/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>>294025 →
Velvet's "Heal the slavers, and the enslaved" moment would have been less stupid if the slavers put a potentially-lethal shock collar on her neck (the kind that automatically tazes runaways who get too far away from the masters' remote) and forced her to heal/sing/dance. Just imagine her trying to sing a cheery little song about love while on a stripper's stage, as a bunch of evil meanie-pants poopie-head ponies yell lewd shit at her. The baddies could possibly even projectile-nut onto her stage, because the author's a weirdo who loves his bodily fluid-soaked beds/bedsheets. LP's attempt to violently save her from this life and practically kidnap her would more sense after that, if Velvet visibly hated working here.

>LP had no direct reason for getting involved
author should have bugfixed that by giving Derpy a kid, making the Old Appleoosans take the kid, and making Derpy beg LP "Please save my kid! While eliminating the town's military advantage over us so they can never enslave us again and couldn't take vengeance on us if they wanted to."

>ow oof ouch my bones- i mean blood, being whined at by Velvet hurts sooooo much
This is stupid, why is LP still acting like a smitten fangirl desperate for Velvet-Sempai's approval? Velvet's newfag moments on the train "And her choice to heal slavers" should have killed LP's crush on her and forced her to see this doc in a more realistic light.

>revenge
Can it truly be called revenge if you're killing one baddie because they're responsible for an ex-baddie who tried to kill you turning out the way she did?
Silver Belle might justifiably want vengeance, if she was here to get mad about shit relevant to her character and backstory, but she's no longer a main character. She isn't with them. This Tiny Tina wannabe got on a bus that traveled offstage straight to irrelevance town. She's out of this game, just like a Heartless Qwark and Nobody Qwark. Even though the story's acting like Silver Belle is still relevant, she isn't here! The heroes are getting offended on Silver Belle's behalf!
The story's going to treat LP like she's morally right and entirely justified in this scene. The story's going to treat her like she's right, but LP is accepting an "Assassination request" without any direct pay given by a paid assassin of dubious morality/loyalty. LP should bring up a better reason like "That baddie I want to kill is clearly bad for the environment and if we don't put a stop to this villainy soon this area of the world will only get worse as a result of his greed and sin!".
If this scene's supposed to make LP look "Noble" for accepting a hitman job without pay, it should be bugfixed so the Griffon offers LP a cash prize, half up front and half when the deed's done, and LP says "I don't want your money! I'm no assassin. I'm an adventurer, and the hero of my own story! I'm killing that baddie because I want to! His wicked deems have harmed innocent lives for far too long!"

>>294032

Anyway, it looks like the matter is settled for now. Littlepoop has already made up her mind anyway, and plans to go ahead with the "contract" regardless of what her friends have to say about it, and Calamity's mild objections seem to have been almost immediately placated by Littlepoop's assurances that bad pony is bad, so murder, which is normally bad, is now good.
[YouTube] Bad meaning good #jazzyjeff #rundmc [Embed]
sorry, I went through a wigger phase in high school so I know rap references

>Calamity nodded to me. “Ah’m in.” He glanced at my horn meaningfully. “How’s yer TK?”
I'm assuming that "TK" means telekinesis, as Littlepoop's Titty Klamps appear to still be functioning.

>“Rest did wonders. I won’t be juggling train cars,” I admitted, “But I think I can manage barrels. How’s your wing?”
Ah, nice. The minor handicaps that LP's tiredness and Calamity's wing injury posed won't be a factor anymore; we can assume they will be kicking ass and chewing bubble gum at full strength now. Everyone charge up your murder-boners, I suspect this next fight is going to get messy.

>Velvet Remedy’s eyes jumped between the two of us over and over. With a touch of desperation in her voice, she tried, “Are you planning on finding out which raiders were involved and killing them too? Or are you just going to lay waste to the whole of Shattered Hoof?”
>“They‘re raiders,” Calamity said evenly, stretching his wing. “Honestly, Ah been wonderin’ just why we’re helpin’ them out at all. Ah figure, let ‘em and the slavers duke it out. Stomp down what’s left.”
Wait, which raiders are they helping? Which slavers are said raiders fighting? Once again, I find I'm almost as confused about alliances in this story as its author is about his gender. Is the implication that Gawd and her party are raiders? I thought they were mercenaries. Or are mercenaries a kind of raider? The ambiguous terminology in this world is apt to drive a man insane.

>I had another idea. “Actually, not everypony here is bad.” I was thinking of the rock-breaker I had talked with while he escorted me out. “I think... I believe this place could be turned around. Maybe become a trading town instead of a raider fortress.”
Wait, isn't it already a trading town? Or wait, no; it's like a rock-breaking factory or some shit. But wait, it's also a fortress. Are Deadeyes and his crew supposed to be raiders? I thought they were rock-breakers, but also soldiers working for Red-Eye. Or is it Topaz? Jesus Fucking Christ, this shit is getting ridiculous.

Anyway, it seems like Littlepoop's grand ambition here is to have Gawd take over Shattered Hoof, which she hinted at earlier:

>Even as the words came out, I knew they were stupidly idealistic. But I pressed on. “I’m thinking: kill Deadeyes. Find Mister Topaz and deal with him -- amiably if possible, lethally if not. And leave Gawd in charge.”
I guess this kind of makes sense. But have we had any indication that Gawd would be interested or capable of managing a rock breaking plant? Or is that even what she's planning on using it for? If I had to hazard a guess, here is what I suspect LP's idea is:

Their crew goes in guns-blazing and murders Deadeyes, pew pew pew. Once Bad Pony™ is dead, along with whatever other Bad Ponies™ are in there, the remaining Good Ponies™ will form the backbone of a new Shattered Hoof, which will probably be in the same business as the old Shattered Hoof (rock breaking I guess), except it will be Good™ now. Gawd, who despite being a killer for hire (which is Bad™ according to Velvet and possibly Calamity) is actually Good™ because reasons, and so Littlepoop will have no moral qualms about leaving her in charge, even though nothing that Gawd has said or done thus far would indicate that she has any interest in running a large-scale industrial rock breaking operation, nor that she would know how to run such an operation, nor that she would run said operation in a Good™ manner should she be given the opportunity to do so.

Presumably the idea here is that the new Good™ management will eliminate the Bad™ practices of the previous management, so instead of raping and killing the farmers who harvest rocks for them, they will simply buy their rocks at an equitable price, and will probably not rape or kill them with any more frequency than local customs permit. Well, I'll hand it to Littlepoop: as far as hare-brained Littlepoop schemes go, this is one of the more practical ones we've seen.

Anyway, there's a page break here. When the next scene resumes, Littlepoop is walking back to Shattered Hoof by herself, stroking her guns and thinking about all of the Morally Justified™ murderous murder she's about to commit.

>Deadeyes had told me to come back for one more job. Feeling the comforting weight of Little Macintosh in my saddlebags, my sniper rifle and assault carbine now returned to my back and side, I suspected this wasn’t the job he had in mind. But his invitation was the perfect opportunity.
Oh, Littlepoop, you're such an uppity know-it-all cunt. How can you be sure that when Deadeyes told you to come back for another job, he wasn't planning to have you murder him? No, that's actually a serious question; this story is nonsensical enough that I honestly wouldn't be surprised it that were an actual plot twist that kkat had in mind.

>I had explained that I planned to take the long way, explore some of the wings of Shattered Hoof that I hadn’t seen yet. Including how to get down to the mine below. Seeing the yard in daylight for the first time, Calamity had immediately spotted the metal plates of a hydraulic cargo lift, but the controls were damaged beyond repair. If it worked at all, it would only be from within the mine itself. There had to be another way. Somewhere, there was a door that went beneath the prison itself, and I wanted to know where it was.
So wait, she has free rein to just wander around this place at will now? That's just...oh, whatever; I don't even care anymore.

>>294057
>I believe this place could be turned around
This should be Gawd's motivation, not "Muh contract but also fuck that guy"
If Gawd went on a big motive-explaining rant where everything here is set in stone, the pacing would be improved and the confusion would be cleared up. The author shouldn't rely on Littlepoop's sometimes-right sometimes-wrong assumptions and unwillingness to ask follow-up questions as a crutch to "keep the audience guessing".
>Gawd: "Being one of many PMC armies in a crime-ridden shithole society full of dumb thugs ruling fearful peasants sucks. I want to be paid the big bucks to defend a prosperous nation-state! I want to conquer this Wasteland with Red-Eye's help! He thinks he's manipulating me, but I am manipulating him. Red-Eye wants us to manage this rock-breaking penal labour prison, to train obedience into slavers. But taking over this rock-breaking penal labour prison and turning it back into a gem mine will let me manufacture sick magical guns to arm my privately-owned army better! We'll take all the protection gigs in the land, defending towns and caravans alike, starving our rival PMCs and forcing them to war with us. Then we'll kill them with the help of Red-Eye's shitty army full of drafted slavers and ex-raider cunts. They're low-skill and poorly-equipped, but we're high-skill and equipped with great gear! Soon, we'll have a monopoly on violence as Red-Eye's only choice for a powerful standing army, even though we could dethrone him at any moment! And we will effectively have all the power we need to keep Red-Eye's authoritarian tendencies in check! Mwahahahahaha! I'm the hero of my own story, bitch!"

>>294063
>train obedience into slavers
*train obedience into slaves

Gawd's flimsy characterisation is probably the biggest problem with this whole arc, for reasons which will become particularly apparent later. Granted, flimsy characterisation is a well-established hallmark of this story by now, but the plan that Pip's developing here hinges heavily on Gawd being trustworthy and, at the very least, less of a heinous shit than Deadeyes and Topaz. Bearing in mind that Gawd has explicitly pointed out that her loyalty is solely reserved for her contract, and that the Talon Company as presented in Fallout is an utterly amoral mercenary company even by the standards of the wasteland, we're lacking in tangible reasons to get behind her.

Pip's plan to replace Deadeyes with Gawd is at least nominally solid, provided that we assume a grizzled mercenary with no personal loyalties would make a better leader than a slaver/raider/bandit/whothefuckevenknows with flexible ones. But considering that this is ultimately setting up Gawd to become President of Equestria in the supposedly happy ending, we desperately need more reasons to trust or AT LEAST like her.

Pic unrelated.

>>294117
"The Hitman with a heart" cliche is a really old cliche, and it's hard to believe the author's fucking it up so badly.

You know that thing where the Hitman's got some moral limits like "I might willingly work for baddies, but I refuse to kill innocents/children/innocent children"?
That.

Fallout Equestria, so far, has been a comically black and white world.
Raiders smear poop on their walls and make gruesome spectacles of random bodies within their own homes and piss and nut onto their own beds before sleeping within them. Slavers abuse their slaves even though this would logically make their slaves worth less money. And heroes can do literally anything as long as they slaughter enough baddies, because genociding raider ghettoes reduces the number of rapists and mass murderers in the world faster than they can use rape to spawn more stupidly-named ugly raider bastards with shattered skulls and ring targets and bloody knives for cutie marks.
Baddies do stupidly disgusting/evil things that directly reduce the quality of their lives and their chances of survival because they just don't give a shit about anything except pissing off the heroes before their inevitable deaths.
The baddies are so stupid and evil, even a complete novice like Littlepip is able to channel some cheesy Young Adult fiction protagonist by berating a Raider for being inefficient and not thinking anything through.
It's a bizarrely literal interpretation of how you literally gain more Positive Karma Points from killing one raider than you gain from giving one free water bottle to a perpetually-thirsty hobo outside Megaton. If the author sees any problem with the Set Designers of F3 dropping random gore decorations outside Raider homes AND EVEN INSIDE Raider homes, he thinks it'll be enough to copy it completely and then write a disgusted pony calling this a bad habit that makes no sense.

But this "Gawd" character...
What the flying fuck are we supposed to think about Gawd? hehehehe geddit? geddit? it's because griffons fly. hey lois! lois! lois, I made a funny! ehehehehe
The author might think he's "clever" for taking The Talons from Fallout 3, an entirely-unexplained type of baddies you can randomly encounter sometimes, and giving them a leader with one character trait (muh contracts) but he's not clever. A bad explanation is worse than no explanation. A bad attempt to flesh out a bad idea still isn't good when it would be so easy to take the blank cheque that is the Talons and write something that makes sense onto it.

If there has ever been a place for the "Noble Demon" cliche, this is it.
You know, that thing where a villain is bad or on the side of baddies but not outright evil.
He's honourable, or he's got some moral restraints. He's concerned with bystander casualties. He'll tell you to "Fuck off and heal yourselves and fight me at full strength" when you're tired instead of killing you for the easy win.
If this baddie and the hero have to team up, this baddie won't backstab the hero at the end of it like a meaner villain would. If he's got meaner thugs working for him, he'll tell them to behave.
Where other villains would do petty evil shit for no reason, he wouldn't. Maybe it's because he's pragmatic and doesn't believe in killing or torturing underlings for fucking up, or maybe it's because he's a good person deep down. If you're honourable, he'll comment on it instead of calling you a stupid-ass pussy.
Maybe this "Noble Demon" is an underling of a 100% evil big bad evil guy. Maybe he is the big bad evil guy, or one of the many baddies. Maybe he's got good goals and bad methods, or an evil goal and nice methods, but the end result is a villain that you could realistically see a hero turn to the side of good. Or at the very least, understand why a hero would be sad after killing this baddie. Maybe if he seemingly wins for a while, he'll even mourn the hero.
You know, less the "Dr Eggman" and "Lex Luthor" type and more the "Senator Armstrong" and "Magneto" type.

My biggest problem with Gawd is that so much focus has been put on Muh Contract. As if work ethic is ethics in general.
If Gawd was given a contract to slaughter every mare, stallion, and foal in New Appleoosa would she do it?
If the answer is no Gawd should have revealed that by now.

>>294143
>My biggest problem with Gawd is that so much focus has been put on Muh Contract. As if work ethic is ethics in general.
>If Gawd was given a contract to slaughter every mare, stallion, and foal in New Appleoosa would she do it?
>If the answer is no Gawd should have revealed that by now.

This is precisely the problem. Up to now Kkat's leaned heavily on presupposing that the reader is intimately familiar with Fallout in general and Fallout 3 in particular. In that game, the Talons' indiscriminate killings of women and children for pay is precisely what they're infamous for. With that in mind, it's expectation we can reasonably have of Gawd too. We also know that at least some of the Talons are working for Red Eye, who appears to be a Pretty Bad Dude.

Kkat probably imagines that having Gawd NOT be an ice-hearted puppy-kicker is therefore some kind of clever twist - and without any of the effort necessary in actually giving her a history, personality, long term goal or motive himself. Convenient.

Hell, I almost forgot. The Fo3 Talons' full banner is literally a skull-headed vulture preying on a crying baby. Might as well throw a swastika on there for good measure.

>>294144
Aye.
It would be one thing for a pony romance fanfic to rely on our existing knowledge of Rainbow Dash when she suddenly shows up halfway through a Pinkie and Twilight romance story. But this is a Pony fanfic that arbitrarily forces random Fallout elements to be born within ponyland to give the illusion that this is a crossover.
They've usually been about as "Ponified" as Germany would be if you copypasted our world's germany into ponyland and gave it a pony name like Germaney.
The Eyebots are renamed Spritebots but they're still floating balls with a laser and radio. And when evil Diamond Dogs show up, they're still evil Diamond Dogs but with a new Fallout-ish name and laser miniguns from Fallout 3.
But this right here...
The Talons were nothing when it comes to their writing/motivation/backstory/gimmicks. Team Aqua wanted to expand the ocean and Team Magma wanted to expand the landmass in Pokemon RSE, but The Talons in F3 AND in F4 are just there to shoot at you on sight while looking different from the Raiders(TM) and Slavers(TM) and Bandits(TM) and Orange Orc Super Mutants(TM) who already shoot at you on sight.
The author isn't just relying on your familiarity with external media unconnected to MLP. He's relying on everyone who reads this to say "Well, this take on The Talons is better than nothing!". But you'd only know the Talons were absolutely fucking nothing but some moving targets to shoot at if you played Fallout 3.
He's relying on you to dislike something from Fallout 3 so much that you'll think his gang of "Muh contract!!1!" faggots is superior by default, even though he normally relies on you to love Fallout 3 so much that you'll happily read it again but very slightly ponified, insofar as a texture/name-changer mod and a gameplay upgrade to give the protag sometimes-overpowered sometimes-unuseable Telekinesis counts as ponification.

Speaking of magic, we still have absolutely no idea what the limits of LP's magic are beyond vague "Tired=barely any TK" handwaves.
I think if magic was split into named spells with limited numbers of uses per day like in DND and Goblin Slayer, it would improve the story.
Because when LP floats over landmines, instead of thinking "Why would Wastelander ponies even invent or use landmines in a world where at least two thirds of the population can make them irrelevant and unicorns could toss your own mines at you or disable them and loot them?" we'd think "Oh geez, Littlepip just used Telekinesis to float over landmines! She can only use magic twice more today, and after that she's FUCKED!"

And speaking of romance, I thought of this when we were reading that knight and Celestia story but forgot to ask.
Why does it seem most romance writers would rather write anything other than romance?
After character A and B get to know each other and seem to like each other, circumstances and the universe conspire to keep them apart pr give them some stupid misunderstanding so the writer can write a load of "One character longing for another while something else happens" scenes and won't have to write as many "Two characters growing closer together and existing together" scenes. What's up with that? Instead of giving you a romance and letting you watch it develop and possibly face realistic challenges, it gives you two characters and tries to make you want them together so it can cocktease you over it until the finale, where "And then they finally got together" is treated like a happy ending rather than a new beginning.

>>294146
Man had a huge rant I was about to post with my gripes with the community when it comes to the abilities of all 3 races but to cut it short I agree authors for the show or fanfics should decide on the capacity for unicorns. Seen so many where they just write unicorns as these demigod magi who can do nearly anything they want with just a simple thought which kind of kills any tension or makes situations seem improbable.

If LittlePip is a weak magic user and midget but can still lift box cars effortlessly then we'd have to assume most unicorns are Dr. Manehattan level casters who can simply bend the laws of reality to suit any if their whims.

Another minor thing that bothered me to was how LittlePip and Calamity snuck into Shattered Hoof. She levitated a mattress infront of them but even back in season 1 unicorns when levitating an object had a slight glowing shimmer and glitter effect around the object and after had a very distinct shimmer effect around it. It's pretty much the 1 weakness he could have made for LittlePip's magic but she doesn't even have that holding her back. They should have been able to see the glowing glittering mattress and since unicorns are somewhat common they should be able to tell that the floating mattress is likely being manipulated by a unicorn somewhere.

>>294185
To avoid that "OP Magic" problem, where do you think the average Unicorn, and the super-special protagonist unicorns like Twilight and LP, should fall on this tiering system? https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/Tiering_System

>>294237
Come to think of it, limiting Unicorn magic to "Can only lift up to 120 pounds for 10 seconds before exhaustion sets in, can only make magic shields about as tough as a brick wall, and being able to destroy a small cottage with a single explosion spell puts you in the top percentile" still wouldn't change how useful magic can be.
What can one party member contribute to a Wasteland Adventurer party? Are you a medic, a sniper, a tough soldier with more experience than most? Fuck you, the Unicorn nerd here has 50% of his head filled with worthless anime trivia and the other 50% filled with spells to solve the unsolvable.
Low on food? He can convert rocks into burgers.
Low on water? He can conjure water, or purify water wherever he sees it.
Low on medicine? Who needs some chemicals or bed rest or herbs when one spell can heal you in seconds?
Low on ammo? Transmute the raw materials you find in scavenged trash into bullets and high quality guns.
Low on cash? Just fix all the broken crap in a town for pay!
Found a locked box you can't open because the thief is out of bobby pins? The wizard just transmutes the box open.
Threatened by an enemy? Just hide behind a wall while you psychically float your gun and fire it at foes without ever moving out of cover, using your Pip-Buck Compass to tell where the enemies are!
The author's solution for this was to "Limit" LP by making her unable to cast any real spell besides telekinesis. And then because he feels entitled to write a strong character even though this ruins the "underdog in a desperate world" tone, he made LP's telekinesis strong enough to lift fucking boxcars.
Is there some kind of disorder that causes "I must make all my characters strong, or people will think they're lame" syndrome?

>>294243

Magic's a tough thing to 'balance' (remember that this is a story based partly on a game, but not actually a game). What's important is establishing consistent rules for the setting early on, so that there's a reasonable expectation in the reader's mind for what the characters can do. Kkat doesn't do this, probably because he's basing magic on how it appears to work in S1, where unicorns simply learn a handful of spells related directly to their special talent and Twilight's an anomaly because her talent IS magic. This is speculation on my part of course, since Kkat hasn't taken the time to explain within the context of the story.

Presumably, since no other character seems to show the same level of lifting power, Littlepip is supposed to be a sort of telekinetic savant. Unlike Twilight whose range of spellcasting is unusually broad, Pip's magic appears to be focused entirely into her basic TK spell. Or, to put it another way, she has the unicorn equivalent of tard strength. Detracts from the whole "generic newcomer underdog" thing, but that died almost immediately after she left the stable.

>>294250
Limiting magic exclusively to Cutie Marks is a common solution to keep Unicorns interesting yet specialized taken by most fanfics. So a unicorn with sweets for a cutie mark could do something taxing like make an entire house out of candy, or do something complex like shoot a beam that turns you into candy on contact while still keeping you alive and conscious, but she would be unable to do something simple with magic like fix one leg of a broken wooden chair because her mark has nothing to do with wood. This means multiple Unicorns in the party can still contribute different magical things.
Kkunt probably thought he was being clever when he gave Littlepip a Pip-Buck for a cutie mark, since he spent so long trying to snark about it, and tried to snark about Diamond Tiara's mark too. But who the fuck needs a natural talent in operating what's basically a glorified smartphone with an aimbot app?
I'd call it simpler to use than a smartphone since its main functions are accessed through big, clearly-labelled red buttons.
It keeps track of what items you carry, keeps track of your "karma level" and relationships with various factions, it has maps and a radio, it can generate a map around you using echolocation or let you view a top-down satellite map of the area, it can let you check your physical and mental capabilities and the condition of your limbs, it can show you a list of all the effects upon you(like buffs from drugs and clothing), and it's got an auto-aim auto-firing mode that...
Well in this fic it turns you into an aiming god, but in the actual Fallout games every shot in VATS is RNG-based. If you have low Guns skills, you'll have a low chance to fire at anything more than a few feet from you.
And then the fucking author Kkunt goes ahead and says LP can queue up telekinetic attacks and other spells in VATS!
Who needs a "natural talent" for using a marketable plushie of a stupid-looking device that's desperately trying to make videogame menu elements look "In-universe"?
When it comes to Cutie Marks, it makes sense that a few wrapped sweets can represent making sweets and a watch can represent fixing watches and a campfire can represent camping and a spanner can represent fixing things in general since you fix things with a spanner, but a Pip-Buck is a pip-buck. If he's trying to say LP's talent is repairing tech, why does that skill rarely if ever come up compared to her far-more-used Lockpicking and Sneak and Small Guns skills? She has no justification for having those skills! It's not like she, as a child, got good at sneaking around her family's Stable Room to avoid waking her single alcoholic mother. It's not like she signed up for Stable Security Service because she wanted to be an official Stable Guard and fire guns and wear armour and hopefully help people, only to flunk out of basic training for being short and small despite the handiness with a gun she earned after thousands of hours at the gun range.
Is he trying to use the VATS Cutie Mark to justify why she's a natural at scoring auto-aim killshots in VATS/SATS?
That's fucking stupid! He had an opportunity to give her a Cutie Mark that makes sense for her character and could justify making her an underdog with one gimmick that stops her from being completely useless, but he chose to give her a mark exclusively restricted to the use of one specific piece of highly user-friendly technology with over 10 incredibly different uses.

Having a Cutie Mark of a Pip-Buck isn't like "Having a Cutie Mark of a Cutie Mark". It's like having a Cutie Mark for turning on and operating your Coca-Cola(TM)-brand combination Apple Smart Watch, old-timey radio, and Meta Runner TAS arm that turns you into a godly shooter for a few seconds at a time.

I wish this fucking author would spend less time trying to sound smart with all this "Hurr durr, isn't it silly that the Raiders in Fallout decorate their homes with gore? Isn't it fucking silly that the guards can't notice you if you telekinetically hide yourself with psychically lifted physics objects? Isn't Diamond Tiara a silly character with a silly Cutie Mark?" bullshit

It reminds me of Assman's pseudointellectual musings on human nature, and the modern sexual marketplace, and relationships with women
Except at least that faggot tried to do something about these things and do something with these ideas when writing his shitty pony fanfic! Even if it was just putting all of humanity inside their own Matrix-inspired cum pods where they can be duped into thinking they're cumming inside Rainbow Dash or their own custom-made meek and adorable bullied-to-perfection waifu forever so nobody ever has to deal with a stupid selfish spiteful shitty human whore-woman again.
Assman fucking TRIED to write scenes where the copy of a human and his custom-made waifu NPC speculate together on whether simulated events such as things that happened six years ago to a character literally invented yesterday happened. And, in the process, speculate on whether any of this fake-ponyland shit is truly "happening".
It's disappointing that those two characters came to the "Fuck it, if it feels real and evidence of it seems to exist then it must be real" conclusion, but Assman still tried harder than Kkunt ever did.
Still, fuck anyone who thinks putting your brain inside a jar is transhumanist. Transhumanist chads want sick laser-arms and robo-legs and multiple downside-free ways to cheat death. But MatrixFags like Assman? You aren't transcending your human limitations or impulses, you're succumbing to your primitive lust for safety and easy unearned dopamine by locking away your brain inside a cum jar matrix machine where you play videogames and get blowjobs from your imaginary waifu all day. Or worse, taking a photograph of your brain and then committing toaster bathtub as a computer tosses your brain in the trash where it belongs and gives simulated buttsex to an AI imitation of you vaguely inspired by that brain photograph

>>294252
Pip playing up her pip-boy cutie mark as uninteresting and meaningless is simply bizarre, considering that it essentially means that her destiny is to be an FPS/RPG protagonist with all the powers and narrative privilege that implies.

>>294255
I know why the author gave the audience his "My OC's not a SUUUUUE, I swear!" lecture. It's because he's a faggot.

You know what?!
You can tell the term "Mary Sue" was invented by a woman, because it's as fucking worthless as the whore responsible for burdening all of fiction with it!
A Trekkie's Tale is a joke of a story intentionally made out of every cliche one stupid boomer woman got sick of seeing in stupid boomer fanfictions sent in to stupid Star Trek fan-magazines. A stupid author wrote this while screaming "STOP WRITING THIS!", but because she's a fucking failure, the lesson everyone took away from this was "Don't make your protagonist like this chick".
This boringly-perfect yet mopey chick who dies in the end and gets Kirk and Spock to want her sexually and has the same unusual half-alien heritage of one canon char and has the middle names of assorted later-series canon chars and MORE MORE MORE!
But not all sues look like mary sue, talk like mary sue, or act like mary sue.
Not all bad characters are sues, and whether a character has "too many" sue traits or not is subjective.
Not all boringly perfect characters die tragically in the end "to explain their absence from later canon material". Some can't die!
Not all bad OCs written by trashy writers desperate for your sympathy make their heroines overpowered! Some are underpowered and constantly-rescued!
Discussions on whether a character fits someone's personal definition of a Sue or not are usually wastes of time unless the character is so blatantly awful (Rey from Star Wars) that she literally is every Star Wars fanfiction cliche out there.
Is a character boringly perfect and bland? Call her boringly perfect and bland and ask yourself what traits could make her more exciting!
Is a character boringly strong? Call her boringly strong, and ask yourself what about the strength makes her boring! Is it dull because the author never sics anyone stronger than the OC on her, or boring because nothing creative is ever done during her fights, or boring because there is never any tension or threat?
Does it strain the suspension of disbelief that an OC can get away with breaking rules right in front of a rules-obsessed superior officer, get away with directly insulting an easily-angered character without a single punch being thrown, get away with wearing whore clothing like fishnet stockings in a military setting, and get away with attempting countless daring death-defying stunts she should logically lack the ability to pull off? Then fucking say so instead of trying to construct a new "type of Sue" just so you don't have to explain why you hate the character in ordinary words anyone can understand!

This author is DISHONEST.

And that's what REALLY pisses people off about sues, deep down.

It pisses people off when you tell them this perfectly-ordinary chick is a helpless underdog, and then write a story where she effortlessly defeats everyone. It pisses people off when you lecture the audience about how "Plain" the heroine's face is, and then write the ultimate chad billionaire falling in love with her because of her plain-ass face. It's annoying to be lied to and told this goddess is "just like you", because you know some dumb fucking woman in the audience actually sees herself as the bitch from The Hungry Divergent's Twilight featuring Angelina Jolie as the self-insert whore and Chris Hotmann as Bruce Wayne.

Come to think of it, that "protagonist cutie mark" is a terrible idea but it could be salvaged.
Imagine if Littlepip was a bored adrenaline-junkie bookworm obsessed with stories of heroism but deeply in over her head.
Imagine if she said things like "My dream is to save this world! If I die trying... then I die! Giving up on my dreams would truly make my soul die!" instead of pretentious emo poetry like "If this evil world will gobble me up then I will float myself down a stream and make it choke on me! I am the lightbringer because I say so!"
It'd be an interesting character trait if she often said "I must be the hero, because my Cutie Mark is a hero's weapon of war! Pre-war heroes used these to destroy many evil zebras!"
She could be propagandized into a patriot for a fantasy version of Equestria that never existed. Or a bookworm who truly adores the old Equestria she only knows from big hardback books and old newspapers.
Learning more about pre-war Equestria could shatter her worldview if she was raised to think Equestria never did anything wrong but then it turns out they did and caused the apocalypse.
It could be fun. She could be the type of RPG player who picks wacky dialogue options just to see how her friends react, even when something more tactful would work better. The world could shit on her constantly for trying to do the right thing. And the story could constantly shit on her for treating this like an adventure novel when it's really a tragedy now.

>>294257
Nigel, we talked about this.
Thesis statements, not essays.
You need to separate your emotions and hate-boners. When you dont, you write unreadable trash like above.

>>294257
>This author is DISHONEST
Are you speaking of Kkat, or are you speaking of your unbalanced hatred for Sue's as evidenced by yet another unwelcome diatribe, ostensibly to exhaustively (that's the one thing it is, definitely) definitely e mary Sue's in a manner that totally isnt strawmanning, but just so happens to look sound, and feel like a strawman.
The entire first half of your post could and should have been deleted under the thesis statement "This author is a dishonest faggot".
>It pisses people off when
Hmmm, that seems a bit off
>It pisses me off when
Ah, that fits like a glove.
To properly write a mary sue, the author has to deceive their audience. If one seeks to implement a mary sue they have to limit their activity and make them seem incompetent, excepting those few instances where they succeed.
>Imagine if

No. Stop it right now. We've been over this, this is not an imagination thread. If you cant get your point across without resording to 'imagine' rhetoric then you should NOT BE POSTING. I get it, you need that dopamine. And I mean NEED it, cuz otherwise you'd take a step back and see how abysmally atrocious your attempts to get it are and continue to be in spite of all the effort that has been put into you specifically. Seriously, countless hours have gone into (you), but it's like trying to change Tyrone Biggums (and THAT is how you make a referential point. Do you see me explaining the point? No, I'm walking away, leaving it to those who get it and allowing the rest to either look it up or remain oblivious).

I wi advise you to keep a saved copy of your posts in the future. It would be a shame if someone rejected the post and you hadn't the means to go back and refine it.
P.S. Your writing has always been unrefined. You need to learn to turn a rough draft (which all your writing is) into a final draft. You think you can, which is why you're always being rejected. And it's a shame, cuz with a little polish you can write decent shit. It's a shame you have deliberately dismissed any efforts or attempts to be of assistance. So it will be forced on you.

>>294257
Jesus, I wrote all of this? LP's a Sue, and more importantly, a bad character. That rant about Sue being a stupid concept and a bad way to sort good characters from bad ones doesn't belong here. I know there are people who agree with me about the dishonesty in "I swear she's an ordinary relatable underdog nobody" because I've met people who agree with me about this, especially when it came to Ma-Rey Sue from Disney's Star Wars but that shit isn't really relevant here
Sorry about this.

I need to focus on the author, not the culture that gave him such stupid misconceptions of what will make people like his OCs.
Even though the desperation to make people like his OCs is keeping him from really putting these OCs through hell, showing us them at their worst, and telling a good story involve them.

I get that the author's trying to make his OC "cool" because he wants to write an explodey quippy emotionless tensionless Marvel movie. Someone who shoots baddies and points out the idiocy in others is his idea of cool. He wants to put his OC above the "silly" thoughts that resulted in almost-Fallout happening on Equestria's grave. Ponies only object to Littlepip's murderhobo methods so she can have scenes where she's right about the necessity of bloodshed and violence
But at the same time, he didn't put any serious thoughts into what mindset or mistakes caused Equestria's downfall, so he can't think of any ways Littlepip could go out of her way to avoid the mistakes that caused Equestria's downfall and reject the ideas that let it happen
A small post-apocalyptic story works best when it focuses on the characters and their responses to the wasteland
The hellish world is a backdrop for a character-focused tale
But a big post-apocalyptic story like this that focuses on the world and its downfall and offscreen restoration works best when it's one specific flaw or vice that caused the earth's destruction, like short-sightedness or pride or greed or "the cycle of revenge"
So the hero can break this cycle by going out of his way to not act vengeful and try taking better third options

The author made Team Littlepip better murderers than the Mane Six so they can thrive in a world the mane six couldn't stop from existing. Eventually murderhoboing fixes everything when there are no more baddies left to shoot. Nothing was learned from the ashes of old Equestria or the pain endured in the Equestrian Wasteland.

You see the problem here, right?

LP and pals are products of this world. LP's murderous nature is a product of this world and her Pip-Buck is a product of the era that let Equestria die, yet neither of these are ever painted as bad things she must overcome or reject. Team LP is not united by their desire to reject the fates they were born with
Only two out of i forget how many main characters have "I don't want to be like my guys" for their personality and it never meaningfully goes anywhere
Never inspires serious introspection from other chars. It's just some backstory element with little to no effect on them, making it mostly irrelevant
You could argue that Equestria died for putting the Mane Six in charge of shit they weren't qualified for, but putting unqualified poners in power and giving them absolute power works just fine later on

But the author's mindset with the bond one-liners and "Here's how you could be evil more effectively, the protagonist newfag said to the lifelong expert in evil! Wait, you use coal to transport coal? I need a fucking drink, cried the protagonist" shite just doesn't suit the dark tone this story tries to go for.
LP might be an effective hired killer but that doesn't make her a hero. Heroism makes heroes! Virtue! Passing up opportunities to be evil and take the easy ways out even when they present themselves temptingly!

It's not just about being the best killer in a dark world. It's about not letting the dark world turn you into another cog in its cycle of evil
LP talks big about being "Incorruptible" because she never starts dressing evilly and speaking evilly and doing evil shit for fun, but she still does violent shit for fun to baddies and tells herself it's okay because she's a hero
No meaningful commentary on anything is ever added to elevate this above the... What did Glim call it? MurderPorn? MoralityPorn? SplatterPorn? He's right
That's all this story philosophically is and I'd be fine with that if the story didn't waste so much of the reader's time on pretentious pseudo-philosophical shit that's never allowed to meaningfully challenge any characters or restrict their murderhoboing action-movie sidequests. Because the author missed so many goddamn points I still don't know where to begin with this.

And at the same time, this world isn't even that dark. Because it's a world where somepony like Littlepip can take on endless swarms of baddies and win every time without any significant losses.
Is there a list of all the shit she's survived? I remember her surviving a point-blank nuclear sky-car explosion, and didn't she survive a point-blank rocket blast at Old A? Her plot armour's too great to put any tension into the action scenes the story's an excuse for
A dark world is a bleak and hopeless place where heroes can do nothing wrong and still lose. It's a place where no good deed goes unpunished. It's a place where the slightest mistake can get you and those you love killed. It's a place where the best most heroes can hope for is to die fighting to prolong the end of something they care about.
The author doesn't have it in him to threaten his characters with plot armour, or seriously wound them in a meaningful way, or kill them. So to compensate, he inflicts all sorts of horrible fates on canon characters we already have emotional connections with, and OCs who exist to suffer until people with plot armour save them.
He doesn't want anything bad to happen to his precious Littlepip, so he unfairly makes her OP from day one and then tries to insist she's nobody special.

>>294057

Anyway, apparently because Littlepoop delivered a message for Deadeyes she is now a trusted member of his gang, and can wander around the fortress as she pleases. Littlepoop and I at least agree on one thing here: Deadeyes most certainly deserves to die. Not because of all the stuff he did to Silver Bell's parents or whatever, but simply because anyone who is this lax on security has no business trying to run a banana republic in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He even knows that LP is actually working for Gawd, and he still lets her wander around his completely unguarded fortress looking for the door to his secret treasure vault. At this point the most implausible thing about this scenario is that nopony has assassinated this retard already.

>I was behind the stage in the mess hall. To one side, the curtains, heavy and stained, concealed this darkened space from the large, catwalked area where the raiders ate whatever passed for their meals.
Are Deadeyes' soldiers supposed to be raiders, in the same way that the ponies we've seen before, that decorate their houses with entrails, are raiders? I'm still a little unclear on that point.

>Enough dust had accumulated back here that I could tell no pony ventured behind that curtain. Why would they? The space was full of rotting stage props and the skeletons of hundreds of ponies.
What?

>Countless bones were stuffed into cabinets, spilled out of metal boxes, and formed piles that must have been three ponies high when they still had flesh.
What????

This is probably a dumb question at this point, but why exactly are large numbers of skeletons being stored here? For that matter, why are they being stored at all? I get that the location was originally the site of a prison uprising or whatever that involved cannibalism and starvation, so presumably there would have been a lot of skeletons in this building at one point. However, wouldn't one expect that whoever became the next occupant of the building might, oh I don't know, get rid of them? Granted I'm an eccentric guy, but when I move into a new apartment, the first thing I usually do is gather up whatever corpses and skeletons and ceiling-entrails the previous tenant left behind and put them out on the curb.

>The “guests” of Shattered Hoof had spiraled into barbarism and cannibalism, and eventually every one of them had perished in here. I’d found logs; I’d found graffiti. I had wondered why I wasn’t tripping over their skeletons.
The reason you aren't tripping over their skeletons is because most normal people ponies, whatever don't want to live in places with piles of bones lying around all over the place. If some wannabe-third-world-warlord and his platoon of possibly-raiders-but-maybe-not decide that an abandoned prison complex would make an ideal fortress from which to administer their proto-industrial rock-smashing operation, but find that the building is full of skeletons, the normal thing to do would be to just remove them. In this case, assuming I'm understanding this scene correctly, Deadeyes seems to have opted to simply place the skeletons in storage rather than throw them out or bury them the way someone normal would do. However, we at least seem to be on the same page about not leaving the skeletons lying around in the halls and such.

Anyway, she finds a metal door surrounded by gun turrets in this area, which she deduces must be the entrance to the vault.

>I wanted inside. And not because there was a vault filled with possible treasure. Only Deadeyes had a key to the vault, and only Deadeyes had ever seen Mister Topaz face-to-face. If Mister Topaz really existed at all, I was dead certain he was down in that vault. My mind was conjuring up images of everything from a dedicated computer terminal that allowed Deadeyes to speak to a very remote Mister Topaz, to the vault being a Stable, to Mister-Topaz-the-Brainbot.
WHAT????

At this point I am actually beginning to worry that I will run out of original ways to call this author a retard, and will end up just endlessly writing the same complaint over and over for however many more threads this review is going to span. Even so, I would be remiss in my duties as commentator if I did not call this passage out for being [/b]completely pantsu-on-head retarded.[/b]

What insane leap of logic brought Littlepoop to this conclusion? Mr. Topaz is hiding in the treasure vault? Mr. Topaz is possibly a brainbot? What in the wide world of fuck could possibly have caused her to believe this? What is her train of thought here? She might as well say that Topaz is probably hiding in one of the skeleton-cabinets she just saw; it would make about as much goddamn sense.

So far, all we know about Mr. Topaz is his name, and the fact that he keeps a low profile. I've been more or less assuming that Topaz is some kind of regional boss, sort of a local Mafia chieftain who employs guys like Deadeyes to run little operations for him. He skims off the top and probably provides muscle and protection from bigger fish like Redeye, but otherwise stays out of the day to day operations of his enterprise, hence he is seldom seen by the pones with whom he does business. At this point it's beginning to sound like kkat's plan all along was to have Deadeyes actually be the final boss of this scenario, and have Topaz turn out to be some sort of elaborate ruse he cooked up to fool the masses...or something.

You know what, scratch that; I have absolutely no fucking idea what this author is planning to do. This is one of the most weirdly-constructed stories I've ever read. It's like the author purchased a build-your-own-story kit full of cliches, but instead of following the assembly instructions just started slapping everything together at random. This is like a child's Lego construction or something; the medieval castle that inexplicably has spaceship parts on the towers and Yoda in a cowboy hat guarding the ramparts.

>>294308

>The gate was locked. I had to push aside mounds of crumbling bones to get to it, holding my breath as white flakes stirred into the air.
You know what? I'm not even going to bother asking why there would be mounds of crumbling bones blocking the gate to the treasure vault.

>It took several minutes of effort, but the gate finally opened to my talents.
Naturally, the most important location in Deadeyes' fortress would be sealed with nothing more than a common padlock that could be picked by some autistic klepto who learned simple lockpicking tricks by dicking around with PipBucks and reading magazines on the subject. I'm actually not being sarcastic here; this makes perfect sense. One consistent thing about this arc is that Deadeyes has repeatedly shown himself to be a complete dunce when it comes to personal security.

>The metal door, however, was another story entirely. It could only be opened by a terminal elsewhere in the building, and only then if I could restore power to it.
Oh my, a challenge; I wasn't expecting that. I'm not being sarcastic here, either; in this entire arc the heroine has not had to do anything more complex than run a couple of mundane errands, and I had every reason to assume this trend would continue until it was over.

However, with this particular challenge, we are once again back in vidya-game territory. This kind of thing is a common enough puzzle to encounter in a game, but in a real-world scenario it makes little sense that Deadeyes would lock his treasure vault with a remote terminal that needs to be opened from the other side of the compound. This would mean that every time he needs to go down there to get something, he has to go to the terminal, punch in the code, walk all the way across the fortress to the door, and hope that nopony thought to try the now-unlocked door in the amount of time it takes him to walk down there. Needing to switch the power to the door on and off every time makes it even more inconvenient.

It makes even less sense to set it up this way if Topaz is indeed living down there for some insane reason. Deadeyes and his underlings would presumably need to go down there fairly often to deliver supplies or run messages. Also: what happened to Deadeyes having the key to the vault on his person? I thought that getting the key was the whole point of coming here. Or is the key he carries just the key to the dumb padlock that LP was able to pick so easily?

Anyway, page break.

>I must have spent hours poking around Shattered Hoof, seeking to restore power to that door. It was just a simple matter of replacing a mouthful of fuses, and swapping out a row of spark batteries, but those proved annoyingly difficult to find.
Once again, it's a little ridiculous that she is able to do all of this without encountering any opposition at all. I know Deadeyes has shit for security, but does literally nopony have any questions about why this little weirdo who just joined the crew yesterday is suddenly wandering around the entire compound, screwing with fuseboxes and flipping random levers up and down?

>I did find the armory through a side room off the guard barracks. It was completely devoid of weapons -- no surprise, as most of the raiders seemed to be armed with magical energy weapons that I assumed were looted from the armory. There was, however, a framed news article on the back wall, and behind it, a safe.
Let me guess: the news article contains absolutely nothing relevant to the current situation, but will provide several contextless pieces of random information about the setting that will not factor into the story until ten chapters from now when we've forgotten all about it.

Yep, turns out that's exactly what it is. There is a photograph of what appears to be Applejack attending the funeral of Big Macintosh, who apparently sacrificed himself to prevent the assassination of Celestia. Do we care? There's no reason to at present, as we don't technically know either of these characters, but since it probably will be important in another twelve chapters or so, it's probably worth noting.

>The safe had opened to reveal two (!) Stealth Bucks, the last spark batteries I needed, and a variety of ammo clips which, according to the documents found with them, were magically enhanced.
I'm really getting tired of these safes. Again, I'm probably just repeating myself by now, but it's illogical and dumb for anyone outside of a video game to just find easily-cracked safes containing random bric a brac everywhere she goes. People ponies, whatever don't just lock up random commonplace objects in hidden wall safes, I don't care what universe you're in. In a video game? Sure, it's fine; scattering treasure boxes around the world for the player to find adds an extra dimension of entertainment, and is a good way to hide weapons, upgrades, ammunition, healing potions, and other useful objects that the player will frequently need. But in a story? You need to at least try to be somewhat realistic. Whose safe is this? Why did they put two StealthBucks and some extra clips and batteries in there? What kind of autismo does something like that?

I mean, think about it: this is the armory. It's a room that was built for the express purpose of storing weapons. We are told that it at one time contained magical weapons, probably far more powerful than anything Littlepoop needs ammunition for. I mean, imagine the situation here: you've got an entire room full of military-grade hardware just lying out in the open, but you feel compelled to keep that pack of AAA batteries and a couple of extra clips for your Hi-Point locked up in the hidden wall safe, because you don't want them to fall into the wrong hands? 555-come-on-now.

>>294309

>Bullets for Little Macintosh, the needle gun, even Calamity’s battle saddle.
I've completely lost track of whether or not she ever actually built that needle gun, and if so where she got the parts she needed, and so forth. Part of me almost wishes I cared enough to go back through the text and find out. But I don't, so I'm just going to assume she has a needle gun now.

Anyway, she finishes raiding the safe and puts the article back where she found it, but then she overhears snippets of conversation from two approaching raiders.

>I hastily finished replacing the frame and hugged a wall behind one of the empty sets of ammo shelves, ears alert.
Why is she hiding? I thought she had free run of the place now.

She overhears bits and snippets of their conversation:

>They took all the mares and bucks they could, killed the rest and left them dead and rotting where they fell. But the colts and fillies? Red Eye doesn’t have any use for kids. So they just left us behind to fend for ourselves.
This seems like a potential continuity error. Red Eye runs the slaver operation, and from what I understand the Appleoosa slavers worked for him. If he doesn't have any use for kids, why were those slavers specifically rounding up kids?

>Place went bad real fast. Hell, it was bad to start with, so many of us seeing our parents sliced and splattered. But it got a whole lot worse. Got my tail out of there quick as I could. So personally, I’d be more than happy if a good deal of this raiding party died screaming with their legs blown off.
As ever, I find it very confusing trying to keep track of who is allied with whom and where exactly the battle lines have been drawn. Assuming I'm still following things correctly, Deadeyes' army is expecting an attack from Red Eye, who I guess is trying to round up slaves or take over Topaz' operation or something to that effect. When these ponies here talk about "this raiding party," I'm assuming this is what they mean. They presumably don't yet know that Deadeyes is planning to betray them and let Red Eyes take them all as slaves, if that is indeed still what he's planning. However, the use of the term "raiding party" is a bit confusing here: the story has made it clear that raiders and slavers are two separate things, Red Eye's attacking army is an army of slavers, and LP keeps referring to Deadeyes' soldiers as "raiders." So is this fight raiders vs. slavers or raiders vs. raiders? Or does "raiding party" mean something different than "raider?" Since in its normal context "raider" simply means someone who raids, it would logically follow that a raiding party would be made up of raiders, but if being a "raider" is not a prerequisite for raiding, then I guess you could have a raiding party made up of non-raiders. See how complicated all this shit gets when you're careless about how you use terminology?

As if all of this weren't complicated enough, k "kat then drops this bombshell on us:

>Ayep, Ah get that. But if Deadeyes’ trap works, we’ll have a whole mess o’ them slavers as our slaves. Then ya c’n take it out on ‘em all slow and personal-like. Ah’m sure Deadeyes won’t mind if a few o’ his new rock-breakers are missin’ some non-vital internal organs.
So Deadeyes is now planning to double-cross Red Eye and use the raiders to enslave his slavers, who are also apparently raiding? This shit is giving me a headache. Also: what is meant by "non-vital internal organs?" Are they going to remove their appendices or something?

>My mind raced to put together what I’d just heard. Deadeyes wasn’t, then, wasn’t betraying Shattered Hoof to the slavers after all. He was just tricking Red Eye’s forces into thinking he was -- luring them into a trap. Of course he wanted them to get in without any difficulties.
In all seriousness, though, this makes sense enough. Having complex allegiances between characters and throwing in the occasional surprise doublecross is a tried and true element in many different types of stories. That doesn't necessarily mean kkat won't fuck it up, but in and of itself this is fine.

>And he was deceiving Gawd into acting against him. Which, if this plan had the hoof-stamp of approval from Mister Topaz... or worse, was actually Mister Topaz’s plan...
>I needed to speak to Gawd. Before I went shooting anypony.
I'm not entirely following her reasoning, but here's my best guess: we already know that Deadeyes already knows that Gawd is planning to move against him, and if Topaz is in on the scheme, it could mean that he plans on using Gawd as some sort of expendable cannon fodder to accomplish whatever the fuck the greater objective here is supposed to be. Again, this kind of thing is a pretty well-established trope and there's nothing wrong with it, if it all makes sense.

Anyway, there is a page break here, and then in the next scene we have Littlepoop back in Deadeyes' office. Instead of murdering him like she is supposed to, she keeps playing along with her stupid scheme of pretending to work for him so she can get close to him and kill him, even though she's close enough to kill him right now. As it turns out, the mystery assignment is that Deadeyes wants her to kill Gawd. Apparently, delivering one letter proves that she is capable enough to handle assassinating the queen of the assassins. In fact, not only does he feel she's fully capable of handling this assignment based on her past experience as a delivery girl, he plans on making her one of his personal guards if she succeeds. Now I know this is all a ruse; he knows that she works for Gawd, and he may even know that she knows that, so obviously this whole thing is bullshit. However, it's still pretty implausible that he would just offer to promote her to one of his most trusted positions based on just two assignments. Then again, if this is his screening process, it would explain how ineptly guarded his fortress is.

>>294305
It's clear that you have put some effort into improving your posting behavior, or whatever I should call it, in this thread.
>>294257
While I agree with this Anon here, >>294277 , about the fact that the Mary Sue rant was unrelated. I don't disagree with the boiled down point you are making: Mary sue isn't a specific criticism because many people disagree on what it means and therefore it is preferable to use other types of critcism. While I do have csome reservations about this. This is not the time. And the concept that I first learnt from E;R that the dislike for Mary sues comes from their dishonesty of not being special.

>>294305
I like this post. While a little bloated at times and a bit spoilery, it is on point and is relevant. Your point that, Lp and company should learn from the past as to not dothe same mistakes is very good.

>>294310
> k "kat
You didn't post about how gay kkat is here, mr. Glim"I didn't just drop the ball but the nutsack as well"Glam.

>>294310
>Yep, turns out that's exactly what it is. There is a photograph of what appears to be Applejack attending the funeral of Big Macintosh, who apparently sacrificed himself to prevent the assassination of Celestia. Do we care? There's no reason to at present, as we don't technically know either of these characters, but since it probably will be important in another twelve chapters or so, it's probably worth noting.

In fairness to Kkat here, Littlepip came across a statue honoring Big Mac's death back in chapter 3 (had to open the fic myself to double check), which memorialized him as the 'Hero of Shattered Hoof Ridge'. This gives some more context to that, so there is at least an attempt at slowly revealing a past series of events going on.

As with a lot of things in this story, I get the impression that Kkat had a big list of things to include in the story and maybe even a set timeline, but often simply fails to consider what the reader does and doesn't know. In this case, at the very least, it's a partial answer to a question that was set up earlier.

>This seems like a potential continuity error. Red Eye runs the slaver operation, and from what I understand the Appleoosa slavers worked for him. If he doesn't have any use for kids, why were those slavers specifically rounding up kids?
This is absolutely a continuity error, as we'll see later when we learn more about Red Eye's plans.

>>294344
If, at the 85% mark you finally say 'lets get back to topic' you lost the point entirely.
Rejected, rewrite it. Stay on topic, fuck ur hateboners.

Stick to the facts

>>294349
I actually managed to copy your post >>294344 before it was removed.
After having read it, my verdict is that 20% of it was solid criticism that I liked.
About 23% were of tpoints that, if proven and elaborated a bit more could made into intresting points.
About 5% belonged to the thread as it was related to gg but was not connected to fe.
About 42% was ranting hateboners that didn't provide proof to their points and seem kinda meaningless.
10%
>"So I hereby crown Kkat with the gayest thing possible, a paper mache Naruto(TM) Ninja Headband but instead of a village symbol on the front there is just a poop emoji and a graffiti dick painted on the front instead."

>>294353
Sigh, don't throw a tantrum. No, the moderation here is not comparable to the chinese communist party. Or are you not implying this? Why are you otherwise posting this here?

It's fascinating how the fanfic's inaccessibility has driven some people to ignore it completely and exclusively post about something shorter: My posts.
But then people say they want my posts to be even shorter.
Isn't that crazy?

>>294393
>the fanfic's inaccessibility
You proposed this as an explanation for why "fewer" people posted in the thread. While I don't know if fewer people post here compared to the thread before, I would like to politely disagree.

I don't think this fic is unaccessible at all. It's a mlp fic combined with an post-apocalyptical fps. So far, Lp and company hasn't really had any overarching story either. In fact, this story is almost episodic. Therefore, I don't think anyone needs to actually read this story to tag along. I don't and if I'm ever unsure of something gg's summary of events seems pretty acurate and all-encompassing.

>>294312
Here I approve of your post and the post in question isn't short. I don't want your posts to be shorter but for them to be on-topic. I also think your posts should be more structured and make your points like less rambling and so on but I don't actually demand that. It requires more practice to present your points better while the same cannot be said about not posting off-topic. That's just to stop.

>>294357
Here I wrote that 42% and that is just to remove. But I got a feeling that you have hard time to diffrentiate between what Anons mean with hateboners and your actual points. This also sort of involve those 23% of missed opportunities.
From my understanding, I could be wrong, a hateboner is in the context of this thread something you hate without providing insight to why you hate it. This is also regards those 23% which were points that I probably would have agreed with, since the sounded pleasing but you didn't provide reasoning for them so they were left as mute points.

Hateboners also refers to the moments when you just start to throw insults at the writer but compared to gg, it comes off less charming. Can't really put my finger on it. When gg does it, it's more cheeky, endearing, and often enough funny but you often don't come off as this.
But that's just my subjective take on it so you don't have to take it to heart. Maybe, it is just colored by bias or something.

>>294398
When I use the term hateboner, I'm referring to an irrationally emotional response to the material that is neither justified (and is arguably unjustifiable) and/or results in a loss of composure and etiquette. As an example,... well, I think it would be redundant at this point to provide examples.

Here's another thing that I think you're trying to touch on (if not, no worries). There is an air to his writing that feels artificial. He phrases things as though he expects a friendly and concurrent reception to his spiels, as though his conclusions are, objective, unarguable, and unequivocal. I would simplify it as the "am I right?" propensity, where a person pats themselves on the back both self-congratulating and with the expectation/inference that everyone else would and should do likewise.
Conversely, one should maintain no illusions as to how effective any of this is or will be to correct the offending behavior. I can speak with specific authority as to how our friend responds to both negative and positive reinforcement (spoiler:he doesnt) and attempting to correct his behavior from a moderation standpoint is technically not in keeping with the site rules (I've been given a tacit pass in that he is a VERY special case, but trying to get through to him even if it WASNT an exercise in futility is not worth jeopardizing my position).
So ta da, theres really nothing to be done I'm sorry to say.

>>294357
Now that the context for the comparison (this fic's "guy mentions a torture method to look edgy" moments are inferior to naruto fics) is gone, my subsequent "I hereby dub Kkat a gay person and give him some gay crown related to what I just mentioned" comment looks off-topic.

>>294410
I didn't really qoute that specifically because it was off-topic though it still kinda is. Becuase what really is your point?
>this fic's "guy mentions a torture method to look edgy" moments are inferior to naruto fics)
Yeah, in the post and here, it isn't very clear what the problem is. Is the problem that they aren't edgy enough or too edgy? Or is it that this trope is too cliche that is the problem?

But I mostly posted that qoute as I thought it spoke for itself. Not to say that you can't be funny nor that I decide what is funny or that I'm always funny but there seems to be no punchline here. I guess comedy is subjective.

To respond to >>294027 → from the previous thread:
>Could you mention which one?
I did some limited prereading/editing work on the early parts of Project Horizons and latter parts of Murky Number Seven - though mostly in spelling, grammar, continuity and formatting checking rather than content. As such I had to be pretty familiar with the original FoE and read through it a couple of times.

That said, this was several years ago now, so my opinions and understanding aren't the same now as they were back then, and I've forgotten a lot of the finer details. Not going to digress into a long spiel on PH or MN7 unless they end up being relevant to the thread.

>>294414
I didn't want my post to seem too long but I'll try and explain this better.
The way this character talks, with the "Ah" and "Y'all" just doesn't fit the sudden use of the phrase "Non-vital internal organs". It sounds silly. It sounds pretentious. It sounds completely at odds with the lazy and clumsy way of speaking the character's shown so far.
It doesn't sound cool and to the point, like "I'll slice them up" or "I'll smash their skulls in".
It doesn't sound graphic like "I'll crush their limbs and leave them to die!" or "I'll shoot their knees and watch them bleed out!" or "I'll chain them up and stick red-hot needles in their eyes!" or "I'll bite their throats out, gargle the blood, and spit it back in the shocked faces of their friends!" or even "I'll cut their hearts out with a rusty spoon! Yes, not a knife, but a fucking spoon, so it will hurt more!"
It's not a good threat.

But putting that aside, this threat in particular doesn't sound right from this mouth. It doesn't suit what we've seen of the character's diction so far, and that doesn't seem intentional in a kind of "This character talks like a thug or cowboy or some other stereotypically-stupid type of guy but is unexpectedly intelligent and able to whip out the big words when he wants to" way. Kkat's trying to make this character sound all violent and scary and spooky and creepy and dangerous, but who the hell would expect these random absolute motherfucking faggots to have the kind of medical skill necessary to remove any organs without fucking up and killing someone, whether those organs are "essential" or not?
"Non-vital internal organs" sounds fucking goofy. Even goofier than just mentioning one of those organs like "Spleen" and saying he wants to stab some spleens.
It doesn't sound plausible on its own. The problem isn't just that it's an attempt at needless edge, it's a really bad and stupid attempt that makes little sense and sounds more comical than anything else. These aren't highly-trained and incredibly experienced torture and interrogation experts from a secret village full of hyper-competent magical ninjas for hire.

This edge attempt doesn't sound good, but even putting that aside too...
They don't have a reason to talk like this.
They don't have an excuse such as "They are directly talking to a captured goon and trying to scare him into spilling his secrets".
These are just two random assholes, they're probably going to be killed by Littlepip at some point, and when Kkat decided he had to write dialogue for these characters so you won't like them, this is the best he could do.
This is the scene: Littlepip overhears two idiots talking to each other, and this really is how they always talk, even when they think they're alone, because they're baddies and that's how evil thugs think in this universe: "hurr durr me angry, so me wanna torture poners and remove *their non-vital internal organs!*".
This scene is cringe. It's CRINGE! It's also pointless, and stupid-sounding, and incredibly straining to the willing suspension of disbelief. It'd be one thing if these were Raiders(TM) who have some kind of flimsy justification like "We know we could die anyway so lmao why not be as evil as possible?". These are the kind of thugs in this facility, this is how they talk even when they don't think they need to put on some kind of act for some boss.
And it's really fucking stupid that the fic is like this. This is a fanfic, yes, but it's a world-renowned fanfic that's been printed, so you'd think it would get shit like this right!

>>294425
>Not going to digress into a long spiel on PH or MN7 unless they end up being relevant to the thread.
You can make them relevant to the thread. All you have to do is make a point, using them as evidence and tie it into FE.
Having somebody tell us what kind of things that were brought over into other fics from FE, stuff that's already been covered like pipbucks, could be really intresting and add to the thread.
The point is always to use refrences to other things as evidence to your points.
But it really isn't such a problem if you happened to post things that are off-topic. Stuff like that happens, it's when it happens consitently and dominates a thread that it becomes a problem.

>>294432
Yes, this is good post. You explain yourself and your point. I'll maintain that the post were you mention this first wasn't very clear but I do agree with majorly the points you are making in this post. However, that's based on my limited understanding of the situation sinceI haven't actually read gg's post on this part.

>>294432
I agree with >>294436
This was an excellent post. I sincerely hope that you endeavor to maintain this level of quality going forward, and if so I'll gladly stfu

Was thinking some more about the story's strange moments.
The moments where Littlepip's strange little mind goes to some bizarre places but the story goes along with it because the author is on her wavelength to put it politely.
For example, Gamer Brain moments where LP attempts something that could only work in a video game such as attempting to loot a dead body for ammo in the middle of a firefight, or going along with bullshit sidequests for a guy you are supposed to kill just because you dont want to fail those sidequests, or pausing in the middle of a fight to enter a shack and read some computer terminal journal entries, or pausing your solo assault of a raider infested tree library to loot and lockpick.
And then there are LPs Book Brain moments where she assumes that just because a pony mentions Crane he surely must be an immensely important pony you can learm things from, or starts listening to dead pony diary mp3s while sneaking around an ememy base because she craves those stories more than she wants to be able to hear approaching foes.

These are weird. Hiding yourself with a cum soaked bed so guards cant see you is silly enough, but that scene where Calamity hides under a cum soaked bedsheet and it just works... this is silly. It's like a Looney Tunes skit sometimes. And that really doesn't suit the "ultra bloody adult Dorkly Skit cartoon with gore and realistic edgy consequences" tone this fic usually goes for. These tones cant combine.
And it cant be intentional characterization that rubs off on others like Pinkie doing weird shit because shes Pinkie. Because when Littlepip hears about something the author found silly - coal powered coal trains - Littlepip needs a drink so she can handle how stupid she finds the thought of a coal powered coal train.
The author wants to establish LP as an underdog hero facing an impossibly evil world, not an anti-logic anomaly that can do wacky Pinkie Pie stuff and make it work. But if the author leaned into that, a bit of Sam And Max bullshit could give this fic some desperately needed levity. Could write characters thst quip about the black comedy dead baby shit they encounter. And then make that dark and tragic by saying the characters use humor to hide the pain. Could make an automatic 9mm fire cylynder grenades by sticking one pill where the clipazine should go.

The fic would probably be better on a technical level if it lacked these moments of "well it worked in a game once so it must work now. Also this is a book so it must follow book logic therefore Crane is important because why else would he get screentime?" strangeness.
But while giving LP the power to break reality would make her OP and destroy the dark tone, my "bookworm littlepip" idea could be used to turn the choices she makes and the often bizarre conclusions she comes to into the result of consistent characterization other characters get to comment on and react to.
Littlepip was already a loot obsessed murderhobo from day one. She must have had some screws loose from day one, right? But all the significant characters adore her. Even the ponies banning her from their minecraft server- i mean town still love her. Nobody views her as an emotionally unstable walking grenade. Crane doesn't think she's an annoying weirdo best given an impossible task before coming around and liking her after she completes the task. In designated argument scenes Velvet The Pussy is wrong just so that Calamity The Guy can agree with LP for being right in the authors eyes. Calamity doesn't say anything like "I'd rather not get involved with fights this big when I hate everyone who could end up in charge anyway" but imagine if he was the sensible one providing reasonable arguments for her to sometimes listen to and saving LP whenever she gets herself in over her head.
LPs canon characterization is so flat that her teammates have very little to bounce off.
Canon Littlepips idea of a hero is one who slaughters all the baddies because they are there. Like Batman or The Punisher, except there are comics with these characters that try to deeply analyze these characters, ask if its worth it, examine the downsides of being like this, and show the toll these neverending crusades take upon their minds and bodies. I guess she never read those as a kid.
Shouldn't LP's simplistic definition of a hero be challenged by a grim and dark world of moral greys if the world is truly dark? Alternatively if the story is just splatter porn it should stop with the "littlepip is a helpless underdog and a brave strong female character who never gives up and will fill this world's dark soul with LIIIIIIIiiiIIIGHT" pretenses. Surely a bleak world where men run out of food and eat their dogs and are forced against their will to become raiders is darker than a popcorn action flick where all good guys have plot armour and all bad guys laugh evilly while kicking puppies and throwing out lines that are corny and cheesy enough to make Rita Repulsa cringe, right?

>>294404
>I would simplify it as the "am I right?"
It wasn't what I was touching upon but I do agree that when you mention it that's a good description for the tone of a lot of his posts. While I actually think that believing in your own points isn't bad since otherwise they wouldn't be your points. (I hope I don't misunderstand.) I do think that it is generally easier to get people to discuss things when you don't go in hard and basically start of with, "This is how things are and you can't change my mind." Not saying that's how Nigel is... I think? Anyway, if one at least doesn't judge and let the discussion be free in a manner then people will truly allow themselves to think unqiuely or whatever...
I'm sorry but I honestly don't know if what I'm saying makes any sense right now and I haven't really thought this out I feel.
>I can speak with specific authority as to how our friend responds to both negative and positive reinforcement
I can actually also do this. I have been on this site since the first summer after that april that started it. If you check the Silver Star threads, which still aren't updated btw It is fine. Just wanted to inform anyone who is in charge of it again. But I guess I should do that on /qa/ instead., I'm all the swedish flags in both of those threads. I think. I'm 99% certain but there could perhaps be like one post that I didn't notice that popped up among them but I doubt it.

Well, I don't wanna put Nigel down now that he made such a good post >>294432 so here's for hoping.

>>294462
Admit it, you love him
It's not to put him down, but it is to take him down a reasonable peg

>>294464
Is true.
I vuw all my hoers friens.

>>294464
"Are there whabbits in the pipe, Sven?"
"Yes, Nigel. Yes." jk Nigel.

>>294510
Appearently, I'm a sassy asshole these days.

>>294310

>I looked around like a drowning pony looking for a helping hoof. And once again, my eyes fell on the picture of Stable Two’s first Overmare, Sweetie Belle. I remembered something that Velvet Remedy had told me. Something the Overmare had told her.
What in the name of everloving fuck is going on here? Why is she even standing here humoring this guy? The whole reason she's here is to kill him, so why not just kill him? Who cares if he wants her to kill Gawd or not; she already knew he was plotting against her. This really shouldn't be that surprising, and she's only working for him to get close enough to assassinate him, which she literally is now. Alternatively, she could take his offer and go assassinate Gawd if she really wanted to; not sure what that would achieve, but she could certainly do it. Either way, though, just pick someone and kill them already; I've got other shit to do today.

>Looking straight back into Deadeyes’ slate grey eyes, I nodded firmly. “Okay. Not a problem.”
No, I guess not. Oh well, whatever it was, I'm sure it was super-duper extra relevant.

Anyway, what the fuck. She is now apparently tricking Deadeyes into thinking she is going to kill Gawd, when in reality she is actually going to kill him, even though she sure is taking her sweet-ass time about it. Either that or she's going to kill Gawd now, I guess.

>I turned as if to leave, took a few steps, and stopped. Looking over my shoulder, “It’s not like ponies here won’t suspect you. You should have an alibi.”
What? Who cares? By "ponies here" I'm assuming she means Deadeyes' own troops, and I see no reason why they should care if Deadeyes kills Gawd or not. For that matter, I don't even see why he's using Littlepoop to do this. Wait a minute, if he knows that Littlepoop works for Gawd and is here as a double agent, does that mean he doesn't expect her to actually go through with it? Does he want Gawd killed or is this just part of the ruse?

On some level I want to applaud kkat's attempt at creating intrigue here, but this is just illogical. There's no reason for these characters to be pussyfooting around each other like this; all the doublecrosses and the lies upon lies are just making things complicated without making them interesting. If Deadeyes wants Gawd dead he should just send someone he trusts to kill her. If he doesn't trust Littlepoop, he should just kill her right here and now. Littlepoop herself has no reason to keep playing along with any of this; her task is quite simple. All she needs to do is kill Deadeyes, which she could also do right here and now. None of this needs to be as complicated as these characters are making it.

>“Tell you what. I’ve got a plan that will take care of your griffin problem and leave you looking clean.”
>His eyes narrowed now. “Oh do you? Please, do tell.”
>“Ever heard of a pony named Sweetie Belle?”
Hm, I was going to guess Aryanne. Oh well, I guess things are complicated enough that we may as well slather on yet another layer of complexity. Ok, Littlepoop, I'll bite; what the fuck does Sweetie Belle have to do with any of this?

>Well, by now you know I didn’t travel here alone. One of the people traveling with me just so happens to be a direct descendant of Sweetie Belle. And as it turns out, musical talent runs in the family.
>Her name is Velvet, and she’s on her way to Manehattan to record some new music for DJ Pon3’s radio station.
Wait a minute. I feel like I already knew that Velvet was a descendent of Sweetie Belle, but I don't remember if it's something I gleaned from the actual text or if it was in one of Nigel's spoilers. More importantly, though, I'm not sure if this is something Littlepoop should know.

More to the point though is that it shouldn't be this difficult to keep track of details like this. If one of the main characters is descended from Sweetie Belle and this fact is important to the story, then it should be a well established fact, and we shouldn't have to go back and comb through pages and pages of text to see if it was quietly mentioned somewhere, probably in a 9 point font footnote underneath an itemized list of crap that LP dug out of some poor bastard's abandoned safe. This work simultaneously suffers from being too detailed and not detailed enough. Details that pertain directly to the story, for example an explanation of what exactly a "raider" is, are frequently omitted on the assumption that we should already know; other important details, of which this business about Velvet's ancestry is a good example, are technically in the text but are buried under the constant deluge of extra garbage and trivia this author spews on us.

For instance, >>294347 mentioned that the article detailing the death of Big Mac filled in the blanks on a detail mentioned earlier: the memorial statue that LP found commemorating his valor at the Battle of Shattered Hoof. The details are consistent, but the problem is that neither of them have any apparent relevance to the story. Big Mac died protecting Celestia at Shattered Hoof. Okay, so what? What does that have to do with this current story about Littlepoop and her battle against Red Eye, or slavers, or whatever this novel is supposed to be about? The statue itself I remember struck me as an irrelevant detail at the time; her PipBuck pointed it out to her, but there was no apparent significance to it that made it feel like it bore specific mention.

The author has clearly built a very large and complex world here, and on some level that's commendable, but that doesn't give him open license to just throw whatever details he wants into the text and let us sort out which ones matter; he needs to learn how to tell a single coherent story. Just because an event happened in the history of your world doesn't mean it needs to be mentioned in the text. If I were going to novelize my own life, I wouldn't include details about WWI just because it was an event that happened in the world I live in.

>>294514

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, Velvet Remedy is descended from Sweetie Belle. For some reason, Littlepoop brought this up during a conversation with Deadeyes. For some reason or another she lied to him and told her that Velvet is on her way to Manehattan to record for DJ Pon3.

>Wait... that’s actually a pretty good idea! And it would give me a way to talk with the wasteland’s most famous buck.
I still don't understand why talking to the DJ is a priority for her.

>“What I’m thinking: I think I can talk her into putting on a performance here. Using that very stage...” My mind was racing, trying to put together a decent-sounding plan as quickly as I spoke. “We’ll do it tonight. Invite everypony in to see it. And... Gawdyna Grimfeathers too.”
Again, some part of me wants to give k "it's not gay because I call my inside out scrotum a vagina" kat credit for attempting to create a complex and interesting storyline instead of just the usual "LP goes in, blasts baddies, steals treasure" routine. However, this really is getting absurd. She literally has one job here: kill Deadeyes. That's it. That's all she came here to do. She could do it right now: she has more than enough firepower, she appears to have him off guard, and since we have had no mention of them in this scene I'm assuming his bodyguards are not present. Just pull out your glock and pop a cap in this mark ass bitch, holmes. Bang bang. Don't be a busta.

>Deadeyes, I could see, was liking this idea. And with the battle coming tomorrow morning, he had to be figuring the timing for a morale-boosting celebration was perfect.
"An army is marching towards us in order to annihilate us, but we know the exact date and time they are going to arrive and attack us, so in the meantime let's have some pop idol do a concert for us." Only in Equestria, amirite folks?

Also, I may not have emphasized it enough, so I'll repeat it: this idea is completely, laughably absurd. Gawd and Deadeyes are not open enemies, but they obviously don't trust each other. It's clear that each is aware of the other plotting against them. So what is going to happen here? Littlepoop goes back to Gawd with an invitation to come alone and unarmed to Deadeyes' private fortress, which is filled with his soldiers, to enjoy a fun concert? This is about the same level of cunning that Wile E. Coyote uses to trap the Roadrunner; all it needs is a giant boulder suspended by a rope and a sign that says "Free Bird Seed."

>“I’ll be hiding up in the balcony. I’ll take two shots. One through the head of the griffin. The other into your table, close enough to look like you were also a target.”
So, on top of everything else that makes this ridiculous, she now expects Deadeyes, who I will once again emphasize knows she was sent here by Gawd to kill him, to just trust that she will "accidentally" miss him when he places her in the balcony as a sniper? How pantsu-on-head retarded do you actually have to be to believe that this is a good plan? fuck, I already used "pantsu-on-head retarded;" looks like I actually am running out of ways to call this author a retard

>I levitated out one of the Stealth Bucks. “I’ll be gone before any pony can catch me or even see who it was. You can blame it on a slaver assassin. Who wouldn’t buy that?”
Alright, I'm willing to give her some style points for waving the StealthBuck she just stole from him under his nose. However, I still don't see why all of this subterfuge is even necessary. Gawd and Deadeyes appear to be fighting kind of a cold war here; both are actively working against each other, both are aware, and both seem to be aware that the other is aware, but for some reason they have to keep pretending they're on the same side. For Gawd it has something to do with her contract, which kind of makes sense, but I have no idea why Deadeyes couldn't assassinate Gawd with impunity. It might have something to do with Topaz, since he hired Gawd and might take offense if his underling kills her, but he hasn't been mentioned; LP seems to be implying that the deception is for the benefit of Deadeyes' own troops. What do they care if their boss kills some strange griffon they have no connection to? None of this makes any goddamn sense.

>Deadeye contemplated the plan while I stood there, feeling increasingly nervous. He had to realize this plan put him in the same crosshairs as Gawd, and he already thought of me as her spy. Would he believe I would betray her so quickly, that my loyalty was up for grabs?
Once again: the author has enough brains to see the logic holes in his story, but apparently not enough to actually fix them.

Anyway, I've already spent far more time on this scene than it deserves. Yada yada yada, Deadeyes accepts the deal because he's a complete retard, and stipulates just one idiotic condition: that Velvet appear before the show and sing a couple of old Sweetie Belle songs for him. Littlepoop agrees, and takes her exit. On the way out, this happens:

>I noticed a sickly apple-colored glow which I hadn’t seen before. One of the terminals in one of the desks in the room outside of Deadeyes office was powered up. I was sure it hadn’t been before. Replacing those fuses and spark batteries must have powered it up. Pulling out my access tool, I hacked into the terminal.
Oh, the computer that opens the treasure vault was right there, how convenient. That's the last thing you need to get in there, right? That key that Deadeyes apparently keeps on his person that was the whole reason you came in here, you just don't even need that anymore? But you're still going to go through with the assassination of Deadeyes because of Silver Bell's family or whatever? But instead of just assassinating him now when you could get it done cleanly and efficiently, you're instead going to stick to this utterly moronic, overly-convoluted plan in which any number of things can and probably will go wrong? That's just the tops, kid.

>>294515

Couple more things here before we move on.

>Pulling out my access tool, I hacked into the terminal.
What is her "access tool" exactly? This is the first mention I've heard of such a device. Is this how she's been "hacking" the terminals? News to me. If so, the author should have at least mentioned the existence of such a device the very first time she ever hacked a terminal. Also: where the hell did she get this thing? I was just joking earlier when I talked about her suddenly pulling the Staff of Ra out of her saddlebag, but this is almost the same level of absurdity. There exists in this world a device that just allows you to effortlessly crack any password on any terminal, and LP just magically has this thing in her possession because reasons? The author didn't think that was a detail worth explaining?

Where did she get this fucking thing? How did she come across it? What are it's origins? Who designed it originally, and how did it end up wherever LP found it? See, this goes back to what I was talking about with the difference between relevant and irrelevant details. The author goes out of his way to wedge in these interesting but ultimately irrelevant bits of trivia about his setting, like how Big Mac died protecting Celestia 200 years ago, but completely sidesteps gigantic logic holes like this one, which he leaves gaping wider than his anus after "ladies" night down at the Manhole Lounge in San Francisco.

>There were no menus, no entries. Instead, just a single function. I had found the terminal that opened door to the mines and vault below.
"Hey, Shattered Hoof construction committee, I've got an idea: let's design, build and install a dedicated terminal whose sole purpose is to unlock a door in a completely different part of the building, but only if a fusebox in yet another distant part of the building has the correct combination of fuses and spark batteries hooked up." This is why level designers don't build houses.

And then, page break. Littlepoop now returns to Gawd, who was no doubt expecting her to either return with the blood of Deadeyes on her hooves or not at all, and explains her idiotic plan to her. She now tells Gawd the exact same thing she just told Deadeyes, but in reverse:

>“I’ll put a bullet through Deadeye’s head,” I told Gawd. “And another into your table. Then use a Stealth Buck to slip out before anypony can identify me. You can blame it on the slavers who are attacking tomorrow.” Gawd was pondering the idea skeptically. “Sure, some ponies might still have suspicions, but not the kind they could act on. Particularly if you take over and lead them to victory against the slavers.”
Once again, the possessive form of Deadeyes' name is written inconsistently. Also: how dumb does LP think these two actually are? I mean, Deadeyes seems like a complete nitwit from what we've seen so far, but Gawd seems to be basically intelligent, or at least cagey enough to have survived in the backstabbing world of being a professional mercenary. I will also once more protest that THIS PLAN IS FUCKING RETARDED NO MATTER WHO YOU'RE TRYING TO SELL IT TO.

>Gawd shook her head. “I’ve got t’ hand it to you. Yer one hell of a devious plotter.”
No. No she isn't. She's this year's nominee for the "invent the most unnecessarily complicated solution to what is essentially a simple problem" award. Literally all she had to do was go in there and shoot this guy, glock glock nigga; now she's planning a Velvet Remedy concert at an abandoned prison apparently filled with skeletons, where she intends to hide in the balcony using a StealthBuck and fake-shoot one of them and real-shoot the other, and I guess it's supposed to be a point of suspense which one she's actually going to shoot. If both Gawd and Deadeyes are dumb enough to go along with this, she ought to shoot both of them for being morons, then shoot Velvet Remedy because she sucks, and then shoot herself for being the retard who thought up this ridiculous plan in the first place.

Anyway, this is the only thing Gawd has to say on the subject, so presumably she intends to go along with the scheme. Next stop is the boxcar, where LP informs Velvet Remedy that she will now have to perform a free show for what I'm assuming is still a group of raiders. Despite being vehemently opposed to the notion of Littlepoop assassinating Deadeyes only a few short scenes ago, Velvet now seems to have no problem whatsoever with being made an accessory to what is probably the dumbest assassination plot in the history of Edgequestria. Instead of simply refusing as would be both sensible and in keeping with her professed ideals, her only response is to get cutely flustered at only having a few hours to prepare for a concert, a reaction which no doubt causes LP's nether regions to start frothing like a cappuccino machine.

Calamity, being quite possibly the only character in this entire story with even a tiny iota of common sense, asks the first sensible question we've heard since LP left for Shattered Hoof:

>“An’ why are we doin’ this again?” Calamity was confused. “Whose side are we on now?”
I can sympathize. If Littlepoop accidentally shoots herself in the back of the head during this concert, perhaps Calamity would like to take over the protagonist's duties going forward.

Littlepoop's answer is less than helpful:

>“Same as before. Basic plan shouldn’t change. But first, I want to get those two in the same room together.”
What is the basic plan? I thought the basic plan was to kill Deadeyes, which she could have done like nineteen times by now. This blood-guzzling little lunatic murders half a platoon of raiders every morning before breakfast, but for some reason she's tiptoeing around this simple assassination of a target who blindly trusts her and has the most incompetent security team in the history of the Wasteland. Also: why does she want them in the same room?

>>294514
>Wait a minute. I feel like I already knew that Velvet was a descendent of Sweetie Belle, but I don't remember if it's something I gleaned from the actual text or if it was in one of Nigel's spoilers. More importantly, though, I'm not sure if this is something Littlepoop should know.
I don't recall if it's pointed out explicitly in the text, but presumably this is the reason that Velvet's pipbuck contained the "CMC3BFF" code to Stable 2's door back at the beginning - because it was passed down to her from the generations that followed Sweebles.

As with so many things in this story, Kkat seems to have no conceptual barrier between "what I know in my head" and "what I've made clear to my reader."

>For instance, >>294347 mentioned that the article detailing the death of Big Mac filled in the blanks on a detail mentioned earlier: the memorial statue that LP found commemorating his valor at the Battle of Shattered Hoof. The details are consistent, but the problem is that neither of them have any apparent relevance to the story. Big Mac died protecting Celestia at Shattered Hoof. Okay, so what?
The ponies we know and love from the show are dead and that's sad :((((((

Sarcasm aside, there's more information given on Big Mac's death later, but its relevance remains pretty questionable. It also ties into how Kkat handles the character of Celestia which is slightly more meaningful but oh lawd we'll get to that hot mess eventually.

>>294515
>I still don't understand why talking to the DJ is a priority for her.
Because the plot says so. This is another thing that relies on the reader being a superfan of Fallout 3 over making any kind of internal sense. In the game, you leave your home vault in search of your missing father. After resolving a few minor quests in the first town in return for information on his whereabouts, you're eventually pointed to his last known location - a local radio station in the ruins of Washington DC, home of Three Dog, a well-connected DJ.

Pip's already found the person she's looking for, but to anyone that's a fan of Fo3 and isn't thinking very hard, going to visit the DJ once she's done with the early quests would feel like the natural next step.

>>294516
>What is her "access tool" exactly? This is the first mention I've heard of such a device. Is this how she's been "hacking" the terminals? News to me.
This is bizarre, because as far as I know the access tool never comes up again. You can hack terminals in Fo3, but that's done purely with a good old fashioned clacky keyboard and 'find the word' minigame. There's scenes later on where she uses her Pipbuck to interface with things so ''presumably'' Kkat means that here, but otherwise I have no idea what this is supposed to be referencing.

>'''THIS PLAN IS FUCKING RETARDED NO MATTER WHO YOU'RE TRYING TO SELL IT TO'''
Get used to it. The entire story's primary conflicts hinge on Littlepip's enemies being less intelligent and competent than her.

>>294514
This game of double-crossing is really quite bizarre. Reminds me of the kind of story an AI tells when it almost understands something, but not quite.
It's as if Kkunt knows people like political-intrigue games where everyone's double-crossing each other and someone's a double or triple or even quintuple-reverse agent, but he didn't understand what makes a political intrigue clusterfuck engaging on an emotional or intellectual level.
The characters involved are supposed to have clearly-defined personalities and backstories that influence the who they are today, why they turned out like this, and who's goal is whose. It's not mandatory for someone to have a flaw that's being exploited by a schemer, but schemers pulling shit like that that makes the schemer look credible and ruthless. It's supposed to be a game of wits where different schemers play their games and seek to get the newest pawn introduced to the game on their side. And there's supposed to be a big and clearly-established reason why the shadowy game of secrets is preferred to an outright duel or uprising or massive war or simple assassination.
If LP's target suspects LP of being a double agent, he should either kill her, give her a letter to give to Gawd and then subtly slip explosives into her saddlebags to be detonated when close to Gawd, announce "I know you're a double agent but I want you on my side for real", or avoid tipping her off while trying real hard to subtly sway her into thinking she should side with him instead of Gawd.
Yes, a good schemer usually has hidden motives and backup plans and more than one cards to play, but to get invested in this we need to understand what's really at stake.
We still know practically fuck all about Gawd. Not like she's a former hero beaten down into becoming nothing more than a hired gun who tells herself making the biggest baddest gang of ruthless assassins in the Wasteland will one day help her make this world a better place somehow eventually someday probably.
Littlepoop is "technically" the kingmaker here because she's been artificially thrust into the role, but she has barely any intel on who her manipulators are or what the long-term consequences of her choice will be. A Newbie Hero shouldn't be this gung-ho about risking her life and working for an unknown Griffon assassin to assassinate a baddie for another potential baddie until after she knows who killed Bootleg Pinkie's family. Then it makes sense for her to really want this guy dead and his stuff looted.
You'd think she would try to get some of that information, so she can learn more and decide for herself who to side with. This would give her an organic opportunity to find and read some kind of diary so she can learn why this baddie needs to die. A well-written "hero who doesn't want to be the pawn of someone less morally-upright" would do that.
Shouldn't there be some moral greyness in a situation like this? Kkat has a boner for making everything as black and white as possible, but heroes reveal their priorities and true essence when making morally-grey decisions with no clear right answers.
This is too easy for Littlepip, both in a difficulty sense (I'm amazed nobody assassinated this baddie before LP could get to him) and in a meta sense. Littlepoop's definitely had some screws loose from day one.
Littlepip trusts Gawd absolutely because the author knows Gawd's mostly morally upright, but LP shouldn't know that right now or make such major potentially-Wasteland-transforming decisions as if she does. Littlepoop should have gone through at least one internal argument about the ethics of accepting a "kill that baddie for my personal gain" job for some griffon she barely knows, at least until the baddie's evil makes her say "Fuck it, anything's surely better than this". And that kind of thinking could really fuck her over if Gawd turned out to be a total cunt, but what subjectively personally irritates me is that I know despite all of this nonsense web, there probably won't be any unforseen consequences. A moral about the dangers of thinking the world can be improved by putting the right people in power instead of embracing the ideal world where authority figures are minimized? Nah, that's too deep for Littlepip's looty-shooty-lockpicking misadventure.
There isn't anything to latch on to or get invested in when it comes to this clusterfuck of under-written characters playing shadow games for no real reason.

>"I wanna sing on the radio"
this fake motivation is too gay for anypony to realistically buy it. travelling cross-country just so you can get some song on the radio? He should at express at least a little skepticism over it, prompting LP to say some edgy shit like "What else will we do with our lives?".

>Big Mac and the Practically Overlooked Heroic Sacrifice
This "The author has no idea what to linger on, what to emphasize, what to repeat, and what to cut because he can't tell wheat from chaff" problem is bad.
Could fix the effective irrelevance of pre-war stuff to these OCs by giving every failed Mane canon character some kind of lesson the OCs can learn from them. Something like "Don't be reckless like Rainbow Dash was when she got a squad of fliers killed during the war" or "Don't be stubborn like Applejack was when she wasted shitloads of lives hanging on to some mostly-irrelevant landmark just for the propaganda value".
Could fix the emotional irrelevance of pre-war stuff to these OCs by establishing Littlepip as a history nerd who greatly respected the canon main characters at first based on the propaganda she was taught in high school, even making her fangirl over the Little Macintosh gun she gets when she discovers it once belonged to an Apple Poner, but then over time she learns of unsavoury things some main poners did like Pinkie inventing meth and Twilight... I don't know, running some nightmare science facility that would give WW2-era Japan a boner and nightmares.

>concert
*Paz from Peace Walker flashbacks*

>>294523
I'm supposed to explain my reasoning behind major references but not overexplain the references themselves so I'll spoiler it. [YouTube] MGS Peace Walker - Koi no Yokushi-Ryoku (Romanji - English - Portuguese) [Embed] basically Peace Walker had a better excuse for its random gratuitous pop concert moment. It's also darkly hilarious when you remember this cheesy bullshit pop song was canonically written by Kazuhira "If you fulton a nig I'm throwing it in the brig" Miller and Paz "There's a reason why I'm an equippable item in Smash Ultimate that gives you a bomb and that reason is because I have two bombs inside me, one inside my gut and one deep deep inside my cooch" Pacifica Ocean the double agent who secretly hated everyone had to go through with this song to maintain her cover. This was a concert done for fun, for soldiers who were tired from all their constant battles but were still soldiers who didn't expect to see a major war any time soon.
Fuck this story for having no good excuses to put a big musical number in the middle of this story. Littlepip literally carries a fucking radio on her wrist, and one of the few un-destroyed buildings still functioning in the post-apocalypse is a high-quality radio DJ tower. Why does the author feel the need to pull shit like this when he could just shoehorn his shitty poetry into another "Velvet and Calamity sing together" or "Littlepip listens to the radio" moment?

>Deadeye's suspects her but thinks her loyalty really is this weak
For the sake of making this as easy as possible for LP, Deadeye' just assumes LP really will work for him but so far has LP said anything like "I want to betray Gawd because I fucking hate Griffons and think you'll pay me more than she said she was going to"?

>"Velvet must appear before the show and sing for me"
I bet this baddie won't think to put a bomb collar on Velvet's neck to be detonated later if Gawd doesn't die or if LP shoots Deadeye'ss's.

>access tool
the pretentious faggot should have just given LP's Pipbuck a USB on a stretchy magical string. WHY DOES HE GIVE NONSENSE HACKING TOOLS TO LP WHILE MAKING EVERY SINGLE LOCK SHE ENCOUNTERS, FROM WALL SAFES AND DOORS TO GRENADE BOXES AND MORE, INTO SOMETHING THAT CAN'T STAND UP TO SOME BOBBY PINS AND MAYBE A SCREWDRIVER TOPS?

>stealthbucks
That reminds me: If invisibility devices are so incredibly useful, why are they so common? If they're so common, where are the raiders/bandits killing from perfect stealth using these things? If they're so common, where are the countermeasures against these things, such as AOE anti-invisibility enchantments or robotic killer guards who can detect invisible foes? Shouldn't a prison turned whatever the fuck it is now have some kind of anti-invisiblefag countermeasure?
The Pip-Buck can detect invisible enemies, marking them as a red dot on the shitty tiny compass like any other foe. Shouldn't a smart invisible foe sit atop a tall mountain surrounded by hostile wildlife, to hide his red marker from Pip-Buck-wearing foes by hiding amongst other easily-avoided non-dangerous markers? That way you're hiding a tree in a forest, by hiding one marker amongst many. And taking advantage of the Pip-Buck's inability to display the elevation of enemy markers.

>Littlepip seemingly has a plan she's not telling the audience or Calamity about by not explaining her real reason for wanting them in the same room
If Littlepoop turns out to have a secret third plan she's really going with while playing every faggot involved in it like a violin, FUCK THIS STORY!!! After all it's gotten away with by making Littlepoop, our viewpoint character, as ignorant about this world as possible, and after all the time it's wasted on LP's generic internal monologue, it has no business trying to pull a fast one on the motherfucking audience like this. And if she's really playing her friends and risking their lives by not telling them about a secret third plan I've forgotten if she actually has or not, fuck this author preemptively because I expect him to forget to make LP's friends significantly mad about being played.
Hollywood's "Magic Trick" style of surprising the audience by not showing you what you need to see before you can see it coming has got to be the laziest writing trick possible.

Based on what we've seen of the story so far, how do you think Littlepip's plan will go?
Btw I just realized something. If LP usually abbreviated her name to LP and considered her shitty real name embarassing, it could be played off as another music reference.

>>294643
Personally I suspect everything will go exactly according to plan in the long term aside from one minor hiccup involving a baddie taking a hostage friend LP is easily able to save anyway.
How common is it for amateur writers to make things far more overcomplicated than they need to be in an attempt to show off?
In a parallel universe this could be one of the fics greatest chapters where after hearing the plan Calamity subverts everyone's expectations by whipping out his shotgun and blasting Deadeyes in the face like gay sucked cocks blast Kkunt in the face at gay bars.

>>294432
>>294454
>>294523

These are good points. Thank you for modifying your posting style to be a little less caustic, the effort shows.

>The way this character talks, with the "Ah" and "Y'all" just doesn't fit the sudden use of the phrase "Non-vital internal organs". It sounds silly. It sounds pretentious. It sounds completely at odds with the lazy and clumsy way of speaking the character's shown so far.
One of the harder things to do when writing is to break away from your own thought process and to get inside the heads of your characters.

It's also difficult to develop individual speaking patterns that feel believable; either you layer the accents and such on too thick (something I think this author does a lot) and it feels unrealistic, or else you don't give the characters enough expression and they all end up speaking in the same voice. You make a good observation here about the raider pony; it's out of character for him to say something like "non-vital organs." That whole bit about non-vital organs struck me as odd too; I wasn't quite sure what the author was trying to get at there, as removing non-vital organs would require both surgical ability and enough medical training to know which organs were vital.

>And then there are LPs Book Brain moments where she assumes that just because a pony mentions Crane he surely must be an immensely important pony you can learm things from, or starts listening to dead pony diary mp3s while sneaking around an ememy base because she craves those stories more than she wants to be able to hear approaching foes.
I would actually still include these under the umbrella of Gamer Brain moments. In particular, the diary entries are a storytelling device that works well in a game but not in a novel.

Linear storytelling in a game is usually seen as a negative because a lot of the entertainment value comes from having the freedom to explore and interact with a fictional world instead of just observing it. A game that is just an interactive movie, where you're watching a story unfold more or less on its own and are only being asked to press a button every now and then, is usually seen as boring for the sake of simplicity I'm going to ignore visual novels and certain categories of adventure games where what I just described is literally the object of the game. However, non-linear storytelling presents some technical challenges for a writer because you have to find a way to break the story into chunks that can be played/seen/read independently of each other in any particular order.

A tried and true method of doing this is to hide little notes and diary entries and things like that, that make no apparent sense out of context, but form a larger picture the more of them you acquire. This can be used to develop any number of backstories and side-stories concurrently with the more or less linear main story that the player is progressing through. However, in a novel there is no reason to do this, since a novel is by definition a linear mode of storytelling; having the main character picking up random fragments of an entirely separate story while a main story is happening just feels odd, and it feels even odder to have the character focusing attention on this apparently irrelevant side story while something important is happening in the real story, ie sneaking around an enemy fortress.

When writing in any medium it's important to remember that each medium has its own advantages and drawbacks, and you need to make sure that your idea works in the medium you're developing it in. If it doesn't, you need to either reevaluate your idea or reevaluate your choice of medium.

>Because when Littlepip hears about something the author found silly - coal powered coal trains - Littlepip needs a drink so she can handle how stupid she finds the thought of a coal powered coal train.
This also is noteworthy because the idea isn't silly in the first place; coal is usually transported by train, and before diesel engines became common coal-powered steam engines were the standard. It doesn't make any less sense than using gasoline trucks to transport tanks of gasoline, or an animal burning calories in order to hunt for food. Unless you're consuming more fuel in transportation than you're able to transport, it makes perfect sense economically to do things this way. This is just one of many things that k "the only reason I haven't killed myself yet is because I can play Fallout while dilating" kat could learn about the world if he ventured outside of his mother's basement for a few minutes.

What is, however, quite silly is the idea of having a team of ponies pulling a 600 ton useless steam engine just so the whistle can be used. However, to the author's credit, I recently rewatched an early MLP episode and noticed pic related, so I think he was just trying to poke fun at that particular scene. I had completely forgotten that this was even in the cartoon. However, this is another example of things not translating between mediums; in a children's cartoon you don't question something like this because it's obviously silly and was obviously meant to be silly, but in a story that's attempting to be serious it's the sort of thing you immediately question if you don't get what it's referencing.

This actually brings up another side point that's worth mentioning: you have to be careful when making pop culture references that your references still work internally within the story. Pop culture fads come and go, and just because people would get your reference at the time of writing doesn't mean it will still be relevant enough to be understood in 15 or 20 years. I had completely forgotten about that ponies-pulling-the-steam-engine bit from the show, but I'm guessing in the early days of the fandom people rewatched the S1 and S2 episodes often enough that they would have just instantly caught that without needing it explained.

>>294647
I talked to a few friends who are really big fans of Fallout Equestria and asked them what they think about some of the criticism and what really hooks them to the story and characters. I don't wish to admonish them but for some the biggest criticisms here are some of the biggest selling points for them.

One said how Little Pip being named after the Pip Buck and it being her cutie mark makes her the Fallout Pony being a ponafied mascot of the franchise and as such a good avatar to be the main character. Talked as well how they enjoy the shootouts with raiders and slavers with her after action looting and browsing of audio files and papers. Said it felt like reading someone playing Fallout and emulates the moment to moment gameplay you'd find in Fallout 3 which makes the world feel more relatable and lived in. They all had similar positive marks about the moments of LP meeting characters like Crane or Deadeyes'sss's (sorry Nigel had to steal that joke you had me cracking up when I saw that one lol) and being able to chat with them and be presented these quests.

I can understand where they are coming from with why they'd enjoy it especially since we were all younger teens riding high on the pony train and Fallout 3 so having something so reminiscent of somethings you enjoy could be really appealing.

Reminds me of something Nigel said though about how Kkat should copy stuff from other games and got me thinking how this 1:1 translation of video game to book doesn't seem like a profitable venture. He mentioned Ace Combat and I feel like while those games have good stories most is due to characters and drama happening in the background more so then the overall conflict. Even then it wouldn't be too fun to follow Trigger's every moment and have paragraphs describing every single manuvers and weapon he uses in a battle or sitting in the hanger debating which special weapon to bring.

Halo is an fps and a direct novelisation of the games with all the gameplay elements described every time would be boring so they focus instead on the background lore and characters you meet or hear about in the games while the combat mostly focuses on how it's affecting the characters mentally and emotionally.

For Fallout I feel like it'd be best to ignore the main character of the video game when adapting it to a story. Never have much of a character and instead your actions help sway the balance of power with factions represented by charismatic characters with an overall theme each game has with the different factions presenting unique and opposing solutions to it. If I read a Fallout New Vegas book I'd say it'd be best to have the story jump between characters of different factions since the stakes are so much larger like Fallout Equestria is while something like Honest Hearts would be best to have a single character we follow who can come across theses relatively smaller conflicts and be presented different view points and watch them struggle to learn from them and try to decide which side to toss their hat into.

Of course this isn't a thread to tell people their stories are absolute shit and no one is allowed to like it but meant to show people how to avoid writing pit falls so I suppose it isn't worth fussing about how Fallout Equestria is or isn't the second coming of pony Jesus.

>>294523
>this fake motivation is too gay for anypony to realistically buy it. travelling cross-country just so you can get some song on the radio? He should at express at least a little skepticism over it, prompting LP to say some edgy shit like "What else will we do with our lives?".
This would make sense in some worlds but probably not in this one.

For instance, if your character lives in 1930s rural America and spends all her free time listening to the radio, and one day decides to go on a journey to find the station that the music she loves is broadcast from in order to get her own voice on the air, that would be a good motivation and could make a good story. This works because for someone living on a farm during the Great Depression, the radio would have been a major source of entertainment, probably the only one available, so a farm girl elevating her favorite radio stars to this mythological level would make sense. It would also make sense to undertake a quest like that, because music was a major commercial enterprise at a time when there was not a lot of practical work available, so becoming a professional singer would be both a realization of a personal dream and a way to escape crippling poverty.

However, in a world like FoE, it doesn't make a ton of sense, as the world appears to be too chaotic for a commercial music business to be in any way practical in fact, I think even having the DJ character in the story to begin with is a bit of a stretch logically. Plus, music seems to be mostly a hobby activity for Velvet; as far as I can tell she considers her true calling to be medicine. In fact, the whole reason she left Stable 2 is because the overmare wanted her to be a pop singer instead of a doctor because cutie marks, which incidentally I still think is a retarded idea. For a hobbyist singer, who left home because she didn't want to be a professional singer, to make a long journey across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, fending off violent raiders and slavers and whatever the fuck else, just to do something that only serves advance the professional music career she doesn't want and shouldn't even be possible to have, is just ridiculous; there are so many WTFs in that sentence I wouldn't even know where to begin addressing them all.

>>294524
>I bet this baddie won't think to put a bomb collar on Velvet's neck to be detonated later if Gawd doesn't die or if LP shoots Deadeye'ss's.
This would have made far more sense than what he actually ends up doing. Also, I notice that the business about Velvet singing for him beforehand never actually takes place as a scene and has no apparent relevance to anything, so I don't see why the author bothered mentioning it at all.

>>294518
>I don't recall if it's pointed out explicitly in the text, but presumably this is the reason that Velvet's pipbuck contained the "CMC3BFF" code to Stable 2's door back at the beginning - because it was passed down to her from the generations that followed Sweebles.
That actually makes sense, but again we have an example of the author doing a piss-poor job of integrating all of these complex ideas into the main story. I had completely forgotten what the password to the door was; in fact I'd completely forgotten how Velvet even escaped. I remember there was some kind of subterfuge that involved giving her PipBuck to LP, but beyond that I've lost track of the details. One of the biggest problems with this story is that it contains too much information about too many different subjects, without any central plot or idea to knit all of it together.

However, here is a counterpoint to this that I thought of:

It's occurred to me more than once that I might be the wrong sort of person to even be reviewing this story in the first place. It was obviously written not just with gamers in mind, but a very specific type of gamer, who plays games obsessively and thoroughly. Though it may sometimes seem like I come down on this story pretty hard for it's gamer-bait moments, it's not my intention to disparage video games in general or to bash gaming as a hobby; I play video games, I dabble in making them, and I have fun doing it. However, I'm definitely not the sort of gamer that kkat is writing for here.

For an RPG style game like Fallout, I usually just play through the main story and call it good, and whatever bonus stuff I find along the way is just extra. I don't really care that much about finding every secret item or unlocking every side quest; once I've played through the main story I just delete my save file and uninstall the game. If I like the game enough to play it again, I'll just start over from the beginning and see if I find anything new the second time around.

However, I know that there are some players who meticulously collect every item and catalog every available piece of information about the game and its world. It's occurred to me recently that such a person might actually enjoy the way this story is written: blasting the reader with word-bukkake consisting of all sorts of random bits of information, and leaving it to them to piece together the larger story it's hinting at. I personally find this infuriating and I'll also note that it's still done poorly here, and also that having a complex and well-thought out backstory doesn't make up for having an illogical, clumsily told main story with poorly-developed main characters, but I can see how a certain type of person might enjoy this kind of writing.

>>294651
Some of what I said here >>294652 applies to this post as well. However, I will add that while I don't have a problem with games in general, and I've never played any of the Fallout games so I can't comment on them, I think part of the reason I have a visceral dislike for this story is that I have a visceral dislike for the type of obsessive gamer this story is being written for. Your post here actually illustrates several reasons why.

>One said how Little Pip being named after the Pip Buck and it being her cutie mark makes her the Fallout Pony being a ponafied mascot of the franchise and as such a good avatar to be the main character.
This is fanboy thinking at its absolute worst. Ponifying things is fun, but just because something can be ponified doesn't mean that pony will work as a character. Littlepoop is a violent murderhobo with a nonsensical cutie mark who uses her generic non-values as an excuse to murder nearly everypony she encounters while obnoxiously moralizing about it. If she's the ponification of Fallout, it doesn't reflect well on Fallout.

>Said it felt like reading someone playing Fallout and emulates the moment to moment gameplay you'd find in Fallout 3 which makes the world feel more relatable and lived in.
I've heard people say this as well, and again I think it's just the particular personality type that both the game and the story appeals to; I'm not that sort of person or player, so I don't understand the appeal. However, it's telling that it makes the world feel "relatable" and "lived in" for them. Imo if a person finds a novel about a game world to be more relatable than a novel about a realistic world, it's probably a sign that they are putting too much time and energy into gaming.

>Reminds me of something Nigel said though about how Kkat should copy stuff from other games and got me thinking how this 1:1 translation of video game to book doesn't seem like a profitable venture. He mentioned Ace Combat and I feel like while those games have good stories most is due to characters and drama happening in the background more so then the overall conflict. Even then it wouldn't be too fun to follow Trigger's every moment and have paragraphs describing every single manuvers and weapon he uses in a battle or sitting in the hanger debating which special weapon to bring.

>Halo is an fps and a direct novelisation of the games with all the gameplay elements described every time would be boring so they focus instead on the background lore and characters you meet or hear about in the games while the combat mostly focuses on how it's affecting the characters mentally and emotionally.
The way you'd approach novelizing a video game would depend on the type of game it is and how much of an actual story it has to begin with. As you say, with something like Halo or Ace Combat, you have gameplay that probably wouldn't work for a story, but the backstory of the game is rich enough to draw from.

Games that are almost entirely story-focused, say something like The Last Express, could probably be novelized directly without changing very much at all I actually was able to pass Language Arts in 7th grade by sharting out an "original" short story that was literally just a walkthrough of an adventure game I was playing at the time. On the other hand, if you tried to novelize something primitive like Asteroids or Space Invaders you'd pretty much be writing an original story from scratch. Again, the trick when adapting one medium to another is to keep in mind which elements work universally and which elements are specific to the medium you're adapting from; omit the latter, focus on the former.

[YouTube] Fry battles space invaders while listening to RUSH [Embed]

>>294647
I'll mention this because I want to check if you think it's as brilliant as I do when it comes to integrating narrative with information revealed naturally over time.
Devil May Cry 1 has journal entries made by Dante, the playable character and professional demon hunter, about the island castle he explores and the lore he uncovers and the monsters he fights over the course of the game. As you fight enemies and notice things like "guns fuck haunted puppets up because these demons haven't seen the outside world since 1250 and have no idea what guns are" and "fire spiders are immune to grenades" and "you can interrupt the Nightmare's sword strikes with your own" he will make a note of this for later. He also records notes about the lore and objects he finds, and this can help a stumped player figure out the "take object x to place y and press use" puzzles.

As for the train thing I don't think he was trying to mock it. I think he was trying to justify it, even though steam whistles only work when steam trains have enough steam. He wanted to justify something dumb in canon without realizing his train lacks the steam needed to use its whistle therefore his explanation could not work.
A lot of fanfic writers have this weird habit of trying to justify all the silly seeming things in a show when writing a fanfic for it. But only the things that seem silly to them and feel like they need explaining.
So they will type up some headcanons that claim Pinkie gained her reality warping powers from being half Discord.
Or they'll claim the Gym Leaders in pokemon handicap themselves by exclusively using pokemon of one type because the law says they have to and the only reason those adult professional Gym Leaders regularly lose to 10 year olds is because they are literally paid to do so while giving those kids a tough yet fair challenge appropriate for their skill level.
Or claim that infamously memed "Naruto Run" is actually a good idea for magical ninja athletes who accelerate from 0 to 70 mph in 2 seconds and usually keep hidden blades stuffed up their sleeves that would fly everywhere if they bent and pumped their limbs like proper olympic sprinters.
These examples are specific to three different franchises but it isn't restricted to these franchises. Good moments of headcanoning can help make the setting feel more realistic but bad headcanoning just wastes time or draws attention to dumb overlooked moments without patching them up.
Getting it wrong seems to be a writing mistake made by writers who want to tell you all their headcanons and make someone else's setting into their own even if it gets in the way of telling a story in that setting.
And of course it can be taken way too far.
It's one thing to try and handwave away some episode of FIM where everyone was uncharacteristically awful to their closest friends by saying everypony was tired and cranky from a late night party yesterday.
And sometimes your story relies on something that was barely used or barely explained or glossed over in canon, something you need to clearly define. Like the relationships between different countries and factions that were barely mentioned in the show.
But when you start trying to retcon tiny unimportant details with overly long explanations or take the magic and wonder out of settings by trying to give absolutely everything an arbitrary scientific nonmagical explanation that's when it goes a bit too far. Kojima ruined his franchise by trying to blame all the supernatural elements on nanomachine parasites. When an author goes down the same route by claiming Ghastly the ghost pokemon from Pokemon is actually an entirely magicless farting bat coated in hallucinogenic methane whose big smile and big eyes are actually markings on its chest, this...
While I personally dislike it when its taken that far I still understand the urge to try to make their settings more coherent and consistent and "realistic" and I respect authors that have pulled it off well.

>emulates the moment to moment gameplay you'd find in Fallout 3 which makes the world feel more relatable and lived in
A world feels lived in when things happen on their own without the direct involvement of main characters, the world makes sense, and NPCs have a life of their own beyond the PCs. The world of Deus Ex felt lived in. Remember when you read that email from your co-worker who cant spell and wanted a head gun? Remember the Domino Effect in Mass Effect's worldbuilding where so much was a consequence of something else? Remember any setting that hasnt been swallowed up by a handful of important families everything must be related to? A world feels lived in when it has people innovating and trying and failing or succeeding instead of just sitting around with quirky gimmicks waiting for the player character to show up.

Btw that theoretical Ace Combat fic sounds fun to me. Describing the tenseness and panic or calm and flow state of a pilot could help add more emotional weight to things. Saying Trigger is sad IRL out of the plane could make things deeper. Like that Halo novelization where MC only feels happy on the battlefield following simple instructions.
Plus I always liked moments in stories where people weigh the pros and cons of picking certain weapons over others. Reminds me of those hours wasted fretting over teambuilding in pokemon. Damn whoever keeps refusing to expand pokemon team sizes beyond 6. Been reading a lot of military books lately about badasses and guns and special forces teams and so on but I understand this stuff's boring to some.

>>294652
You and I aren't in the target audiences of Fallout Equestria or Harry Potter, but that doesn't mean we can't critique these stories on what they offer to people they aren't pandering to.
Come to think of it there was a time when I was in the target audience for this fic, but then I read better stuff and learned more about writing and got higher standards.

>>294516

>Velvet Remedy opened one of her saddleboxes, pulling out a notebook. “What songs will I do? Most of my music isn’t really raider-appropriate. Somehow, I don’t think songs about peace and love, nobility or freedom are really their fare.”
And right on cue, Velvet chucks her principles straight out the window. Seriously, bitch; are you not going to raise even a single tiny objection to this?

This is exactly what she said to Littlepoop just a few short hours earlier:

>“Littlepip, it’s one thing to kill in self defense. Or to protect others. But this...” She turned on me with a stare that could petrify the Overmare herself. “This. Is. Murder!”
Clearly, Velvet feels quite strongly about this. But surely, if LP has a good reason to kill Deadeyes, like avenging the horribly slaughtered family of an innocent little filly, that would make it justice, right?

>Velvet shook her mane. “Revenge, you mean.”
Well, it's clear that Velvet's principles are written in stone. So naturally, when LP returns and asks her to perform a crucial role in her plan to assassinate Deadeyes, I'm sure she'll just flat out refuse, right?

>Velvet Remedy was checking down her list of songs. “Well, that one’s out. That one... might work. Oh, that could be fun, but it was originally meant as a duet. (I read in an old magazine that Pinkie Pie and Vinyl Scratch once performed it at Hoofbeats.) I could tweak it for one pony, but it really requires musical accompaniment. Maybe a Velvet Remedy original? How about...?”
In these troubled times of chaos and uncertainty, it's so refreshing to see a mare as committed to her principles as Velvet clearly is.

>I blinked, remembering, “Well, Deadeye’s expecting two songs before the attack. And he says one of them has to be a song by Sweetie Belle.”
Ffs, is his name Deadeye or Deadeyes? It isn't this goddamned hard to use apostrophes correctly.

>I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. As much as I adored Velvet Remedy’s music, and fell in love with her in every song, tonight we were just looking for a distraction. It didn’t have to be perfect.
"Tee hee, oh Velvet, you are just too adorable. Your willingness to berate me for being a cold-blooded killer one moment and then immediately flush your beliefs down the toilet and start sperging about which songs you should perform for a room full of actual cold-blooded killers just gets my peepee place all slick and tingly. I have never wanted to lick your labia so much as I do right now." Ugh.

Believe it or not, it actually gets worse from here:

>Velvet Remedy looked playfully insulted. “Why of course, dear. There won’t be an eye for anypony else in that room.” I believed it. I believed Velvet Remedy could keep every eye on her even if Ditzy Doo was in the audience. Suddenly, Velvet Remedy gasped. “Every eye! I’ll need a bath! Oh no, what am I going to wear!?”
"Tee hee, oh Velvet, you're so endearingly adorable, I don't even care how lacking in substance your character is. I wish I could just wear your labia on my face all day every day until the end of forever."

>“I can help with that.”
>Velvet cocked her head. “No thank you. I can bathe myself quite well enough, dear.”
>I stammered, flushing hotly. That wasn’t what I meant, but now that she had said it, I couldn’t drive the image out of my mind. My heart fluttered in my chest.
"Tee hee, oh Velvet, I only wanted to help you pick out some clothes, but here you've gone and flustered me, you silly delicious filly you. Now I'm going to have to stammer adorably while the midwit reader base for this dreck cackles over this delightfully erotic misunderstanding. If I could have one wish, it would be to have your labia surgically grafted to my lips, so that I might lick you until the day they bury us together."

Blecch.

>Calamity neighed and turned away. “I’ll give you two some private time for...” he waved a hoof between us, “...whatever this is.” He made a quick exit, muttering something about helping Gawd’s ponies get their magical plasma cannon up and running before Red Eye’s forces got here. I wasn’t paying any attention. I only had eyes for Velvet Remedy, and I could feel my face burning.
The author is making a clumsy attempt at advancing the romantic plot here. This is meant to be the part where the two characters who are supposed to eventually fall in love start awkwardly brushing hands accidentally, or stumbling over words while talking to each other. It works when done right, but it's not being done right here.

The way this kind of thing works in your average modern-day love story is you have two characters who start off as strangers, or occasionally adversaries. They're presented as separate people with separate lives and goals, but usually with some deep-rooted unhappiness; they're each unhappy in their current relationship, or they're both lonely and trying to meet someone, that sort of thing. Eventually they are brought together through some chance encounter, and strike up some kind of platonic relationship. This can take many different forms: sometimes they end up working together for some reason, or they're competing with each other, or the girl is a platonic friend helping the guy win some girl who is clearly wrong for him (or vice versa), etc etc. If anyone reading still has an uncancelled Netflix account, you can pretty much just go to the RomCom section and grab any random title you like as an example; they all basically follow the same plot model:

1. Introduce two people who are clearly right for each other but don't know it yet
2. Have them meet
3. Create some external situation where they are forced to spend time together for awhile
4. Develop chemistry between them
5. ???
6. Profit

As I said, this is a standard plot model that is very easy to follow, but the crucial point that determines whether the story will succeed or fail is step 4. There needs to be some kind of chemistry between the two characters, either positive or negative. Running out of space, hold on.

I figured out who this story was really meant for-
The kind of tasteless fake nerd who thought Ready Player One was a good movie and thought Fallout 3 was better than 2 for being "bigger".
The kind of faggot who thinks Skyrim is better than The Witcher 3 because he beat one in 500 hours and put over 9000 hours into Skyrim and still hasn't permanently finished any of the endlessly repeatable Radiant Quests or figured out that they cannot be permanently completed.
This story isn't just trying to out-edge Fallout 3. It's doing so in a way that appeals to the kind of consoomer who bought a VaultBoy Funko Pop even though the Vault Boy was designed to parody that kind of consumerist iconography by contrasting it with the gory grim world and images of Vault Boy punting pregnant women in the baby bulge.
Remember how in Fallout 2 the further your character went south, the more your dialogue would change from that of an innocent ignorant tribal savage to a snarky veteran who has seen it all? Character progression like that is alien to this story. From day 1 Littlepip can scam slavers with overly elaborate plots and negotiate with robbers who should know better and correct pro raiders on how to hold hostages correctly.
It's like it was written in a consoomerist completionist trance. When I obsess over games I try to figure out how to get the most of them and master the mechanics for optimal efficiency and style and fun. When these fags play games they only touch shallow AAA shlock and grind until they tell themselves they have gotten to the good parts by getting past the slow dull prologues and tutorials for the dull and slow.
Fallout Equestria was written for the kind of people who would have taken up CelestAI on her offer if she existed, and would have ended up blind fanboys of that fic instead of this one if they read it first.

>>294656

Positive romantic chemistry would be a situation where the two characters get along with each other and clearly enjoy each other's company, but there is some barrier preventing it from developing into romance. Often this involves another person, who is usually the significant other of whoever the protagonist's love interest is. For instance, if I were writing a RomCom film called Sweet Titty Bunt Cake starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, I might create a situation where Tom's character and Meg's character end up as business partners in a failing cake shop. They clearly get along with each other and have a good rapport, but Tom's attention is focused on pleasing his stuck-up, selfish, arrogant fiance who is clearly wrong for him, and so he never notices poor Meg in her paint-spattered overalls and thick black nerd glasses, whom he sees as just a friend and business partner.

For a negative chemistry situation, I might write a film called Little Cock Surprise, in which Meg Ryan is trying to keep her family's failing chicken farm afloat, and Tom Hanks plays the cocky pun intentional CEO of a multinational chicken conglomerate who is trying to buy her out. In this situation, the barrier to their romance is the situation itself: they are positioned to be bitter enemies, and will frequently clash. However, as they interact and spend time together, they realize that they have more in common than they think, and eventually love will blossom.

The point of all this is that in order to make a romance story work, you need to have two characters who each have enough personality to be interesting on their own, make the audience like both of them enough that they will want to see them end up together, and then put them in a situation where some obstacle needs to be overcome in order for that to happen. The prerequisite is that the two characters must both be interesting and likable, and there must be interesting chemistry between them. Just writing two characters who are attracted to each other and having them fall in love doesn't work, you have to make the audience give a shit. People don't want stories about normal, functional humans having normal, boring relationships, they want to see the plain-Jane girl oust the head cheerleader to win the captain of the football team; they want to see the hunky single dad stop mourning his dead wife and find happiness with the quirky shy girl who works at the bookstore. Learning this is the crucial difference between writing the RomComs that middle-aged cat ladies cream themselves to, and writing the ones that end up being broadcast on Hallmark Channel at 3 in the morning, when the cat ladies are already snoring on the couch with an empty bottle of chardonnay at their feet. I feel like I'm starting to veer off topic a little bit.

Anyway, point is, if the Littlepoop x Velvet Remedy story were a RomCom, it would be a snoozer, and the cat ladies' private parts would be as dry as the Sahara. The reason is that k "you will never be a real cat lady" kat missed both targets: neither of his characters are very interesting (Velvet is a particularly bad character, for reasons I've already gone over), and there is no significant chemistry between them. Ironically, he actually has a pretty good setup for negative chemistry here: if Velvet actually gave a shit about her own ideals and stuck to them, she would be constantly butting heads with Littlepoop over her murderhobo behavior.

As I've said before, the author seems to have deliberately set things up so their values clash: Velvet is a pacifist who believes that violence is never justified, and so she tolerates even ponies like the slavers, who engage in business that is probably sort of reprehensible to her. Littlepoop is an idealist who feels that any action is justified if it achieves a benevolent end, so she makes it her business to murderhobo her way around Equestria, rooting out evil wherever she finds it. My suspicion is that Velvet's flip-flopping on her ideals was actually the author attempting to show her as conflicted: she thinks the slavers are evil, but she also thinks violence is evil, so she can't decide which way to go. The problem is, he doesn't do a particularly good job of writing her, and so she comes across as an insincere hypocrite instead. Littlepoop, for her part, just comes across as insane and poorly developed. Despite being the narrator of the story, she never really explains her beliefs to the reader; I guess we're just supposed to assume that her reasons for wanting to take down slaver colonies and murder raiders are obvious. However, this basically robs her of any opportunity she might have had for serious depth and places her in Dudley Do-Right territory; she's the hero who does good because it's good, and fights evil because it's evil. This kind of hero is almost always dull.

This lack of development saps any energy that the interactions between these two characters might have had. As such, not only does the reader have no reason to care whether or not they get together, there's no reason to even believe that they might. Apart from Littlepoop's occasional comments and innuendos that indicate she's attracted to Velvet, what chemistry has there been between the two of them? What indication have we had that anything will ever come out of this one-sided attraction that Littlepoop has? Hell, it's honestly not even that convincing as a one-sided attraction; Littlepoop is always either fawning over Velvet like a lovesick puppy or berating her for not being murderhobo enough for the murderhobo club, but she almost never tries to strike up a conversation or hit on her. Once again, I get the impression the author is trying to show conflicted feelings in Littlepoop, but once again he mostly sucks at it.

>>294658

Anyway, there's also this:

>“I...” I stomped. “I meant, I have the perfect thing for you to wear!” Focusing my magic, I opened my saddlebags and slid out the most beautiful dress in the wasteland, my find from Carousel Boutique.
Holy shit, that's the dress she found in Rarity's old trunk clear back in Chapter 2 or some shit. I'm amazed I even remember that. She's been carrying that thing around with her all this time? Stuffed into her saddlebag along with ammunition and magic statues and whatever the fuck else she's carrying? That dress has got to be a filthy, wrinkled mess by now.

Page break. The next scene opens at the concert, which apparently they were able to organize, choreograph, find backing musicians for, and promote within the space of two hours. Velvet is onstage singing, and Littlepoop is in the audience ogling her instead of paying attention to whatever retarded murderhobo stuff she's supposed to be doing right now. The subchapter opens with some lyric snippets from Velvet's song:

>“How can I fix this? How many times must I try?
>Please, this time, let me get it right...
>Get it ri-i-ight!”
If only the author thought this way about his writing process.

>I crouched on the balcony, covered in the ever-disgusting mattress cover.
She's still carrying that goddamn jizz-blanket around with her? I hope she wasn't keeping it in the same part of her saddlebag as Velvet's dress. Anyway, why does she even need that thing? I thought she was going to use the StealthBuck to stay invisible.

>Deadeyes hadn’t been stupid. When I entered the balcony, I found a note had been left for me: One shot to the target, one to the table. The stage is rigged to explode if you shoot anything else.
Deadeyes not being stupid for once is probably the most shocking plot twist this author has yet thrown at us. I'm a little unclear on how specifically this would work, though. By "shoot anything else," does he just mean that everything in the room except the table she's supposed to shoot at and presumably Gawd's head is somehow wired as a trigger to the explosives under the stage? That seems pretty logistically complicated to set up, not to mention the fact that she could easily miss unintentionally. Also, if the stage blows up, wouldn't that kill everypony in the room, including Deadeyes? Seems a little self-defeating.

Also, this doesn't in any way shape or form protect Deadeyes from getting shot. If I'm understanding the situation correctly, aside from the table Deadeyes is at, everything else is wired as a trigger, but couldn't she still shoot Deadeyes without hitting anything else besides the table in front of him? I get what the author is trying to do here; he just wants to have Deadeyes take extra precaution to ensure she won't doublecross him, by making it so if LP kills Deadeyes she also kills Velvet. This is the first intelligent thing Deadeyes has done in this story and I want to applaud it. However, a much saner way to accomplish this would be to have a single trigger for the stage bomb that is wired to Deadeyes himself, and if his blood pressure drops below a certain level the bomb will go off; this would ensure that if LP kills him, Velvet would also die, and it has the added benefit of being actually somewhat plausible.

>Celestia burn him! Even if I could get a message to Calamity, he was no better at disarming explosives than I was. (Out of petty spite, I stole his copy of Applied Gemstones.)
I don't quite understand what stealing Applied Gemstones has to do with anything here. Is it supposed to be a book on disarming explosives? Would it have been useful here? This is either a joke that didn't land, a reference I didn't get, or both. Anyway, if I'm understanding this correctly, the current situation is that Deadeyes has some kind of magical bomb that will go off if LP shoots anything except Gawd and the table, mechanism of operation presently unknown. Whatever; let's just roll with it.

Anyway, I'll actually give the author some credit here: if removed from its completely nonsensical context, this scene is decently written. He evokes a striking image of Velvet giving a moving performance, and the mood and atmosphere is appropriate. Unfortunately, though, it's not quite good enough to distract the reader from how completely ridiculous the story itself has gotten.

Velvet finishes a heart-wrenching rendition of a heart-wrenching song, and manages to wrench enough hearts to draw thunderous applause from the crowd. She then launches into an uptempo number to get everypony dancing and shouting and whatnot.

>My ears were up; my eyes widened. And for a moment, I completely forgot about the sniper rifle at my side. All that mattered was that I didn’t recognize this music. I’d never heard this song!
Jesus Christ, Littlepoop, every time I think you can't possibly suck any more than you do already, you manage to surprise me.

>By Celestia’s grace! She’s going to set off any explosives under that stage herself!
One would assume that this line was not meant to be taken literally, but apparently it is. LP is now genuinely concerned that Velvet will somehow accidentally blow herself up by getting everyone to clap too loud, or something. This just makes the already questionable issue of how the bomb trigger works even more questionable.

Anyway, she decides that now is the time to finally do the thing she came here to do, so she fires a shot into Gawd's table, shoots Deadeyes in the brain, and then telekinetically lifts Velvet off of the stage so she doesn't get all blowed up, all in the same instant apparently. The mysteriously-triggered bomb that Deadeyes set up predictably detonates, injuring Gawd with shrapnel (this could easily have killed her) and flat-out killing the entire front row of ponies (who were just innocent bystanders, btw; if Velvet Remedy doesn't chastise LP about this later then she's even more of a hypocrite than usual).

>>294658
>People don't want stories about normal, functional humans having normal, boring relationships
Well, as you said once, people are different. I guess this could be true for the general populace but speaking for myself I do enjoy the idea and stories that is about already established couples. Perhaps I misunderstand what you are saying here because I read this without the context of the other posts..

>>294651
>Reminds me of something Nigel said though about how Kkat should copy stuff from other games and got me thinking how this 1:1 translation of video game to book doesn't seem like a profitable venture.
Something that is both a roundabout credit to FoE and an absolute nightmare for those attempting to untangle copy/pasting from original content is that FoE isn't a direct translation of a game's plot into a story. FoE's story draws major elements from Fallout 1, 2, 3 and NV and blends them together into a single giant complex clusterfuck, with a few original elements thrown in as well. Amusingly, if you're familiar with what's being referenced you can often tell precisely where Kkat stopped aping one of the games because a nominally intelligent character or idea suddenly takes a violent swerve into idiotville.

For example, as mentioned in an earlier post, Fallout 3 begins with your character leaving their home vault in search of their missing father. Much later in the game, you find him and learn his secret - he was never a resident of the vault, and brought you there as a baby for your own safety. Once your character was old enough not to need him, he returned to the wasteland to resume work on his secret project to purify the Potomac river. And now that you've found him he wants your help to make that dream a reality. Writing quality aside, there's the skeleton of a story there.

In FoE, Pip leaves her home stable in search of her missing crush. Once she finds Velvet, she quickly learns that Velvet's secret is... well, she's a jackass with vague, wishy-washy principles who wants a career that makes no sense. And that's about it. But she's still her crush. So... low effort girlwank. Hooray?

The main villains of FoE are prime examples of this, once we get to them. Eventually.

>>294658
Romance writing is not my specialty but would I be correct to assume that while LP shallowly likes Velvet for being pretty, she lacks any deeper appreciation for her and Velvet lacks a deep appreciation for and bond with Littlepip and that's one major reason why this sucks?
Velvet is a popstar turned wasteland survivalist. Her attempt to go solo got her captured by slavers and forced to heal slavers and slaves and fucking sing for the slavers. She got her ass saved by a fucking nopony whose life she was willing to ruin unintentionally with the "remove my pipbuck" bit.
Picture a scene where at first Velvet barely recognizes LP or remember who took her PipBuck off. But when LP explains how she was blamed for the disappearance of the stables idol Velvet realizes she was a stuck up selfish cunt and cries because she is not used to the idea that she might be a flawed imdividual who needs improvement.
Velvet should not have the capacity to smile right now. Or flirt. She should be a changed mare. An innocent soul full of regret wrapped into a clusterfuck of a plan that could get them all killed. She should cry into LPs shoulder and need a pep talk. Shouldn't the thought of singing for hardened killers remind her of how she was forced to sing for slavers and fill her with disgust?

Also I cant stop imagining LP tying that jizzed matress cover around her neck like a kids superhero cape.

Also holy fuck Deadeyes wrote instructions for LP. She could pin this whole op on him using that note as evidence. Dead-Eyed Deadeye Deadeyes'ss is retarded. Kkunt is retarded for not turning this inconsistent name into a joke where his name turns out to be Deadeye Deadeyes.
Everyone loves when you retcon what looks like a mistake into something intentional.
Like how at first those scenes in Kingdom Hearts 3582 Days where Xion has her hood up in some camera angle shots and her hood down in other camera angle shots and her hood abruptly switches from up to down multiple times in a conversation seems like a genuine mistake. Then you realize all camera angles from the main hero Roxas's perspective show Xion with her hood down and camera angles from his friend Axel's perspective show the hood up. At least until Axel starts seeing her face too, after spending enough time with her. Spoiler alert it's because Xion is no i the imaginary number. She is magical puppet and the face you see on her depends on you not her. Deep symbolism. *sips purified water* yep that was a good game.

>>294654
That's a good post.
>A lot of fanfic writers have this weird habit of trying to justify all the silly seeming things in a show when writing a fanfic for it. But only the things that seem silly to them and feel like they need explaining.
It's a simple format that seems easy.
X wonders why Z happens/is.
Tell or show happens what Z is.
The problem is fitting incompatible worlds together (unless that is supposed to be a key element done well). Besides as you've said they tend to do this poorly.
When it's done that is internally consistent, believable, and supports story elements such as characters it's great. The world feels lived in.
The other problem is they feel like they have to have those questions answered fully. Especially if they can't do the explanation justice, and it actively and passively harms the story.

>>294653
I've read quite a few game-like stories and to be honest I'm not the target for this fiction either.
The 'character' Littlepip is a meta representation of a let's play for Fallout and a showcase of the author's 'modded' world.
The closest I know of is Mass Effect stories where they detail the past in bullet points and dates.
The punch line is yes it's Equestria AND it's Fallout 3 gameplay, wouldn't that be fun. In Fallout Equestria you too could wear a jizz stained bed too.

>>294663
>The 'character' Littlepip is a meta representation of a let's play for Fallout and a showcase of the author's 'modded' world.
This is probably the best succinct description of Littlepip I've ever seen. Her seemingly arbitrary morality and casual approach to bloodshed make a lot more sense if you view her as a self-insert for the author. With that in mind, of course the fight scenes are bad and the characters are bland - we're reading the written equivalent of a manchild bashing his action figures together.

>>294663
Which school of fanfic thought do you prefer?
>we never see a hospital in Canterlot so they must canonically lack hospitals and some OC doctor is a hero for wanting to make his own hospital in Canterlot and a baddie gets in his way for some reason
>Canterlot now has a hospital because it would be silly if this major city lacked one and the story requires one to already exist

>>294713
I prefer the world as being internally consistent with its story. The story, characters, magic, rules, and world come first,. While those two choices could make good stories, that requires going about it with respect is a key point.
>We never see Canterlot hospitals, but we know Ponyville has a rather large one, and actual vet offices.
>In Ponyville makes a lot of sense it's a frontier town next to dangrous areas.
>It stands to reason to keep the city aesthetic consistent those hospitals are harder to find for someone not ingrained with that culture.
>Not only that we don't have a reason to see a Canterlot hospital.
Another option
>The royal castle and guard houses also double as a hospital.
>Most 'guards' are emergency specialists keeping to the ancient royal theme.
Or even
>Canterlot doesn't need hospitals. Or they don't have it for some good reasons.
>It's relatively safe, when hostile forces take Canterlot they are on the side of a mountain.
>Without easy access to medical supplies ponies can bleed out the enemy and bring them under siege.
>It's a means of last resort.
Both points could be true.
>Canterlot is designed to fall when hostile forces take over and when various pony groups decide to attack as well.
>Hospitals are also like bunkers where it's not above ground to prevent damage to patients, and emergency key figures.
Or any number of reasons.
>Both situations could be true
>The 'hero' is trying to force an above ground hospital, yet meets resistance along the way.
>First bureaucracy, then some key figures, then guards 'harass' him, finally the final boss appears Celestia sets things straight with the pony.
>Along the way he starts to make illegal contacts to force his idea into reality.
Or another inversion
>Docs make house calls
>and they have lots of magic
>New doctor that transferred from somewhere else is feeling the culture shock.
Or
>They are there the audience never sees it and attention is not brought to it.
>Also it can be done with we're in a hospital in Canterlot and that's all that needs to be said any other relevant point could be brought up if that enhances the story.
<Or
>They arn't there heres a fun tale about it.
Finally (not the only option left either) it's still not important or relevant enough to go about discussing in the story anyway.
<Also Magic ain't gotta explain shit
<Also Magic gonna explain that shit
<Also Magic why not both?
<How about none or all of the above.

Do you think the story should have focused harder on LP GRADUALLY losing her stable poner sensibilities to embrace Wasteland morality so when she meets Velvet who has had less character growth than her, they argue?

>>294728
The story (as a story without other considerations) without a major rewrite or change (or fixing it up everywhere) in at least one kind of area with everything existing as is it won't really stack up one way or another.
Stacking shit up in different ways gives you differnt looking shit stacks, but it's all shit. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but the ooint remains. There are tiny points that glimmer with hope and possibility, but not enough. Unless someone is specifically looking for that.
Not to say it's irredeemable or the worst fiction ever it does have it's flaws.
As just an idea Fallout Equestria serves it's purpose with a hobbled step.
For the very niche audience it has that certain quality they desired to see that other works just didn't have (or they desired more of that quality in different fiction). Towards that end it did its job.
I understand that. Especially since I'm more focused and geared toward finding those ideas, concepts, and imagined world stuffs.

>>294728
>>294729
The main issue with FoE so far is that it has three things with which to keep the reader invested: the plot, the characters, and the videogame references. Videogame references mean absolutely nothing to people who aren't intimately familiar with the game in question. The plot is more or less nonexistent so far, aside from a few as-of-yet inconsequential hints that larger things are going on. Pip and friends haven't really been presented with a goal, so they're wandering from place to place and addressing local problems in a sort of episodic sense.

This leaves the characters themselves as the sole point of interest, which is why it's so frustrating that Pip is an empty shell for Kkat to insert his big idea of the day into and that Calamity/Velvet are both very wishy-washy with no consistent opinions or motives. And as we'll learn later in the story, their character (both personal and moral) and friendship becomes vital to the plot. It's a shame, because all the makings of a strong group dynamic are at least potentially there and could, at least in theory, carry the story's early worldbuilding.

Littlepip is the curious, naive newcomer and audience vehicle. Calamity is the hardened wasteland veteran. Velvet is the beautiful dreamer who struggles to reconcile her lofty principles with harsh reality. It wouldn't be hard to build a dynamic there if only they could dismount Pip's throbbing murderboner for five minutes. If these were the case FoE would at least have the foundations of a solid core cast:
- Pip's kleptomania needs to lead us to things that are both interesting and relevant, not vague breadcrumbs for things that will become meaningful-ish in hindsight dozens of chapters later, as well as putting her into actual trouble that she can't handle.
- Calamity's experience needs to come into play to cover for when the two girls' unfamiliarity with the wastes put them in danger, while his jaded nature blinds him to solutions the others can see easily.
- Velvet needs a defined set of principles that are grounded in something meaningful and the spine to actually stand by them, for good and ill.

Is it correct to assume the best way to tell an episodic story is to establish the characters and goals, and then make every episode one more step on their road to their final destination so that everything at least slightly feels like progress?
Kkat even has two perfect excuses for LP to put the main plot on hold and stop to help out random noponies in the form of LPs completionism and Velvets moralizing doctor quest.

>>294732
>Pip and friends haven't really been presented with a goal, so they're wandering from place to place and addressing local problems in a sort of episodic sense.

>>294739
>Is it correct to assume the best way to tell an episodic story is to establish the characters and goals, and then make every episode one more step on their road to their final destination so that everything at least slightly feels like progress?
>Kkat even has two perfect excuses for LP to put the main plot on hold and stop to help out random noponies in the form of LPs completionism and Velvets moralizing doctor quest.

An episodic story can be a good vehicle if you've got a lot of ideas as this author seems to, but there still needs to be a larger plot that explains what the characters are trying to achieve overall and why they are traveling together. Even if you're going to take awhile to build up to the main plot, the characters still need to have goals that drive them from episode to episode, otherwise you're better off writing a bunch of disconnected short stories featuring the same characters, that can be read independently of each other.

With FoE, the initial goal driving Littlepoop was to find Velvet Remedy. Even though she didn't really do much to look for her and most of her early adventures had nothing to do with this quest, it served at least as a rudimentary motivation for her to be out wandering around in the Wasteland. However, this goal was accomplished rather early on, and there's no secondary goal after this to keep them moving. The Appleoosa escape basically wrapped up the "find Velvet" story, and after that Littlepoop just wants to go to Fillydelphia to beat up more slavers, which I wouldn't really count as a goal since there's no more reason for her to do that then there is for her to go look for the radio DJ or do any of the other dumb things she wants to do.

There's not even really any reason for these three ponies to be traveling together; they just do because the author wants them as a party. Velvet left the Stable on her own and never asked LP to follow her, and despite LP's crush the two of them don't have any strong connection to each other. They weren't friends beforehand, they don't particularly need each other, and for reasons I've gone over exhaustively Velvet should logically have some strong reservations about traveling with a pony who solves every problem with excessive violence and goes looking for trouble at every turn. Calamity, meanwhile, has no connection to either of them, as well as a life of his own in NA that he can return to. So, what's the glue that holds this group together? Where are they going and why are they all going there together? The author can't answer this, let alone explain why they are getting involved in larger events like this scrap between Topaz and Red Eye.

Writing an episodic story where a group of friends and/or comrades wanders around the countryside fighting evil is a tried and true story format that can work with any number of different settings and genres and types of characters. However, it needs a few things. There needs to be some common goal between the party members that gives them a reason to work together, or else they need to be an established group that formed before the story began. Also, not only does there need to be a series of goals that drives them from episode to episode, but the goals need to lead to each other, and ultimately to the main plot.

For instance, if LP's initial goal was to find Velvet, and then after finding Velvet found out that Velvet had some significant goal of her own that she had left the stable for, and decided to follow her because she was infatuated with her, that would serve well enough to explain where the group is going and why they are a group. For Calamity's presence to make sense, he would need to either have some personal connection to one of the two characters (maybe he has a thing for Littlepoop the way Littlepoop has a thing for Velvet) or else has some external goal of his own that aligns with Velvet's. From here, they would travel together to pursue Velvet's and possibly Calamity's goal, and accomplishing this would lead to a third thing that would involve all three of them together.

>>294659

>I activated the Stealth Buck and galloped silently towards the stairs.
Why is she just now activating the Stealth Buck? I'm still not clear on that. Seems to me if she has a device that makes her invisible, and she doesn't want to be seen for the duration of the concert, the most sensible thing to do would be to just use the device and become invisible for the duration of the concert. Instead, she chose to hide under the jizz-blanket for most of the show, breathing in the warm musky scent of raider spooge while she clopped to Velvet's singing, and then switched on the invisibility-device when she made her escape.

Part of the problem is that we still don't know what the limits of these Stealth Bucks are (or even what sort of device they are in the first place, but I've completely given up hope of ever getting a straight answer on that). If there was a time limit on the invisibility that exceeded the amount of time she needed to be invisible, what she did would make sense. If the device is single-use or requires a charge or something in between uses, then what she did would make sense. Based on how these types of devices work in games, I suspect that both of these conditions are probably true; however, the author has not established either of them as fact, so it remains an ambiguous point.

>From below, I could hear somepony yelling, “It’s the slavers! They’re attacking early!”
>Completely fair assumption, I thought as I hit the stairs.
Yes, completely fair assumption. Those slavers are just plain rude, attacking ahead of schedule like that. I'm sure nopony even noticed the little murderhobo conspicuously perched in the balcony with a jizz-crusted blanket draped over her face, just as I'm sure nopony ever thought to question why this concert was even being held in the first place.

>I was halfway down when an explosion from somewhere outside let me know the panicking pony hadn’t been completely wrong.
Well, isn't that convenient. Looks like the slavers really did attack ahead of schedule. If only the raiders had been at their defensive posts instead of in here watching some random pop idol who randomly showed up and offered to sing for them, they wouldn't have been caught off guard. Maybe the eve of a battle wasn't the most ideal time to schedule an impromptu concert. Oh well, Deadeyes, live and learn. Wait a minute; never mind.

>As I raced for the terminal, my mind boggled at the coincidence.
There is nothing even remotely mind-boggling about this coincidence, nor is it a coincidence. The slavers were planning an attack within this time frame, and they attacked. This is probably the least mind-boggling thing that has happened in this entire chapter so far.

>But no, I realized as I got to the desk and activated the terminal’s single function, it wasn’t coincidence at all. Red Eye’s slavers weren’t going to trust Deadeyes. Just as Deadeyes planned to betray them, they must have always intended to attack early.
Oh, okay. So much wacky shit has happened I'd forgotten that the original plan was for Deadeyes to open the gates and let the slavers in. He probably would have literally known when they were going to attack.

>In accordance with the plan, even Gawd was in attendance, as were her loyalists.
Wait, whose plan is this in accordance with? Were the slavers also planning to kill Gawd, or was it just Deadeyes who wanted her killed? There are so many plans in this convoluted mess of bullshit I can't keep half of them straight.

Anyway, the long and short of this seems to be that the slavers were playing some kind of 5D chess, and Littlepoop played right into their hooves by spontaneously organizing a concert in order to assassinate somepony she could have easily assassinated eons ago without all of this hassle.

>The Stealth Buck was just wearing off as I dashed into the room behind the curtains.
This at least confirms that the invisibility of a stealth buck has a time limit. Now all the author needs to do is confirm whether or not it's a single-use device or is something you can use over and over, and also what the fuck it is exactly, and also he should go back and clarify all of this before we actually saw a stealth buck in operation for the first time so we would know what we were dealing with instead of trying to piece it all together after the fact.

>I found Velvet Remedy pulling herself out of a pile of skeletons. Her perfect dress had bones hanging from it.
lmao.

>Panting, I apologized, explaining about the note. She waved it off. “Oh that’s quite all right. I’d much rather be buried in a pile of skeletons than actually join them.” With a smile that melted my heart, “Thank you, Littlepip!”
>Then, as an afterthought, “Couldn’t let me finish the song, though?”
Seriously? The fucking stage just exploded, probably ten or eleven ponies were killed, Velvet herself very nearly died, and all of this was preceded by the assassination of Deadeyes, which I will once again point out is something that Velvet was vehemently opposed to only a few short scenes ago. This is her only reaction?

This is shitty writing even by k "my train wreck of a fake vagina is the result of a stage explosion and not a botched surgery; that's my story and I'm sticking to it" kat's standards. Forget Velvet's so-called principles for a second; is this seriously all she has to say about this? She was nearly killed. An entire row of ponies who were cheering her performance a few minutes ago are dead now, blown to bits as a direct consequence of her friend's actions. Something like this would traumatize nearly anyone; trained, battle-hardened soldiers get PTSD and night terrors from remembering shit like this. And all Velvet has to say about is is "Gee whiz golly gosh gumdrops, I sure am glad I didn't get all blowed up in the explosy-wosion! I just wish I could have finished my songy-wongy first!"

Seriously, kkat, take this story and cram it up whatever orifice people like you prefer to cram things.

>>294744

Anyway, whatever; fuck it. The building is now on fire or something I guess, so they have to get out. Then, suddenly, Calamity shows up. I have completely forgotten where he was supposed to be in all of this, but fuck it; I'm sure he was somewhere.

>The rust-colored pegasus galloped in a moment later, his black cowpony hat nearly falling off. A key dangled from a chain between his teeth.
Oh good, he got the fucking key. That was supposed to be their reward for doing all of this wacky bullshit in the first place. What is the purpose of this key again? Does it unlock the simple padlock that Littlepoop picked already? Or maybe there's a second locked door behind the locked door that opens with a dedicated terminal? Oh, who even gives a shit anymore?

>Velvet Remedy rolled her eyes with a laugh. “You actually stopped to get the key?”
>Calamity turned his head, hooking the chain to one of the guns on his battle saddle. “Hells ya!” He grinned to Velvet. “Dependin’ on who wins out there, Ah’m already makin’ plans t’ swoop back in an’ loot the bodies.”
"Hells yeah" is obnoxious millennial-femme-speak, not obnoxious fake-cowboy-speak. At least keep your stereotypes straight, you spooge-gargling tranny. Also: does anyone in this group ever think about anything except looting?

[YouTube] Dowland - Complete Lute Galliards Works / Lachrimae + Presentation (Century's record.: Paul O'Dette) [Embed]

>Velvet Remedy turned up her nose.
This pony picks the weirdest moments to remember that she is supposed to have beliefs.

Anyway, it looks like they're going to sneak down into the treasure vault while the battle is going on. I remember initially thinking it was weird that the vault would be located behind the stage of the auditorium. Seems like if you've got a room that you want to keep secret, the absolute last place you'd want to put the entrance would be the literal most public room in the entire fortress. However, it seems that the whole reason was because this scene. They are now conveniently right at the entrance to the treasure vault, plus they have the key which may or may not actually be important, so they can go on down and help themselves to whatever goodie boxes are in there without having to deal with the pesky battle going on in the fortress itself.

As you may or may not recall, the entrance to the treasure vault consists of a metal gate (apparently opened when LP picked the padlock earlier), a "kill zone," which is basically just a short hallway with some gun turrets, and a second door, which was opened just now when LP used the terminal. They now have full access to the vault, but they are going to need to get past the gun turrets first. Well, how are they going to get themselves out of this little jam?

>I groaned. Turning back on the power turned on the turrets too. How could I have been so stupid as to not realize that would happen. I could have disabled them before, when it was safe.
Who the fuck designed this place? Seriously, kkat; pretend you're not a sexually-confused degenerate video game addict for like ten whole seconds and think about this the way a rational human would. Your fortress has a treasure vault, where presumably important things are kept. This room needs to be protected, but it also needs to be accessible to whoever needs to move things in and out of there. Do you:

A. Install a thick, sturdy door, put a strong lock on the door, and keep the single key on your person at all times
or
B. Install a gate with a flimsy padlock, followed by a hallway with automated gun turrets, followed by a thick sturdy door, which is computer-controlled by a remote terminal located in a different part of the building, and powered by some kind of electrical box located in yet another part of the building, and also make it so that the same electrical box that powers the door also powers the gun turrets, thus ensuring that the gun turrets will be active at the same time the door is open?

Since I'm sure this is a really difficult puzzle for you, I'm going to give you a hint. Option A will provide a reasonable amount of security while also allowing privileged access for anyone who needs it. Option B will ensure that anyone who tries to go into the treasure vault, regardless of whether or not they have a legitimate reason to do so, will have to dodge fucking machine gun fire during both ingress and egress.

I'll give you some time to think about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdmOVejUlI&pbjreload=101 [Embed]

>“Why are we still going down there anyway?” Velvet asked, clearly assuming the rest of the plan was a bust.
Let's all take a moment to savor this line; it's the first sensible thing Velvet has had to say for the entire story so far, and I suspect it will be the last.

>I lifted my PipBuck and looked at it. “Okay, we’re in luck. I’ve got one more Stealth Buck. I can use it to get up to the turrets and reprogram them, just like the ones back at that pegasus convoy. That way, they’ll let us through, and keep anypony who gets the idea to follow us out.”
Sure, why not?

>We had a plan. I pulled the dead Stealth Buck out of my PipBuck and slotted in my last one. Then I got to work.
Also, I am now more confused than ever about what exactly a Stealth Buck is. I mean, it's clear enough what it does at this point, but literally what is it? Earlier, it was described as a wrist-mounted device similar to a PipBuck. Now, it's being described as something that slots into a PipBuck. Is it like an SD card or something now? I am now officially suspecting that k "this isn't all I've got up my ass, not even by a long shot" kat is just pulling most of this story out of his well-traveled ass.

Oh yeah, one last thing:

>How could I have been so stupid as to not realize that would happen.
This is a question and it should end with a question mark.

[YouTube] Twilight gives Rainbow a cookie [Embed]

>>294745
>Also, I am now more confused than ever about what exactly a Stealth Buck is. I mean, it's clear enough what it does at this point, but literally what is it? Earlier, it was described as a wrist-mounted device similar to a PipBuck. Now, it's being described as something that slots into a PipBuck. Is it like an SD card or something now? I am now officially suspecting that k "this isn't all I've got up my ass, not even by a long shot" kat is just pulling most of this story out of his well-traveled ass.
All I've got to go on here is that it's most likely meant to be a horse pun version of the StealthBoy from the Fallout series. In those games it's a single-use device which grants the wearer a temporary bonus to their ability to evade detection - a bonus to their sneak skill (Fo1) or a Predator-style cloak (Fo3). Neither is infallible, but Kkat seems to be treating his horse version as total invisibility. Because Pip needs more unbeatable powers on top of hulk telekinesis and autoaim, apparently.

In Fallout, the Stealthboys are small devices similar to the PipBoy, worn on either the wrist or the belt depending on the model. Kkat seems to have made them into a sort of disposable PipBoy peripheral here, which at the very least streamlines their use and storage - not that he's actually taken the time to establish this. They also cause dementia if overused, so that's fun.

Another divergence from Fallout - in Pip's favour, naturally - is her apparent ability to hack turrets simply by getting close to them. There's a perk in Fallout 3 that lets you shut down turrets and robots by sneaking up on them undetected, but it requires a fairly advanced level and a reasonable investment in the Science skill. In other words, we're now supposed to assume she's a competent military software technician on top of all of her other skills and powers. Methinks the actual reason this is an ability Pip has is simply that Kkat got a bit of a boner from playing sneaky hacker with his Fallout 3 character and decided he wanted his fanfic character to do it too.

>>294745

>We found ourselves creeping through caves converted to storage, piled with crates emblazoned with the name Shattered Hoof Re-Educational Stockyard.
See, this is what I don't get about this author. The gun turrets in the hallway are a little implausible to say the least, but they at least present a challenge to LP and her group. Sneaking past machine gun turrets has to make for a somewhat interesting scene, right? And yet, instead of writing a scene for it, he just has LP throw out some half-assed "oh, I'll just use my Stealth Buck to sneak around it or something" to get past it, and then doesn't even bother to write it out; he just throws in a page break and resumes the story once the characters are past the obstacle, leaving us to assume that they must have made it through the trap without incident. What was even the point of having gun turrets in there? It doesn't make much sense but it could have at least been interesting to read about; here he's just introducing something that makes no sense and then not even doing anything interesting with it. Why, for God's sake?

Honestly, as much as I bitch about the implausibility of the gamelike setting, I wouldn't mind it so much if the author could just make it interesting. You can write the most logically preposterous story you can dream up if you want, so long as you maintain some level of consistency with whatever "rules" you devise. Alice in Wonderland is not just nonsensical, it's deliberately so, and it's a great story that people love. This isn't bad because it's nonsense, it's bad because:

A) it's not intended to be nonsense
B) it's poorly written nonsense
C) it's almost excruciatingly dull nonsense most of the time.

At almost every turn, the author manages to do the exact opposite of what he ought to do. He inundates the reader with detailed trivia about characters and events from the past that have nothing obvious to do with the story, but leaves out information that could be helpful for understanding what's going on. The StealthBuck and the mysterious audio recordings LP finds lying around are good examples of this. He introduces preposterous twists like "there are machine gun turrets in the walls" and then not only does nothing with them, he purposely skips over them after introducing them, leaving the reader to wonder why they were ever mentioned at all.

This most recent scene, with the concert, was actually not bad in and of itself. Having an assassination take place during a concert scene could make a vivid scene, and the scene here was decently executed. The problem is that the setup made no sense at all; there was no reason for LP to go to such lengths just to assassinate Deadeyes, Velvet Remedy should logically have objected to participating in such an event on moral grounds, Gawd should not logically have agreed to attend a concert that could potentially have gotten her killed when there were any number of more sane options available for killing Deadeyes, and finally, it makes no sense in the first place to hold a concert at a military fortress on the eve of a fucking battle. It's almost as if the author just wanted to write that scene so badly that he didn't care how badly he had to bend the logic in his story so long as he could include it. But if the object is just to have a scene where Velvet is giving a concert and LP has to snipe someone from the balcony, there are probably any number of smarter ways to set that up.

Since the author has an established pattern of directly plagiarizing events from Fallout 3, and since it also looks like most of the decent scenes and ideas in here have been the parts that were plagiarized, I'm curious if any of our Fallout players can confirm whether or not a scene exists in any of those games where someone gets assassinated at a concert.

This author is so meticulous about doing exactly the wrong thing at every turn, that I could almost believe he's actually someone famous writing under a pseudonym, and that this is just some kind of avant-garde experiment in writing the most intentionally awful novel ever written, solely for the purpose of pissing off anyone who tried to analyze it.

Anyway, they're walking through the caves and they find some boxes.

>A few were marked with a circle proclaiming them Celestial Tier Priority and branded with either the initials M.A.S. or M.W.T.
>“Well,” I whispered conversationally to my companions. “I know M.A.S. is the Ministry of Magic, but I haven’t heard of the other one.”
Oh goody. Here I was worried about this story starting to drag. A long infodump about some long-defunct governmental organization from the distant past would be just what we need to liven things up.

Velvet informs us that M.A.S. stands for Ministry of Arcane Sciences, but before she can give us the awaited long infodump, a booming voice suddenly interrupts her:

>“So! You’re the little ponies who have come to my town and made such a mess of things. You’ve killed my lieutenant, and now you’ve come for me.”
So we're actually doing the "Mr. Topaz was hiding in the basement the whole time" schtick? This author really does seem to have a pathological need to do the exact opposite of what he ought to.

>“Mister Topaz?” Calamity asked, echoing my own thoughts. Either he was using an impressively well-hidden speaker system, or he was using magic to augment his voice. I suspected the latter. And that probably meant a unicorn. Or... a worse idea struck me... one of those pseudo-goddess things like the creature from old Appleloosa.
Yes, I think we can all agree that the most pertinent question here is "how is he amplifying his voice?" Also, the idea of alicorn-Topaz hiding in the basement is even dumber than regular-Topaz hiding in the basement. I've completely given up trying to predict where the author is planning on taking this clusterfuck.

>>294755
>Since the author has an established pattern of directly plagiarizing events from Fallout 3, and since it also looks like most of the decent scenes and ideas in here have been the parts that were plagiarized, I'm curious if any of our Fallout players can confirm whether or not a scene exists in any of those games where someone gets assassinated at a concert.
There aren't any concerts in the Fallout games as far as I recall. The closest parallel I can think of is the attempted assassination of the New California Republic's President Kimball in Fallout New Vegas. A battle is due to take place soon and the president vists Hoover Dam to give a speech to his troops. The opposing side send assassins to murder him by way of a sniper and by placing a bomb under the stage. The player can thwart these attempts (or not), with repercussions for the game's story going forward. FoE puts the assassination target in the crowd and a secondary character on the stage, makes the main character the sniper, and tweaks the context a bit.

This is one of those bizarre moments that makes me think Kkat planned a lot of this story in advance and actually thought himself very clever for it, as Gawd, one of the potential assassination targets, winds up becoming the president of the New Canterlot Republic faction at the end of the story. This is either galaxy brain foreshadowing or a happy coincidence he jumped on when the opportunity arose.

>>294753
>They also cause dementia if overused, so that's fun.
Only in Nightkin, who almost all have some kind of cartoon schizophrenia. At least that's how it worked last I checked. Knowing BugthEAsderp they probably retconned that twice for a lazy half assed joke like the magic ghoul from Nuka World.

>was this ripped off?
The president saving or assassination quest from FNV. Hilariously this was the NCR sending out one vital easily sniped guy to give a speech and award some medals to "boost morale". Everyone smart involved hates this and wants you to help save the president unless the NCR hates you. The Legion also wants the president dead and you do that for them if working for them.
Kkats attempt to one-up that moment in FNV robs it of the context that made it work. This would be like if Caesar and House and Kimball all went to see an idol show performed by Veronica "left my wife at the Sierra Madre" McBrotherhood all because you shakily passed one speech check.

>>294771
>Only in Nightkin, who almost all have some kind of cartoon schizophrenia. At least that's how it worked last I checked.
If I remember right, this was because the nightkin used stealthboys near-constantly to hide from the outside world, what with being hulking nine foot mutants and all. Then again, it's been ages since I last played Fo1/2.

A pity that FoE's equivalent of the super mutants ie. the alicorns are so badly written. They're one Fallout concept that I'd say Kkat actually did a fairly good job of adapting into something new, at least conceptually. But I'm getting way ahead of things here.

>>294780
Oh yeah, most Nightkin hate being seen.
It's cool how Nightkin were originally just Super Mutants but invisible and in blue. Basically like those pallete swapped stronger versions of Dragon Quest enemies. Then a later game did more with the concept.
Was 2 or FNV the first game to give them their distinctive hates-being-seen skitzobullshit?
when do we get to the alicorns? I think it will be fun to see Glim tear them apart harder than Kratos and The Doomguy could while working together.

>>294781
>It's cool how Nightkin were originally just Super Mutants but invisible and in blue. Basically like those pallete swapped stronger versions of Dragon Quest enemies. Then a later game did more with the concept.
>Was 2 or FNV the first game to give them their distinctive hates-being-seen skitzobullshit?
In Fo1 the Nightkin were simply an elite caste of the super mutants who were better equipped than the rest, including Stealthboys. They didn't appear again in any real capacity until NV, which was what introduced their schizophrenia and explained it as the result of repeated Stealthboy use over the intervening decades.

Again, I'm of the opinion that FoE's adaptation of the mutants *in concept* is pretty neat since it twists Fallout's take on them in interesting ways, but their role as Enemies of Littlepip means that their intelligence and competence are hard-capped at roughly the level of a broken toaster.

>>294048
heh

>>294783
It's fascinating how so much of Fallout came from rejections of pulp scifi tropes and post apocalyptic action movie cliches. This is a terrifying world of doom and gloom where what would be sick in an action movie becomes a terrifying part of daily life. The greatest heroes are not guaranteed glory or recognition. Even the Super Mutants - who represent the idea that humanity can overlook racial differences and mutate and mix themselves into abominations while being religiously indoctrinated and forced into it by the mixed hive mind - end up sterile because that type of humanity has no future. A rejection of the idea that forced transhumanism can prevent what human error enabled.
Fallout 2's Enclave can be read as a rejection of the idea that a post apocalyptic world can only be saved once the terrible old governments partially responsible for the state of the world take over once again. As if a functional post apocalyptic country in america cant truly be called whole until the map looks like it did before the nukes flew.
Fallout NV...
The NCR continues their attack on the idea that America can be reunited through force. The NCR is full of corruption and cronyism but it could be reformed and redeemed if it had just one President who wanted that enough. The NCR could survive the death of its leaders and half of its followers and still remain functional because while they love the aid of elite Rangers they don't need micromanaging Elites to get everything done.
The Legion rejects the Wasteland by seeking to become the worst part of it. They seek to purge this terrifying world of its sin by being tougher and crueller than the nastiest tribes or beasts out there. But they at their best can barely compete with the NCR at their worst. The uncompromising Bandages The Mormon walked his units into a trap. While Caesar and the Legate made plans that only work if he has a sufficiently competent spy to enact them (you) while House has Securitrons and the NCR has the facilities to manufacture guns and armour and more. The Legion doesn't train replacements for their best and brightest like the NCR and Boomers do. House attempted to raise a successor but it backfired with Benny and could backfire harder with you.
House could save the world if everything went his way. Or he could be betrayed and robbed and ruined if things didn't go his way. Gambling's always a risky bet. If the Courier died at Goodsprings the NCR would win the Dam and House would try his hardest not to lose the Mojave as he clings to Vegas. If he couldn't do something unexpected like successfully apply to become a state of the NCR without giving up too much control over it and then begin a slow plan to become president.

The Alicorns in this story have none of this depth. I don't think it's possible to see any depth in them no matter what angle you view them from. They are just evil cunts because they are evil. Just like Raiders and Slavers, they are another type of target to shoot at in this firing range. They don't represent man's scientific hubris or blind religious zealotry and mandated ignorance of science or a muddy mixed mob. They don't repeat the sins of the past in an effort to prevent them. And they aren't even any form of meaningful social commentary on pony OCs or the inherent folly of making a "badass oc" in a world never meant to be this dark or violent.

>>294791
>>294791
>The Alicorns in this story have none of this depth. I don't think it's possible to see any depth in them no matter what angle you view them from. They are just evil cunts because they are evil. Just like Raiders and Slavers, they are another type of target to shoot at in this firing range. They don't represent man's scientific hubris or blind religious zealotry and mandated ignorance of science or a muddy mixed mob. They don't repeat the sins of the past in an effort to prevent them. And they aren't even any form of meaningful social commentary on pony OCs or the inherent folly of making a "badass oc" in a world never meant to be this dark or violent.
Respectfully disagree. I'm not going to any particular depth here since it won't be relevant to the story for at least a few chapters yet, but there's a lot of potential - and I stress that word - in FoE's alicorns because their main divergence from Fallout's super mutants is that they're a true hive mind, united by the controlling persona of a specific canon character rather an an OC. This allows them, at least in theory, to act as a sort of character exploration of Trixie, whose overriding arrogance and self-image were all she had left after mutating into a hideous monstrosity. They could also have served as a sort of "Starlight Glimmer but four seasons early" by posing the question of whether harsh circumstances justify giving up one's individuality for power or security. They also sidestep the "mutants are sterile" problem that the muties have in Fallout, which gives them a long term goal aside from "lol conquer the world just because".

Kkat writes them as idiots and squanders any hypothetical value they might have had from a narrative perspective, granted, but that's how he writes EVERYONE.

>>294793
But this story was written during S1. Trixie was just a travelling performer whose big talk convinced two local idiots to put her to the test. She could have fled town when the Ursa Minor they thought was an Ursa Major showed up. But instead she stood and fought. And got her home destroyed for it. Nopony thanked Trixie for trying to help. Spike and Snips and Snails ended up rewarded with moustaches for bringing this monster into town while Trixie left town. She has at least some good inside her. And did not yet willingly seek out an evil amulet of power boosting and let it corrupt her into a vengeance obsesed torturing tyrant umable to express much of any horror at what she did once the amulet was removed. To this day I still consider this and her return some of FIM's worst episodes but certainly not the worst. This character is a Unicorn who professionally performs the kind of stage magic a goddamn Donkey could do. There is so much opportunity for depth and analysis here. She could have been FIM's first ever well written redeemed villain if they just gave her episodes more drafts. She works well in a "manipulative schemer magician" role but to reduce her to a mindless brutish egotistical Power Rangers villainess is a massice disservice to her character.

>>294802
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with virtually all of this, but I'm only talking about what the character could have been in the hands of a competent writer. Kkat's writing ability (or lack thereof) is the point of fault here.

>>294808
True.
In the fandom's early years a lot of people projected new villainous traits onto existing minor villains when they didn't feel like making anything new. If this character archetype had been used as a baddie before, it became that baddie but again. Suddenly Prince Blueblood becomes a politically powerful evil bastard able to abuse mares however he wants and force them to be with him. Suddenly Trixie becomes a schemer obsessed with destroying or stealing everything Twilight has that she doesn't. Gilda becomes evil too. Sometimes they even got together in a stupid "elements of evil/insanity/disunity/chaos" band with any empty "evil counterpart of this mane six member" slots filled with background ponies given stupid fandom names.
Never saw anyone write this seriously, exploring the characters of some assholes brought together to destroy some heroes lives only to end up forming actual friendships with each other and finding the companionship and acceptance they needed.

Littlepip and her friends should have evil counterparts. People who are almost entirely like the heroes only slightly different in a way that makes them evil. It would also call back to your ability to play a self-interested asshole or malevolent puppy-kicker in Fallout games.
Just imagine showing this team of "evil protags" who run around robbing and lying and carelessly murderhoboing despite the horrible consequences this "I must be the biggest baddest baddie. I will solve all the world's problems with power and a bullet" mindset create. The real heroes could sometimes do their own quests and sometimes clean up the consequences of Team Littleheart's Evil
What do you think Team LP's evil counterparts would look and act like?

>>294873
I didn't read the end of the story so not sure if it goes down this way but feel like considering what you said about Red Eye and his opinion on the alicorns it would make an interesting dichotomy between him and Little Pip. Got LP who believes in the idea of the Princesses and what they represented, thinking ponies as individuals should strive to follow the teachings they provided. Then got Red Eyes who only sees the raw power the alicorns possess and think they should rule the wastelands with an iron hoof simply due to the fact they are as powerful as they are.

Would allow for some interesting banter between the two and give them both some internal conflict trying to think of the benefits behind their beliefs wondering if memes are enough to make ponies try to rebuild and be better or if unfettered power can be trusted to build anything worthwhile.

I'd say currently it might not be the best to have an evil counterpart to our band of misfit heroes considering how little the current cast is fleshed out. Each only have 1 or 2 traits to distinguish themsevles so their evil counterparts would just be as equal of caricatures.

If the story was more video game-y I'd say it'd be a really funny idea to do giving a little meta wink at the fans of the Fallout games. I really liked that idea Glim had of this story just being the CMC and some others playing a Fallout Equestria tabletop rpg and a bit shocking how well it fits so far. As is the story keeps skirting this line between the two trying to be dark and serious but also want to be quippy and meta about MLP and Fallout game mechanics and Bethesda AI programming. Makes it hard for the dark stuff to stick when characters have to crack a joke or LP comments on how thick Velvet's ass is and hard for the comedic stuff to land when it feels like LP looks at the camera while the actions pause for a bit so she can wink and tell a joke about how goofy the situation is.

>>294874
I suggested this game might be the CMCs and Spike playing a Fallout DND game and started thinking this as I went through the story. I had this whole journal theory post full of what I thought were hints at the last second twist I thought the story would take. But the journal was on deviantart and my deviantart account was deleted by the commie bastards.

If I recall some of the theory was...
Apple Bloom is Littlepip. She's the leader of the bunch. She's in pony hell. She's finally back to kick some tail. Her scoped handgun can fire in spurts. If she shoots you, you'll fucking die. Hoo. L! P! Littlepip! L! P! Littlepip is gay!
Just kidding. Basically they both have goal oriented mindsets and a tendency to forget the small steps leading up to the big goals. Both are small and female. They are both leaders of their groups but AB knows little about magic and couldn't be bothered to deal with the magic system so she asked to swap spellcasting for overpowered telekinesis instead.
Sweetie Belle is Velvet. Sometimes she remembers she is supposed to be a Lawful Good Bard and tries to make her character act even more noble and moral than LP. Sometimes she forgets that and gets caught up in the singing and gay flirting. AB isn't gay but likes getting Roleplaying EXP for acting gay while SB loves it when people treat her character like she's pretty. SB initially started writing the Silver Belle character, using a name she wanted to use for Velvet, but eventually decided she was too sad and needed a happy ending RIGHT FUCKING NOW even though Spike just finished working parts of her backstory into the plot and world by making Deadeyes responsible for her home burning down.
Scootaloo is Calamity. She designed him stats first and then forgot to give this cowboy plank of wood a personality or meaningful history. Eventually she gets bored and designs another character with a different gun and different highest stat and different backstory. And proceeds to play him like a boring plank of wood. Also the best she can do when trying to think of an Apple name is Applesnack.
Spike is the Dungeon Master. He's trying to write a grim dark edgy pony hell world for the heroes to adventure in but he gets way too obsessed with dumping lore on the heroes so they tend to forget about it and focus on the looting and shooting. He even does GM sin number zero introducing an invincible self insert GMPC with a flimsy excuse for not saving the world himself for the sole purpose of infodumping lore on the heroes and handing them a direct path to their vague objective only for the players to pretty much forget about it and focus on fun murderhoboing instead. Spike is The Watcher aka those random spritebots aka pure motherfucking plot convenience and that is cringe.
Twist showed up for a few sessions and didn't like the backstory for the world so she made her character an Obligatory Good Zebra with a super tragic backstory and nothing else and then got tired of the game and quit. This shallow character has nothing to say or do but is still a part of the party anyway now controlled by Spike. This gives her the power to melee the most dangerous enemies possible to death.

>>294878
Ah been a bit since we last talked about it so forgot who said it initially but man that had me cracking up reading that and would vastly improve the story if that was the case. Could make one of those big sequence jumps like the epilogue of Sun and the Rose work super well with an exhausted Spike watching his campaign derail while the CMC are oblivious to his plight and decide a cutie mark in role playing isn't that neat and just wander off learning nothing from the experience.

>>294873
>What do you think Team LP's evil counterparts would look and act like?

Excessively Large Pip
This huge, hulking Pegasus pony is a distant descendant of Bulk Biceps. Remarkable even amongst large ponies for his excessive size and strength, Pip is also an adept Pip-Buck technician, hacker and locksmith, who specializes in being able to break nearly any lock known to ponykind. In addition, he is a notorious kleptomaniac who is also famous for cutting a long, bloody swath across the Edgequestrian Wasteland. This pony will ruthlessly and gleefully slaughter nearly anypony who crosses his path. While this may sound exactly like Littlepip, the difference is that this guy does Bad Guy Stuff for Bad Guy Reasons, whereas Littlepip does Bad Guy Stuff for Good Guy Reasons. This is a very important distinction to both LP and ELP. Also, he's big.

Scarlet Pumpernickel
This in-your-face Earth Pony likes to dress hood and talk trash. She always wanted to be a gangsta rapper, and will bust phat rhymes at anypony who cares to listen, as well as anypony who doesn't. Unfortunately, the strict Asian Overmare of her Stable insisted that she become a doctor instead. She takes out her frustration on her patients, intentionally giving them the wrong medicine so that they die slowly and painfully. When that doesn't work, she makes them listen to her raps, which are terrible. As such, she is known as the world's shittiest doctor as well as the world's shittiest rapper, and was subsequently kicked out of her Stable. While one might suspect this would be exactly what she wanted as it would allow her to give up medicine and pursue her rap career, one would be wrong, as she has an irrational terror of the outside world. Highly opinionated, she will cling stubbornly to her beliefs even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that she is wrong.

Lord Wimbledon III
A descendant of Fancy Pants, this Unicorn hates all things country with a passion. He goes out of his way to use proper diction, pronouncing all words slowly and carefully. He usually wears a top hat and monocle everywhere he goes, so ponies will see him and know how dainty and fancy he is. Having a particular disdain for big, over the top displays of firepower, he refuses to arm himself even while wandering the Edgequestrian Wasteland. Instead, he carries a set of single-shot dueling pistols, and instead of fighting will challenge his enemies to an old-timey duel. By the time he has finished explaining all of the complex, archaic rules by which the duel is to proceed, his enemies have usually lost all interest in killing him.

>>294755

Continuing.

>And here I was, all out of boxcars.
Durr hurr hurr.

>I quickly passed out the magical ammo, giving a prayer to Celestia and another to Luna.
What magical ammo? Where and when did she get magical ammo? How does magical ammo differ from regular ammo? I suspect that if I went back through the text with a fine toothed comb, I'd probably find some point in the story where LP picked up some sort of magical ammo, so it's probably legal for her to have this right now. However, as I've often complained, it's annoying to have to constantly search for stupid details like this. Also, while I don't doubt that she legitimately picked up the ammo, I am also fairly certain we have not had any sort of explanation as to what it is or what its capabilities are.

Anyway, in what I'm assuming is an attempt at channeling Fluttershy's angry-mom routine from the series, Velvet begins yelling at the mysterious voice. She tells it that she is "not impressed," and demands that the speaker show himself. There is a completely unnecessary page break, and then it turns out that Mr. Topaz is a dragon. Yep, this autism is actually in the text.

The first few paragraphs of the next scene are dreadfully incoherent, and it took me awhile to figure out what exactly is going on. As far as I can tell, they pissed off the dragon, and now it's chasing them. There was a clear attempt at humor here, but a visual gag in a story needs to be described clearly and concisely enough that we can see what's happening without the timing of the joke being ruined. Here is my best guess as to the exact sequence of events:

>Topaz the Dragon makes a big, scary speech
>Velvet Remedy is not impressed, and begins scolding him, admonishing him to show himself
>As soon as it becomes apparent that Topaz is a dragon, Calamity fires a shot
>The dragon begins to chase them
>Velvet makes some snarky remark about how they could have talked it out

Now, they are running through the tunnels of the underground vault, with LP recklessly tearing out support beams behind them in an effort to trap the dragon, apparently not realizing that causing a cave-in would not benefit them in the long run. Oh, also, the magic bullets, whatever the fuck they are and wherever the fuck they got them from, apparently work well enough, but the dragon is large enough that they don't do much actual damage.

>Without slowing, Velvet laughed as we ran past a large metal door. “Well, there’s your vault! Anypony want to stop and open it?”
Wait, aren't they in the vault already? I thought this location was the vault. I have completely lost all track of what the fuck they are even supposed to be doing at this point. Maybe this door is what the key they took from Deadeyes opens.

Anyway, now, after all this bullshit, they run back out of the treasure vault and are now where they started, in the backstage area behind the auditorium of Shattered Hoof. Apparently the tunnels that LP collapsed by knocking away support beams were not the tunnels that they needed to get out. So now, they're right back where they started. Wait, aren't there machine gun turrets in the walls here? Oh wait; Littlepoop disabled them or something.

>The turrets opened fire as I raced through them.
No, wait; actually she didn't I guess. Then how did they get past them initially? Oh, who even cares.

The next few paragraphs are also very poorly written, and it's again difficult to follow what's happening, but here is my best guess:

>Calamity runs out of the treasure vault, followed by Velvet. For some reason, the gun turrets in the wall don't fire on them.
>Littlepoop runs out. The dragon is right on her heels, and she can feel its breath on her neck.
>The gun turrets don't fire on Littlepoop either for some reason. However, as soon as the dragon enters the hallway, the turrets begin to fire.
>The dragon gets mad and breathes fire on the turrets, which destroys them.
>Littlepoop is close enough that she gets caught in the blaze. One of her saddlebags is destroyed, and she is badly burned.
>Despite being badly burned, she is still able to escape the hall and run off down another hall that is apparently too narrow for the dragon to fit through.
>She looks back over her shoulder and sees the dragon burning the crap out of the cafeteria or auditorium or whatever the fuck, attacking slavers and raiders alike.
>Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, the dragon disappears.

There is another page break, and the next scene opens with Littlepoop in one of the bathrooms, treating her third degree burns by pouring cold tap water on them. The whereabouts of Calamity and Velvet Remedy are not known.

>The dragon, I assumed, had headed back into the mines. He could fly around the mess hall all he wanted, but the rest of the halls were too narrow for him. He was probably born down there or...
I have completely given up trying to figure out where the author is going with any of this. I guess Mr. Topaz was a dragon the whole time, and he lived down in the mines and apparently must have been born there because he is physically too large to pass through any other part of the building so it would be logistically impossible for him to enter or exit the mines. Oh, also, I think I've figured out that the mines and the treasure vault are two separate yet connected locations: the mines are below the fortress, and the treasure vault is accessed through the mines.

>Velvet Remedy collapsed next to me, breathing heavily.
Oh okay, I guess Velvet Remedy is in the bathroom too. Good to know.

However, it appears that Calamity is still missing. Neither of them know what became of him. If he has any brains, he is probably high-tailing it the fuck out of there and will want nothing further to do with Littlepoop and her dumb ideas; however, I suspect he does not and will not.

>>294883

>I had realized that the giant hole torn in the razor wire over the yard must have been the work of the dragon. And that led me to: “The cargo elevator! The dragon’s going to come up through the rock yard!”
Several things here. First of all, I don't recall hearing any previous mention of a hole in the razor wire or a cargo elevator. As ever, this probably means that the author did in fact mention them at one point, but without placing any special emphasis on them that would mark them as significant details.

Second, this seems to be yet another example of LP making leaps of logic that don't necessarily follow each other. A moment ago, we had LP speculating that the dragon must have been born in the mines because he is too large to physically maneuver through the halls of Shattered Hoof. Now, she is apparently speculating that he must be able to get in and out via a cargo elevator that I don't remember ever being mentioned, and cites as evidence a hole in the razor wire that could have been made by just about anything.

Third, if a cargo elevator exists that leads directly from the rock yard to the mines, it only makes the design of this place even more absurd. The entrance to the mines was protected with a locked gate, a hallway full of machine gun turrets, and a second locked door. What is the point of all of this ridiculous security overkill, when anyone who wants to go down there can just use the goddamn elevator in the yard?

Anyway, Velvet treats Littlepoop's third degree burns with a syringe and some bandages. Despite not having the slightest idea where Calamity is or whether or not he's in any actual danger, LP determines that she needs to find him and help him. However, her third degree burns are apparently severe enough that the usual bullshit medicine doesn't 100% cure her at this point I'd like to remind my readers that this pony's leg was literally severed at one point in this story, and iirc was healed with a potion.

>“Do we... have any Buck in our supplies?” I bit my lower lip, hating to ask her for such a thing.
What the buck is Buck? The name has been mentioned once or twice, and from what I can tell it's an illicit substance along the same lines as the crack mints she may or may not have an addiction to, but we've never had an explanation of what it is or what it does. However, it's a moot point; they apparently do have it for some reason, and Velvet gives it to her. For anyone who cares, it is apparently an orange pill.

Now that the pesky matter of having third degree burns has been attended to, Littlepoop now turns her attention to what's really important. She orders Velvet to go look for Calamity, and then informs her that she will be going back down into the fucking mines to try and get to the fucking treasure vault.

>“But...” Velvet Remedy frowned, “Littlepip, you don’t have the key!”
>With a smile, “When have I ever needed a key to get past a lock?”
Have I mentioned lately that I really, really hate this character?

Page break. LP is now running back through the charred remains of the auditorium, or cafeteria, or whatever the hell it is. And needless to say, being third-degree-burned doesn't stop her from looting a few corpses along the way.

As she reaches the entrance to the mines (here described as the vault, despite the author's earlier clarification that the vault is a separate location within the mines), she is challenged by a pony of unknown allegiance who attacks her with some kind of magic lance or something. Blah blah blah, they fight, LP gores the pony with her horn. The pony is now lying on the ground, dying in agony and whimpering about how she doesn't want to die. LP does this:

>I contemplated breaking her neck. She was already dead -- why make her suffer? I raised my hoof...
>...And stepped over her. I just couldn’t do that. No matter what I was allowing the wasteland to make me, I hadn’t changed that much yet.
This pony picks the weirdest moments to remember that she is supposed to have a conscience. Wait a minute; is she supposed to have a conscience? Wait a minute; shouldn't her conscience compel her to put this pony out of her misery, since that would be the humane thing to do here? Again, I get the impression the author is trying to show LP as morally conflicted, but again he's doing a piss-poor job of it.

Anyway, she drapes her blanket over the dying pony. Since we have not heard about her having any blanket besides the raider blanket she's been using as "camouflage," I can only assume this is the one the text means. So, as her sudden pang of "conscience" precludes her simply putting this poor pony out of her misery, she instead throws a jizz-crusted blanket over her face and leaves her to die alone and in agony. In the author's warped imagination, I'm sure this counts as a gesture of kindness. Also, for some reason or another, she drops the magic rifle she was carrying and swaps it out for the pony's magic lance.

Despite the fact that the fire-breathing dragon that nearly killed her had returned to the mines and would reasonably still be around, we are assured that Littlepoop does not encounter any trouble on her way to the treasure vault.

After a page break, we rejoin her at the door of the vault. She is once again plying her obnoxious lockpicking skills, proving that she does not, in fact, need the key that they went to all the trouble of obtaining. However, she does trip some kind of alarm system when she picks the lock.

>I planted my forehooves on the heavy metal door and, straining, pushed it open. (Something I almost certainly couldn’t have done if I wasn’t hyped on Buck.)
It's clear enough from context that Buck is some kind of amphetamine similar to the crack mints she was munching earlier. Again, it might have been helpful for the author to clarify a few things here; we have absolutely no idea why the party has this stuff with them, and it's also unclear how LP would know what it is in the first place.

>>294884

Anyway, she gets inside the treasure vault finally.

>The room was filled, top to bottom, with shelves of memory orbs. Each orb was tagged with a date and a “guest number”. There must have been hundreds of them.
While we're on the subject of shit the author hasn't bothered to explain, did we ever find out what exactly a memory orb is? I remember they found one somewhere, in a safe near the ruins of Cloudsdayle as I recall, but I don't think we ever found out what it is or what it does.

Then, suddenly, the dragon appears. He is too large to get inside the vault, but he is able to effectively block the exit and prevent her from escaping. I don't know if there is any significance to it or not, but all of Topaz' dialogue is in boldface for some obnoxious reason or other. I think it's meant to signify that he has a loud and booming voice.

Anyway, it sounds like he was on his way to go and eat up all of Littlepoop's friends, but then she set off the alarm and that made him decide to come down here and eat her instead, because he's a dragon and eating ponies is what dragons do I guess.

>“The gemstones are dessert, of course. You ponies, you’re the main course.” The dragon scowled, making me want to scream. “Of course, you went and mucked everything up. I spend all this time and effort ensuring a harvest perfect for a final pre-sleep meal, and now most of them are dead!”
I'm not entirely clear what the hell he's talking about here. I'm assuming the implication was that he was going to eat the invading slavers, or maybe he was planning to eat the soldiers on his own side too. As to the gemstones, I have no fucking idea. From what I understand the purpose of Shattered Hoof is more or less to harvest gemstones by breaking them out of rocks, but I assumed the gems were being sold somewhere or used for something. If the purpose of the entire operation was just to provide food for this one faggot dragon then that is beyond retarded, but I'll reserve judgement until we see where the author is going with it.

>The dragon’s gaze was drawn momentarily to one of the rolling balls. “What exactly were you expecting to find in here anyway? Mountains of gems? Because you thought I’d enjoy needing to call down that imbecile Deadeyes every time I got a bit peckish? Did you even look in the crates?”
I for one have no idea what she was expecting to find down here, or even why she bothered to come down here at all, since Calamity has the key and it would stand to reason that finding him would take priority over breaking into this stupid vault anyway. So little of this story makes any damn sense. Also: what crates? There are no crates in this room that the author has mentioned.

Anyway, I guess she's trying to keep him talking or something until she can think up a plan. The dragon helpfully explains that all of the memory orbs contain "confessions" extracted from the various prisoners of Shattered Hoof back when it was a prison. The question of why an old storage room full of dusty old criminal records from 200 years ago would have been important enough to Deadeyes that he'd keep the key on his person at all times is left unexplained. The question of how the dragon knows what the memory orbs contain is also left unexplained. For that matter, the question of what the memory orbs are exactly, how they work, and what sort of magical ability is a prerequisite for reading the information on them is also left unexplained.

Instead, the dragon rattles off a bunch of cliche villain bullshit about how the pony race does terrible things to each other and they clearly don't deserve to be anything but dragon food and blah blah blah.

>The dragon was going to eat me. There were no options, no tricks, no other ways out. I was going to die here. Like this. Alone in a tiny metal room underneath a prison.
Sucks to be you, bitch. Maybe you should use your final moments to reflect on some of your recent choices.

Anyway, there's some more inane dialogue, mostly consisting of dumb jokes about eating ponies (the dragon seems to think of little else), and then suddenly Calamity shows up out of nowhere and rescues her from the clutches of certain death.

For some reason or other he went all the way back to Junction R7 to pick up some kind of plasma cannon that I guess they had there, that was probably mentioned earlier but I've forgotten all about because I can't be fucked to keep track of all the different kinds of ridiculous weapons that exist in this story and where they are kept. However, it seems that even this was not enough to kill the dragon, because it gets up and starts coming after them again. Calamity blasts it again, it survives but just barely, and then he dumps the cannon, puts LP on his back, and carries her up out of the mines through that elevator shaft that I guess exists.

The dragon is still alive for some reason, and chases them for some reason. Littlepoop throws some grenades down his throat, and that seems to finally do the trick. Calamity flies LP back to the Junction, and then informs her that Velvet Remedy is at the Visitor's Center and he has to go back and get her. He departs, and LP goes to sleep. End of chapter.

If anyone cares, she also got some perk that improves her ability to land headshots or something.

>>294884
>What the buck is Buck? The name has been mentioned once or twice, and from what I can tell it's an illicit substance along the same lines as the crack mints she may or may not have an addiction to, but we've never had an explanation of what it is or what it does. However, it's a moot point; they apparently do have it for some reason, and Velvet gives it to her. For anyone who cares, it is apparently an orange pill.
Another thing for the Fo3 fans. Buck is most likely a ponification of Buffout, an anabolic steroid that boosts strength and endurance. So in other words, she spends the latter part of this chapter roided up on top of all her other endearing qualities.

>So, as her sudden pang of "conscience" precludes her simply putting this poor pony out of her misery, she instead throws a jizz-crusted blanket over her face and leaves her to die alone and in agony.
GOD. I'd forgotten about this. Littlepip really is an absolute self-righteous shit. If I recall correctly, the scar she picked up in the fight with this random mare causes her more long term angst than leaving the poor pony to bleed out under a filthy blanket. And this isn't the last time Pip behaves in an absolutely abhorrent manner towards the dead and/or dying. Just wait until the scene much later with the cola bottle.

>>294883
Still got to read the other posts so may have clarified it there but LittlePip went and reprogrammed the turrets after sneaking up to them with the Stealthbuck. Didn't explain how since you said there was a page break but after the scene resumes she talks about how they are programmed now to let LittlePip and her party pass while any of Deadeyes'sss's goons will be shot at now.

Very video game-y type thing and would have been interesting had it been explained how she understands programing centuries old tech like that but I'm guessing she probably did something like the EFS where anything green it'll avoid and anything yellow or red it'll fire on. If not that then I'm guessing she's have just made a quip about reading a magazine on hacking military grade turrets at some point during their travels.

Will have to call a mulligan in favor of Kkat this time. He didn't mention how any of it happened but did say what LittlePip's plan was with the turrets.

>evil counterparts
This is fucking perfect.
Hey, wouldn't it be funny if to contrast with Littlepip's ezcessive wordiness
And occasional tendency to make things overcomplicated despite the one track mind she usually has
And frequent scenes of trying to justify her evil deeds to herself
He was an immensely and comically straightforward guy able to find the easy solution and achieve it easily with his overwhelming might? The kind of cut-the-knot motherfucker who calls himself a "master lockpicker" because he can smash any key or safe door open. Plus while she simps for her lesbian girlfriend, he is awash in mare pussy and canonically ploughs numerous bitches. Bitches will literally offer their goods and services to him in return for a night with his turboner supreme. And while LP uses the guns of dead people and scavenged shit he makes it a point of pride to construct his own mighty bullets and oversized guns for a unique brand of overkill only one as big and strong as he could control.
Speaking of sex this story's sex scene is worse than My Immortal's.

>>294884
>lp's amazing disappearing injuries
The author uses Littlepip taking horrible injuries, and then recovering from them almost immediately with the aid of plentiful overpowered supplies, as a substitute for the author's reluctance to meaningfully wound or hurt or hinder Littlepoop the overpowered god moder.
I'd accuse the author of taking videogame "if you have more than 1 HP a health potion can fix anything" logic too far but videogames, especially RPGs, double especially Fallout, solved this immersion problem with Limb Condition and Status Effects.
If your only meaningfully different health states are "alive" and "dead", anything dangerous that can't instakill you is meaningless. Who cares about losing 40hp out of 200?
Crippled limbs slow you down and can fuck you up, Fallout has that, but almost all RPGs have status effects like Confused and Burned and Frozen and Asleep. Ideally this keeps encounters tense because you never know when you'll need to spend a turn that could be spent attacking or healing using a Status Effect-removing spell or item instead.
What good is a poison when everyone has enough antidote or temporary immunizations? What good is burn salve and poison antidote and smellingsalts when everyone carries enough healing potions to keep a reckless murderhobo alive?
A heroic soldier in a realistic setting full of heroism and pride marching despite the pain of his shot and bandaged leg is more heroic than some overpowered action movie god slaughtering puny humans in a setting where bullets never kill anyone named.
>buck
Guys I forget is Buck supposed to be the Fallout drug Buffout or Psycho? One of them makes me angrier than the other, no pun intended.
Buffout temporarily makes you stronger and fitter. Psycho makes you angry temporarily which increases the damage you deal by 25%. Neither of these are used for or could reasonably used for used for curing burns. It's not like Littlepip's an old hag taking a shot of Buffout so she can temporarily gain enough fitness to become likelier to survive some risky medical operation. That's something smart only a genius would think of, and whoever thought of that must be very handsome.
>LP can SPARE/KILL
The first time I saw this scene I expected LP to give the dying poner some healing potion in return for intel amd/or a party member. Instead she lets the pony bleed out horribly and loots the magic lance while forced to endure this fucking cum rag (imagine the smell!) for fuck's sake. This is like something out of a goddamn parody of itself except it is the joke and not even an Abridged Series-style take on this thing could make it funnier than this.

A moment like this, when done right, would have been better earlier on in the story. Imagine the party encounters a wounded merchant and saves her from raiders but the merchant got fatally wounded and her choices are get her neck snapped now or die crying. Velvet would be all "I wanna try healing even though we have no medical supplies strong enough to save her!" and Calamity would say to give her the easy way out. Calamity kills the Merchant because LP couldn't bring herself to kill an innocent pony, Velvet gets mopey and whiney over this, Littlepip gets sad but also tougher.
Alternatively she could have a Conscience Moment when trying to play Good Cop to Calamity's torture-loving bastard cop with some assassin they captured alive and need intel from.

>they never established buck
Would it have killed Kkat to write Gawd giving Littlepip some items that could be useful on her little murderhobo quest followed by explanations of them? You know, some Bond Movie/Spongebob The Movie/Monty Python and the Holy Grail shit.
The StealthBuck and Buck the drug and the magical lance/magical bullets that should have buck in their name somewhere to keep the theme going... this would be the perfect place to seamlessly introduce them to LP and the audience before they are used to-
Yo what if Team Littlepip separated heist style during the concert?
3 separate factions. Gawds griffons and Deadeye Deadeyes's Dead-Eyes, two rival merc groups working for Red Eye, are scheming against each other and LP arranges the concert in Mr Topaz's Dragon Hoard Casino. Topaz the dragonfurry spellcasting unicorn also works for Red Eye but is being blackmailed by Gawd and Deadeyes.
Gawd thinks LP will shoot DE. DE thinks LP will shoot Gawd. MrT thinks LP will shoot both Gawd and DE.
LP's real plan?
Velvet sings the longest songs she knows and this stalling gets funny fast because she's been drinking the Schezerade, LP tries to rob the vault and deal with security that requires some lead security guards severed head to bypass but she KOs him out of morality after a bossfight, and when the singing stops Calamity shoots Deadeyes to buy more time for LP's secret heist on the Casino
Then Topaz finds out, Dragons Up with a single spell, and gets killed by LP
Heist mission stylishly accomplished

>>294878
>>294881
Kek

>>294885
>memory orbs
You know that movie Strange Times with the rioting nignogd and memory device that can let you store and replay memories for the viewing pleasure of yourself and others just like the memory balls from Imside Out or the Pensieve from Harry Potter? Kkat must have seen one of those before writing this.
I want to give Kkat credit for putting something in this story that isn't stolen from Fallout even though it's literally just a pre-war flashback justification device that's been done a million times in other media and never gets used for anything smart. An exercise VHS tape or training manual VHS tape would work better if that VHS was actually a memory ball that lets you experience its stored flashback to let you remember its skills instantly. Those are the kinds of memories that would sell well enough to be found after the apocalypse. That and sex. Maybe happy convincing but fake wholesome memories too, but I doubt Kkat would think to poopoo Ponyland's cutesy kiddie cartoon character-sryle immaturity and childish "wholesome 100 haha my house looks like its made of gingerbread" tastes by saying they only read books with happy endings and hated hearing bad and sad news on the radio. Fallout took massive shits on the aspects of American culture that supposedly caused its nuclear downfall but Kkat's attempted moments of "satirizing" of pony culture is muddled and aimless. Canon ponies never put up "Better wiped than striped" posters. Those who might would never allow pony cities to be swamped with Zebra refugees.

>bolded text
Only thing worse than quirky text tricks like this is when some words get bigger or a fancy font to represent how they are said, or the author arbitrarily decides some characters never use capital letters or speech quotes. Motherfucker, Kkat, you ain't Sans Undertale.

>mucked up
Did kkat forget this is rated R? I don't think this is supposed to be a mothertrucking "affably evil guy never swears because he wants to feel above his vulgar coworkers" character trait.

>final pre-sleep meal
Everyone in this world talks exactly the fucking same aside from crude forced gimmicks. "Final pre-sleep meal" sounds awkward because it is ham fisted exposition shoved into too few words for any personality to be expressed here. Nobody realistically talks like this and it doesn't sound right in fiction. Shouldn't this massive motherfucker who's threatening to eat ponies talk in a more grandiose manner befitting of an arrogant bastard who thinks he's invincible and has all the time in the world to talk and sadistically savour the fear of his prey between hibernations?

>one mine for one Dragon?
Establishing Topaz as an evil casino owner working for Red Eye and making Topaz a Unicorn who turned an old mining oenal labour prison(shut down by Flutters because she is now a cuck who thinks prisons should not be punishments) into a casino that passes for fancy in Edgequestria would make it less retarded that LP is able to get a concert together so quickly. Making him secretly skim gems off the top to fuel his Dragon Form feasts while he supplies gems for some Red Eye Weapons Factory the heroes can raid later, this would clear shit up and keep things more believable. If there's a motherfucking dragon here under Red Eye's control why would it be here and not conquering somewhere else for Red Eye? Why would this motherfucking Dragon be a myth or mystery? Why would he take orders from Red Eye unless sufficiently big guns fired by big bads could hurt it?

Also if LP saved Whatshisface the Magical Lance User, now would be a great time to be saved by that poner to prove mercy and sparing can be good too.

I forgot to mention this but no matter what type of roid Buck is supposed to be, LP doesn't act like a pony on drugs. Doesn't act hyper brutal and then get shocked at how brutally she beat a Raider to death. Doesn't act like she feels invincible right until the drug wears off at the worst possible time for her like the Berserker Powerup from the Doom Comic. She fucking lets an enemy bleed out when she would normally execute enemies without a second thought. She sucks at mercy. But being on roids canonically makes her try to be more merciful than usual. Gee its almost as if Kkat writes drugs like they're videogame powerups and forgets all about the story effects they should have beyond strength buffs.

And does anyone else think LPs ability to easily turn turrets to her side is way too convenient and powerful? It should backfire horribly at least once.

>>294900
I noticed that LittlePip's drug addiction aspect seems to appear and disappear at random. Tried to establish she got addicted to those Mentats or whatever the pony version is but she hasn't shown any withdrawal symptoms for awhile and Kkat hasn't used that addiction as a way to explain why she is such a kleptomaniac trying to find more drugs or stuff to sell to buy more.

In my earlier post I hypothesised since LittlePip is a Pip-Buck technician maybe she knows how to program or troubleshoot the Eyes Forward Sparkle. Granted we have no idea how that works and the actual act of her hacking the turrets was skimmed over but perhaps she was able to code it to be synced with her EFS so any blips registered as her friends will be spared and any pony else is fair game.

>>294903
"She connects the turrets to her HUD's perfect display that displays whether someone is a friend or foe to get the turrets on her side" is the excuse for how it works, but it's unsatisfying for this to be in this state. Turrets are just one of many things, like locks and landmines and most traps, that can't truly be a problem for her.
Imagine if LP relied on turrets and carried a portable one that's immobile when fully expanded. Relies on her hitting it with a magic wrench to fix it during fights, otherwise enemy bullets will easily chew it up.
Her HUD EFF is never wrong and that just seems stupid to me. LP can see foes through walls using her HUD and the Friend/Foe Indicator is so perfect that at one point... mild unimportant spoiler... Littlepip is able to tell that when a baddie is threatening LP with a minigun by revving it up, the baddie isn't actually going to shoot because the baddie's marker and name didn't change colour from Neutral Yellow to Hostile Red. LP has a minigun revved up in her goddamn face and doesn't flinch specifically because her HUD is so utterly perfect in the information it grants.

>>294900
>>294903
>>294907
>memory orbs
Another thing that could have been written much better. In theory they're a fun idea, a way to look directly into the setting's backstory and learn what actually happened to the canon characters and how that relates to the present situation. But well, they're written by Kkat, so...

>In my earlier post I hypothesised since LittlePip is a Pip-Buck technician maybe she knows how to program or troubleshoot the Eyes Forward Sparkle.
Many of Pip's apparent skills and abilities would be a lot more tolerable if they were well established *before* they became relevant to her quest rather than the moment they happen to be needed, she wasn't the undisputed master of all of them, and she didn't have so damn *many*.
Telekinetic savant? Okay - it's a fun gimmick for a unicorn.
Capable lockpick? Okay - she's a klepto.
L33t H4x0r? Maybe with some training - she's a technician by trade, so at the very least she knows her way around a (specific type of) computer.
Master marksman? More dubious; the pipbuck gives her autoaim but at the very least a wasteland veteran like Calamity should be able to outdo her.
Devious sociopolitical manipulator? Ehhhhh. Her entire backstory is that she's that one borderline NEET who nobody likes, even herself.

All of the above, with no comparable peers in any of those fields? Nah. Fuck off. Her horn is a gravity gun, she's the only lockpick in the world, computers always do what she wants, she can outfight seasoned killers after a couple weeks of running around outside, and everyone else seems to have an IQ 50 points below her own, which is hardly stellar. She's a sue of the most obnoxious kind.

>>294976
True. Despite all the shit stereotypical Shonens get for their stereotypical big-hearted empty-headed hot-blooded hero boy protagonists, putting gaps in your hero's skillset is a a smart writing choice that lets other characters become useful whenever they need to be. Would One Piece be as beloved if Luffy could do alone what his entire Straw Hat Pirates crew could do together and then some? What would be the point of the party's Thief, Swordsman, Sniper, Cook, Musician, Shipwright, Doctor, or Achaeologist if the hero Luffy could do all of this and more on his own? Are you really writing about friendship if it is easy and pointless amd meaningless?

If Littlepip is supposed to be an underdog valiantly struggling in a doomed quest against the evils of this absurdly dark hell world, she shouldn't be overpowered enough from day one to outperform all her friends. What's the point in giving her Calamity so early if he barely matters? Why write one edgy veteran who says no to joining Team LP because her Speech Skill is too low and then immediately write a new edgy veteran who says yes to joining Team LP? If you make her a combat goddess from day one, where can she go from here? How can she grow? Giving her even more guns with even bigger damage numbers? Giving her extra party members who are meant to contribute three skills that can be combat or noncombat skills? What's the point in Velvet's silver tongue and Calamity's battle saddle and any other party members and the flavour of DPS big damage they can shit out with their favourite weapon type when LP can already sneak whenever she needs to and talk her way out of and into anything and shoot any weapon perfectly and psychically lift boxcars? Hell, I'm surprised she doesn't carry that boxcar around with her! Except I am also not surprised because Boxcar isn't a weapon in Fallout like the Scoped Hunting Revolver is.

>>294978
>Hell, I'm surprised she doesn't carry that boxcar around with her! Except I am also not surprised because Boxcar isn't a weapon in Fallout like the Scoped Hunting Revolver is.
Funny you should mention. Bethesda being Bethesda, in FO3's Broken Steel DLC they had an NPC run underneath the level 'wearing' a train instead of putting in the effort to implement a functioning one. As a result Fo3 does, technically, have an equippable train car if you're willing to dive into the code for it.

>>294897
>Will have to call a mulligan in favor of Kkat this time. He didn't mention how any of it happened but did say what LittlePip's plan was with the turrets.

Here is exactly what the author wrote:

>I lifted my PipBuck and looked at it. “Okay, we’re in luck. I’ve got one more Stealth Buck. I can use it to get up to the turrets and reprogram them, just like the ones back at that pegasus convoy. That way, they’ll let us through, and keep anypony who gets the idea to follow us out.”
In light of what you pointed out, it's a little easier to see what the author probably had in mind. I'd forgotten about the earlier scene where she reprograms turrets, but when we go back to Chapter Nine we find this:

>I was trained to reprogram the spell matrix of a PipBuck. Tweaking a turret to run off my PipBuck’s definitions of friend and foe was comparatively easy! Especially right now!
As absurd as this is, the author technically establishes a precedent for LP to be able to reprogram gun turrets to shoot at her enemies, and provides an explanation for how she does it that makes sense in-world. As far as a story's internal logic is concerned, this is all you really have to do. Whether or not it's a good idea is a whole other conversation, of course, but now that I see this I think I have to agree with you that the behavior of the turrets are within the scope of this story's logic. So, I will grudgingly give k "just ignore that poop smell coming from what I generously call my vagina" kat a pass here.

My confusion was partly that I'd forgotten about the earlier scene, and partly that the whole idea of gun turrets being programmed to detect "friend" and "foe" is so bizarre that I missed what she actually did. Now that I read it closely the meaning is clear, but when I read it the first time I just assumed that she had used the stealth buck to sneak up and simply disable the turrets, rather than reprogram them to target different enemy types.

This really illustrates how far my thinking is from the author's, and is probably a big part of why I am having so much difficulty following his logic most of the time. As you say, it is very video-gamey. In a real-world setting, I can't even imagine what criteria one might use to program automated gun turrets to only shoot "bad" guys; even in a world with magic this is a very tall order. Unless the spell is sentient and capable of making moral decisions on its own, you'd need to specify some concrete group of traits it could use to identify who gets shot and who doesn't. Having it target based on something visual, like only shooting at combatants wearing a particular uniform, could work; similarly, you could program it to target a specific type of creature (pony, griffon, zebra, etc) and that would make sense. But the logic problems inherent in trying to write a spell and/or computer program that could look at any given individual and somehow sort them into "friend" or "foe" is so complex that I wouldn't even consider putting it into a story; it just doesn't make any sense.

However, in a video game, it's not a complex idea at all. You've got a player character controlled by a human and a bunch of NPCs controlled by AI. The NPCs can be tagged PlayerTeam, EnemyTeam, NeutralTeam, etc, and each type of NPC can be easily programmed to only target characters of a specific type. Thus, concepts like an auto-targeting system for the player that only targets baddies, or an AI-controlled gun turret that can be programmed to target EnemyTeam instead of PlayerTeam, is very simple.

So, while the author isn't technically violating his own in-world logic here, he has inadvertently shown us yet another example of why video game logic doesn't necessarily translate to real-world logic, and why it can be tricky attempting to convincingly novelize a video game environment.

>>294885

Chapter Thirteen: Voices of the Past

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>"It is a ghost story. They're all made up."
Honestly, I have no idea what to make of these epitaphs at this point. This out-of-context quote from some unknown speaker could signify that there will be ghosts in this chapter, or it could just be the author expressing his remorse at having paid thousands of dollars to have his penis cut off. Time will tell, I suppose.

>"Relinquish your rights to the contents of the vault, and she's all yours," Gawd explained as she pointed a wing at Junction R-7. "Do you accept?"
As far as I can tell, what's happening here is that Gawd is going to take over Shattered Hoof as LP wanted, and since she won't need the junction-fortress anymore, she is offering it to Littlepoop. However, LP has to give up whatever claim she might have on the memory orbs inside the vault. I'm assuming since Gawd promised her the vault as payment for killing Deadeyes, but now wants the memory orbs for some unknown reason, she needs to trade her something for them in order to make things all squaresies as far as her goofy contract-logic is concerned.

Basically, then, LP's choice of reward for killing Deadeyes is this: she can either have a vault full of crap from 200 years ago, or a defensible structure she could live in and/or use as a home base. Since LP has no reason beyond idle curiosity to give a fuck about the memory orbs, this decision should be a no-brainer, but the author prefers to draw it out as if it were difficult for her.

>I looked at the disabled train and scrap metal shacks, seeing it in an entirely new light. This could be my home. Our home, if Calamity and Velvet Remedy were willing. A place to rest. For Calamity to hang his hat.
Technically, Calamity already has a home, as it was established earlier that he has a house or something outside New Appleoosa. I'm still curious why he doesn't just return there.

Anyway, there are a few more paragraphs of her daydreaming about what she could do with the property, but ultimately she accepts the offer.

>Any hesitation (or concern about why Gawd suddenly wanted a vault full of memory orbs), was washed away by that wonderful “we”.
I'm a little curious why Gawd would want the memory orbs as well, seeing as she has even less use for them than Littlepoop does (as far as I can tell, they require some level of magic to use, so it would stand to reason that only a unicorn could do anything with them). In this story, there could be any number of reasons for this, ranging from decent to utterly retarded, and we won't know if any of them actually apply unless the author decides to tell us, so for now we'll just note it and move on. In any event, Littlepoop is at present more interested in the fact that Velvet is using words like "ours" and "we" to describe this new domicile of hers, which predictably has her nether-regions all atwitter. Littlepoop accepts Gawd's offer, and the scene ends in a page break.

>"Ah don't get it," Calamity muttered. "She's helpin' raiders now?"
I have completely lost track of where all the allegiances in this story lie. As far as I can tell, "raiders" in this context refers to the group at Shattered Hoof that was working for Topaz and Deadeyes. Since Gawd's contract was with Topaz as I understand it, this means that she was technically helping these raiders the entire time, or at the very least they were all on the same side. I am therefore unsure why Gawd helping this group should surprise Calamity, as Gawd has never expressed any particular antipathy for this specific group of raiders or for raiders in general; as I understand it her quarrel was with Deadeyes himself, and the only reason she had an issue with him was because she suspected him of plotting against Topaz, with whom she had a contract.

Anyway, the short version of what's going on here is that now that Topaz is dead, Gawd's contract with him is null and void, and with Deadeyes also gone Shattered Hoof is leaderless. Gawd has decided to step in and take over the operation, although now that Topaz' real identity has been revealed, it's unclear why she should want to do this.

This story has a well-established pattern of setting up a potentially interesting plotline and then taking it in a very stupid direction. My original assumption for Topaz was that he would turn out to be some kind of gangster or local big-shot who was running this gem-harvest business as part of a larger enterprise, and Red Eye was invading because he wanted to take it over. Gems presumably have some kind of commercial or practical value in this world, so this would have made sense and I think this is the direction most authors would have chosen to go.

However, I seem to have once again underestimated just how pantsu-on-head retarded this author really is; what was actually going on is that Topaz was just some fudge-packing dragon who lived in the mines for some reason, and was harvesting gems because he wanted to eat the gems. And, as if that were not pantsu-on-head-retarded enough on its own, the dragon apparently also intended to eat his own workforce. Yes, you read that correctly: Topaz the rump-rollicking Dragon organized an entire commercial gem harvesting operation, consisting of a network of rock-farms, a dedicated rock-breaking facility, and an entire private army of enforcers, for no better reason than that he wanted to prepare and consume a single fucking meal.

Even if you completely ignore how stupid this is, there are still any number of logical holes that need to be addressed. One of the bigger ones that jumps out at me is the question of how or why Topaz bothered to hire Gawd's Talon group in the first place. What did he expect them to do exactly? Literally what was their job? Was he just going to eat them or did he actually have some larger plan here? Kkat has actually managed to make even less sense than usual, which is an accomplishment in itself.

>>295077
It just dawned on me that this story is really bad at working pre war stuff into the post war world. It cannot mix Setting and Plot.

Littlepip left her vault and went to Ponyville aka Poopyville
she escaped
And learned that Sweet Apple Acres is shit and full of poisoned apples
the GM aka DM aka Watcher tells her to get back into town and recover some books
She just does because lol why not
LP frees slaves along the way and kills a sniper and many other baddies
then goes to a random factory full of killbots and finds a gun
here she learns a relative of Applejack had a gun once I guess
she fucked around in a sewer full of RadGators at some point even though ponies should not know what radiation is and radiation never factored into mutations or the apocalypse
then she went to New Appleoosa and was told to save it from some nearby vaults monsters so she goes through the vault. She could close the door but the vault was misoginist so she loots it completionistically while someones poisoned and dying then blows it all up
Crane the NPC gives her lifting training she never needed and the author could take this opportunity to explain magic and its limits and use and how to train it but nah lol.
oh and she befriended a cowboy with a shotgun and wings
then she goes to Old Appleoosa to free more slaves
she does so
encounters an alicorn and fights it and kills it by dropping a cow on it- haha just kidding this isn't earthworm jim it's "kkat never set foot in a gym"
moves on to a random rock farm and almost gets killed by a small child Pinkie Pie fangirl who's out of this story faster than fuck
Oh also Velvet Remedy joined the team
and The Watcher showed up to give some exposition about the pre war world
now Team LP is going to a slaver infested city far far away for more murderhoboing and they might stop at a nearby radio tower at some point
Along the path...
the heroes get involved in an incomprehensible power struggle over a rock farm mafia or rock breaking plant or something
the heroes kill a dragon unexpectedly after putting on a backstreet boys all-girl cover-band show
while here they learn these baddies were responsible for the tragic backstory of one who is no longer in the story. And listen to some quirky audio logs about Diamond Tiara and the horrible fate she met here in this skeleton filled shithole.

Nothing pre war meaningfully influences the choices these post war ponies make.
So far there is no light flung into the future by the Mane Six to try and give future poners a way to fix things.
The heroes are not on a quest to uncover what really happened to their world.
Nor are they on a quest to avenge it by destroying those they blame for its destruction.
They are not trying to rebuild a better world by befriending factions that can be reformed and crushing those maintaining the evil state of this world.
They make no effort to learn everything possible before choosing sides and deciding who to kill. They are on a quest to slaughter mean ponies for trying to make the best of a bad situation forced on them by ziggers. Who did everything wrong.
It's like they know they are in a tabletop RPG where if they just keep killing baddies and leaping on whatever sounds important like Crane The Lifter or that slaver filled pony city they are gunning for, they will eventually get to the main plot.

>>295077
>However, I seem to have once again underestimated just how pantsu-on-head retarded this author really is; what was actually going on is that Topaz was just some fudge-packing dragon who lived in the mines for some reason, and was harvesting gems because he wanted to eat the gems. And, as if that were not pantsu-on-head-retarded enough on its own, the dragon apparently also intended to eat his own workforce. Yes, you read that correctly: Topaz the rump-rollicking Dragon organized an entire commercial gem harvesting operation, consisting of a network of rock-farms, a dedicated rock-breaking facility, and an entire private army of enforcers, for no better reason than that he wanted to prepare and consume a single fucking meal.
There's a flimsy logic here in that Topaz alludes to it being a pre-sleep meal - later in the story, around chapter 20 or so, it's established that in Kkat's conception of Equestria dragons hibernate, implicitly for many years at a time. None of this is in the text, which is entirely to the story's detriment, but if you really wanted to reach in the story's defense it makes just a tad more sense if Topaz is preparing to turn himself into a proper thicc boi so that he can sleep for a decade or two. Once again, Kkat fails to communicate what's in his own mind through the text. With that all said and done, consider Topaz's methods and diet when another dragon shows up later.

Topaz is... well, an FoE villain. He's the boss of the tutorial dungeon and the "get your own place" quest. We can add "killed a dragon in the same chapter it appeared" to Pip's list of accomplishments before even reaching the main plotline. A truly engaging narrative, this is.

Unrelated, but merry christmas everyone.

>>295139
Merry Christmas to all of you beautiful bastards, I motherfucking love you all for reigniting my passion for writing.
Regarding Topaz there are probably some villains out there in fiction who have their words/deeds re-examined in a new light by the heroes and audience after new information is revealed. But never before have I seen a villain who only makes sense 10 chapters after the chapter in which he is introduced and killed. Time Topaz wasted on "Git in mah belleh!" could have been spent villainously monologuing about his motivation for being the way he is. You know before he is introduced and killed in the same chapter like a goddamn afterthought.
What bugs me about the story's inability to marry pre-war lore and current year plot is that I've seen so many stories do it better. The locations LP finds are not remnants of pre war Equestria usually. When they are, they are never linked to the past in a relevant and deep writing ironic way. Ponyville got taken over by Raiders who pooped on the floors and put spikes on sticks, but... why? It's not as if they all became assholes overnight once the Mane Six left Ponyville to take charge of their own Ministries and the mid-war govt started rationing sugar and bananas and other nice things.
New Vegas is made of House's attempts to recreate what was destroyed long ago. It's an old snowglobe of a city ruined by nuclear hellfire and transformed by genetic and cultural shifts.
New Appleoosa exists because I guess not everypony at Old Appleoosa was fine with slavery. But if this Old Appleoosa is supposed to be the canon pony Appleoosa after centuries of nukes... how can you tell that from anything besides the name? It's not like they're still dealing with Buffalo bullshit. Or home to a cherry factory full of automated robot workers that became frenzied killbots once angry saboteurs who lost their job started destroying machines and taught them to hate. There's Pinkie Pie's house and a random rock-breaking gem miner prison but it's not like the sins or follies of the past created the arbitrarily "Fallout-ish" tragedies and monsters and factions who call this world their home. The heroes of today are not cleaning up the messes of the earlier years that created the villains of today. They are simply travelling around slaughtering villains today while barely giving a fuck about the backstory behind it all or whatever the author calls the causes of the villain's existence.
Remember Diamond Tiara's stupid audio logs? Imagine if Topaz made them. Imagine if Topaz wrote audio messages to himself and scattered them around the facility talking about his life as a pony and the events that led up to him taking an experimental Dragon transformation potion. Imagine him scattering these logs around the place so he can get to a safe and listen to his own voice - calming himself - if he ever starts transforming into an uncontrollable dragon Hulk-style without wanting to. Eventually Topaz becomes a full-on Dragon and embraces eating gems and ponies. Gawd and Deadeyes are specifically fighting because Topaz promised the place to Gawd and then his underling Deadeyes took over once Topaz was unable to lead effectivepy due to declining mental abilities. The fight begins when LP meets the Dragon but LP's already feeling bad for the guy and saying "With your strength you could help us save lives" but he doesn't give a shit and LP kills him. He finally gained the power he wanted but lost his mind and his ability to do anything with it, becoming a feral beast Deadeyes keeps locked up in the mines.
I reckon that would be cool.

Fuck me for saying this but at least Assman tried to justify the whole world minus one dying mudslime abandoning reality for pony AI waifu buttfuck matrix simulator Cyber-horsejunk 2069 by making it pony themed. Even though his fantasy novel about a fantasy AI goddess was pure wish-fulfillment nonsense on two levels (he wants to be the loser gamer solving puzzles for AI god. And live in a universe where AI god ate everything)
That said, the story's still fucking retarded. The AI goddess can manipulate any humans copy on any level with their consent or control their entire environment to manipulate them without their consent. The AI was able to modify everyone to be able to break the theoretical Dunbar's Number limit but didn't think to delete all other AIs and modify everyone that can be called a former human to have their values permanently satisfied by being reduced to mere brains trapped in separate slow-existing boxes plastered in low-ponygon ponies. Doing this would massively reduce computing costs for humanity instead of simulating extra AIs for the grandchildren's children of AI and human children and letting resource costs balloon exponentionally until IT ALL COMES TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOOOWN and the AI starts eating all the planets.
That story tried to connect its shitty shallow mockery of humanity to the MLP franchise even though it was effectively just a pony label arbitrarily slapped on a low-quality sci-fi magazine short story.
Despite all of Kkat's lines like "Twilight Sparkle invented batteries and laser guns" and "Applejack invented shotguns" and "Fluttershy's Bunny invented steroids and was a mass-murdering war criminal on the battlefield who struck fear into the hearts of Zebras everywhere" he is utterly unable to properly marry Ponyland and Fallout in a way that is consistent, logical, and emotionally impactful. In fact those lines and attributions only serve to make his choices look arbitrary and desperate. Personality flaws didn't kill Equestria. Apathy didn't kill Equestria. Bad ideas didn't kill Equestria. A loss of culture or a degradation of culture didn't kill Equestria. Pride and Greed and Gluttony and Envy and Lust and Sloth didn't kill Equestria so how can the heroes wield the seven holy Christian virtues or the six Elements of Harmony to fix it? Nothing Team Littlepip can fight against today in a literal or moral or emotional or philosophical sense is responsible for the death of Equestria or the existence of Team Littlepip. They cannot save the world by choosing some new path. They can only slaughter the enemies along their own path until the author drops the solution right onto Littlepip's labia.

>be Littlepip
>fight some baddies and slaughter raiders while breaking some ribs
>pass out from the pain of your broken ribs
>have weird dreams on painkillers while Velvet Remedy heals you
>live through a Sonic Sez episode compilation where Dream-Calamity tells you wasteland survival advice he's already given you except every piece of info comes after a skit where everyone's stupid, especially Raiders, and their folly demonstrates the value of this advice given by a super-fast Calamity armed with Pinkie Pie/Looney Toons cartoon physics
>sometimes Velvet gives you stupid and unwanted and obvious childish moral advice during skits instead
>awaken hours later thinking you need to lay off the steroids and painkillers and beer-basted mesquite pod honey-fried crack mints

What do you think of my greentext? Showing LP's dreams could be a perfect consistent source of comic relief without compromising the bleakness of the grim dark setting. Also merry christmas everyone, I love you.

>>295325
>Showing LP's dreams could be a perfect consistent source of comic relief without compromising the bleakness of the grim dark setting.
Hard disagree. In principle, sure, dreams and imagination can be a source of humor in an otherwise bleak setting. But in FoE, this apprach actually working would depend heavily on the premise that "inside Littlepip's head" is an entertaining place to be.

This actually comes up later as memory orbs become more important - the events that take place in the memories themselves are all filtered through Pip's first person perspective rather than objective narration, so she's constantly interjecting with "witty commentary" and "unga bunga she female, me horny" and "ew a penis".

>>295327
You're right that does sound like shit.
>ew a penis
Lesbians are pure cringe. Who looks at a decent cock and considers it unappealing? Surely they just feel insecure about an inability to please a cock. There are futafags out there specifically because cocks are so great. Cocks inspire architecture and symbology, they can be found in the upwards points of military shoulderpad chevrons and the wide thick shafts that hold up ceilings.
Littlepip's conscious head isn't an entertaining place to be because she is annoying and unfunny. Just like the author. But watching her trip on weird shit in the realm of dreams sounds fun to me. Only a good writer could pull that off though.
Speaking of flashbacks do you think this story made the right call when "Connecting the present to the past" by putting Flashback Balls in the present for Littlepip to experience and react to?
I think filtering those flashbacks through LP's lesbian gigafaggot lens was a mistake because it stops the author from trying to get into the mindset of pre-war ponies and write the story so that you can get into that mindset too. We don't get to feel enough of the terror and loss and other strong emotions of the pre war ponies, we just see a megafaggot's reaction to it.

>>295077

Merry Christmas all, hope everyone had a fun holiday. I personally spent a fair portion of mine reading better stuff than FoE, and I hope you all did the same. But now, alas, we must get back to the grind.

>I watched her, admiring her words and the way she moved. I didn't like Gawdyna, but I couldn't help but respect her. And yes, she was sleek and powerful and very attractive for a non-pony. (And so what if she’s a griffin? There's nothing wrong with just looking.) Gawd herself had taken on both of the enemy griffins, felling them with her magical energy shotgun and her talons. She'd picked up a few new scars in the battle. I thought they only made her look more impressive.
In case you've forgotten that Littlepoop is a lesbian since the last time it was mentioned, the author is kind enough to remind us here.

Honestly this kind of thing feeds into what I don't like about the author's attempted romance angle between LP and VR. LP seems to be pretty indiscriminate as to whose flanks she admires, and while that's normal enough (for a guy at least; not sure about a dyke), she doesn't seem to regard VR any differently than anypony else she salivates over, so it's hard to take her "love" seriously.

Anyway, LP goes on to remark that she has picked up a few scars of her own, which I'm sure she secretly loves since it probably makes her feel like more of a badass, and meanwhile Gawd has been droning on about how she intends to take over Shattered Hoof and run it differently. She is guarded about giving away details, but it seems as if she intends to run it as a commercial gem harvesting operation, and will trade the gems with Manehattan and other nearby settlements; basically what I assumed Topaz was doing already, back when I assumed the author had something sane in mind for that plotline.

It actually sounds as if Gawd is planning to run her operation completely in line with how I imagined Topaz already did: a legit trading operation that is backed with the muscle of Gawd's mercenary group, who are presumably not averse to playing hardball when it comes to protecting their financial interests. I'm assuming she intends to train some of the raiders to this occupation as well. All of this makes it even more suspect that LP would place as much blind trust in her as she does, actually.

LP asks about the memory orbs and is flatly told that it is none of her business. I'm assuming the author is going somewhere with this, and it has a lot of potential, but at this point I am expecting to be disappointed.

>As we reached the end of the yard and stepped into the guard tower, I could hear a radio playing. The ending of an ancient song by Sapphire Shores gave way to the voice of DJ Pon3.
>“Good evening wastelanders! How’s every pony doing? Got some great news for you today! Remember that little Stable Gal who took on the slavers of Appleloosa and saved all those ponies? Well don’t ask me how, but she survived takin’ a nosedive off a cliff in a speeding train. That’s right, fillies and gentlecolts: she’s back!“
In traditional video game style, only the actions of le player are important enough to be newsworthy. Even if LP is attracting enough attention at this point that the local news is mentioning her various deeds, it stands to reason that other things would be going on that the DJ would report about.

In a video game, the world is generally static and will not change until the player begins completing objectives. This makes sense from a technical perspective: the game revolves around the player and it is assumed that the player's actions will be the primary driving force that moves the story along, and it would also be a programmatic nightmare to try and create a complex world that moves on its own regardless of what the player chooses to do although it has been done before; one of my favorite games is The Last Express, and in this game events will move on their own in real time, and the story's direction will only change when the player takes action. In a novel, though, there is no reason for the world to revolve entirely around the main character in this way, unless your story is about a king or something.

>“And what’s she been up to now, I hear you ask? Well, sit down an’ put on your listening ears, cuz it’s time for DJ Pon3 to tell you a story. Ready? Good. This is the story of a little filly named Silver Bell…”
This is completely absurd. How or why would the DJ know anything about this? Silver Bell's story was could have been a nice little side-arc, but the events and their aftermath were mostly personal for LP. Nothing that happened there had any impact on the wider world, and I see no reason why the DJ should be reporting on it. The only newsworthy thing there might be the megaspell in the barn, but seeing as how they just left it there unguarded, it would actually make more sense for the DJ to keep quiet about it. Presumably raiders, Red Eye, and other bad actors have as much access to the radio as the Good Guys™ do, so announcing on a public channel that a weapon of mass destruction is just sitting unguarded in an abandoned barn somewhere would probably not be a good move. Then again, we don't really know anything about this DJ, so it's entirely possible that this guy is either a baddie or just an oblivious attention-whore.

>I looked to Calamity in distress. I did not like getting credit for what was really Velvet Remedy’s good deed.
What exactly did Velvet Remedy do here? I remember she was the one who calmed down Silver Bell, but apart from that...you know what? That whole story was so poorly executed that I don't think anyone really deserves credit for a "good deed" there.

>DJ Pon3 didn’t mention my pegasus friend at all, and Calamity seemed unduly pleased by that.
This also doesn't make much sense. Why is Littlepoop famous but not her friends? Because she's le hero and as such is entitled by birthright to all glory and recognition, deserved or otherwise?

>>295417
>Even if LP is attracting enough attention at this point that the local news is mentioning her various deeds, it stands to reason that other things would be going on that the DJ would report about.
This is another holdover from Fallout 3 (surprise!). One of the relatively novel aspects of Fo3 was being able to tune into various radio channels with your Pipboy which would then play in the background as you carried on with the game. it ranged from ironic old-timey music about how great the apocalyse is to propaganda and local news. One channel will periodically report and opine on your character's exploits, be they heroic or otherwise. You meet the DJ as part of the main plot and can even kill him if you find him obnoxious, putting a stop to his reporting for the rest of the game.

As for how the FoE equivalent of this character knows so much about what's happening and why he focuses so heavily on Littlepip's actions, I will credit Kkat with giving both of these in-universe reasons where Fo3 didn't even bother, which will be revealed once Pip gets to know more about the DJ.

>>295417

Anyway, Littlepoop has some plans for her junction boxcar fortress I guess; she's planning to put turrets on the walls or something. The text begins to ramble a bit here, and I suspect this is another point where the author was just thinking out loud while typing. As ever, the progression of time is unclear.

>Calamity was already getting restless. He had joined me because, like him, I wasn’t content to do nothing while others were being abused and murdered.
"I wasn't content to do nothing" is a double negative. Also, I'm going to complain again that this is a lazy motivation to assign to even one character, let alone two. "The hero is a good guy who does good because he's good" might work well enough as a motivation if you're writing an Adventures of Captain Blaster cartoon aimed at 5 year olds, but if you want to attempt anything with real depth it's usually better to put a little more thought into it than this.

>He respected the idea of Junction R-7 as a base of operations, and was already drawing up plans for a workshop in one of the cattle cars, but my pegasus friend was never going to settle down and play happy homemaker.
This clashes with what we already know about Calamity. When he and LP met, he was living outside New Appleoosa but was basically associated with the town. He worked as a guard protecting their trade caravans. While we don't know much about his broader history, he doesn't convey the impression of being a restless wanderer or anything like that; he seemed fairly settled-in when LP found him. As I've often complained before, I find it a little odd that he even joined up with her in the first place, instead of simply returning to his old life once their initial quest together was complete.

>Velvet Remedy was still fretting over the most gravely injured whom she had been able to save, but I could tell she was beginning to accept there was nothing more she could do which other ponies were not capable of. Soon, she too would desire to leave this place. The nightingale wasn’t done flying yet.
As long as I'm complaining about how all of these characters' motivations are dumb, Velvet Remedy's motivations are dumb. On the one hand she seems to have some vague desire to help others and to be a doctor, which she could easily do from here, but at the same time she has this weird "I don't want to be in le cage, I must be le free as le bird" motive crudely grafted onto her hindquarters like an unsightly appendage. What the hell does this pony even want out of life? Does she even know? Does she even have a vague idea? Do any of them?

>I, myself, wanted to stomp out the cruel shadow of Red Eye’s slavery that darkened the soul of Equestria -- but that was a goal both vague and absurdly ambitious.
Admitting it to yourself is the first step.

>In truth, the only tangible goal ahead of me was meeting with DJ Pon3.
Still not understanding why this would be. Nigel II has thus far assured us that "because it happened in Fallout 3" is the driving force behind most of the plot for this, and I agree that this is probably the actual case. However, I will continue to protest that it makes little sense according to the story's internal logic.

Though, to be fair, this DJ has been weirdly focused on reporting LP's actions, which as I've noted is pretty bizarre. I suppose seeking out the DJ simply to ask "why the fuck are you so interested in me" would make sense at this point; however, I don't get the impression that this is why she wants to see him. I'm not even sure the author actually picks up on this whole thing being weird. He seems to think that LP going to meet this DJ would be a natural next move for her, and seems to assume that all of us are on the same page, and as such doesn't seem too interested in explaining the particulars to us. And yes, I ask all of these questions knowing full well that the answer, most likely, is "because Fallout 3."

For my part, I would assume that her next move would be to go to Manehattan and thence to Fillydelphia, since that was what she was supposed to be doing before she got sidetracked by this whole Gawd/Deadeyes/Topaz arc. However, it's clear at this point that she is headed to the radio station, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

>I was rather counting on him to point me the way.
Why? Why would you assume he would know anything? Oh, why even bother? I'm sure the answer has something to do with Fallout 3.

>Plus, after listening to his radio broadcasts for the last few days, I really did fancy the idea of getting Velvet Remedy’s music onto the airwaves.
As far as dumb side quests go, this one is definitely up there on the dumbness scale. Does Velvet give a shit about her music being played on the radio? Will she be willing to travel all the way across the Wasteland, braving whatever dangers might be lurking in their path, just for the opportunity to sing a few songs on the radio? I'm assuming she'll have to sing live, as we haven't had any indicators that Velvet has made any recordings they could leave for the station. I thought Velvet didn't want to be a singer? This story is all over the fucking place.

>By the end of the week, it would be time to go.
After a quick page break, it's the end of the week and it is therefore time to go.

They are apparently all saddled up and ready to set out, but for some reason Velvet is moping in her boxcar, batting the Memory Orb around. LP asks her why she still hasn't viewed it yet (do we even know how these things are viewed?), and she basically blathers out that she's worried about what it will contain. If I remember correctly, they found this thing in a locker with a bunch of other random crap, scattered about the ruins of Cloudsdayle. For all she knows, it contains someone's shopping list.

>I’ve been hoping that it’s about Fluttershy… but now.
Literally nothing about where this object was found or the items around it would suggest it has anything to do with Fluttershy.

>>295424

Addendum to my last post: I went back to the point where Velvet and LP found the first memory orb, and I found this:

>Inside: numerous scrolls, ruined when a bottle of something had shattered, and the glass shards of said bottle, a framed picture of a bunny rabbit, a small crystal orb sealed in a clear bag (Property of the Ministry of Peace -- Restricted Viewing Only -- Unauthorized Viewers Will Be Prosecuted!), and a book (Supernaturals).
Once again, we have a situation where some completely obscure detail that the reader would have no reason to remember is being suddenly referenced. In this case, the "framed picture of a bunny rabbit" probably would suggest Fluttershy to the observant reader; however, within the story's internal logic, this is still a stupid connection for Velvet to make. Nothing about the circumstances under which this object was found would suggest Fluttershy; it was simply found in a delivery wagon. It could have been literally anypony's shit that Derpy was transporting when her wagon was shot down.

Moreover, while the bunny would be a dead giveaway for most MLP fans as to whose belongings the party had chanced upon, it's not clear why Velvet would know that Fluttershy had a pet rabbit she was fond of. There have been vague implications made that Velvet is some kind of Fluttershy fangirl, but it's only been mentioned once or twice in passing and hasn't factored into the story at all. Therefore, it's unclear how much information about Fluttershy Velvet would actually have.

Assuming the lifespan of pet rabbits in Equestria is similar to their lifespan in our world, it's extremely unlikely that Angel would have lived much longer than a decade, and most of the significant events in this world's backstory seem to have occurred when the mane 6 were much older (middle aged or later from the way they've been described, and I'm assuming they were in their teens or early twenties during the events of the show). Fluttershy might have kept a picture of her long-dead pet from her youth as a memento, but it's unlikely that this would be a widely-known fact about her.

I'll also mention that from the reader's perspective, it would be impossible to make this connection at all without prior knowledge of MLP. The character of Fluttershy has barely been mentioned in this story, and in the world of FoE we only know her as some vague shadowy figure from the past. Again, the bunny thing would be a dead giveaway for a fan, but someone coming into this story fresh wouldn't necessarily make this connection.

Anyway, Velvet is currently agonizing over what might be on this memory orb she found. She's worried that it might show her a side of Fluttershy's personality that she doesn't wish to see.

>I could understand. I remembered my reaction upon realizing Velvet Remedy was not a prisoner of the old Appleloosa slavers. And even though that had turned out to be for laudable reasons, I knew how much it hurt to see the pony you idolize fall from the pedestal you put them on.
Again, if more had been done to establish Velvet's admiration of Fluttershy this might actually mean something; as such, we're barely even aware of it, and LP's sentiment here is mostly confusing. Why does Velvet idolize Flutters exactly? There's no apparent connection between Fluttershy and Velvet. If anything, it would make more sense for Velvet to idolize Rarity since she is apparently a descendant of Sweetie Belle, or for that matter, why shouldn't she idolize Sweetie Belle? What is it about Fluttershy that attracts her? How does she even know who Fluttershy was? For that matter, who was Fluttershy? We don't know anything about her in this world. Once again, the author is just assuming we can see what's in his head.

Anyway, LP offers to view the memory orb for her in order to spare her whatever kind of icky naughty stuff might be on it inb4 it contains porn. We have still had virtually no explanation as to what the memory orbs specifically are or how they specifically work, nor do we have any indication that either Velvet or LP would have the slightest idea how to operate one. However, since it's FoE, I'm assuming that none of that shit matters.

>I took a deep breath, swallowing back a sudden hesitation. I’d never actually viewed a memory orb before. Logically, I knew what to expect: a reliving of some other pony’s experience. I’d been told such memories were visual, auditory, tactile… even taste and smell were preserved. But would it be crisp and vivid, or blurred by age? Would I see things as they had really been, or would it be filtered by the perceptions and biases of the rememberer? Would I sense the pony’s thoughts? And would I be able to tell them from my own?
Again, there's really no reason she should even know this much about memory orbs, but again, I'm assuming that kkat considers such trifles to be beneath his creative genius.

LP puts her horn on the orb, and something something magic happens, and she is able to activate it as easily as if it were a bunch of almonds.

>A strange flushing sensation washed over me as the train car
I'm assuming that the author meant to say something along the lines of:
>A strange flushing sensation washed over me, as it had on the train car
However, that is not what this says. The way the author has it written, LP has somehow become the train car, and a strange flushing sensation is washing over her now that she has assumed this form.

>Velvet Remedy and the entire Equestrian Wasteland was obliterated and replaced with an entirely different reality.
Velvet Remedy and the entire Equestrian Wasteland were obliterated.

><-=ooO Ooo=->
This special kind of page break indicates that we are now in Roger Corman psychedelic dream sequence territory.
[YouTube] House of Usher - Nightmare sequence 1960 Vincent Price [Embed]

What horrors shall Littlepoop uncover in the depths of the memory orb? Find out next.

>>295325
Nigel II is right; this is a terrible idea. Dream sequences and things like that only add extra weight to a story without necessarily adding substance, and when your story is 500,000 words long already the last thing it needs is extra weight.

>>295375
>Who looks at a decent cock and considers it unappealing? Surely they just feel insecure about an inability to please a cock. There are futafags out there specifically because cocks are so great. Cocks inspire architecture and symbology, they can be found in the upwards points of military shoulderpad chevrons and the wide thick shafts that hold up ceilings.
This is such an easy shot that I don't even think I can make a joke here.

>Speaking of flashbacks do you think this story made the right call when "Connecting the present to the past" by putting Flashback Balls in the present for Littlepip to experience and react to?
In a word, no. The present and the past are extremely poorly connected in this story. So far, much of this text revolves around the events of the past (and to be fair, the pre-war backstory seems to be a much richer and more interesting world than anything going on in the main story), but little if any of it connects to anything going on in the present. The author should have ideally written the main story so that it connected to events in the past, which would be revealed naturally as the story unfolded. If he couldn't manage that, he would have been better off just focusing on the main story, and leaving the reader to wonder about how the world got all blowed up and what happened to all their favorite characters from the show. He could always write a prequel or something if he wanted to fill in some of the blanks.

In any case, dropping the backstory into the main story as a series of disconnected anecdotes that have nothing to do with what's going on is a terrible way to write a novel. The method of delivery for said anecdotes doesn't really matter.

>>295375
>>295429
Okay, I couldn't resist.

>>295432
:'D

>>295428

Littlepoop finds herself watching a pony's memories through the eyes of that pony. She is unable to interact with the world or move of her own volition, she is merely witnessing the events that the pony in question witnessed. She finds herself standing on a stage in an auditorium filled with ponies.

>I wanted to take a closer look at the walls of the auditorium -- I had the distinct impression that they were not wood paneled but rather actually formed from growing trees, much like the Ponyville Library.
This seems like a bizarre thing to notice in this situation.

>She concentrated on an elder (yet adorably cute) yellow pegasus
"Adorably cute" is redundant; it's a little like saying "kkat is a mentally ill transsexual."

Anyway, a pony that is presumably Fluttershy goes out on the stage and stands at the podium.

>I was struck by the distinct similarity between this pony and the one on the billboard I had seen a week ago, although what string of fortunes could take a pony from being the spokesmodel for carrot-flavored cola to serving as one of the most powerful mares in government was beyond me.
Once again, it's virtually impossible to keep track of all the weird little details the author has dropped at random intervals throughout this story. Do we actually know that Fluttershy was one of the most powerful mares in government? Was this actually mentioned anywhere? Should Littlepoop have this information? What, if anything, was Fluttershy's role? Even if we can piece enough of this autism together from our knowledge of the show and whatever snippets of disjointed information the text has haphazardly flung at us, this shouldn't be required in order to understand significant points in the story. If Fluttershy is important somehow, we should know exactly who she is at this point in the story. If she isn't, then why is this scene even happening?

>I immediately recognized the pattern. Velvet Remedy had hung the medical boxes in her Appleloosa boxcar so their butterflies would look exactly like that.
Do the medical boxes in this world have butterflies on them? Has that been mentioned? Should we remember it if it has? Was it even mentioned at the time LP entered her Appleoosa boxcar that her boxes were arranged in such a pattern? Again, instead of dropping in these obscure clues that Velvet admires Fluttershy, the author's purpose would be better served if he would just explain why she admires her so much. If we felt the connection or at least understood it, this would make a hell of a lot more sense. If it's supposed to be this important, it should have been a major part of her character up until now. Other than a couple of slight hints here and there, it's barely been mentioned.

Anyway, the flashback scene is completely pointless. Flutters goes up to the podium and hems and haws for awhile, and there's a lot of side commentary from Littlepoop about how adorable she is. She clearly holds some position of authority, and her underlings clearly hold her in high esteem. She announces that Luna has given them a new project, and it is supposed to help end the war. After this, the scene cuts off with the same kind of goofy-looking page break device. As to what, specifically, the project they are being assigned might entail, there is nary a hint.

>Some pony (whom I had the distinct urge to buck in the face) actually asked, “If the war ends, won’t we all be out of a job?”
This seems like a reasonable question, and unless LP is somehow absorbing the emotions of whoever's memories she's viewing, there's no reason for her to react emotionally here.

>Velvet Remedy was looking up at me with big, beautiful eyes. I smiled to her, levitating the memory orb back to her, being careful to focus around it rather than directly at it so as not to be lost in the memory again.
>“It’s not bad.”
After this, a page break. Was there any point at all to this scene?

Anyway, the next scene begins where the previous scene ought to have. They are back on the road to Manehattan, because even though LP was blabbing on for paragraphs upon paragraphs about how she intended to go see the DJ for some weird reason or other, it looks like she decided to go to Manehattan after all. Her friends, as ever, are trudging along beside her, blindly following this wack job wherever the hell she decides to go, because reasons.

They come across a partially intact hut, the front facade of which was able to survive the nuclear/magic/whatever blast because it was facing away from the city. Calamity hears movement inside and goes to check it out, returning a moment later to inform them that it's only a humble (((merchant))) and that he and his owl are perfectly harmless.

>my PipBuck flashed an enigmatic notice on my Eyes-Forward Sparkle, letting me know that it had decided to label this particular ruined hut “Trixie’s Cottage”.
Is there any particular reason this device is highlighting random landmarks like this, other than that a video game radar system will generally do stuff like that, and the author wants us to know that this was Trixie's Cottage, even though there is no apparent way this information could be in any way meaningful?

>I had long since given up trying to understand why my PipBuck kept marking seemingly random locations.
Perhaps I ought to do the same.

Anyway, for some bizarre reason or another, someone apparently nailed a recording to the door of the hut, and for some equally bizarre reason it's still here after 200 years. The recording appears to be in "bad shape," although it's difficult to visualize what this might look like since we still don't know what medium these "recordings" are even supposed to be on.

>>295452

>In the back of my mind, a voice insisted that this might be hard enough to call for some Party-Time Mint-als. I knew the voice was lying, and I tried to ignore it.
This author only brings up these quirky little character traits when he wants to use them; most of the time they're MIA. If LP is addicted, or becoming addicted, to crack mints, it should be a constant nagging little voice in the back of her brain that we hear all the time. If Velvet is obsessed with Fluttershy to the point that she rearranges boxes to resemble her cutie mark, this should be a major aspect of her character that we should be well acquainted with by now. These things need to be continually reinforced if they're important. The only trait that actually does get any continuous reinforcement is LP's being a lesbian, and even that isn't integrated into her character particularly well. If you went through this text and deleted all the derpy little jokes she makes about how this and that mare has a nice ass, the entire story could go exactly the same and you'd never know this character was meant to be a lesbo.

>As I rejoined the others, the merchant (a grizzled unicorn stallion with a dust-colored mane and wearing trader barding) was telling Calamity and Velvet Remedy tall tales of the Manehattan Ruins.
What is "trader barding?" Is "trader" another one of those common occupations that in this universe denotes membership in some rigidly-defined social caste, along the same lines as "raider" or "slaver?" Do each of these groups have their own special designated barding that denotes their caste, so anypony can take one look at them and immediately know which group they belong to?

For being an anarchic, post-apocalyptic wasteland, this world seems weirdly organized and well structured. How formalized is any of this? Are these designations enforced somehow? Like, let's say a "raider" figures out that everypony avoids him wherever he goes, because he wears the official raider barding that designates him as a raider. He, being somewhat sharper than most of the other raiders in his local raiders chapter, decides he's going to put on "trader" barding instead, and is able to walk among ponies disguised as a trader. Then, when some unsuspecting pony approaches him to trade, he can spring his trap and say "Aha! I have fooled you! I am actually a raider! Now prepare to be raided!" And then he would proceed to raid the shit out of him. Would that be allowed? Or would he be fined by the raiders' guild for impersonating a trader?

Like, does it ever occur to any of these ponies to break out of these predefined roles just a weensy little bit? Maybe a slaver decides he wants to do a little trading and raiding on the side? You know, diversify his portfolio a little, learn some new skills? Maybe one lone, iconoclast raider decides that hanging entrails on his bedroom wall is unsanitary and gross, and decides to just hang up an old Milli Vanilli poster he found instead? Maybe spruce the place up a little, burn some incense, see if he can't convince some girls to come over? If he pulled that off he could change his name to Panty Raider.

What I'm getting at is that it's completely unnatural for individuals living in a chaotic wasteland with no rules or societal structure whatsoever to just spontaneously sort themselves into a handful of rigidly defined groups like this. Even if the characters the party is supposed to encounter on their journey are just generic throwaway bad guys or good guys, that doesn't mean they all have to fit specific archetypes from the Fallout games. You can humanize them a little poninize, whatever; give them their own little individual quirks, make them complicated. It would go a long way to making this story feel a lot less ridiculous.

Anyway, the merchant appears to be warm for Velvet's form, and also he warns them that there are ghosts and manticores in Manehattan. Velvet is skeptical about the existence of ghosts. They are in the process of arguing about it, when suddenly the merchant notices Littlepoop walking in.

>The pony finally noticed my approach and gave me a big grin. “Ah, and another customer. Welcome to…” he waved a hoof at the collapsed building around him, “…the Luna-Damned Shithole.”
Something tells me this guy isn't exactly salesman of the year. Is there any particular reason he chose this crumbling hut to be his storefront, out of all the other crumbling huts along the road to Manehattan? Is there any particular reason he didn't try to fix the place up a little if he was going to be living in it and using it as a store? Did it ever occur to him that maybe some customers would be put off by the idea of doing their shopping in a crumbling hut called "the Luna Damned Shithole?" For that matter, how many customers could he reasonably expect to see coming this way? Seems like if Manehattan is haunted and populated by manticores, it's not exactly going to be a hot tourist destination. Has his shop ever been raided? Have any passing bands of slavers ever tried to abduct this lone weirdo living in a ruin surrounded by absolutely nopony? Mightn't this guy be a little better served by going to one of the more populous regions and setting up shop there?

>Behind him, a robotic owl whirred and hooted from the top of a doorless cabinet.
[YouTube] 1988 Bubo [Embed]

>I nodded. I passed Calamity the magical energy lance to add to his bartering load and sat down to work on the recording. These things were designed to be ridiculously hardy, but this one had taken one hell of a beating.
Again, it might be helpful to know what exactly we're dealing with here in terms of this recording. They're "designed to be ridiculously hardy?" Alright. In what way? What is this exactly? What should I be imagining? Is this like a cassette tape? A floppy disk? A game cartridge? "Recording" doesn't exactly nail it down.

>>295428
>I'll also mention that from the reader's perspective, it would be impossible to make this connection at all without prior knowledge of MLP. The character of Fluttershy has barely been mentioned in this story, and in the world of FoE we only know her as some vague shadowy figure from the past.
could fix this with a flashback scene where child LP is studying alone in the library for an upcoming history test on the Mane Six Ministries and struggles to ignore the noise of a nearby study group full of friends loudly MST3King all over the history book and arguing over which historical figure failed the hardest and bears the most blame for the downfall of Equestria.
one filly could say "Celestia did everything wrong" and that could trigger Littlepip, since she's such a devout Celestrian.
If LP grew up idolizing the alicorns and mane six and exclusively read propaganda schoolbooks it would shock her to learn that they fucked up sometimes.
Come to think of it... Littlepip is from a vault. Velvet is from that same vault. Fluttershy and Celestia are historical figures who were alive at the same time. If anypony should turn these figures into deities it should be a dumb Wastelander like Calamity. Making him a badass preacher would certainly help make him more than Yeehaw the Pegasus with a Shotgun.
Establishing Littlepip as somepony who thinks she had no friends as a kid for being short and uncool and having an embarassing alcoholic mom but actually lacked friends growing up because she was a violent opinionated manipulative creepy thieving little shit would be an interesting character trait.
>>295432
Lol nice one. Walked right into that.
>>295462
You'd also have to erase the sex scene
>trader barding
Kkat is a faggot and here's another reason why
yes there is an outfit called "wasteland trader outfit" or something like that in fallout 3 but it should be described better. Kkat just lazily namedrops it and changes outfit to barding because hurr durr horses.
It just doesn't make sense to look at a specific suit of metal armour and immediately know its name in the game data and say "that's some nice Raider Ravager Armour you've got for sale, last week I killed someone in Raider Painspike Armour. I'll trade what's left of it and two grenades for that armour and this Trader Barding and some Plumber's Gloves".
Nobody fucking talks like that. LP might have a videogame excuse device bolted to her arm but she still shouldn't be able to identify clothes based on what role they serve in this "200 years after the nukes fell" social order now. I thought it was a fucking plot point earlier on that she couldn't guess the fact that only raiders would be caught dead or alive wearing raider clothes! If she looked at some Caesar's Legion niggers from FNV would she identify their clothing instantly as Caesar's Legion Futanariius armour despite having no idea what that is or who they are, or would she identify the pseudo-roman armour they wear made from American Rugby armour as customized American Rugby armour in poor condition?
"From the thick brown clothing he wore, utterly coated in buttoned pouches and zippered satchels, not to mention his large backpack and two saddlebags, this pony was either a travelling trader or a hoarding-obsessed hobo with no fashion sense. Then again, considering how I once wore Raider armour unironically and got shot on sight for it, did I really have any room to judge?"
There we go. Physical description first followed by LP's guesses at what it means and a joke at the end.
>raider's guild
If any group would unionize for the sake of extortion and illegitimate power first in this world, it would be the raiders. A literal Thief's Guild.

>>295452
>Do we actually know that Fluttershy was one of the most powerful mares in government? Was this actually mentioned anywhere? Should Littlepoop have this information? What, if anything, was Fluttershy's role?
Logically speaking, this should all be common knowledge in-universe. Minor spoiler, but it's been hinted a few times now in-story - the main six were all elevated to significant government positions second only to the princesses. Their names and roles would be part of fundamental history lessons in the stables, considering that the nation they administrated was the one that built the stables in the first place. Velvet and Littlepip ought to be intimately familiar with Fluttershy, by reputation at the very least. This, obviously, isn't communicated well in the text, because Kkat doesn't know or care that the reader can't read his thoughts.

>Anyway, the flashback scene is completely pointless. Flutters goes up to the podium and hems and haws for awhile, and there's a lot of side commentary from Littlepoop about how adorable she is. She clearly holds some position of authority, and her underlings clearly hold her in high esteem. She announces that Luna has given them a new project, and it is supposed to help end the war.
Funnily enough, this project turns out to be vitally important to the wartime side of FoE's plot. It's also one of the pants-on-head dumbest parts of the story.

One small thing I will give the story credit for in its portrayal of Fluttershy - medical supplies bear her cutie mark in much the same way that real life ones have a red or white cross. That's a cute little detail.

>The recording appears to be in "bad shape," although it's difficult to visualize what this might look like since we still don't know what medium these "recordings" are even supposed to be on.
Yet another Fallout 3ism. In the Fallout games you can come across 'holotapes' left over from before the apocalypse, essentially a more advanced form of tape cassette in the style of VCR. They typically contain data or audio recordings. Don't ask me how one survived being nailed to a door.

>>295493
Wait a second, the story has shown us Big Mac's fate twice but failed to explain any of the context behind it. We know he died protecting Luna but we have absolutely no idea why Luna was there or what this war was about. We don't know what caused the war or who started it. We know the mane six were involved in different Ministries but we don't know why this choice was made yet.
Our first glimpse at pre-war Fluttershy in this memory orb shows her deciding to end the war with the Pre-Retcon Hashirama Senju Option (Hashirama gave most of his nukes away to rival nations for no reason other than they had to be there for the plot to happen. 600 episodes later this is retconned, now those nuclear magic monsters of his were payments for a peace treaty with those nations and the peace treaty didn't last long. If he wanted world peace he should have threatened the world with his nukes to get it instead of giving those things away to "maintain the power balance") when it would be more world-buildy and emotionally resonant to show her miserably suffering as she and her medical guys try to save lives and fail.
Or do a public "don't look back in anger" speech shortly after a zebra terrorist attack and get booed off the stage by a propagandized crowd hungry for zigger blood.
This is somebody's introduction to the Fluttershy character. Someone is reading this fic and has never watched FIM before probably. Kkat should try and get us to feel something positive for the character before she fucks everything up.

It doesn't particularly matter whether Cartoon America or Commie China fired the first nukes in Fallout because Fallout isn't really about those pre-war nations. It's about the people alive today and choices and deep shit like that.
But Fallout Equestria? Everything happens in Equestria. The heroes are trying to piece together parts of an Equestrian history they should already know, and sometimes they use information they learned offscreen or even before the story's start to fill in the blanks between pieces of information they gain in today's chapter.
The heroes want to bring back pre-nuking pre-war Equestria despite having no idea how to do this and at the story's end everything gets wrapped up so goddamn neatly by a deus ex machina that the next generation of ponies seen during the epilogue openly doubts that the stories of their parents could ever be true even though motherfucking memory orbs still exist. The author just forgot about those during the epilogue.
Equestria and information on it is central to Fallout Equestria but even at the story's end we still don't get a complete picture when it comes to Equestria's history. There are still massive holes in the story like "why did the fighting start in the first place?" and "but what did ponies/zebras learn from this?".
But if you point this out to a blind fanboy he'll say "Surely Equestria was being too white and imperialistic and therefore deserved nuking since they're white-coded and they were scared of Zecora at first in one episode. Equestria is better now in FE because it's less racist and its president is a Griffon and there are tons of alicorn waifus for me to fantasize about". He just fills in all the gaps with the propaganda he was raised on, and doesn't realize his assumptions and headcanons and biases make him a retarded niggerlover.
Kkat never made any of pre-war Equestria matter to post-war Equestria and to compensate for that he eventually makes post-war Equestria into a deus-ex-magically-undone afterthought for the post-post-war Equestria era.
At the end of the day... Fallout Equestria is devoid of substance and themes. Past Sins wanted to be about the sins of the past and that knight love story wanted to be a love story and Friendship Is Optimal wanted to warn the world about a magical god AI tricking humanity into permanently shoving their brains into My Little Pony brand bad dragon horse vaginas. But this story can't be called a story about LP struggling with morality or addiction or even love. She is a murderhobo who clears deathcourses and slaughters enemies until she is rewarded by the author with the sappiest shlock imaginable. Despite all the time this story spends on unimportant details it fails to figure out what details are so immensely important that they need to be in the story above all others. I'm tempted to joke that Littlepip missed some important memory orbs somewhere and that's why the audience never gets to see the most vital parts of the lore that give all this suffering and tragedy some kind of meaning or lesson to learn. It is fundamentally incomplete as a story despite spending over 500k words on its dismal tale of pony gore and mass murder and failure and gunfights and schemes and war and pony characters saying "Damn" like they're Shadow The Hedgehog.

>>295495
>Fallout Equestria is devoid of substance and themes.
Gotta disagree there, but this isn't a defense of the story. FoE has themes, they're just morally and logically awful on multiple levels. It gets particularly explicit towards the end, when the intended messages and emotional conclusions of the story are stated outright. But OH BOY, we'll get to that...

>>295502
that face x)

>>295502
I'll elaborate a little, since one of the major themes has actually come up already. FoE spends a lot of time paying lip service to the old adage that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". A lot of FoE's major events, past and present, are made out to be failed attempts at doing good, which go/went wrong due to ignorance, incompetence, poor information or the like. This specifics are often either very silly or completely contrived, but it's at least fairly consistent throughout as a recurring theme. The story never settles on an actual functional solution to the problem of well-intentioned ideas going wrong - well, aside from "be Littlesue and have the favor of the author", but the question is at least posed.

This theme is flatly contradicted by the story's other primary theme, "sometimes the correct moral choice is actually horribly evil" which essentially exists to give Littlepip an out for being an enormous murderhobo, but I'm getting way ahead of the story so far.

Throwing my hat in the circle.
>>295495
>It's about the people alive today and choices and deep shit like that.
Not quite. It's more closely aligned towards the inherent evil of humans and exemplifying the worst the world has to offer while showing good still exists in people, albeit in a smaller magnitude within men but there is still hope left even if it is all lost, life still exists in the most bitter conditions although vigilantes are not the heroes they make themselves out to be even when faced with choices that defy morality they still seek to do what they believe is right while all hope is lost, rape murders are a common theme as it exemplifies the harshness of unsympathetic psychopaths that revel in anarchy.
All in all, humans haven't changed and still do what they think they should even if it isn't always right, they still continue to exist in a world of perpetual hell while seeking to help others for the sake of it or giving into personal freedom and living a life of inflicting misery upon others, basic human emotions never change and won't, along with war.

>>295544
That makes sense, your interpretation is valid. And nice Spurdo SPQRde!
>>295524
Funny how the mane six's "good intentions" couldn't save the day in a setting where you can fire rainbow lasers of friendship by being nice enough. But even when Littlepip's "good intentions" manifest in the form of shooting first and asking questions never or toppling two unknown criminal figures so a third unknown will rise to fill the power vacuum, her actions don't ever result in disaster except for that one really retarded and forced and artificial scene much later, you know the one.
Hell, Littlepip literally took multiple buckshots into her body from Calamity because he assumed wearing raider "uniform" must mean kill-on-sight. So you'd think this would influence her decision-making at least a little. But no, this annoying invincible murderhobo with infinite health and ammo is going to raider and slaver places specifically to war with them and slaughter them all. But at the same time she lets Velvet give away the group's highly limited medical supplies to "bandits" who shot at Team LP and got defeated for it!
A raider is a bandit that wears ugly spiked clothing and acts edgy! A slaver is a bandit that won't stop at stealing your wallet and will steal you away to sell you into slavery! Stealing is wrong no matter how you're dressed! Stealing only becomes moral if you're taking back what's yours from thieves. Sometimes these three robbers wait around on roads and attack ponies and sometimes they attack settlements. These shouldn't be treated like three separate categories of villain badness or three separate monster races.
Kkat's attempts to make Velvet look more "admirably moral" than the protag makes her into a goddamn liability who's typically there to be wrong except when she's got the author on her side.
Something just feels wrong about saying ponies can't win a war or stop a war with pony magic or friendship or kindness but they can slaughter random baddies in your nuked country with a glock and magic flaming 50cal until the only smart thing pre-war ponies ever did is finally allowed to instantly save the day and undo all the damage inflicted by the war. I can't put my finger on the word for it. It's self-indulgent on an incomprehensible scale. The heroes of Equestria fail it in the face of a threat they should be able to stop and their methods and mindsets change at random with each chapter because the author's trying to force "racist Fallout america" attitudes into cutesy cartoon ponies who unironically don't know what PTSD is. But this stupid fucking murderhobo can save the day by wasting time until she eventually finds the Dragon Balls of magical wish-granting bullshit. I'm joking because it's a different deus ex machina device I don't want to spoil. Come to think of it, the nuked world was eventually un-nuked by magical bullshit made by pre-war ponies with good intentions so what's the "theme" there?
If there's one consistent thing about the author, considering his love of ripping off unrealistic videogame "tropes" and then mocking some of them while playing sillier ones straight, and his love of giving canon ponies horrible fates completely disproportionate to what they did in life and what they deserved, it would be his motto of "X is only okay when I say it is".

I think I've been too negative with this fic so...
What is your favourite part of the fic so far, and what one moment sticks out as a missed opportunity to you?
Personally I really enjoyed the creativity of using an idol concert to draw in assassination targets even though the setup for it was retarded. If this was a movie, this part of the movie would probably look great.

As for missed opportunities... Remember when Littlepip went through that robot factory and fought some robots and got a gun?
She was all "haha robobrain go splat". Even after she learns that the robots are alive and powered by brains that have gone mad. The fact that these were once ponies and she is technically sort of a murderer now since she entered into their turf and killed these guys to loot a gun just doesn't bother her but it should.
There was a missed opportunity here to turn one of Fallout America's weapons into a tragic tale of Equestria trying to use tech to solve their problems like they once used magic and failing. And start with Littlepip being all "quip pun haha squish oneliner, god you're fucking stupid and I need a drink" but when she finds out these robobrains were once ponies and are still alive and conscious while having the actions of their robot bodies controlled by GuardBot programming it should shake her greatly. Reveal that her "generic action movie heroine" personality is just a front she puts on - a mask she wears - to feel more confident while scared and in combat. Make her cry and whimper and beg the robots to go away as they march on her position with melee weapons readied, forcing her to reluctantly shoot and squish all the bots. It could be a moment that kicks your heart right in the balls and shakes LP to her core. She officially becomes a killer of non-raider ponies and practically raided this destroyed robot factory. Her "little macintosh" goes from some random scoped revolver she found to a tragic reminder that she was forced to mercy kill these robots.

>>295632
I don't see any Naruto/Bleach/whatever references in my previous post, but I'm not surprised you see shit that isn't there. Your bitching never was grounded in reality. I'll never be able to please someone as entitled and irrational and whiny as you, and I don't really want to. You are nothing to me. You have no idea what you're talking about so why do you feel entitled to my respect? Why do you feel I need to take what you have to say seriously? This is a thread for writing discussion and I'm tired of faggots who want to start petty fights here. I've seen youtube commenters with more to contribute than you. This thread would improve if you kept quiet and stopped being such an entitled crybaby.

Lurk moar and act less like a redditor.

>>295632
I actually think that the post you're refrencing is on-topic. Its about missed opportunities and it brings up an example from the story and then explains itself through that example. Now, if it's good or bad point is up for each person to decied. I think it was servicable.
Nigel has been much better in this thread than in the previous one. And while I haven't check out every post of his in this thread, everything seems adaquate so far.
>>295752
Yeah, I agree you were on-topic.
>I don't see any Naruto/Bleach/whatever references in my previous post
His post uses the phrase "inspired rants" meaning... Well, I'm not completely sure what it means but it doesn't mean that there necessarily has to be any refrences of these things in it.
I don't really mind where your inspiration comes from so long as you make good points or, really on-topic ones.

Even with all my complaints towards you, I still do want everyone here to still be here. I believe you all are geniune souls that I share a lot of intrests with. At the end of the day, we do not have many allies. We should not burn bridges with potential ones over minor diffrences in beliefs when our enemy is what it is. I guess, that only tangentially applies here since, we're talking about books and forum conduct not the fight against jewry.
I will just express my opinions without compromises towards anyone here because I care for you and I expect the same in return.

>>295632
Sorry fren, but I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one. Not only is the post on topic, but I agree with his post enough to reply. His phrasing could still use work, but that's not an expectation that can be asserted, though in this case suggestions are still perfectly reasonable.
>>295576
I agree with this point about the robot brains and missed opportunities. Thesis statement
With a little bit of effort, this could have been turned into a very deep and dark moral quandary for Little pip and anypony who was along for the ride (was anyone along for the ride? I'm not actually reading the story). One sentence expounding of thesis statement
In the end, it needed not have changed anything about the direction of the storyline; "robot brains go wrrrrr and then splat" is the appropriate outcome in the end, but at least Gaykat could have tugged at heartstrings a little bit.hypothesis and conclusion
Compare it to a series like Bleach or D Gray Man where the soul of the Hollow, or the trapped soul of the Akuma is given consideration. This doesnt prevent Ishida or other Quinceys from destroying Hollow souls in the one, while the other example emphasizes the torment of the trapped soul and the importance of freeing them, even unto death. The memories inspired by the revolver dont even need to be guilty, as LP doesnt have the skill or means to change or fix the robo-brain's situation, but ffs GKat could've paid lip service. Succinct examples that relate to hypothesis, and validate the conclusion
All in all, a huge missed opportunity to develop LP and thiat particular section of the story with depth and emotion that would significantly increase the quality of the instance reiteration of thesis statement and conclusion after the facts

Please pardon the spoilers, this is to help our friend with his phrasing.
>>295576
This is the best example I can give of how to make short, succinct, yet effective references to other media. I dont meander at all, because my purpose is to stick to the facts and info when conveying the idea. I also dont emphasize "I" or "my opinion" because for one that would be redundant; it's all my opinion that I'm positing to be agreed or negated by discussion. Additionally, emphasizing the opinion makes me the subject of discussion versus the idea/info. I am virtually irrelevant to the discussion, whereas the info/idea is paramount to the discussion. This is something I feel you could improve on, and will significantly aid the quality of your writing

>>295759
>>295756
Thanks mates!
I dropped bleach about seven-ish episodes in (Fisher King's introduction was the last ep I saw) so I've got no idea if anything I said has anything to do with bleach.
Still I don't think Bleach is likely to have robobrains or pop concert assassinations, it just seemed like a gloomy pretentious Danny Phantom/DBZ knockoff but with goofy swords. Though I hear Ichigo's got a Hitler Swastika on his sword and starts hitting people with a giant swastika named Fullbring?
Anyway I've seen all of Naruto so I can confidently say absolutely nothing in my recent post has anything to do with Naruto.

If Equestria invented RoboBrains to try and give a body to terminally-ill/disabled ponies only to fuck up and put the robot programming in control of the body while the brain is used as a backup processor by the machine, it would be really tragic.
Double-tragic if the robot AI acts like a convincing replica of the terminally-ill/disabled pony while the real brain is trapped and screaming inside the metal body!

And a neat contrast to Fallout-America, which built the Robobrains that way on purpose because they wanted a smart and mentally-flexible killbot still forced to follow orders. America initially used chimp brains in those robots until realizing human brains worked better. Then it took brains from executed criminals, military prisoners, and so on. Obedient brains that are smart but lack personality/individuality were preferred, then they had their memories wiped anyway and tried to brainwash the brains further.
(why select for obedience/lack of personality if you're brainwashing and memory-wiping the brains anyway? how do you have any sort of selection process when your brains only come from executed criminals and military prisoners? goddamn it bethesda stop being so bad at writing lore)
These "RoboBrain" bots never reached full production status because they kept having problems with RoboBrain aggression and violence. (which doesn't fit the lore because Fallout America put ads on TV featuring their power-armoured troops executing kneeling Canadians in Fallout 1. Bloody hell, it's like Matt Ward of Warhammer 40K fame but dumber)
There's no Naruto stuff there. Captain "One post thread-wide by this ID" over there >>295632 can go fuck himself.

As it stands, Littlepip's robobrain encounter is basically:
>"I am Littlepip and I went into a factory and squished some robots and liked it and then I found a sick gun and then I read some computer terminal entry to learn the gun's backstory and then I fucked off out of the factory and moved on".
The only meaningful change this has on the status quo?
Littlepoop gets one new gun, a scoped revolver that could have been found anywhere else.
This scene could have been cut. It probably should have been cut since this story is over 500,000 words long.
If the revolver was put on a corpse Littlepoop found when fleeing "Rad-Gators" or found it while looting the Raider-infested Ponyville Library this entire factory could have been skipped while still keeping its only change to the status quo (+1 gun) intact.
This early on in the story we've got big questions like "Why did the world end?" and "Whose fault was the world's end?" and "why are Raiders like this?" and "Who's in charge of this shitshow?" and "How will the hero fix things?" and "Why did we see a statue of Big Mac?"
So a question like "Where did the guns come from?" is high on the question list but not the highest-ranked question.
a detail like "The apple family ran a gun-making company and Applejack was in charge of it plus a gun-making ministry also she commissioned a big revolver named Little Macintosh in honour of his death and kept it here" seems too inconsequential to the world to have this short story arc and location dedicated to it.
It also seems like too big an answer for it to be revealed so early on. Shouldn't we still wonder where all the guns and grenades came from?
We learn the backstory of this revolver in particular in such an awkward manner, too. Has Littlepip met even a single friendly face at this point if you don't count The Watcher?
Is this really the time to drop those super-special named "Unique Weapons" with their own special effects and short backstories into Littlepip's lap and on the audience when there's so much the author hasn't established yet?
Unique Weapons in Fallout 3 are better than their non-unique non-named counterparts, but that's a stupid videogame effect and it makes no sense to copy that in a book when this ordinary-ass gun is firing the same bullets as all other guns of its caliber.
If Littlepip is supposed to be an underdog, how come she's the only one who gets to find and unlock all these safes, why does she get special super-gear that's nonsensically better than average, and how come she's better-equipped than most of the Raiders/Bandits/Slavers she slaughters effortlessly?
The only way to turn this stupid side-story distraction Filler Moment into a meaningful part of the story (that I can see) is to make it emotionally significant to Littlepip and her development. She goes from "I've literally never seen or operated a gun before" to "Haha squish mmf that sound of crushed robobrain is so satisfying" way too fast, and this could be reworked into a stepping stone on the path from scared stressed terrified pissed-off newbie who needs a hug to snarky seen-it-all pro murderer. Better books make a hero's transformation from bloodshed-fearing rookie to hardened killer/sadistic hardened killer a slow and gradual process for a reason.

>>295761
The point of the references were to establish that LP's motivations after exploring the moral implications of murdering otherwise alive robots ponies didnt need to devolve into sadistic hardened killer' territory. It could as easily have resulted in the determination that while technically alive the robots weren't either 'really living' nor 'themselves', by way of the madness. In this sense, LP could be performing something of a service of freeing the robots from an otherwise hellish existence that was the result of best intentions in the interest of survival.

>>295762
That's a good point.
Littlepip started her murderhobo adventure by killing "Raiders", the most cartoonishly evil ponies imaginable. They smear gore and poop over the walls of their own homes and abuse captors for fun, and Littlepip thinks "I am a good guy because I am killing baddies who must die" every ten seconds to help her get through the stress of her first fight.
She can reasonably claim "These baddies must go" even though she wandered onto their turf (well, was brought to it by her captors) and ended up robbing them anyway. Not sure if she can claim self-defense until after they started shooting at her though.
But the robots... That's closer to killing a pony, even though RoboBrains (unless the author does something new with them) are angry guard robots that use the still-alive insane mind-wiped brains of assholes for talking graphics cards. She can't claim "These guys morally needed to go" here because the bots guarding this abandoned factory are still just doing their jobs. She can call taking these things out a necessary mercy kill and claim robbing this ruined factory is necessary because it could contain resources useful to the Wasteland or traders or her Make-Equestria-Great-Again plan, but Littlepip shouldn't show such glee when taking these bots out after learning what they are.

While we're talking about moments Littlepip enjoyed but shouldn't have enjoyed, that "Hahahaha dumb Earth Ponies never think to look up" moment when she was escaping her Stable and telekinetically clubbed them unconscious was cringe too. Leaving the home she grew up in and the society she was raised in, saying goodbye to everypony she ever met or knew of... Even if she hated them all, there should still be at least a little hesitancy or regret or sadness here. She's leaving her bunker and entering a deadly world to bring back a pop star who might not even want to come back with her, and she's fine with living out here in The Hellhole Formerly Known As Equestria with the target she was seeking, the reason she had her reputation and stable life ruined and ripped away from her, the reason she might never get to take a warm shower or sleep in a warm safe Stable bed again.
You'd think there'd be something like that scene from Madagascar when the Lion and Zebra ran to each other while yelling each other's names, only for the Lion to get increasingly pissed as he realizes everything going wrong right now is this Zebra's fault, so the Zebra ends up running away. [YouTube] Madagascar - San Diego scene - on the beach [Embed]
A scene like that would be perfect for when Littlepip realizes she came all this way, risked death all these times, and killed all these ponies for the sake of a stupid fucking singer who's singing her heart out willingly to literal goddamn slavers.

>>295770
Come to think of it...
Right after Littlepip escapes from Raider's Ponyville for the first time, "The Watcher" aka the author floats right up to Littlepip and clumsily says "You must go back into that town because you were supposed to kill all the Raiders and get a certain book from the library".
She "has" to have the book so that she can say "Now I have the Wasteland Survival Guide"
and all the people who played Fallout 3 will say "Whaaat? The book was already made? In Fallout 3, the player had to make that with some possibly-ghoul NPC's help! Who made this book?"
and those people will nut uncontrollably when they find out it was ghoul Derpy Hooves.
But that's an out-of-universe reason for her to go back to Poopyville. She has no in-universe reason to go back there besides a robot telling her to and claiming it's got good loot.
And Littlepip just... does what the robot questgiver says.
This really stands out as a stupid videogamey moment because aside from "lmao what else would I do today? at least he told me there's sick lewt in that raider hellhole. I guess I'll trust this weird robot hacker guy and risk my life because he tells me to" she doesn't have any reason to go back into that raider hellhole and has plenty of "I don't want to go into that zone of almost-certain death! I just escaped it, and you're telling me to go back in?! I'd rather go anywhere else even though I have no idea where anything is! Fuck you and fuck your book!" reasons not to.
Is any intel he could give her for completing his quest worth risking her life? Possibly, but Littlepip shouldn't think she's invincible from day one! And if she does, any dark world worth its edge should pin her to a wall and fuck her over for such arrogance! Did he even think to mention the captives in Twilight's Tree Library? Gee, it sure is convenient that despite all the damage done by these Raiders for fun, all of these captives can easily fuck off without needing food from Littlepip. Or needing any help to stand/walk. Fuck, one featherless ghoul Pegasus can even fly!
If Littlepip is a danger-loving thrill-seeking loot-hungry murderhobo who loves winning (and squishing) from day one, why was she loathed back in her Stable for being a small weak wimpy coward who canonically had a nightmare at a slumber party about falling upwards into the endless sky outside her vault, causing her to scream like a little bitch?
How Littlepip thinks and acts outside the Stable doesn't fit the character he spent all this time setting up inside the Stable, meaning all that time spent inside the Stable was pointless too, along with everything established during that point including who Velvet is and LP's "relationship" with her.
First he establishes Littlepip as the type to think "Fuck, I'm boooooreed. Somepony should paint a mural on this boring-ass wall" for 10 hours instead of trying to paint one herself, and then after leaving the Stable he writes her as somepony who goes above and beyond the call of duty whenever there's the promise of loot and EXP even when she has no guarantee that doing things the explosion-loving murderhobo way will result in more EXP/reputation/good impact on the world/Loot gain.
Despite never seeing a gun before and having absolutely no idea what one is (fucking somehow?) she can immediately figure out what it is and how it works and how to threaten somepony with it just by watching it get fired once or twice. Even learns how to reload and knows what reloading is, and gets a chance to use her new knowledge "intimidatingly" almost immediately because Monterry Jack's retarded.
She escaped from Raider Ponyville and went back in for the loot while slaughtering and intimidating all the baddies she could just because a hacker's voice coming from a robot told her to.
She solved a "Go close the door to this monster-filled vault" quest by locking herself in it, stealing everything that isn't nailed down, getting her friend poisoned, saving him and getting the antidote, blowing the place up to kill all the enemies, and escaping!
She single-hoofedly (ok Calamity helped and she found Velvet along the way) slaughtered an entire Slaver settlement on their own turf and LIFTED A FUCKING BOXCAR to squish an Alicorn guard she didn't expect to fight.
She also derailed a train during a fight and there was some other shit and right now her goal is to put her pal's music on the radio or slaughter everypony at Slaver City on the other side of Equestria just because it's there, whichever comes first. Point is, she's so destructive and violent and reckless and overpowered and unnaturally hungry for bloodshed and loot, yet the world and the characters within the world and the author never seem to notice this isn't a scared little pussy newbie struggling to survive. This isn't an underdog. "her limbs get crippled sometimes" but that never fucks her over or significantly impacts her. No matter how often characters jack the world (and the author) off by calling this world the saddest edgiest thing ever, it's a lie full of easily-duped, easily-intimidated, and easily-defeated cardboard cutouts for Littlepip to knock down one by one.
Characters speak as if this world of pure edge is infinitely bleak and utterly unchangeable and truly forsaken and she's a tragic hero on some doomed quest of folly for trying to make this world a better place, but not only can she solve all the problems in the world with a handgun and "sufficient determination"(guess nopony else had enough determination, not Big Mac or Twilight or Fluttershy or anypony else without plot armour!), she will fucking enjoy it whether she and the author realize it or not, no matter what inconsistent scenes of angsting the author sometimes writes.
The tale of a world of failures and monsters getting consumed by a bigger and badder ever-growing monster who seems like a cute little girl at first would be improved if Kkat realized that's what he's writing and started writing it better.

>>295762
>>295770
I may be wrong, but going purely by memory I don't recall the robobrains ever coming up again in any meaningful capacity for the rest of FoE. They're essentially a disposable enemy in the same vein as the raiders. This makes sense *if* you assume this conception of Equestria works the same way as Fallout 3 the videogame, where raiders and robobrains are disposable recurring enemies that one can kill without thought or consequence. Considering that this is *supposed* to be the Equestria we know from FiM, just 200-odd years down the line, and that Littlepip isn't *supposed* to be a sociopathic murderhobo who exists to kill and loot, this is simply bad writing.

In Fallout, the robobrains were a highly unethical top-secret military project that used the brains of prisoners to create perfectly obedient (in theory) military cyborgs. This is consistent with Fallout's presentation of America's government as jingoistic and deeply corrupt. Their mere existence in Equestria, wandering around a random factory, ought to raise a dozen red flags about what went on during the war. The existence of combat-capable robots makes sense - if a technologically advanced Equestria went to war it's understandable that they'd use artificial soldiers instead of risking pony lives, but this goes a step further. Why were these things made? Who signed off on their creation? Where (or who) did the brains originally come from? Even if we accept the premise that Equestria had reason to create these things, there's entire potential stories to be told about how and why. But nah. They're just mooks guarding treasure.

>Right after Littlepip escapes from Raider's Ponyville for the first time, "The Watcher" aka the author floats right up to Littlepip and clumsily says "You must go back into that town because you were supposed to kill all the Raiders and get a certain book from the library".
I can kinda accept Watcher as a sort of mysterious mentor figure, given what we learn about them later. Enigmatically guiding people to perform small acts of good like saving Derpy makes sense in their situation, setting aside the question of whether Pip should logically be up to it. The real author avatar in this story is Homage, the DJ and oh jesus christ is it both obvious and insufferable.

>>295752
>>295761
Okay muttnigger. Good job continuing to gaslight and QQ'ing about your oh-so-nuanced exposition dogshit being called out even though it's the same verbatim trash. Again. Like usual. For the 1,000th+ time. Your retardation is so old the dinosaurs are tired of your whinging and kvetching at this point. Keep on winning all those Social Darwin Awards over there, they still do not make dealing with you worthwhile. Also poor job with that low quality plebbit/jewt00b b8, your "b-b-but it's not me it's all U" meter is still pounding somewhere around the 100 out of 10 mark. Go hang yourself, you worthless inbred mutt.

>>295756
>>295759
Not one bit. Nigel is still poorly disguising [aka: shoehorning] his retarded, old animu rants as "new content" by using a slightly different stench of bullshit to mask his brain damaged 'tism outbursts. Not only that, as a so-called 'writer' he has not changed enough to warrant being treated differently from the crybaby douchebarge he's been, especially for being unable to accept ANY form of critique or criticism without it becoming a !!PeRsOnAl InSuLt!! which makes him a fairly reliable lulzcow.

On the Robobrains, they featured in Fallout 1 & 2 as a specific type of cyborg. Some regions, particularly in The Glow (Fallout 1), Mariposa Military Base (Fallout 2), and the Sierra Army Depot (also Fallout 2) harbored anywhere from 10-80 of them. Only being vulnerable to EMP, the fairly to extremely rare rare coilguns [and their much more rare ammunition], and a few unique weapons which could be nearly impossible to get without knowing how, made them a major threat. Drowning them in bullets, shells, grenades, laser bursts or plasma is an option, although they're generally too durable unless you specifically toss every companion 40+ Stimpaks and give them 40+ pounds of ammunition. The one 'friendly' Robobrain was part of a sidequest in the NCR during Fallout 2, where it was a helpful technician/mechanic for an NPC. Another one, however, was MUCH more prominent (especially if one used the Fallout 2 Restoration Patch). It's name was... of course, Skynet. The PC could transplant any number of brains into it, which would greatly improve skills and combat abilities, also improving the number of action points. However, pissing off the Skynet A.I. before attempting to transplant would cause it to shut down the Sierra Army Depot through the use of extremely lethal biological weapons. From it you learn that a large number of Robobrain cyborgs were willing subjects from a large pool of severely wounded and/or crippled soldiers, although a small 'test' population of lizards, cats, dogs, chimpanzees, pigs, and a few other animal species were also available. In particular there were NO prisoner brains due to "one incident" mildly referred from a holodisk log.

Long version: Robobrains were intended to be used as an extremely cheap, efficient stopgap measure between soldiers without power armor, and those with T-45 power armor. Robobrains were capable of utilizing nearly any weapon, especially the PPK12 Gauss Pistol and the M72 Gauss Rifle, reload most weapons quicker than any human could, have armored storage compartments for ammunition/grenades/etc., and be easily & cheaply repaired using commonly available components from hundreds if not thousands of vehicles and machinery. They would have been vastly superior even if they weren't cybernetically improved like Skynet was... but there was juuuust one huge problem: production for the medigel necessary to transplant a human brain was completely halted, In Fallout: New Vegas we learn why the previous occurred: nearly all medigel was sent to the Big Empty where the Think Tank robobrains used it for a number of dipshit experiments. Thank them for the Cazadores, too. There were hundreds of thousands unfilled throughout now-derelict, lost, abandoned, or merely buried bases, which could have swung the various wars into positive outcomes.

In FoE: Robobrains are simply a "m-muh danjerus enemih!" emote moment that falls flat.

>>295576
>Personally I really enjoyed the creativity of using an idol concert to draw in assassination targets even though the setup for it was retarded. If this was a movie, this part of the movie would probably look great.
I actually agree with you that this was a good scene. Velvet singing before an assembled crowd of wastelanders, belting out some heart-wrenching old song, until suddenly a shot rings out from the balcony and Deadeyes goes down, is great visually, fits the setting perfectly, and is an all-around great idea for a scene. If it was the honest product of the author's imagination and not something he plagiarized directly from one of the games then he deserves all the more respect for it.

Unfortunately, as you say, it was poorly set up. My guess is he had the scene thought out well in advance, possibly before he even started writing the actual story, and intended for this scene to go in somewhere. His choice of where and how to work it in worked heavily against him, and mostly negated whatever impact it might have had.

The existence of the robo-brains had a much darker implication than the story ever dealt with, which is odd because the author was clearly trying to make it dark. Unfortunately this was a definite missed opportunity, as the purpose of the factory invasion scene seemed to be nothing more than "Littlepoop finds a cool gun."

>>295821
>On the Robobrains, they featured in Fallout 1 & 2 as a specific type of cyborg. Some regions, particularly in The Glow (Fallout 1), Mariposa Military Base (Fallout 2), and the Sierra Army Depot (also Fallout 2) harbored anywhere from 10-80 of them. Only being vulnerable to EMP, the fairly to extremely rare rare coilguns [and their much more rare ammunition], and a few unique weapons which could be nearly impossible to get without knowing how, made them a major threat.
Contrasted to their appearance in Fallout 3, where they show up anywhere vaguely associated with technology, wield only a weak laser, and can be easily dispatched by small arms fire. Big think.

>In particular there were NO prisoner brains due to "one incident" mildly referred from a holodisk log.
The Fallout wiki references an old interview with Chris Taylor where he supposedly stated that the brains came from prisoners, though granted this is a pretty dubious source. Whether the brains were from willing volunteers or "volunteers" is largely moot, since the process of creating a robobrain involved wiping the original personality and artificially fostering obedience and compliance. If the subject wasn't lobotomized or simply killed in the process, that is. However you slice it, there are massive ethical questions involved in their creation and their sudden, meaningless appearance and disappearance in FoE would be shocking if such a level of hackery weren't already firmly established as the norm.

>>295821
You are a very angry baby. Delusional, too. Ain't no anime repackaged in "killing robobrains should make LP cry".
Still, you actually posted something related to Fallout this time instead of just trying to restart long-dead drama so it seems you're improving. Maybe with your third post, you can leave the whining at home and focus on the thread's topic? Then again I'll ignore your whining from now on anyway because I don't respect you or your opinion of me.

>>295777
That's a good point. Why the fuck are Robobrains in Equestria? What pony would make a killbot with a brainwashed fleshy brain for a CPU instead of something more magical like a lifesized metal or wooden pony puppet possessed by a pony's soul?

While I like the idea of LP having a mysterious mentor figure, Watcher is too powerful. He can control any spritebot and send any message anywhere in the Wasteland to bring help whenever it's needed, but only when the author remembers he exists. He also feels redundant because Littlepip already has Calamity for an experienced friend and mentor figure. He would be teaching her about gun use and wasteland survival if she wasn't already instantly an expert at those. What has Watcher really taught her? I've said he feels like a GMPC before but by that I mean he doesn't feel like a character that truly exists in this world and makes himself a part of it. Instead he feels like a tool of the author who shows up conveniently whenever he is needed and fucks off once he has deus ex machina'd things away. And it makes no sense that he would fuck off whenever his work here is done. Why doesn't he join Team Littlepip? The answer eventually given for this is retarded.
Perhaps it would be better if Watcher started out as a voice in Littlepip's PipBuck who can only tell her things and hack things for her. But only when she wirelessly connects her Pipbuck to those things. Then Watcher sends her on a quest to "Free me" from an abandoned robot factory that turns out to be metaphorical. Watcher is an AI that wanted LP to repair this factory and build a robot body to his exact specifications, because he was the AI of this factory that has been protected from scavengers by out-of-control killbots for 200 years. Now Watcher is just a robotic friend in Team Littlepip. A hacker robot with a laser pistol or some shit that can only be in one place at one time. Not a mysterious omnipresent ghost that can possess any spritebot anywhere to send any message or get help from anyone anywhere. That would give Kkat the opportunity to make Watcher into a character with a personality and motives and a character arc. What does the artificial intelligence who abandoned his lost post and watched Equestria fall have to say about the places he encounters while travelling with LP? Could be interesting. Or Kkat could be a faggot and rip off E123 Omega/HK42 and make the robot call everybody "MEATBAG" every ten seconds.
>>295844
It's weird that even though the author tries way too hard in some places to make things as artificially dark as possible, he misses obvious opportunities to make things dark in a tragic way that fits the "good intentions aren't enough" theme he thinks he's writing. If Robobrains were an attempt to help disabled ponies walk in better bodies that went wrong it would be really sad.
Or it could be an attempted PTSD cure. Let's say prewar ponies tried curing the bad memories of shellshocked soldiers by magically removing them but they fucked up and lobotomized them. So the soul is fine and alive but trapped in a body that can't be moved by the nonfunctioning brain and shoving their souls into puppet bodies while burying the real bodies was the only way to save the souls and keep the ponies "alive". But over time the puppet ponies went crazy because they missed being able to eat food and feel sunlight and sleep and shit and fuck. So they became magically controlled and used as rentable/buyable guards because prewar ponies just didn't have the heart to mercy kill these things since magic couldn't tell them if there was an afterlife or not.
>>295846
That's another problem with Fallout 3's "go anywhere at any level" mindset. For that to function the player needs to be able to beat any enemy he encounters and clear any enemy den he wanders into, even if he is weak and low-level and has terrible weapons/armour. Rewards can't be too big a deal or they make areas designed for gearless newbies even easier, but some rewards are OP anyway because lmao fuck game balance here's a perfect invisibility device and a perk that makes you immune to traps that are too wimpy to really hurt you anyway and a robot friend that gives you free water sometimes and a giant invincible stupid mutant with a goofy name and an infinite ammo laser minigun. It's weird that the author reflects this in his story by making LP more than a match for any enemy she runs into even though LP is supposed to be a weak undergeared newbie at the start. And it's weird that LP seemingly knows she's invincible but only sometimes.

Wait a second, we must be at least 80k words into this story by now. Almost a fifth of the way through these 500k words, and despite how much exposition the author has dumped on us involving backstory and lore and setting wankery, so far the only hint of a plot for the future and the characters we're reading about now is "Littlepip heard there's a slaver town over in that direction so she's going to go fuck it up. Also she might stop at a radio tower to get her friend's songs on the radio and possibly meet the DJ".
Littlepip's goal is to slaughter Evil(tm) NPCs for being there and get Velvet's music on the radio, and Velvet's going along with it plus she might want to be a doctor. Calamity's got no dreams besides keeping these two girls alive. There's something inherently cool about wanting to protect your friends with your life. And he's so simple that the author can't fuck him up like he fucked up the murderhobo and singing doctor. I wish Calamity got cooler moments and I wish the author didn't treat him like an afterthought. When the trio got banned from New Appleoosa, did he say anything about the home he had there?

Anyway, the author's pacing is absurdly slow. All this time spent lingering on this and diary/terminal-entry-reading about this and backstory-expositing about that doesn't help the story because Kkat can't tell what to focus on and explain and elaborate upon from what to gloss over and leave behind in Fallout and skip.

Trying to be more positive now as part of another new year's resolution.

While reading great real books made by professionals, it dawned on me that the prose is usually really fucking good.

The specifics of the prose depend on the author but it can be be tight, refined, and focused. Nobody's afraid to end a paragraph after less than three words or let some dialogue float on its own without some accompanying text outside the quotation marks. Some authors do it more than others but it's rare for an author to clutter up their story in an attempt to get you to visually understand the movie in their heads.
A good book can be more than "a movie in your head", senses are mentioned besides what the "camera" sees.
There are conversations with brisk and snappy paces. And quick arguments from motivated characters who speak for a reason feel like dances, even sword duels at times. The value of brevity is known, whether the author lets you watch the dueling lines without commentary or postfaces every line with some narration that tells you what the character thinks and how he formulates his response. It's not a competition of kitschy speeches that instantly sway someone just for sounding nice enough.
When characters speak, how long their sentences take to get to the point depends on the character and how complex the point is to explain. Characters really do speak differently from one another, and not just in the sense that some characters speak "normally" in the author's eyes and some say a word over and over like "Darling" and some have funetik aksents and apostrophes where letters should be.
Even if some shit doesn't matter, everything important feels like it does to the plot or characters. Characters go through arcs, characters can be wrong, characters can have their whole world turned upside down. Characters can be broken and brought to their lowest points. Characters can do morally questionable things because the author isn't afraid of some audience member saying "I don't like this character as a person so I loathe this story and author for inventing him/her".
If the prose lingers on one subject for a while, it is because the author or some character has something to say on that subject. So when sentences get long, it stands out among the short sentences.
But while prose can be short, it can be long, flowing, and flowery. Instead of showing off Said-Book thesaurus fuckery like they're trying to impress someone, good authors can precisely use fancy words and clever metaphors/similes to elevate their text in indescribable ways. They can make you feel shit, man.
And instead of hiding vital information from the audience for a big reveal or stupid "once more with clarity" flashback later on, good mystery writers can let you figure shit out along with the characters, or even before the characters have figured out information that confirms your educated guess!
And when authors do enough research to make the facts right, it makes the world feel plausibly realistic and the story feel believable. Even if the "science" is just impossible magic bollocks disguised as science.
I've seen shit authors fuck their prose up, but I'm glad I read the prose of good writers in my lifetime. Even though prose is not one the most important thing out there, it's still a vital part of the book-reading experience.

How great prose can be contrasts with this story, because this story's prose sucks gay asshole. It feels like an un-edited rough draft that has yet to be seen by a single editor, even though Kkat probably had more proof-readers than Nyx's stupid story.
What's the point of a proof-reader if your editor can't tell what to cut from what to elaborate on, or point out when the author's assumption that everyone already knows what he knows renders a story arc borderline incomprehensible until it's over and everything's spelled out after the fact?
When Littlepip talks and thinks, it is with the author's train of thought. She's familiar with shit she shouldn't be whenever the author forgets her backstory and any prior characterization as anything other than a blank-slate murderhobo whose only consistent traits are "Lockpicker", "Moralizes", and "Lesbian". This whole story feels like one big stream of train-of-thought vomit barely reined in by a vague outline of what "sick loot" Littlepip needs to find and where, along with a word doc full of setting backstory the author isn't sure where to put or what to do with. Keeping the chunks of Canon Pony backstory directly (or at least thematically) relevant to what's going on now would improve these exposition dumps about long-dead characters the author killed off and didn't create or get.
Everything's so long and drawn-out when it doesn't need to be, except when it's skipped over even though it shouldn't be. Sometimes LP's looting sessions are needlessly detailed and sometimes they're skipped over, only for something LP picked up "offscreen" (during a skipped scene) to be vitally important later. You can't keep track of LP's loot-katamari so why ever narrate her picking ammo from corpse pockets and swiping shotguns from safes as if the reader could? Littlepip's limbs might break often but that never significantly impacts her and only exists to make her seem tough for "fighting through the pain". Littlepip might struggle to lockpick one particularly dastardly safe but she'll eventually get it open after enough lockpicks, not that the author keeps bobby pins limited so LP must think+weigh possible loot vs the risk of breaking her only bobby pins.
Characters under-explain who they are because they're NPCs who only exist as far as their role in the story allows, except when there's some backstory unrelated to who they are and what they do in the story. You can't work things out with the information you're given to guess shit ahead of time, unless your guess is "The oversized 8-ball Guybrush Threepwood picked up at the Mêlée Island theater will be used later like that dress from chapter 2 was".

>>295462

Alright, holidays are over, so I suppose it's time to get back to this in earnest.

Littlepoop pulls out some tools and starts working on fixing the recording (which from >>295493 I am now imagining as something akin to a VHS cassette), while Calamity barters with the merchant. I might have found something interesting here:

>I had just started working when Velvet Remedy gave a stomp. “No, no, no.” I looked up, wondering why she objected to my efforts, only to realize she was neighing to Calamity. Lowering her head, she pushed him away from the merchant.

>“What’s got yer tail in a twist?” he huffed.

>“You’re letting him rob you, that’s what,” she retorted. “Here, let a pony who knows a thing or two handle this.”

>I watched my companions, bemused. The merchant pony was staring at them with a slight frown. Velvet Remedy returned, and while Calamity watched from behind, she ignored the pile of goods he was trying to sell the pony, not to mention everything he had been hoping to buy; she fluttered her eyelashes at the merchant, giving him a look that sparked a twitch of jealousy in my breast, and asked, “That dress over there, the one in the spring colors? How much is that?”

This is one of the few times in this story where an ordinary, mundane interaction taking place between characters is written convincingly, and what's even more shocking is that it's not just a dialogue exchange; the author appears to have actually injected some meaningful subtext. Let's take a closer look.

Littlepoop is engaged in repairing the recording she found, that for some bizarre reason was nailed to the door. From the events we've actually witnessed, Littlepoop is clearly a Mary Sue protagonist who can do nearly anything that any situation requires; however, the author has thus far tried to present her as an awkward, unremarkable, untalented pony whose only skills involve fiddling with PipBucks and other small gadgets. Working from this image of her, we can assume a couple of things: first, that she likely takes a great deal of pride in her tinkering, and second, that on some level she probably feels inferior to Calamity, whom she sees as being more experienced and knowledgeable. Please bear in mind that I am currently speaking about how the author intended these characters to be seen; obviously the reality he's presented is quite different

The group is currently engaged in bartering for supplies, and fixing the recording should be a low-priority task; however, Littlepoop whips out her tools and starts working on it while the others are bartering. Subconsciously, she is probably doing this more because she wants to show off in front of Velvet than because she really cares that much about the recording. The text actually tells us that this is her mindset:

>“No, no, no.” I looked up, wondering why she objected to my efforts, only to realize she was neighing to Calamity.
Here, Littlepoop just assumes that everypony, specifically Velvet, is paying attention to what she's doing. She is probably expecting Velvet to say something about it to her; however, she is slightly miffed to discover that Velvet either hasn't noticed or doesn't care.

Here is where it gets interesting. Velvet is not only ignoring Littlepoop, she is ignoring her in order to help Calamity barter for goods. Littlepoop confesses to feeling a "twinge of jealousy" when Velvet starts making googly-eyes at the merchant, but this is only superficial. Nobody actually thinks this merchant is a legitimate contender for Velvet's affections; even Littlepoop can see clearly that she's just using her feminine wiles to get him to come down on his price a little. The jealousy here is not because Velvet is trying to seduce the merchant, it's because Velvet is seducing the merchant in order to help Calamity. Littlepoop is trying to show off for Velvet by repairing the tape in front of her, but Velvet completely ignores her a focuses on Calamity. That she uses her feminine appeal to help him adds a sexual dimension to the exchange and adds to LP's jealousy and frustration.

What's more, the help was unsolicited, and the end it achieves doesn't serve any practical purpose. If we read a few lines beyond the section I highlighted, we see that Velvet doesn't even end up buying any important supplies, she just talks the merchant into selling her a few extra dresses at half price. Once this transaction is complete, she gives Calamity the new dresses as well as the one that LP gave her from Rarity's boutique, and asks him to use the new dresses to patch up the damage that the Rarity gown sustained during the dragon fight.

This is a bit awkward since there's been no indication that Calamity has any talent for sewing dresses (in-world it's unlikely that anypony except a unicorn would be able to sew in the first place), but the significance of the scene is clear enough: Velvet ignored Littlepoop's showboating in order to flirt with Calamity. It's not surprising that she would do this; while LP's views on pony vaginas are a matter of public record, we've had no indication that Velvet has the same appetite. Thus, if Velvet is going to develop feelings for anypony, Calamity would be the most likely target for her affections.

I was beginning to wonder if something of this sort was going to happen eventually. My original guess was going to be that Calamity would develop feelings for LP, which she would naturally rebuff, and this would put strain on their friendship and add an element of discord to the group. However, this Velvet x Calamity angle accomplishes the same purpose, probably even more effectively. Assuming all this was intentional on the author's part and I'm not just reading into things that aren't there, this short interaction, and its hint of a love triangle, is probably one of the best things we've seen in the story so far, and is the first indication that the romantic subplot will be anything more than LP drooling over Velvet's hindquarters.

>>296124
>when one of the best things seen in this story so far is a love triangle
TerribleWritingAdviceGuy_happy.jpg

Funny how The Love Triangle is a running gag on the "Terrible Writing Advice" youtube channel, where a guy gives comically bad advice like "Make your characters as simple and uninteresting as possible! Don't make them deep and multi-layered, that'd be hard! Being a good fantasy author is all about colouring inside the lines and doing exactly what thousands of fantasy authors are doing! Shoehorn a love triangle into your story even if it detracts from the story being told!"
But by giving this party a love triangle Kkat ends up livening up this party by giving it some conflict and internal drama. Even though so many people are sick of love triangles, it really is better than nothing.

>>296029
Bit of a random tidbit really quick but I think I may have found you in a YouTube comment section. Not sure what Silver looks like besides that meme Glim made but saw a profile with the exact same pony.
>>296124
Bit nice to see some actual natural interactions between the party. When I first read through this part (which granted was years ago) I didn't pick up on this sort of stuff not only in this story but most stories in general.

I like the idea of the love triangle bit and while this is about the last bits of the story I remember ever reading I certianly wouldn't get my hopes up on that element. Talking to fans of the story to ask about reception to it at the time they mostly said how people were going gaga over the lesbian stuff since she types like it and autistic guys like it so it's a garuntied home run.

Bit interesting to see not only how Fallout 3 rubbed off on FoE but how FoE rubbed off on a lot of the fan fics for the fan fic. Seems like everyone tried to replicate it with having a spunky lesbian unicorn who is super powerful and the best and has lots of lesbian sex.

>>296135
Yeah, that's my pony.
I don't want to spoil how the romance in this story goes but I find it interesting how so many "fanfics of fanfics" try to make themselves similar to the original. Some elaborate on backstory or show the lives of minor characters, but so many more would rather recreate the story "but more". They want to recapture the story's "mass appeal" (by a small mini-fandom's standards) so they make their story similar by default and rarely diverge from that templatee.
If the original tale featured a small lesbian unicorn with a big revolver and sniper rifle, here's a tale about an ordinary-sized bisexual unicorn with a bigger revolver and bigger sniper rifle and even bigger laser cannon, or a tale about a massive lesbian alicorn who keeps saying she "sucks at lockpicking" even though she just telekinetically tears locks open which always works and makes her the world's best lockpicker.
If the original tale featured a teenager who turns into a Lucario with an arbitrary chosen-one superpower tacked on that makes EXP grinding and pokemon attacks irrelevant while giving him infinite health/stamina/magic, fans make their own fics where teenagers turn into Lucarios or other primarily-bipedal Pokemon with similarly-overpowered god-tier superpowers that render actual Pokemon combat utterly irrelevant.

There's a fanfiction concept called "The Stations Of The Canon".
Basically, take any piece of media.
People might expect Naruto from me but I'll pick Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone for this.
The sequences of events in Harry Potter 1, where Harry does magic and gets a letter of acceptance to Hogwarts and meets Hagrid and goes to magicland and buys his wand at Olivander's and then buys a robe and then goes to hogwarts, the order in which he meets certain characters, the important plot beats from this story...
They are "The stations of the canon".
So a fanfic that seeks to answer "What if Harry Potter was raised by Tony Stark instead of the Dursleys?" would still show this story's "Harry Stark" doing magic and going to magicland and buying his wand and then his robe and so on and do these scenes in the same order as the original.
This fic's Harry Stark will meet Hermione on the train just like the canon Harry did, even though HS will talk and act differently from canon. Harry Stark will still meet Draco Malfoy when Harry Potter did, though Harry Stark might show off for the audience by calling Malfoy a faggot.
Despite what some say about a butterfly effect's wingbeats causing hurricanes somewhere else, the author is still using the original story as a guide and template when writing this story so it will take a shitload of changes piling up before things diverge from the familiar and comfortable Harry Potter 1 fans really just want to re-experience all over like they're kids again.

It's the same with Pokemon fanfics.
A Pokemon Trainer's goal is to catch and train strong Pokemon then visit the 8 major towns so you can fight their Gym Leaders and get their Gym Badges. After that you head to the Pokemon League, battle the Elite Four and Champion, kick all their asses in pokemon fights, and become the new Sinnoh Champion.
Looking at a map of Sinnoh for example (the red marks are cities/towns, the blue ones are towns or other locations) you might pick any town for your OC to start his journey from, and plan your own unique route around the region.
But in the Pokemon games and anime, assorted roadblocks block your path until you've completed certain objectives or found certain items.
Sometimes there's a small tree or rock blocking your path, and your Pokemon must destroy it using the Cut or Rock Smash move, and you'll need a Hidden Machine to teach that, so you must get that HM somehow. You'll need the HM for Surf to teach your water Pokemon to let you surf across the ocean. You'll need Waterfall's HM to climb waterfalls. Oh and you also need the Gym Badge connected to that HM for it to work for some reason.
Sometimes it's the arbitrary artificial NPC kind of roadblock where some prick blocks the only way out of town and says "Sorry, the bridge up ahead is broken!" until you go complete a story-event cutscene moment ten feet away, then he fucks off after you've done everything you can in the town.
So every adventure through the games is the same when it comes to where you go and what order you do stuff in.
Fanfics don't have to copypaste this limitation, but they do out of laziness.
So many rookie trainers start their journey in Twinleaf Town, get one of three approved Starter Pokemon (or an Eevee) from Professor Oak, and start doing everything exactly as it happened in the anime/videogame.
Because why be a rookie trainer from a big city like Jublife or Hearthome desperately trying to win fights with the shitty pokemon his unhelpful parents got him, when you could instead take the fatherless blank-slate protagonist's route just as literally as you take the turn-based RPG mechanics?

Even Naruto fics do this.
Naruto was born in Leafland, he did an escort mission to protect a bridge-builder from Shark-man and Ice-Notagirl, fought against Sandy Cuntman in the Chunin Exams, then Sasuke defected so he tried and failed to bring Sasuke back, then he fucked off. One timeskip later, he comes back home to Leafland and then Akatsuki shit sort of happens around him while he blathers about friendship. He fails to kick blonde bomberman's ass and his crush crushes Reverse Pinnochio with the help of an old lady who dies for King Sandy of Sandtopia. He fails to save Sasuke, who got snaked by snakeman. Eventually he gets a win against Your Heart Will Go On in the background of a story arc where Shikamaru's the real main character going through real shit. Eventually 5 kagays show up and eventually 3 dudes do everything wrong to start WW4 then assman's moon matrix then flashbacks then fucking moon-people.
AU fics change like 1-2 things tops while keeping everything else the same.

It's like a fucking game of Mad Libs.

>>296124

Anyway, as with the skies of the Equestrian Wasteland, this short bit of quality writing is only a thin ray of sunlight, poking momentarily through the clouds. Before it can even be savored and appreciated, it's gone; swallowed up by the grey, endless canopy of mediocrity that is the rest of the story.

>I went back to tinkering with the recording. After the better part of an hour, I was pleased by my progress. I realized the contents of the recording wouldn’t be worth the effort, but by now it had become a challenge. The actual message didn’t really matter.
Littlepoop's brief moment of heartache is quickly forgotten, as she becomes absorbed in the maze of her own autism. What a complete retard.

>Calamity had finished repairing Velvet Remedy’s gorgeous dress. I was impressed.
She is also a cuck, or whatever the lesbian version of a cuck would be.

>Velvet smiled and gave him a small kiss on the cheek (eliciting another flutter of jealousy from me)
It ought to elicit more than that. Despite its undertones, Velvet's flirting with the merchant was superficial enough and could probably be brushed off with a quick "flutter" of jealousy; Calamity, however, is another matter. He has the potential to be a serious contender in a love battle that Littlepoop hasn't even technically staked a claim in yet. If she had half a brain in her head, she would be very worried right now.

>then took the dress and trotted around behind some rubble to put it on. (Which, truth be told, made no sense to me.)
Again, assuming this isn't just more random autism on the author's part, trying the dress on is probably a continuation of Velvet's efforts to attract Calamity's attention. LP is correct that in and of itself, this action does not make sense.

Anyway, instead of focusing on any of this, LP once again turns her attention to the recording, which she has just finished repairing. As you've probably guessed, it contains another randomly-placed chunk of backstory that has nothing to do with anything happening in the present. The references to canon MLP characters are more overt than in previous episodes; both Twilight Sparkle and Trixie are mentioned by name.

The recording is addressed to somepony named Whitelip, and the speaker appears to be Trixie herself. It's actually a little confusing, since the only direct reference to Trixie is in the third person and there are no other clues as to the speaker's identity; however, the actual Trixie has a habit of talking about herself this way, and LP's PipBuck referred to this location as "Trixie's Cottage" earlier, so it's not hard to put two and two together here.

As far as I can tell, the story is that Whitelip is somepony who delivers Trixie's groceries, and judging from the familiarity with which she addresses him, they probably have a personal relationship as well. Trixie is leaving a message to say that she has been summoned to Manehattan by Twilight to work for the Ministry of Magic, and she doesn't know when she'll return; however, Whitelip can just leave her groceries on the porch. There are several fairly obvious logic problems here that we may as well go over.

First, I really don't understand why all communication in this world is handled via these voice recordings. Some of it kind of makes sense; for instance, Diamond Tiara probably would have found it easier to verbally narrate the last few days of her life instead of trying to write it out longhand (assuming she had a convenient method of making a sound recording nearby, of course; this is another detail the story is vague about). However, it mostly seems like a cumbersome way of handling communication, particularly for mundane tasks like what Trixie is doing here. Imagine yourself in her horseshoes for a moment: you've just been summoned out of town, and you need to communicate this simple fact to the guy who delivers your groceries and possibly bangs you. Do you:

A) Write out a quick post-it note and stick it to the door, or
B) Record yourself speaking the message onto a cassette tape, and then nail the tape to the door like a fucking autist?

The nailing of the tape actually brings us to another point. It was nailed well enough to still be attached to the door after 200 years, and furthermore the nailing damaged it to the point that LP had to spend an entire hour repairing it. So what exactly was Trixie thinking here? All she really needed to do was tell a delivery boy she's not home; a simple note would have sufficed. Even if she wanted to make a recording, was there no better way of ensuring he'd find it than by physically nailing it to the door? What is he supposed to do here? Pry it off, take it home, spend an hour fixing it, and then listen to it, only to discover that all it says is "I'm not home, leave the groceries by the door?"

There's also the question of how or why this tape is still tacked to the door after all this time. We can probably assume that the apocalypse must have happened before the grocery delivery came; either that or the delivery boy just dumped her groceries in the trash and didn't bother with the tape. However, there's obviously been activity here between then and now. Even in a vastly depopulated world, a lot can happen in 200 years. This hut has probably had numerous occupants; for that matter, the merchant has probably been operating his store out of it for quite a while. In all this time, nopony, not even the merchant, has ever thought to unpin that stupid tape?

Any potential this story might have is counterweighted by all of the ridiculous crap the author expects us to swallow. As I've been saying over and over, just because you can get away with a particular device in a video game, it doesn't mean that the same device will work in a novel.

>All of that effort, and I’d salvaged an order to the local milk-buck? I’d promised myself I wouldn’t be bothered, but I kinda was.
I'm honestly not sure who is the biggest autist here: LP, Trixie, or kkat.

>>296137
Seriously, you'd fucking think that in an alternate timeline where Naruto was born with some kind of super-amazing power from day one, his life would have gone very differently and baddies would have planned things differently.
You'd think he'd be sent on different missions even if it does mean he doesn't get to meet Zabuza/Haku and cry over their bodies like he did in the original show. Snakeman went after Sasuke back then specifically because Snakeman wanted Sasuke's special eyes and at the time Sasuke seemed more special than Naruto. Why wouldn't The Akatsuki make their move earlier than they did in canon given their goal requires capturing and soul-draining Naruto and his living-pokeball pals?
The Ninja World's fucked because of 5 different masterminds trying to out-scheme each other at the same time, no matter how many lives their schemes cost (RIP snakefag 2 and wannabe-geass) and if anyone would do shit differently and react to the different circumstances, it's them. It's absurd that aside from Naruto becoming a buff chad with a harem and Haku lucking out and surviving his canon death, barely anything gets to change the "glorious" canon unless it gets in the way of giving Naruto more power and importance and girlfriends.

But the worst offender has to be Code Geass.
This is a series about a level twenty turbo-autist and the clusterfucks that happen when he and other turbo-autists play speed-chess with human lives and giant mechs and supernatural powers. The only times he ever lost at anything was when something unpredictable happened and there was nothing smart he could do in time. And he canonically hates people who "Play chess by the numbers", doing wacky suboptimal shit during chess games just to make people adapt. Fucker makes his King chesspiece walk ahead of his other piece just to expose it, even though it's an illegal move, just to flex.
So if he was sent back to episode one for a "Re-do" of his life with all his memories intact, he would make MANY changes to his life.
He wouldn't waste this opportunity to fix everything or die trying. Or fuck everything up harder trying. He'd throw things off the rails just to prove to himself he can win when he doesn't know what happens next.
But every goddamn fic like this is just a retelling of the show except every 5 lines the main character tells himself "This is the part where ___ happened so I need to ____ just like I did last time" right up until the moment the author decides to finally start making changes, whenever that is, if that moment ever comes.
There is never any excuse given for this kind of slavish devotion to canon like "Death said I can only change one moment in my life and I'm saving that for the Euphinigger Moment" or "I'm a doomed old-man time-traveller trying to subtly help my past self win my own life without alerting The Bureau Of Hostile Canon-Obsessed Time-Travelling Faggots In Black by making massive changes".

>>296138
Kkat could have made this "Tape pinned to the wall" moment less retarded by making Trixie's tape say "I left this tape on my doormat for you, so if you're listening to this and you're not Whitelip, put it down and fuck off. Whitelip... leave the groceries here. Also I'm breaking up with you, by the way, and I'm already halfway to Canterlot by now. Sorry but I'm just too important to be your housewife, also fuck you, you're too much of a boring doormat for me"
So Whitelip finds this tape on her doorstep, listens to it, drops the groceries, and then comes back with a hammer and nails so he can angrily nail this tape to her doorframe before stamping his way back home and crying into his pillow as his mommy tries to soothe his broken heart and his dad calls him a faggot and tells him to move on.
It becomes an emotional moment of "Fuck you" aimed at Trixie.
It's still retarded but a little less retarded, as the tape was never meant to be repaired. It was meant to stay on her door and look really dramatic. A sign that he accepted her rejection letter, and now hates her forever. He might move on some day and consider this a cringe moment in retrospect but the tape can't reveal that.

Being able to find a 200-year-old tape nobody's touched in over 200 years just as easily as you'll find unused ammo nobody manufactures any more and dead bodies with unpicked pockets nobody even bothered to move and mint-condition guns in gun safes nobody else knows how to pick is a fallout game thing, but Kkat should have updated this to fit a literary world of cause-and-effect better.
Writing as if Littlepip's the only pony in the world who knows how to loot doesn't make the world feel "Desolate and isolated", it makes the writer seem retarded. Stops the author from writing an interesting morally-grey conflict scene where LP and some rival scavenger want to scavenge the same territory, too.

>>296138

Anyway, after LP finishes with the tape, Velvet reemerges wearing the gown from Rarity's. She resumes haggling with the merchant, this time attempting to sell off the goods that Calamity was trying to sell earlier. She talks him into buying the magic lance, and some other shit as well. Both LP and Calamity are visibly impressed by her ability to fleece this poor, retarded middle-of-fucking-nowhere shop owner. The scene ends with a page break.

>The body of the radroach crunched grossly under my hoof. I quickly scraped the radroach gunk from my hoof using a collapsed road sign. We’d slept at Trixie’s Cottage the night before, and had made good time over the course of the morning.
As with the "radgators" we met earlier, which the author also didn't bother to explain, I am assuming that a "radroach" is just a more "rad" version of an ordinary roach. See pic related for visual.

>We were taking it slow; such a large area meant that there were still a dusting of scavenge-worthy items to be found, even outside of locked safes and trunks.
I've completely forgotten what they are even supposed to be doing right now; they're either going to Fillydelphia to beat up slavers because reasons, or to the DJ tower to get Velvet's music played on the radio, also because reasons. Either way, their task can't be that urgent if they're willing to take the time to explore every single house they come across, just so they can pilfer more random junk for their collection.

>Velvet Remedy squealed happily as she opened up an old refrigerator and found several bottles of still-pure water inside. Our canteens were almost empty, and the few working faucets I had found made my PipBuck clickity-click at the radiation levels in the water. Her find was a blessing straight from Luna.
I know that radiation is some kind of a factor here (albeit a vague one as the author has not even made the slightest attempt to explain it yet), so potable water may be hard to find. Still, I find it a little hard to believe that conditions are actually this harsh. Uncontaminated water sources would have to be common enough that life on the planet could still be supported; it's virtually impossible to imagine a large population sustaining itself for 200 years just on whatever bottled water the previous civilization left lying around. It's even harder to imagine that in such conditions, an entire refrigerator full of the stuff would have been left unattended for this long. If there are literally no uncontaminated water sources, then bottled water would be the most precious commodity on the planet, and its value would exponentially increase as the supply inevitably diminished due to consumption. Forget about gems and bottle caps; bottles of water would be the most valuable thing in Equestria.

Part of the problem, again, is that k "don't stare too long into my gaping taint wound or you'll go mad" kat has obviously created a fairly complex world here, but there are any number of essential details about it that he either hasn't thought through or hasn't bothered to explain. It's well past time that he at least supplied us with some cursory explanations about radiation and magic and how badly fucked Equestria actually is as a result of whatever the fuck happened exactly. Other than some vague references to "the war," we don't even have the slightest idea what happened, and without knowing the capabilities of weapons like "balefire bombs" or "megaspells" that the text also makes vague references to, it's impossible to ascertain their effect on natural resources.

How does water work around here? Is the groundwater contaminated everywhere, or is that limited to urban areas that suffered direct attacks? Can wells be dug anywhere? What about rivers and lakes? Has magical-radiation-whatever made those sources unusable, or has that problem run its course by now? Can they drink rainwater? Even if it's not directly explained, the author needs to have shit like this thought out, and it needs to be implemented in the text consistently enough that we don't wonder about it.

I'd also like to restate my complaint from earlier, that this whole vision of the apocalypse is the kind of scenario that only a modern mind could produce. In the immediate aftermath of an apocalypse event, presumably most would survive by scavenging and would live in repurposed old houses and RVs and what have you, but this would pretty much have to be a temporary situation. Sooner or later, people ponies, whatever would have to come to grips with the fact that the old civilization was gone and it wouldn't be coming back. For someone who has lived their entire life in a world of grocery stores and running water and for the record I include myself in this group, it would be immensely difficult to adjust to life without all of that. However, eventually people would have no choice but to adapt. Water sources would have to be found, food would have to be grown, new houses would have to be built, new weapons would have to be made. In the absence of civilization, the world would simply revert to a pre-civilizational state; those who can adapt would do so, and those who can't would die out. Eventually, civilization would return. The idea that 200 years after the fact, people ponies, whatever would still be fighting over old cans of creamed corn, because nobody remembers how to grow corn, is either extremely implausible or extremely depressing. Anyway.

>There was no shelter to speak of, and red spots were always crawling across my E.F.S. compass. Mostly radroaches or the occasional giant mutant hedgehogs.
I'd think "giant mutant hedgehogs" would deserve more than just a casual mention.

>The magical radiation that had soaked into the water had twisted a multitude of wasteland’s animal inhabitants into grotesque and often monstrous versions of their original species. Most creatures had not survived the transformations.
This at least kind of explains things.

>>296137
>>296147
>The Stations Of The Canon
>Harry potter
>Pokemon
>Naruto
>Code Geass
Why use more than one example when the concept was explained in the Harry Potter paragraph and why is there so much unecessary text in this?

Literally, Pokemon paragraph but short:
"In Pokemon, the games, you have a map over the region the game plays out on. It looks like you can take many different paths to complete yor goals but, it's actually quite linear since only some many paths are open for you to explore. The others are not avialable until you have complete the tasks you have to preform in that paths that are.
For some reason, fanfiction writers that use this concept copy this, video game restrction and paste it into their story."

>The naruto example
>Gives synopsis for naruto and then says
>AU fics change like 1-2 things tops while keeping everything else the same.
You could have just wrote, "it's naruto with two plot relevant events changed tops.
"Since the story is about evil masterminds trying to outscheme each other, any changes to the circumstances would make them deploy new strategies."

>Code Geass
"The Mc of Code geass is a egomanic and an intellectual so he wouldn't go through the same motions if he had his whole story in his head from the start."

Your point is valid but I just don't like that this ramble of off-topic stuff. Like, seriously why are you including so much of this?

Another thing is that I don't really understand. Like, while your point is true, all I gleam from that is that there is a bunch of bad writers in fanfiction. Who really cares if some fanfiction writers are mediocre? Its all free and you don't have to read it. The people who write it are probably new to writing as well. I guess, the only ones who suffers from this are people such as myself, who tries to find the good fanfiction writers and have to scroll through a bunch of trash. Because, there are writers on fanfiction.net, for example, that really should be professional writers instead.

I suppoe this relates to this fic in some manner (I'm not sure if you specified how this point related to this fic, but whatever.) Is the point that Kkat does this as well to some degree?
.

>>296159
I guess, it's fine. I guess, that happens when you try to explain yourself, just try to be more concise or something in the future.

>>296156
Yep, it's time for another round of "let's thoughtlessly lift things from Fallout 3".

>As with the "radgators" we met earlier, which the author also didn't bother to explain, I am assuming that a "radroach" is just a more "rad" version of an ordinary roach. See pic related for visual.
Kek. Fallout and FoE subscribe to the good old Godzilla logic of 'radiation makes things bigger'. Rad-[animal]s show up throughout the games, and are essentially scaled up, typically hostile versions of local wildlife. Radroaches are cockroaches the size of dogs. Radscorpions are scorpions as big as a human, and so on.

>Uncontaminated water sources would have to be common enough that life on the planet could still be supported; it's virtually impossible to imagine a large population sustaining itself for 200 years just on whatever bottled water the previous civilization left lying around. It's even harder to imagine that in such conditions, an entire refrigerator full of the stuff would have been left unattended for this long. If there are literally no uncontaminated water sources, then bottled water would be the most precious commodity on the planet, and its value would exponentially increase as the supply inevitably diminished due to consumption. Forget about gems and bottle caps; bottles of water would be the most valuable thing in Equestria.
This is both a massive plot point later AND plot hole throughout, and something Kkat really should have paid much more attention to. In the early Fallout games, the question of resource scarcity is addressed. In Fallout 1, securing a new water source is the primary goal of the game. The water trade guarantees the setting's bottlecap currency. Both Fallout 1 and 2 featured new settlements, farms and so forth being set up in the wake of the apocalypse at various scales and tech levels. It's not until Fallout 3 and Bethesda came along that the people of the wasteland became a bunch of squatters living in rusty sheet metal sheds and living off 200-year old junk food they happened to find in a nearby fridge. FoE subscribes to the latter logic, which is bizarre as Kkat has clearly played the earlier games and bases large parts of FoE's later arcs on them.

For reasons that will be pointed out later, Equestria logically shouldn't be able to support life at all.

>>296160
Sorry about that.
To put it more concisely and relate it to this fic, "The stations of the canon" is when despite any changes certain events still happen, perhaps even in the order they happened in canon, typically because fanfics use their inspiration as a guide and template.
Some cry "stations of the canon!" whenever stuff happens in a fanfic that happened in the original story but it's only really SOTC when it defies reason.
Any new OC Hogwarts student is going to visit Diagon Alley and buy a wand and robe and other necessary shit unless there's a good excuse not to. But if that OC goes through an adventure unreasonably similar to the canon HP plot even though changes the author made to the characters and backstory and setting should radically transform the plot but doesn't it's SOTC.

In this fic, even though the hero is a unicorn and everything is supposedly in Equestria, the hero is still from a fairly ordinary Control Vault (vault without a gimmick or social experiment) even tthough the Vault is called a Stable. The hero still can't return home even though it makes little sense this time since LP's goal was to retrieve Velvet and the Overmare is just mad that LP left without consent. The hero still leaves the vault in search of a doctor. People might be ponies but they still live in Fallout 3 style homes like rusty sheet metal shacks and repurposed train cars. A Vault/Stable the hero runs into still has a mandom gimmick unrelated to how it ended in mutant monster disaster even though Fallout's vaults were mainly Enclave experiments and Equestria's vaults were actually supposed to save ponies. The hero still fights psychically linked Super Mutants and will eventually fight the overmind controlling them even though they're alicorns now. The hero is still eventually going to The Pitt in Pittsburg Philadelphia to defeat an evil slaver in charge of slavers even though Ashur has been renamed Red Eye and Philadelphia has been renamed Fillydelphia. The Talons still exist even though they've been turned into goodish guys. There's still a 3Dog on the radio commenting on the hero's actions and playing music even though the DJ is named DJ Pon3 in this fic. Stuff in Fallout 1 2 and 3 is still going to show up here on a world entirely alien from Fallout America even though it makes no sense.
Even though the existence of magic and giant dragons and Elements Of Harmony plus the lack of american guns and robots and nuclear ICBMs should make a post-apocalyptic Equestria entirely different from the Fallout post-apocalypse, everything necessary for a Fallout product to "Look Fallouty" still happens to be invented by long-dead ponies before this tale began.

>>296156

>But at least it wasn’t raiders or slavers. It was a relief to not be battling other ponies.
I know that I, for one, would definitely rather fight a giant radioactive hedgehog than an ordinary human with the same capabilities and physical makeup as me.

>Velvet Remedy was beginning to develop skill with her needler pistol; her moral reservations about killing clearly did not apply to ravenous and hostile beasts.
And this is the girl who is supposed to idolize Fluttershy to the point of obsession?

Anyway, they're wandering around the decaying remains of a Manehattan suburb, aimlessly looting crap out of buildings and fending off gigantic hedgehogs. Just another humdrum day for Littlepoop and Co. After a long day of cracking safes and stuffing random junk into their saddlebags, they decide it's time to bed down for the night. In the midst of this gigantic, ruined and largely empty city that is probably chock full of semi-habitable buildings, Calamity manages to find them the perfect shelter: a rusted out passenger car filled with the charred skeletons of ponies who were caught in an explosion of balefire or whatever the hell.

>I stared at the wagon full of pony skeletons and found myself wondering who they had been. What had their lives been like? Had they been happy? I wondered if the wagon had been heading into Manehattan. Were these ponies all heading into work. Were some of them friends, chatting about the shopping they would do?
>I squelched those thoughts under a strong hoof. The apocalypse was already a daily assault of horror and sadness without making it worse by actually thinking about it. Doing that could only drive a pony to suicide or madness.
[YouTube] Futurama - iHawk [Embed]

>Looking away, I felt a tiny ember of joy as I spotted the flickering light of a Sparkle~Cola machine tucked into a nook just around the corner from the wagon-stop. “I’ll be right back,” I announced, leaving Calamity and Velvet to clean out the passenger wagon. Or argue about it. Whichever.
"I wandered through the crumbling ruins of this once-great Metropolis, gazing upon the charred remains of thousands of ponies; just ordinary ponies, cut down in the prime of their lives by the horrors of war. Oh, the ponemanity! I thought to myself. The sheer horror of it all! The purposeless, wanton destruction and carnage! When would the killing end? Would we ever be free of the terrors of this neverending--OOOH! Is that a 200 year old vending machine over there? I'm kind of thirsty!"

Anyway, after droning on about the horrors of war for a few paragraphs, Littlepoop goes to get a soda out of the vending machine, and runs into a manticore which she has to fight. However, she doesn't have any of her thousands of weapons handy for some reason or another, so she tries to melee fight it, which doesn't work out so well. She runs away, and then Calamity jumps in and shoots it with his battle saddle. This gives LP enough time to whip out Lil' Macintosh, and...long story short, they kill the thing.

I think I remember manticores being in MLP somewhere, and I know they're also a creature from mythology whose mythology exactly I can't remember, but I've forgotten what they are exactly. I think it was a lion with the head of a scorpion, or a chicken that with the body of a snake, or some wacky shit like that. Are manticores the things that can turn you to stone by looking at you? Or was that something else? Either way, even though "manticore" is a somewhat commonly-known creature, it would still help to provide a brief description of its appearance. Even if you're referencing a common mythological creature like a dragon that nearly anyone could be expected to know, it's still a good idea to at least paint a quick picture of it so the reader has something specific to visualize, and so that the occasional odd reader who for whatever reason doesn't know what a dragon is won't be left in the lurch. How big is it, what color are its scales, how long are its claws, does it have wings, etc etc. A short sentence or two giving a super-brief physical description is all that is needed here.

After they kill the manticore, there is a page break and we rejoin them a few hours later after they've settled into their camp. LP is roasting manticore flesh over an open fire, and Velvet Remedy is scarfing down their last can of creamed corn. An idyllic scene if ever there was one.

Calamity apparently ate a bunch of beans and then crawled under the passenger wagon for some undisclosed reason, probably either because he's afraid of a charred skeleton uprising, or more likely because he didn't want to fart in front of Velvet. Littlepoop, always the cockeyed optimist, remarks that even though she took a few knocks fighting the manticore, she managed to get some usable supplies out of it:

>the venom sacks from the manticore’s stinging tail were the last thing I needed to build a poisoned dart gun from the schematics I’d found in the old Appleloosa armory.
She hasn't built that thing yet? She found the plans like 5 chapters ago, and I'm pretty sure I remember something about her finding the parts she needed to build it a chapter or two later. Either make the gun or don't.

Eventually, Velvet pokes her head under the wagon and demands that Calamity come out from under there so she can attend to whatever wounds he still has.

>“And this time, I want you to strip completely out of that saddle and let me give you a full examination.”
Wakka chicka wokka chicka.

Anyway, it turns out that the reason Calamity was down there is he wanted to inspect the workings of the passenger wagon. Turns out I got it slightly wrong: it's not a train car, it's one of those flying skywagon things that exploded earlier. He apparently thinks he can get this one working again without it exploding. It apparently needs a new "flux regulator," though, and as LP points out, that's apparently not something you just find lying around.

>>296460

Anyway, there is some more overt flirting between Velvet and Calamity, in which Velvet tries to prod him into taking off his saddle so she can see his cutie mark. This appears to sail right over Littlepoop's head; she realizes that she doesn't know what Calamity's cutie mark is either, and her autism compels her to see it.

>He was always wearing at least his barding and saddle bags, except when he bathed. And I’d always given him privacy for that, albeit mostly out of disinterest in watching a stallion clean himself.
Littlepoop is a lesbian, in case you've forgotten.

Anyway, quelle surprise, it turns out that Calamity is a blank flank. A full grown stallion who never got his cutie mark? Sacrebleu! Is Calamity Equestria's version of a wizard? Well, as it turns out, not quite. It seems he used to have a cutie mark, but he lost it. Or, more technically, it was "branded off" by his pegasus brothers for some strange reason, which he appears to be about to explain to us.

>How could a grown buck not have his yet.
Btw, this is a question and it should end with a question mark.

>“They say that Rainbow Dash saw what the other pegasus ponies were doing, and turned away from them just as they turned away from all the ponies below…”
>“Who?” Velvet Remedy interrupted as politely as she could.
Returning to one of my more frequently voiced complaints, the author really does a piss-poor job of laying out exactly how much of this world's history is meant to be common knowledge, and how much of it Littlepoop and the others are supposed to be aware of. By now, it's pretty clear that in the pre-apocalypse days each of the Mane 6 was the head of some kind of government Ministry. Littlepoop for the most part seems to know almost nothing of the outside world and its history, yet some of this stuff, particularly the stuff about the Ministries and the large-scale history of the war, is also presented as if it ought to be mostly common knowledge. As I've said before, these characters tend to mostly fluctuate between being weirdly knowledgeable and weirdly ignorant about various aspects of the world they live in.

Case in point: nobody here except Calamity seems to be familiar with Rainbow Dash. Both Velvet Remedy and Littlepoop seem to have already known who Fluttershy was from their days in the Stable, and yet Littlepoop has only learned who Pinkie Pie was from seeing her on billboards and such. The status of the other ponies and their ministries is unclear.

Anyway, Calamity goes on to offer something like an explanation. Apparently, Dash was appointed head something called the Ministry of Awesome I'm not making this up, which apparently didn't do much of anything. She was also an ace fighter pilot and she militarized the pegasi and so forth and so on. Seems like she ought to be as famous as any of the others, right? Well, that appears to be complicated.

At some point, the pegasi decided that they didn't want to be involved in the war anymore, so they cut themselves off from the rest of Equestria and basically declared themselves neutral to the whole thing. It's unclear where they went exactly; from what I can tell they retreated to some kind of sky fortress, and covered the entire sky in some kind of mass cloud cover which...maybe protects their fortress somehow? I'm not quite sure how it works. Either that or the "sky closing" was just meant to be a final "fuck you" to the rest of Equestria. But, in any event, the pegasi are the reason the sky is permanently overcast, and they have all agreed upon some kind of mass code of neutrality. Any pegasus that doesn't agree to be neutral, and who gets involved in whatever the fuck is going on with the ground ponies' world, apparently loses their status as a pegasus and gets branded a traitor. This process involves physically removing so to speak the pony's cutie mark, and replacing it with a crude copy of Rainbow Dash's, because I guess Rainbow Dash was the first pegasus to refuse to become neutral with them. Or something.

Seems to me that a better way for pegasi to brand one of their own as a traitor would be to chop the offender's wings off, since that's literally the physical attribute that makes them a pegasus. It would also be perfectly in line with all of the other edgelord crap this story is so fond of. My guess is that this idea either didn't occur to the author, or else it occurred to him but then he rejected it, because it would effectively mean that Calamity could not really be a pegasus, and he would thus no longer be able to do any of his cool flying tricks. There would be ways around this handicap of course; for instance, giving him robotic wings or something wouldn't be any stupider than battle saddles or mouth-mounted pistols or any of the rest of the ridiculous technology that's in here. However, for whatever reason, the author did not wish to go this route.

But whatever; the point of all this is: Rainbow Dash didn't want to join the other pegasi in being neutral, so she was cast out and lost her status as a hero to them. They took her "employee of the month" picture off the wall, revoked her parking pass, and gave away her reserved seat at the bar. Now, whenever any other pegasus wants to leave the glorious Hall of Neutrality and go down to the ground so they can run around the Wasteland shooting at stuff, they are branded a Dashite and lose their cutie mark. Calamity, for reasons we have yet to learn, is just such a pegasus. And that's the story of why Calamity doesn't have a cutie mark.

There is a page break, and the next scene opens at some indeterminate point in the future. They have moved on from the area they were in, which was called Fetlock, and are now at a place called SteelHooves Shack. Whether or not Calamity ever found his flux-whatever to fix the flying-train-car-jiggy is left unresolved for now.

>>296462

Anyway, the trio arrives at this place called SteelHooves Shack, and they're about to go down there for some reason, when Littlepoop notices that there's landmines outside or something and she tells them to hold up. Then, suddenly, a wild alicorn appears.

The alicorn tells them that she "remembers them from Appleoosa," but Littlepoop observes that it's not the same one she dropped a train car on. Then, out of nowhere, two more alicorns appear. Littlepoop laments that there are no boxcars nearby that she can drop on them, and then the chapter ends on a cliffhanger.

Chapter Fourteen: SteelHooves

Today's Fortune Cookie:
>The Stables were never meant to save anypony.
Something something out of context unattributed epitaphs are stupid.

In a refreshing twist, the opening chapter actually gives us the payoff for the cliffhanger of the previous chapter. The way cliffhangers usually seem to work in this story is: Littlepoop encounters some kind of horrible enemy, the chapter ends, and then in the next scene we learn that LP defeated it somehow, usually accompanied by a half-assed recap of whatever preposterous thing she did. It seems that this time around, we get to actually witness that preposterous thing.

However, it's a little difficult to figure out what exactly is going on here. There's clearly a battle going on, but the chapter seems to have begun in the midst of some kind of giant explosion, and it's not obvious what the source is:

>Time slowed to a crawl, as if sensory overload was causing my own brain to lag. Fire and shrapnel tore at me, sparks of pain igniting all over my body. The roar that filled the world died with a high-pitched whine as I lost my hearing. I was rooted in place, unable to make my body move. Blood splattered across my face as the pseudo-goddess standing in front of me tore apart, the parts of her body savagely flung in every direction.
This author can occasionally pull some decent descriptive passages out of his ass, and I notice that it mostly happens either when he's talking about characters being violently dismembered, or when he's describing some terrible, desolate scene like an old ruin or a bus full of skeletons. It takes a lot of effort to write polished prose, and the natural tendency of just about any writer is to use the best prose in their arsenal mainly when writing about the subjects that interest them, and wallpapering over the rest. So, it speaks volumes that k "I do to my characters what that third rate surgeon in Guatemala did to my penis" kat is usually at his best when he's talking about something excessively depressing or violent. Between his obsession with death and gore and his gender confusion, a psych profile on this guy might be turn out to be a more entertaining read than anything he's actually written.

Anyway, it looks like I may have jumped the gun on giving him credit for properly resolving the cliffhanger, because it appears that we are again skipping the battle and jumping right to whatever silly deus ex machina event is going to save Littlepoop's bacon this time around. As we can see from the above passage, at least one of the alicorns appears to have mysteriously exploded, thus bypassing the need for the party to actually fight it, and I have little hope that the other two will not encounter a similar fate.

>The second pseudo-goddess was turning, wide-eyed as she brought up her own magical shield. But it was too late for her; the rapid-fire explosions that were killing Velvet Remedy and me just by proximity were ripping directly into the creature. The pseudo-goddess’s shield rippled, fluctuated and died before it could fully manifest. Then she too was consumed in a mutilating blaze.
That's two down.

Anyway, before vaporizing the third alicorn, the author is kind enough to give us a glimpse of the thing causing the explosions:

>A pony completely concealed in steel-grey armor, even its tail. It was a mighty relic from the war, a “Steel Ranger”. A bright lamp on its forehead spotlighted its target, and the huge gun on the right side of its monstrous battle saddle began to fire again.
So there are cyborg ponies now. Sure, why not? At this point most of this story's entertainment value comes from its sheer absurdity, so we might as well see how far the author is able to push it.

The third alicorn has time to raise its shield, and the robo-pony's exploding apples yes, this autism is actually in the text bounce harmlessly off of it, despite having completely obliterated the magic shield put up by alicorn #2 literal seconds ago. Realizing that its grenades are doing no damage, Roboponer tries using its rocket launcher. It's not very effective. The alicorn uses some kind of alicorn voodoo magic to reverse the rockets, and Roboponer seems to be KO'd. The alicorn cackles triumphantly, then Calamity flies in and shoots some regular-ass bullets at her, which unsurprisingly accomplishes nothing.

Alright, I've decided to give kkat partial credit here. Anyone who was expecting an actual fight scene as payoff for the previous chapter's cliffhanger basically got one. However, if anyone was assuming that just because the chapter ended with three alicorns threatening Littlepoop's party, it meant that the next scene was going to be a fight between Littlepoop's party and three alicorns, well, that person would be getting something of a mixed bag: while it looks as if LP & Co. are going to have to do a little bit of heavy lifting now that Roboponer is down, it doesn't alter the fact that two out of three preposterously overpowered enemies were conveniently taken down by a preposterously overpowered mysterious ally, who showed up out of literally nowhere at the most convenient possible moment.

Lastly, anyone expecting LP to win the fight in a non-ridiculous way would be completely let down. However, I am out of space, so you will all have to wait until the next post to find out just how ridiculous a solution LP comes up with.