh, in one of Estee's earlier stores, "anchor foal", it said that for a unicorn to levitate herself requires making her magic flow BACKWARDS through her horn.
also, the title reminded me of a quote in an old book, i'll paraphrase:
"the right way, the wrong way, and the Sunny way."